• 3:02 AM
  WFT?!?!

Guess what? I got a fever, and the only prescription is MFC applications. Ugh. So here I go with the spending hours flipping through the docs looking for the closest class to what I want. Fortunately, Brett has spent several hours on his own working through a problem I ran into right away, so I got to plow through that without having to search through 5 GB of MSDN documentation which may have eventually provided an example of what the typical route to proceed would be. As it is, I got to a point where my app looks like this:

It actually makes the HTTP query now, it just doesn't have a data structure to return the data to the view with.
I'd also like to move this u/p thing to a configure dialog.

What it will eventually do is spend all day obsessively checking to see if my livejournal "friends" have updated their pages and telling me what time they do so. It will do this so I don't have to. In effect, it is an automated procrastination device. My "friends" don't update all that often, so it will mostly sit there telling me not to bother checking. I plan to extend this to a more general model that also monitors arbitrary websites for change. The ideal UI will be a narrow vertical window, like an instant messenger's name display, listing website names. It'd pop up notifications like YIM when something happened. Hopefully not that often.

What to call it though.. what's a good name for a device, the purpose of which is to reassure the user that nothing of interest is occurring anywhere? It's like the opposite of TV, which brings us a constant stream of things which are more interesting than thinking. I guess it could turn into that. Maybe I should build in a "lying" mode where it just PRETENDS that nothing is going on... shit! I can't now - I already know about it. I'd check even MORE often, thinking that it was always lying!