In a few minutes I’m headed over to Ryan’s for an “Edgeworks Lan Party”, so I figured I might as well make sure I got this post in just in case the party goes a little late. We’ll probably be playing Halo 3 and Brawl most of the night, but who knows what other games could creep into the proceedings. This isn’t a publicized event like a previous Halo 2 night was, so it should only be 4-5 of us playing locally.
Our game event at UTD next weekend is coming together more and more, but that doesn’t mean that there’s still not a lot of work to be done. My primary focus this next week is contacting people and then getting the programs printed up, so my goal for this weekend is to finish up all of my homework for this next week so that I’ll have the free time to do the other stuff. Of course, there’s no hope at all for me to “finish up” the game project, but progress is all I want at this point, and I think that should come in the amount I’d like for it to by Sunday night.
Personal - Dallas
Man, four whole days without being at, near, or having anything to do with HP is the longest amount of time that I’ve been away from there for the past month or two. The way the baseball schedule ended up working today was that we finished the game from last night at noon, and since they were able to get the lights working, we played the game originally scheduled for today at 7:30 as planned. As far as winning went, we split the games (won the first, lost the second). Tuesday’s game will be in Greenville, so who knows when I’ll need to be at the stadium for that, but I’m sure I’ll find out either Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be spending working on homework for UTD, tomorrow afternoon I’ll be at UTD, and then finally tomorrow evening I’ll be at a LAN party with the people I did The Heretic with. Busy day, but then my Saturday should be extremely relaxing (minus the part where I kill myself in the middle of working on the game project). I wish we got tomorrow and Monday off like I used to, but hey, once I own my own company, I can set my own holiday dates. Seeing as how much I like holidays, I’ll probably be fairly liberal with them. :)
Personal - Dallas
They’re getting more creative, those weather gods are. Yesterday was going to be an obvious cancellation of the game because of the rain. Today, however, looked fairly optimistic about being able to play. 7:00, the game started, and all was well. Then, as the sun was going down, we noticed that the lights were not performing to their optimal ability. In fact, they all had seemed to go off. Ok, it took a little time, but they successfully came back on and the game continued interrupted. Then, right before the bottom of the 3rd inning, the field was pitched into darkness. (Get it, “pitched”? Sorry, I’ll continue.) Apparently the weather gods had made it rain so hard and so strong yesterday, they were successfully able to short out one of the light posts which was tripping the breaker for all of them. So, short story is that the game from tonight is going to resume tomorrow at noon, then the game that was going to be tomorrow night at 7:30 is being moved up so that it can be played in the daylight.
My test today went surprisingly well, but not well enough that I feel the need to be worried about it. My quiz tomorrow is the last thing I really have to do this week before work commences on the “big three”: my Automata HW, my OS project, and the game project that is driving me insane. For Easter weekend I’m surprisingly not doing much, so that should give me plenty of time to work on everything.
Personal - Dallas
As of 7:50 this evening we apparently had only officially gotten 2.11 inches of rain, but I’m pretty sure that Plano got well over 3 inches. It poured all day long, and by the time I was leaving my first class, the streets and parking lots had become a human maze of finding where to walk that wasn’t in water deep enough to entirely soak your shoes. Then, once I got back to my apartment around 6:00, I discovered the wonderful fact that there was no power. Since I didn’t feel like sitting in the dark with no computer to use, I came home for the evening (yeah, the baseball game got canceled) where I still am and will be for the night rather than risk the power still not being on or going out once again with the additional rain we’re supposed to still get.
I’m about to go to sleep, but when I wake up tomorrow, most of the time between then and going to UTD will be spent reviewing for my OS test. I made a 90 on the last one which is basically like a 95 when taking into account her scaling of where an A, B, etc. are, so I’m not too worried about the test overall. In between Linear Algebra and the baseball game, however, it’ll probably be more conceptual outlining for the game project plus a little bit of work on some of my normal HW due next week. Then, baseball will hopefully come to my rescue and save me from the semester of doom since when I’m doing that, my mind is as far away from UTD as it’s ever going to get.
Personal - Dallas
Every time I go to the WordPress dashboard to make a new post here, there’s a counter that says the number of spam comments that have been caught. Over the past few days, I’ve noticed this number steadily rising. Now, granted, since I moved to WordPress almost 2 years ago it’s only caught about 200 spam comments, but I just cleared 8 out of the queue after having cleaned it late last week also. You’d think that bots would want to spend their time trying to target more high-profile sites than mine, but I guess to them a spam comment is a spam comment, no matter the blog. (Bonus points if you get the reference!)
I haven’t made as much progress as I wanted/should have made over the past 24 hours, so this’ll probably shape up to be an interesting couple of weeks for me. I think everything will start to come to be better once I just better understand the conceptual model of making Flash programs since the way I’d be building it in Java/C# just doesn’t fit the Flash model that well. The backend can (and most likely will) be hacked together, so as long as the game appears to work, everything should be fine. By fine, I mean that I get an A in the class.
Personal - Dallas
Our last day of class this semester is six weeks from tomorrow, and the fact that I’m just finishing my spring break aside, I’m probably the most ready for it to be here of all the semesters I’ve been at UTD up to this point. The two classes that are requiring the majority of my time aren’t turning out to be as enjoyable for me as I’d hoped, so it just seems like the majority of the work I’m doing this semester is for stuff that I don’t want to be doing. HP baseball has been great because it’s been a place where I have been able to escape from everything going on at UTD. I don’t really think there’s anything I could have done to make this semester more enjoyable from the start, but hopefully my summer and the fall will be much more enjoyable.
Jarrett came over and we played some Brawl this afternoon, and then I started doing a little bit of work on the game project. My next goal is to get player-player duels working, and then once that is done, the only big thing left should be a feature of the combat system that lets players reactively dodge incoming attacks. Both those things need to be done in about two weeks, and after that, the amount of work that this project should require of me should decrease considerably (primarily since we aren’t allowed to add in any new features post-Alpha).
Personal - Dallas
The Ballpark in Arlington, Ameriquest Field in Arlington, and finally Rangers Ballpark in Arlington are all names of the same building: the home stadium for the Texas Rangers. That’s where we went today to go play a team that we lost (badly) to a few weeks ago. This was the first time that (when I’ve been there) we were the visiting team and by extension in the visitors’ dugout. Doesn’t matter where you are if you win though, and that’s exactly what we did, 6-1. After the game there was a BBQ tailgate party out in the parking lot, so I didn’t get home until almost 7:00. That may be all the baseball I have until Tuesday, but I have school once again in just under 36 hours.
Now that spring break is basically over, I have school work that I need to start worrying about again. I have a test on Wednesday, a project due the next Wednesday, weekly meetings for our game project, and finalizing plans for the gaming event which is two weeks from today along with other things due along the way. Once again, let me express my desire for a two-week spring break. I guess that if I can’t have that though, I’ll settle for just a little bit less work to do.
Personal - Dallas
I left my house at 7:30 this morning, and I didn’t get back until 11:15 tonight. That entire time was spent either at the high school, in the surrounding area, or at an HP-related event. I dare you to find any day where I’ve given (willingly or not) that much of my time to UTD. Heck, aside from Boy Scout campouts, I dare you to find any organization that I’ve given that much time to. The best part of it all? I enjoyed virtually every single minute of it.
In fact, I liked it so much, I think I’ll do it again tomorrow! Well, not quite, but it will be something similar. I’m going up to the stadium at 9:30 tomorrow morning to help Coach Gibbins set up for the JV game(s) taking place at HP and do some treatments on a couple baseball players. I’m then heading back there around 12:00 to get ready to go to the baseball game at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington at 3:00. That game should be over close to 5:00, I’ll probably get back to HP around 6:30-7:00, and then I’ll head back to my house for good tomorrow. So, not quite as long of a day, but still very evident of the black hole phenomenon that HP is exhibiting on me.
Personal - Dallas
When most people think of spring break, something along the lines of today is what should come to mind. I used the fact that I had nothing to do today to fix my internal clock, and even though I initially woke up close to 7:00, I didn’t get out of bed until after noon. Once I was up, my day consisted of going to get lunch and then just watching TV and playing games for virtually the entire afternoon. It was 100% restful and allowed me to prepare for tomorrow when I’m going to be leaving my house at 7:20 AM or so and not returning until close to 11:00 PM.
I read today that the seventh Harry Potter movie is (finally) going to be split into two parts rather than cutting out significant portions of the book. I personally think that this should have been done starting with the fourth or fifth, but it’s good to know that they at least are doing it before the series is finished. The movies will be released six months apart from each other (November 2010 and then May 2011), so the final one won’t come out until I’m 24. Considering I read the first book when I was 11, that’ll make it close to 13 years that Harry Potter has been a (fairly continuous) part of our entertainment culture. If only one of my future games could do so well…
Personal - Dallas
Since I wasn’t around to pick it up on Sunday, I went this afternoon to finally go get Super Smash Bros. Brawl from Gamestop. I haven’t had a chance to spend that much time with it yet, but it appears like it’ll be just as fun as the original and Melee. So far I’ve been playing it with the Wii remote and nunchuk rather than a Gamecube controller, and that’s caused a couple of movement mishaps since the buttons aren’t in the place that I’m used to while playing. It probably won’t take me that long to pick up the controls if I stick with it, but I may switch just due to familiarity.
Today I also went out to a high school in McKinney with someone from UTD in order to speak with the CS classes there about UTD. The day actually didn’t end up being as long or boring as I was semi-expecting, but it’s also not something that I’d want to do every single week. Tomorrow is probably going to be a day of pure rest and relaxation (with maybe a tiny bit of HW thrown in just so I don’t have as much to do once school starts back up), and then Friday, Saturday, and Sunday should all be fairly busy. Why can’t spring break be two weeks long?
Personal - Dallas