Other's Vices

I've come to the sad realization that I've taken on a number of a former roomate's 'vices.' Which is to say, I now drink lots of coffee and beer. Of course, I've taken the latter to a bit of an extreme given that I've been homebrewing for about a year, which means I pretty much always have an ample supply of some sort of beer sitting around.

I've actually backed off on the former a bit, and while I suppose I can thank Sean for getting me to start drinking beer, Europe is entirely to blame for my coffee drinking. Thanks to work getting their free coffee (which isn't great, but I drink it anyway) act together late last year, I was drinking several cups a day for a while. Nowadays I'll have a cup or two in the morning, and spend the rest of the day drinking tea (typically caffeine-free red 'tea', before anyone claims I'm a caffeine addict).


I do miss the weekly dinner-and-beer nights we had in Livermore. It'd be nice to find folks around here interested in doing that sort of thing regularly. I also ought to plan for some brewery trips in the future; now that Sean lives in Colorado I have an excuse to head there, Oregon isn't too far away, and visiting Stone in Escondido would be nice sometime.

End of Line

This weekend was the eleventh (and my second) Puzzle Hunt. Despite some near-drama when getting teams together earlier in the year, I ended up on a team that was a whole lot of fun and did surprisingly well. We spent most of the hunt in the top 5 and finished in fifth. Things started to drag towards the end, due to the rather normal situation of not being very clever at 4am and only having a handful of puzzles left, but we managed to drag ourselves out of that and finished around 10:30am, meaning I got to get some much-needed sleep prior to the wrap-up.

Despite the nap, I'm still really beat. I did a much better job of staying awake this time around, though around 9am I found myself nearly dosing off and don't think I was very helpful at that point. I sort of wish this was a three-day weekend so I could have a day to recover.

Hopefully we'll be able to keep the same team together for the next hunt; I bet we can do pretty well.

Refactoring

I've finally decided to try updating this thing again. I don't know if anyone even looks for updates here anymore, but what the heck.

Pet Projects

In an effort to do something with my idle time, I've been working on implementing a more complete version of one of Jamie's Crap-u-Hack mini-games from the 2006 Intern Game. Specifically, I'm trying to make a 'full' implementation of Fourtris (which feels a little silly since this just came out on XBLA).

Lately I've been noticing that I'm falling into the same trap I encountered in my last game development project; which is, I keep working on it at somewhat random intervals and never really keep track of a grand design in my head. As such, things seem to reach a critical mass where I can no longer stand to look at the code and feel too frustrated to work on it.

Thankfully, as of late I've come to enjoy this. I don't think that I've got things quite where I want them, but work as of late has been building up one or two little things I want, and then tearing down a lot of code that was just temporary crap to get things working. It's not perfect (since I'm terrified of deleting a lot of things and instead just comment it out; I really should get source control set up, but I'm very lazy), but I like to think I'm learning from the experience.

Anyhow, a screenshot of how things look right now can be found here. It still needs a lot of polish, but the core mechanics are there. I think at this point I just need to get a bunch of friends over so that I don't have to try and control two players with a controller in each hand. Maybe I should brew another batch of beer to help out with that...

Too Much to Do

Despite my best efforts, I seem to be very good at developing a huge pile of things to do and not actually getting around to any of them. On the one hand, I'm looking into buying a new camera (a DSLR), but I fear that it's far too big an investment when it'll probably collect dust like so many other things. The big motivating factor for wanting a camera upgrade is my plan to visit Lyle around New Years and wanting to get decent pictures of Japan.

Of course, I still have a handful of Germany pictures I haven't really sorted through. I've also really got to get off my rear and start working on my Japanese again; I haven't really looked at the language since Freshman year of college, though recently I've been listening to podcasts from JapanesePod101.com, which seem decent, all things considered. To really make them worthwhile though, I need to be spending more time than I've been looking through their kanji lessons.

I've got a handful of other pet projects to deal with plus a messy apartment. On the bright side, the latter situation is still way better than it ever was in college.