2 Weeks Later

04.16.2012

Despite 2 weeks of silence, I'm both still alive and have plenty going on to keep me busy. Sadly enough, none of the things keeping me busy merits anything interesting to talk about.

Seriously. Mailing in my taxes, collecting paperwork from the new mortgage company I've been sold off to... none of it is interesting enough for outside attention. It's barely interesting enough for my attention.

Sounds like it's time to go do something just so I can post about it.

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2 hours later...

Last week I reformatted my hard drive. My browser had been acting funny (loading seemingly random websites on occasion) along with a couple of startup programs just taking forever to start up. It's been 2 years since I had a fresh install of Windows, so I was about due. I keep important stuff on a variety of disks so that if I ever need to reinstall the OS/reformat the C: drive, I won't lose anything that I can't reload.

Except I forgot about the My Documents folder. That's the folder where all of my Unity game files are automatically stored. And now, since I didn't save them anywhere else, they're gone.

And that's ok. It's been long enough since I played with Unity that I would need a fresh start to do anything worthwhile. So next time my flaming coconuts will be even MORE extreme!

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April Gaming Stoop Booty

04.03.2012

Soon after last week's victory in Catan I placed an order with Cool Stuff Inc, where I've gotten the majority of my gaming booty over the past year. I always have something on my wish list that I either want or want to find out more details about. Since my birthday gaming booty purchases there really hasn't been anything I need. There's never anything I need. There's plenty I want. The key now is tare pare down what I can use from what I want.

This is a fun game. You should try it with a 6 year old who runs around wanting everything in a store. I think I did that until I was 12 fine, I still do it!.

The gaming closet is full of games yet to be played. This year, game night is working out to have an alternating monthly gamine schedule of previously played game on odd numbered months, new game on even numbered months. That's actually on purpose! The alternating, not the odd/even aspect. I like playing through the unopened games, especially when finding that we like the game! Alternately, I've found that I've gotten a couple of games that are 2-player only and don't really lend themselves to our 4-player game nights.

But I digress, for I had made a Cool Stuff order which had no new games, so what was in it? Oddly enough, the first thing in it was an old game, which we haven't played.

That's just insane!

Well, it's a game I had previously purchased but which we have not played. At some point last year I bought Star Trek Expeditions which has little HeroClix Star Trek characters. I've run across a blog post where someone used these in a zombie game and thought that would be a great idea and fun to do. I then ran across a different blog post of how to remove the Clix figures from the base and re-base them like regular miniatures. I like bases, so that sounds fun too. I might still play Expeditions, and the game price is about what the going rate for pre-painted gaming miniatures are, so I went ahead and bought a 2nd set to tear apart and re-base.

It's not completely sane, but less insane.

Thanks to a trip to my local comic/gaming shop, I had been looking in more detail at the World Works Games Terraclips buildings. I've bought their paper model PDFs (remember that mall I'm working on?), but this is a pre-printed, pre-cut on heavy card cardstock model(s). Although the 3 sets currently available have more of a fantasy theme than what I usually play, I could see working them into one of our games. Maybe Frag? Each set retails for $49, which is what the local store has them priced at. I came home and checked Cool Stuff who had them for sale substantially cheaper.

The trigger for my purchase was that Cool Stuff was running a random sale, and 2 of the Dust Tactic figure packs that had been sitting in my wish list had dropped from $12 to $9. I was eventually going to order these things so why not save $6 while I'm at it. And to get free shipping I needed a $100 order, so I went ahead and got the other stuff to qualify for free shipping.

Today my gaming order arrived, with no new games. Wings of Glory was just released a couple of weeks ago, but it's a new game. I can't have any new games right now, so it must stay on the wish list.

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Catan Prep

03.26.2012

After a week and a half of silence, I need to post something. I should post about the fire at Jerry's house, but that's a story for Jerry to relate on his own terms. Granted, I've filtered the story out through various channels, but I don't want a permanent history of that such as what the interweb provides. Instead I'll ramble about something fun.

Wednesday is the next gaming Widgey night. Usually I don't mention any of these until after the fact, and unless you know where to luck it's nothing more than a blurb on the front page with a pic of a game box and another link. This game night is a little different. First, we're playing a new (for us) game which is part of a theme for this year. Setlers of Catan is one of the more popular European games of the past decade. It lacks combat, firepower, racing, character leveling, and spacecraft. Still, I played a little solo-demo to learn the rules and it's a fun little game. There's not a lot of waiting around for your turn to come. The basic rules are easy enough to pick up, yet there are enough expansions to add on to make it properly complicated along the way.

If everyone who's invited shows up we'll have 5 people. Catan is a 4-player game, although there is a 5-6 player expansion (which I also have). I'm currently thinking that if everyone shows up I'm going to opt out of proper playing and act as the banker/rules-looker-upper. With this being our inaugural playing of the game I'm sure we'll have aplenty rules looking up, plus being the banker will give me something to do that feels like playing.

I've also gotten the board/table ready to play. Board prep feeds into my anal need to organize things, such as when I took 3 days to prepare the HeroScape map for a battle. I once again have a 3-day head-start before we play, but I didn't go as far overboard.

The Catan board fits together like a puzzle, with hexagonal tiles that fit together inside a type of cardboard frame. It works pretty well, but I wanted the pieces to fit a little more flush. Thanks to a game room setup I saw on Board Game Geek I got the bright idea of fitting the Catan map between 2 pieces of plexiglass. After a day of searching and finding out how pricey an option that would be to do correctly, I instead went to Hobby Lobby and got 2 16x20 poster frames (I think they were labelled Glazing Inserts or something. Less than $6 each regardless). 16x20 is a little small for what I needed, but I managed to make it work. At least I think I made it work, we'll find out for sure on Wednesday.

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Less frustrated.

03.15.2012

In looking back, yesterday comes across as a lot of whining and bitching, at least for me. That wasn't the purpose of my long winded, rambling post. The post was more of a way to call myself out to make some progress on all those things I've been procrastinating on, or with the case of some of those items, don't dwell on them if I'm not going to do anything about (for example, I'm not going to run off and find another job before the contract on the current job runs out).

Today was a day that felt like I was making some headway, although I touched nothing on the list from yesterday. At work I made some progress on the documentation I'm working on, up until the point where I need to create a test user in active directory. AD hates me. It's mutual. I'm asking for help when I return to this little task.

I've had a handful of things at the house that I've managed to mark off my to-do list. Granted, none of them took over 5 minutes, but I feel better for having done them instead of putting them on a list for me to find time to do later.

I've also got a little something to look forward to at the end of the month. Two things, actually. The first is my grandfather's 91st birthday on the 24th. My aunt from Texas is flying in and I'm threatening to take Gina along with her mother (who has never met my grandparents before). The other is this month's Widgey Night, where we're on tap to play Settlers of Catan. I went through the Catan rules yesterday and played part of a solitaire game, enough to get a good beginning grasp of the rules. From there I made our somehow mandatory cheat sheet for the game. It's still early, but it looks like Trevor the Chiropopper might join us for the game.

This is a better example of the even keel my life tends to take. I don't like bitching. Bitching Lite, maybe?

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Why would I be frustrated?

03.14.2012

I'm frustrated. Just frustrated. Not in a claw my hair out way, although there are times I have to remind myself to just calm down. There's not one thing frustrating me, it's just a combination of things building up.

Frustration #1 - Programming in Unity. It's been a while since I actively did any game programming. Lately I've been tossing little suggestions to Joe to help him learn the programming side since he's pretty adept at the graphics side. So in talking to Joe I feel like I've kept a toe in the Unity programming pool. I've continued to go to the Burgzerg forums (when they're up), and those forums are the source of one of my frustrations. It seems people are getting stupider. Granted, I forget the average independent game programmer out there is a 10 year old who uses the Google translator to type questions in English, but have people forgotten how to search on the internet?

I swear 80% of the questions people ask point to one of 4 problems people consistently have, and I consistently answer at least 2 of those. The other questions feel to be easily answerable by a Google search: one question was "Can I write a menu, for example in Java, and the remaining scripts in C #? How Unity works with several programming languages at once?. I asked Google about passing variable between languages in Unity and the first link to me to the answer, or at least to a link with 2 answers. Granted, I may know better how to ask Google the question since in my professional programming life I've had to pass variables between languages, but I would think a rudimentary Google search would still offer up the correct answer.

Others still don't know how to properly ask a question. "I have the following error" without the code it points to doesn't give itself to much more than telling the poster what the error is since there's often multiple paths to getting the error in the first place.

For the above, I'm forcing myself to quit looking at the forums. I'll still check the website for tutorials, but I just can't handle the level the forums have degraded to. I think this is a shame, because I actually felt like I was helping people for a while there. Plus, it gave me a chance to find out about DogRobber/StephanLome who I feel is a kindred spirit when it comes to video games and programming.

Frustration #2 - I'm tired. I'm trying to chalk this up to my blood pressure medicine, but every day around 3:00 I just want to lay down and take a nap. I've been trying to note what time I eat lunch, how much I eat, etc, and it doesn't seem to make a difference. Yesterday I switched taking my BP pill from breakfast to before I go to bed to see if it would make a difference. Yesterday I still wanted to take a nap at 3:00. Worse yet, I couldn't go to sleep last night. I went to bed around 10:45 (late for me as I'm usually in bed closer to 10:00), but at 12:50 I was still awake, looking at the stupid alarm clock. Although I've been tired today, I didn't want to take that afternoon nap, so maybe there's some merit to my madness? My only worry is that my night time routine isn't as regular as my morning routine so I've got to find a way to remember to take that pill at night.

Frustration #3 - I'm procrastinating. I made a list of things to do when I took off of work for a week around my birthday. I managed to check off 10% of what was on the list. Sure, I can blame the tornado/power outage and something else that happened one day that screwed up my schedule, but they're all excuses. The big thing I've been putting off is a general cleaning/straightening up of the storage building and garage, which is going to include some crap from my bedroom closet. This is going to be at least an all-day operation if I realistically look at how I work since I have to factor in breathing hard, sweating, sweating, and seating. It's not hard work, but I'm not in the best of shape so it's going to take a while to get me moving to move all of this other crap. I've got this weekend earmarked for getting this done if the weather cooperates (Isolated Thunderstorms forecast which is normal for this time of year). If I can get this checked off the list it will be a major step forward. Of course then I have to tackle weeds and the back porch. Why did I ever think to get landscaping done back there?

Frustration #4 - Work. The actual day job. The contract keeps getting extended, which should be good, but after more than a year of extensions getting tacked on it starts to wear on you. The final RFP came out with a due date of April 10, so factoring in the way the world works the new contract should be awarded and handed over around November. We (Spiritus) are teamed up with a gaggle of companies going after the contract, but there are 2 big contenders we aren't partnered with. Mentally, I've awarded the contract to one of those other companies. Old me would have already started looking for another job, but I like my boss and the company I work for. I've also worked on this project off and on for 7 years, so I'm determined to see this through until the contract is awarded, but to be honest I'm ready to work on something else. I have no idea what that something else is, and that's the true source of my frustration.

I got my first job during the summer of 1985. I've been unemployed for a month twice since then. I've always worked, but never thought much about what work I was doing. This could be evidenced by having 3 jobs where I stayed at each only a week (one of those I only went in for a day: I drink Coke but I never want to work there!). There are things I enjoy doing that my job allows me to afford, but I know I couldn't make a living doing those things. I still enjoy writing code, but I think in the last 6 months I've written 6 lines of code, and those lines weren't connected to each other. Regardless of all my whining, there's no easy, acceptable answer to this one.

Frustration #5 - My weight. Last February I suddenly put on 20 lbs over the course of 2 weeks, putting me at 415. I've pretty much stayed there for the past year. I don't know what I did to put on that weight, it was like my body just decided it needed an extra 20 lbs. During the course of a week my weight will fluctuate up or down 5 lbs either way. I've been trying (saying) I'm back on the low carb/South Beach diet that I had success with back in 2006, but I don't really think putting chopped up fried chicken tenders on my salad really qualifies. This week, since everyone I eat with is leaving/out of town, I'm endeavoring to return to the strictness of low carbs. Nothing fried or breaded. Even though I was eating sugar free sweets, I'm doing my best to cut those out for 2 weeks. I'm back to only drinking water when I eat, so that my diet soda is a treat (even though I think I'm supposed to be avoiding those while jump starting this diet). I'm also concentrating on eating smaller portions. I really don't need to eat a pound of bacon just because I'm avoiding carbs.

I'm not going to look at the scales until my 2 weeks is up (10 more days). Saturday I tipped the scales at 421, having had a good 3 days of eating whatever I wanted. If, when those 10 days are up, those scales can say 410 instead I believe I'll be on the right track. If not, it will seriously be time to start looking into the various surgeries that are out there that I've been avoiding.

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