Okay, this was silly, but it is a little LiveJournal combat card system. I think it is really cool what you can do with LJ’s API layer.
| COMBAT CARDS 2.1 |
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| to fight dmoonfire enter your username below |
| CREATE YOUR CARD |
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2007-01-30
Combat Cards 2.1
Deadlines Looming
Apparently, there are people still reading this. We had a little scare last night. The code that is put into the code to self-destruct the code went off. We forgot to update it in the last two months, so it was a nasty surprise for everyone. Sadly, I couldn’t fix it but Tom had the code and I believe he put out a new version for everyone to enjoy. The self-destruct code will stay in there until we go “live.”
On the other news, we have dates for the live since we have to finish everything for a convention. From the meetings we had, the following dates are set:
- Feature Freeze on Feburary 16
- Code Freeze on Feburary 23
- Going live on Febrary 26
That means the next three weeks are going to be hellish for programming, but we should be in the final stretch. Kat promises that I’ll get a break after this, or at least time to play Minesweeper during the day, which I haven’t really been able to do for eight months.
2007-01-28
Tedious Maintenance Day
I spent pretty much the entire day cleaning my office and sorting through about three hundred of my DVD’s. As I mentioned before, I got tired of the space that the DVD’s took up, so I removed them from their large cases and transplanted them to slim-line CD cases. Now, my entire collection fits in a single set of drawers and takes up about… maybe four meters of linear space. If I was using the full-size cases, it would probably take up about nine meters of shelf space, which is really excessive. I figured about another six hours will help me finish up the last of the DVD’s.
I’m also planning on going out to have dinner with my dad for his birthday. I haven’t seen him since my brother got married in October and it would be nice to just remain in contact.
Once I get back, I have about three hours of laundry folding to do. Apparently, when the pile gets over the three meter point, Fluffy gets annoyed that I’m just washing them, not folding and putting them away. And we have this new, shiny furniture set just begging to be properly stuffed.
Still anxious for Mr. Helfers’ response on my book. Only six more weeks.
Working on a new theme
Yeah, its about that time. Two years since I came up with a theme. I started with the one currently on moonfire.us but I really didn’t like it. It was a tad too… simple for me. It was based on that really nice lunar eclipse picture I found. Currently, I came up with a much different one that looks much better. Not to mention, Print Preview looks pretty damn good on the new one. It is also based on the image, every color on the page came from some part of the moon image. Once I figure out what I’m going to be doing, I’m planning on switching moonfire.us to a MediaWiki for entry and create a theme for both that and my blog. That way, everything will have a nice consistent look to it.
2007-01-24
Final Fantasy 12 and other games
I finished Final Fantasy 12 last night. It was an entirely enjoyable game, but I really hit the point of “I want it to be done now” decently into it. The cheating, which consisted of setting up a Gambit system to auto-level over sixty hours, really helped me get through the game. Even with having an average level of ninety, I actually enjoyed the last bits of the plot. Fluffy said it was very pretty and I think she’s right. I also think there were a few other things they did right.
The Master Plan
We have a Master Plan. Most of it came from Fluffy and most of the time I’m pretty cool with it. In general, the master plan consists of us moving back to Iowa, getting 5-10 acres, and having children. The having children bit is the key part right now for Fluffy, every time she holds a baby, reads Baby Blues (one of our favorite comics), or even thinks about others having children, her biological clock starts making that annoying buzzing noise. She is also turning 32 in February and I think its getting to the point that, if we going to do it, we should probably do it soon.
Having a child is a scary plan. Right now, I’m working for a company that really doesn’t pay very well. Another way of saying is, we are only seven paychecks behind and the arrears is over 20% of the expected $180,000 it takes to minimally raise a child from concept to eighteen. Yeah, we get a paycheck enough to pay the bills, but it is almost impossible to save up to move and have a child.
But, its really important to Fluffy. Most of her family is near Iowa City. They are very close-knit, their clan (and the husbands). She wants to be near her mother for moral support and I can understand that perfectly. For me, its big and scary, but I’m not opposed to it. I’m… just not exactly in favor of it yet. I still think I’d be a terrible father, despite what everyone tells me. I don’t know if I can sacrifice that much of myself for another person. That’s the scary part.
The idea of moving to Iowa is just as bad. While I make reasonable amount of money here, despite the late paychecks, I’m afraid there won’t be jobs in Iowa for me. Or, more accurately, jobs I’ve spent the last two decades getting really good at. The catch-22 there is that I have to wait to start looking until I’m ready to move, because I have to be able to say weeks instead of months for being a new hire.
2007-01-19
GNOME Idiocy
Okay, I have to rant about this one. This came on a Tomboy mailing list and it points out something I find frustrating.
I wanted to set the number of recent notes that can be directly accessed
from the Tomboy menu on the panel. He said that I have to set this
option through /apps/tomboy/menu_note_count in GConf and you felt that
it’s an advanced option and that’s because it can only be set through
GConf.I do understand the philisophy of this approach that GNOME advocates
that users shouldn’t be exposed to too many options because it’s
confusing and I do agree, but Tomboy has hardly many options at this
time and it’s quite a relevant one.
I love GNOME, I like how Gnome looks and how the applications feel. But there is this distinct feeling that every new release of Gnome removes more and more features. Part of it is because it is moving toward a Mac approach, where everything works well together because they hide all the features, but I really, really hate it.
Exalted Map of Creation
Last night, I finished entering the cities from stephenls’ map into my own. It is beginning to look like a decent map now. I think the last few steps of doing the stephen map are doing countries/boundaries/regions, roads, and air boat routes. I think the main reason I’m doing this is because I’m planning on making maps for Fedora and my own fantasy worlds and this is a great way to get some experience. Overall, I think the maps are looking pretty good.
I am looking forward to running on Saturday.
2007-01-18
Getting back into the programming spirit
The last couple of days, while I was blatantly and utterly cheating on Final Fantasy 12, I’ve been working on cleaning up my MfGames.Utility library, playing with Visual Studio 2005, and writing up a new iCalendar parser/management library. No major reason other than someone expressed an interest, but I’ve wanted to write it for a while, so I’m just knocking it off my TODO list while my characters try to automatically reach 99th level.
2007-01-16
He remembered!
Something to be said about hope. Mr. Helfers actually sent me a really nice email back, telling me it will be 8-10 weeks (instead of the 12 I was expecting). The other part that was really nice is that he remembered me. Actually, he remembered me from last year’s GenCon, despite the fact he probably sees a couple hundred people every convention, each one desperate to sell their own book to him. And it wasn’t the fake “I remember you” that I’ve gotten in a few places. He actually remembered details of Wind, Bear, and Moon which he read eight months before and that was one of the things that I was really impressed with. I’m not used to people remembering me.
I’m not that good with remembering people, but I remember details. I remember some of the names, like Dylan Birtolo because he happens to have the same name as mine, which is the reason I went into the Author’s Lane at GenCon, but also because the fight scene near the end of the book and the one in the garage. I can barely remember Mr. Helfers except that he sat next to the lady who didn’t like the pool love scene from Undead and Unwed, one of my favorite romances. She, I probably could remember on sight, she wore a dark suit the first day I saw her. Couldn’t for the life of me, tell you who she was or what she wrote. I could tell you what position she sat in the last two GenCon’s on the table though.
Yeah, its the little things, but I still have to admire that he remembered my novel from what was basically his slush pile from half a year before. Well, not quite. The first workshop at my first GenCon (2005), I went to his panel on writing. It was much like the various panels I’ve been on (just not the writing industry), but it was really interesting in how networking, which was a later session, worked in the writing industry. He told us when to send a manuscript, what format, who to send it, and also what to put in the subject.
If you can’t tell, I’m already getting a bit excited about getting a response.