Spring Cleaning and Small Triumphs

Ah, a day of blissful laziness.  I slept until a shameful hour, finished playing my Lost game, and spent time working on my own game.  A large part of today’s work was actually just code cleanup – putting things in logical order, and fixing my headings (I had books inside of chapters, volumes inside of parts – it was a complete mess) which rendered the new “Contents” pane much more usable.

Fitted out a couple more rooms with scenery and objects, including a filing cabinet, which led to today’s triumph.  I wanted to have it so that only one drawer in the cabinet could be open at a time, without actually requiring the player to close one himself.  My first 15 attempts at coding it ended in run-time errors (and to think, I was so giddy when there were no compile-time errors!) so I started drafting a plea for help on raif.

OT: Newsreader suggestions?

I am looking for a good share- or freeware newsreader to replace Outlook Express.  I have tried a few different ones but they’re either too clunky, too cluttered or simply no better than Outlook.  Here are a few I have tried, with notes about what I didn’t like:

Time enough (to write) at last…

So I didn’t get as much coding done over the weekend as I had hoped, mainly because the telephone company *finally* installed my DSL line, which meant I was up til 5:30 Saturday am catching up on the new episodes of Lost.  That, in turn, meant that most of the weekend was spent wishing I hadn’t stayed up until such an ungodly hour, and concentration just wasn’t in the cards.

However, I did get some stuff done, which is good.  Even the tiniest bit of progress counts as momentum, which is crucial for me.  If the pendulum stops swinging, it will be very hard for me to get it moving again.

So the other day, as I was going over the blog (which really is as much a tool for me as it is a way for me to share my thoughts with others), I realized I had overlooked a very basic thing when coding the whole “automatically return the frog to the fuschia” bit…

Taking the leap

Well, more like re-taking the leap.  I actually started an attempt a couple of years ago but quickly got caught up in the trials and tribulations of that dread “real world” and never got very far.  But here I am, determined to give it a real go this time, since my brain needs a challenge both creatively and intellectually.  I write for a living, but that’s far different from writing for myself.

Anyway, I thought that blogging my experiences might serve two purposes:  one, it would be interesting to look back on, and hopefully interesting for anyone that happens to come across it; and two, it may help keep me on track, since I am notoriously flaky and tend to get completely obsessed with things just to get bored a few days later.  So that’s that – this blog’s raison d’etre.

Enjoy.