Welcome back to my life. Been a few months since I’ve been able to organize my thoughts.
Had my parents over for my birthday. It was pleasant to have them over at my house for the first time. My daughter is leaving for China and my son is getting back from Spain. They will be passing each other overlapping for about a week.
The game programming is coming along. Python and PyGame are the back on my things to do for fun list. I’ve been digging apart Sean Riley’s book and distilling the patterns. Read a book at B&N on patterns and designs of games. It was interesting to think of games as patterns. Breaking things down simplifies fun into components. Tic-Tac-Toe here I come.
My day job is entering an interesting phase of the project. Massive upgrades of the infrastructure and large amount of knowledge transfer. I’ve been in classes every other week for the last two months. It’s only going to accelerate in the coming months.
My sister-in-law is in Washington state doing well with the pregnancy. Daniel is still abroad doing his thing overseas.
I’ll be back here in a bit.
TabletPC Research
Been digging into Windows Tablet PC and have a copy of the most up to date SDK on CD. Been digging around the 2002 edition and it’s strange stuff. Finding it either incredible detailed or very vague. I may just “not be getting” it yet. Won’t be the first time and not having a TabletPC to work with probably isn’t helping. Something popped and a friend of mine has a Tablet PC that they want help learning to use. So I’ve got a place to test out things once I build the test framework built.
I’m still in limbo on the part time job. Maybe I’ll have that settled by the new year. I want to do something more than just make money. Maybe I can combine the two and do something useful for society and make a little extra for fun money.
I took the full time job with the community college system. Viva 2005 for exercising and doing a 7am - 4pm job Monday - Friday. Cannot wait for it to start.
Family
My baby brother’s wife is pregnant so I’ll be an “Uncle Mike” sometime next year. Did Christmas at my parents house and stayed at a Bed&Breakfast a few miles down the road.
GameDev
Well the full time game development job went exactly the way I expected. I’m just not a risk taker. I’ll keep doing what I’m doing now and do some development in the background. The Python code base is still there but will require a huge investment in time to complete that a full time job would have allowed. It is definitely the elegant long term solution but will never ship with my available time. The VB.Net work is starting up now and I’m evaluating it. Looks like a faster to market method but cuts out cross-platform entirely. Sad but shipping to 90% of the market is better than not shipping. My Mac G3 will just have to wait until I get more time. I’ll revisit Python someday.
Resume
Something exciting in the job area. Someone asked me for a resume. I’ve updated my resume and posted HTML and MSWord copies at http://www.mcgarware.com/resume/ for public consumption. I’ll get the OpenOffice and PDF versions up sometime soon. I just love creative writing.
MKPTracker
A resurrection from the ashes. Someone is interested in an updated version of the tracking software for the Tablet PC. They need to break out the writing.stylus from the keyboard/mouse movements. I’m going to do some reading in the TabletOS SDK to see what’s available. All that work I did on the centralized data repository web server may get to actually get used. The initial versions data format was horrific to parse and use. Lesson learned, make data easy to get at whatever the cost in space and performance. The central server will centralize the management of the data which gives me more control but also requires more commitment from me. Going to be an interested project no matter what happens.
Certification
I’m reviewing my certifications and trying to figure out the bang for the buck. I’ve got an MCP with two completed (workstation/server) and two more gets me an MCSA and three more after that get’s me the MCSE. I could also take a four courses on a grant in Oracle and get both the OCA/OCP for the DBA track but that would consume my entire life for about 16 weeks. The joy of deciding how best to screw my social life.
Microsoft .NET
Microsoft .NET is strange stuff. I understand why they had to build a VM on top of the OS to abstract themselves from the hardware, but good lord is it inefficient. I guess we have to use those multi-gigahertz processors and multi-GB’s of RAM for something. Let’s design something bloated and processor intensive to consume the hardware. Who says the WinTel alliance is history? I’m still wrapping my brain around some of the more esoteric pieces of this new world.
Educational Programming
Been thinking about educational game design and development again. I have the base Python libraries in place for the Windows/Macintosh work. At some point I need to get moving on this again and complete something. Talking and writing about it doesn’t get it done. In my darker moments, I’ve thought about just coding it in VB.NET. …and the world was less than it once was.