New house-mates!
Big House by Audio Adrenaline
Hi all. This has been, in many ways, a very busy month. My brother and his wife decided to move in with me, as I charge them less than half the monthly rent they were paying at their old apartment and they're trying to save up for a place of their own. Not only did helping them move in take a lot of effort, but they've insisted on remodeling a lot of my condo -- apparently it's more of a run-down bachelor pad than I thought. X) I'm okay with paying the materials for the renovations, it boosts the value of the property for eventual resale and I'm getting free labor and expertise. ;) And having them around, I of course have to take advantage of the opportunity to play with them. n.n We've established Friday nights as game night, and we're watching through Naruto together since she's never seen it before. I suggested watching shows during meals, something I already do to multi-task, but I didn't account for my brother's binge-watching habits. X) We're likely to watch nearly a dozen episodes once we get started, and while I can get up and do stuff on my computer during it since I've seen the early parts of the series at least three times before, it's still pretty distracting.
There's also, of course, the fact that I've started my new job. It's a true 40-hour-per-week job, none of that cushy 9-hours-Monday-through-Thursday-and-forget-the-remaining-4-hours stuff I had before. X) Adjusting my body clock to getting up early enough took a while too. Ironically, though, we've actually had very little to do during the time I've been there. Apparently our client requested teams be made ready as quickly as possible, my company responded by hiring me and a bunch of other guys, and...the client wasn't ready to plop the projects into our laps. X)
In the meantime, we've been studying up on COBOL, the venerable mainframe language which has unstoppable momentum in so many established systems. We had thought our project was going to be mainly Java with a little COBOL, maybe translating an old COBOL system into Java, but apparently no, it's going to be mostly if not entirely COBOL work. Only one guy on my team (the, ahem, most senior one) has any experience with COBOL, but the rest of us were able to pick up the essentials without too much trouble. Personally, I've also been working on finishing the last couple projects in my mobile application development class -- not something that directly benefits the company, but arguably adds more value than the thumb-twiddling we've had to do otherwise. :P The last two projects are a huge jump up in scope and complexity from the other three, so if there was going to be several weeks when I had almost nothing else to do, this was great timing for me. c.c God is good.
Oh, and my family had a bit of a get-together yesterday because my aunt was visiting with my parents. My sister with her husband and daughter came down, and it turns out the little 'un is tottering around upright now. :) She still clamored to be picked up by Mom (meaning my Mom, her Grandma) at nearly every opportunity, though. X)
This month in Forgotten Gates, I have accomplished...almost nothing! :D The little bit I did sneak in on FG-related stuff is some testing on the DynBattleChoices plugin. Currently the plugin forces RM2K3 to run any battle event pages with a switch condition after a battler's turn is done, so that the user can set up some event pages to make use of the action data the plugin gathers. I was worried this might have some unintended side effects, like event pages that aren't related to the plugin being run twice in one turn. So I set up some pages to try and make that happen, and...it didn't seem to. That's sort of good news, although it makes me nervous because it means I don't totally understand how the event page running works. X) Still, I'll probably just release the plugin with a disclaimer that it could be buggy, please contact me if it causes weird behavior in your project, etc.
Not much to tell of on NMR this month, just a couple of scenes in whichJon took part. In one of them, a recurring villain brought a huge force of mooks to attack Kumogakure, but got wiped out after just a few rounds. It was mainly due to OOC concerns that it ended so "quickly", although it still took five hours -- there were just way too many players involved. X) In the other scene, some Kumo ninja went to investigate why the "Head Ninja" (really second-in-command to the Raikage) Michiko didn't return to the village at her scheduled time. They found a battlescene with evidence that she had been kidnapped, but not much clues as to where to look for her.
Super Mario Enigmatic:
Yet another Super Mario Bros. X game! This one's rather unique, actually. Each stage consists of a collection of single-screen rooms, and there's an emphasis on puzzles. Power-ups are used sparingly, and you can expect that you'll spend most of the game as ordinary small Mario (or Toad).
Some of the rooms, especially toward the end of the game, are more straightforward, but involve tricky execution. Occasionally the difficulty strays into "fake difficulty" territory, which can get frustrating. Some of the bosses especially, while very creative, are ridiculously awkward to fight. On an interesting note, the game provides "rest areas" where you can very quickly stock up to the maximum of 99 lives in between stages (which, remember, consist of around a dozen rooms each). I never once got a game-over playing through this game, but on the very last, secret world...
...I came right down to the wire. x.x
Bottom line? Worth playing if you like intellectual and precise-execution challenges and have some tolerance for frustrations.
Click to viewHi all. This has been, in many ways, a very busy month. My brother and his wife decided to move in with me, as I charge them less than half the monthly rent they were paying at their old apartment and they're trying to save up for a place of their own. Not only did helping them move in take a lot of effort, but they've insisted on remodeling a lot of my condo -- apparently it's more of a run-down bachelor pad than I thought. X) I'm okay with paying the materials for the renovations, it boosts the value of the property for eventual resale and I'm getting free labor and expertise. ;) And having them around, I of course have to take advantage of the opportunity to play with them. n.n We've established Friday nights as game night, and we're watching through Naruto together since she's never seen it before. I suggested watching shows during meals, something I already do to multi-task, but I didn't account for my brother's binge-watching habits. X) We're likely to watch nearly a dozen episodes once we get started, and while I can get up and do stuff on my computer during it since I've seen the early parts of the series at least three times before, it's still pretty distracting.
There's also, of course, the fact that I've started my new job. It's a true 40-hour-per-week job, none of that cushy 9-hours-Monday-through-Thursday-and-forget-the-remaining-4-hours stuff I had before. X) Adjusting my body clock to getting up early enough took a while too. Ironically, though, we've actually had very little to do during the time I've been there. Apparently our client requested teams be made ready as quickly as possible, my company responded by hiring me and a bunch of other guys, and...the client wasn't ready to plop the projects into our laps. X)
In the meantime, we've been studying up on COBOL, the venerable mainframe language which has unstoppable momentum in so many established systems. We had thought our project was going to be mainly Java with a little COBOL, maybe translating an old COBOL system into Java, but apparently no, it's going to be mostly if not entirely COBOL work. Only one guy on my team (the, ahem, most senior one) has any experience with COBOL, but the rest of us were able to pick up the essentials without too much trouble. Personally, I've also been working on finishing the last couple projects in my mobile application development class -- not something that directly benefits the company, but arguably adds more value than the thumb-twiddling we've had to do otherwise. :P The last two projects are a huge jump up in scope and complexity from the other three, so if there was going to be several weeks when I had almost nothing else to do, this was great timing for me. c.c God is good.
Oh, and my family had a bit of a get-together yesterday because my aunt was visiting with my parents. My sister with her husband and daughter came down, and it turns out the little 'un is tottering around upright now. :) She still clamored to be picked up by Mom (meaning my Mom, her Grandma) at nearly every opportunity, though. X)
This month in Forgotten Gates, I have accomplished...almost nothing! :D The little bit I did sneak in on FG-related stuff is some testing on the DynBattleChoices plugin. Currently the plugin forces RM2K3 to run any battle event pages with a switch condition after a battler's turn is done, so that the user can set up some event pages to make use of the action data the plugin gathers. I was worried this might have some unintended side effects, like event pages that aren't related to the plugin being run twice in one turn. So I set up some pages to try and make that happen, and...it didn't seem to. That's sort of good news, although it makes me nervous because it means I don't totally understand how the event page running works. X) Still, I'll probably just release the plugin with a disclaimer that it could be buggy, please contact me if it causes weird behavior in your project, etc.
Not much to tell of on NMR this month, just a couple of scenes in whichJon took part. In one of them, a recurring villain brought a huge force of mooks to attack Kumogakure, but got wiped out after just a few rounds. It was mainly due to OOC concerns that it ended so "quickly", although it still took five hours -- there were just way too many players involved. X) In the other scene, some Kumo ninja went to investigate why the "Head Ninja" (really second-in-command to the Raikage) Michiko didn't return to the village at her scheduled time. They found a battlescene with evidence that she had been kidnapped, but not much clues as to where to look for her.
Super Mario Enigmatic:
Yet another Super Mario Bros. X game! This one's rather unique, actually. Each stage consists of a collection of single-screen rooms, and there's an emphasis on puzzles. Power-ups are used sparingly, and you can expect that you'll spend most of the game as ordinary small Mario (or Toad).
Some of the rooms, especially toward the end of the game, are more straightforward, but involve tricky execution. Occasionally the difficulty strays into "fake difficulty" territory, which can get frustrating. Some of the bosses especially, while very creative, are ridiculously awkward to fight. On an interesting note, the game provides "rest areas" where you can very quickly stock up to the maximum of 99 lives in between stages (which, remember, consist of around a dozen rooms each). I never once got a game-over playing through this game, but on the very last, secret world...
...I came right down to the wire. x.x
Bottom line? Worth playing if you like intellectual and precise-execution challenges and have some tolerance for frustrations.