May Contain Nuts

I’m sure at least one person in the community has noticed that I haven’t been saying much in public these days. I want to take a moment and apologize, as well as lay out why that’s the case.

First off, I’m definitely not trying to ignore folks. If you’ve PMed me on DPWR, sent me an email, or otherwise tried to contact me and been met with silence, I’m sorry. I’ve been super busy at work for the past couple of months, and the onset of winter coupled with the fact that the sun sets around 5:00 PM here has left me feeling incredibly lethargic when I get home for the day. I typically manage to find the time and energy to read my email and skim some news feeds before collapsing on the futon for the night and zoning out to MythBusters, Countdown, Daily Show, and Colbert Report.

As some may also have noticed, I seem to have stumbled into helming Mysterium in 2009. This is super-convenient since I actually live in the host city, but it’s also a lot more work than even I thought it would be, mostly because I’m trying to keep the ball rolling while keeping a master plan for both the planning process and the event itself in my head. There’s also a fair amount of pressure, whether real or perceived, to pull this off well because of how passionate about Mysterium its attendees are, and that’s not really doing wonders for my psyche either ;). I can easily see why Eleri decided not to be in charge again this year, and honestly can’t fathom how Scraper managed to do it for 8 straight years (I think it’s safe to say I won’t be chairing the committee for 2010 if I can possibly avoid it).

I’ve got so many things to do in terms of digital projects and general around-the-house work that I’ve gotten a little overwhelmed lately, and when that happens my brain tends to go into full-on lockdown mode, at which point not much ends up getting done, which just increases the number of things I need to do later and furthers the cycle. It’s incredibly frustrating, and I’m going to try to work myself out of it over the next month or so.

So, with that said, I need to go do laundry, contact a few people about Mysterium stuff, start a load of dishes, and see if I can start banging on one of the various gaming projects I’ve got rampaging through my head. Then tomorrow I get to veg out to lots of food and good company, so that’ll be an awesome and welcome reprieve before heading back to work Friday.

I’m not dead! I’m just acting like it!

I’ve been mulling this over for more than a month now, since I brought it up to Blade as part of our conversations about the GoA after attending the GoMe meeting in August, and have finally reached a conclusion: I can no longer be the sole point of development and administration for DPWR.  The site has gotten large enough, and I’ve gotten busy enough, that I simply can’t handle the work load anymore.  Unfortunately, because of DPWR’s history, transitioning to shared ownership will not be an easy thing.  The code has never been under source control, and development hasn’t exactly been what one might call “professional” at any point in time.  DPWR is how (and why) I learned PHP, and a lot of what I do with the site generally consists of hacking and modifying existing files in Invision Power Board, with poorly-documented and poorly-commented results.

What I want to do is essentially start from scratch in some ways.  I want to start with a virgin installation of IPB and the various components that I use for DPWR (Links, Gallery, and Wiki), and then build the current feature set back into the site.  It’s a fair amount of replicated effort, I know, but I think it’s the only way to start off on the right foot.  To make things potentially easier, I’ve already subversioned the current files so that there’s a base point of comparison that can be built from and re-implemented whole-cloth where appropriate (and possible).  In addition to re-programming the PHP, I would also like to tackle modifying the site’s skin as well, since it’s got some rather obvious legibility issues and needs some love to pull it more in-line with the Guild of Archivists concept (Tweek being the awesome person that he is has provided me with his “Guild Pub” emblem for the GoA, which I’d like to run with).

Ultimately, my goal is to get everything updated and moved to the live site by the end of the year (just in time for IPB 3 to come out and start the process all over again :P).  Since most of the stuff on the site doesn’t need much (if any) modification to work, and all of the really hard work of getting the Archive to support tags has already been done (it just needs to be re-implemented into the vanilla install), I think the thing that would take the longest would be the skin.

I’ve decided to do this now (rather than wait for IPB 3 to come out) for several reasons: 1) I want to make sure that the site is actually maintainable by a small group before IPB 3 comes out and the really hard work of porting the Archive component to the new version begins, 2) I want the site to be able to support all of the requirements that being the host for the GoA puts on it ASAP, and 3) I don’t have the time to do any of this by myself anymore.  I’ve got one pro bono web design project I’m working on right now, and will hopefully have a contract for another site by next month.  Coupled with the 3 months worth of other small-to-massive-sized projects I’ve accumulated over the summer without a Mac to call my own and the fact that I’m at work 9 hours a day, I just don’t have the ability to throw myself at DPWR the way I did when I was 15 without a care in the world ;).  (On a side note, it’s actually kind of scary that I’ve been managing this site since I was 15… it originally launched on Homestead on June 30, 2000)

So, if you’re a PHP developer interested in helping to get DPWR on its feet, please leave a comment with some way of getting in touch with you, or email me and let me know you’re interested.  I realize I’m asking a great deal with no real compensation (all I’ve got are my gratitude and appreciation [as well as my most profound apologies for the current sorry state of the code base]), so I don’t exactly expect a stampede of volunteers, but anyone willing to lend a hand would be very, very greatly appreciated.  I’ll discuss the details of how to get to the SVN source, as well as some other guidelines and requirements, privately with anyone who volunteers.  It’s not nasty, mean, paranoia-inducing “OMG SEEKRETS!” stuff, just stuff that I would rather discuss in confidence because it has to do with a non-open-source project ;).

So yesterday the most wonderful thing happened… I finally got a new Mac.  Y’know, to replace the one that I had sold on consignment at the end of May?

Last night was spent getting applications and personal effects moved onto the machine from the extenal life boat drive and setting up not one but two installations of Windows XP (one for Boot Camp gaming, the other for running 3DS MAX in a VM so I don’t have to restart the computer all the time).  This in and of itself took almost an hour to set up for, because I needed to create a slipstream disc with XP SP2 on it (I was unsure of the slipstreamable status of SP3, and didn’t want to risk it), and the process for doing so, while not necessarily complicated, was hampered by a lack of certain pieces of software that ultimately became unnecessary once I found nLite, which did all the hard work for me.  Trying to do it on Vista was also not entirely conducive to the process, as said missing pieces of software were incompatible with the new OS, but in the end I managed to get it done.

So now I have three different computers running on one machine, each with their own name (the new iMac’s name is Apollo, courtesy of Oscy, the Boot Camp partition is named Hephaestus, ’cause I thought the fact that he forged lightning bolts was somehow appropriate and amusing, and the VM machine is just called “MaxBox” because I was feeling incredibly uncreative by the time I got to that install).  There’s still a little bit of work to do to get everything back exactly as it was on my PowerMac, and I need to max out my machine’s RAM as soon as financially possible, but beyond that, I’m back in the saddle again.

So now comes the apology part…

Over the past three and a half months, my only computers have been the one at work (which I’m typically supposed to, y’know, be doing work on), the Dell hooked up to our television for the original purpose of watching downloaded movies and TV shows, and a G4 eMac running Tiger that probably wouldn’t have even been able to serve as a boat anchor thanks to its lack of a handle on the top (language warning on that link, btw).  Needless to say, this was not supposed to be a long-term solution to the problem of me consigning my G5, and with regular platitudes promising payment “early next week” for the better part of two months, I was never really motivated to come up with a seriously functioning secondary setup for my needs.  As a result, my access to (and general tolerance for reading) forums, chats, IMs, and even emails was rather substantially degraded, as I had no interest in setting up a whole ‘nother machine with my accounts and preferences and whatnot when a new iMac was perpetually just around the corner, and using a TV for a computer monitor (even an LCD TV) is something I regularly refuse to wish upon my worst enemies.

Anyway, the thrust of the above paragraph’s worth of justifications is that I have been rather remarkably unreliable this summer, for which I sincerely and humbly apologize.  I’m doing my best to get back up and running at full capacity as quickly as I can, and hopefully by the end of next week I’ll be moving full steam ahead on several things that were supposed to be done mid-last-month, and following up on some emails and other communications that have sat far too long unanswered.  As far as inconveniences go, I realize that being stuck with a computer attached to a TV is far less problematic than having one’s house flooded by a hurricane, but this has been a pretty crappy summer for me, performance-wise, and the computer issues only compounded my general apathy towards the world.  God help me if I’m ever stuck in a hurricane, you may never see me again :P.

Also, Mister Cloak, I want to apologize directly to you for not only not answering your IM last night, but dropping offline almost immediately after you sent it… my connection to Steam last night was not exactly reliable… I think I was on and off about 10 times in the space of 5 minutes at one point.  Finally I just gave up and signed out completely.

Our office just got a penis enlargement spam message.

Through our FAX MACHINE.

I kid you not.  I’m going to see if I can abscond with it at lunch and scan it for the sake of posterity.  And humor.  Mostly humor.

It’s been a bit of a while since I last posted something, so I figured I ought to.  Nothing fancy, just a bit of a status report on what’s going on with me.

After months of saying I needed to do so, this month I finally started tearing through the Archive cleaning up attachments and re-tagging entries as appropriate.  I’ve got a running list of entries that need a bit more TLC (or a lot more, in some cases) that I’ll need to come back to after I finish the initial clean-up push, but so far the list is only about 30 entries long out of the 900 that currently exist (so, roughly 3% of the Archive).  I’m almost all the way through the collection of journals and notes (which are being split into 2 groups for organizational simplification), after which there’s just people, places, objects, speeches, and translations.  That may sound like a lot, but I’ve already gone through Ages, plants, animals, DRC research, and all of the D’ni culture sections (DRC Research was a bear… I think most of the really screwed up attachments were in that tag).

On a related note, is anyone having problems accessing the Archive?  I just discovered that for no apparent reason a couple of my staff members can’t see anything in the Archive… if anyone else is having this problem, PLEASE let me know!  I can’t fix it unless I know it’s broken!

I’m also hard at work on a number of game ideas.  A couple of them are a lot more advanced and will require considerable time in the modeling, texturing, and figuring out how to do stuff in the engine departments, but one of them I’m actively developing right now.  Some of you may recall my little Labyrinth project from last year’s ill-conceived attempt to enter into the Unity Top DOG competition about 3 weeks from the deadline for entries.  Well, I’ve decided to do it up proper with much better graphics, a whole slew of Labyrinth boards of varying difficulties, and way fewer bugs.  Right now I’m working on laying out all of the game boards, and trying really hard not to make them overly-difficult in the early stages.  I don’t think the game will end up being easy by any stretch of the immagination, but I’d at least like it to be somewhat challenging without making your brain explode.  The current design plan calls for 30 boards across 4 difficulty settings: 8 each of easy, medium, and hard levels, plus 6 more “tutorial” boards for practice, training, and introduction to some of the wackier elements of the game.

I’m also still working on getting a new iMac.  My G5 has been sold, but the buyer is also getting a whole mess of additional hardware and software from Mac Odyssey as well, and has yet to pick up the G5.  Since I don’t get my share of the sale until the buyer has committed to keeping the machine a couple of days after pick-up, I’m still waiting.  Fortunately, the delay may in fact work out in my favor: Mac Odyssey got wind that a number of last-gen machines that failed to sell in the education sector are being pushed into the non-Apple Store retail sector at discounted prices (this being Apple, “discounted prices” could here mean a minor reduction, but any reduction is money I don’t have to pay!), so I may be able to work out a deal on a much nicer Mac that I’d otherwise be able to afford.

Changing gears, I’ve been keeping quite busy at the job I’m actually paid to do as well.  I’ve been making continued improvements to the software I’ve developed, and am working on ways to further improve the standards-compliance and design flexibility of the HTML I generate.  I’m also teaching a two-hour-a-week “class” on XHTML and CSS, which may be the single best thing I could have done for my own understanding.  It’s one thing to teach yourself… it’s another thing entirely to teach others.  I think I’ve picked up more tricks and all-out skills since I started teaching this stuff than I have since the first couple of weeks of learning it.  I’m also continuing to make advances in what I know about ASP.NET and C#.  While I’m still rather utterly lost on some of the bigger concepts, I’ve been able to start playing within small things those concepts to start broadening my understanding.  For example, yesterday I fixed a bug in an ASP.NET control adapter that replaces the table-based layout of the standard control output with CSS-stylable DIVs and list elements.  Initially, I was unable to assign attributes to the control through the C# code-behind, which prompted a bit of research and finally a bug-fix that resolved the issue, so now my radio button list has its onclick attribute once again.  Hooray!  I still couldn’t actually write a control adapter from scratch, but I now have a bit more knowledge of how to edit an existing adapter to suit my needs.

Anyhoo, I’d best be getting back to work… plenty to do, and no time to do it in :P.

So my Mac has been at the local Apple reseller’s since Wednesday, to be diagnosed and spec’d for a sale on consignment.  I realize there’s more important business ahead of it, like Macs that are actually in need of repairs, but still, I miss my G5.  It’s even weirder because I still have a computer to use, so it’s not like I’m going through withdrawal or anything, I just miss my G5.  I keep trying to tell myself not to get so concerned about it, because the guys at Mac Odyssey are really good people, and all of my data is backed up on my external drive, and there’s nothing to worry about, but I can’t help but be worried.  Hopefully I’ll hear something Monday when the person in charge of consignment deals is back at the store (I called yesterday to see what the progress was, but he wasn’t there on the weekend).

God help me if I ever have a kid go off to summer camp…

I would like to know exactly where the past year has gone.  I don’t think I lost any of it, so asking for it back would be decidedly difficult, but I certainly seem to have been mentally absent for most of it… I’ve been looking back over a number of things lately and realizing that most of them happened almost a whole year ago.  It’s actually been nearly a year since I last picked up my Wacom tablet and doodled anything; nearly a year since I stopped working at Cyan and started working where I am now; almost two years since my last Mysterium… where has this time gone?!

I’m trying to figure out if the past year being a complete blur is a really good thing or a really bad thing, honestly.  On the one hand, it’s really good, because that means my job - which takes up most of my day anyway - doesn’t suck so much that I want to hang myself when I get home every day (okay, none of my jobs have ever really been that bad, but there have certainly been days that have done nothing good for me).  On the other hand, I wonder if perhaps my job is so similar from day to day that the passage of time just seems to slip under my radar as each day goes by in a blur.  Personally, I prefer thinking of it as the former possibility, because it’s not only less depressing, but it also takes into account just how much I’ve been doing this past year.  My project load both inside and outside the workplace has been borderline obscene, and I don’t see it getting much smaller anytime soon (as I’ve mentioned before).  I think I’ve just had so much to keep me busy that each day has been a blur, but not in the monotonous “what the hell day is it?” sort of way that implies that my job is sucking the life out of me.  It’s been a blur in the “what the hell happened to Tuesday?!” sort of way that turns every project into a race against the clock, much to my continual annoyance.

If I were to make an incredibly belated new year’s resolution, it would be to try and pay more attention to the actual passage of time, and maybe take some time out each day - or at least each week - to do something for myself that has no bearing on any projects that I’m working on for the Myst community or for my job.  Drawing, modeling, reading, writing (like, actual writing, not this philosophical commentary on life and video games I’m doing here)… anything constructive that I can do for myself to make time for me over the next year, so that I don’t suddenly look back again and go “WTF happened to 2008?!  I had plans!!!”

On a similar note, I may be dropping a few projects in an attempt to cut down on the number of responsibilities I have to juggle.  I’ll probably stay on the Mysterium committee, and you’d have to kill me before I dropped DPWR, but simply out of lack of time I may have to drop a few things like moderating the MOUL forums and pounding the pavement for help with the Guild of Archivists (which I wasn’t doing a very good job of anyway).  Once I finally finish assembling Issue 12 of The Archiver, I’ll probably try to find someone I can pawn my Pages templates off to in the event that the publication starts up again in the future, because the past week has rather plainly illustrated that I just don’t have the time to sit down and fiddle with content layouts and image placements that I did when I started the thing back in 2006.  I’ll also have to put a few of my more hair-brained ideas like learning Objective-C for the hell of it on the back burner while I bang out some more practical things that have been bouncing around in my head for 6 months or more.  I’ve never been good at project management - ask anyone I went to ITT with about how completely insane I get when handed something like a simple “build a bathroom sink” quiz in 3d modeling class - but I think I’ve finally managed to over-do it to the point where I just can’t get anything done due to how many things I’m trying to do.  It’s slowly driving me crazy, and it’s started affecting my productivity when it comes to even the smaller things that I need to do.

It’s funny how a complete break from one’s normal routine makes them look back at it from the outside and go “dude, I’ve got some problems to deal with…”   I’ll have more on what I did this weekend in an upcoming post, but for now, suffice it to say, it was an interesting and even enlightening weekend that I wasn’t expecting at all.  However, I’ll save that for later today since a) I have to get some work done and b) I don’t want to flood the MystBlogs feed ;).

Sometimes I want to smack myself senseless.  Obviously, this requires a little bit of setup to adequately explain where I’m coming from, so I’ll try to start far enough back that it’s enlightening without being boring or otherwise unnecessarily detailed…

Oscy and I have, for some time now, been involved with a neighbor in our apartment complex who has, to put it lightly, been going through some really serious relationship-related issues.  On the side, she’s a complete technophobe who also happens to have a bizzare tendency to want to have all manner of technology in her apartment, then freaks out about it a few days later because she’s either unknowingly broken it, forgotten what it was there for, doesn’t actually know how to use it, or thinks that someone might be hacking into it (this includes being suspicious of the little circuit boards in her smoke detector, fearing that her apartment may be bugged).  Stay with me here, because I’m slowly getting to the point…

One of the less intelligent things I did for this woman was give her my extremely outdated Dell laptop in an attempt to assuage her fears about her computer being hijacked and get her to a functional state of computing again, both tech-wise and peace-of-mind-wise.  In the course of the month and a half or so that she had the laptop, I ended up re-installing XP three different times (once for the initial wipe before I gave her the system, and twice more after that because either she or someone in her family who promised to “fix” this perfectly operational system for her completely trashed it instead).  Finally, she ended up just giving the laptop back to me a couple of weeks ago (a blessing in more than one way, as I’d been missing the nicety of having a lappy around, and it meant I would no longer be dragged over to her apartment at 11 PM to “fix” something that wasn’t broken and listen to another hour or two of sob stories).  She then tried to get it back a couple of days later, only to then change her mind once more a few days after that, but that’s neither here nor there (just annoying).

Anyway, throughout this whole mess, she’s ended up becoming friends of sorts with the complex’s maintenance guy, whom she also had try to “fix” the not-broken laptop (which resulted in me having to re-align the pins for the power plug after both of them failed to realize they were forcing the jack in the wrong way… bloddy idiots).  At some point she mentioned me and my incalculable technological prowess to him, and about a week ago, he came by asking if I could take a look at his computer, because he was having problems with pop-ups and couldn’t get some of his games to run.  The end goal of this post is now in sight… stay on target!
I agreed to look at his computer after he promised to pay me for my time (something my neighbor has never done), and spent last Saturday evening merrily removing over 200 virus- or malware-infected files from his computer, deleting all of the crapware that came with it, and setting up a functional AV/Anti-spamware suite (in other words, Not Norton)… which was actually pre-installed, never activated, and probably damaged by a bit of malware because it wouldn’t run properly despite launching at boot-up).  All told, I ended up charging him $70 for the time spent, which is still easily half of what he would have been gouged for at Geek Squad.

It then occurred to me that I lived in an apartment complex that was probably full of lamers as hopelessly lost as these two people, and that there was probably a fair amount of money to be had fixing their problems for them at half the price of what Geek Squad would charge (still a fair amount of money by any estimation) without the hassle of lugging their computer off to a retail store and dealing with Best Buy’s interminably long wait times and generally clueless staff.  This led to the ad-hoc creation of the Computer Defense Force, an “on-site” computer service & repair operation for apartment tennants.  Now, I’ve prided myself on not having to deal with endless system maintenance since I bought my G5 three years ago (doesn’t seem that long, but maybe thats a good thing, hehe), so Oscy was understandably baffled by this decision to start servicing computers in my “copious” spare time outside of work.  There’s actually two reasons why I decided to get into this again after 3 years of just dealing with Oscy’s computer and the occasional service call from my clueless family members: 1) more money is always a good thing, and 2) it actually makes me kind of happy doing this to computers that aren’t mine.  I have to be a bit more careful with other people’s systems, obviously, but I’m helping people get their computers working again, and oddly enough, it’s good stress relief watching a virus scan or disk defrag run.  And did I mention I’d get paid for this?

Now we’re on the home stretch… I realized last night that my quaint little Pages document of a sales invoice was pretty cool and all, but that I’d need a real way to track expenses and payments, as well as services offered, services rendered, the costs for those services, and to whom I provided them (as well as who still owed me cash moneys).  The problem is that most of the apps that handle invoicing and billing on the Mac are built for web designers and other freelance-type people who have big projects for small number of specific clients.  Now, if there’s one down-side to what the Mac has done for me, it’s made me less inclined to try and shoehorn the way I want to do things into the way an application wants me to do things.  My growing tendencies toward programming my way out of a hole I’ve found myself in have done absolutely nothing to help this situation.  So, at a loss for an app that does exactly what I want (a surprising rarity on a platform that supposedly has far less software than Windows does), I decided on a whim to start up XCode and start dinking around in the hopes that I might be able to figure out how to build my own program.  For those of you who have been waiting for this moment, this is the part where I commence smacking myself senseless.

OS X apps are written in Objective-C, which is a related language in some ways (but obviously not others) to C, C++, and any of the other not-C# variants of C floating around these days.  I have nothing but bad experiences from my C++ computer programming classes, learning how to create MPG calculators that ran in the Command Prompt, which has made me extremely hesitant to try learning a C-variant language that has absolutely no practical use where I work.  My forray into XCode last night wasn’t exactly nightmarish, but I was just blindly following the instructions given to me by the Hello World tutorial, so I didn’t get much of anything out of it beyond learning that XCode/Interface Builder’s way of building apps and linking them to UIs is very different from Visual Studio’s (in some ways better, in other ways a lot more tedious).  I still know next to nothing about Objective-C, and I’m betting that by the time I’ve learned enough about the language to build my shiny little application with CoreData usage and iCal &Address Book integration, I could probably just make money by selling that instead of the services I’d be managing with it.

Plus I still want to make video games…

And I need to actually get Issue 12 of the Archiver done for TCT, which I was asked to help with 5 days ago…

And I’m still interested in trying my hand at C# desktop programming, just so I can have a potentially useful new skill at work if the need arises…

And I’m helping to plan Mysterium…

Which, speaking of, means I need to get the Room Share system finalized tonight and handed off to TW and Odo for assistance in developing…

See why I want to smack myself?  I mean, Learning New Skills for Fun and Profit is cool and all, but I’m still working on that “and Profit” part… I have a ton of ideas for things to do, and no time to finish any of them as a result.  And all the while I keep coming up with more new things to try and do.  It’s somewhat maddening…

Well, that was fun…

Here’s what happened to cause DPWR’s several-day downtime this month: I received an email from my web host informing me that they were going to be relocating their server center from Hopkinsville, KY to Columbus, OH sometime this month.  Obviously, since this requires physical relocation of the hardware, the site would be offline for a day or two while that migration took place.  When DPWR became non-responsive several days ago, I figured that was the problem, and let it be.

Now, to change gears, the DPWR.NET domain was registered back in 2002 when I signed up for a hosting plan with my former web host.  At the time, I knew very little about the details of domain name management, and my host was never terribly good at informing me of things I needed to do to keep it (like, for example, that I needed to pay for it after the first year despite it being included as a free domain in my registration).  Eventually, after getting fed up with the reliability and general incompetence of my former host, I migrated the site to a new host, but didn’t migrate the domain; I’d paid for it to be renewed for as many years as the contract allowed (which was 5) without bothering me about it, and managed to get the nameservers changed over to point to the correct web host.

This month, without any notification, my domain expired, and evidently reached the end of its renewal contract, because it wasn’t renewed.  Only after some thorough investigation did I discover that my former web host was either bought out by or otherwise subsumed into a completely different company, which apparently has as many communication problems as the one it acquired.  Fortunately, further investigation and semi-frantic calls to my current host revealed that both providers use the same registrar (tucows/OpenSRS) , and that transferring from one service provider to another on the same registrar is roughly a 30-minute process once the authorization goes through.

So, the short of it is that DPWR.NET is now managed through my current web host, which has proven to be considerably more reliable in telling me things that are relevant and/or important to me keeping my site up and running than my old host (in fact, over a year after I canceled my account with them, I was unceremoniously billed for over $100 in unpaid service fees… not exactly a reliable group, them…).  Next March will proceed without incident, provided I’m not so destitute that I can’t keep the site running (highly unlikely at best).  There will likely be one more period of downtime this month when the servers get relocated, but after that, it’ll be smooth sailing.

One last note, though, which I will be relaying to several other forums for the sake of keeping people informed… I will be making concerted efforts to improve the speed and efficiency of DPWR over the next however-long (ideally things will improve by the end of the month) by moving the database to a new SQL server within the host and clearing out as much of the cruft as I possibly can.  DPWR’s file server works pretty well; it just takes forever for the SQL server to respond, and on a site as DB-reliant as DPWR, that creates some serious slow-downs.  I’ll fiddle with it and see what I can do to make it faster, but no promises yet.

I have a ton of work to do on the site, and absolutely no time (or energy, lately) to get any of it done, it seems.  I’ll try to make some improvements before the end of the month, but again, I can’t make any promises.  I think my plate’s finally gotten over-filled, and programming 7-4 every day is doing very little to improve my attitude toward getting more programming done when I get home.

Someone else has already used the monitor resolution joke, so I’ll go with a Microsoft product name joke instead… And now for some New Year’s Resolutions, 3 days late!

There are a lot of things I want to do this year, and it’s going to take a lot of work to make them all happen. Hopefully I can find ways to keep myself invested and motivated enough to follow through on all of these. Some of them are sillier than others, and some are more superficial than others as well, but they’re all things I want to do, so here goes.

1. Eat healthier. We’ve gotten into the bad habit of going out to get food when we don’t feel like cooking anything, and things like lunch meat and other simple-to-fix foods end up going bad all too often in our fridge because of this. There are a few things I’ve got in mind to try and combat this problem, and the first is to make extensive use of a nifty recipe program I found for the Mac called YummySoup!. A quick call home last night has ensured a steady flow of recipes and cooking ideas from the Family Cookbook, and I’d also like to go through the recipe books we’ve gotten through various sources in the past to build a comprehensive library of things to eat. This will be an ongoing project throughout the year, inputting recipes, cooking them, and photographing the results for inclusion in the program afterwards. It may be the sign of someone who’s lived so much of their life in the digital age, but I think creating a cookbook on the computer will be a much more likely way for us to actually make use of it than if we just stuffed a bunch of note cards with recipes on them in a drawer and forgot about them. Perhaps the nicest feature of YummySoup! that I think will be helpful (aside from being able to visually cruise through recipes ala CoverFlow) is the grocery list feature, which compiles and totals up a list of all the ingredients needed to complete the dishes selected.
2. Manage the money better. While I dare say we haven’t done a bad job of managing our finances in 2007 (and we did a far sight better than in previous years…), we haven’t exactly done a terrific job either. Most of this comes down, again, to eating out entirely too often, which is a huge money sink. In part as a way to try and counter this trend from another angle, and in part to try and get our ducks in a row financially, I’m looking at a financial app for the Mac called Cha-Ching. Obviously it’s not as full-featured as something like QuickBooks or Quicken, but it’s less than half the price ($40 instead of $90), it’s supporting an indie developer (a far nobler cause than shoveling more money into Intuit’s pockets), Intuit has a rather nasty track record of Mac support, and Cha-Ching, from my basic fiddling last night, seems to support pretty much everything that I’d need to have in order to keep track of our money, and also the finances for North of February (Ash’s jewelry and chainmaille outlet).
3. On a related note, pay down our debt. We made some initial strides in this last year, which have since been hampered by things like replacing Ash’s old computer in desperation when it seemed to be falling apart in a fairly terminal fashion, and draining the savings account on trips to see family this holiday season. This year, I want to seriously invest myself in paying off the debt we’ve already incurred, along with the debt I brought to the table in the first place when we got married. I know for a fact I won’t get it all paid off this year, but I can make a concerted effort to do so, and I will.
4. Don’t go through 4 different jobs this year. This one’s a bit on the silly side, but I had 4 paying jobs last year, and it was tumultuous to say the least. I seem to be in a fairly stable place right now, making a fair amount of money to boot, and hopefully I won’t have to leave for a new job for quite a while now. I’ll likely remain completely overloaded in the “hobby” department for most of the year, especially with regards to Mysterium, but I don’t want to have to deal with changing jobs this year and all of the hell that raises on the finances, especially since Ash isn’t presently working for anyone but herself.
5. Build a media center in the apartment. A superfluous one this time (and an expensive one, for that matter), but one that I’d like to accomplish before the year is out. The primary motivation behind this one is to make the apartment more like a home and less like an office with an attached bed and kitchen. Virtually everything that we do involves the computer somehow, and I’m kind of getting tired of having to either sit in my art chair (which is good for work, but bad for casual movie-watching) or lay on the floor whenever we watch a TV show or movie, for example. However, I don’t want to half-ass this project, and there’s a lot of pieces that we need to make it work. In no particular order of purchase, we need a new TV, a wifi network, and a Mac Mini to provide the actual media center capabilities. Assuming $600 for the TV, $400 for a refurbed Mini, and $200 for the wifi, that’s $1200 (plus tax) for this little project.
6. Get Labyrinth published. I created Labyrinth with Ash in about a week and a half for a contest sponsored by the company that produces the engine I’m using for game development. It wasn’t terribly well executed, it was a bit janky, and it’s just sat in the corner and done nothing since then. I intend to do it up right, with multiple levels, better visuals, more music, more options (like mouse axis inversion), and a pay-only downloadable version in addition to a simpler, free web-based version. The downloadable version would have more levels and probably include the options pane and high score tracking per-player, in addition to the all-time high scores being posted online. I hope to release it for about $15 by the end of July. For the time being, it will be Mac-only, and all proceeds from the sale of the game will go toward purchasing an upgrade to Unity pro, which will let me build the game for Windows (and thus hopefully open the game up to an even broader audience).

Obviously I have a lot on my plate this year. Some of the stuff I’ve listed will be easier to accomplish than others, but I want to accomplish all of it if at all possible. On top of all this, Ash plans to go to Faerieworlds, and we’d also like to be able to attend Mysterium, so we’ve got our work cut out for us.

Happy New Year, everybody. Let’s make it a good one, eh?