2002-10-13 - 7:30 a.m.

Well well, another morning and I'm not dead yet. I fought off the desire to sleep in this morning. It would be colossally stupid to do so because then tomorrow I would almost certainly sleep in for a third morning in a row and then on Tuesday it would be hell to actually wake up for work. So no, I'm up, and it's 7am and I'm writing in my diary :o)

Small annoyances with the roommate continue. More piss on the seat. More dishes left out and undone. More cheese improperly wrapped lol. Hahaha the cheese thing always gets me. But yeah, little things here and there in a constant stream. Tanis and I specifically read the "Acceptance was the answer" story in the AA book just to talk about how we should be dealing with our problems of accepting life. My mind isn't seeing how it applies in this case, though.

Well, actually, my mind just gave me a rather sad thought: that since Mark is giving me $300 a month to stay here that I am being paid $300 to wipe his piss off the seat, do his dishes and rewrap all cheese blocks in cellophane. When I look at it that way, it's more acceptable because you would do those kinds of things in a minimum wage job and not care too much. The only reason it bugs me is that I am so much more respectful to him. I don't feel as though he purposely disrespects me, just that he doesn't realize what he's doing isn't respectful. I can't expect everyone to be like me. God.. where would that leave the world! HA!

I have to admit that I'm not really looking forward to today. This is my third Sunday of planning and life evaluation. Last Sunday it didn't actually take me all that long to do all the planning, but then again I didn't do all that much. I think I'll make the diary review a little quicker. That went rather well last week and I think the jotting down notes as I reread will work fine. The major purpose of the exercise is to make sure I read over what I have written at least once so I can remember anything I've said that either still needs to be done or that I need to realize I was wrong or right about in hindsight.

Otherwise, I have laundry to do which is usually actually pretty quick. Considering I only do it once every two weeks, there is at most an hour's worth of effort involved. I think I have enough quarters and loonies and everything, so the hard part is over :o) hehe.

I should probably at some point today end up writing out chords and ditties in sheet music. It's something I nearly started doing on Friday but put off for lack of time. Well, I've suddenly had lots of time thrown in my lap lately and if I don't have some music written out by Monday then I'm probably not going to do it at all this coming week. Something to keep in mind.

I just want to eat breakfast. Bah. What's up with me? Is it because I slept in yesterday? Maybe it's because I didn't do any exercise yesterday.

After my morning routine, I... hmmm what did I do even? oh! nothing. Because I slept in. Boy, I'm a little slow. After my morning routine it was time to head over to Jamie's and Paul's so I could be there by "noonish". Well, at least I didn't sleep to noon like I used to. Mark begged a ride to the mall so I drove there first then got to the place just at the right time. We set up a three machine LAN and had a go at some cheesy games. The highlight of the day was playing Counter-Strike.. it was actually quite fun considering how little I play it now. We played on a quebec server and the guys were pretty good. Jamie, Paul and I were top of the team usually so it was .. well.. you know I wouldn't have missed it if I didn't go. Sigh. But it was fun to hang out with friends.

I got home from there around 6:30, just ahead of the all-day-gaming induced headache. What did I do however but get right back on the computer. I ended up eating dinner and spending the evening reading stories about Andrew Braybrook, the programmer of one of my favourite games. He wrote Paradroid for the Commodore 64, my first computer. He also wrote diaries while he was writing his games and it was quite amazing to read about his struggles and daily accomplishments.

At first I got the impression that the guy was a genius and could program an insane amount of functionality in no time, but now I'm not so sure. I keep trying to think he was just like everyone else and not that special, but it's hard when he talks about writing routines to hide the robots that aren't in the same room as you and gets in done in a day. I mean, this guy was writing in Commodore assembler and although I don't know too much about it, I did study it a bit when I was 12 and I did do some assembler writing in university. I don't know how long it would take me to do something similar. There must be some explanation. He must have thought ahead in insightful ways. I'd love to sit and talk to the guy for a few days.

So anyway, at the end of the night I found out that after working on computer games he went to some large company to write client-server mainframe code for the insurance industry. I was kind of disappointed. But the more I thought about it, the more it came to me that piracy must have driven him to it. Then again, though, in reading his diaries he did often concentrate on pushing the C64 to its limits. Maybe he was just more into optimizing the hell out of his code than coming up with fantastic game concepts. From that point of view, optimizing code for a mainframe would suit his skills a lot better than coming up with a graphics engine to kill Doom3 or whatever.

So anyway, where does this leave me and where am I going? Well, here I am at the ripe old age of 26 (almost 27) and feeling rather old this morning, and I've never completed a single game. I'm finally at a point in my life where I could actually plan to write one and actually finish the plan, so I think I should give it a go. Of course that means that I should really sit and think about it. As I always try to say, today is the day. I've thought about it many many many many many many many many many times but now I have a lot more tools of analysis and time prediction at my disposal. We'll see.

Well I guess I filled this entry in. What more can I really say? Oh, Tanis called yesterday while I was over at the boys' place gaming. I was being invited to the saturday lasagna-fest at Evelyn's that we had talked about last week but I had completely forgotten about. So that was cool. I'm looking forward to seeing her at tonight's meeting.

Back on the subject of writing a computer game... I may not have finished a game yet but I sure haven't sat still for the last few years. After I got off the web programming kick, I did land an honest to god C++ programming job and I have learned a hell of a lot about how to program and design software. Not only that but I have a good amount of Direct X knowledge as well as Win32 programming, multithreading concepts etc under my belt, so I can tackle almost all the technical aspects of writing a single game without having to refer to a manual or learn new technologies. I should finally write that space taxi clone I was trying to do when I lived in Toronto. It would be soooooo simple to do it with the tools and knowledge and technology I have at my disposal today instead of what I was trying to do with practically no knowledge, turbo C 2.0 and VESA graphics. Bah.

Anyway, food for thought. And speaking of food...

Au revoir.

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