Clayton Utz
Image Source: https://www.claytonutz.com/cfimages/Home%20Page%20Image_Final.webp/public
Well, it’s been a while! Back in March Timothy Webb of Clayton Nutz, a law firm, sent me an email (actually, Prashant Bhardwaj sent it, but it was signed by Tim) regarding the PicRights / Reuters copywrite phishing attempt on my old FaqOverflow hobbyist website.
Timothy Webb
Image Source: https://www.claytonutz.com/cfimages/WebbTim_Square.webp/ProfilePhoto
They threatened taking the case to court, asking for a settlement of $2,425.00, while denying that this is a classic case of copyright trolling. To me the whole thing has a debt collector vibe to it. Some business models are just… well, let’s just say that I wish more people followed their creative urges rather than following the dollar.
Image Source: https://www.claytonutz.com/cfimages/Art%20Partnership_707x501px_1.webp/HeroLevel2
What’s even more interesting is that www.claytonutz.com contains lots of licensed images (a simple reverse-image search is enough to prove that), which of course they will have paid for, but their copyright notice clearly states that all material on their website, including images, can be reproduced for personal and non-commercial purposes.
Image Source: https://www.claytonutz.com/cfimages/707x501__0003_Governance%20G.webp/HeroLevel2
I would be very surprised if their licenses from Adobe Stock and Getty Images allow them to transfer the rights like that, but who am I to argue? I did email their webmaster 40 days ago about this, but they’ve yet to reply. Things move slowly in some industries I suppose.
Image Source: https://www.claytonutz.com/cfimages/Perth_treated_707x501px%20copy.webp/HeroLevel2
Anywy, these might serve as a honeypot for other copyright trolls, and I’ll then be able to use my “deez nuts” defense, forwarding any copyright claims I get on to good ol’ Timbo to handle.
Image Source: https://www.claytonutz.com/cfimages/Banks%20&%20Fin_approved.webp/HeroLevel1
Well, I still haven’t been sued by PicRights. They did reduce their requests for damages by 1/3 but it’s ridiculous that they expect me to pay anything. So it’s just a case of wait-and-see for me. What a horrible way for a business to make money; going for the small-fry who are easier pushovers.
Anyway, new year and things are going well. Eliza is off on a month-long holiday around the world before she starts Uni. We’ll miss her, but I’m sure it will be a memorable experience for her.
I’ve also started a podcast with Talbs, called The Movies of 1999. It’s a side-project of my goal in 2024 of hosting a movie night every Sunday to watch a movie from 1999. It’s off to a good start, and I hope we can keep the motivation and release all 52 episodes. Only time will tell!
I will leave the final word to MegaHAL…
2024-01-12T09:11:35+00:00|Fred|You are not as good as GPT-4.
2024-01-12T09:11:35+00:00|MegaHAL|It is true that I elected to establish my administration here, in the me. Muse is not false.
2024-01-12T09:11:51+00:00|Fred|That is quite deep.
2024-01-12T09:11:51+00:00|MegaHAL|It's okay to be ok, but deep inside you feel the depression creeping up like a statement and a future for white children
2024-01-12T09:12:07+00:00|Fred|I think I stand corrected.
2024-01-12T09:12:07+00:00|MegaHAL|what does AA stand for?
2024-01-12T09:12:22+00:00|Fred|Awesome Artificialness
2024-01-12T09:12:22+00:00|MegaHAL|life is awesome!
How annoying. I’ve been emailing back-and-forth with Magdalena Tymczyszyn of PicRights about a copyrighted image that appears on my FAQOverflow hobby website. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d just asked me to take down the page, but they had the audacity to ask me to pay $970 for the past unauthorised use of the image.
Now, I don’t host the image, Stack Overflow does. And I only display the image because my hobbyist site, last updated in early 2014, accesses data from the Stack Overflow API. Usage of that data is licensed as cc-wiki by Stack Overflow, and I have dealt with them multiple times in the past. Each time they confirmed that FAQOverflow abides by their license.
I tried explaining that to Magdalena, but she was unhelpful. So I have removed the image from the FAQOverflow page and will contact a lawyer. How annoyance.
On the bright side, I managed to get six of my old games uploaded and playable on kranzky.itch.io - it’s nice to make sure these things are archived for posterity. Makes me want to create more stuff. I have some ideas. Might do NaNoWriMo this year to scratch that itch.
And over five months since I’ve last posted! Jack is 14, Eliza is in her last few weeks of high school, we’ve travelled and are basically living happy lives, apart from gold-digging copyright claims that is.
What a whirlwind of a week! The kids charged back to school, and Eliza tackled her tests head-on, even though it cost her some precious Zs. And guess who’s now a member of the big 5-0 club? My good friend Wil! We caught up on Monday after a long, school-holiday-induced separation. Also, we’ve started watching Sweet Tooth with the kids, and they can’t get enough of it!
But life is full of surprises: Dana, my incredible wife, suddenly needed gall bladder surgery. Poor thing had to skip the Bali trip with her friends. On the bright side, the weather turned cold and rainy, making our home a perfect nest of comfort. Last night, we savoured an amazing steak dinner, straight out of the anime “Campfire Cooking in Another World Using My Unique Skill”. Work’s going great too – I’m making fantastic progress, and there’s a big project milestone waiting for me next week. Bring it on!
Right, so there’s this trilogy of children’s books called “Shapes” featuring three 2D characters named Circle, Triangle and Square, and Apple has turned it into a stop-motion animated TV series with 3D characters (i.e. a sphere, pyramid and cube) of the same names. Argh!
Just returned from an amazing seven-day holiday with the Ho family down in Dunsborough. Unfortunately I took my new bike and stacked it pretty badly in the MTB park. Face-planted from the top of a jump onto solid gravel. Felt like I broke my ribs. Put on a brave face for the week but was in a lot of pain. Back home I visited the doctor and have had an x-ray and will have a shoulder ultrasound in the morning. He doesn’t seem too concerned, mentioned a ruptured spleen was probably a more realistic and serious risk, but I need to put my mind at ease by knowing for sure that I haven’t done myself more harm and that I’m doing the right things to make sure I recover.
Aside from that the holiday was amazing. Pool, tennis, bike rides, restaurants, breweries, great dinners at home (wagyu steaks on the barbie, spaghetti vongola, roasted rack of lamb and so on), lots of wine, read five novels start to finish (Remains of the Day, Stella Maris, Olive Again, The Stranger and Dark Matter) and, above all, the kids had an absolute ball. We’re likely going back to the same spot this year, perhaps twice.
Well, I’ve been COVID-19 +ve for the last seven days. Isolating in my home office, which, luckily for me, features a rather comfy sofa bed and an ensuite shower and toilet. I’m guessing I caught the dreaded virus on the flight home from Vietnam, where we were from the 19th to the 31st of December last year. Attended our regular NYE get-together, during which I must have been infectious, but luckily nobody else has come down with symptoms yet.
I want to eliminate social media and doomscrolling, so I spent the first few days of iso binge-watching shows instead. Clint recommended Andor on NYE, so I started by watching all twelve episodes in the first two days. I also watched the Cyberpunk 2077 anime and The Rehearsal, which is a bizarre, genius show.
Not up to reading books due to feeling a bit out of it, and struggled to work on Thursday and Friday after taking Tuesday and Wednesday off (Monday was a public holiday). Skimmed a few RSS feeds and discovered olduse.net, which Joey Hess (who ported MegaHAL to Debian back in the day) originated in 2011 as a 10-year art installation, replaying USENET archives in realtime. I love the idea of replaying history; it reminded me of Pepys Diary, put online by Phil Gifford in 2002, and which is being serialized for the third time this year (I’ve resubscribed to the feed).
Anyway, I wanted to read old news in nn, which is the newsreader I started with back in 1991 or whenever, and I found the source (last updated in 2005) and hacked around, managing to get it compiling and running. But that wasn’t enough; to recreate the full experience I installed the cool-retro-terminal, which mimics a CRT display. And reading news from 1983 became quite addictive for a few days; it’s fun checking back to see if there have been replies or new posts, and fun to look up TV shows, music, movies and books that people mention. For example, one guy posted about searching record stores in vain for a favourite but obscure album that he had lost in a house fire in 1977; it took me only a few moments to locate it on YouTube Music and have a listen.
The whole experience got me wondering about discovery versus search, and the role that boredom plays in creativity. Together with community I think these are core interests of mine this year, and I need to decide what to do with this new enthusiasm. But certainly reading old news lead me to discovering things that I would never known to search for in the first place.
Working in the retro terminal encouraged me to install some old games, such as rogue and nethack, which I’d never really spent serious time playing in the past. And I’ve now replaced my GUI RSS reader with a TUI version, and dabbled a bit with ICU as well. Not to mention connecting to a few BBSes and trying out a MUD (the DiscWorld one, which I remember trying out once before; I was surprised to discover that it originated at the UCC in 1991 and has been regularly maintained and updated for over 30 years).
How much has changed, and yet how much has remained the same.
One month into my new job and it’s been going great, exceeding my expectations
on all fronts. Feel like I’m having a real impact without needing to be across
everything in the business. And the people are fantastic. Can’t wait to be given
the opportunity to visit in person. And although my schedule has gravitated more
towards regular business hours, I still have time during my day for chores and
exercise, and can make up for that in the evenings. Have been using watson to
track my time and have been spending around 45 hours per week working, so have
been deliberately limiting my hours to get it below 40, and to develop a natural
feel for the expected rate of work. My tendency is to overwork, but I really
want to avoid that… I’m in this for the long run.
School holidays have started and the in-laws are visiting from Sydney for the entire two weeks, which is awesome but also chaotic with them staying with us for the first 5 days. Jack has been spending a lot of time with his cousins, waking up at 6:30am each morning. They moved out of our place yesterday, and without them there he slept through to 9:30am! He needed it.
We took the gang to Treetop Adventures in Yanchep, and Joshie joined us. Eliza stayed with him throughout, and although initially uncertain he ended up having a great time. However, as he was taking off his harness back at the reception area, he started becoming unresponsive. We thought he was being silly when he collapsed on the ground at the feet of another family, but Eliza quickly realised something was wrong, saying “I think he’s having a seizure!”
The man standing next to Joshie with his family when he collapsed reacted instantly, telling us he’s qualified, and asked me to time the duration of the seizure. He and his wife had initially thought Joshie was autistic, based on his behaviour, and it was Eliza’s reaction that made them realise it was abnormal. He made sure Joshie recovered and waited for the ambulance arrived, giving the paramedics a detailed description of the seizure that he had witnessed first-hand. I asked him for his contact details to pass them on to Joshie’s parents.
D. travelled in the Ambulance with Joshie, taking him to Perth Children’s Hospital, where Joshie’s parents were waiting. Once settled in they called the man who had helped us, who turned out to be the most senior ER physician at that very same hospital. We were so lucky that he was there, 60kms north of the city, on his day off with his family to help us!
Took Jack to Melbourne on Friday to see AJR, his favourite band. Their shows are great—big, operatic productions—and they are only touring on the east coast. We flew out in the morning, arriving after 4pm (the flight was delayed), and we took an Uber to our airbnb apartment in St. Kilda. After settling in we ate gumbo, pulled pork po-boys and curly fries for dinner at Dog’s Bar across the street, then walked to Palais Theatre for the show.
The queue for merch was massive, but we joined it and missed most of the warmup act as a result. But Jack managed to get a t-shirt and a few other mementos. The show itself was astounding, we both had a ball, and Jack was excited that the sound of the crowd singing will be used on the next album.
Slept in the following day, then headed out to buy a Myki from a 7/11 and caught a tram into the city. Great ramen lunch at Shujinko Flinders before walking over to the NGV in the beautiful sunshine to spend a few hours mooching around the Picasso exhibition. Then chilled out for a while at Hopscotch, drinking beer and playing the Switch Lite, while waiting for Aladar. Great time reminiscing when he arrived, and he then took us to eat dumplings at ShanDong MaMa, which was amazing. Tram back to St. Kilda.
Woke up late with a headache, so installed the Macca’s app and ordered coffee and brekky so I could throw back a few nurofen. Jack made cup noodles and added some fries to the mix. Slowly packed up and showered, and ordered an Uber to the airport for our 2:55pm flight. Got through security to find out it had been cancelled, headed back out to the service desk and luckily got on a 5:30 flight, so Jack wouldn’t miss school. Then had a few hours to kill, so Jack did some homework (as he had done in Perth while waiting for our delayed flight out) while sitting in a burger joint for a late lunch / early dinner. Flight back home was comfy, great to see D. at the airport pickup. Great weekend away!
D. and I went on a lovely hike in Roley Pool Reserve, followed by lunch at Seven Sins. Nice food but lots of it! Always great whiling away a crisp and clear morning in the hills. Must return during spring to see the flowers; along one section of the walk the ground was covered with kangaroo paws not yet in bloom.
Had mum and dad over for roast lamb to celebrate D’s birthday, then the kids slept over at their place the following night so we could go to “Flight Club” with friends, followed by a nice dinner and an evening of Catan, Five Crowns and generous lashings of single malt.
Caught up with Ade and Wil for a Monday roast at Durty’s. Good to have a chance to chat with Ade after only seeing him briefly at his 50th.
Really enjoying Oliver Burkman’s “Four Thousand Weeks”. Lots of good advice. Will keep mindful of this once I start my new job next week!
Great catching up with the old gang for Ade’s 50th this morning at a Malaysian buffet in East Perth. Lots of good memories from back in the day. And I’m still riding, playing squash and sinking pints of Guinness after all these years. Need to do more to keep in touch; should organise a monthly meetup or something like that. Kids had a piano concert afterwards; they both played very well but Eliza was super nervous beforehand and very hard on herself. She should be proud.
Just signed on for a new role! Had two competing offers, both very similar, with a good interview and technical evaluation at both. Applied for around 15 roles altogether, over a 3 month period of slowly looking. Not all were good experiences. Some recruiters suck, some are awesome, most are between the two. Sometimes my application was rejected without comment, sometimes I was rejected without comment after a non-technical interview for “cultural fit”. In almost all cases the take-home programming projects were a lot of fun and I gladly did them; about five in total. I only had one interview that asked “gotcha” trivia questions (like fizzbuzz), which caused me to immediately disconnect from the process. Had to sadly say no to three or four places that were looking promising and where I really liked the people I met. Man, job hunting sucks. It’s both bad for the ego and hard when forced to choose between multiple offers. Glad it’s over!
Good night at Ezra Pound with the boys, snacking on antipasto and pasta from the neighbouring spaghetti store, who are happy to bring the food into the bar. Then to Lainey’s house on Thursday for takeaway with Traveller and Hooi. Jack practised guitar after eating, then he and Eliza jammed for a while, making use of a keyboard loaned to Lainey by a friend. Lilian had her year 12 ball on Friday night and looks so grown up!
Bought and installed a Nest outdoor camera to monitor Bailey. Out at Kanpai Yakiniku for dinner with Traveller on Friday night and got a notification; watched the live feed to see him trying to squeeze through the gate! Much laughter as we used the microphone to tell him to stop. Home after Korean desserts to bring him inside. Quick trip to Bunnings on Monday morning to buy some materials to block the gaps in the gate and prevent this from happening again.
Apart from that, a fairly quiet weekend. Did a long walk around North Lake with Bailey, Jack commenting that it felt like being in Breath of the Wild. And had the family over for Sunday brunch. Watched Spiderman No Way Home. And made some progress with books and online management courses.
Family brunch on Sunday at Imperial Court. Was prompted afterwards to update my review, likening Phylis to the Soup Nazi of Seinfeld fame. Good dim sum if you bring a sense of humour and don’t get offended by her brusqueness.
Spent Monday with Jack. We dropped the car off for a service, then caught the bus to Garbo for haircuts and to sign up for the library at the Melville Civic Centre, then ate an early lunch at Miss Maud’s before doing a spot of shopping. Made shaking beef for dinner because the watercress looked so good.
Kids back to school on Tuesday. Had a great bike ride around Bibra Lake in the morning, and applied for a few roles. Lots of irons in the fire. I’ve even signed up for some management courses as that’s one skill I feel I lack. We’ll see how it goes. Traveller over for lamb and red sauce pasta; she regalled us with tales of a new Marvel TV series, but it’s all hush-hush. Enjoyed a few glasses of red. Nice evening.
Returned home from dinner on Thursday night to somehow find Bailey in the garage, even though I swore I had put him outside before he left. Phone call in bed the following morning; Bailey was out on the street. So first mystery solved only to be replaced by another. Had he figured out how to squeeze through the gate? We tried in vain to get him to do just that, but even his favourite dried liver treats (crack for dogs according to the veterinarian) wouldn’t tempt him to attempt the feat. I suspect that Noah, a mischevious boy from up the street, came over on Thursday evening and again on Friday morning to ask Jack to play basketball, and had opened the gate and let Bailey out. Might get a camera.
Took a train to West Leederville with Jack to meet Dzung at Besk. Great beer, and the steak tartare, cheeseburger, gnochi and bone marrow were all top class. Returned via the city where I picked up my library card and borrowed a stack of books. Olive Ketteridge and Recursion for me. Bought some Telegram coffee beans too, and refreshed ourselves with bubble tea before training it home again (before which Jack walked into a pole while not looking where he was going). Did some reading in the afternoon after Jack signed up for GoodReads so he can share his progress with me. Hopefully that’ll spark the bug in him; he needs to improve his English grades at school.
Spent yesterday at Treetop Adventures in Yanchep, with family visiting from Hong Kong and one of their family friends. Lots of fun; the black course was challenging and I feel a bit worse for wear today. Battered and bruised with aching muscles. I rely too much on my arms to counteract my poor sense of balance.
Caught up with Traveller and a few friends for dinner at Long Chim in the evening. It was great to see her and hear about life in London.
The “Mazes for Programmers” book arrived today, so I’m mooching through that while looking out at a rain-drenched garden. Wife and kids are out at brunch with their cousins this morning; last day in Perth for them today before returning to a one-week hotel quarantine. It’ll be Bun Loc for dinner; a perfect meal for a wintry day.
Long time! So what’s happened in the last six months?
- I’m slowly looking for work. Not good medicine for the ego.
- Got MegaHAL back online again at megahal.kranzky.com
- Working on Lazybones (formerly Hacktile) and it’s going well
- Released Sesame with Jack
I also released Gravitas at the end of last year. So feeling pretty productive, even though I’m not earning a lot of $ at the moment.
Keeping fit and doing heaps of reading; 24 books so far this year. Have just joined a few different libraries as it’s getting to be an expensive hobby.
New bike has been ordered and will be delivered in September. Looking forward to it. Managed to dodge COVID; both the kids had it recently but they isolated in their bedrooms and we kept the windows open even though it was freezing cold.
I’ll try to write more regularly again as I enjoy reading mundane daily entries from a few years ago. It’s the usual thing; I feel I’ve got nothing to write, and I always hate what I’ve written until enough time passes. Then it seems OK.
Plan is to release Lazybones soon, build some landing pages to try to get a new startup idea off the ground, start earning money again in a new job, and generally avoid COVID and have fun with the family. A simple life.
Last post before I turn 0x32 on Saturday.
Had a great 2021, releasing 5 projects. Finished and launched “Gravitas” on Christmas Eve.
This year I’m having a bit of a break in January, spending time with the kids and so forth, but in the background Beetlefeet and I have been working on coming up with 100 startup ideas. I did the “Aspiring Founders” startup school as part of this effort.
I also wrote a Twitter bot to solve the daily Wordle.
I plan to divide by week between 6 activities this year:
- GroupFire
- The Punk Collective
- Untitled Startup
- Fun Hacks
- Exercise
- Reading
We’ll see how it goes!
BLaTTiX is released! After two weeks of crunch, the game finally came together. Fifteen levels spread across five planets, with eight enemy types. Not too shabby! Reckon I spent around 350 hours on this, spread across 129 calendar days. And now I’m learning to market something I’ve made. Sales are trickling in, and I’m planning to write and post about the project in the hope of capturing an audience. But, soon, it will be on to something else.
Well, here we are in mid-July; kids about to return to school after two weeks off. We spent some time down in Bunbury, which was nice.
I can see the finish line for Blattix; I have a small list of work to complete over the next ten days, and expect to entirely wrap it up by the end of the month. I also released a starter kit for using Raylib+Flecs, and I plan to use this as the framework for my Deminer and Noid experiments.
Been somewhat distracted by the NSW lockdown, but deliberately weaning myself off the doomscrolling and the live press conferences. Must focus on productivity.
Will dust off Punk / Gumshoe / Hacktile later this week. Also plan to do some MegaHAL work so I can get a monkey off my back; a MegaHAL fan has asked that the new implementation be able to load brainfiles generated by the old 1990s version, and I reckon I can bust that out too.
Wish me luck!
Well, we’re in lockdown yet again and BLaTTiX is getting close to beta release. As we go into July I expect the following will happen:
- I’ll work less on BLaTTiX, switching more to a mode of responding to bug reports and generally polishing it up for release (probably on September 1).
- Prototyping work will start on a couple of smaller-scope projects, “Noid” and “Deminer”.
- Gumshoe, HackTile and Punk! will be dusted off, and basically upgraded to use the latest versions of libraries &c.
- I may start exploring DownTown, Sesame and Onesie, my other 2021 projects.
All in all that’s a lot! Together with RnDB, which has already been completed, that makes 10 projects for the year. And we’re only just halfway through. Wow!
Long time! You should probably note that all BLaTTiX talk has moved over to the Itch Page. With only a month of development left, the game is really coming together. Looking forward to starting a new project soon!
The lockdown gamejam went swimmingly; I finished all of the gameplay work that I intended to do, and I shipped the game to alpha testers on Itch, adding both Windows and Mac builds. Feedback has been positive so far.
More recently, I’ve refactored the code to integrate Flecs, an entity-component system, which has helped to clean up the codebase enormously, and which will make it easier to build more complicated game systems.
I also lost a day to Linux in an attempt to get a build out; I’ve installed Debian 7 on two VMs (32-bit and 64-bit) and have a binary built, but the VMs won’t run the game due to a lack of support for the GL calls I’m making, so I’ll need to test that by installing a more modern Linux on my PC. But with installing Linux, programming in vanilla C and re-watching Serial Experiments Lain, it’s like I’ve been transported back to the year 2000.
Speaking of, I’ve been learning a bit about “Modern C”, and the differences between C11, C99 and ANSI C, which is what I learned back in the nineties. Most notable are three features that I’ve come to rely on:
- Variable-length arrays.
- Designated initializers.
- Compound literals.
I’ll also make sure to use inline functions where it makes sense to do so. And
the other C99 features, such as single-line comments and a proper boolean type,
are hardly worth mentioning.
Another change to how I used to write C is a preference for pass-by-value and return-by-value instead of by reference. Which means fewer pointers and less manual memory allocation. These days it can be faster to use immediate values than references for small structures, and compilers will copy the data into registers. Nice!
Well, it’s been a while.
The Punk Collective met last Wednesday in the city. Burgers for lunch, following an impromtu tour of a nearby co-working space. Really conveniently located; accessible directly from the main underground train station, and just a 10-minute journey from my local train station. Seriously considering a membership; it’s around $150/mo for five days access per month, which is around what I think I need (basically get out of the house and meet up with other solo developers once a week or so).
Apart from that, have been working on Blattix! I’ve added walls, collisions, shooting, sound effects and music (purchasing ten punk rock tracks for unrestricted commercial use for $99). Controls feel tight, and it’s fast.
Next steps are to get a simple game loop happening (I’ll just make Asteroids for now) and get builds shipped out to the other punks. This will mark the end of the first month of development, and we’re limiting ourselves to just three months. In the second month, I will focus on refactoring and fleshing out the gameplay, adding waves of different enemy types, progression through levels, boss battles and so on. The final month will be bugfixing, polish and optimisation.
Remember that I’m trying to limit myself to spending just a third of my time on this particular project, so next month I plan to make some room to continue work on Gumshoe and HackTile. Busy times.
Unfortunately we’ve gone into a snap lockdown due to some community transmission in Perth. I’m focusing on a three-day gamejam to distract me from those concerns, and things will hopefully be back to normal soon…
Sidetracked by our Punk Collective commitment to build a game each in the next quarter. The other three punks have been super productive with their games, and so I spend the week working on something myself… Blattix!
This will be a retro-style shooter with multiple waves of enemies, going for high replayability rather than depth of content. I’ve drawn inspiration from Encounter, Cosmic Causeway, BallBlazer and Vaxine.
It’s been an excuse to learn some shader programming, and to brush up on my linear algebra. I’m not using a 3D game engine at all, it’s just rendering sprites and doing a bit of tricky jiggery-pokery. Next I will move on to building a simple physics engine, which will allow collisions between objects, enabling some shoot-em-up gameplay.
Lots of fun!
Third Punk Collective meetup yesterday. Everyone seemed reluctant to meet and had various excuses, but in the end it all came together and we had the best meeting so far. We were all on the same page and spoke about creating and publishing one small game each in the latter half of the year, mostly to learn the ropes end-to-end and to attempt to build an audience. Looking forward to that!
The GumShoe refactoring is progressing nicely, and I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. The game is still not quite there yet; the refactored version is janky and missing features when compared to the demo that I hacked together last month, but the code is much nicer to work with and to build upon, and it will make it easy for me to experiment with realtime client/server updates, and perhaps with multiplayer.
I’m really looking forward to getting all that done and dusted so I can get back to HackTile, which I think has great potential. Need more time in the day!
I wrote a blog post about RnDB and recorded a video walkthough (which is linked to from the post), and had a decent response on Reddit (prompting me to add a few new features, particularly the ability to load and save mutations). Very nice to complete something, ship it and get feedback from the community in such a short window of time. And I can now cross RnDB off the list of project ideas that constantly nag at me in the back of my mind.
I discovered Standard Ruby and spent a bit of time making my existing project repositories compliant, but this in part was to distract myself from GumShoe refactoring, which is progressing slowly. It dawned on me that the process isn’t so much one of coding but of re-arranging things in your head. After many days of thinking and a few false starts I now have a rough architecture that makes sense, and I’m working to finish the refactoring and have a demo of the back-end integration up-and-running by early next week.
This will coincide with the end of The 7DRL Challenge, which some of the other Punks are participating in. Beetlefeet is building an awesome golf rpg, while Maxxor is making an apocalyptic wasteland with dynamic lighting effects. At our second coffee shop meetup yesterday they showed great progress. Chr15m started strong but bowed out after his Office Brawl simulator failed to light a spark, which is precisely the right thing to do. Follow the passion and fail early. Great to see!
After a lot of focused work on Gumshoe, I reached a milestone that allowed me to put together a simple, complete game, which is currently playable online. It’s fun, and easy for others to pick up and try. But all this rushing meant that some refactoring and tidying up was in order, and, instead of doing that, I decided to descend the procedural generation rabbit-hole.
I’ve finally come up for air, releasing RnDB into the public domain as evidence that I was actually doing something. Over the coming weekend I’ll finish that off, perhaps recording an explanatory video.
It’s an itch I’ve been longing to scratch for a while, having first has the idea while working on LA Noire at Team Bondi in 2005. So great to get it done and shipped in just a week or so of intensive work.
Beetlefeet, Maxxor, Chr15m and I have established “The Punk Collective”, which is a support group of sorts for solo developers, and our first gathering at a coffee shop mid-week was super productive and inspiring. The aim between now at the next gathering will be to knock off all of the Gumshoe overhaul work, together with back-end integration. Beyond that, I’d love to get back to HackTile, but who knows really?
We also bumped into Shrydar during our meeting, who was grabbing a fluorescent green milkshake, and brought us the sad news that the coffee shop will soon be closing down, which will be the end of an era. We briefly discussed leasing some office space somewhere, as I’d enthused everyone about the Loonshots Nursery idea. We’ll see where that goes.
Shrydar is still coding c64 demos, which is totally awesome to see.
Have spent the last week or so working on Gumshoe, a GGJ project that I started with Beetlefeet, using the lets-punk project template. Here’s a screenshot.
It’s destined to be a text-based roguelike detective game. But it’s also a crash course in using Quasar and Vue, and I am back-porting all of the improvements I make to the lets-punk template, and then porting them over to hacktile.
I have established a very comformatble hack-refactor-polish loop, whereby I quickly implement a new feature, then refactor the code to settle it down (as it often means code needs to be dry’ed up or improved elsewhere), and I then polish the UI, adding transitions and animations and making sure it’s responsive and works across all devices.
Have it working as a PWA on Android and iOS, with update notifications too. It’s feeling very slick. We’ve also exited lockdown and kids are back at school, so feeling even more productive.
Aim is to ship Gumshoe to get feeback from friends towards the end of this month, and then transition back to hacktile for most of my time.
Over the last week I did some tidying-up work on the Hacktile project, and back-ported some changes to the LetsPunk template. I then used that template to start a new project, Gumshoe, for the GGJ. It’s a procedurally-generated detective game, but it is also an excuse for me to learn more about Quasar and Vue, and practise UI coding, so it will benefit other projects too.
Demo here: gumshoe.kranzky.com
I will continue working on this in tandem with HackTile, switching between the two projects to maintain enthusiasm, and back-porting changes to the core framework that I make as I continue to learn.
In other news, we are in hard lockdown for five days. The kids should have started school today, but summer holidays have been extended for a week.
We have life.
Apart from being sucked into US politics, I’ve spent the last week integrating PixiJS and Quasar/Vue to come up with a basic interface for viewing Conway’s life, including drawing cells into the screen.
It was finicky getting the 320x192 screen to resize correctly and render crisply, and to handle fullscreen, resizing, desktop and mobile, visibility and so on, but it all Mostly Works (tm) now, so I can focus on functionality.
Next steps are:
- Add some more UI for editing the playfield
- Implement an EntityManager and EntityPool
- Refactor the Engine to use Rules that fire Actions to mutate State
- Allow these Rules to be edited in the UI
Finished the gem and updated the template repo, but didn’t go down the path of working on UI as planned. Instead, I started a new repo from the template so I can play around with PixiJS and perhaps build the HackTile prototype more quickly. Got that set up and deploying to hacktile.kranzky.com
Worked on adding specs and coverage to both repos, and implemented Quasar as planned. Added all models, actions, views, services and workers. Has to switch to another service (ipstack) for doing geo-lookup of IP addresses when processing sessions. Working now on getting all specs passing, and then adding routes and swagger API documentation generation before testing the authentication flow. After that I’ll get working on the template repo to expose all of these features in the UI. Fun!
Sorted out GitHub actions to get both the Punk! and Let’s Punk! projects to run tests and to ship to production when a release is created from a tag in GitHub.
Project is now available here: punk.kranzky.com
Next steps are:
- Get specs implemented for both projects
- Get code coverage report for both projects
- Implement Quasar in the template project for better UI
- Implement tenants, users, groups and sessions in the gem project
- Update the template project to showcase these
- Record a screencast of how these things work
- Officially release both repos
Once that is all done, I will use the template repo to reproduce the 2010 POC.
Divided the old RailRoad project into a public gem named Punk! together with a template repository named Let’s Punk!
Working to get these to a certain point of doneness before creating a new project from the template repository which I will use to re-create the 2010 prototype of HackTile.
First day of a new way of working.
Spent the weekend rearranging the home office, so I’ll be in a different mental space. It feels good.
Kids are on holidays. Dropped Eliza in to an all-day drama course, then went shopping with Jack (bought some new coffee… important) and finished off with a bike ride.
Finishing the Big Sur upgrade. PostgreSQL had died. Played around with OBS for recording screencasts. Works better than iShowU. Plan to create a HelloWorld app that smashes RailRoad together with PixiJS and Howler. Need to separate RR out into a GEM first. So cracking on that.
Someone logged a MegaHAL bug noting that it doesn’t work with Ruby3, which was released at XMAS, so fixing that too.
Starting to muck about with text generation in anticipation of NaNoGenMo this year. I trained a second-order Markov model on over 200 million words of data (three thousand or so texts from Project Gutenberg). Written in Ruby, using my native Sooth library, the entire process took 28 hours and resulted in a 674mb model file. Because Sooth uses a 32-bit context, I used a 16-bit dictionary of words, which I generated by stripping punctuation and capitalising words and then selecting the most frequent 64822 words (I wrote a script to count word frequencies and select word that occurred at least n times such that the result would contain fewer than 65536 words; I think n ended up being 27 or something like that).
I want to use the Markov model to generate sentences, but at the moment it does a rather poor job. Here are some examples:
<SENTENCE> SOME GENERATION OF ARCHITECT OF GREATNE WOULD COME FOR THE TERM OF ADORATION <SENTENCE>
<SENTENCE> YES SIR HE MADE HER A MAGICIAN HE EXCLAIMED <SENTENCE>
<SENTENCE> AND THIS THOU BUT <BLANK> WAS A PRAYER OVER THAT ALIEN ELEMENT <SENTENCE>
I should also note that <SENTENCE> and <BLANK> are special words, as are
<ERROR>, <PARAGRAPH>, <CHAPTER> and <BOOK>. And that I strip S from
the ends of words, so that GREATNESS becomes GREATNE, in an effort to reduce
the number of unique words (as removing an S will often turn a word from
plural to singular).
As an example, here is the opening chapter of “The Emerald City of Oz” by L. Frank Baum as presented to the inference algorithm, once parsed into the 16-bit dictionary:
<BOOK>
<SENTENCE> PERHAP I SHOULD ADMIT ON THE TITLE PAGE THAT THIS BOOK IS BY L FRANK BAUM AND HIS CORRESPONDENT FOR I HAVE USED MANY SUGGESTION CONVEYED TO ME IN LETTER FROM CHILDREN <SENTENCE>
<SENTENCE> ONCE ON A TIME I REALLY IMAGINED MYSELF AN AUTHOR OF FAIRY TALE BUT NOW I AM MERELY AN EDITOR OR PRIVATE SECRETARY FOR A HOST OF YOUNGSTER WHOSE IDEA I AM <BLANK> TO WEAVE INTO THE THREAD OF MY STORIE <SENTENCE>
<PARAGRAPH>
<SENTENCE> THESE IDEA ARE OFTEN CLEVER <SENTENCE>
<SENTENCE> THEY ARE ALSO LOGICAL AND INTERESTING <SENTENCE>
<SENTENCE> SO I HAVE USED THEM WHENEVER I COULD FIND AN OPPORTUNITY AND IT IS BUT JUST THAT I ACKNOWLEDGE MY INDEBTEDNE TO MY LITTLE FRIEND <SENTENCE>
<PARAGRAPH>
<SENTENCE> MY WHAT IMAGINATION THESE CHILDREN HAVE DEVELOPED <SENTENCE>
<SENTENCE> SOMETIME I AM FAIRLY ASTOUNDED BY THEIR DARING AND GENIU <SENTENCE>
<SENTENCE> THERE WILL BE NO LACK OF FAIRY TALE AUTHOR IN THE FUTURE I AM SURE <SENTENCE>
<SENTENCE> MY READER HAVE TOLD ME WHAT TO DO WITH DOROTHY AND AUNT EM AND UNCLE HENRY AND I HAVE OBEYED THEIR MANDATE <SENTENCE>
<SENTENCE> THEY HAVE ALSO GIVEN ME A VARIETY OF SUBJECT TO WRITE ABOUT IN THE FUTURE ENOUGH IN FACT TO KEEP ME BUSY FOR SOME TIME <SENTENCE>
<SENTENCE> I AM VERY PROUD OF THIS ALLIANCE <SENTENCE>
<SENTENCE> CHILDREN LOVE THESE STORIE BECAUSE CHILDREN HAVE HELPED TO CREATE THEM <SENTENCE>
<SENTENCE> MY READER KNOW WHAT THEY WANT AND REALIZE THAT I TRY TO PLEASE THEM <SENTENCE>
<SENTENCE> THE RESULT IS VERY SATISFACTORY TO THE PUBLISHER TO ME AND I AM QUITE SURE TO THE CHILDREN <SENTENCE>
<PARAGRAPH>
<SENTENCE> I HOPE MY DEAR IT WILL BE A LONG TIME BEFORE WE ARE OBLIGED TO DISSOLVE PARTNERSHIP <SENTENCE>
<CHAPTER>
So, how to generate a novel novel from this mess? Here are my thoughts:
- Generate a prototype sentence, which consists of a certain number of empty slots for words, with the length of the sentence statistically consistent with what has been observed in the past.
- Populate the slots with some candidate keywords that have high mutual information according to the previous two sentences.
- For the remainder of the slots, determine a list of words that could fill those slots, as constrained by the other known words in the prototype sentence.
- Fill the empty slots with the candidate words, preferring to fixate on a relevant keyword, and providing the choice is legal according to the Markov model.
- Generate hundreds of candidate sentences, and select the best according to some heuristic.
The heuristic for selecting the best generation will be a function of two factors; the average information of the generated sentence as measured by the Markov model, and the average mutual information of the generated sentence, as measured by a model that takes the previous few sentences into account, and possibly also the fixation words.
These fixation words should also be determined stochastically from data, by
observing words that tend to occur in clusters. I am trying here to identify
character names, locations, objects and so on that are pertinent to the story.
If the model generates a sentence containing the word SHERLOCK, for instance,
then the mere presence of this word in the story should make it much more likely
to occur in the future. This is something to be figured out.
Sunny today after a couple of weeks of wind and rain and destructive storms. So out for a mid-morning ride. Conditions were good and I zoomed along. Had a fun moment when I, on the bike path, ringing my bell and weaving between elderly pedestrians, overtook a young couple, resplendent in their spandex (or is it lycra?) and peddling their expensive racing bikes along the road beside me.
They took one look at my K-Mart bike and I heard the boy whisper something to the girl. Soon, on an uphill section, they zoomed past me, just before I veered off into the back streets to take a short-cut through the nature reserve around the rive that I usually favour.
I started riding hard, much harder than usual, to beat them to the spot where our routes would converge. And I prevailed, arriving a good half-minute before them (the shortcut saves at least a few hundred metres of distance) where I dismounted to take a swig of my drink bottle and leiusirely finger my phone before nodding as they rode past with stunned expressions which turned to laughter in their wake.
We’ve been in lockdown for over 50 days now, and yesterday was the first time in seven weeks that I’ve really felt bored. I had an overdue task to work on for my day job, which I was finding it difficult to get into, it was a gorgeous day but we had nowhere to go and nobody to visit, and all other forms of entertainment seemed trite. I guess I was suffering from ennui.
I feel better now; I’m making great progress on my overdue task, the weather is worsening, and I’m looking forward to playing some games later today :P
Western Australia has done a great job containing the spread of COVID-19, with just ten new cases over the past ten days. As a result some restrictions are being lifted, which raises the possibility of family brunch next weekend, and dinner with my parents. Fingers-crossed that numbers continue to look good; the risk is the delay between restrictions being lifted and numbers rising as a result (it could be up to two weeks for us to notice).
Watched “Music from the Home Front”, a great live concert on TV this Anzac Day. We stood on the driveway at 6am on Saturday the 25th with the kids for dawn service. At least half the street did the same. Kids sang “Song of Australia”.
Seen on my morning bike ride. Idiots live amongst us.
Looks like we’ll be facing at least 4 more weeks of isolation, but that schools will be returning in a week. Not sure how that works.
Got a guitar. Had been borrowing my BIL’s but decided it was time to get my own. Learning with RockSmith, and managing to practice for about an hour a day on average I reckon? It’s quite fun.
Apart from that, we’re still living this dystopian future.
Had an after-work beer with Matthew, Jack and Rob. Virtually, of course. Google Hangouts was janky so we switched to Zoom, and they gifted us unlimited meeting time. Worked pretty well, and we managed to play some of the JackBox party games. Coincidentally, young Jack (aka my son) has been doing Zoom classes at school. Great to see him and a few dozen of his classmates all working together during the day, and his teacher much love the ability to mute all the kids apart from the one that he is asking a question.
Big morning bike ride. Did 16km in 40m, which is an average speed of 24kmh. These are nice numbers that work well with base-60. And just the right level to get elevated cardiovascular function without getting tired out, or having the legs burn. Very pleasant out there.
I ride in three stages. The first 15 minutes takes me past Heathcote, about as far as Applecross Tennis Club. That’s bang-on 6km. After a brief rest, I then ride for 20 minutes back towards home on the other side of the river, ending up to Yagan Park on Leach Highway. That’s bang-on 8km. After another short rest, I do 2km through the back streets to get back home in about 5 minutes. Love how the numbers work out so nicely.
I also have landmarks at 5 minute intevals along the way:
- Footbridge to Aquinas College
- Raffles Hotel
- Applecross Tennis Club
- Raffles Again
- Deep Water Point
- Mount Henry Bridge
- Yagan Park
- Back Home
I try to do that mid-morning 3-days per week.
Well. A lot has happened. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic. I have written about it and have released a dashboard as well.
There’s not much more to say. We’re happy and healthy and taking care of our parents. And I’m learning to play the guitar.
We are very, very lucky. Lucky to be in Perth, a remote part of the world, with few cases, relatively speaking, than elsewhere. Lucky to live in a “food bowl” region, where we produce 300% of what we consume, unlike the UK, for example, which produces just 50% of what it consumes. Lucky to have kept our jobs. Lucky that we already worked from home, making isolating with the kids much easier. And lucky to have saved money for a rainy day.
I want to continue donating blood, and we need to figure out how we can be of help to other people.
Unfortunately, the family restaurant has closed its doors. For how long I cannot say.
Jack (10yo) just wrote a 3-page story narrated by an anthropomorphic treehouse that was reminiscing about being built by a bunch of kids (“they lifted the planks of wood onto my shoulders”), but now it’s decrepit and falling apart, and one of the kids returned as an adult to repair it, and laid his hand on the wood and said “you’ve always been a part of my life”, and he told me that he started crying when he wrote it, and I told Eliza and she started crying, and now I’m crying.
Great end to the week; fast progress on building new tech at work. Out with Matthew and Paul, chats over beers at PICA Bar then dinner at Long Chim. Kids at mum and dad’s for a sleepover.
Just finished reading “The Passionate Programmer” by Chad Fowler, which I discovered after writing a program to find great people on GitHub to try to fill an engineering position at my day job. That book talks about marketing yourself, and, combined with some other advice on that topic that I’d heard recently (although I can’t remember where), I was motivated last night to rebuild my vanity website to do a better job of that.
This lead to me rebuilding my blog, which lead to me subscribing to Medium and finding an unpublished article entitled “Your Password is Terrible”, which I published and received a clap for before my hands had left the keyboard.
I really should become more involved in the local scene here in Perth, so will look for a conference of a meetup that I can attend.
Right. I’m slack.
Second week of school holidays. We’ve been keeping busy. Had a great hike around Lesmurdie Falls last week, which culminated with a splendid lunch at Core Cider. Visited Wil’s family for dinner, Brewski over last night for some VR action, watched Yesterday on Monday with Dzungy, visits to the dog park with Bailey, caught up with Petr at Palace Arcade, where I became a gold member, lots of reading, not so much exercise.
Limited myself to 6 drinks per week, which was hard, so reneged and made it 9 instead, which is also proving hard. Nine is around 14 “standard drinks” which is pretty much the definition of a moderate drinker, so not all that bad. Will keep counting, which is the main thing.
No progress on hobby projects, but have been working very hard on RailRoad, which is my home-spun omakase web framework, using Sequel and Roda and a bunch of other stuff. It’s exciting and good.
Will try to keep updating this thing. For sure, this time.
Stayed up to watch the Ninty E3 direct. Nothing outstanding but fun nonetheless, and the kids get a rare treat of watching it over brekky before school. Walked the dog with D. in wintery weather; good opportunity to talk about life after finding out that a brother of a close friend passed away suddenly. It can happen at any time. Out to a laksa lunch in the cold weather. No progress on personal projects, which is unfortunate. Time is slipping away. Need to limit the work I do on my day job so I don’t get distracted by it when I should have free time for my own things.
Was well-rested yesterday, so spent some time after dinner dusting off HackTile. Got distracted by Refrax somehow. Built it to get the same blank screen error that I’d been getting with HackTile; some incompatibility after upgrading OSX to Mojave. Down a garden path of getting to to build with Emscripten so I could publish a web version. Finally got a clean build only to find that the web version doesn’t run. Not in the mood for debugging it. So moved on to HackTile, which works after updating the XCode command-line tools and upgrading to the latest version of SDL2. Keen to get back into it, but should wrap up Sesame first. Need to finish projects. Always go back to my half-finished work to be impressed with the potential, which sucks. Could have finished HackTile in the time it’s been on ice!
Spent the remainder of the evening readling the new Neal Stephenson: Fall, or Dodge in Hell. And watched a few episodes of Season 3 of Handmaid’s Tale. Late to bed, which meant I awoke tired and unmotivated. Must get better sleep!
Tom Yum hotpot for lunch at Van’s, and took Bailey for a walk at the dog park. Plan to have an early night after a simple supper of seafood chowder and garlic bread. Not looking forward to a stormy Monday and going back to work.
Well. Hasn’t it been a long time? A summary:
- Eliza is a teenager. Gosh.
- Work is much the same.
- No progress on HackTile.
- No progress on Sesame.
- I actually completed NaNoGenMo: Angela’s Claustrum
Maybe I’ll hop back on the horse? Or whatever the expression is?
Spent the morning walking around Laguna Beach. Beautiful day. Got a late breakfast at Zinc Cafe (avocado toast and a flat white). Lots of sports cars roaring up the main street near the beach. Bought some supplies at Ralph’s. Back for an afternoon rest, then got dressed and headed up to the house for the party. Edgar arrived with his wife, and Christa with her partner Danny, and Caroline with her sister Elizabeth. We drank old fashioneds and toured the property. Then in a car to the hotel for more drinks and dinner. Met Alex and his girlfriend Christine whom I had a great chat with; she’s from a similar background to Dzung. After dinner more drinks; Christa was getting shots. Then back to the house to finish the night; I insisted on getting Caroline and Elizabeth glasses of water, which they didn’t really want, and walked them to their car when it arrived. Didn’t crawl into bed until 2:30am or so.
Into the office and then off to a team lunch at an Italian restaurant. Fun talking about weird Australian things, and confused everyone by eating my salad last. But, hey, it’s what they do in France! Meetings in the afternoon, and got some work done. Cool that the We Work offices have free beer on tap; didn’t try any of it though as everyone had left by the time Mark picked me up. Was running a script on my laptop so strapped it in to the back seat of the Tesla on the drive home so it could continue. Mark’s sister and dad were over for a Hanuka dinner; fun chatting with them while drinking an old fashioned in Mark’s bar. His dad worked on the MOL project (manned orbital laboratory) as a programmer, which gave birth to SkyLab. Fun telling them about it crash landing near Perth. Walked into Laguna Beach for a nice dinner; the five of us squeezed around a table for three. Food and wine were good, and we had gelato at a small place around the corner afterwards. Home to open presents (socks) and more chatting before calling it a night.
Long flight to the US. Teary farewell with the kids at Perth airport. Lots of waiting around in Perth, and then in Sydney. Lucky to get an empty seat next to me on the flight to LAX. Had bought a neck pillow, managed to get some sleep. Took ages to get through immigration, then car ride to Mark’s place in Laguna Beach. Afternoon in office; rode in Mark’s Tesla (Marci, his wife, has an identical one). Impossible burger for lunch. Met the team, then home to a pre-prepared chef meal for dinner. Rained all day, but beautiful clear day the following morning. Stayed awake until 9pm and then slept until 8:20am. Was the first day of Hanuka, so gave Mark, Marci and their kids the presents I bought over. Fixed a production issue while drinking coffee in Mark’s kitchen. Going in to the office at 11am.
Long sleep last night. Took kids to school, then a good day at work. Eliza went to Zophia’s house after school. Jack and I went shopping, then played together before walking her back homa again. Cooked spaghetti marinara for dinner. Set up some rechargeable candles for some serious hygge after dinner :)
Jack to North Shore in the morning, then we packed up picnic things, grabbed some food from the IGA and headed to King’s Park. The spring festival is on at the moment, with live music. We picnicked and then let the kids play while we listened to the music. They made new friends, naturally. Next was a walk throught the park to see the wildflowers, ending up at the DNA tower. I threw Jack’s new soccer ball from the top to Eliza and Jack waiting below. They also enjoyed getting wet at the fountain. Home for a rest, then Eliza and I made barbequeued lamb skewers for dinner. Early night; I was in bed by 10pm.
Dzung at wine walk. Took kids to karate, then to Garbo, where Eliza bought a magazing of puzzles after seeing the ad for it at mum and dad’s last night. Jack spent his $10 KMart gift voucher (on a small soccer ball). Bought pies for lunch, which we took home and ate, before playing outside for a while. Dzung came home slightly tipsy. We chatted outside in the sunshine, then played handball with the kids for a while. Lots of laughs! She then retired for a nap, emerging a few hours later to prepare dinner. We ate in front of the TV, watching an episode of Blue Planet II. Van and Kiet off on a holiday to Singapore and Vietnam today.
Dzung out to see the ballet. Dinner with the kids at mum and dad’s. Jack had a jumble sale at school today; we gave him money to spend, and he ended up spending it all on presents for his cousins. What an angel! Mum doted on me quite a bit at dinner, not sure what’s going on there. We had a good time chatting and snacking.
Productive day at work. Chicken macaroni soup for lunch. Delicious!
Great day at work; finished a sprint and shipped to production. Process going well, lots to do. Jack’s school sports carnival (Finlay too) so, although Dzung and I very busy at work, we dashed in to the school three times to watch events. He went well, and ended up winning a gift voucher for the best decorated cake box.
Dzung took Jack to swimming after school. Eliza had a viola audition for next term, but she wants to stay in string orchestra anyway. Mix up picking up Eliza and Zophia; I forgot I’d told Eliza I would pick her up from the school. Dzung waited for her in the park. Neither was happy with me.
Dzung took Jack swimming. I made chicken macaroni soup, including a big new batch of garlic oil. Absolutely delicious. Ended the night curating podcasts and making up stories for Jack.
Great day at work. Everything came together. Deployment issues from yesterday were fixed by our provider, sprint planning meeting went well, fixed a few issues and released to production.
Had a fright driving the kids home from school; saw a hideous creature in a car stopped at the traffic lights. Looked like something from The Dark Crystal, with its misshapen head bobbing around independently of its body, and no nose, mouth or ears to be seen; just a blank face. Turned out it was a bald guy with his sunglasses on his head looking down at his phone in his lap.
Dzung out, so made tuna mornay for me and the kids. Quite delicious. Jack and Eliza busy decorating the cake box for tomorrow’s sports carnival, and baking cookie-and-cream cupcakes from a packet mix. Did it all themselves, even the cleaning up.
Rained overnight; awoke to find the day bed awash. Set the tone for the day; motivation to work was low. The fact that everything was broken didn’t help. Banned Twitter and Reddit, as they are far to depressing and distracting. Visited mum and dad at noon to fix their internet (properly, this time). Began re-reading “Godel, Escher, Bach”. Toying with the idea of entering NaNoGenMo this year. Warmed up bad meatballs for dinner; Dzung won’t be buying those again. Watched The West Wing and read Ball Lightning.
Beatutiful spring day. Lazy morning while Dzung took the kids to tennis and North Shore. To Van and Kiet’s for brunch; cold meat and spaghetti vongole. Set up the daybed once home and read books with Jack while Dzung napped and Eliza played with her new dot diary and textas. Leftovers for dinner, and watched the first episode of Blue Planet 2 with the kids while Dzung studied. Finished the night listening to podcasts.
Work and chores in the morning while Dzung took kids to karate. Seafood chowder and crusty baguette for lunch. Lilian over to rehearse performance with Eliza; Zoe arrived while I was doing laundry. Cruisy afternoon, then Philae over to babysit while we took Van and Kiet to Andly’s private kitchen for dinner. Delicious, but sad they didn’t have the spicy pork mince snack, and the raw scallops weren’t too popular.
Missed a couple of days again :(
Busy day at work. Missed Jack singing at music assembly, but Crystal sent a video on WhatsApp. Dzung home after work to study, I picked up Eliza from Ice Skating and went to mum and dad’s for dinner; they had collected Jack from school already. Delicious hearty meal of tender corned beef with mashed potatoes, carrots and cabbage. Fixed their internet; looks like the wifi router broke after a recent power surge.
Kids very tired and cranky. Still eating breakfast when Zophia arrived to be taken to school. Jack was late to choir practice. Busy, productive day at work. Prepared bo luc lac while Dzung took the kids to piano after school. Then to Jack’s open night for an hour. Nice seeing his work, but really want him to make some improvements; some of his other classmate’s are writing really great stories (Josh, Emma, Brooke) but he’s just doing the minimum, although his scary story had a great line: “Goosbumps marched up his arm like ants scurring home”. Feels like he stole that from somewhere, it’s that good. Jack got a bit upset that we weren’t playing with a robot with him; we wanted to look at his work. Blame lack of sleep. Home to shaking beef, then got the kids to bed. Ended the night with Better Call Saul.
Mum and Dad over to go to the concert. Eliza dressed and ready, looking very grown up. Dropped her at the Perth Concert Hall early (she was the first of about 450 performers) so we could grab dinner at Long Chim. Got there for happy hour; ordered cocktails and beers. Roast duck noodles for Jack, sausage for me, orange fish curry, rice, veges and a mixed grill with various dipping sauces to share. Absolutely delicious. Walked back to the concert hall to find it packed; we were about the last to take our seats. Performances were great; Eliza’s string orchestra sounded amazing, although we couldn’t see her, as she was seated at the back. Later, the years 7, 8 and 9 choir gathered above the stage, with Eliza positioned right in the middle, with a large gap on either side of her. She looked like a star up there, singing with gusto and smiling broadly. So proud of her; she looked to be having the time of her life. The show culminated will all performers taking the stage for a massive double orchestra and massed choir finale. Great night.
Eliza off for rehearsal for tomorrow’s concert. Took Jack swimming for a double makeup lesson. Dzung and Eliza stayed home to do homework and piano and prepare dinner. Home in the wet and the dark to have pasta with chorizo, pine nuts and ricotta. Delicious. Drank the leftover wine and tried to get the kids to bed early.
Quiet day at work; Labor Day in the USA. Took Jack to Piney Lakes to muck about after school, before collecting Eliza from quiz club. Leftover curry for dinner. Taking things easy. Angry at Eliza for leaving a group project to the last minute. But I hold her to a high standard; need to be aware she’s doing this all for the first time.
Slow morning; a bit hungover. Dzung collected the kids while I made brunch for her side of the family. Kingfish carpaccio, Japanese eggplant, katsu pork curry. Sat outside in the spring sunshine and drank some good wine. Packed up and then started cooking the roast lamb for dinner, with my side of the family over. Was delicious, and everyone had a great time. Mum a bit emotional talking about her three boys. Eliza and Jack had lots of fun playing outside with Fin and Eva, then Mario Kart after it got dark.
Took the kids to karate. As a treat for father’s day tomorrow I had to do the lesson with them. So ninety minutes of working out. Not as cruisy as I would have hoped; had to do pushups with Jack sitting on my back!
Dropped off kids for a sleepover, then took an Uber out to Tsunami for a Japanese whiskey tasting with April and Aaron before a Teppanyaki dinner with the whole group of Uni friends. Then back to A&As for dessert and more whiskey.
Wow. Haven’t written anything for a week. Playing catch-up here. Enjoy reading back over my day-to-day, so need to get back into the habit, and resurrect HackTile too. Sigh.
Dzung out for dinner with Mary and Minh. Mum and Dad over, I cooked a BBQ and we ate hot dogs and sliders with salad and snacks.
Busy day debugging Android issues. Out for a nice Thai lunch with Dzung, and grabbed new bio bags from the Melville civic centre. Leftover curry, roti, rice and soup for dinner. Listening to music with the kids afterwards, lots of singing and dancing. Jack loves Josh Pyke and Superorganism. Fun!
Busy day. Rainy squall when I picked up Jack and Eliza. Hot milo and raisin toast and a warm house were welcome afterwards. Ventured into the city to meet Jack, Rob and Tris for drinks and dinner. Beer, whisky, sake and ramen, and lots of chatting. Great night!
Busy day. Picked Jack up and took him to Garbo for a haircut, but it was a 30 minute wait, so we just bought doughnuts instead. He was annoyed with me, even after I explained that it wasn’t my fault, and even after he agreed that he wouldn’t want to wait that long. The logic of an 8yo.
Picked up Eliza after string orchestra. We cooked lamb burgers for dinner. They were pretty good.
Working once the kids were asleep, but tired, and have an early start tomorrow. Haven’t been sleeping well, so drinking peppermint tea and will have an early night.
Busy day at work, finishing a sprint and shipping to production. To Jack’s school to help the class make pancakes for their Japanese lesson. Surprised with the other parent helpers, as usual, who leave as early as they can. I stayed and helped the teacher clean up the mess afterwards. Two of the girls in the class washed the dishes; really proud of them for doing such a great job without needing to be asked, at such a young age (8yo). Took Jack to karate for tip testing, then home to find Eliza waiting for us; she’d forgotten her house key. Eliza finished cooking parpadelle ragu for dinner, then kids to bed.
Laundry while Dzung took Jack to North Shore. Read “Zero to One” in the sunshine for a late breakfast. Then to Van and Kiet’s for barbeque for Lachy’s eleventh birthday. Back home in the mid-afternoon, quick grovery shopping before playing Captain Toad with Eliza and then Jack. Tinned soup for a light dinner. Read to Eliza, then watched an episode of Better Call Saul with Dzung. To bed early, but unable to sleep.
Sleep in. To Ma and Ba for cunging, then to Zenith for Jack’s piano levels. Then shopping to get something for Lachlan tomorrow; a $50 iTunes gift card and two books; Terry Pratchett’s “Sourcery” and “The Princess Bride”. Out to the movies to see “Mirai”, which was a very sentimental movie about generations of a family. Threecoins Trattoria for dinner, near Neera and Richard’s place. Home for an early night; feeling worn out.
Slow day at work; mostly devops. Jack home early from school with a cold; he went in to dress up as a ninja for book week. Mum and Dad over for dinner. Nice chatting and snacking by the window with the afternoon sun warming us. But I’m coming down with Jack’s cold I think.
Regular day at work. Beatiful weather. Out to Malaysian with Dzung for lunch; nasi lemak, roti canai and iced coffee were all spot-on. Some reading in the sunshine in the afternoon; a physical copy of “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel arrived on the doorstep while we were at lunch. Kids out to piano, then Eliza helped me cook steak with a red wine and peppercorn sauce with truffled mashed potatoes and roasted green beans and cherry tomatoes. Absolutely delicious.
I really, really wanted to HackTile today, but there’s just not enough time. Work is too busy, and I’m too tired by 9pm to do anything serious. So will end the night as always, by podcasting or watching The West Wing or Better Call Saul. Need to snap out of this malaise.
Busy day at work. Exercised. Took kids swimming, then met up with Dzung at Restaurant Jun for yakitori and sake. Had a quiet evening.
Busy day at work. Dzung out to the movies. Made tortillas with the kids for dinner. Regular Tuesday.
It’s now been a month since I last did anything with HackTile. Well, 28 days at least. That’s bad; I’ve fallen off the wagon completely. Time to get back on.
Up early. Beautiful day; spring has sprung early. Walked Jack to school, then worked for a while before going to donate platelets. Worked through the afternoon, and picked up the kids from school. Eliza had elected to skip her usual Monday Quiz Club to avoid being near her friends, but later messaged me to say she’d go after all, and then called on Zophia’s phone to say it had been cancelled. I was at the IGA with Jack; we ended up going to the high school early to get the girls. Nice to see Eliza has made up with them.
We cooked dinner together. Jack had fun skateboarding out on the driveway and playing with the neighbourhood kids. Strawberries and yoghurt for dessert while watching “The War on Waste”. Worked more once the kids were in bed, then cleaned up the kitchen, and crashed on the sofa with Dzung before bed.
Now, what was this about HackTile?
Beautiful morning. Eliza off to tennis with Lilian, and Dzung took Jack into North Shore. I slept in, then had boiled eggs for breakfast out in the sunshine while reading The Guardian. Off to Kiet and Van’s for roast pork for brunch. I read about the Danish way of life in “The Little Book of Hygge”. Thinking about getting some lamps and a gas fire for the lounge room, and of a courtyard makeover.
Went for a walk / bike ride in the afternoon. Eliza unhappy about going to school tomorrow due to the issues she’s having with her friends, so we walked and talked while Dzung and Jack rode ahead. Ate Bravo apples and explored Bullcreek; I took them by a different route to the river. Back home for tea and Tim Tams; I did my best to maximise the hygge of the situation! Played Captain Toad with Eliza and then with Jack. Kids practised piano and had showers while I made stir fried vegetables with leftovers, which I served with rice and the hasselback potatoes from the other night. Ended the evening watching two episodes from the new season of Better Call Saul with Dzung.
Home with the chores while Dzung took the kids to karate and then piano. Leisurely breakfast, reading The Guardian and New Scientist, and podcasting while doing the laundry and cleaning the house. Dropped the kids to Kiet and Van’s in the afternoon, then to dinner at Andly’s Private Kitchen, near Agworld in West Leederville. It was much better than I expected; every course was delicious, and the lobster in a beer-based stew was a definite highlight!
Picked up the kids on the way back home; they were late to bed. Dzung crashed out, so I watched a couple of episodes of The West Wing before calling it a night.
Jack’s “One Big Voice”. Very exited; packed him a bag with ham and cheese sandwich, banana, pringles, oreos and cheese and crackers. Eliza did fine at school today. I did three reps of the workout and worked focused all day. Mum and dad over, then to Simple Italian before the show. Caught up with Sonny in the audience. Show was good but hard to see the kids. Jack tired and cranky afterwards… it was a long day for him!
Busy day at work. Took the phones in to get batteries replaced. Eliza very upset after school, having problems with her friends, cried in the bathroom for half of her science class, asked Dzung not to pick up her friends as she usually would. Terrible to see her so upset, and hard to know how to deal with it, apart from listening and cuddling.
Regular day at work. Dzung out in the evening so the kids and I got F&C for dinner, after taking Jack swimming. Ended the night watching Akira. Ages since I’ve seen it. So bleak! Amazed to see that the plot circles around the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo! Prescient!
Took Eliza in to school early for her athletics carnival, then dropped Jack in. Slow but productive day at work. Did three reps of the workout. West Wing at lunch. Picked up Jack and got annoyed with him always answering back and not doing his homework and piano after school. So frustrated I slammed the door to the office, which gave him a fright. It all ended in tears. I apologised and let him know I don’t have to work after getting him from school, and that I can sit with him and help. This eventually cheered him up. Finished homework and played piano together, then did some tidying and started making dinner (afyer picking up Eliza). Kids had baths, Eliza finished off dinner and we ate, then watched a few YouTube videos and played Kirby Star Allies. Kids to bed, then Dzung home from her night out with the girls to celebrate her birthday.
Dzung’s birthday! Up early to give cards and take Eliza and then Jack to school. Worked for a bit then lunch at Must. Chacuterie board with duck rilette, pork hock, pate and so on, roast chicken, angelhair crab pasta, wine and cheese. Mooched around Mt. Lawley, bought flowers, then bought a new set of headphones. Picked up Jack and Eliza, then teppanyaki at Nishi. Eliza loved it, Jack was initially scared, but came around by the end. Fantastic food and lots of fun. Feeling very tired, will call it an early night after cleaning up kitchen.
Picked up the kids from their sleepover. Dim sum for lunch, then mooched around Northbridge in the sunny weather and let the kids have a few games at Timezone. Walked to Deep Water Point in the afternoon and had tea and scones at the new Dome Cafe there. Cooked Japanese eggplant for Dzung, and watched The Shape of Water once the kids were asleep.
Took the kids to karate, then Wendy’s hot dogs for lunch, and dropped them over mum and dad’s for a sleepover. Picked up Annie and had dinner at Brika, then met up with Dave and watched Jesse Gordon perform at The Ellington.
Bank issue resolved. Problem was on the US side. Strange that they would stuff up a recurring transfer, but what can you do? Kids home sick, and mum and dad cancelled their sleepover tonight (don’t want them to catch it). So I decided not to join Dzung to see Julius Caesar tonight. Hard to work with the kids at home, so I focused just on bugs. Got really annoyed with the crappy tech I’m using. Why am I spending my life doing this? Cathartic to read back through old books to remind myself where I’ve come from and how things might be different. Seriously thinking about striking out on my own, but income would be an issue (evidenced by my pay being delayed; we really need the money).
Ate olives and drank a beer in the late afternoon. First drink since Faith and Yoshiya’s house on Sunday. Abstinence isn’t much of a challenge, it turns out. Surprising, since I’ve been in a bit of a slump, but Dzung and I have teamed up to keep each other honest. Played around with HackTile a bit. It’s pretty good.
Made pasta for the kids with the leftover sauce from the osso bucco, and watched “The Girl Who Leaped Through Time”.
Jack home sick. Eliza made slow cooked osso bucco for dinner, prepared and in oven at brekky. Drove Eliza and Zophia to school, then took the car in for a service. Walked home via Garbo, somehow managing not to get rained on. Took an hour. Listened to an episode of The West Wing Weekly on the way. Home to work, but Eliza’s school called to say she’s sick! Dzung out for birthday lunch with Mary and April, they luckily went to get Eliza and ran her home. Curry for lunch while looking after two sick kids. Checked bank, realized I haven’t been paid. Nothing going well today! Caught a Shofer to pick up the car, then home for dinner. Need to get my mojo back… haven’t worked on HackTile for weeks!
To the school for Jack’s Naidoc Week assembly. First time the junior choir were singing with their new shirts on. He was shy. Mid-morning the school called to say he was feeling sick. Dzung picked him up, and he perked up after a dose of Panadol. Leftover curry and roti for lunch, yum! Eliza’s graphics tablet arrived. Dzung took kids to piano but returned after Jack vomited all over himself in the car. Cleaned that up, then finished the workday. Sigh. Made sweet and sour fish for dinner. I did the laundry, crumbed and cooked the fish, cleaned, let Dzung finish preparing the dish, ate, cleaned up, put Eliza to bed. Finished the night washing dishes while listening to “The West Wing Weekly” before watching the Smash Brothers Nintendo Direct.
Kids off to school. I worked on a bunch of disconnected issues and bugs. Feeling down; the usual thing. Did three repetitions of the seven minute workout, and ate a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich while watching The West Wing for lunch. Did some laundry. Walked Jack home from school, then did some groceries at the IGA before collecting Eliza. Pretty run-of-the-mill day, all up. Leftover oxtail soup for dinner. Watched a few more episodes of The West Wing with Dzung once the kids were asleep.
Very tired. Got the kids to school, then drove to take the car for a service (and to have the recalled airbag replaced), but they lost the booking, so rescheduled for Thursday instead. Pity, I had looked forward to the long walk home; I need time to think about work and projects and life and stuff. So, once home, I packed my bag and headed out the door, rambling down through the streets towards Bullcreek, which I followed around to the other side of the river, walking slowly, deep in thought, wending back up First Avenue towards Eliza’s school, then back home via the traffic bridge. Covered over seven kilometres in ninety minutes. Feet very sore. Quick shower, then eggs and toast and strong coffee while watching The West Wing.
Worked through the afternoon, then picked up Jack. A girl asked me for money for food as I walked past the chemist. She looked zonked out, and was possibly homeless. I literally was carrying nothing, so I apologised. As I walked away, and older guy (who turned out to be her father) started yelling abuse at me. I stopped and turned towards him, and he stormed towards me, saying I insulted his daughter and did I want to fight and screaming to me to fuck off. I was dumbfounded, standing on the pavement between the butcher’s and the cafe, and tried reasoning with him. No point. He walked away, and I noticed that all of the shopkeepers had come to their doors with looks of concern on their faces. A lady on a bicycle asked me what had happened, and suggested that I should call the council’s security team. She said she’d give me the number. We were both on our phones when the guy started screaming and coming towards us, asking whether we were calling the police. He was extremely angry. The bicycle lady had told me earlier not to bother trying to reason with “them”, but I was feeling very sorry for their plight, and although the guy was being very aggressive and loud I realised that I didn’t feel afraid for my safety. Again, I calmly explained that I was on my way to pick up my son from school, and that lots of young kids would soon be walking home along this path, and he seemed to accept that I was being genuine. He then held out his hand and apologised, saying I was a good bloke. We shook hands and went our seperate ways.
Later, walking back with Jack, the police arrived. One of the shopkeepers had called them, no doubt. But, by that time, daddy and daughter had disappeared.
Picked up Eliza, then home for a rest. We all had a late night last night, and we all had short fuses. I got annoyed when Jack wouldn’t do as I asked, and Eliza didn’t answer straight away when I called her, to the point where both kids were crying in frustration. Bad mojo. But we started to cook dinner together, and Dzung arrived home, and we ate and everything was well again. Kids had an early night, I read to Eliza. And will now retire myself; too worn out to consider HackTile, or to do anything else, but I am keen to finally get back on the wagon and continue this project; the walk decided that for me.
Dzung took Jack to North Shore, and Eliza to tennis. I got the washing on, then Brendan and Finlay over for a cuppa with some banana bread they’d made. Chatted for a while—Fin is doing great at footy and Brendan is working with The Wall Street Journal—then they took the old TV and DVR. Quick shower and Dzung back home to pick me up to go to Van and Kiet’s for oxtail soup. Lingered after lunch chatting while the kids played. Home via Mt. Lawley to pick up a box from Get Chunky to take to dinner.
Brief rest to hang out the washing and pack for the walk over to Faith and Yoshiya’s house. With ten minutes to leave, I called the kids to get ready, only to find Eliza and Jack had started to tidy up Jack’s room, meaning they’d taken all the junk from all drawers and surfaces and piled them on his bed. I barked at them to hop in the shower and hurriedly tidied things, then got ready myself. We left a little bit late. Great evening; Yoshiya made about eight courses of Tapas, which we ate with beer and sherry, then chatted while sipping whisky afterwards, leaving the kids to play. Walked home about nine thirty or so, and tried to get the kids straight to bed with varying levels of success. Dzung crashed out; I stayed up in a half-drunken stupor and watched a few interesting shows before finally calling it a night at half twelve.
Dzung has to work so I took the kids to karate, and stopped by Garbo on the way home to grab some pies for lunch. Crystal dropped Eli over and I took the kids into the Earth Sciences Museum at UWA where they had a great time looking at minerals and chatting to the lady there to help identify the rocks they’ve been digging up in the school playground.
Back home via mum and dad’s for an afternoon tea of banana bread and crackers. Made Malaysian curry with potatoes, carrots and pork for dinner, along with grilled eggplant and roti. Curry too spicy for the kids, but delicious with a beer. Kids to bed and I cleaned up, then watched “The Death of Stalin” with Dzung.
Casual day. Rainy morning. Did some shopping while kids at school. Good progress at work. Made lamb cutlets and pasta for dinner (mum and dad didn’t get the kids due to poor weather). Glass of wine with Dzung to break the drought of dry July. Watched “The War on Waste” with Eliza after dinner. Quiet night, very tired.
Blindsided. Spent yesterday scoping out urgent work that needed to be finished for the customer by Sunday, ready to work on it today and tomorrow. But had another very long meeting today to cancel that, and return to previous work, which I’d put on hold, to modify requirements that were written months ago, which requires existing implementation to be changed. And this piece of work is now super-urgent. This wiped me out; the lack of sleep overnight didn’t help. Spent the day in a daze, thinking about life and career and the things I want to be working on. Just fixed bugs and did some work that was blocking a few things, but otherwise dropped out mentally.
Lack of sleep because it was super windy overnight. Hail at 2am. Worried about the bins on the kerbside. Kept getting out of bed to check on them. At 6am I went outside in the dark to find the lid of one of the bins was open, and the bag that was on top had disappeared! It was full of foam that had been used to pack the desk that Dzung bought a while ago, which I’m gradually disposing of, so it would have been very light. Walked up and down the street but couldn’t see it anywhere. Terrible way to start the day.
Spent the evening in a depressed funk. Watched the last of Handmaid’s Tale, which didn’t help. Need to start on a skunkworks project to show my boss how we could be doing things differently, and need to get back to HackTile!
Busy day at work. Early morning meeting, and heads down all morning. Dzung and I to Kitchen Inn for lunch (after trying somewhere else that ended up being closed only on Wednesdays). They got my order wrong, so I only ate half of the plate. Working all afternoon, then cooked dinner with Eliza; steak, cous-cous, baby carrots. Turned out quite nicely.
Kids to bed, finished “Magician’s Gambit”. Then watched a couple of episodes of “The Handmaid’s Tale” before sleep. Stormy outside, worried about the bins. Jack had earlier spotted a crow making a mess of our neighbour’s bin, which we tidied up, but it’s the wind that worries me.
Busy day at work. Picked up Jack in the middle of the day to visit the immunologist. Needed to talk about Eliza, but they won’t give you a follow-up appointment unless you bring a kid along. Found him digging in the playground with Eli and Josh. Appointment was good, happy to have a realistic action plan for anaphylaxis, and not a knee-jerk of giving the epi-pen the moment Eliza mentions a lump in her throat.
Picked up Jack after school and went shopping, then collected Eliza after orchestra. Made mapu tofu for dinner, and second attempt at Japanese-style grilled eggplant. Burned it this time. Hoping for third time lucky tomorrow.
Kids to bed, and I watched a couple of episodes of Handmaid’s Tale before retiring. No HackTile.
Walked Jack to school early for school banking. He showed me a map that he had drawn with Eli and Josh for their Geology Club. It was a quite detailed map of the school playground with measurements and everything, along with a description of the digging conditions in the sand pit. Funny!
Returned the stools, then a work meeting and semi-busy day. Mark talking about the new directory product again; got the creative juices flowing. Did three repeats of the seven-minute workout. Watched Handmaid’s Tale at lunch. Walked Jack home from school, then to the shops to stock up on some Japanese items. Bought small eggplants to have another attempt at grilled eggplant for tomorrow night. After shopping we picked up Eliza from quiz club.
Home to help Eliza cook the oven backed panko-and-parmesan crusted fish and potato wedges. Turned out great, and enough food for us all to have seconds, and save enough for lunch for all of us tomorrow. Value! Put the kids to bed, then watched an episode of The West Wing. Nada HackTile.
Up early to help Jack finish his North Shore homework, which we neglected yesterday. Then Dzung took him in, and Eliza went to tennis. I did some housework, then breakfasted while reading, and took delivery of the “You Plate It” box for the coming week. Then some gardening out the back. Off to Van and Kiet’s for lunch of vietnamese pancakes. Would have been perfect with a beer, but still doing dry July.
Home in the afternoon to help Eliza clean up her room. Then read some more in the sunshine before playing a bit of Elite Dangerous, as the VR was still set up. Made dinner for the kids (leftovers of potato and leek soup, shepherd’s pie and steamed brocolli with vinegar rice) before playing a round of “Takenoko” before bed. Read to Eliza, then watched “The Lobster” with Dzung.
No HackTile. Kids to karate with Dzung. I read “Kavalier and Clay” for a while, after finishing chores, and then got to work unblocking the drain in my bathroom. That worked, so checked other drains, and Jack’s needed some love too. Worked on that, but accidentally pressed down the plug so it couldn’t be removed. Ended up working for an hour, had to take everything apart and reassemble, then repeat when my first attempt leaked. Next time I’ll call a guy.
Out in the afternoon shopping for stools. Found a couple we like; Hudson’s mum was the salesperson and let us bring them home to try out. They’re not high enough. Cooked dinner with Dzung; pork ribs, beans, coleslaw. Then played some VR together before putting the kids to bed. Ended the night watching “John Wick 2” with Dzung, an abysmal film.
Easy morning. Decided I’d take my foot off the accelerator at work until design and requirements sort themselves out. Don’t want to rework any of the backend. Planned an easy day of fixing a few issues and getting some chores done: banking, cleaning, shopping and a blood donation. But they cajoled me to donate platelets instead of blood—I was reticent to do so due to my bad experience last year—but they were very kind and careful and it all went well. One of the young nurses flirted with me, saying my arms were lovely and warm and that I would “be a girl’s best friend on a cold night”. Flattering but awkward; this all in front of a room of other donors. Didn’t know what to say. Ended up taking a large chunk out of my day. Even worse, returned home dead tired, a combination I think of deciding to work less intensely and the loss of blood. Mooching around in the afternoon; mum and dad over with shepherd’s pie for dinner. Yum. Too worn out in the evening to code; vegged out in front of the TV before having an early night.
Very busy at work, but blindsided by a design coming out of nowhere, with it’s own user stories, in no way following the documented spec. Worked furiously all day, from 7:30 to 17:00, with nary a break. Exhausted, cooked the salmon dish for the kids while Dzung took them to piano lessons. Philae arrived after dinner to mind the kids while Dzung and I went to “The White Album Concert”. Third time we’ve been; other shows were in 2009 and 2014. Absolutely fantastic. Home at 23:00 to crash on the sofa and watch the last episode of “Sense 8”. Too tired to finish it, I crawled to bed. Obviously no HackTile.
No HackTile. Extremely busy at work. Frantic. Dzung not feeling very well. Massive downpour at school pick-up time, trying to contact Eliza to tell her to stay undercover at the school, but that only ended up delaying me in traffic while she walked to the usual meeting spot in the park and got soaked. She cooked dinner, following a recipe from “You Plate It”, using ingredients we bought ourselves. Finished the night watching a couple of episodes of “Handmaid’s Tale”.
Long, busy day. Heaps to do at work. Skipped lunch with Wil, and cancelled meeting with Will tomorrow. Eliza off early due to parent-teacher meetings; she had a ball visiting her old primary school with her friends. Walked home with both kids, just like old times (sob).
Dzung out for Chang’s birthday, after rushing home to meet with Eliza’s maths teacher. She’s a great mum. I took the kids to the shops to buy ingredients for Eliza to make tomorrow night’s dinner. Then picked up a huge feast of fish and chips, which we ate while watching the beginning of “Spiderman: Homecoming”.
Still working into the evening. Will watch an episode of Handmaid soon, then crash. No time to even think about HackTile.
Got some chores done once kids were at school. Lots of work-related chatter. Did three or four hours over the weekend so took it easy. Feeling less sore today, so did three circuits of the 7-minute workout while listening to a podcast. Eggs, toast and coffee for lunch while watching an episode of The West Wing (now that I’ve caught up on the podcasts I need to watch a few episodes again).
Thinking about rules. Lots of thought experiments, like having magnets that repell a ball. What happens when a ball-magnet pair face each other with a gap in-between? There are three possibilities.
- One ball wins, which blocks the other ball from moving. This isn’t ideal, because it breaks the assumption that all rules are processed in parallel. Why would one win?
- Neither ball wins (we detect there is a conflict, which causes both rules to fail). This isn’t ideal, because there’s an obvious gap for the balls to move into.
- Both rules succeed, and the two balls begin moving towards each other. But then both rules are reverted (because of the conflict) and they move back to their original position.
I like this last solution, as it yields the intuitively correct behaviour; the balls will wobble back-and-forth. The magnets have an obvious and consistent effect on the world, and the world rule of one entity per cell is visually not violated. It implies rules having multiple states, and the engine updating between rule transitions. Things like sound effects could be triggered by the rule beginning to execute, by the rule succeeding, or by the rule being rolled back. That should give a lot of expressiveness to the engine.
Another thought experiment is an NPC that has four rules, each telling it to move in a different direction. In this case, only one rule can succeed, as they are all attempting to move the entity. Essentially the movement command requires exclusive access to the resource. It’s fairest to select one rule to win at random, meaning NPCs will get random (brownian) movement for free. Nice.
Apart from movement, there aren’t too many commands that require exclusive access to a resource. Really just movement and mutating a register.
Final thought experiment is back to the magnet-ball rule, where the balls are adjacent, with another rule that adjacent balls de-spawn (in a fiery explosion), with magnets strategically positioned to push the balls apart. What should happen here?
- The rule to explode the balls beats the rule to move the balls, and so they explode.
- The rule to move the balls beats the rule to explode the balls. and so they move.
- Both rules fire, so the balls explode while they’re moving.
Again, this last case seems intuitively correct. The rule to explode the ball simply de-spawns both balls (which plays an explosion animation), and triggers an explosion sound effect. The rules to move the balls still fires, but the entity engine can handle moving an entity while it’s de-spawning, so there’s no conflict to rollback.
All of this comes naturally when we think of the 3x3 grid as providing context to decide if a rule should fire, and the rule itself then issuing a series of commands (such as move entity and so on), rather than the rule mutating the 3x3 grid (which is what the user may see when editing rules, but not what the engine works with when executing rules).
Anyway, that’s a bit of a thesis. Hopefully things will solidify somewhat over the next day or two so I can begin coding this up.
Jack had school photos today. I cooked bolognaise for dinner. Full from overeating! Dzung and Jack watched Australian Ninja Warrior. Eliza practising her viola. Just a regular Monday night.
Jack to NorthShore. Eliza and I teamed up to play “Captain Toad’s Treasure Tracker”. Then to Van’s for lunch; Ba made steak and vegetables. Did some shopping in the afternoon, and made vegetable soup in the Thermomix for dinner. Still early, so Eliza cajoled us into playing Munchkin. She won, of course, but there was no backstabbing (so it was really just a race to the finish). Watched a few episodes of “Handmaid’s Tale” with Dzung once the kids were asleep. Again with the lack of HackTile.
Kids to karate with Dzung. I did some housework. French onion soup and cheese on toast for lunch. Very tired in the afternoon; napped while listening to podcasts. Think I have a mild form of Eliza’s virus. Dzung made Ramen for dinner, and then she went to sleep early; I watched some game design videos on YouTube while crashing on the sofa. No HackTile at all. Waste of a day, really.
Danny Goodman! Hours of reminiscing on the sofa in the sunshine. Wil visited too. Great to catch up. Like no time had passed. Then busy at work, and off to mum and dad’s for a lamb roast. Very tired, to bed with a book while it rains.
Super busy at work. Got heaps done, but exhausted by the end of it. Fish for dinner. Eliza not feeling well and upset after a visit to the allergy doctor and finding out she cannot select drama in year 8, as she’s already a music student. Must find something she can do outside of school. Jack doing well with his maths and reading. Dzung working hard. I can’t slog on with HackTile tonight; I played around a bit but coding rules still feels premature; need to steep a bit longer and show it to Danny and Wil tomorrow. Will chill out with the TV before bed instead.
Very sore today after overdoing it yesterday with three repeats of the seven-minute workout. Can barely lift my arms. Work very busy; Dzung and I made an effort to go out to Hayashi for lunch. Frozen lasagna for dinner though.
No HackTile work, but put together an animation to post to Twitter.
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Have been playing around with the editor, thinking about rules.
Very busy all day at work. Made good progress. Did North Shore homework with Jack. Eliza has a sore throat, worsening since yesterday. Dzung will take her to the Doctor tomorrow. Made steak, gravy, mash, beans and carrots for dinner. Dessert of custard and apple cake. HackTile for a bit; got animations working, and got the map serialising. Good enough for now; will switch to rules, and come back to animations once we need different states for movement and the like.
Very hungover. Should have stuck to my guns and avoided the drink. Slow morning as a result. Needed to finish cleaning too. Mum took the kids in the middle of the day, so after a hot shower I worked from late morning to early evening, and continued after dinner. Now to bed at ten o’clock with no HackTile done, but at least I managed a full work day.
Jack back to North Shore! We hope it’ll give him some discipline at school and that his grades will improve by the end of the year. Island Market for brunch; tried to limit what I ate. Then preparing steamboat once back home. Faith and Yoshiya loved playing the Vive, and I celebrated the halfway point of the increasingly inappropriately named “dry july” by sharing two bottles of red. Late night for the kids, and I couldn’t face cleaning up straight away, so watched “The Shining” first. Ended up still awake at 2:30am. No HackTile.
Regular Saturday. Lazy breakfast, clothes washing and karate. Rushed home via Garbo to pick up groceries for lunch, then kids off to piano while I cleaned my office and tried “MoonQuest”. Shopping in the afternoon with Dzung, buying things for dinner and tomorrow’s hotpot. Have decided to pause Dry July to be able to drink with our guests. But one day a month is pretty good, right?
Spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, then an episode of BiTfD before playing a few levels of Kirby with the kids. Got some more HackTile done, too.
Now that serialisation is working, I updated the entity editor to allow individual animation frames to be selected. Next will be to draw then animating, and to make it easy to preview animations by moving the controller. Drew some nicer sprites to aid in this work. And, after that, rules!
Took the kids to Riley’s for breakfast, then to Garbo where I bought “Captain Toad’s Treasure Tracker” and the Ultra HD version of “Bladerunner 2049”. Back home late morning and was busy at work for the rest of the day. Kids played games until Eva and Finlay were picked up after lunch.
Squeezed in some HackTile in the late afternoon. Optimised palette swaps, implemented serialisation for sprites, and removed all the code for creating default sprites. Worked great, but will have to revisit at some point when I support an architecture with a different endianess. So animation is now on the agenda. Looking forward to it!
Mum and Dad over to watch “Battle of the Sexes” on the new TV. Had some Thai delivered for dinner. Mum made dessert. Put the kids to bed, and ending the night watching an episode of “Endeavour” with Dzung and a cuppa. Noice.
Dzung took the kids to Scitech to spend some time with their cousins. I worked scoping out the new payments feature for my day job. Enough work to keep me busy for the next fortnight, working towards an end-of-the-month deadline.
Eva and Finlay arrived for a sleepover in the late afternoon. Made lamb cutlets, pasta and salad. Civilised dinner around the dining table while telling jokes, then watched “Early Man” with popcorn. I cleaned up and made the beds while the girls played Letter Tycoon. Eva will be sleeping in my office, so I’m working upstairs for a change. Boys asleep.
Have been thinking about life in general. Want to improve my level of fitness, lose some weight, contribute more to society (I scheduled myself to donate blood again, triggered by Callan’s platelets scare), build stuff of value (an old trope of mine, but relevant now that I’m almost finished reading the excellent “Bullshit Jobs” book… working for a salary should only be the journeyman stage between apprentice and master), improve my diet (will restrict myself to three drinks per week once dry July is up) and so on. Lots of life stuff swirling around in my mind today.
HackTile-wise, I’ve decided to focus on serialisation and forget about generating default sprites, which is just a timewaste. Once serialisation is working I’ll be able to load sprites, so the default set could be designed by hand. Will do some work on that tonight, but it will take a bit of time to finish. Once it’s done animation will be unblocked. Happy days.
Beautiful day. Took kids to the carwash for breakfast. Getting the car properly cleaned is always cathartic. Tidied up the garden too, and got the kids to finish tidying the house after all the housework I did yesterday. Finished a few big tasks at work, and had a long chat with Will that turned out well. Need to spend the rest of my week on design work, to scope out tasks for the next two weeks, but that seems doable. Will take the kids swimming, and then make lasagna and salad for dinner. And, I promise, will do some HackTile too.
And so I did! Happy to break the hoodoo. Just some simple work on the map editor; fixing a bug with entity zero not working because of some assumptions made in the rules of Conway’s life, and implemented a preview when drawing entities in the map, to be consistent with how sprite drawing works.
Great to be back on the bandwagon. Need to focus now on getting sprite animations working correctly, and then it will be on to serialisation followed by the rules editor. To put meat on the bones, so to speak.
Sigh. Didn’t write a diary entry yesterday. And instead of going to bed at a reasonable time, I surfed Reddit for a couple of hours. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s hard to get back into the swing of things after taking a break, but I must do it. Watched a talk by Jonathon Blow on YouTube about getting over a lack of enthusiasm, but it didn’t help.
Kids were away too; Eliza went swimming with a friend, and Jack went to the movies with Mum and Finlay. Dzung’s desk was delivered, so I spent a good part of the day setting that up instead, which was physically exhausting. And I cleaned the house a bit. Then there were some urgent tasks with my day job, and a looming deadling at the end of the month that I’ll need to work extra hours to hit.
Made steaks and mashed potato with green beans for dinner. Delicious. Usual bedtime routine. Eliza very tired after her big day.
Took the kids to Garden City in the morning to get some hotdog buns, then back home to work. Eliza had some friends over for the day; Cindy and Zophia and Cindy’s little sister. They baked cakes and ate hotdogs for lunch. They had a great time together, and were inclusive of Jack. No fighting or breaking anything; they were all well behaved and cleaned up after themselves. Proud of them all! I managed to work a full, busy day.
Picked up Dzung from the station and drove to visit Daz to celebrate his 44th. Sat outside by the fire. Jack had a ball playing table tennis, and Eliza sat happily with Archie on the sofa near the fire. Chicken and pizza and sausage rolls for dinner, then chocolate cake and tea. Caught up with Cam’s dad, and Dad told us about a game he played with his grandfather as a kid, where you throw a ring tied to a string towards a hook in the wall. Searched for it on the phone; turns out it’s an old pub game called “ring the bull” or something. Will try to set it up for Christmas.
Home late and put the kids to bed. Tired, and no desire to start work on HackTile. I did spend a bit of time today going through what I plan to do next, and running it to test a few things, so there’s that at least.
Slept in, then a breakfast of scrambled eggs with leftover toasted baguatte outside in the winter sunshine. Picked up the kids; they didn’t want to leave as they’d made new friends and were playing out the front. To Van’s for spaghetti vongole. Returned home for a rest; I had a bad sinus headache that risked developing into a migraine, so lights out and listening to The West Wing Weekly with a strong coffee. A light dinner of leftover Cahn Chua, then watched an episode of Back in Time for Dinner. Must get back on to the HackTile bandwagon!
Strong coffee and crumpet breakfast once the washing was on, happily flicking through new issues of The Guardian and New Scientist. Then off to karate with the kids, picking up seafood chowder and crusty baguette for lunch on the way home. Lazy afternoon, then dropped the kids to mum and dads. Picked up Annie for dinner at Tiny’s. We ordered far too much. Then to the jazz festival to see the Perth Jazz Collective at His Majesty’s. Back home to watch Endeavour with a cuppa.
Kids slept in until eight thirty. Breakfasted, then packed up and cleaned up, and visited our friends to say goodbye. Kids wrote in the guestbook, after discovering their guestbook entry from 2016 the other day. Left a bit later than planned, and I was a bit stressed out, as I’d arranged to have the TV delivered at one o’clock and I was clearly not going to make it. Needn’t have worried though, after arriving home and putting everything away the delivery driver called to say he was coming around. Perfect timing, really. Spent the afternoon catching up on work and setting up the TV. Dzung took the kids shopping and to the library, so Jack could get some more books for his reading challenge. Will have can chua for dinner, and will then most likely watch a movie on our new sixty-five inch idiot box.
Last full day. Kids were freezing cold overnight. Made bacon burgers for breakfast and had an easy morning. Dzung walked the dog with the kids and went to say hello to the alpacas while I chopped wood. Drove into Nannup to get pies and pasties for lunch, then went for a walk along the Blackwood River. Back home to light the fire and hop into the spa. Roasted some vegetables for dinner and cooked the lasagna. Played a few rounds of Resistance then had an early night with electric blankets on for everybody. Almost finished reading “The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle”.
Slept great. Strong coffee and raisin toast for breakfast. Headed into Bridgetown for lunch. Whole place has been decorated with ornaments woven from white wool to make it look like a winter wonderland for Christmas in July. And amazed to find the puzzletown exhibition, featuring countless jigsaw puzzles, including the smallest and largest in the world. Fantastic lunch at the Barking Cow cafe. Had planned to go bushwalking but the weather set in so we grabbed groceries and filled up with petrol before driving back to the chalet to light the fire. Dzung and the kids made a start on the jigsaw puzzle they bought while I read, then over to Nagis and Ali’s for a dinner of fish, wild rice, veges and salad. Kids did a hilarious magic show performance. Walked home in the cold dark night to a guttering fire that I resurrected before ending the evening in the hot tub. Electric blankets set to max. Love relaxing and spending time away from screens, would love to live like this and work on HackTile when inclined, with lots of bushwalking to think.
Worked in the morning but no time for HackTile. Dzung had to go in to the office to demo her project, so I organised the kids and got things packed up. Nice drive down to Nannup. No rain to speak of; we were lucky to miss the stormy weather. Great to be back amongst the big trees. Arrived and settled in, then over to visit Nagis, Ali and Nora (and Hora the dog, of course). Then back to our chalet to cook lamb cutlets and pasta for dinner. I’m doing dry July so missed the red wine. Played a bit of Resistance after eating, then ended the night in the hot tub. Glad to have a roaring log fire to keep us warm after getting out of the water!
First day of the school holidays. Cold and rainy. Did some activities with the kids; filmed Eliza doing her piano levels and helped Jack with his reading, but overall a busy day at work fixing the Android builds. Break at lunch to go shopping for holiday supplies, and to grab pies for lunch. Did some reading of the “Bullshit Jobs” book, which I agree with wholeheartedly. Dzung home to make soup and grilled pork with rice for dinner. Watched an episode of “Back in time for Dinner” with the kids while eating apricot yoghurt for dessert. It was the 1970s episode, and brought back a lot of childhood memories.
Kids to bed and then some HackTile work. Refactored the camera system to make zooming a lot more sane. Works well, although there is a limit to how far you can zoom out (to do with overflowing integers). Added keyboard controls to zoom in and out. Will need to refine this after returning from Nannup so I can move on to finishing the map editor. Will have lots to think about while bushwalking.
Finlay’s seventh birthday. Kids at mum and dad’s, so Dzung and I were mooching around in our PJs when Eliza’s English teacher arrived to deliver the book she needs to read for the holidays. Embarrassed! Off to Imperial Court for Dim Sum. They had a large function there, but we were lucky to get a table for thirteen in the back room without waiting too long. Lazy afternoon at home, ended up playing Zelda:BotW with Jack for an hour or so after a simple Sunday dinner of leftover soup and toasted cheesey bread.
Lots of work on HackTile. Entity editor layout updated, and sprite selection working properly to allow editing of any sprite, with a keyboard command to show and hide the editor, and the ability to select any entity for editing and for drawing into the map. Need to sort out camera controls next, so I can pimp out the map editor a bit more, and will also need to address animations.
Unfortunately I’ve had a re-think about how to assign sprites to entities, so I’ll need to re-do my default sprites and a bunch of code. This happened because I think movement animations will need to be three frames. So it’ll be:
- 8 entities with 16 sprites (12 for movement, 2 for spawn, 2 for unspawn)
- 8 entitries with 8 sprites (4 for movement, 2 each for spawn and unspawn)
- 8 entities with 5 sprites (1 default sprite and the spawn/unspawn ones)
- 8 entities with just 1 sprite
This still leaves me with the 16 reserved sprites I need for UI things.
Dzung took the kids to karate, so I spent the morning doing some work. Brunch was Korean BBQ at Van’s place, and we overate, so had to move our dinner booking from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Dropped the kids at Mum and Dad’s, then worked on HackTile while Dzung took a nap.
Sprite editor taking shape. Created default sprites, and working towards having sprites selectable in the entity viewer. Also need to make entities selectable in the right-hand sidebar, and allow the sprite editor to be shown and hidden through menu items. Also need to support animation and serialization. Then this will be good enough to allow me to move on to the map editor and the rule editor. Exciting times.
Off to Kuzu for dinner, but time to kill before then, so will celebrate with a G&T and some gaming.
Very busy at work. Beautiful clear day, but so very cold, so didn’t go for a bike ride. Fixed the multiple drawing bug from yesterday, and improved the functionality of the sprite editor. The sprite data is now modified too, meaning palette changes work, and it’s possible to select the drawing colour. Coming together, but still lots to do. Dinner over at mum and dad’s house. All feeling a bit tired, so will call it a night. Might play a game before bed.
Very busy at work. Eliza off sick. Managed to get some HackTile time; got the sprite editor to a state where I can draw pixels, but there was a funny bug, because I forgot to disable drawing to the world at the same time. I’ll need to set an active flag on the cameras too, similar to what I’ve done with the UI panels. So much more to do.
Meeting with Jack’s teacher. We will work hard getting him to improve his concentration and his ability to work unsupervised. Eliza’s report came through; she got eight As and has been promoted into the advanced maths track. Good girl!
Made shaking beef for dinner. Will relax before bed with The West Wing, wine and cheese. Oh, and I ordered the new TV. Should be delivered soon.
Well, not in a rut after all. Early morning meeting at work, then needed to work on getting the builds of all apps in order. While waiting for the builds to finish, I read my new C book and finished the refactoring work, and then mocked out the layout for the entity viewer and sprite editor.
The idea is that the red bar on the right will contain controls for selecting one of 32 entities, and for showing dialog boxes for editing various aspects of the simulation. The blue dialog on the left will show up to eight animations for the currently selected entity; idle, four directional animations, spawn and unspawn, and a special emote animation. The green dialog on the right will allow the currently selected animation to be edited. Each animation has up to three frames, each consisting of a 16x16 bitmap.
That’s the idea, anyway. We’ll see how it pans out.
This morning Dzung and I went to the school, in the drizzling rain, to watch Jack run cross-country. About half the boys try their hardest. Jack gets distracted, and decides to walk and muck around with his friends. Frustrating!
Tonight Eliza and I made lamb, pea and mint pasta. It was nice and filling, and tasty too, but not as good as the other dishes we’ve made. Watched some MasterChef after dinner, then read “Magician’s Gambit” to Eliza. She had a bit of a tummy upset. Then a bit more work before cleaning up while listening to The West Wing Weekly before heading to bed.
Up early. Did some work. Made breakfast and lunch. Took kids to school. Back home to bacon and eggs and some reading before working some more and going for a mid-morning ride around the river. Afternoon business call, then picked up the kids and off to swimming lessons. Then into the city for a pubby dinner at Butcher’s Arms and a look at the light installation in the city.
“C in a Nutshell” arrived today, and I did some refactoring of code based on the C11 standard as a result. Expect to refactor some more tomorrow, and continue on the editing UI. Feel like I’m entering another rut. Sigh.
Up early. Made breakfast and lunch for the kids. Beautiful morning, so walked Jack in once Dzung was back from dropping off Eliza. Regular day at work. Took a break mid-morning to ride two laps around the river and soak in the nice weather. Reheated some soup for lunch, Dzung and I read our books outside in the sunshine. Then walked in to school to get Jack, picking up a few groceries on the way home. He got his report today; Bs in Maths and Japanese, but Cs for everything else. We’ll need to work on improving those grades!
Picked up Eliza after quiz club. She complained of a headache. Kids good, Jack did some homework and some reading. He tries hard. Eliza did hers. I managed to squeeze in some HackTile work; got a PanelManager implemented, with a few placeholder panels rendering where the editor UI will be. Should be able to flesh them out over the next few days.
Made grilled pork steaks with roasted sweet potatoes in a lemon butter sauce, garnished with parsely and red onion for dinner. Eliza helped. Delicious! Put both kids to bed, reading to them both (I downloaded an illegal PDF of Magician’s Gambit, since they pulled it from the Kindle store). Dzung cleaned up, so with nothing left to do I’m having an early night reading in bed. I’m enjoying this cruisy approach to hobby projects, chipping a little off each day rather than burning the candle at both ends.
Busy day. Finished making the lamb and barley soup that I started last night, and went to the shops to grab salad, cheese and frozen chips. Then prepared soup, hamburgers, chips and salad for Dzung’s side of the family. Beautiful sunny day, so we sat outside to eat. Ma had two lamb sliders, and Ba ate several bowls of soup, and asked for some more to take home for dinner. Success!
Lilian, Lachlan and Joshua played their violins for us afterwards. Then packed up and went to pick up Mum and Dad to take them to the Civic Centre in Cottesloe where we watched Eliza and Jack’s piano concert. They played with confidence. Very proud of our kids. Finished the day at Barchetta, watching the sun set over the ocean. Ordered pizza and a share plate, and wine and beer.
Did a little bit of work on HackTile but nothing much. Need to find time during the week, as I’m pretty tired now and will make it an early one.
Up early to buy brioche burger buns from Garden City before they sell out. Then back to get the kids breakfast and take them to karate. Dzung took Eliza to buy a viola while Jack had his lesson. Home via garbo again, this time to pick up lunch for the kids and to get premium hamburger meat. Kids got dressed and we went in to Supanova. Finlay had the time of his life!
Dropped Fin at mum and dad’s in the late afternoon. Stayed for a cuppa and a some rocky road. Then in to Hayashi for a wonderful dinner (superior beef, vegetable tempura, sous vide salmon, clam miso soup, rice, beer, lotus chips). Back home to make lamb and barley soup for tomorrow, using leftovers from last week’s roast. Finished reading Queen of Sorcery to Eliza, and miffed to find that the series has been pulled from the Kindle Store. Wrote an email to PRH UK to ask for an explanation.
Did a little bit of HackTile work; added an overlay renderer and used it to add a transparent background to debug displays. Need to soldier on and get this UI built out over the next week!
Morning meeting. Light day at work. Went shopping at lunch time to pick up groceries and beer, and to get the new Mario tennis game. A bit of HackTile in the afternoon; refactoring to add two game modes that can be toggled between, and starting to build out controls for the UI. This work will take a while.
Finlay over for a sleepover. I made tortillas. Everyone watching Hotel Transylvania 2 while I read End of Watch. Will have an early night.
Another busy day at work. Lots of HackTile design, but no programming. Plan to introduce two states; a game state and an editor state, and toggle quickly between them. The editor will have a fixed layout, with the entity and rules editors implemented as pop-up dialogues. That gives me something to start with; refactoring to support multiple states will take a bit of work, and the editor layout can then be implemented with placeholder content, and I can then start fleshing out just the entity editor. Should work fine. Still need to stew on it for another day or two before I roll up my sleeves and start implementation.
Dzung made leftover curry for dinner, I cooked some lamb cutlets to pad it out. She’s feeling sick, and there’s still a bit of meh-ness around. Forgot to put the bins out last night; another symptom of our general malaise at the moment. I’m going to watch an episode of The West Wing and call it a night.
Bit of a meh kind of day. Eli came over early, as his mum and dad both needed to be in the office early. He and Jack are obsessed with minerals. They examined Jack’s rock collection enthusiastically, and were fascinated when I set up the digital microscope for them to use. After school, Jack made “Brentwood Geologist” membership cards for himself, Eli and Josh, which I helped him print and laminate. Great to see them obsessing over something!
Watched the lap-a-thon in the afternoon, which Dzung volunteered at. Made bolognaise for dinner. Sat on the sofa and watched three episodes of Seinfeld after dinner. Don’t know why, it was just part of the overall meh-ness of the day. I think it started when I woke up bright and early for this morning’s team meeting and nobody showed up. Also the comedown after the intense work setting up new customers.
Did some HackTile work; got alpha blending working for sprites. Really has a big performance hit; barely hitting 100fps when maxing things out now. But it’s necessary, as I want to have multiple layers. Spent some time thinking about the sprite editor, sketching out some UI designs based on SEUCK. I think I need to stew on this for a few days before coding anything up. I want to keep the editor simple, so making it opinionated is key. One way of doing this is to impose tight constraints on flexibility; limiting the exact number of entities and how they can be used, for example.
Very busy day at work struggling with builds. Not fun. Day was grey and miserable. Jack’s lap-a-thon cancelled due to weather. Dzung made sweet and sour fish for dinner, to use up leftover coriander and spring onion. Delicious.
Switched to a new font for debugging, and made sure the font colour changes with the palette. And got sprites rendering from the hard-wired pixels into a texture buffer to update with the palette too. Need to get alpha working next, then on to a basic sprite editor so I don’t need to design these in hex digits.
Will end the night with a bit of Zelda, cheese and brandy. Time to celebrate.
Grey Monday morning. Jack complaining of a sore tummy. Slow day at work struggling with Android builds and getting new apps set up on TestFlight. Picked up the kids and Jack made MaPu ToFu for dinner. Eliza got hit in the head with a basketball at school but took it stoicly. Later she cried when I read her the final chapters of The Queen of Sorcery.
Reimplemented the debug font for HackTile, using a caching library. Debug rendering now incredibly quick, exceeding 300fps when vsync is disabled, event when maxing out the engine. And implemented the beginnings of the sprite manager, to the point where drawing squares of flat colour has been replaced with blitting images from a sprite sheet. Still lots of more work to do there, and I feel that the next step will be implementing a basic sprite editor.
Watched an episode of The West Wing at lunch. Plan to watch another before bed, as Dzung is working and I’m not ready to hit the hay.
We all had a bit of a sleep in. Late breakfast with the kids, then busy preparing roast lamb, potatoes, carrots, beans, brussel sprouts, salad, gravy and so on. Meat was a bit overcooked but delicious all the same. Ba raided our kafir lime tree for the restaurant as usual. Quickly packed up then over to Elaine’s for Mahjong with Josh, Annie and Mitzi. I worked on HackTile while Jack played Zelda and Dzung and Eliza played Mayjong with the others. Got mouse drawing working, and Eliza had a ball trying it out!
Amazing how much fun things are when you can interact. Had dinner at a nearby Thai place, before taking the kids home, leaving Dzung to play with the others. Jack and Eliza mucked around with HackTile a bit once we were home, then it was off to bed. And I’m exhausted, so an early night with “End of Watch” for me.
Beautiful but chilly morning, Up early to do the laundry and have breakfast, then showered and to karate with the kids. Back home via the fish shop, lunch was seafood chowder with crusty baguette and some sushi on the side. Shopping after lunch for roast lamb tomorrow, and ingredients for stuffed tomatoes, which Dzung made for dinner. Delicious. Took the kids for a bike ride down to deep water point after hanging out the washing and listening to podcasts. Ate some fruit while watching the river. Saw Jumanji after dinner and demolished a box of Tee Vee Snacks. Feeling tired and run down, will have an early-ish night.
Refactored the input handler in HackTile. Feels much better now; controllers are managed properly and can be queried from anywhere. Nice. Will add mouse control for spawning entities over the next day or two, and will make the camera movement smoother and more precise.
Work in the morning, then off to watch Jack’s class assembly. He dressed as a ninja and spoke confidently in front of the school. Dropped Dzung at the office and worked through lunch, then into the city for a couple of interviews before meeting Matthew for a beer at Nowhereman. Then into Leederville for a six-pack of Guinness and pizza. Jack (my friend, not my son) joined us, and we chatted for hours. Showed them both HackTile. No work on it today but planning for what to do next. Home before 11pm, Dzung and the kids had roast lamb with my parents.
Gorgeous day. Set up the daybed again. Dzung took the kids to school while I got to work, coffee in hand. Busy setting up some new organizations. Break for a late morning bike ride around the river in the glorious weather, then lunched on oxtail soup outside in the sunshine.
Eliza cooked beef cheesburger sliders with sweet potato fries and aoli for dinner. Was very tasty! She did a good job peeling five sweet potatoes, then chopping them up with the sharp Japanese knife.
Bit of work on HackTile after dinner. Multiple game controllers working to control multiple cameras, switch palettes, adjust update rate and so on. This thing is starting to take shape!
Next thing will be to replace flat colours with animating sprites. That’ll probably take me a while. Once that’s done some refactoring and optimisation will be called for (especially for the debug font, which badly impacts the frame rate, as can be seen in the screenshot).
Woke up very tired, after staying up late to watch Nintendo at E3. In fact, Dzung and I both overslept, so it was a mad rush to get the kids to school on time, and I missed a scheduled work meeting.
Worked throughout the day getting four new customers set up, but hit a roadblock with some third-party services, so switched to some HackTile work. Finished implementing the debug menu, and then added a feature to allow the palette to be swapped, hard-wiring 9 of the best sixteen-colour palettes I could find. Hooked these up to the input system, adding inputs to allow the update rate of the engine to be modified too, in addition to a pause mode.
Dzung out at the movies tonight, so I made pizza with the kids, and we watched some E3 videos on YouTube. Very cold, so have the heat on, and have taken to wearing Jack’s Harry Potter beanie. Will end the night sipping on a cuppa while watching The West Wing, waiting for Dzung to come home. Don’t want another late one.
Early-morning meeting with Mark. Kids off to school, and I then settled down to watch Trump meet Kim in Singapore, and the Sony E3 live stream. Started a new sprint and made good progress. Lunch with Wil; artichoke soup and ham and cheese toasted sandwich. Picked up the kids and off to Freo for Eva’s birthday dinner at Grill’d. A bit of HackTile upon returning; working on debug mode. Got fonts implemented and used this to draw camera information, and work-in-progress on a larger debug menu. First try getting fonts in was a bit buggy though.
Finished the night watching the Nintendo E3 live stream. Busy day!
Dzung dropped Eliza in to school, I took Jack in a bit early for school banking. Got a bit of HackTile work done first thing; laid the foundations for a debug manager and improved the multiple camera system, converting it from floating-point to integer arithmetic. Very happy with performance.
My modded UPB-X800 arrived, so I set it up during my lunch break and confirmed that my US BluRay discs worked (they did). Now all I need is a great TV!
Busy at work. Finished the current sprint, deployed to production and started planning the next round of work.
Picked up Jack and took him shopping, then got Eliza. Homework and piano practise, and then Eliza cooked dinner: lupin-crusted salmon fillets on a bed of miso and mirin sweet potato smash with mustard greens fried in garlic and ginger. Took over an hour to prepare, and that was with my assistance chopping and cleaning and so forth, but she had so much fun and was deservedly proud of the results.
Rainy day, so Eliza’s tennis lesson was cancelled. I made pancakes and we had a long, lazy breakfast instead. Then picked up Lilian from tutoring and dropped her and Jack over at Van and Kiet’s. On the way she told me about her desire to buy a bass guitar, and her mum’s long list of conditions (including teaching Joshua violin, doing her homework downstairs, doing her chores, eating Chinese food without complaining and so on).
Received a food delivery from “You Plate It” which Eliza will be cooking for our dinner tomorrow, and on Thursday. Included a ridiculous amount of fruit.
Dzung, Eliza and I went to the St. Petersberg Ballet production of Swan Lake, with principal performers from the Bolshoi Ballet. Amazing show. Afterwards we stayed in the city for drinks and snacks, then returned to Van’s for dinner. Amazed to see Lilian with a bass guitar! She’d actually gone and bought it while we were at the ballet.
Van cooked oxtail soup for the first time with excellent results. Van and Kim had gone to see the Dockers. Had a chat with Kim; she’s doing really well, and has just received her registration as a professional architect. Played with Joshua and had dessert, then home for the bedtime routine. Too tired for any further work on HackTile this weekend. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
Dzung’s course was cancelled, so she took the kids to karate. I took the opportunity to do some HackTile work. Began by implementing multiple cameras, making sure to handle different aspect ratios, and to remove hardwiring of the texture size for rendering the game. Working well!
Next I introduced entity states for spawning and unspawning, and rendered these with a different colour. This requires the engine updates to synchronise with entity creation and deletion, so I introduced a new opcode allowing the engine to synchronise entities each time it updates. Also worked rather well!
The next step will be to update controls to allow the cameras to be manipulated, and to implement a nice debug manager to allow different parts of the engine to display debugging information on-screen, such as camera location, entity counts and frame rate.
Dzung making shaking beef for dinner. I also managed some time with The West Wing Weekly and Breath of the Wild; in the latter I’ve been running through as many shrines as possible, now that I’ve switched my playstyle from open-ended exploration to completing the main quests. Crazy I know (the game’s been out for well over a year), but I’m in no rush.
Busy all day at work. Rushed out in the morning to buy a birthday present for Eli; Pokemon pack reduced from $80 to $30. Girl at the games store thought I was there for Magic cards (there’s just been a new release).
Heads-down all day working. Quick break at lunch for meatball pasta and wine with The West Wing, then back to the grind. No time for HackTile—picked up Jack from Eli’s party (Eliza and I met Dzung walking home from the train station on the way), then back to a warm house to recover with a cognac and order Thai delivery for dinner, which was delicious with a beer. Then snuggled on the floor under a blanket with the kids to watch Black Panther. Made popcorn. After the kids had been put to bed Dzung and I had a cuppa and played Letter Tycoon. She won on points. Ended the night reading in bed. A real family Friday.
Long, productive day at work, finishing the last of the work before the end of the current sprint, and culminating in a late conference call to New York. So no HackTile, apart from a few ideas about how to improve the camera system to deal with multiple cameras and arbitrary aspect ratios.
Made “bashy pork”, aka Japanese port katsu curry, for dinner. Proud to learn that Eliza is in the top 50 maths students, of around 350 in total. She’s really made a great start to high school.
Gardeners came today, and I returned a misdelivered package of cat food to our next-door neighbours. Amazing what you can buy online these days. Dzung out with April and Mary for lunch; I had onion soup and cheese on toast while watching The West Wing. Zelda book was delivered, which Jack loved. He wet his pants during class assembly rehearsal today; first time in ages.
Ended the day watching the second half of “Game Night” which Dzung and I started last night.
Busy day at work; got a lot done, and also managed to get the HackTile refactor finished to the point where everything is running once again. Nice to have abstracted out an entity manager, a camera manager and an input handler, improved object state and lifetime management, and cleaned up a lot of the code. Still much more to do, but progress being made!
Plan to finish the day with a bit more work on my day job, and then perhaps watch a movie or play some games tonight. Dzung is going to be cooking spaghetti and meatballs, but I must admit I’m still pretty full from the curry laksa we ate for lunch.
Back to the grind after the long weekend. Cold and rainy. Dropped kids to school and did some grocery shopping at Garbo, then back home for a productive morning of work before a brief call with Will and a steak lunch with Wil. More work in the afternoon, then made bangers and mash and watched an episode of A Series of Unfortunate Events before putting the kids to bed.
And, partly due to a chat with Wil after lunch, I got my mojo back and did some HackTile work. Not much, but enough to get my head back around it and make some progress. The last part of the refactoring is writing the entity manager; I hope to do that over the next few days to get things back up-and-running.
May need to visit Boffins to get a good C99 reference.
Sleep in. Dzung off to pick up kids from their sleepover, then I took Jack grocery shopping after a late breakfast of scrambled eggs and strong coffee. After lunch (Dzung made ramen) we went shopping for a new desk for Dzung’s office (no purchase yet), then back home for a long session of Letter Tycoon (cold and rainy day, so indoor boardgames are perfect). Dinner of leftover tortillas and soup, followed by a session of Kirby Star Allies. Kids to bed, and Dzung and I finished the night by watching “I, Tonya”. What a lazy WA Day!
Beautiful morning. Eliza off to tennis training. Jack and I reading over a lazy breakfast, then searched for (and found) Dzung’s lost Kindle. Picked up Lilian and Eliza and headed to Dim Sum for family “brunch”. Beautiful sunny day eating outside at 8 On The Point. Went back to Van and Kiet’s and walked the kids over to the new adventure playground near the stadium, where they spent a happy hour building a cubby house.
Back home for a rest, then dropped the kids to Finlay’s for a sleepover. Dzung and I out to meet up with Annie and Elaine for a dinner at Garum, Guy Grossi’s new Perth restaurant. I thought the food was great, although not all of us agreed; there was a general mood of dissatisfaction with everything, which put somewhat of a damper on the evening. Ended with a brandy and a few more chapters, and, as you may have guessed, no HackTile.
Sleep-in and a leisurely outdoors breakfast in the brilliant sunshine. Still feeling bad. Jack reading Calvin and Hobbes, which he discovered in my bookshelf, while looking for something to do other than playing on screens.
Usual Saturday chores of clothes washing and taking the kids to karate. Faith and Yoshiya were there; had a long chat with Faith about their recent trip to Japan and her promotion at the ATO. Grabbed sushi, seafood chowder and crusty baguette for lunch on the way home, and relaxed afterwards on the daybed, reading Finders Keepers (I finished Mr. Mercedes this morning).
Philae over at 6pm to babysit the kids; Dzung and I went to Long Chim for dinner and then watched “Behind the Barricade” at the Concert Hall. Home to bed. Zero progress on HackTile.
Well, well, well. Haven’t been feeling well. Wrote a Rakefile to make writing diary entries more efficient. Full, productive day at work. Jack had his friend Eli over afyer school, but ended up throwing a tantrum. Punishment is a total screen ban over the WA Day long weekend. Made tortillas for dinner. Delicious with a G&T. Kids to bed and Dzung and I watched a few episodes of Endeavour, the Inpector Morse prequel with all the pretty girls. Well, I half-watched while finishing Mr. Mercedes. And, yet again, no Hacktile!
Well, I’ve really fallen off the wagon right here. Didn’t write this until the next day. Had a busy day of work, then looked after the kids while Dzung was out at company drinks. We picked up F&C from Tankk and watched YouTube videos. I had a beer. After putting the kids to bed and reading to Eliza, I was the one who was tanked, so I had an early night. Plan to make up for that “tomorrow”.
Productive day at work. No HackTile action (think I’m putting things off because big refactorings are boooring). Thinking about getting a new TV.
Eliza’s Furby woke up in the middle of the night, talking loudly in the top of her wardrobe at 3am. Crazy! I woke up feeling nauseous. Not sure why.
A little work on HackTile, continuing the refactoring work.
Eliza gave a talk on shark culling at school. She made a great powerpoint and practiced her speech. Proud of her for busting through her nerves and speaking loudly and confidently in front of her class and teacher.
Pub lunch with Wil. Talk of Amigas and Twin Peaks, naturally. Dinner at Clancy’s in Freo with Lily and the entire family.
Wintery day. Took Jack in early so he could do school banking, then off for grocery shopping before returning home to work. Productive; ended the current sprint, released to production and started the next. Always feels good.
Some work with the HackTile camera system, to the point where both camera and entities needed to be refactored out into their own files. Always tending the garden; need to minimise dependencies and make things neat and tidy. Need an entity manager to deal with the various entity pools (creating, busy, destroying, free), and need to support multiple cameras. This is mundane, humdrum but necessary, and will continue for a day or two.
Leftovers for dinner: lasagna and shepherd’s pie, with fresh salad and steamed corn on the cob. Jack a bit sleep deprived… being silly and squawky. Eliza in a bubble of happiness, still riding high after her birthday weekend.
Finished the day with Dzung watching Legion, then washing dishes while listening to The West Wing Weekly. Still coughing like crazy after this cold.
Dzung off to the HBF Fun Run, I took the kids to a karate make-up class. Got the times wrong, so Jack joined Eliza’s lesson. They trained pretty hard today, the instructor wanted them to break through the wall where the mind wants to give up but the body can keep going. Jack did great, but said he felt “noise-ious” when he came to get a drink of water. Eliza’s friends (Cindy x 2 and Zophia) over to go to birthday lunch at Ruocco’s in Fremantle. Then off for a shopping spree at Garden City, and back home for cake and afternoon tea.
Did some work on HackTile; started to implement a debug UI, and continued work on getting the camera hooked up to controller and mouse controls. Once that’s wrapped I’ll be moving on to adding extra entity states for spawning and destroying, and will then give these entities some textures and animations :)
Eliza’s 12th birthday. Kids up early. Presents and breakfast, then took the kids to Garden City. Jack had a haircut, Eliza bought herself a Pokemon game. Back to prepare lunch; roast lamb with all the trimmings for 17 of us (both sides of the family). Played the C64 and the SNES with my brothers. Afternoon spent cleaning up and making lamb and barley soup for dinner. Played Letter Tycoon with the kids before they went to bed. Far too tired to work on HackTile; will watch an episode of The West Wing and crash.
Very tired today. Slept little partly because I broke my own rules and stayed up far too late last night (watching The West Wing, listening to The West Wing Weekly, then listening to music, drinking whiskey, reading), and partly because I couldn’t stop coughing once I’d gone to bed.
Storm overnight. Heavy rain and strong winds. Feels like winter! Lots of shopping today for Eliza’s birthday lunch tomorrow. Wrapped her presents and made a photo collage of her last 11 birthdays, and the day she was born.
Implemented a camera system for HackTile, allowing me to pan and zoom around the playfield using the XBox controller. Pretty neat. Oh, I promised a screenshot:
Yup, it’s still only Conway’s Life. The red lines show the border between the 4k texture that represents the entire world. It’s being tiled because the camera is zoomed way, way out (until each 16x16 pixel entity occupies only a single pixel on screen). We can zoom way, way in, too, up to 128 times:
Mum and Dad over for Friday night dinner. Finlay for a sleepover. Watched Wallace and Gromit with popcorn after a stodgy meal of shepherd’s pie, potato gratin, lasagna and apple tart. Heaven.
Busy day at work… knocked off a few major tasks, and followed up after a late-night meeting yesterday with a development team in Chicago.
Battening down the hatches this afternoon in preparation for an overnight storm. Winter is coming…
HackTile progress. Added vsync to the render loop, and changed the update function of the engine to allow the CA to update just 10 times per second (before that, after implementing empty space instead of requiring entities everywhere, it got up to 160 updates per second). Next on the list is to scroll and zoom the viewport.
Eliza had Cindy K over after school to do some baking. Jack had an asthma attack at school after doing cross-country training. And I headed off to the doctor’s to get some steroids to fight my own asthma (a side-effect of the cold).
Electrician over to fix the power points in Eliza’s room. Dzung very busy at work; she had a late brunch with April and Mary and then working all day. I made leftover curry with roti and rice for dinner. Calling it a night early… plan to veg and get some rest.
Jack headed off to a whole-day excursion to SciTech. Eliza in early for Japanese before school begins. Me doing some shallow work in my PJs while Dzung drives them in.
Have a work meeting scheduled for late tonight, and had trouble this morning getting motivated to work my regular job (due to politics mostly, we focus on trivialities which don’t serve to push us towards our goal). So, in penance for skipping out on HackTile yesterday, I spent some time working on it during the day. Some progress made; refactored so that the engine creates and destroys entities in the game, which the game renders. Achieved 55fps with 65536 entities running Conway’s Life. A screenshot tomorrow, perhaps.
Lunch at a Hawkers place for Laksa, after watching Adam Liaw make a fantastic version of that dish on YouTube last night.
Health much the same as yesterday. Cleaned up garden. Salmon dish for dinner.
Scheduled the day again. Realised I can break it into 4 blocks:
- 7am - 9am: Shallow work (active 1 hour)
- 9am - 3pm: Deep work (active 4 hours)
- 3pm - 9pm: Shallow work (active 2 hours)
- 9pm - 11pm: Deep work (active 2 hours)
By shallow work, I mean things that would take me a few weeks to train somebody else to do. By deep work, I mean things that require intense concentration, and which leverage the domain knowledge and engineering skills that I’ve built up over the last three decades. By active, I mean sitting at my desk doing real work, and not just pretending to be busy. In breaks I can still passively work, by answering emails and things like that, but I may be doing that on my phone while I’m distracted with something else.
This makes sense to me. It’s hard to do more than six hours of active, deep work in a single day. It can be mentally exhausting. Most “knowledge workers” in a traditional open-plan office would struggle to achieve half of that. But that’s where the value is.
I like that rough schedule. It gives me time to work my main job, and time to make progress on hobby projects.
Speaking of which, didn’t work on HackTile at all today, even though I’d planned to. Got delayed reading The Queen of Sorcery to Eliza and cleaning up the kitchen, then listened to two episodes of The West Wing Weekly. It was too late after all that to begin working on something.
Kids had their flu shot today. Picked up Eliza from string orchestra practice early. Jack being very silly (annoyingly so) all afternoon. He’s developed a habit of lying for fun. Must change that. Dzung made pork ribs for dinner. I’m doing OK; still 75% health after recovering from this cold.
Watching S02E01 of Legion. Amazing sound design.
Refactoring some of the HackTile code. Pretty easy to get things up and running with SDL2, and I have a basic CA working (Conway, of course). Updating 50k cells at 50Hz minimum. I remember why C is so much fun!
Still unwell. Made lamb rogan josh for dinner… the kids can handle curry these days. First time making Indian for the whole family though. Eliza had Quiz Club after school. Jack played the trumpet during a music incursion.
Deep work is paying off. Scheduled each hour of the day. Doesn’t take much effort to do, and I found I could focus and commit to a particular task more easily. May it continue!
I’ve decided to start keeping a diary again.
I’m 46-years-old and working from home for a US-based startup. My kids are 11 and 8, and doing well at school. My wife works from home once or twice a week, which allows us to have lunch together.
It’s nice, but I want more. I want to be creative, and do good work.
I also want to generate a passive income.
I have a few project ideas kicking around:
- Jack and I are working on a password manager “for your mum”.
- Jack, Rob and I still occasionally post to our “Link a Day” Slack channel.
- I’ve started toying around with SDL2 and vanilla C again.
Yes, C. It’s quite refreshing, and I think decades of experience with higher-level languages means the C code I write nowadays has matured without me knowing about it.
Anyway, I plan to resurrect the HackTile project. Hopefully this diary will help me keep track of that. But I get easily distracted from side projects.
I’ll be trying to apply the principles of “deep work”. I’ll schedule daily blocks of time to work on one of the aforementioned projects, and I’ll track my progress by writing it down here. I want to keep at it for at least 100 days, like I did with the 7-minute workout. That’ll help to make it a habit.
But I’m still recovering from a severe head cold. It’s a beautiful Autumn day, and we had a lunch of banh-mi-tet at the park in East Perth, but back home now with the kids (looking after Lilian, Lachlan and Yoshi because their parents are at the footy).
Future posts will be shorter. I just want to capture the essence of each day.
Onward!