2018-07-13
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.
2018-07-12
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.
2018-07-11
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.
2018-07-10
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.
2018-07-09
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.
2018-07-08
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!
2018-07-07
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.