Life – Page 4 – Steve Dougherty's Blog

Cupcakes

I learned about the diference in dictionary definitions of cupcakes and muffins today. Cupcakes are made of cake and cooked in seemingly anything cup-shaped, whereas muffins are made of bread and cooked in cup-shaped pans.

I’m waiting on the hole in the wall for the LAN. Hopefully a friend can come over and help. We haven’t been very successful. Because the router has been crashtastic enough for me to notice, I may replace the router with a P3 box with two ethernet cards connected to a 5-port switch. I don’t know if this will cause unbearable latencies, but it does mean that I will probably be able to do fancy DNS things, a downside being I’ll probably have to figure out how to modify ZoneClient’s search keys so that it works with whatever I use for router software.

Only 14 days until Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex!

I’m now running Rosetta@Home on my rig at mom’s. The zombies are still seti.

Cat

My mom decided to go outside, pick up a cat, bring it inside, and stuff it in a box. All cats involved were upset. Wally, the alpha cat, ran away. It’s still meowing what I take to be its displeasure in being stuffed in a box against its will.

Because I uploaded that image with the built-in WordPress tool instead of cropping in Photoshop and uploading a single image, it’s fancy, meaning you can click to bestow upon it bigness. Mom says it looks like an adolecant male. This is very sudden…

EDIT: She put the cat back outside in the morning.

EDIT 2: Cropped now. Link is to full-size.

More Coding, and 17th Birthday!

Well, I’m 17 now. Those years just keep coming. If I have any brilliant insights about age, I’ll let you know.

Now, on to the interesting stuff. I now have a saving function that saves the position of the win area as well as information about the player. With help from my instructor, my collision detection only checks for collision with crates that are relatively close to it. I had the idea when I noticed that when I triggered noclip, my framerate got much better, and as expected this feature improves framerate greatly. With the improved saving I can now do level editing entirely within the game. I just need to feed it a base file full of crates with a location for the win area, a starting position and direction, and gravity and jump velocity settings. Given that crouching and jumping work great now, I hope to finish with sound. When I only had one crate, I could create a sound instance specifically for that crate. Now that I have more like 300 to 350, I can no longer do that. I’ll make a global sound-maker that is passed the location where it needs to make a sound, with a capacity for around four simultaneous sounds. This finite number (as far as I know, it’s not four specifically) of possible concurrent sound sources (mixing would help, I’d think) can be noticeable in some games where there’s loads going on – some sounds do not play. Well, back to coding to the beat of Basshunter!

Fan

We have two fans in our dorm room, one a ground fan and the other an oscillating upright fan. The upright has power and speed LEDs. If you look at the speed and power lights straight on, they’re both solid, but if you look at the lights through the spinning blade, the speed light appears to flicker, while the power does not. Weird.

Also, massive subject change, but if you’re in for an hour-or-so long interesting and inspiring lecture, (By, sadly, a professor who died Friday,) click thusly: O_O;

What was that?! Too much coding. I ended a sentence with a semicolon. I’m leaving that in…

CAEN

The C++ class was overwhelming. We’re being given a library to make pong with many of the functions stripped out so we have to write them ourselves. It’s strange to be dumped in the middle of someone else’s code…

Also, I got to play Dota, (which I sucked at) and Counter-Strike 1.6. (in which I was rank 18 of 200!)

CAEN Again!

So yeah, I’m waiting for 7:30 so I can go to breakfast. Class should be cool – we’re going to do graphics. It’s with DirectX according to the class description, so I may have to learn the more cross-platform OpenGL on my own. I hope they aren’t too different… My roommate Jamie has a DS flash cartridge and has cloned an old game on it. It’s pretty sweet.

Back From Canada!

I got back from Canada on the 11th. In Canada, they ask if you want gravy with your fries, or ketchup with your eggs. Some of their roads are pinkish. They have lots of heather. Many do say “about” like “aboot,” but the only person I met that really said “eh!” was my grandma’s friend Tom. We went up in the CN tower’s spinny dining room. It was awesome and the food was really good, but it was $50 per-person. The science museum had a hallway where they dampened the sound 10Dbs with holes in the walls and weird-shaped foam things. That was cool. There was also this thing where they let you control one of two frequencies and you had to try and get them to form a circle on the occiloscope. I got it to a slowly turning oval, but not past that.

Toronto

We’re going to Toronto! I’ve never been out of the US before, so it’ll be interesting to go through the infamous border security. I’m leaving today, and I’ll be back by the 12th. From what I’ve heard of Canada, I really like it. Their socialist democracy is working wonders. Do want.

Bike

I like my bike. It’s a Scott hybrid – not a mountain bike, not a road bike – a comfortable middle ground. I like it, coasting along briskly is very enjoyable. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble using it, not because of the bike, but because my hips don’t have enough range of motion to easily pedal. 🙁

Driver’s Ed

I passed my driver’s ed test! They made it sound like it was hard, so I read through both the horribly written textbook, the “What Every Driver Should Know” booklet, and the study guide. I passed it, but so did everyone else. I know for a fact that at least two of my fellow test-takers didn’t study, so it makes me feel that I might have wasted my time somewhat. Nice to get it over with anyway. I still have one more hour of driving to go, and I’m not sure what else, then I can get my green certificate of completing segment 1, and go on from there. Something unexpected happened today, though. We got pulled over! (Jimmy was driving.) The car had a licence plate that was four years out of date! Yeep. Mr. DeLeano couldn’t believe the school would let it get that bad. The insurance info in the glovebox was also four years out of date… We didn’t get a ticket, though.