2015-06-18:

Don't tell me you don't love it. I know you do.

Fri:
About what I expected.

The morning one I just hooked up his old router, seeing as how the TW provided one keeps giving up the wireless ghost.

Then out to #2. Which was not strictly speaking a printer problem, it was a windows is stupid problem. I mean why would any program print a bunch of stuff off the page? Scale it, of course! It didn't help the thing he was trying to print should have been a PDF not a JPG (for some bizarre reason). Did a few little things and came home.

Ate Lunch.

Went right back out again. The guy's laptop monitor does seem busted, so I'll order him a new one. Showed him he could hook it up to his TV if he couldn't get it going while I'm getting the part in.

Then over to the accountant guy, having office (2000, nach) problems. Fixed them. Tried not to barf as she said she replaced the free MSE with Norton. The one machine it was just sitting there using 100% of one CPU for no discernible reason. And she set it to scan the whole thing every night? Holy overkill Batman. Plus Holy wear and tear on your hard drives. See, this is why we need to keep building power plants, because morons leave all kinds of electric equipment running all night long.

Then came back here. Got all the cards on the screen, and animated them, and now it's ready to actually begin coding the gameplay. How about that!

Also finished up that system I brought back here. It was that RAM I put in it, taken out it ran fine. Huh.

My parents came back, so I don't have to go over there tonight.

Rained pretty hard for a few minutes, but passed us by.

Watched a movie and ate dinner, then got back to work on the game. It chooses 4 random cards and shows them. Tried doing the scaling thing so they got a little bigger when you picked them up, but the way I've had to make the cards… it didn't work. I did find out how to make a drop shadow, so I just turn that on and off and that looks even better!
I even installed xCode again so I could run the old code and see how something worked. Ugh, it's not right in the emulator but I got the idea. It's looking pretty good.

Sat:
Went to see if there was anything half off I wanted at the sale. Came away empty handed. Ah well.

Back to work on the game. Got the first hand of cards moving to where they needed to go, simplified the animation code so it all looks good! Good progress today.

Ate lunch and then baked a pretty cake.

Back to work on the game, I have the basic cycle complete! You can deal all four hands and the last hand where you choose one card is all put out automatically. I noticed some bugs, but that's to be expected.

I was going to leave but Sean texted me that we were starting later, so I did not.

Read more comics instead.

Then finally left. Still beat them there, but only by about 30 seconds.

Despite the late start we did get some plot advancement, and played some mario kart. Good to be back!

Sun:
Got up quite late, had cake, and get back to work. You can now cycle through the game, starting a new one when the old one is over.

Next step is making the phenomenon cards appear. Also solved a weird bug where on android if you moved a card wherever you touched the screen that card moved to. Like that variable was stuck in there. I moved the clearing of that variable out of the if statement and it worked fine.

Cut the back lawn. Think my lawnmower is dying. It's just not running very well at all. The self propelled feature was plodding, and I eventually gave up on that and pushed it. There's just no power in it. I haven't changed the oil since my father and I did it years ago, because you have to disassemble the whole thing basically. Maybe I should do that? I'm going to look it up.

And as with most things in life, it could be anything. Clogged fuel line, air filters, oil filters, springs, valves… why can't everything be done in software? I suppose if we're just a simulation on some giant otherworldly computer somewhere everything is software. Just… not at our level. I want admin privileges, darn it!

Watched a movie, then went back to working on the game. Found a very clever way of making the cards into phenomena cards, MUCH easier than I expected. And it works! Got them all in, one sound effect to see if that would work. It did. Good progress. It's really taking shape. Now to finish the sound effects, fix a couple of bugs I noticed, and then start the LARGE task of the scoring algorithm.

Was my progress this rapid doing it in objective-C? I wonder.

Mon:
Survived the new Aldi I went to and did the other shopping. Dropped off that CRT monitor at Staples, but they didn't have job invoice forms. Neither did the one I passed by on the way home. Aarg. The Aldi seemed bigger, but it had an incorrect number of rows. The correct number of rows allows one to traverse them all exactly once and end up at the register. In this store I had to traverse one twice, so silly.

Came home, viewed my websites, ate lunch, and went out to see about a laptop. It's a BSOD with a message I've not seen before, but the hardware seems fine. Windows just won't boot, safe mode, last known good, nothing. I'm copying the files off to reload it. It's going slowly.

Then over to set up the modem for the guy. Misread the number as the font sort of blurred together the AA4 that was there, I just thought it was AA. Other than that, it went fine.

Back here, started the laptop stuff.

Ate dinner.

Not many calls, but I did get the LCD panel in, and I have that other system to bring back. Plus I made an appointment for tomorrow yesterday, so tomorrow should be rather busy.

Turns out I'm going to five places tomorrow. Returning 2 systems, putting in the LCD panel, someone's keyboard doesn't work, and setting up a new system. Should be quick for the most part, let's hope so.

While the reloaded machine copied/updated I went and got the new sound effects for the game. Thank you freesound.org. Got all the names so I can put them in the credits. Odd though, trying to use a search engine to find a sound that reminds you of a solar eclipse or of the north star. I think I managed pretty well.
Also fixed those two bugs I found, it was easy. You can turn the ability to send messages to things off, so I did. What was the other bug? Oh right, not a bug so much but they could start the new hand before finishing the old one. They didn't have to choose the last card. I made them choose the last card.

Gee, is just scoring left? Of the major code, I mean. I still have to do the tutorial, and remake the graphics (which will probably take the longest, given what you know about my art skills, but I have a plan.)

Whew.

Tues:
As expected, pretty busy. And I didn't have any major problems. First up, the longest one, was the setup. That went fine. On the way home I stopped to see the lady with the busted keyboard, and it was pretty busted. As I had sold it to her I offered her another.

Ate lunch, worked a little on the game. Got the message for what card you've touched/clicked working, and more work on the sound because it wasn't playing on Android.

Then out again, dropped off the desktop. Moved a wireless card over and their documents, so that was fine. Shoot, forgot to make sure they had word but I think they did, I just wanted to open something and see it for myself. Oh well.

Then to install the LCD, that also went fine.

And dropped the laptop off, they didn't need any printer or anything hooked up, so the only thing I had to do there was that stupid phone activation, as I had forgotten about it. Stupid phone activation!

Finished the messages code, so if you click a card then another it doesn't get blown away with the timing of the first thing you clicked on. In fact, I think this was a problem I noticed but didn't actually find a way to fix with the original. Not sure, but I seem to recall not being satisfied with that before.

Dinner, then phone calls.

Did the livecode survey they sent me last week, and then went poking around the livecode website. Seems they offer only free/GPL and monthly subscription services. Huh? What happened to just buying commercial like I did with 5.5? It wasn't that long ago, even. Ugh. What does "source code" even mean with livecode? The whole file? Just the scripts? I emailed and asked.

Oh, and FF7 is getting remade? For reals this time? With HD and goodness? Well, I bought an original PS for the original FF7, can history repeat itself?

But I think I need a new lawnmower before I need a playstation 4. Oh well. Of course by the time it comes out I'll probably be able to get one used for a decent price. Guess only future me knows for sure.

Good amount of work for tomorrow, and I get to drop off the laptop so I'll finally get paid for that.

Looked the huge algorithm I used before to score the touching cards and asked myself if there's a better way. "Robert," I answered myself, the lit tip of my cigarette partially illuminating my face like a beast from the underworld, "There's always a better way."

I only move one card at a time. I know what that card is. Can I build up the points in real time just by tracking the card that I'm moving? I wrote up some notes, maybe tomorrow I'll see if they're worth anything.

Wed:
Pretty good overall. Finally got paid for the laptop I ordered, and pulled the printheads out of the HP, a task far from what I imagined learning about binary tree traversal algorithms I never used in collage.

Came back here, ate lunch, and was out again for a tuneup. When, at the end, I remarked her machine felt incredibly draggy to me she said to replace the HD so really that was two hours wasted as now I have to reload the machine and basically not charge her because all that work was for nothing. At least I can do that at home. So I'll order her an SSD in a bit.

Then to the dentist guy, actually managed to answer his questions in a timely manner this time, and got to the last one nearly when I thought. She just had a dead power supply, which I changed, and vacuumed out her machine.

Back here I ate dinner, made a few phone calls (2 for tomorrow thus far) and started work on the scoring algorithm.

ugh. Troubles.

Thurs:
Mostly an enormous pile of fail, let's talk about it. Er, let's write about it!

The first and at this point (at 5:37 only) paying job was the short one in the morning. He had two (active) wireless routers next to each other, uh, you know what interference means, right? Got rid of one, took out the expired and seemingly broken Kaspersky and plugged his USB wireless adapter into the *gasp* USB port and not the ethernet port.

Came home.
Stopped at Staples on the way home, they didn't have just plain replacement modems, only ones with built in routers. They are $100 so he said that was fine.

Back here, stepped through the game algorithm and saw where the slight oddities were, and got it seemingly working exactly the same. It should be the same, it's taken line by line from the older version. But with the minimal testing I was able to do, it seems to be okay thus far.

Then out to let the afternoon of fail begin.

To start I spent far too long trying to set up said modem. I think it's busted. It just power cycles over and over, seemingly. It didn't help that there was an outage in the area, so I couldn't be sure if it was just reacting to that or was actually busted.

Little bit late to my next one. He just had a very, very minor issue, so I was off to see about putting in the print head for a lady. Yes, she can't handle that, not that she even tried, because she didn't.

Turns out it's the printer. Shock. An inkjet printer going bad? Say it's not so! And this will be her third model of this printer, so there's some quality right there.

Got home at 5:00, straightened up the place because someone was supposed to come at 5:30, but it's 5:45 now an he hasn't shown up. He wants me to run disk warrior (remember that!?) on a "backup disk" that has stuff he hasn't actually backed up. Nice one! We'll see if he shows.

He did! About 45 minutes after he was "shooting for." Managed to get the data off his drive. Apparently fsck was trying, in the background, to repair it, and wasn't giving up. Killing that process let it be mounted read only so I connected his laptop to my machine via firewire, and copied it over. Tried to fix it with disk warrior, but it didn't work. Erased. Hope it's okay.

Otherwise sold him some RAM and answered a few other questions. He didn't have the cash, or his checkbook?? so he's going to send me a check. Hopefully.

Not many calls tonight, really just the modem guy saying the modem doesn't work. So tomorrow I get to take that back and exchange it. Then go through setting it up again.

And that's really it. Seeing my parents, of course.

No news on game for this week. Perhaps my father will finally come and watch that Dr Who we haven't seen?

My game is moving along smoothly. Got all the 2 card combos in, and it works great. Had a few head scratching moments, but figured out why things were happening. On to 3 card matches. I hate to use that old enormous algorithm, but I do know it works, so there's that. Copying it over into "hyper talk" seemed easier than what I was trying to attempt as it's just if statements and array manipulations. That's pretty universal in any language, I just have to get the syntax right. It's just so freaking long, I hoped to simplify it, but maybe given how complex a task the card matching is, there isn't an easier way. Or I'm just brute forcing it because I'm dumb. Could go either way.

And nothing for Saturday. I'm not complaining too much, I've had a lot of work this week, and that's fine. Let's keep that up.

See you all next week.