Thursday, March 19, 2009

Choices

Do I use my free time this evening to:

  • Retool my class scheduling program to use XML input
  • Play Rock Band

Why is this even a debate? Is programming really supposed to be a fun activity?

...

(Sigh) I guess I'll be social and play Rock Band.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Preparing for R&R

Well, it's been just about a month since my last post, so I guess I'm a little overdue. Let's see...

Probably my most exciting news is that I have a date for taking my two weeks of mid-tour leave. Of course, everything is weather-dependent and so forth, but I should be home sometime around April 17th, just in time for me and Ashley's first wedding anniversary! And I should be in good time to see Kelly's wedding as well! I'm very excited, and even though I'm trying not to, I'm counting the days.

Work has been treating me well. We've been busier than usual, with many offices shifting around the base. We've been running new CAT-5 cables all over the place, enough for 4 office buildings. It's definitely different than sitting around in the office, waiting for something to happen. It's nice to get out of the office for a bit, but I'm not used to being on my feet all day. All the same, it's fun.

Work on my class schedule programming project is going nicely. I have a basic working version now. It will take in my manually-entered database of classes and times and generate a list of schedules, excluding all of the ones that have overlapping classes. Right now, most of my effort has been on polishing the user interface, but I should start working on automatically pulling the database soon. The program is much more interesting if it has more than 5 classes to choose from!

In the wake of Circuit City closing it's brick-and-mortar stores, Ashley was able to get a couple of great deals on computer games I wanted to buy. The one I've been getting into recently is Left 4 Dead, a first-person shooter with a zombie thriller theme. Currently, I can only play the single player mode, as my internet won't handle an internet game. In single-player mode, you play as one of the four Survivor characters, Bill, Francis, Zoey, and Louis, making your way through various urban and rural terrain to get to a rescue zone. In internet games, you can also be on the Infected side, taking control of one of the Special zombies: the Boomer, the Smoker, the Witch, the Hunter, and the Tank. Each Special infected has it's own abilities; for instance, the Hunter can leap dozens of yards and pin one of the Survivors to the ground, and the Tank is a huge Hulk-like zombie that can take enormous amounts of damage. It's a whole lot of fun, and I can't wait to play it online. And the really great news is that it uses the same engine as Half-Life 2, which means its system requirements are not too heavy. My gaming laptop is able to keep up nicely.

I'm still waiting to find out if this laptop will play the other game Ashley sent; Crysis. It's a notorious machine hog. Two years ago, all of the serious gamers were in a rush to get their gaming computers ready to handle Crysis. It was one of those games that pushed people to upgrade their machines. Gaming on laptops is also notorious for being sketchy at best, so we'll see how this one holds up to "the beast."