Weekend....

Well, just having a quiet weekend at home after all, my last before returning to work. Vacation summary: two weeks was probably one week too long, unless I really do travel (and maybe even then). Day-tripping plans dashed yesterday when I overslept by many hours, and I wasn't all that mournful about lost opportunity, to be quite honest. Just not in a wandering mood, anymore... I think I would have liked to do that at the start of my break, but was more inspired to do the stuff that I ended up doing.

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My big happy project now is making a web client for Volity, and installing it on volity.net, thus making it usable by the public. Hey, that's yoooou! I'd like to have it done by Origins, which I deem reasonably ambitious. (True fact: I have been getting better at calling realistic software development times. A year or two ago, I woulda told you (and me) that I could have something like this done in a weekend. I sigh and fondly ruffle the hair of my past self. Youth!) But the problem of how to keep server-side, persistent Jabber connections that are shared among Apache sessions is devilish. I hate network programming. Probably will need to drag daerr in for help on this.

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Am declaring that, for my own health, I have to get involved in a project that isn't Volity, and ideally one that isn't even programming. Alas, knowing me, I'd make a programming project out of it anyway; recall that Volity is, at bottom, my wish to make testing my own board game ideas easier. And that desire is still there, deep down in the heart of the project, but meanwhile it's taken on life and direction and will of its own, as such things do. (Well, that's one project idea, at least: make Volity Currents. The tools are all there, assuming I was telling the truth earlier, hmm?)

I just know that as soon as I wouldn't be able to do any work on, say, a web comic without, say, trying to make half of it auto-generated by Perl, or something. Maybe I should stick to thinking about game design, since I'm already as deepy involved in automating that as I can get. I mean, there's that game I dreamt about last year, which was really cool, and which I have sworn up and down I'd develop further in my waking life...

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I have downgraded my phone. Failing to quickly locate my newer phone's charger, I made good on recent self-muttering and popped my SIM card back into my old Nokia. Wow, even though it still has the problem of shutting itself off randomly, it remains the better phone. The antenna is much more receptive (I have a bar of signal three tables into the Diesel!) and the UI is all kinds of non-crappy. A two-way directional rocker, an 'OK' button, and a 'Cancel' button. Seriosly, you can do anything with this. I guess the folks at Sony Ericsson figured you could do twice as much with a four-way joystick, two OK buttons (which do unpredictably diffrent things depending on context), and two Cancel buttons (ibid). Oh, and making the joystick clickable. Really easily clickable. Flussssh; this was one of the stupidest purchases I have made recently.

I hereby stand on the cupola and shout into the driving rain that if I cellphone's navigational controls are more complex than a standard NES controller I will seize it and feed it to the ducks. The ducks!! Boooom, says the thunder.