Draknek's Dullness

Topsy Turvy

alan@draknek.org — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 21:57:02 GMT

Last weekend I made the game Topsy Turvy for Ludum Dare 16. It's a one-button platformer with gravity switching, and it's HARD. Here's the post-mortem:

What went right:

* The concept. I've had the idea in my head for a while, and I'm very glad that I used the competition as an excuse to make it rather than forcing myself to think of a game idea inspired by the theme. And the game ended up pretty much how I imagined, so that's good too.
* Inkscape as level editor. AS3 has some rather lovely XML-parsing abilities, so reading the SVG file was surprisingly simple. It's very much hard-coded to the specific output that (my copy of?) Inkscape generates, but it should be fairly easy to fix if it ever stops working.
* Abstract graphics. I am not an artist, so I decided to save time and just draw everything out of lines. I think the results fit the game fairly well, even if they're not actually good.

What went wrong:

* The goal. I added the collectables to provide an incentive to get to the more difficult areas and also as extra landmarks for getting your bearings. Unfortunately, with time running out and no win conditions implemented, I made the decision that you would win if you could collect all of them. In hindsight, I should probably have added a level exit instead.
* Difficulty. The game is ridiculously hard. I knew I wanted to have some areas which would be tricky to get to, as a challenge, but when the goal became "collect everything", those areas suddenly became non-optional.
* First day motivation. I wanted to have all the basic game mechanics done by the halfway point, but I was just procrastinating like crazy. I'd come to the conclusion that it just wasn't technically interesting enough to hold my attention, but then on Sunday morning I added death and respawning. Suddenly my game idea was in front of me and I could start constructing devious routes through the level, and I spent the rest of the day excited by it.
* The name. It actually changed name twice between starting and submitting, and I'm still not really happy. Currently thinking about maybe renaming it "Jump-Zap-Flip".

Lessons learnt:

* Get death/respawn implemented earlier in future
* Think of a win condition as part of the design process
* Don't make ridiculously hard challenges required to complete the game

alan@draknek.org — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:54:21 GMT

I have a problem, which is that if I don't write things down I forget them. Be they amusing, meaningful or important, before long I struggle to remember details and soon after that they're gone.

I also have a secondary problem, which is that I don't have the time to write things down.

Put together, these might seem like an insurmountable obstacle, but I am of course equal to all things. Solution: I shall use Twitter to post messages summarising my day. Call it a two-weeks-into-the-new-year resolution if you like (personally I wouldn't).

Events requiring more than 140 characters will be typed up to a blog entry, but they will be short blog entries, such that they can still be written before sleeping. If Twitter's character limit annoys me too much, I may post everything in blog format, but I'm unsure about that.

I have tried this a couple of times before (originally prompted by the film Into the Wild) but I hope that by posting daily rather than saving the entries up for one large (and mostly boring) post in the future, I will manage to keep it going for longer.

For completeness, here are some entries for 2009 up until this point:

Dec 31: Saw Yes Man with Gnus; played Monopoly until the new year then tried to play Cheat with a confusing pack of cards.
Jan 1: Spent all day not packing but somehow got to bed before 2:00.
Jan 2: Up at stupid o'clock to get to the train station; travelling to skiing with a four hour stop-off in Paris.
Jan 3: Arrived in Val Cenis around 9:00 am and spent the day teaching Mairead and Hennell to ski.
Jan 4: Skiing.
Jan 5: Skiing.
Jan 6: Spent all day in the apartment writing an essay.
Jan 7: Skiing.
Jan 8: Skiing.
Jan 9: Last day of skiing.
Jan 10: Travelling home. Missed our flight due to Italian train doors that wouldn't open (twice!).
Jan 11: Spent all day on internet. [Amusing read]
Jan 12: First day back at uni.
Jan 13: Six straight hours of lectures followed by a project meeting.
Jan 14: Slept through an exec meeting and was generally unproductive. Played Perudo in the late evening. [Game]
Jan 15: Joined RememberTheMilk.com. Started doing Rob's coding challenge, which is to create a C++ program without being able to compile it.

Let the daily dullness commence.

Jailbreak

alan@draknek.org — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:44:23 GMT

No money. 36 hours. As far away as possible.

It starts tomorrow morning: where will we end up? Well in the best of all worlds we would smash all previous records and find our way to New Zealand somehow, and I see no reason not to work under that assumption...

You may or may not be able to follow updates at Twitter and/or my Facebook profile, depending on what Orange decides to charge me for texting from abroad and whether I decide that's worth it.

If you wanted to sponsor us you could do so here.

Things I have learnt this past weekend

alan@draknek.org — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:55:04 GMT

Church of Fools had some gaping wide security holes that no one ever discovered.

You can write a webserver in XSLT (if you're crazy enough to want to).

Southport doesn't have a beach, just some sand, a pier and no sea.

21 seems an awful lot older when an 8 year old child asks your age.

Observations

alan@draknek.org — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 02:28:14 GMT

Three things have struck me on arriving in New York:

1) It's very hot
2) Everything's very tall
3) None of the phone numbers start with 555.

Revision strategies

alan@draknek.org — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:24:54 GMT

May 17: Silly little Flash game day
May 18: Video watching day
May 19: Exam day
May 20: Hangover day
May 21: Procrastination day
May 22: Excessive procrastination day

Things are looking good for my exam tomorrow morning...

Today

alan@draknek.org — Fri, 16 May 2008 22:07:20 GMT

April 24: Today I completed my project report.
April 25: Today I helped write and record a short audiodrama.
April 26: Today I went round David's with James W and played Worms.
April 27: Today Hennell told me how he accidentally got the internet to send someone thousands of dollars worth of flowers.
April 28: Today I learnt how to write games in Flash.
April 29: Today I mocked Tanya for playing Minesweeper for hours, and then even more when she displayed a total lack of understanding of the basic game mechanics.
April 30: Today I spent hours looking for one stupid little bug.
May 1: Today I watched Once Upon a Time in Mexico with Tanya and she loved it.
May 2: Today Jon and Ellie came round for a games night.
May 3: Today I started making a very simple Flash game.
May 4: Today our house was invaded by Christians.
May 5: Today I did not much of anything.
May 6: Today I juggled in the beautiful weather.
May 7: Today I was busy with revision lectures, discussing fourth year project ideas, a strange film and a console social. But none of it was memorable enough to mention here.
May 8: Today I went to the IGDA meeting in Leamington, where there was cheap alcohol.
May 9: Today I began making yet another physics-based game.
May 10: Today the game began to vaguely look like a game.
May 11: Today the WGD library conspired against us in every way imaginable, and Jen had her birthday party.
May 12: Today Leigh and I decided that we needed to just pick a project idea for our fourth year group project, and that as we were the ones doing the picking, we should do an awesome 3D physics engine with pluggable components.
May 13: Today we found some more people for our group, who unsurprisingly weren't that keen on the idea of doing a hardcore physics engine.
May 14: Today the internet went down and it made everything sad.
May 15: Today I began revision.
May 16: Today I updated this for the first time in almost 5 months.

Vaguely inspired by a scene from Into the Wild, which I found to be an amazing and beautiful film.

Contrast, if you will

alan@draknek.org — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:20:26 GMT

What I should have been doing:
* Writing up my progress on my project
* Doing more cool stuff on my project
* Adding more cool stuff to the mindbender game
* Thinking about the two business essays I have
* Buying Christmas presents

What I have been doing:
* Watching Heroes
* Watching Scrubs
* Watching Dexter
* Playing Super Mario Galaxy
* Playing Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

One month of good, bad and ugly

alan@draknek.org — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:22:48 GMT

The Good: (all programming stuff, apparently)

* Me and Sam made a buggy game called Clockspider for the 48 Hour Game Making Competition. And then Sam rewrote it to be way less buggy (zip file with exe).

* I made another game that's still a work-in-progress, but that I think has loads of potential. It'll bend your mind! (Java applet). Mostly, it just needs more levels and more stuff to go in the levels.

* My third year project, a 2D rigid body physics simulator, has finally come together and is now looking like one kickass 2D rigid body physics simulator (YouTube video).

The Bad:

* I had to do a progress report for my third year project, which at that point was behind schedule and still seemed hopelessly ambitious. It took ages and was generally demotivating.

* My student card (used to access the Computer Science building) and my bank card (used to access my money) were, for different reasons, cancelled. Both are now sorted out, however.

* I still haven't gotten my loan, although hopefully it's now working its way slowly through the system towards me.

* There was an essay that I found myself totally incapable of doing. That made me feel useless and pathetic, and I'm choosing not to think about the fact that since I didn't do it, there are two others to do for the start of next term, instead of one.

The Ugly:

* I got some poi for Christmas. Poi, as we all know, are girly and rubbish unless set on fire and spinning very quickly. The problem is that they're also kinda fun.

* I played Singstar at a Game Design social.

* I've been asked to be a flowergirl at Jon and Ellie's wedding.

Five years

alan@draknek.org — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:41:21 GMT

That's a long time...

Extreme Busyness

alan@draknek.org — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 01:06:41 GMT

I am far too busy to write this entry, since I really should be in bed sleeping, so that tomorrow I can be up at/before 8:00 in the morning for the third day in a row.

But the world needs to know of my horrific struggles (and apparently I need to further avoid being productive and/or refuse to get sensible amounts of sleep):

* By the weekend of the 13th, I need to have a complete Java game framework and an absolute beginner's guide to programming (with games) written. If I don't, then I let Warwick Game Design down and our first event is a terrible flop and it will all be my fault.

* Within a week, the project specification for my horribly ambitious third year project needs to have been started, finished, and shown to my supervisor who is quite nice but I think already has a bad (but probably fair) impression of my work ethic.

* I have an Assassins' Guild website to make but the old webmaster let the site stop working completely and has now disappeared off the face of the earth.

* I have a house full of people which means that I'm incapable of being remotely productive while I'm there.

* I've bought a bike, which my leg muscles are already attempting to kill me for.

* There's no nearby supermarket and I have yet to even have the time to go shopping anyway.

* I have been among the many caught out by the incompetence of the student loans company, by which I mean that I realised yesterday that I never applied for mine. I'm also very close to my overdraft limit, which temporarily reduced itself for no good reason at all.

* I haven't even had time to do any juggling other than at the juggling society meeting. And I've already lost one of my new juggling balls.

* My laptop arrived, which you'd expect to be a good thing, but when I first booted into Windows, I got this screen. Of course, that wasn't really so surprising. Ubuntu got hit by a particularly nasty bug, but thankfully someone else had found and posted a solution for me, so it didn't require hours of work to fix.

The price of laziness

alan@draknek.org — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 01:37:05 GMT

(Not the repercussions of being lazy, but the price you're prepared to pay to be lazy.)

I've recently been looking at laptops - last year I carried my desktop onto campus twice for game-making competitions, and both times I vowed never to do it again. It looks like the second vow might be more successful than the first...

My current computer has lasted me at least 5 or 6 years, and wasn't exactly top-end when I got it. I figure if I get a decent computer it should be able to last at least that long again.

After several weeks of constantly changing my mind, the choice eventually boiled down to either EfficientPC, who sell Linux-compatible computers with Ubuntu pre-installed, or Dell, who are practically the polar opposite. A Macbook was pretty high up on the list but didn't make it to the final two.

Whichever of them I got was going to have Ubuntu as the primary OS, with Windows XP also installed so I can run XNA. From reports, the Dell laptop would require an unknown but probably significant amount of time to get Ubuntu running smoothly -- nothing I wouldn't be capable of doing, but not really appealing. However, it was also over £200 cheaper than the effort-free alternative.

Now for the past couple of years, I've generally avoided delving into Linux's internal workings, just because the time/benefit ratio hasn't been worth it. The scenario in which I left my new laptop with half the features disabled because I could get by with only the other half didn't seem all so improbable. But although I'm not exactly desperate for cash, £200 is a non-trivial amount of money, so I decided to go with Dell.

That is, until I tried to buy it, and realised that VAT wasn't added until you add something to your basket, and that the shipping costs would be an extortionate £60. Suddenly the price difference had dropped to under £100, which seemed a much more tempting price to pay to make it work out of the box.

I chose the laptop from EfficientPC in the end, so in this instance, the price of my laziness was somewhere around £100...

LiveJournal auto-post

alan@draknek.org — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 22:14:48 GMT

I've been working on ZI since yesterday, and it's going quite well. I improved the fanart page (any PHP is better than the ones they used to be.

---

This next bit is still techy. However, it's different techy.

DK MSNed me, asking whether I wanted to talk about. That means that I won't delay making a super-post forever, until I don't make it at all.

Windows 98 sucks

Which is what you want to really show off you need to try over and over again. It seems like you're not getting anywhere and that you might as well give up. Eventually, you manage to almost do it, which gives you a short burst of confidence, but then you need to get on without hearing the other parts of his life story. He never did accuse me of shoplifting a stray old lady.

---

The only other interesting thing that happened today was thinking of was from two years ago, in fact. And then someone has to reverse-engineer it all over again.

But Google Talk uses an open standard. They can't choose to not release a client for Linux, because there are already clients for Linux. And instead of breaking third-party clients, they are encouraging them.

This guy points out that you still require an account on each IM network: Google Talk requires a Gmail account. I'd say that's not too important, though. It's a step in the right direction, and I think glasshouse is dead and by now slowly rotting.

Blue watch: No sign of blue yet. Will keep looking.

I'm *NOT* marching to the beat of a different drum. Its the same drum, I just have no rhythm.

Annoyed at myself

alan@draknek.org — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 20:34:56 GMT

There's so much stuff I could be doing. Things I've promised others that I'd do; things I've promised myself. Most of it would be pretty interesting, too. But I just want to escape it all and do... nothing. It's just so easy to lose a day watching episode after episode of some TV show, or playing a game for hours on end. It's like I have an aversion to working on interesting projects, and I must find some way to defeat it.

I have no such aversion to juggling (possibly because it comes under the category of wasting your time), but so far today I've managed to hit my nose and thumb painfully hard with flying clubs, and taken a nail-shaped chunk of skin off my finger.

Fun with letters

alan@draknek.org — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 01:15:17 GMT

Since last update:

* Had exams; they were mostly marked up

* Come home

* Had a birthday

* Beat Twilight Princess and Super Mario Sunshine - OoT to come

* Actually posted at ZI; implemented hax

* Begun making a game framework

* Been playing urban dead with LUE

* Had waterfight

* Not been finishing Neeble

* Not yet put uni stuff away

* This is getting tough

* O1OO1OOO 0ll00l0l OllllOOl

hh even even even 8 = eght. ot OoT OoT OoT en tee y t l

---

Explanation: the above entry was written using only the letters from my previous entry. I've done some juggling as well, but I foolishly didn't think to include a "j" when I was writing all that time ago.

If anyone wants to see the highly readable piece of Perl you can use to count letter frequencies, here you go:

perl -lne '$c{$_}++ for uc=~/[A-Z]/g;END{ print "$_:",$c{$_}||0 for "A".."Z"}' < textfile

Stuffs

alan@draknek.org — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 22:16:25 GMT

So it would appear that I'm one of the more knowledgeable people in the Game Design society about Final Fantasy. Obviously not the most knowledgeable though - that title would have to go to someone who's actually played any of them.

I blame ZI.

My current schedule is blargh. I'm revising until 11:00 in DCS and then heading home to sleep. Then I wake up the next morning before 8:00 to get to an exam. Repeat until Saturday.

Exam season

alan@draknek.org — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 10:53:48 GMT

And so begins the exam-a-day period of terror. See you in the last week of June...

Those were the times we were hopping

alan@draknek.org — Wed, 30 May 2007 18:27:49 GMT

(The title is my suggested alternate ending to the poem Footsteps in the Sand)

I read an excellent article a while ago: Ten Things Christians and Atheists Can – and Must – Agree On. I'd be interesting in hearing what other less sit-on-fence-y people think of it.

In vaguely-connected news, Amazon apparently thinks that an interest in comedy and sci-fi is likely to mean an interest in (or possibly hatred of) religion:

I can't see the connection myself.

My programming projects

alan@draknek.org — Thu, 24 May 2007 23:23:59 GMT

I have several programming projects at the moment that I could work on:

Kraken prototype

There's a game-making competition on the theme of Ocean Odyssey that VGDSoc is involved in. One of the ideas suggested was a game where you play as the Kraken, destroying passing ships.

I liked the idea, but wasn't sure controlling a Kraken was feasible - tentacles are fairly deformable, and that's always seemed quite complicated. So I made this prototype and decided that not only was it feasible, it was also damn cool.

Unfortunately, the competition needs to be done in XNA, which being a Microsoft thing, won't run on Linux. Also, the competition culminates in a 48 hour session which is right in the middle of my exams...

Operation Meltdown

I want to polish off one of my games before the end of term, and since Operation Meltdown works (although isn't yet very game-like) and Blobber was way too ambitious and is full of bugs, the decision was quite easy.

I finally got it to the stage where it contained the bare essentials of a game the other day. Then I packed it into a JAR file and it broke. Apparently you can't read from a directory in a JAR file the same way you'd read a directory on the filesystem, so my code to load all the images in a directory broke. Okay, so I thought, I'll do a check for that and get the directory listing another way. And I did, and it worked, so I tried uploading it.

And then it broke again when you ran it as an applet. The code was opening the JAR file containing itself and reading through the entries, but you can't do that from an unsigned applet because you can't read from the local filesystem. In the end, I just removed the applet version from the website; I'm not sure anybody would want to play it in applet form anyway.

Javascript for Mark

This one has the benefit of me getting paid if I do it. But it wouldn't be as interesting as some of the alternatives, and it involves Javascript and maybe some Ajax too. I should probably do it just because I said I would ages ago and never did, though.

ezConvert for phpBB 3.0

With the release of RC1 of phpBB 3.0, I took a look at the conversion system. It assumes you have database access to the forums you're converting from, so I'd probably have to bend it quite a bit to get it to convert from ezBoard.

The alternative is to keep it as a module in the Admin Control Panel, which is probably what I'll do. But even though it wouldn't require a total rewrite, I'd want to pretty it up before releasing it like that, so either way would be a fair amount of work. Probably not something I do before the exams, then.

Neeble

The Web 2.0 start-ups must be mocked! And they must be mocked at the very latest by next April Fools Day.

Blobber

Blobber is retired from development, probably until I start my third year project which will probably be a physics simulator. Because after failing to make Blobber work, trying something more complicated is the ideal plan...

One day closer to being able to unicycle

alan@draknek.org — Sun, 20 May 2007 00:54:29 GMT

It was too windy for club juggling and too cold for ball juggling, so I spent most of yesterday's juggling session attempting to unicycle. I've found a way of getting on that isn't painful, which is nice, and my skill at getting on is only exceeded by my ability to fall off. I'm improving at the going forwards part too, but not nearly so fast.

What juggling I did do wasn't great - James beat me at endurance (a competition of who can keep juggling the longest) 4 times out of 5, using 5 clubs against my 5 balls. Admittedly, James is an annoyingly good juggler, but I was doing much better on Thursday, learning to do 441 with clubs with the 1 behind the back and managing some good backcross throws too.

Later in the bar I actually talked to and learnt the name of one person who's been coming for most of this year. I think I also got some people interested in the Assassins' Guild, so hopefully that doesn't die the horrible death it's threatening to.

When it got dark we went outside to play with fire, and I did some fire juggling. You might call it that if you were feeling generous, anyway. More accurately, I threw some fire clubs about and made some generally successful attempts to catch them, once in a while trying to do a trick and failing completely.

I was only at the fire juggling for twenty minutes or so, because I had a birthday party in Earlsdon to get to. Which brings us neatly back to unicycles, because Ralph has one and insisted that we have a go in the very small space between his house and his garden. There wasn't really enough space for my current learning tactic of "point yourself away from walls, fall off the front, and remember to keep pedalling while you do so".

I didn't see a huge amount of Ralph, despite it being his party. Hopefully he enjoyed himself (and didn't feel too bad in the morning). I came home and had a cool dream about vampires (and a less cool one about siteswaps).

Friendly people and friendly debate

alan@draknek.org — Fri, 18 May 2007 01:34:28 GMT

I was walking through the Tesco car park today when some guy stealing traffic cones in a trolley (cunningly disguised as a car park worker) asked if he could speak to me. I thought he was about to accuse me of something like shoplifting, kicking a stray dog or mugging an old lady.

Instead, he just wanted to quip that his generation were the ones who gave my generation long hair and beards, and now his generation had lost them (the guy was balding). He then said that his generation were also responsible for getting naked and dancing to loud music, and I'm sure he was secretly disappointed when I denied having any interest in dancing to loud music, naked or otherwise.

We chatted for a couple of minutes, and then I felt the need to get on without hearing the other parts of his life story. He never did accuse me of shoplifting a stray old lady.

---

The only other interesting thing that happened today was thinking of a counterargument to a Christian argument for why sin exists:

Non-Christian: Why is there sin in the world? Wouldn't it have been better to have made us incapable of sinning?

Christian: Aha! God gave us free will, which allows us to sin if we choose to. Without the capacity to sin, we would not have free will.

Me: But what about when you go to Heaven? Surely you won't be able to sin when you are there; are you suggesting you won't have free will in heaven?

It's possible to argue that we sin because of the temptation of Satan, and he won't be there in Heaven, but what's to stop some other angel from rebelling and starting the whole thing over again in Heaven?

Comments welcome.

I like numbers which don't have an odd prime factor

alan@draknek.org — Thu, 17 May 2007 01:45:33 GMT

I must have walked more than 6 miles last Friday - to and from campus twice with heavy things like my PS2 and my juggling stuff, and into Earlsdon for Jen's party and back (and I later dreamt that I walked there and back again to climb a tree). And also spent 3 or 4 hours in the middle not being able to sit down, while teaching people to juggle and falling off a unicycle (not both at the same time - falling off a unicycle requires both hands for flailing purposes).

The party was good. There were some great scenarios, like "shoes tell lies and socks tell the truth" and "boys are friendly and caring; girls are cold and mean". And I had fun making a tiny card out of paper (with an envelope too) after Jen commented that several of her cards had the same general image on them. Of course, talented artist that I am, my card design was obviously greatly superior.

I spent a lot of Sunday trying to fix my Gallery installation after what should have been a simple 2 minute change instead broke everything. Wanting to move the directory it was installed in, I should have disabled the URL Rewrite module before doing anything. Like it said in the FAQ which I didn't read until too late. And so, wanting to avoid having to undo and redo something exceedingly simple, I made my life ten times harder by ploughing on anyway.

It also didn't help that I was confusing the data directory and the code directory. I ended up installing a newer version and pointing it at the older version's data, but it seemed to get confused by the URL Rewrite module, which refused to work, and stopped everything else from working also. The moral of this story is to read the documentation before you start doing something, not during.

A lot of today has been spent reading this thread in its entirety. Time well spent.

Musings from a second-rate Second Coming

alan@draknek.org — Wed, 16 May 2007 00:31:19 GMT

After Top B yesterday, next to the Hot Chocolate stall, some guy kept calling me Jesus. I totally missed the opportunity for an "I'm Jesus? LOL!" joke. Other comments I wasn't sober enough to think of include the fact that I was wearing all black rather than the traditional messianic plain white of forgiveness, and anything involving the idea that Cliché Jesus and Jesus are different people (one talks about peace and forgiveness and is unlikely to have been a white caucasian, the other travels the world appearing in toast and befriending lepers).

If I were Jesus, I probably wouldn't spend my time thinking of names for the chat-shows I'd almost inevitably be invited to host when the news got out. "Face to face with Faith's true face" (subtitle "We're going one-on-one with the One") has the benefit of annoying the continuity announcers, while "Allah-bout Allah" is simple, but implies the wrong religion. "Al is I Am" or "Al-eluia" could work, but only if I keep my current name to some extent. There's also probably something you could do with "Yahweh-t", and "Logos" is simple enough that I feel I ought to be able to find a title it fits into.

Just for the record, I'm fairly sure I'm not actually Jesus. But on the off chance that I'm wrong, and I am in fact destined to herald in the End of Days, you should all repent from your sins and start a new relationship with me. Reading my blog is probably a good way to start. It's quite hard to sin while reading blogs (although I'm sure the more dedicated sinners among you could manage to do so), and it could definitely be the start of a relationship if you don't already know me. So in summary: sin is bad; the Apocalypse is potentially coming.

Chapter 18, in which I talk about mundane topics

alan@draknek.org — Fri, 11 May 2007 00:19:44 GMT

Since getting back, I've been kept fairly busy with coursework, but no longer. It's all done, leaving nothing to do for the next month except watch TV, make games and juggle, with maybe some revision thrown in at the end if there's time. Maybe.

And then at the end of that month, I'll have 11 exams in 11 days, and the exams will take pity on me for being totally unprepared and make themselves easier for my sake. This is how it will happen; I'm sure of it.

I've been watching a lot of Heroes, and might be able to catch up to everyone else before the final episodes air next Monday. The last several episodes have ended in some of the most cruel (but awesome) cliffhangers.

I went to a juggling convention last weekend. Attended a unicycling workshop, meaning I am now even more skilled at falling off. Also attended a workshop on continuous backcrosses with clubs (where every club is thrown from behind your back). It basically turned into, "Continuous backcrosses are hard. It'll take you months to even get close. Now here's a large variety of tricks that are easier than continuous backcrosses." And all of those tricks were also ridiculously hard from my current level of ability.

My schedule

alan@draknek.org — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 02:14:20 GMT

1) Finish assignment
2) Sleep (optional; if time allows)
3) Hand in assignment
4) Sleep
5) Do laundry/washing up/food-buying/TV-watching/anything else that has been neglected for the past week
6) Begin procrastinating for the next assignment

Hmm, I don't notice any time for "learning from my mistakes" there. Ah well, it can't be that important then.