Three Weeks Later

24Oct06

Time heals many things, which apparently includes our kittens.

The two new additions to our family have now been with us for three weeks, and they are doing a fabulous job of being kittens. Our worries that Crow would not adapt proved to be completely unfounded as he gre to love Chibi from day one. He’s extremely playful and curious, and he makes an attempt to bite anything and everything. However, the older cats keep him sort of inline and Chibi has taken it upon herself to give him daily baths. Weird how our older cats seem to just adore the baby.

Squeaker resisted being assimilated, but it’s finally gotten to her, too. She now cuddles with Chibi or Oreo on her favorite chair, though she loves to curl up with me and Brian, as well. She acts cute, and is no longer coughing her lungs out. We gave her anti-biotics for a day before surrendering and she pulled through just fine. Now she’s slowly gaining weight and energy, which apparently means she can now kick Crow’s ass.

In two weeks is their vet appointment, so that will be well worth seeing. Might also go to the dentist that day, but man I hate dentists!

Life is finally taking on some semblance of shape. I have this whole long argument that I wrote to myself and to Brian a few weeks back, and I’m sticking to it. Just got to remember where we’re all going.  Today my neck is trying kill me via soreness, and my back is about ready to join it, so I’m going to forego class for a chance to lay down and sleep some. Don’t know what Brian plans to do, but I’m behind him all the way on whatever he wants to do.

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I was doing some thinking in that Ethics class, more or less wondering what’s the right course of action on a lot of things. Everything from work to school to our kittens to life in general passed through my brain at some point in those three hours, and I think I have some coherent answers now that I didn’t before.

Work:

For now, I think I want to stick it out with City and County for the money, although I think we’re best off totally saving either my or your paycheck so that we can eventually move on from this place. Maybe not in the next month, but soon enough to make the goal feel reachable. I dislike unreachable goals. When Michael Wright mentioned last week that people who work for the City stay a long time, it really hit me. This job is not what I want to be doing five years from now, or even three years from now, so I won’t. That’s the end of the debate. I can quit any time, and if I’m fired it will be cause I wanted to leave not because I did a bad job. And before long, leave I will. This is not a “forever job”, it was never meant to be, and I will not make City Help Desk into a career.

Destiny:

After doing a lot more research into JPCT I feel fairly sure that I will need to rewrite my code completely in order for it to mesh well what anything we create in JPCT, which is fine with me. I think that creating the model for me to work with will be the first great step, although I can certainly work without it. As far as the GUI goes, it will have to be an instance of the World inside a Frame (AWT, not so playful with Swing) and within that frame a simple Panel (again AWT) that will be the chat client. I think the Panel can be made see through so as not to interfere with the terrain. I have no way of knowing what fullscreen would do to a Panel, but I’m sure we can scale it appropriately since its dimensions are known along with the dimensions of the Frame at any given time.

The problem I foresee is that I do not know how AWT handles events, and as such I may have to rewrite some of that code. The only affected Frames would be the chat frame. The majority of the project will remain untouched as the base foundation for server interaction is already implemented.

The code will need some additions to accommodate for a set of changing users. Currently all data is echoed to screen, but if the client will need to distinguish between moving objects and keep track of them to move them (their coordinates at any given time, their new coordinates, to simulate movements, and their avatar), that will require kicking the DestinyUser class completely out and using something different. Or possibly extending the class into an array thereof, and then calling individual instances based on ID or some other unique factor. This should be fairly easy to handle in Java.

Any changes made to the Socket class will be fairly minor since it will not handle encoding and decoding. My main function will take care of that via global functions (functions in main) and it will be responsible for taking the output and giving out orders accordingly. The encoding will happen before a send with me passing the function arrays of the four types (system, movement, user, chat) and then allowing it to combine all of them into a single String which it will then send out.

Currently the problem I see with JPCT examples we’ve been using is that it completely steals thread priority from Main, which is obviously a problem. Yesterday I started to rewrite that, and now there is no such conflict but there is also no picture. I will need a lot of help with integrating one into the other, first by creating our own frame and then by writing the panel into it.

School:

Is a waste of time and effort. Honestly, I see no reason for it. The more I look at it (and I’ve evaluated this statement before), the more I want to throttle whoever invented it. As of right now, I really see no good reason for paying $800 for someone to tell me that Java is good and great. Whatever I learn from JPCT will be very un-OO design (as proven by the creator’s manual as well as his coding) and I see no reason to show case any of it before the teacher. Now I’m just coding Destiny to code Destiny the game. Class is worthless in comparison. I still want to learn the hard stuff, but damn, I’m coding the hard stuff.

Thus I’m seriously considering not paying for college this semester and taking a different route. Not sure which one yet, but there has to be one.

Kittens:

The kittens are cute, but I’m being realistic here. If both Crow and Squeak do well, then I see no reason not to keep both of them. I keep searching for reasons, but none come to mind; they are both ours and I see them as members of the family. If one of them can’t make it for some reason, then I see it as our responsibility to find it a new and better home where it will be loved as much as we love it.

Website:

The blogs are at the point where slow connectivity and lack of good themes are all that stand between us and blogging. I want to sit down with you some time and pick out some themes you like, then set up your blog. I want to set up mine but not sure I’m ready to do any writing in it yet. Maybe this weekend we can take some time and just work on that. Get you up and going. That, I think, will be a big step towards blogs. I’d also like to work with Steve on the fiction portion of the site, primarily getting some sort of layout, creating HTML and PHP for it and the creation of a database. I’m sure you’ll want to participate in the design of this as well. Then I’d like to start coding the main page as much as I can.

In General:

It’s been some time since I’ve really thought about it, but in reality it’s exactly what you said before. I need to make choices for myself, lead instead of simply following along. And in order to lead, I have to know what I want to do.

So, I asked myself what I wanted to do and came up with the obvious. I want to see Destiny on its feet, I want to be a part of creating Chibiness Technologies and expanding it into a business we can really work with and be a part of. I want to see more of the world and more of you. All that I’ve been doing up until now has been for that goal, and I can only hope that my feet don’t stray from the path.  

With that in mind, I am very open to what you think. About school, about Destiny, about ChibiTek.

What I want: To move forward towards our goals and the future as we want it to be.

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