Sorry I have these droughts. I just get distracted by the rest of life. Life’s been good, but busy. We finally released our software at work – and of course the bug reports started rolling in immediately. We’ve already released a couple of patches. We also immediately started working on the next version and I’ve been wrapped up in that.
Shelly and I had our second anniversary of being together. Kinda scary, but we had a good time. We went to Maestro’s here in town. Holy cow it was good! It was really expensive, but completely worth it.
We’re loving our new landlords. Glynn and PJ are awesome. And they are many, many orders of magnitude better than our previous landlords. Yes I know, I still haven’t posted that tale. I will, I just have to find a spare moment to sit down and write it up in a way that does it justice.
I haven’t been reading as much lately, all of my spare time has been focused on a single project (Muddy Reality – I’ll get to that later). Shelly and I have been going to a local Bikram Yoga class a couple of times a week, in lieu of frisbee. It has gotten to cold to play frisbee outdoors. Yeah, I know, I’m a wimp where the cold is concerned. Bikram Yoga is hot room yoga – perfect for Saratoga’s winters.
My reading list hasn’t changed much, still working on Mankiw’s Introduction to Economics, also still working on Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, as well as the Gang of Four book and Stroustrup’s book. Shelly’s been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. She’s been reading it out loud to me or occasionally I’ll take over and read it to her. It’s really good, and has been making us both think about trying to start a more extensive indoor garden using grow lamps and such. We’re still not sure if we can afford it, but we’re thinking very hard about it. In any case we’ve been trying to, with some success, get most of our food from the local farmer’s market. Of course, the market’s going to go indoors soon and so the fresh fruits and veggies will likely go away.
I haven’t actually made much progress on all those books, because all of my spare time has been focused completely on writing Muddy Reality, Middle Earth Mud’s new engine. In alpha 6 I took ten steps back after taking 10 forward in alpha 5. I decided that the telnet engine at Muddy Reality’s core – the one still pretty much exactly the same as it was in CircleMUD – simply wouldn’t do. I started over, from scratch. There is no longer a single line of code left over from CircleMUD. It’s all mine. And I started from a clean slate.
Well, it took a couple of weeks, but as of this weekend Muddy Reality’s object oriented C++ telnet engine is fully functional. So is the new command interpreter. I finished them and spent a while pounding them trying to break them. They held up very well.
The next step is writing the new databasing engine and then starting on the account system. I’m almost reluctant to post this. Posting about the development seems to encourage the continuation of development hell. But I feel like an update is necessary.
Anyway, I need to get back to work. I’ll try and do this more often, so that posts will be shorter and not such a slog.
