I went to the dentist a few weeks ago to get a crown put on one of my teeth (where the old filling was wearing out) thinking it would be a two visit shindig - one to get the old tooth ground down, and one to put the new crown on. The grinding-down visit was fairly uneventful despite the Novocaine not having enough effect. So I grit my teeth (figuratively) and dealt with the pain.

A few weeks later, they received the new crown and called me in. When I got there, they put the tooth on and told me to bite down on a piece of cotton so they could make sure it fits properly. *POP* The crown chipped, of course. So they told me they’re going to repair it and call me in again when it’s fixed.

And so they do. Same spiel - sat down and bit down on the cotton. *POP* again! So then they told me they’re going to completely redo the tooth instead of just repair it, then call me in when it’s done.

Today I went in and tried out the new tooth. So I bit down on the cotton softly at first. No pop. A bit harder, still no pop. Third try’s a charm, I guess. Hopefully it stays that way.

I have a few other topics I’ll be writing about, movies, games, concerts, traffic stuff, etc. So there probably won’t be such a big drought as there has been recently. Hopefully.

Almost half way through February and I haven’t made a post yet. Well, here I am making a post. Typey type type.

Some Canadian guy (who is very awesome) made some medieval armor for cats and mice. Here’s a link to some pictures. I need a set of these for my kitties. Chobi would get the samurai armor and Asker would get the chain.

That’s all I have for this week. Have fun with your significant others tomorrow!

By the way, the title of this post is a lie.

Sorry I’ve been neglectful of this here sitey thing. I’ve been busy as hell - between work and sleep I generally have about four hours per day to do what I want. However there is light at the end of this tunnel. I get to go to Nashville, TN in October to demo the project for a bunch of big-wigs in the tanning industry. No, not leather tanning. Skin tanning. I’ll be out there for a few days and I’ll tell you all about the crazy tan people that I meet as each day comes to an end.

I’m sure they’ll all marvel at my pasty white skin more than the site we created. “You think that’s pasty? Wait till you see my shoulders!”

I’m feeling terribly uninspired this week.

DS development has been slow to say the least. What little time I’ve had to sit down and plug out some code has been spent trying to figure out why my player sprite won’t draw itself on the screen. I’ll pop what I have up on the DS Projects page and any of my developer-type readers can take a look and see what’s wrong. Do I have any developer readers? Do I have any readers at all?!? In other DS news, I learned that I’m actually a 9 year old girl. I’ve been playing the hell out of Pokemon and enjoying it quite a lot. This has nothing to do with me not progressing with IQDS, I assure you (OK, maybe a little).

AEOU? That’s ASDF in Dvorakish. For those not in-the-know, Dvorak is a lesser known alternative to the standard qwerty keyboard layout. I won’t get into specifics but it offers faster typing with fewer errors at the cost of having to relearn how to type. They say it takes a few months to regain your original typing speed - we’ll see how it goes for me. Jumping into a new keyboard format will slow down my typing considerably for a while, which may be frowned upon by the people who pay me to type fast.

I’d like to say I typed this whole post in Dvorak, but then I’d be lying.

A week without updates. It’s almost as though I’ve been working my ass off. Between working 50 hours last week, setting up my shiny new web server, various TV shows that can’t go unwatched (<3 Planet Earth), and my marathon run of Super Paper Mario over the weekend, I’ve left very little time open for DS work. Believe me, I’m as disappointed at me as you are to not see any updates.

I got a lot of work done on the back-end of my web host - FTP and email (plaidman -at- plaidsoft -dot- org) are set up, all my image files and project files stored around the interwebs are now safely stored on my wonderful little host. Now that all that is taken care of, I can resume development of IQDS. Without any reasonable excuse, anyway.

I’m going to petition George to add another hour to the day. He can assign and adjust Daylight Saving Time willy-nilly, I’m sure he can do this for me.

So DS development. Yeah. Gonna be super fun when family members stop calling me to fix their computers and shit. *sigh* I guess I can’t complain too much - they feed me while I’m there.

I started to play around with the graphics routines last week. Visited each of the links to the left at least 3 times each and they were all wonderful in deciphering the non-existent documentation for LIBNDS. In my studies I made a little demo program thing. Nothing really impressive, just getting the hang of button/screen input, FB graphics, BMP backgrounds, sprites, scaling, rotation, and other really basic concepts. Why go through the trouble when there’s things like PALib? As I code, I like to know how and why the code I write works. Using libraries that hide that from me makes me uneasy. It’s not that I don’t trust the PALib guy to write non-bloated, fast code. I just like to know that I can write such code myself first. Some of the stuff in the library is quite amazing though. I might have to use it in future projects.

The only thing I didn’t explore in the demo is tiles/mapping (and sound, but that was out of scope). I plan to use what I learn playing with that stuff in my first real game I have brewing in my head. It’ll be a game closely resembling a classic PSX puzzle game. That’s all I’m gonna say about it for now. I’m really really excited to get started on it. After I fix everybody’s computer in the entire world.

Ooh goody, I get to use the Procrastination category and my blog isn’t even 10 hours old. In my first post I promised no less than 3 posts today. They were going to be an explanation about the various post categories I will use in my babblings. I decided to make them all in one About this blog page. You can click the tab at the top of the screen or the link to the right if you want to read it. They are both labeled About this blog for your convenience.

I’ll put some stuff in about my DS work tomorrow. Probably.