9.07.2008

adventure

Now sore and happy,
After such adventuring,
How can I slow down?

It's been a heckuva weekend.  Friday Ben and I worked on our SuperPong game for Rawlins, which was a lot of fun.  Had some pizza and brownies (care of his wife... and they were delicious!), chunked out some Swing stuff...  It's coming along great.  And it looks like that's going to be my only hard class.  Granted, it will be hella hard, but that's okay, eh?

A couple things I learned about Java during the course of this exercise:
threads are easy.  Just make sure you don't run them til after you paint your console for the first time.
dimensions are dumb.  For whatever reason, swing makes an applet that doesn't actually conform to the dimensions you give it.  We had to put in corrections of about 5 pixels for the sides and bottom (more for the top) to ensure that the paddles and ball in our game wouldn't run off into invisible parts of the screen.
arraylists are mega-useful.  Except when you compare a sprite with itself.  We turned on clipping in our game (so that the ball could, you know, hit the paddles), and instead of flying anywhere, the ball just vibrated in the middle of the screen.  We were like, "wow, what the hell is it doing?" for a couple minutes before we realized that it was just hitting itself every clock cycle.  D'oh.
defaults are good.  We're storing all our correction and size and initial position and whatever variables in a Defaults file in the package, which makes it easy to change them.  But, of course, you already knew that.

Anyway, then I hung out with Nick and Chris, and they fixed my bike!  W00t!  Well, by "fixed my bike" what I mean is that they put my bike's good parts onto Venus's bike.  Hers was still in terrible shape from the flood, so we replaced the chain and wheels and cleaned it up a bit.  I got a bike chain bracelet out of the whole thing, which makes me feel pretty cool.  Then we played some Wii and tried to watch Casablanca, but all fell asleep (most likely because it was about 1:00am when we started it).

Saturday I made sushi for lunch.  It was delicious!  And so easy to make, too.  I screwed up a little, though, and my sushi didn't hold together as well as it could've because I kept thinking that my hands were sufficiently wet that the rice wouldn't stick to them when they... weren't.  Yeah.  Hands wet = good.  And I need to figure out the optimal way of cutting the fish so that the slices are a little prettier.

After sushi, Jeff, Georgia, and I went to a parkour event at IU.  That was pretty sweet.  I was able to do more things than I thought I'd be able to, which was a pleasant surprise.  I gotta work on my triceps, though, so's I can do pullups and stuff.  Uii.  But, um, I also learned the difference betweek parkour and free running (somehow I never learned this over the summer with Evan?): I guess that parkour is all about efficiency in getting from point A to point B and free running is more about "self-expression".  It's sort of like parkour for showoffs.  :P

Then was some marathon training with Georgia, which was tiring, to say the least.  I got in an unbelievable amount of exercise yesterday.  After running 3 miles with her, I lifted some weights, then walked home, found Evan online (yay!), finally saw his pink hair pictures, then packed up again and biked over to Kam's for his housewarming party.  It was pretty sweet.  All my AIs from CS were there.  They were funny drunks.  :P

Today should finally bring a watching of War Games, which I'm excited about.  Unfortunately, it will also bring some reading and some code cleanup.  I can hardly motivate myself to do that kind of mundane stuff after all my excitements this weekend.  :\

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