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Tuesday short takes
Mar. 5th, 2003 07:59 amWell, mostly Tuesday.
I am increasingly impressed with the power of Cocoa. Today, I managed to write a bare-bones Minesweeper game in less than half a day--half a day in which I was paying attention to the instruction and doing the normal exercises. (It was about 250 lines of code that can be measured in lines.)
As one might guess from the previous, I've found my niche in the class. I'm not quite the star of the show, since there are people in the class who were at NeXT and can tell stories about the history of the Cocoa toolkit. Even so, I am comfortably above the level the class is paced for. I've been deliberate about trying to use my extra time to do Cocoa-related stuff instead of surfing the net or reading. Hence Minesweeper, which did exercise some skills about NSMatrices and the cell/control distinction. On the other hand, I had to do some testing of the Minesweeper game, didn't I?
I'm also very impressed with the iBook that I'm carrying around. The networking Just Works in a wide variety of circumstances. The battery lasts long enough to serve me through a whole day if I sleep it most of the time. It sleeps easily, without any fuss about waking. I like the ability to stick it in my bag without worrying about projecting bits getting damaged. It's really noticeably better than laptops I've had before. It's making me consider getting an iBook of my own.
So far, I've had a routine that's unusual for me: in the morning, I'm awake and creative, and I've been writing journal entries and D&D stuff for a couple of hours before class begins. In the evening, though, I'm well frotzed. I just read then, and don't get any creative work done. This is a pretty pleasant pattern, though, and I'm enjoying the early morning sun.
I ate Tuesday night at Fresh Choice for nostalgic reasons; it was a favorite restaurant when I was dating Marcia in 1992-1993. It was much as I remembered it, with bountiful soups and salads. I had a garden salad topped with enough yummy things to overcome any health benefits, a bowl of chicken noodle soup with plenty of vegetables and thick noodles, a banana-pineapple muffin, and other goodies. Even the price seems not to have changed much in ten years.
Afterwards, I walked through the Vallco mall. I was impressed to see that this mall has both a Gamekeeper store and a Friendly Local Game Store called Legends. (Legends seems to have both a comics store and a games store, much like Phantom of the Attic in Pittsburgh.) I purchased Sword and Sorcery's Creature Compendium II from the Gamekeeper, since it was on sale. It has lots of monsters that are appropriately creepy for my campaign, but I worry about them being too lethal.
This morning, I ate breakfast at Hobee's, a chain of Californian food--lots of fresh flavors and healthy-inspired foods. To explain what I mean by 'healthy-inspired': I ate tamale pie topped with salsa, guacamole, sour cream, served with two eggs over easy, hash browns, and approximately 40 cubic inches of fresh-out-of-the-oven coffee cake topped with butter melting before my eyes (which I was unable to finish). In the Hobee's, I had an amusing conversation with a Chinese woman which started with her complimenting my hair, and took a variety off digressions which I was unable to entirely follow.
I am increasingly impressed with the power of Cocoa. Today, I managed to write a bare-bones Minesweeper game in less than half a day--half a day in which I was paying attention to the instruction and doing the normal exercises. (It was about 250 lines of code that can be measured in lines.)
As one might guess from the previous, I've found my niche in the class. I'm not quite the star of the show, since there are people in the class who were at NeXT and can tell stories about the history of the Cocoa toolkit. Even so, I am comfortably above the level the class is paced for. I've been deliberate about trying to use my extra time to do Cocoa-related stuff instead of surfing the net or reading. Hence Minesweeper, which did exercise some skills about NSMatrices and the cell/control distinction. On the other hand, I had to do some testing of the Minesweeper game, didn't I?
I'm also very impressed with the iBook that I'm carrying around. The networking Just Works in a wide variety of circumstances. The battery lasts long enough to serve me through a whole day if I sleep it most of the time. It sleeps easily, without any fuss about waking. I like the ability to stick it in my bag without worrying about projecting bits getting damaged. It's really noticeably better than laptops I've had before. It's making me consider getting an iBook of my own.
So far, I've had a routine that's unusual for me: in the morning, I'm awake and creative, and I've been writing journal entries and D&D stuff for a couple of hours before class begins. In the evening, though, I'm well frotzed. I just read then, and don't get any creative work done. This is a pretty pleasant pattern, though, and I'm enjoying the early morning sun.
I ate Tuesday night at Fresh Choice for nostalgic reasons; it was a favorite restaurant when I was dating Marcia in 1992-1993. It was much as I remembered it, with bountiful soups and salads. I had a garden salad topped with enough yummy things to overcome any health benefits, a bowl of chicken noodle soup with plenty of vegetables and thick noodles, a banana-pineapple muffin, and other goodies. Even the price seems not to have changed much in ten years.
Afterwards, I walked through the Vallco mall. I was impressed to see that this mall has both a Gamekeeper store and a Friendly Local Game Store called Legends. (Legends seems to have both a comics store and a games store, much like Phantom of the Attic in Pittsburgh.) I purchased Sword and Sorcery's Creature Compendium II from the Gamekeeper, since it was on sale. It has lots of monsters that are appropriately creepy for my campaign, but I worry about them being too lethal.
This morning, I ate breakfast at Hobee's, a chain of Californian food--lots of fresh flavors and healthy-inspired foods. To explain what I mean by 'healthy-inspired': I ate tamale pie topped with salsa, guacamole, sour cream, served with two eggs over easy, hash browns, and approximately 40 cubic inches of fresh-out-of-the-oven coffee cake topped with butter melting before my eyes (which I was unable to finish). In the Hobee's, I had an amusing conversation with a Chinese woman which started with her complimenting my hair, and took a variety off digressions which I was unable to entirely follow.
