Monday, March 26, 2012

Status update

My main occupation these days is as executive of damage control, for a 1y old toddler.  Doing so leaves precious little time and brain power for any creative software work.

Whatever free time I get I tend to use for gaming/surfing, which is what my spare brain cycles allows for. It's plain hard to  regularly find some dedicated time for creative work, when your brain is trying to cope with the mood swings and antics of someone who has to program her neural network by trial and error. :)

So, the going-ons in my software world (outside work) are rather slim:
  • BuildBot is ticking along fine without me, although I'm trying to do a bit of pull request checking, since  Dustin Mitchell, "chief maintainer", needs some offloading on that part.
  • ThrustRacer remains a concept and dream. I've had some doubts as to whether twitchy arcade games can be as good on mobile devices as they were in the golden age of the Tac-2, thus wondering if I should spend my time thinking on thinking about something else instead.
  • TF2 is fun, but kinda hard unless you find a server with comparable players. Ranking, seeding and matching is sorely needed. I had to by a new high-DPI mouse to be at least vaguely competitive
  • Skyrim is .. scary .. and buying the discount PC-version on Steam over the overprices PS3 version was not as good an idea as it first sounded. I need a new graphics card, which costs way more! (OTOH, might help with TF2). The scariness (i.e. I'm really afraid to see what will come at me next...) is a problem though, since I play at night/evenings (ref. above mentioned toddler) and playing in the dark, quiet and trying to quickly go asleep afterwards doesn't really mix well. (Still haven't finished BioShock, nor seen Alien 1 to completion...)
  • Our (recently acquired) house sorely needs more power and Ethernet outlets, a small herd of Ardunio boards controlling all the light fixtures and a motorized garage door.

Ah, the woes of geekdom and fatherhood combined...