Golden Anvil

Well, I was intending to post yesterday (I think I'd like to average posting every other day), but unfortunately I got a little bit distracted. I brought gauntman home with me from work yesterday and we played Guild Wars: Factions until a bit after 10:00. Then of course I had to drive him home. By the time I got back, I wasn't exactly feeling up to posting by the time I got home.

It's actually kind of funny, because I'd purchased Guild Wars: Prophecies and Guild Wars: Factions and played both with gauntman, but was never able to really get into playing it on my own. So, I wasn't really going to bother picking up the new Guild Wars: Nightfall, because it didn't look like I'd have much chance to play it with gauntman. I figured I wouldn't get my money's worth out of the game.

Well, this evening Mrs. Kheldar and I watched the movie Mazes and Monsters. Optiker and Big Louie (my folks) had picked up the DVD in a bargain bin, and I just had to borrow it from them, since I'd heard plenty of things about it (nothing good). Well, it turns out that it was not quite as bad as I'd figured. It's definitely a B movie, and it is a little bit non-complimentary of role playing/role players. However, it was fun to see a very young Tom Hanks (and surprising to see how many of his acting mannerisms haven't changed at all), and at least this one had a reasonable plot, unlike the movie MASH, which was an absolute and utter waste of time. Still, I did have to ask Mrs. Kheldar how many movies Hanks has been in now that end with a scene on top of a sky scraper in New York (she's thinking just two).

No particularly big news today, but I don't want to get out of the habit of posting.

I slept in a bit this morning, and have actually spent most of the day feeling relatively good (it seems I'm only deathly ill during work hours). I entered most of the last of my books into my LibraryThing account, played some games with gauntman, finally watched a little more Babylon 5 (it'd been a while, but we've been rewatching the series, and we finished season 3 tonight), and at last I got around to updating the spreadsheet that we use to track how well we do on our budget. It's actually a clever little thing, and I'm rather pleased with how it's turned out.

At any rate, I got a lot done today, and I'm starting to feel better, so it was a pretty good day. I'm off to do a little reading in bed now. Good night all.

Well, on the plus side my throat and body are no longer sore. Mrs. Kheldar says that according to my symptoms compared to hers, I should be over the worst.

On the minus side, I had to come home early today, because I was feeling very feverish, and exhausted. Mostly now I'm just dealing with a badly stuffed up nose.

grumble...

I did go ahead and run through the 39 Greek flashcards I'd entered into my new program. I only missed 15. That's not bad for not having looked at them for a good couple months, especially considering that on about half of them I knew the general gist (or part of the definition), but not the full/exact definition.

Yeah, still sick. Worked from home today (even got some stuff done).

I'm off to read, watch some Batman, and generally mope around.

...I hate being sick.

Of course, on my last day of vacation before going back to work I'm starting to feel more and more sick. I've been holding out against a nasty sore throat and sniffly nose that Mrs. Kheldar has been nursing the last week or so. Looks like it's finally catching up to me though.

I got a little more work done today on memTrainer. I added a couple convenience functions and added the storage of session stats (though they aren't displayed anywhere yet). With that function in I think I'm ready to start using it for real. Tomorrow though. I'm off to read in bed (yes, at 7:30).

Yeah, yeah, I said I wouldn't post today.

Fortunately for us we watched the first disk of The Fellowship of the Ring before church. Otherwise I think we'd have had to take a raincheck on the last disk.

They did such a great job on those movies. Despite the fact that Mrs. Kheldar took an average of one nap per movie, she said she thought it'd make a nice tradition to rewatch them every year.

On a bad note, the second disk of the second movie has been having worse and worse problems each time I watch it. I had to skip over about 6-8 tracks this time during the battle of Helm's Deep. grrrr I guess we'll have to repurchase that second movie. I hate having to do that...

I also reremembered that tomorrow is a holiday from work for me. Perhaps I'll make some more progress on memTrainer after all...

Well, I got a little bit of a late start today, due to my typical Saturday morning City of Heroes session with my dad, Optiker. That, and my initial enthusiasm for the project is starting to wear off. So, work on memTrainer progressed a little slowly today. I did manage to get the quiz window working, so that means the program is technically functional. I'll probably start using it for real sometime soon now.

There are still a number of features I'd like to add: ability to add all cards with a particular tag to bucket 1; editing of existing cards; tracking and display of quiz session stats; import/export; some cleanup of the error handling routines; additional context sensitive status bar messages; package it up for distribution.

I made some real good progress on memTrainer today. I've got the main interface essentially completed, with a summary screen that shows statistics and other details about the current opened box of flash cards. I've also completed the interface that allows you to add new cards:

As you can see from the screenshots, I added about 40 cards in the process of testing things, and I like how it's turning out. Adding cards is relatively painless, and with the exception of needing to cut and paste Greek characters with multiple accent marks from another application (they're currently displayed incorrectly due to a bug in the Qt library I use) everything seems to be operating smoothly.

Earlier this year, gauntman (a college friend that I work with) and I realized that we would both have three extra days off between Christmas and New Year's. One of the hobbies we share is designing and developing computer games (not that we've ever actually finished one yet, but that's only because we haven't yet fully fleshed out a concept that we want to run with). So, we decided to take our free time between holidays and work on a new idea for a game.

We sat down and did a decent bit of design work, and actually managed to come up with something that was starting to look somewhat interesting.

...and then gauntman's plans changed, and he decided to spend additional time with family instead...