Golden Anvil

Thursday we had our first meeting for the Greek small group that I'm leading. 6 other people showed up. There are three others (one a 10 year old boy) that couldn't make it this week, one other who will start in a couple weeks, and one other who might start coming next week. That's a pretty good sized batch of people. Anyway, it looks like a pretty fun group to work with.

This week we're working on the alphabet. This is a review for me, but it does give me a chance to go back and learn the uppercase letters (which I'd skipped my last time through, since they were considered optional). I actually need to also work on the next chapter so that I can try and stay a chapter ahead of everyone (the better to be able to answer questions and help people out as we get further into things).

Anyway, it's pretty exciting stuff. I'm definitely looking forward to this, as it'll be nice to have others around to help keep me motivated and excited about the project.

Well, for the first time in a long time (at least so it seems) I've had a weekend to just relax. I got a chance to play some Quake 4, do a little flying, do some reading, watch some Batman, watch some NASCAR, do some programming work, sleep. It was awfully nice to feel like I could catch up on a variety of hobbies without having to go short on sleep.

I placed my order today on amazon.com for all of the Greek books for the people who will be in the Greek small group that I'm leading. It looks like there will be nine of us (counting me of course). That's about a $350 order. Fortunately, it goes on my credit card, which counts towards our "cash back" bonus, and won't have to be paid off for a month or so (I should be able to collect all the money within two weeks). Anyway, I'm really looking forward to that starting up.

Another long delay since I last posted. It's been a pretty rough week. We had another round of crunch time at work (we managed to get the beta out the door). Then I spent about 11 hours on Friday working on the seven day roguelike challenge with gauntman (that went pretty well, although we didn't make quite as much progress as we'd like). Saturday got all taken up with various errands and such.

However, today went pretty well, and I'm feeling a good deal refreshed.

Wow, 9 days since my last post! Some of that is excused because I was off on vacation (although I technically had internet access there, even if it was slow). Then I had the excuse of having to catch up with things after getting back from vacation. My only excuse after that can only be that we had a deadline at work on Friday, and we've got another this coming Wednesday. So, I've come home after some long days kind of tired out.

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.

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).

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...