Andy Chase

August has been quite a month - my employer has moved into a new office, and the month has been spent trying to stay out of the way of the workers finishing up construction. At the same time, the light at the end of the PHP tunnel seems to be getting brighter as we try to close the doors on those projects in favor of a J2EE-based solution.

I also took a trip with my family to Pine Point, Maine- the spot we always visited for at least a few days each summer when I was growing up. It was the first time I've been there in 10 years, and it was sad and sobering to realize that I had been away from one of my favorite places on earth for fully one third of my life.

Last week saw me in New York City again, for just a couple of days this time. As it turned out, my sister had some workshops that she was attending in the city at the same time, so she wound up crashing in my hotel room. I have the feeling that I wouldn't have written during the trip even if she hadn't been there; the urge just wasn't there. I think it's probably due to the fact that New York is becoming familiar, which seems like a strange thing to say after only three visits - but each time I've been, it's easier to slip into the rythm. Having a considerably more claustrophic room this time around, I decided to spend my time exploring Central Park instead of tapping at a keyboard.

On the train back from New York I began delving into Inform, which is one of the items that's been on my "meaning to do" list for over a year now. This time I have armed myself with a print copy of the DM4, and what little I learned last year came back to me quickly... the basics of the language are not hard to learn- if only Inform had been around when I tried to write my own text adventure in BASIC on my Commodore 64!

I'm still not sure how to proceed - the process of modeling your own interactive worlds is absolutely fascinating and compelling to me, but it's also daunting. Part of it is the creative writing aspect - I need to resurrect the part of me that used to thoroughly enjoy writing fiction before my 10th grade "Creative Writing" teacher systematically destroyed any enthusiasm I might have had for the process. The other part of it is that, unlike other personal programming projects, an Inform project will require actual completion before I can share it with anyone; it's not like a lot of the PHP hacking I've done over the last few years. I can't twiddle with something until I get tired of it, then leave it running as-is and move on to something else. If I'm serious about writing interactive fiction, I have to do some real planning, and see the story through from beginning to end.

Not to mention the fact that I also need to get intimately acquainted with Java and JSP/Servlet/Bean programming.

I spent much of yesterday fluttering between Java and Inform, reading, tinkering, and generally not doing much of anything useful, and feeling generally frustrated... trying to do too much at once, and not having enough knowledge in either area for it to be purely recreational.

On the plus side, after three humid, asthmatic days in Manhattan, I was thrilled to step out of my front door yesterday afternoon and see a crisp, deep blue sky of the sort that is reserved solely for Autumn in New England. It's getting to be the best time of the year.

"A Smoker Can Quit... but a sanctimonious git will probably remain so."^[*]

A complete non-sequitur - the above was merely one of the first Google matches for the phrase "sanctimonious git", which was what came to mind when I read a certain digerati's latest blog entry (Yes, via aggregator), which concludes

"But really, you should ask yourself if you need to keep up with 100 or 200 or 1400 different ?sources? of ?content? on an hourly basis. Shouldn?t you be spending more time with your family or something? Or, if you don?t have a family, shouldn?t you be spending time building one?"

Coming from somebody with more than 200 matches for the word "aggregator" on their site, that's just annoying.

I appreciate that having a new infant around will cause one's priorities to shift, but there's no need to get all high and mighty about it. My goodness, this has been a snarky post - such is usually not my nature (not on per-person basis, anyway), but that really rubbed me the wrong way for some reason.

^* Posted by one 'Rob' at http://www.unison.ie/polls/index.php3?ident=Irish%20Independent&mypollid=637. I happen to be of a mind with Rob, but that's a whole other post.

Williams' 'Diner' is my favorite pinball game, ever. I must have shoveled at least twenty five dollars' worth of quarters into that game during the fall semester of my freshman year at RIT. Really, the only arcade game I ever spent enough time and money on to become halfway decent at.

I played that game so much that I can hear the music and sounds from just looking at the photo linked above.

I was thrilled to find Diner at an eastbound rest stop on the New York Thruway a couple of years after it vacated the SAU arcade, although it was broken. I was absolutely stunned to find the game still there when I passed through on the final leg of my journey east from California, some 7 or 8 years later. Still broken... but at least I got to hear the music again.