Desktops, Chom, Blogs and there only being 168 hours in a week

Life is too short to do everything I want to do. The week, sadly, only has 168 hours in it and I am not on some sort of insane quest to make each and every one count. Alright, I've been on that quest for a considerable amount of time now but I'm going up a gear. Here's how.

Work has stolen hours and days from me recently. I have exceeded my contracted 40 hours by 5-10 most weeks recently. It's not something I'm proud of and it's going to stop. I've passed a deadline, we didn't meet the release (which I predicted correctly in September) and the plan was rejigged to release in the new year. There's no point doing extra hours for a plan I didn't sign up to. It's going to take nearer ten weeks to test something they had down for three. I understand that the project managers try and hit the middle ground between what the client wants and what we say we can deliver but sometimes you just can't squeeze more people into the task. Nine women can't have a baby in one month or as I like to say 12 people can't copy a 12 gig virtual machine in 1/12 the time.

So, I have projects and until recently, I've been giving each an equal cut. Icar is being turned into a single book game with black and white innards. Chom Isis is having the final functionality added. Freelance work is coming in and going to pay the deposit for the house one day. The Free RPG Blog is coming along nicely, even if some of the readership seem to think I should go through the book with a fine tooth comb. I am still writing the Icar novel and want to get that published but it's ok to give that a bit of a break. I'm now the same grade as Baron at the gliding school (although he's way more senior and will probably go up one soon) and that's become a lot more interesting again. Sadly, my Icar campaign has stalled due to people not being around but that's temporary and more social activity than project per se. I'm still putting in bass, guitar, banjo, ukelele and piano practise.

But there isn't enough time. Cocksocks. For all my gallivanting fuckery, everything is moving on just a little too slowly. So, it's prioritise time. I've got to get something finished. Most of the activities above are bit-by-bit ones except Icar and Chom Isis. So, for the moment, version 4 of Icar can wait in the wings while I finish Chom Isis.

The state of the Chom

You know, it really is nearly finished. All the big bits are there: Pawn screen (with faces for arbitrarily picking on the ugly one), life inputs, deviants, job quote / create / track / complete, pawn diaries, location engine (now based in Reading), private messages, message board, alliances (with propositions), ebay-esque auction and now intelligence (see right). There are some tuning issues (life inputs cost 4 times that of pawns still) and some of it is eye blisteringly ugly (intelligence chalk board needs some work) but it does actually work. Having left it for a few months, I come back to find update running, job execution ok and all my unmolested life-inputted-up-to-the-eyeballs pawns really very happy.

So the race is on to get it finished. I'm not going to set a deadline because it was be false to do so. I'm just going to get it into a state where it can be played. Perhaps in the new year, even. Imagine that. A beta game for 10 psychopaths.

There is more I want to do for the full game (before I start pulling in players from outside the usual suspects), like a series of YouTube tutorials on the different screens and what they do and a more fully featured stats system for those end game graphs (I'll be using Google, just need to massage the data).

(P.S. For those who remember the Intelligence conversations Byrn and I had some time ago, I'm implementing all of it, Bone Fide idea is buried)

Programming on a bus

I rewrote my PhD thesis (and performed some further research) on my old and crappy - yet indestructable - 1GHz Celeron IBM Thinkpad with 756MB RAM. Now I'm coding on the bus. It's a different kettle of fish (or box of frogs). The train is smooth and the bus (especially in town) bounces around like a bastard. I don't have a place to use a mouse, so the Thinkpad nipple is all I have. I've been tempted to change my Windows install for some time, to freshen it up but now I had more reason to do so. I needed to work quicker and with less fiddly mouse work.

So I started desktop modding - bit by bit. I won't go into details in this Deviant-only post but I've ended up with this:

Which is easier on the eyes. Applications appear to load quicker too, which I can't account for (except perhaps by not using the windows shell). It feels fresh, like a new operating system but still runs all the old programs. What's more, it's much much much easier to use. I'm tempted to do my desktop the same way. By coding on the bus, I've got back an hour of my day.

So that's it for now, if you're interested in my modding antics, just shout and I'll do a step-by-step guide. I'll be carrying my laptop around to all the things I attend, so you can have a poke about.