Living, breathing and sleeping Chom and Bass

It's no surprise that I've been up to my ears in Chom Isis. I've always found that setting myself a deadline has always been the best way to get something achieved. The behind-the-scenes engine is so complex that I could give the pawns the full range of 512 happiness levels and you'd have trouble working out the job-resources:pawn happiness ratio was.

The first game will be more of an Alpha, it's not entirely playable at the moment. I just need to get the big things checked first. For example, there isn't a screen where you can see all of the pawns in the game. Not yet, anyway. The front page where you login only shows your pawns at the moment but that needs to change to show new messages, recent Alliance changes and so on. It's a skeleton game at best but it's already a world away from Chom 2.

But it's taking its toll. I cycle home from work, organise any house things that need doing, have dinner and start coding/doing graphics. By the time I get to the weekend, I'm looking through the list of tasks left to do and it's a struggle. This weekend, for example, I want to do a system test on my laptop while at the Gliding School. The weather looks pants so I might get a chance. If we don't start registration next week, I'm going to be somewhat miffed. After that, work out a bug reporting system and wait for the comments to come in.

Bass
My amplifier is long in the tooth and has started to buzz at some frequencies. I think it might be something to do with driving a big bass speaker off it. For my birthday, I'm going to buy an Ashdown ABM 500 amplifier head from Guitar Works. They use an Arts Council funding program to give Interest Free Credit on purchases up to 2 grand. Nice. It's 575W of power. To put that in perspective, it's 10 times louder than the amp I have. 10 times. Like, deafening. I won't be able to turn it up to 11 with my external speaker but if I fancy getting a stack, I'm sorted.

To finish off, a bit of Les Claypool (from Primus), whom I love.