Parentheticals

This week I worked a bit more on my Dancing Robots website. The multi-player is working fairly well, but the site still has some bugs, and the user interface could definitely use some work. I need an interaction designer to look at it and come up with something to do to fix it. Now that I am able to play so many games of dancing robots, I am starting to think that the game is a bit too easy. I will have to make it harder by decreasing the amount of electricity provided, or perhaps increasing the size of the parts. Both of the girls are learning things every day. Rea wrote both her name and the word cat this week. Sara is walking all over the place now that she is able to. She still loves taking things out of and putting things into various containers and considers that to be the best game to play. As I type this post, Alison just asked her to put a wet diaper into the diaper pail and she picked it up and walked over, putting it into the pail. At the di the other day I saw a rac...

A few weeks ago I discovered the cheese fridge had been turned off. I feared the worst (remembering the great cheese dying of a few years back I assumed that all of the cheese had been destroyed.) I immediately moved the cheeses to the big fridge and began watching them for signs of spoilage. I finished watching them this week and decided that all of them survived the event admirably. We opened all of them and rewaxed them just to make sure. We even began eating a derby (which tasted fine (although it was more mesophilic than I like (swee is the one who likes mesophilic tasting cheeses))). Sara is a year old now. Alison is trying to wean her, but Sara wants none of that (or all of that as it were). We are giving her goat milk (which she spills all over the place), and she is pretty fussy. We discovered that she is dual teething right now (so now she has 4 teeth). If this keeps up she will have 8 teeth next week, and by the end of the year she will have over 33 million teeth (33,554...

I am told that Sara just took 8 steps today. Prediction fulfilled. :)

I have been working on my Dancing Robots website  a lot this past week. It is now capable of playing a game against up to 5 computers, and it uses web sockets for a persistent connection to client. The game is set up in such a way that multi-player should not be too hard to implement. I can't make any promises, but perhaps by next week it will be possible (and if it becomes so, I will have to play against many people to test it out). Read the rules and give it a try. If you find any bugs, make a comment on the bug spreadsheet , and I will get working on it. I am also open to comments about the visual appearance of the site, so all you graphic designers/artists can chime in as well. Friday we watched Max, and we made pizza. Alison made a very Buddhist request of me: "Make me one with everything" It didn't end up with everything, but it did have 4 cheeses, three meats, and two veggies. On Saturday we made a Parmesan and a bunch of Ricotta. It all seemed to go w...

I have decided to host my Dancing Robots website at theTrueMikeBrown.selfip.com . If you visit it, you can test out how the game is coming along. It is still in a very early beta stage, and should not be considered to be production worthy in any way. If you are interested in testing it out, feel free to. Additionally, contact me with any bugs that you find (If you look, I am sure that you will find bugs.) Disclaimer:  The website is up for demonstration purposes only, and should not be considered to be a real website (for instance, if you make a user account, I tried to make sure that it is secure, but it would probably be best if you use a password that you do not use for other sites.))

This week I spent a lot of time working on my online Dancing Robots game. I am currently trying to get it online, but I have not yet been able to get a production worthy server for it (Serving it from a development environment is way easier than serving it from a production worthy server). I will keep you all up to date on it. I had the Fourth of July off for Independence Day. In the morning we went down to Dimple Dell and hiked around looking for mushrooms. We got a bunch of mushrooms including four edible puffball mushrooms. We also found some golf balls (which were way more popular than the mushrooms with the girls). In the evening we had a barbecue, which Sheila, Scott, and Max came over to. We had hamburgers and bratwurst. We made home made buns, and had freshly picked sauteed mushrooms over them. We also had watermelon. It was fun. In the evening we lit off some small fireworks. Running perpendicular to the bench, and about a half a mile away from our house stands a hil...

Since this was a little annoying to figure out: /* drop TABLE `DancingRobots`.`webpages_UsersInRoles`; drop TABLE `DancingRobots`.`webpages_Roles`; drop TABLE `DancingRobots`.`webpages_OAuthMembership`; drop TABLE `DancingRobots`.`webpages_Membership`; drop table `DancingRobots`.`UserProfile`; */ CREATE TABLE `DancingRobots`.`UserProfile`( `UserId` int NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `UserName` nvarchar(100) NULL, PRIMARY KEY ( `UserId` ) ); CREATE TABLE `DancingRobots`.`webpages_Membership`( `UserId` int NOT NULL, `CreateDate` datetime NULL, `ConfirmationToken` nvarchar(128) NULL, `IsConfirmed` bit NULL default 0, `LastPasswordFailureDate` datetime NULL, `PasswordFailuresSinceLastSuccess` int NOT NULL default 0, `Password` nvarchar(128) NOT NULL, `PasswordChangedDate` datetime NULL, `PasswordSalt` nvarchar(128) NOT NULL, `PasswordVerificationToken` nvarchar(128) NULL, `PasswordVerificationTokenExpirationDate` datetime NULL, PRIMARY KEY ( `UserId` ) ); ...

This last week I worked on my Dancing Robots website a lot. It is still not ready for public consumption, but it is possible to play an entire game, and it is starting to look pretty good (inasmuch as anything that I make looks pretty good (which is not very much according to some people)). It has card symbols, hover text for all the cards, a log, and fairly intuitive controls. After I am done with the first run through I will test it out on my wife to see if that last statement is supported by evidence. Alison had her book club last week (some girls from the ward get together and discuss various books - this time at our house). The book was Hattie Big Sky, but they always end up talking about homeschooling, and it seems more and more likely as time goes on that Alison will try out homeschooling. On Friday I was ambushed by a 'team building activity' at work: Frisbee Golf. I got (on average) about three over par. We also ran into some angry frisbee hippies and were s...