Parentheticals

This last week was a fun one. We celebrated Christmas and spent a lot of time together. I got Wednesday off, and a half day off on Tuesday. Christmas eve was beautiful weather so we decided to walk to the school playground and play a bit. Sara put on her new snow pants (which were technically an unopened Christmas gift, but she didn't seem to notice that when she opened them up the next day) which made the trip last all the longer, and made it more fun. Rea wants to go sledding some time. We need to get a sled first. On Christmas day, after celebrating the birth of Christ in the morning, we got together as a family (with all of the Brown side) and spent time together. We shot guns (which was more fun than I expected), ate food, and played some games. We played 'Two Rooms and a Boom', 'Resistance', and 'Bang: Wild West Show'. They all were fun. I have been working on my Dancing Robots AI recently, and it now beats me fairly often (it still isn't per

This past week mostly consisted of preparing for Christmas and working on my Dancing Robots game. I have been fooling around with card art and working on the AI for the web version of the game at the same time. This ends up being more distracting than useful since I really like to just work on one thing at a time, so I always forget to actually work on both. The image to the right is a mock up of what an actual card could look like. The art for the actual claw was provided by Dave. I just composed the piece, put in the backgrounds, and provided the relevant game texts. The AI changes mostly consist of trying to keep the AI from dancing dances that could never actually work in practice (the AI has a really good ability to build a robot that could theoretically dance a set of moves, but in practice is unable to (such as dancing a set of moves that all require the same piece of equipment (which happens to be a one time use item.))) On Saturday Andrea helped us to clean up the enti

I have been meaning to write up a post for a while, but I have not been feeling too well. Fortunately Alison has been feeling a bit better, so we are making it through. The girls are as cute as ever, and really feeling ready for Christmas. I have also been writing up a neural network to help out my dancing robots AI. I will post a larger, Christmas card type post next week - hopefully that will make up for this post :)

This past week we recovered from our vacation and got our goats back. Alison read that being pregnant is likely to make goats quieter, but Lala is as noisy as ever (if not noisier). The chickens were all scared of the snow until the goats came back and started frisking about in it. They are now cautiously pecking around a bit. They all seem to be doing well despite the cold weather. I have been working on my Moar Moai game as well as Roguelike and Dancing Robots over the past week. For those of you who missed the switch over, I talk a lot more about them in my other blog  (which you can follow in google+ or email just like you can follow this one). Yesterday and Saturday we set up the Christmas tree. The girls were really happy to play with the ornaments. Rea found a candy cane and shared it with Sara. They were both such a mess. I have no idea why anyone invented candy canes. They both loved it. Sara called it a candy bar, and was asking for candy bars the entire day.

We got home from California at 3:00 am Sunday morning. We still made it to church, but we didn't make it before the opening prayer. In California we had a fun relaxing time (though the girls were sick most of the time). Andrea was throwing up and Sara was congested). For those who don't already know: Alison is pregnant. We went to Sea World a total of 3 times. It was very popular with Max and the girls. Sara's favorite thing was the penguins. She would sit and watch them swimming around and say to them "Hi Penguin!" I realize that I probably should have been taking pictures or things like that, but for some reason I didn't Rea seemed to like the cetaceans the best, though the sea turtles were also pretty popular. The coolest part for me was the shark tunnel. They had a glass tunnel that ran through a shark tank, and it was cool to see the sharks swimming all around you. Alison liked the dolphin show the best (I have to admit, they did do some impressive

I was just working on a SQL rollback script verification tool when I got the following error: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Cannot open database <database> requested by the login. The login failed.Login failed for user <user> the usual reason for this is a bad connection string, or a user that doesn't have permissions, but in my case it was that I was trying to create a new db file (to run the scripts against), and the directory did not exist in which I was trying to make my file. Creating the directory was enough to get it to work.