Parentheticals

We split our FHE up in to a lesson on Sunday, and an activity on Monday for the first time this week. The lesson went well. Our plan is to always cover the last week's church, and also to prepare for the next week's church too. We had Sara teach the lesson, and it went well. On Monday Mike started a new semester in school. He is only teaching two classes this semester. He was thinking that they might ask him to teach three, since they asked him in December if he would be willing to try it, however he is sort of happy that they only asked him for two because three would be a lot of classes. On Monday night we went to see a play at the local library. The production was Alice in Wonderland. Mike loved the tweedle dee/dum song. Alison loved the caterpillar/butterfly. Rea loved Alice and her sister, the cat, the butterfly, and the flowers. Sara loved the cat. Timmy loved the rabbit, and Gideon mostly just enjoyed the songs and dancing. This week Rea, and the younger kids built...

This last week was Christmas. On Monday evening we cleaned up and then we had a living nativity, where we all dressed up and acted it all out. We also had the traditional Christmas eve meal of roast and potatoes. After we put the kids to bed, and were visited by Santa. Rea and Sara were very good at getting the boys to go to sleep, so they were able to get out of bed and visit with Mike before Santa came. Tuesday we had a fun Christmas morning. The kids all liked their gifts, and they enjoyed playing with them. Timmy really loved his dinosaurs - he first made them into normal dinosaur shapes, and then later he made them into dino-monsters. Wednesday Mike went back to work, and it started snowing. Rea was very disappointed that it hadn't snowed before, but what can you do? At least it snowed some time. Rea loved Mike's teaching is over for a while, so he has been drawing a lot of icons for people, and playing a little Nethack. He hasn't played it in years, but it is ...

Apparently there is some interest in how I made my dungeon generator. As of yet it outputs pretty basic maps, but there is enough there to build off of (in my opinion). The code is in C#. It is supposed to simulate a human picking up square tiles that are one of the following: passageways (dead end, straight, turns, Ts and intersections) or rooms (vaults, one exit, two exit, three exit, or four exit) and placing them in an  n by m grid configuration so as to make a maze of passageways and rooms. The call to generate a map looks like this: MapBuilder mb = new MapBuilder(); mb.Build(6, 4, 1); And the output looks like this: │╔═╗┬═ ├╝╦╬╬. │$╬┼└┤ ╠┴╬╬═┘ That translates to this: The input that I gave for this example was larger than I would usually give. if you cut off the right two columns and the bottom row: │╔═╗ ├╝╦╬ │$╬┼ It gives a far more nethack like dungeon (7 rooms + a vault on a level would not be unusual.) Having u...

Early last week I mailed out another set of playtest copies of Polynesia. I didn't get a ton of feedback from the last set I mailed, but perhaps this time will be better. The girls have been sick recently, and Friday I even fell ill. I usually don't get sick, but apparently being in close contact with three sick people was enough to push me over the edge. I ended up with a sinus headache, a fever, and general tiredness. By Sunday I was feeling fairly well, but Andrea had a fever, pink eye, _and_ an ear infection, so we kept her home from church. It was pretty miserable. We had a visit from Mom and Dad. They came over and dropped off food and treats since we were sick. It was nice, and Andrea is doing better today. (I am feeling much better myself.) During the weekend I coded a small program that generates mazes that are topologically similar to 'Rogue' levels. I am thinking of making another card game - this one based on Nethack and other roguelikes. You will d...

Both Swee and I finished our NaNos on time. Mine is in a very rough state, and posted here  (in case anyone is bored, or wants to see what it is like). If there was any confusion as to my state of health, I did not actually get trampled on black friday, I was just overhearing a conversation from a team member at work who saw a bunch of people getting trampled on black friday, and helped two of them to escape, and I was disgusted at the holiday. Since NaNo is over, I have started working on the card game again. I hope to be able to have a new version printed by friday. I have also started a name of UnNethack. There is a guy who decided that the next version of Nethack was taking too long, and decided to make his own. It is pretty fun so far. The only thing that has been different is that I made a desperate attempt to prevent myself from starving to death and drank from a fountain and got a wish. I wished for a ring of slow digestion and was told that I couldn't ...