Category: General

Blow Your Own Mind talks about ways to give your brain a surprise to keep it on its toes. It isn’t enough to do things every day that require good thinking. You need to do different things once in awhile.

Some examples are:

• Enter your house/apartment with your eyes closed. You can use tactile feedback to find your keys and open your door and follow your nose to the kitchen.
• Take a different route to work.
• Shop at a different market than you usually do.
• Turn pictures and clocks upside-down.
• Brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand.

Basically, when you find yourself comfortable with a pattern, do something jarringly different! I try to read a lot, so I could read an entire book or magazine upside-down or sideways. I could walk backwards while getting ready for work one day (I guess I’d have to be extra careful with the stairs). Maybe one day I might try to turn my computer monitor upside down and try to work at it. Basically, if I can use my senses in novel ways, my brain will get a workout.

At work I have a few motivational words and phrases posted up at my desk, but after awhile they lose their novelty. So I turned them upside-down or at a 45 degree angle. Now my eye is forced to stop and interpret what I am seeing. Some people I know are participating in National Novel Writing Month (thanks, Cableshaft!), which is a huge change for people who don’t write much. Simple but jarring changes like these can help keep your brain alive.

I’ve been walking every other day or so. Nothing too strenuous. Just an hour meandering around my neighborhood for an hour. It is great to get outside and move about, and I’ve come up with a number of ideas while thinking and walking.

Well, it rained today, so I decided to make use of the treadmill in the basement. I left the defaults and set it for 60 minutes. It was at a much quicker pace than I was used to doing. Still, I felt great, and I was able to read a book for about 10 minutes.

Then I started sweating. Eventually I had to put the book down because it was going to get wet. I didn’t feel out of breath or anything, so I kept going.

For an hour, I managed to keep going at a brisk pace. I took my shirt off halfway through. Note to self: don’t wear the clothes you went to work in when trying to keep a brisk pace for an hour!

Still, I accomplished it. One hour, on a treadmill, at about 2.5 to 3 miles per hour. I was worried throughout that I was going to pull something or somehow injure myself. I definitely needed to drink plenty of water afterwards, and the shower was great.

I felt fine for awhile, but found that some blisters had formed under my feet. What a great place for them! Now when I got to work or anywhere else, I’ll be in slight pain. Perfect. On top of it all, I think I will likely wake up in the morning with sore muscles.

So if you’ve been immobile for a few years and are starting to get active again, remember to pace yourself. I probably should have realized that the faster pace could have been done in 30 minutes instead of an hour. I could even have given myself a 10 minute break between two half hour sessions. And with my blisters and potential soreness, I’m not going to be in a position to play basketball or soccer anytime soon.

That’s my Exercise Caution.

The Learning Kyra series to date:

I’ve spent some time just reading through the documentation for SDL and Kyra. I’ve also tried to pick up what I can at Kyra’s forums on SourceForge.

For instance, GlDynArray has been removed from the library for the next update. I can substitute std::vector<> though, which for all intents and purposes means very little has changed except for a redirection/abstraction. For now, I need to use it when doing hit detection, but I shouldn’t rely on it for my own code.

I was thinking about the need for more complex animations and Actions for an individual sprite. For example, a sprite may have a standing animation. When you press the space bar, an attack animation should run, but I might not want it to loop over and over. Was I going to have to keep track of how many frames of animation there were for a given Action in order to make sure it doesn’t loop?

Nope! Turns out that Kyra’s KrSprite class has functions for determining the number of frames for an animation and for getting the current frame. Now I can do something like the following:


if ( theSprite->Frame() >= numFrames )
{
// then the ATTACKING animation is over and should change state
}


I also found that a sprite can clone itself. In my June GID, I had these fuzzy creatures multiplying, but I loaded in a resource from a file and created a sprite from the resource. I originally thought that I could optimize it by storing the resource to be used later, but I could further optimize by just using the Clone() function to create a new sprite. I could also use GetResource to get a pointer to the resource used by an existing sprite if I really needed it.

I want to work on some code to test what I’ve learned to see how well it works. I can get something substantial completed this week.

I will never make a Texas Holdem Poker game. Ever.

Why? Because hundreds of trackback spam and comment spam just came through the past couple of days. One was for male impotency pills. The rest were for some online poker sites.

And if I do make a poker game, I would fear that people would assume that my company is the one behind all of the spam that I’m sure others also get. I don’t need the bad association.

Who can face themselves in the mirror knowing that they are making money by being so much of a nuisance? When these spams trickled it, they were manageable. Now I am afraid that if I don’t periodically check in a few times a day, I’ll be overrun. Luckily I manually approve these comments so that they don’t get published, but it is getting to be a lot of work.