June 15, 2007

• Some more good news!

  Good things have been happening lately.  Let me get you caught up.

  First things first, you should know that I was working as a sub-contractor for a company to work for a government agency.  I wasn’t working directly for the company, I was working for this other company, which contracted me to the primary company.  Well, the contract that the primary company had was coming to term about two weeks ago.  A new company picked up that contract.  Their partner, which handles hiring and payment of employees (eg. me) decided to hire me on.  The company that I was with, got pissed.  See, I’d been waiting a year to get into this place because they took an awful long time to process my clearance.  And to clear that up, I have Secret clearance.  So this other company tells me that they’re going to pay me on a salary.  At a higher salary than the other company I was working with.  I’m talking about a significant raise, and much better benefits.  This causes a problem between the two companies, because I hadn’t worked for the first company for long enough to get out of my contract.  But they let me go anyway, and now the two companies are in a legal battle about all this, because of the way my clearance was handled.  But that’s out of my hands now.  I’m fully employed for the next seven years.  My first paycheck from this new company came in yesterday.  It’s for over one thousand dollars.  That’s right!  I’m making some good money now! 

  And it feels so good.  I feel so vindicated.  When I was at the law firm, I got myself A+ certified, I was doing the same kind of work I’m doing now, but I was also doing other duties, and they were paying me pennies.  Well now I’m doing less work, there’s no stress, I’m getting paid more, AND I’ve got better benefits!  I’m not leaving the public sector.  This is too good to lose.

  Sometimes I wonder if this is just some fantastic dream.  Of course, I know it isn’t, because beautiful women aren’t throwing themselves at my feet.  THAT would be a dream.

  So with my new fat paycheck, I figure that by the end of the month, I should be able to cover all of next month’s bills and pay off my credit cards completely, and have a little left over as a safety net.  So, what am I gonna do with almost two grand in credit?  Well, first thing’s first, I’m going clothes and shoe shopping.  My shoes are starting to fall apart, and I need new shirts and pants.  Oh, it’s gonna be nice to have money to spend again.  What I’d really like to do is get a new car.  A used car, and just finance the thing.  My current car is falling apart.  Maybe I can get a thousand dollars for a trade in or something.

  Okay, on to other things.

  My roommate has been working at GameStop.  Apparantly one of the perks of working at GameStop is that he can “check out” a game for three days.  Well, he brought home Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy.  I have only this to say about it:

  I have never in my entire gaming career had so much fun with a Star Wars video game.

  If you like Star Wars and/or Legos (and who doesn’t, come on) then you must get this game.  It’s both fun and humorous.  I don’t want to say anything about it, for fear of spoiling it for you.  All I can say is that this game is a must buy.  There’s so much to do, and so much to unlock.  It’s a genuinely fun game.  My roommate and I were playing it (it’s also a two player game) and we were just laughing our butts off and having the time of our lives.

  More nerd stuff now.

  I’ve been fiddling with Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition.  It seems to be very similar to VB6, so I shouldn’t have any issues with writing programs.  The main differences are the look and feel of the IDE and some code changes.  My main gripe is that some things just aren’t well documented.  For example, they changed how you add things in listboxes.  In VB6 the syntax was object.additem(stringobject) but in VB2005 they changed that to object.items.add(stringobject) and what gets me is that I had a hell of a time looking it up.  They also changed the Null function so that it’s a system only function, but they left alone the Nothing function to clear out your variables.  Double-you tee eff?  Anyway, aside from the documentation issues, once I learned the changes I was able to get right back into programming.  Since I have lots of time on my hands, it’s not a hard thing to do. 

  So, I built the foundation for a text based game, like Zork.  And I did it using only arrays.  That’s right, arrays.  Why?  Because I didn’t feel like going through all the maddening processes to figure out how linked lists work again.  So what I would like to do is to actually build a text based single player game, similar to the olden days of Zork, but with a few modifications.  My form has a status window, a key counter (to show how many keys the player has for unlocking locked doors), and four buttons labeled N, S, E, and W.  So far, I can support a maze-like “map” including locked doors.  I’m eventually going to put in an event system and an inventory list.  Later down the line, I should figure out how to put in a save game feature.  And then I’ll just need a story of some kind.

  I’m dealing with a text based game right now because it’s simple.  I don’t have the artistic talent to do any kind of graphical games.  That and programming with DirectX makes my brain hurt.  One of these days I should actually sit down and play with some kind of DirectX demo and see what I can do with this thing.

  • 12:15 pm
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