I finally signed up for guitar lessons. I’ve been playing Rocksmith for about a year and that’s fun but I haven’t been consistent and I haven’t noticed a steady improvement. So I decided to augment my Rocksmith time with some lessons… and hopefully lessons will drive me to play more on my guitar. 10k hours here I come!
All posts by Joe
Lacking Updates Again
Can’t say much other than life has been fairly busy. Our kitchen remodel is finally done. It only took 3+ months of actual construction but that was after 6 months of waiting for them to get started. Now that it is done I expect to send out some invites to friends in the area for a potluck!
Game development has been slow but I have been working step by step on http://www.averagejoesoftware.com/. I have automated builds published to the site (that I’m not publicly sharing yet) and a link to a Trello bug board. I haven’t exposed the feature board yet but that’s setup too.
What’s left?
I’m at that point in my game development process where I have a limited number of things that must be done before I can release 0.1. This is sort of a make-it-or-break-it point in my project.
Here’s what’s on the list…
Oh the pain…
My son and I have been tinkering with this project for awhile now. We’re trying all kinds of things to make this awful sound go away… but alas… still we toil.
Want to hear?
Making stuff
I’ve been doing a lot of printing on my Lulzbot mini. Here’s an example of a Bulbasaur I pulled from Thingiverse that I edited in Blender to make room for a clay planter.
The green one on the left is printed at standard resolution while the blue one on the right is a fast print. The green took about 4 hours to print and turned out great.
Wisdom Teeth
Just had my wisdom teeth removed. I was done about 30 minutes ago. I’m happy the anesthesia isn’t too bad for me. Very groggy but holding up just fine.
Time to relax and play some video games!
Back in the iOS saddle
Posts have been pretty light lately. I’ve taken up some work at my new gig and it involves writing iOS apps in Objective-C. I found a fantastic book at my local Half Price books that got me rolling called Objective-C Programming by the Big Nerd Ranch group.
Cleaning up the blog even more
I’ve been paying more attention to my log files lately. What I’ve found is not surprising, just disheartening. There are a number of requests by bots and script hackers to specific pages that have been regularly exploited in the past.
Aside from keeping my platform up-to-date (this includes Apache, Linux, WordPress, and so-on) I’ve been restricting access to these potentially unsafe resources and I’ve finally put together a script to automate denying compromised hosts access to the site.
Action Sequence
I’ve been working on a simple platforming dungeon crawler. I’m not a super game developer or an amazing artist but it’s not stopping me from building something I want to play.
In my dungeon crawler I want to do more than just whack skeletons with a big ol’ axe. I want to play with multiple people on the screen, cast spells that help my allies and hurt my foes, and I want the experience to be fun.
Hello Kitty
The EMP has an exhibit going right now that Rachael couldn’t pass up. Al and Gigi were out of school for mid-winter break and this made for an excellent opportunity to explore the vast cuteness.