>backgammon free casino money free craps game play free black jack craps video poker strategy play black jack online how to win video poker casino game online uk best casino online casino secure online gambling jackpot casino online casino black jack learn to play craps how to win at video poker craps online blackjack casino game online casino betting free on line video poker casino games no download casino online gambling casino play free casino slots video poker machine bonus video poker free on line slots double bonus video poker free video poker games free casinos roulette online craps rules free on line casino rules of craps online casino free money blackjack 21 internet casino how to play craps free casino game download fortunelounge online casino free casino download free casino card game free roulette game free casino play no deposit free money casino internet casino online Saturday’s Ticket-Europe score. Same basic win as last time, lots of routes, one station, none of the 6 or 8 routes, just good old railin through Europe. One thing I’m particularly proud of is I clashed with another player and burnt up turns just making them ‘go around’ my routes.

Because you’re only allowed to do one thing on each turn in Ticket to Ride, I call this an ‘Economy of Turns’, each turn needs to be spent doing something that puts you on a direct path to making a route and winning the game. That seems simple, but before I realized this, my games consisted of a lot of card drawing and waiting – we all did it. The first time I consciously made an effort to spend the fewest turns to win, I destroyed my opponents by at least 60 points each. That was the only time the strategy worked that well – from then on it has been a driving force behind each game, and they all are done in about 45 minutes. By spending fewer turns building up cards and building routes, thereby using my trains faster (which are the truly limited resource of the game – 45 in Europe, 40 in Switzerland) the game reaches it’s conclusion faster. If you are lucky enough to outpace your opponents, they may have incomplete routes, and curse your name at night.

So, that was a blast. The other thing that was a blast is that when y’all went and left town to go to wedding receptions, my readership dropped sharply! But I’m glad you’re all back and I’ll try to get back to regular posting.

This morning I’m going to a neighborhood garage sale. I’m looking forward to it, because I almost always find something awesome. I would like to get some kind of stereo or home theater receiver that takes RCA input, but for cheap. I’ve got a few good speakers (well, cheap, at least) that I’d like to rig up to a MAME box.

Speaking of, the boy and I went to an arcade yesterday just to look at the games, and … is it me, or are there no great games at arcades anymore? The technology in them looks just barely above N64 level. Well, I guess it’s just a money pit anyway, but I fondly remember the days I’d walk to the Seven Eleven with my friend Miguel to play Street Fighter 2 and watch others play it. The arcade was much better than it was on SNES (which we didn’t have at my house until after we had an N64 – which is the source of some of my fondest memories of my teenage years, but that is a post for another day.) I was never particularly good at fighting games anyway, but it was always fun to test one’s mettle against some random stranger.

I’ve been a hobbyist programmer for nearly 7 years now, I started in late 2002.

Over the years I have worked on dozens of projects, most of them unreleased ‘tech demos’ as they might be called. Actuallly fleshing a project out and making it user friendly isn’t as much fun as messing around for yourself. Back in the early days (5+ years ago) I would share my work with my online friends, and a few online forums. I learned, the hard way, 2 critical things about the Universe through this process.

1. The Internet is full of morons, who find it rather easy to criticize, but who probably couldn’t do the same thing you are doing. If you can’t contribute a worthwhile criticism, you should shut the hell up.
2. The less time spent worrying about what others think gives you more time to worry about what you think. If it’s your project, it’s your project. If it’s your baby, raise it as your own. You’d be surprised how much the finished project (or, in my case, unfinished project) reflects your personality if you let it.

More importantly, I have learned that software development, when it is done for one’s own personal gratification, can be a deeply rewarding and cathartic experience, and I daresay that it has been a spiritual journey.

So why am I getting all philosophical about this?

Because, after a long hiatus from revision control, I have finally set up a small SVN and I vow to put my projects in the repository. In my main project, the ray tracer that I am fond of, I am cleaning the code up since I have already done an initial commit. Oh boy, it’s uggggggly. Lots of silly #if 0 comments and /* blah */ littered throughout, functions that don’t get called … YUCK. So it’s getting scrubbed down. Since I work on it so sporadically, so much testing and partial functionality – it makes me remember when I was working on things, it’s been like going through an old photo album. I remember what I was in to at the time, what music I was listening to, what games I was excited about playing (and ignoring, hence the programming), sometimes I get a faint recollection of what time of day or season. It’s been weird.

So, I have all this source code laying around. Nuts! Time to clean it up and figure out what to do with all of it. Some of it may end up being BSD’d, some has to be GPL’d because it uses snippets from other GPL’d projects, things like that.

I’m pretty proud of my 7 years of hobbyist development. I am proud that I haven’t taken a computer programming course, that me, the Internet, and some good old fashioned cleverness have gotten me by, even when the task at hand has been too big, I’ve always found a way to compile the uncompilable library (or find a replacement) or stumble across the answer, or even just ask someone who actually knows how to program which way I should go.

Last Thursday, Sukie and I went to the Johnson Mill up in Midway, Utah.

Around 6pm they called Sukie (we went after work on Thursday night) to see if we were going to be there to check in. You betcha! I thought it was weird since … who the hell cares when you check in. Well, they left us our key to get in and we checked in late, and …

So we woke up the next morning and I saw why they’d want us to have checked in before sundown – it is one nice lookin place! Breakfast was stuffed french toast with the other couples who were, as could be expected, not very talkative. I wore my Smokey the Bear shirt, prepared to say, “I FIGHT FOREST FIRES!” if anyone asked me about it, but unlike our previous Provo BnB experience, not much of a crowd. I guess, like me, people are just hardwired to love weekends, even when we have Friday off.

So, yeah, 10 years of being married to the Sukes. There’s a lot I can say about that, and with all the weddings in recent months and the pending 10 year WudaniSukieVersary I’ve had a lot of time to think about just what it all means. And I do mean to infer that I wax introspective.

In my head I keep trying to finish this sentence, “Marriage is …” but like all great universal truths it carries such weight that you can’t do it justice with words, or understand the truly complicated maze of it (or how beautifully simple it is.) So I guess the lesson here is, I love my Sukie more than the words can say. Oh ho ho, Cliche!

Won a very silly late night game of Ticket to Ride (one-hundred and fourty-two points, two stations, 6 routes – none of the 6 or 8 routes) followed by about an hour and a half of WordPress tweaking this morning. Now my blogroll works like Bloggers does, and tells me who’s updated recently. Snazzy, right?

It was good to hang out, eat a delicious burger, and play some Dalmuti. I was Jabuti for 3 or 4 rounds but it was not meant to last