Grass, Wizardry, and the US Army…
There’s been a trend in my life lately that is equally good and bad.
I’m not spending as much of my free time updating my websites. That’s the bad. The good is that I haven’t been spending as much of my free time updating my websites because I’ve been keeping myself extremely busy with things that are equally enriching. Not only have I been spending a lot of time with family and friends, but I’ve been cramming my brain with a variety of useful and useless things:
I’ve been planning a mosaic project, learning more about my digital camera, and crafting soap. I’m in the planning stages of the development of my shopping cart application that I intend to develop in PHP for a variety of reasons including that I need a custom shopping cart app for the new web stores I’m creating, I want to learn something new and PHP is the latest and greatest web technology that happens to be surpassing both ASP and JSP usage, and I’m developing it with packaging for sale in mind.
I’m continuing my self-directed studies of the amazingly complex LightWave 3D animation software. Yesterday’s goal was to create a short animation of a first-person view of a low-level flight over a grassy knoll. Seven seconds soaring over a hill of fairly realistic grass took two hours to render. The loop ends just over the crest of the miniature hill because I hadn’t bothered to create a horizon and the pending storm clouds would have bled off into a murky haze that wouldn’t have done the snippet justice. Still, I’m happy with the results. At least I know I CAN do it if and when I ever need to.
As previously mentioned, a week or so ago I started reading the Harry Potter series. Now I’m midway through number four — obviously taking up much valuable rambling time. I now understand why the series has done so well: it has good new ideas mixed in with tried-and-true traditional fantasy. It’s also full of interesting characters, at least one of whom you are likely to identify with. Looking forward to the next installments!
I completed a course in Real Estate Principles, a state-required course for entry into real estate or mortgage brokering or for real estate appraisal. I took the final exam on the 23rd, scoring 97%. Should have studied more, I guess! Next is the actual state-administered exam, the next date most likely five to six weeks away. Thumbs a-twiddling…
I “played” a bit of America’s Army today once I got through some of the frustrating bugs. So far, it’s actually a pretty well done army training tool — I’ve even had to sit through three lectures and take mini exams during “game play”. Edutainment, and yet you get to shoot a military-issue M-16A2 rifle and throw M67 fragmentation grenades! Intended or not, it’s got great potential as a recruitment device. Animation is as realistic as it gets for a game. The most disappointing thing is that I doubt this’ll work here with more than one computer running the game; time will tell.
‘Course, then there’s been both Thanksgiving and Christmas at which I planned and cooked the dinners, something that I may make into a tradition. I’ve always enjoyed cooking.
A busy bee I’ve been…
