journal for 2003-01-19
shopping
We got some good shopping done this weekend.
Yesterday, we hit a string of stores, and managed to find some new jeans and a very warm-looking coat for Gloria. She says it’s warm, too, and I believe her. I just haven’t worn it. I also picked up some video game stuff to enable some more interesting play when Bryan and John are here. I snagged Crazy Taxi and its sequel for the DC, a GBA link cable, and a second DC keyboard for some 2P Typing of the Dead action.
I tried and tried to find Soul Calibur, but I finally had to order it. Fortunately, the pricing is the same online as it is at the stores. Speaking of that: the clerk at EBX yesterday told me of their new “EB Edge” card. For $10, I get 10% off of all pre-owned items. I also get a subscription to their crappy gaming magazine, but I’ll live with that; it might contain a cool demo pack-in someday. I saved $8 already with the card, so that’s pretty good.
In looking for Soul Calibur, I found that I get a similar deal from IGN; for being an insider, I get 10% off pre-owneds. Unfortunately, they have a shipping fee, so I don’t think I’ll ever really come out ahead there.
Anyway, CT and CT2 have been pretty fun. I played CT on GCN months ago, and it was good then, too. The physics model bugs me, though. I’ll be more detailed on $gamesite, I reckon.
programming
I need to get a more coff-like parser working for Debug. Eric is retooling lots of Debug for his use, and I know he wants better coff support. Now that other people are interested, I guess I feel more motivated. I need to come up with a slick way of generically lexing coff, though. I don’t want to use a zillion regexen.
More work, lately, has gone into my work on the “links” library for Inform. It’s a little module for making it possible to connect two objects together. I’d rewritten it to have connection types (and some other little features), and now I’m rewriting it again for multiple connections on an object. I really feel like I’ve learned a lot about programming per se in the past few months, and that’s helping me to do much better with Inform than I had in the past. Even concepts that I had a tight handle on, like pointers, are making more sense in their Inform context than they had previously. I think the links library (which I may rename) will shape up nicely.
I hope Mars will, too.