September 16, 2018 11:11 AM
Mid Year Resolutions: Part 3
These are more "fun" resolutions than ones that will really gain me any valuable skill in life. But hey, if I spend time doing these things over browsing Facebook or Reddit, it's probably a good thing.
Get better at DDR
Yesterday I made a $65 purchase which allows me to play as much DDR as I want for three whole months. It sounds a little ridiculous, but one of my pipe dreams in life is to own my own DDR machine, as well as other arcade games. I've been playing DDR since middle school, and I can pass pretty much anything on the hardest level except those stupid fast songs. What I'm not very good at is playing Double, so I've been hitting up the arcade to try and get better at that.
2021 Update: I can pass what?! I must have been thinking about a really old DDR game. Maybe I was just thinking about the songs on the DDR cab that Victory Pointe had. I did say "pass" and nothing about how well I did. I distinctly remember getting C's on everything when I first started going there. But with current DDR? There are a lot of songs I cannot pass.
I'm also playing more Pump it Up. I first tried this game out when I was in Cambodia last year, and I don't know why I haven't been playing it more often. The local Dave 'n Buster's has a machine, and it's about $1 for three songs (or $0.50 on Wednesdays!). Plus random people like to try the game out and then quit after their first song, so I try to mooch off of them :P
Beat Stardew Valley
I'm really slow at video games. If a game normally takes someone a week to finish, it probably takes me 6 months. I started playing Stardew Valley some time last year, and I've found it a lot of fun. But I only just finished the Community Center which is one of the main goals of the game. This is a farming game like Harvest Moon, and I know you can't really "beat" the game, but I'm trying to actually play through all of the features that exist. My polished farm still only covers less than a quarter of the area available. Once I'm done with playing the main game, I want to check out the mods people have made and see if I can make one of my own.
October 13, 2018 10:12 AM
Writing code is fun
Guys, (I know, no one reads this, who am I even addressing here?) I read and modified some code today. And it was fun. I love writing code. I think computers are awesome. But sometimes in the grind of work and trying to do everything in the best way possible, I forget that.
So last night I was trying to add some tests to my Teochew web app, and it was getting kind of tedious, so I wanted to take a break. I also needed some way to know that I still need to finish these tests. For this whole project, I've just had a single text file that I add notes to, but lately I've been wanting something more sophisticated. I wanted a real bug tracker. I had tried the bitbucket issue tracker, but I thought it was annoying to have to actually log into bitbucket in my browser. I decided to look for command line issue trackers, and I came across bitbucket-issue-manager.
I initially thought it just looked really spiffy, so I installed it. Then I realized I needed nodejs, and then I realized my version of Ubuntu is no longer supported, so I had to upgrade that. That was a long process of installing things, and reconfiguring things, but fast forward and I have the issue manager tool installed! Of course I go to run it and I realize there's a typo in the command name (already previously noted in an issue on the github repo). So I go mucking around renaming the command in my system. And I finally get it all to work, but I realize there are things I'd like modified in this tool.
But it's nodejs! I've literally never touched nodejs code before. Well, before today. Anyway, I decide to clone the repo and modify it. Turns out, nodejs is pretty easy to read. I modified the code to make the issues display the way I want, and it was really satisfying and it reminded me of how awesome the concept of "typing words on a computer and having things magically happen" is.
I actually wanted to modify the typo in the command name, but I didn't even see the typo in the code in the repo, so perhaps that's already been done and the package on npm hasn't been updated? That's a lot of other stuff that I don't understand. Well if I modify something in a useful way, maybe I'll see how the whole pull request thing works.
October 14, 2018 11:36 AM
Mid Year Resolutions: Part 4
What? I'm still making more resolutions? Well, I'm still writing blog posts about new resolutions. I've really had these in my head for a while. Anyway, this should be the last "Mid Year Resolution" post I make.
Learn Mandarin
Hey! I'm supposed to be learning Teochew, not Mandarin! Well it turns out that knowing Mandarin makes it a lot easier to learn Teochew. The nice thing about trying to learn Mandarin is that there are SO many resources available so I don't have to put nearly as much effort into this. Right now I'm trying to do just a little bit of duolingo every day. Once I get past that, I'll move onto another Chinese learning app. It's kind of nice because it allows me to see what characters are the same between Mandarin and Teochew, and what characters are different.
Keep learning Teochew and improving my Teochew app
Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about this. I feel like I have so many things I want to accomplish, but this is really at the heart of it all. I still have so many big ideas for how to improve the app while learning things about programming along the way. Right now I'm trying to add ten new words each week. If I have time to make other enhancements to the app, I'll do that too.
January 5, 2019 7:01 PM
Happy New Year!
It's been a while since my last post because I get lazy around the holidays. But it's a new year now! New Years is one of my favorite holidays because of resolutions. I looked back at my old resolutions that I've made and I realized that I make way too many of them and they're all the same. So I'm trying to focus a little more this year and tackle the one important goal that always eludes me:
Go to sleep early
Of course, there are other things I want to do this year but I think instead of trying to do so many things, I'm going to make my other goal really generic:
Do something productive every day
I'm going to try and actually keep track of my productivity by keeping a journal. I kind of want to try bullet journaling but it seems like way too much work. And hopefully, I'll get back to my food challenge! I have lots of food related ideas so stay tuned.
June 21, 2020 9:33 PM
I wanted to start a blog...again
It's June 2020, and the world has been pretty weird since March. My whole way of life seemed to get thrown off by the coronavirus. I'm home a lot more than I used to be. I acted like a bum for the first couple of months, but I'm getting myself back on track. And as a part of that, I'm going to try blogging again.
I don't know, I just really like blogs. I know I have my food blog, but what I needed was a blog where I could write about anything. I also want to make this site a lot nicer, and maybe get back to the Teochew stuff as well. That's going to take some time, but in the meantime I'll just post my thoughts here.
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