Time off of Work to Work

So, as I mentioned last time, I took two days off to get some work done, with some specific goals. I managed to get an update to Skewed out finally, after almost 2 months since I last posted. I should be able to get another one out fairly soon, as I wrote half of the immediately next one as the first thing I was working on when I was trying to blitz during December, but never got to doing.

I also wanted to get a sprite for Amy Carter done for Spiral Island, and for Xedre Kopta as well if I had time. However, it became clear to me, as I drew out a rough sketch to use as a template for spriting, that it has been way too long since I have done anything artwise, and I am terribly out of skill, so I will have to put that on the back burner and do a lot more practice before I get to any art, which would effectively put that as the very last thing I will do for Spiral Island. I know exactly how everything should look visually, getting it out of my head and into some form that can be used will be another story. Anyone have an Animus handy?

In the mean time, I got some actual structural work to Spiral Island done, making some key changes to allow me to now expand it past just the tile engine I had in place already. But by far the most interesting thing that came out of this vacation was something completely unplanned. I was contacted on YouTube concerning my map editor project on SourceForge, and out of that has now come a new group project for a whole RPG Kit suite which I am part of the team on. I will have to look into some of the rest of the RPG template for the XNA project, as I'm not using anything else from it aside from the tile engine since my needs for Spiral Island are significantly different.

So that's that, that's what is up right now. A rather productive set of days, I'm pleased, and am now wishing I was working more for myself. In time, I guess.

Downtime

Posting through Live Writer from Windows Seven again, mainly because I've been having some server issues all night and so I can just hold the draft here and post it later if it's down.

I haven't really been up to doing a lot lately. I've mainly been just goofing off, and trying to do some planning. I'm taking Monday and Tuesday off to take care of stuff and try and get moving again. If all goes according to plan, I'll have an update for Skewed finally, and have my main character sprite for Spiral Island. Which will be interesting, considering I am quite inept at drawing, so turning out something useful will be a challenge. If I have some time as well, I need to try and get some things cleaned up with my templates on here, and try and do something for a revamp of the AnacondaSoftware website.

So we'll see what happens, and I will go into things more at that time. In the mean time, it is incredibly foggy outside tonight.

Traffic Spike

I try to keep track of traffic on my sites. I regularly check the logs at the end of the month to see what sort of search results there were and if I have abnormal bandwidth hogs. I also look at them at other times if I'm curious, to see how things are going.

Blogs, as anyone should know, are a huge spam draw. Blog comment spam, which I keep a good handle on, and blog trackback and referral spam, which I'm able to keep control of as well, other sites don't fare so well sometimes. I've learned several techniques on the AnacondaSoftware DevBlog for dealing with it on Pivot specifically, and so had certain things in place here to prevent problems from even starting. Nonetheless, there are still some tries. I have tons of traffic and logs from sites trying to spam comments and referrals, but its all kept consistent and always blocked.

Although occasionally something strange happens. In particular, when I logged in to look at them today, I noticed a spike on the 18th. A huge spike. From one IP address, that traces back to Russia, in that one day I had over 2000 hits and page logs, and over 50 MB of bandwidth used. In comparison, I usually have between 2-3 MB of bandwidth used on a day to day basis for this blog. The spam log was relatively bare for that day, and there didn't appear to be any unusual page requests, so I'm not really sure what 50 MB of bandwidth was spent on, but it was done. And that IP hasn't been back since the 18th. I'm going to have to look through the raw logs for the month at this point, then, to see what exactly this machine was up to.

List Mess

Every so often if I need to try and find something I've written, but not sure what document I've written it in, I'll just go through every document until I find it. Doing this is often amusing, because I stumble upon some ackwardly written thing I had written that doesn't really make much sense when trying to reread it. Take, for example, this strange sentence in some miscelaneous work:

"They thought they had killed everyone, but they later discovered that the Queen, pregnant with a child, her nine month old son, and a servant had escaped on a ship heading for Earth."

In theory, this Queen in question was one of three escapees. The way its written, however, paints a rather different image, one that certainly seems far more painful.

Eh?

It's a common joke that Canadians often use "Eh?" at the end of their sentences, and if you're talking with them you should as well to fit in. In reality, however, that's far from being true, I've spoken to very few people from Canada that do that. Strangely enough, though, I use it far more often.

My use of it is rather interesting, though, I would think. My use of it in speech isn't related to Canada or the US, or English even, but in fact would probably be rooted in my studies of Japanese. I have quite a mix of oddities in my speech related to this, most prominent of which may be my own crossing of 'L's and 'R's in words at time, but "eh?" is a strange case. I would most equate it to the particle "ne". That in itself is is somewhat difficult to explain, at least at the moment it is for me, but it somewhat equates to a rhetorical question, or to mark something as a question that isn't really a question.

That's probably not an entirely accurate description of it, but that is roughly the use of it. In and of itself it is a marker that ends a sentence, so that being the case, would likely be why my speech has picked up some equivalent, namely the "Eh?" expression, to use in speech. I'm sure you could ask anyone at my work, I use it quite a bit myself.

Re-sRc

Over a year ago, I spoke some of my new alternate alias, sRc. At the time, as I mentioned, I needed a new alias to use in Skewed, as I was distancing myself from The Anaconda as exists in Spiral Island. Since then, however, as I've continued working on the Spiral Island project for XNA, I've come to realize something: my personality has changed a little from this character in the games.

In August, I went over a general ineptitude I have at coming up with names, and covered some general profiles I use for writing when not having any other character to work with. At this point, I have a new one, which would be me as I am now. At this point, I no longer consider myself as the same as the character I have defined, and instead am inclined to consider myself as myself, and as myself in other defined realms. At this point, I'm going to completely adopt the alias sRc, and drop from The Anaconda down to just Conda, leaving my actual full alias now as 'sRc//Conda'.

That said, of course the character in Skewed would be different than me as well. I will continue using sRc there, because that's where I came up with the name for. I also am stuck using The Anaconda in some places, because of various registrations. But I've now changed my MSN title to sRc//Conda, so there is the distinction, and any new stuff I will be using the alias sRc. This will start with an imaginary developer commentary character of sorts for Spiral Island, available on second play through, but I will go more into that later.

That's pronounced 'Sirk', by the way, not 'source'.

Windows Seven

Just a short post right now, at the moment I'm working with the Windows 7 Beta, and decided to try out Windows Live Writer for posting to the blog. I'm not really sure if this will work or not, so I'll just let this submit and see what happens. I have other stuff to discuss later.