I've been a big fan of the Danger Hiptop cell phone, and have made a decent wage writing games for it. But writing in Java hurts my pride, and when my third Hiptop in a row died a hardware death I decided it was time to rethink my choice of platform ( Read more... )

Nathaniel earned a second yellow stripe this morning; I got to watch the whole thing, this time from up front as one of the black belts helping out with the ceremonies. Fun! He was remarkably mature: no squirming, no silliness, good effort. He took his time with his pattern and did it strongly, even though the other children were rushing their ( Read more... )

Well, so much for that one ( Read more... )

From time to time, I work out of my house; I've got a suite of software packages that help me punch through the office firewall, connect to shared resources and even view and use my office computer as if I were sitting right in front of it ( Read more... )

Yet another exciting day: I tested for black belt this morning.  The whole process took just under three hours--though half of it I was just standing by watching the junior members test, and helping out only by holding boards for breaking or playing attacker for self-defense tests.

The test went quite well, I think.  The patterns went smoothly--didn ( Read more... )

I recently traded in my '02 New Beetle. Kind of strange to remember how excited I was to get that car originally; over the last five years, it spent a great deal of time in the shop and accumulated thousands of dollars of repair bills. When I traded it in, it had 75,000 miles--was on its third windshield, had a driver-side window that still ( Read more... )

Isaac and I attended our first TKD tournament yesterday. The crush of people--particularly at the beginning--was amazing. Since Tara was still at church when it started, for a while there I had all three boys--at least until Isaac went down to the main floor to compete ( Read more... )

The first bit of coding for Hero is coming up! I've written yet more specs--which I won't bother you with here--and am ready to actually start producing something usable ( Read more... )

I've recently written another three or four low-level specs for some of the more easily separable pieces of the Hero game architecture. Still haven't tackled the big ones (the Game Rules Engine and its attendant data structures), but it's progress anyway ( Read more... )

Omega is now the featured app on hiptop.com's main site: http://www.hiptop.com/#catalog

( See their game summary... )