31 October 1997: Blockages

Friday, 31 October 1997:

Blockages

Not a lot of progress on Riven today; I'm mildly stuck in a few places, and I figure I must be overlooking something because I feel like I need to do a bunch of exhaustive searches (known as "trial-and-error" to you non-nerds) to figure out some of the puzzles, and there's so damned much running around in Riven to take that approach. "Okay, back two islands, now up one, now take the long way round because the damn door's closed, blah blah blah..." But I'm making some headway. Wish I knew what the fershlugginer device you see when you first appear in the game does, though.

We had a Halloween party at work today, which was fairly amusing. Some good costumes, like the guy dressed up as the Statue of Liberty. For some reason I thought of a pretty good costume this morning (not that I had time to implement it, even if I'd had time): Do a get-up like the golden age Green Lantern comic book character, and create a jack-o-lantern and paint it green for the lantern.

I also learned that the development deadline is a week later than I thought it was, which might explain why I was a little worried about completing my projects on time. I've gotta find a new way to do my personal time-management; try to hammer the company-mandated approaches into something that works for me just isn't happening. Obviously I've got to try something on the side.

My Mom wrote that one of her cats is having serious intestinal blockage problems, and needed an operation. He's not too happy right now, though he's so trusting that the humans will work it out for him. Poor old guy. Her cats are about ten years old now. I hope my guys don't have that trouble, though they're not yet four.

ObStats: I seem to be up to about ten readers per day of this journal. Not bad, really. I don't get many comments, though apparently my mailto commands were screwed up (actually, I suspect they just weren't working for Microsoft's Anal Explorer, since they worked fine for me in Netscape).

I'm contemplating some minor changes to the graphics. I don't have much interest in redesigns except for functional purposes. I think my site's basic structure and appearance are fine given the amount of work I want to put into them. So you may see some small changes in the near future.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)