Sunday, November 2, 2008

My life right now

So it's Ben this time. Usually Emily is the one to blog, but I thought I'd take a turn. Life lately has been busy. I've been working extra at work lately and really doing well (if I do say so myself). I'm one of the more productive members of my team, so I think I'll have a favorable review next year. At least that's what I tell myself when I have to work extra. The downside of being so productive at work is that they expect so much sometimes. Emily has been very supportive. Did you know that I don't have to get up in the middle of the night when Lily cries? How lucky am I? Lily's sleeping a lot better at night lately. If we get her to bed on time, she'll usually sleep all through the night, and if she doesn't, it's usually just at 5 or so, so she sleeps most of the way through the night all the time now, and that's nice. (By the way that was just a big run-on sentence, but I'm not going to change it because I don't want to!)

I'm still taking the bus to work every day. It takes about 45 minutes when I could drive it in 25ish, but I get to be on my laptop the whole time, plus we don't need two cars which saves a lot of money too. Oh, and did I mention that not only does Microsoft pay for my bus pass, they sometimes give out gift cards to people who ride the bus. I've already gotten 3 so far. I like having the bus time to work on my laptop and work on whatever project I'd like, but with the rainy Seattle weather, I have to put it away during transfers to keep it from getting rained on.

For those of you who don't know, I started programming when I was about 13 years old. My brother Daniel and his friend were making small programs in QBasic, and I, being the tag-along little brother that I was, learned to so I could fit in. Well it turns out that I'm good at it and I love programming (I actually enjoy going to work every day). So anyway, you can't find a QBasic compiler anymore these days, at least not one that will run on Windows Vista. But they did come out with something similar called Small Basic recently and I've been teaching Emily how to program using that, and she's doing really well. She's working on a Breakout (single player-pong) type game, which is really good for a beginner. Small basic does make things a little easier than they were back in the days of QBasic where all you had was PSET, and that wasn't fast enough, so you had to figure out how to write directly to the screen using PEEK & POKE (I bet Daniel is the only one who understood what I just said there).

image Emily's Game. She even made the blocks pink so it would be a girly game.

Me and Emily are on the ball! We're both almost done with Christmas shopping, and birthday shopping which is pretty impressive because I usually wait until the last minute. Now the hard part is keeping everything hidden until Christmas. There's not a lot of places in the condo that we don't use on a regular basis, so we'll have to be creative about hiding spots.

We're going to my parents for Thanksgiving, and I'm really looking forward to it because we don't get to see them very often, and I'm close with my dad. We're spending a whole week there, which means we'll be there for Em's birthday too. I've gotta take Em & Lily to the zoo there because I keep telling her how the Denver zoo is so much cooler than the Woodland park zoo. So look forward to pictures of that in a month or so.

So there it is, my life right now, but the only reason my mom reads this blog is for pictures of Lily. So this next section is dedicated to you mom.

Bubble Bath 005
My Lily...so adorable


Bubble Bath 011
Lily all bundled up for a walk outside

Bubble Bath 062
Rubber ducky, you're the one!

Bubble Bath 021
Lily taking over the computer chair.

Pumpkin Patch 183
Our Halloween costume. Lily's wasn't that creative, but me and Em
liked dressing like babies.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

A few minor nitpicks to re-assert my nerd cred (and 'cuz I'm overly detailed-oriented too):

"Daniel and his friend were making small programs [in QBasic]"
--You call ASCII playing cards or that Star Wars card game knockoff small? Well, maybe they were 100s of lines long 'cuz we weren't smart enough to code things right...

"you can't find a QBasic compiler anymore these days"
--BASIC's an interpreted language, not compiled; big difference, you should know that. ASIC was one that did create executables. It is weird how the world is trying to pretend pre-VB variants of BASIC didn't exist...maybe they're right to be ashamed though.

"so you had to figure out how to write directly to the screen using PEEK & POKE"
--Oh, that wasn't even the 1/2 of it. PEEK/POKE would allow you to directly manipulate pixels on VGA Screen 13 (320x200 pixels at 256 colors), but to get SVGA you'd have to use INT x10... We had to learn assembly to get around most of QBasic's inefficiencies ('cuz it didn't seem to have libraries/modules and stuff)

Natalie Lundberg said...

Wow! look at that Lily go...amazing

Where did you find adult snuggle buns?

(Emily, Don't let Ben turn you into too big of a nerd)

See you in a few weeks

-Natalie

Ashlyn said...

My dad used to teach me how to program stuff! What you were saying sounds like stuff he used to tell me! Not that I get it anymore...

I love Lily's roar! She is so adorable, and is growing up so fast!