Tsadi

In a previous post I went to the trouble of outlining some of my professional projects concerning literary and programming/engineering goals that I want to accomplish over the next couple of years. This post is concerned more with what I believe to be an ideal life in most or all ways and how best I can achieve that life.

For nearly a year -- at least ten months -- there has been a stray cat outside. I've been feeding him, despite Sara's irritation (she considers him ugly) and his rather irritating habit of slaughtering the local pigeons. The cat is skinnier than a supermodel and always happy to see me, though, so I feel a tenderness toward him. This is part and parcel to being an animal lover. Perhaps I'm not serving him well by giving him an incentive to stick around (and therefore making it less likely that he will find a better owner), but I believe it is saving his life.

Well, I'm a bit chagrined that I haven't posted in the past few days, but I've been rather busy. It's the first week of the Fall semester, which means I've been riding the bus 1.5-2 hours each way to UNLV and back, and taking my first real in-major classes. I'm taking Computer Engineering I (CpE 100), Computer Science I (CS 135), Calculus (MATH 181), and the don't-forget-about-me Nevada Constitution (PSC 100, a 1-credit hour online class).

I've settled on what I'm going to do with The Electric Coma, at least for the time being. The obvious problem that confronts my general idea of creating an interactive fiction system as a way of conveying the story is that I don't have such a system at hand, and creating the content will take much longer than it will to create the system. The logical conclusion, therefore, is to create the content before the system.

Well, one thing that I need to do quite quickly is to list my projects for the next few years. I'm intent on a "closed door" policy where if someone comes up to me in two or three months saying "hey, I've got this great idea," I'll just look at them and say "sorry, my time is spoken for until the middle of 2012." Which is pretty much how it's going to have to be, I think, if I'm going to get anything done.

Since I have a child on the way , the simple truth of the matter is that I might not have all that much of a choice about where much of my energy is going to go. And obviously, that's going to be my first priority. But I also have my professional development to consider, and that's really what this post is about.

I've been messing with Drupal for a week or two now, trying to create a workable system for what I intend to create over the next few years. I suppose it's about time to make that mythical First Post that I always find so much more difficult than the Second Post or Subsequent Posts. This is the first real blog that I've started in a couple years, and I genuinely intend to keep this one up. It's a bit more complex than a blog, but whatever.

So what am I doing here?