Monday 8 June 2009

You've Reached The Office Of Psychiatrist Maya...

Sunday I spent another morning at the swimming pool in Almere-Stad. This time I encountered the Chinese family as usual, which was fun, in addition to another family with three children I had met before. In addition to that I spent the last hour or so talking to an Afghani man about relationships, our youths and lots of other things. I got a lot of compliments from him on my smile, giggle and such :P

The rest of the day I spent on taking pictures of some items I'm selling online, or rather some items Pieter is throwing away and which I'm trying to make a buck off :) They include a JVC 26" CRT TV which just needs a whack now and then to keep the image visible, a 21" Sun CRT monitor with dual-inputs which needs a slight adjusting of its electron guns or so to get rid of some faint coloured lines and finally a Killer Instinct arcade cabinet. This cabinet includes the cabinet itself, the original power supply and only lacks the mainboard and monitor. I put the ads for those items on Marktplaats.nl, which is owned by eBay, but is less greedy towards buyers and sellers (most actions and categories are free).

Last night I had the option of taking a sleeping pill, but I had been feeling so tired during the day, to the point where I found myself completely dozing off before 8 PM, that I was fairly certain I'd sleep okay without help. In the end I slept from 10 PM to 6.30 AM, which is quite long compared to the past months. I felt weird, though, with the usual nausea and odd feeling around my abdomen/tummy which passed after a few hours. Right now I'm feeling relatively okay.

I had a nap today from 11 AM to 1 PM because I was feeling incredibly exhausted again. I'm still not feeling 100% right now, but better, especially after a forceful reminder by my body after waking up that it definitely believes it has something closely resembling a vagina. I must say that it's hard to deny the physical structures and responses I feel 'down there'. Very confusing. Also, I really hope the walls of my room are soundproof enough.

Further I have been doing some work today, mostly working on some code we'll be using throughout our games, like functions which deal with putting text on the screen. It's a lot more involved than one may think at first sight. Essentially one takes in a single character code at a time, say in UTF-8 encoding. This character code is the position of the character glyph (symbol) in the font archive, such as a TTF (true type) file. The font archive once loaded into memory is also called a 'font face', as it determines how the resulting text will look.

We'll be using UTF-8 throughout our games for text. While not all fonts have the full Unicode set of characters for all languages included, it nevertheless means that we'll have a common standard for all text strings in our code and thus with the proper fonts things will display as intended which takes a lot of guess work out of matters. Kind of like the pain of viewing foreign websites before UTF-8 became common there. I really don't miss switching between encoding types in Netscape (yes, 4.7x) and Mozilla (I started using it at M16).

In other news, I should follow my own advice and use magnets to keep screws together whenever I'm taking something apart. I've got two small, black screws somewhere on the carpet or bed or somewhere else in my room and I have no clue where they might be. I feel stupid now.


Maya

4 comments:

grim4593 said...

There are two other ways to keep screws together. One, buy one of those clear plastic boxes with the individual compartments in it like for fishing. Another is to lay a piece of duct tape down, sticky side up and tape it down. Then as you take something apart you can write down where the screw came from, and stick it down so it doesn't get lost.

Maya Posch said...

Yup, all good advice :) Once I get a bit less poor I'm going to invest in a pile of such boxes precisely to store small components like screws and electronics. Never can have enough of those boxes.

Didn't try the duct tape one yet, seems a bit... sticky :P

grim4593 said...

Well, at one of my jobs that's how we take apart laptops. It makes sense when the laptops might be there for several days before the part we need gets shipped. By then I'd have forgotten how to put the thing back together.

Maya Posch said...

That makes sense, yes :) Especially if it's someone else's stuff you're working on, you can't be careful enough ;)