rainy day

My main computer has been turned off all day today up until about five minutes before I started writing this post (about 3PM). I got up around 7AM because my body just woke up and it just felt futile in trying to go back to sleep when my body was saying “Here I am! I'm up! Let's go!” I spent the morning reading through Learning Perl and working through the exercises, which are starting to actually become a bit challenging. I actually found myself looking in the back of the book on one or two of them because the clever/tricky solution I was supposed to come up with was just not happening with me at that point in time. It really is quite fascinating how a programming language can be in and of itself based around cleverness. Maybe it is just my perception at this point. I can't even really say that I'm learning Perl for any directly practical reason, other than that I do tend toward code-oriented solutions and those necessarily a lot of typing of text and occasionally having to go through and make the same stupid edit on a thousand different lines somewhere. If nothing else, I see it as an interesting mental exercise, a set of interesting problems that require thinking in a slightly different way; and I know from reading about and practicing lateral thinking that that's the sort of thing that can really stimulate mental growth and more habitual innovative thought. Plus, it never seems to hurt for a programmer to know how to write a quick & dirty Perl script. Or so I've heard.. from a friend or two, and maybe a movie.

Anyway, I've got my main machine up now and have all that other stuff taken care of, and even have a blog post pretty much written, too. So about the only thing I have left to do today is to actually get some work done. I noticed that some people bought my earlier game Patience over the weekend, as part of the Because We May promotion, which is awesome (thank you!). I was thinking that maybe it's getting around time to update the game.. seeing as the last update was, oh, last July.. I was playing the game a bit over the weekend after having watching this video on “juiciness” and thought maybe the game could use some of that.  I have a couple of ideas about what to do. I should probably write some of them down.. :) Then again, it might be more fun to just wing it and do it all game jam style. I haven't even looked at the project file yet, so it might be a good idea to let it simmer a little bit longer so I can get some of the ideas down on paper and then blast into it. In the meantime, I can do some of that boring visually-aided debugging I've been doing lately..