John Zeitler

Here’s a tip for all you young folks out there just starting your collegiate education in the wonderful field of programming. Go out right now and get the SCJP6 study guide, and get your certification during your school years, and not afterwards. I mean it.

I’m probably going to have to switch gears a little bit with my own plan and just sit in on the course this time around until I can focus on the book and the exam, probably at the beginning of 2011. There’re a lot of projects planned for 2011, in fact, but that’s the really big one as far as I can see.

I got to thinking a little bit about some of the things that have usually happened around this time of year. As August winds down and the fall begins, my mind tends towards the past, and thoughts of home. Three years ago, as August was ending, I was struck by an amazing amount of inspiration, and wound up writing what would eventually metamorphose into the beginnings of the universe in which A Civics Lesson is set. The musings therein spawned the title of this post, in point of fact, and while it no longer fits the story, it’s still appropriate. Because now, in this week or so, I’ve managed to be struck with more inspiration, in particular to finish up Frangible Time and hopefully start on a formal outline for the sequel to ACL.

Which is great news, considering I thought I’d be too busy to work on any writing for the foreseeable future.

This week has been remarkably fulfilling, in many respects. Things that were set in motion months ago have crept ever closer to their destinations; some in small steps, and others in tremendous leaps forward. Some things, even, arrived at their next staging points days or even weeks ahead of the schedule I’d been banking on. Regardless, the next few weeks are going to be a bit of a lull as I continue some of the preparatory work towards the big rush of activity that will be September and October. I promise you all now, of course, that by the first of November, I’ll be able to reveal most, if not all, of the details of this current Secret Project.

In the meantime, I’ll just have to keep teasing you.

Today was a whirlwind of activity, and all of it turned out to be very, very good. I’ll be able to talk more about it soon but suffice to say I have my work cut out for me these next ten weeks.

So apparently I’ve been invited to join a fantasy football league, and either due to the sleep deprivation or just a general lack of common sense, I’ve decided to participate. This despite the fact that my interest in football is largely passive, in that I can recognize good football when it’s played on TV and not by looking at a bunch of random, indecipherable numbers on a spreadsheet somewhere.

This is gonna get interesting.

Got a couple of surprises today, most of them pleasant but some unexpected. The one that I can talk about, though, is that the Asian grocery store that burned down literally weeks after I discovered it has finally re-opened, and I’ve already ingratiated myself (albeit inadvertently) to the proprietors by knowing how to handle myself inside such an establishment.

Of course they opened yesterday, and the store is still really, really bare in terms of stuff. I honestly wish I’d known it was opening soon, as it has the kind of rice cooker I was looking for all of last month (though I’m happy with what I settled on). Also, they don’t have udon yet. I mean, they have the instant kind, but not the real kind. Well, it’s still too warm for udon anyway… probably not until football starts, really. The clerk said they’d be adding more coolers soon, which I hope will contain the kinds of fixings I’d need to make udon properly… in the meantime, they also have mochiko, so if I were to undertake the making of mochi– something I certainly would like to try my own hand at– I can do so at any time.

Again, that’s probably not going to happen until after November. But for an entirely different reason.

I apologize for three no-content posts in a row, but tonight was ludicrously busy for me and I am just now (10:45p) getting things ready so that I can go to bed. Sorry.

I’d said, at the beginning of this year, that I was going to do writeups on the games I finish after their completion, and I slacked off from this due to the whole “no-commercialism” thing in February. Tomorrow you’ll see my thoughts on Split/Second, which– if any game this year merits the label– may just be a contender for the top ten for 2010.

Oh, and just for the record? Baccano!? Awesome. You should watch it. Really.

Most of what I’m doing here in between fielding calls is either working with my hands or otherwise leaving my main computer idle, so I’m taking advantage of that by ripping some DVDs to watch on the bus rides from here on out. In truth, I should have been doing that weeks ago, but you take what you can get, really. In my case, I’m probably going to be dumping the files to my bigger external drive once I’m done with them and only putting what I need at the moment on the phone. (My iTunes setup has everything on a 400GB drive that I honestly thought, when I bought it, would be “too massive to fill”. I was half-right: I’m still only about 50% full on it, but it doesn’t have too much video on it. The bigger drive is a 1TB bit bucket.)

I did mention I could do that while I slept, right? ‘Cause I can, and will…

I was sort of looking forward to going somewhere over the long weekend, but I found out this afternoon that there may be a need for me to stay close by in case of work heating up. Naturally there’s no way of knowing for certain beforehand, and it’s my luck that if I do decide to entangle myself by going off the grid for a while, the odds of that call coming shoot up to about 90%. So naturally things kind of look grim for the 4th.

At least I’ll make the most productive use of my time possible by trying very hard to finish up the chapter of Frangible Time that’s set to start on the 9th…