My Chicken Laid an Egg!

Maybe I should mention that we have a new addition to the family - a little orange chicken. She's called Cocolina, after the rooster we used to have called Coco, which is short for cocos, meaning rooster in Romanian.

My grandma originally came home with three chickens, two of which are now soup, and the third is (after a lot of campaigning on the rest of the family's behalf) now our pet. She was in a really mangled state when we got her, but since then she's grown feathers in all the patches where there were none, and she generally looks much healthier. She laid one egg the day we got her, but it's been over a month since then and she completely stopped.

I was outside talking to my mum today when Cocolina started making lots of strange noises that I can only describe as a sounding like a chicken growling angrily. I checked to see whether she had laid an egg, but there was nothing there. It got to the point where me and my mum could barely hear each other over the angry growls, when we checked for a second time and there it was - an brand new egg! Good work Cocolina, we are so proud :)

Congratulations Matt!

Just got back from a celebratory dinner (my shout for Matt) for Matt getting the house! His original offer wasn't accepted, but they accepted the second offer, so now he's handling all the fun stuff like getting a broker, a settlement agent, inspections, and whatever other magic you need to do before they'll give you a house.

Not sure what the plan is yet with regard to moving in (it might be leased for a while), but it's a real gem, and I can't wait to make it home :)

Pet Shop Update

It's the last week of uni holidays and, as always, it's gone way too fast. I've been working a lot slower on my game than I planned to, so with uni starting, it looks like it's gonna take me a lot longer than I thought.

I've just finished writing the prototype which was a fully playable version without some of the extra features I'm going to add in later. I got to the point where I wanted to add the possibility of doubling up on items, so for example, you could drag a fish onto another fish, and a little 2 would appear below it. Then, if you complete a pen with ALL the fish attributes doubled up, you'd get double the points. I hacked it in, and it semi worked, but it was a LOT tricker than it should have been since the code has got so convoluted that even the simplest changes are a struggle.

Now that I've proved that it's do-able and play-able, it's time to stop and start from scratch. By making decisions in the prototype I've got a really good idea about how to do it properly now. I'm keeping some of the classes that I wrote really well, (I'm happy with the simpler stuff like my Scoring and ImageLibrary classes, so I'm just in the middle of writing test harnesses for those), and completely ripping apart others.

So that's what's happening with Pet Shop in case anyone was wondering if I'd completely given up on it :)

In other news... Matt's in the middle of fighting for a house in Ballajura. It's pretty much the best house we've seen so far, in a perfect little cul de sac. Fingers crossed!

I'm a (second) aunty!

My cousin Simona just gave birth to her baby boy!

*** Congratulations Sim and Chad! ***

We can't wait to meet him when they come over in late August :)

Results are Out

Today's the day everyone finds out if they're gonna be doing their units for a second (or third?) time. Hope everyone passed and is happy with their results! Here's mine:

• 100 Artificial Intelligence & Logic Programming
• 77 Embedded Systems
• 90 Circuits & Electronic Systems 3
• 91 Communication Systems

Overall I'm smiling, just annoyed about embedded systems. I'm not complaining, but it was a second year unit, open book exam, and its still my lowest grrrr.

Transformers!

Well it's cheap ass Tuesday, and I've just came back from seeing the Transformers movie!

Me, Matt and some friends from uni arrived at Innaloo for the 6.30 screening only to find that it had been sold out, so we decided to buy tickets for the 8.00 screening. All of us there had our tickets, but Ro jumped back in line to get Lara's ticket since she was running late. As he was in the line (this is at about 6.50 by the way) the board started flashing:

Transformers: 6:30 (FULL) 8.00 (FEW)

But all was well - Ro managed to get one of the last tickets for Lara, and we had dinner at Fasta Pasta (mmm classy) while we waited for the movie.

I really enjoyed it! It was really fun seeing Matt turn into a little kid again every time something Transformery happened. The movie was really cute and I thought there was a nice balance between the fun and the serious. Although, as expected of any movie with a technological base, it was extremely cringe worthy. We all laughed out loud when the blonde girl (who was meant to be a signal expert? hahah in everyone's dreams) mentioned Fourier transforms :)

One thing that sort of annoyed me was the weight. This is strange to describe, but things look real only if they move as if they have the right weight. I think a lot of the times it looked like the transformers were moving way too nimbly for how big they were so that made it look strange, and also made it really hard to tell what was going on. I think the perfect example of what I mean about getting the weight right is in Asuka's final fight in End of Evangelion.

Definitely worth seeing, I'm glad we FINALLY did!

Smooth Sailing

I just got home from a fantastic dinner with Amy and Kym, my two closest friends from high school, and I just got to thinking how nice things have been these holidays. We had great food and great wine at Villa Da Vinci (a local restaurant in Ballajura). It was really nice to catch up since Kym has been studying in Ireland and Amy and I have both had a hard semester at uni, so we'd been craving a nice night out for a long time. I topped off the night by watching an episode of Cowboy Bebop with Matt, over a warm tea. What a nice end to the week :)

My game's coming along smoothly; I've just worked on being able to drag things between the pen components, and I'm planning on adding a timer next. It's getting to the point where it's almost a real game! I'm really excited that I've finally seen something through, as opposed to having an idea and then getting distracted and completely forgetting about it. I'm really looking forward to putting up a prototype to see what people think, so at the moment I'm hacking a lot of things up, but I'll sit down and redesign the whole thing when it's all operational. Matt's been working on some more graphics which is awesome, so we'll have something complete in no time :)

I'm trying to line up some vacation work for the summer holidays, and I've got my fingers crossed about getting a placement at an engineering company. I'd really like to get some experience in that area of my degree since I'm pretty confident on the software side of things, but am really clueless when it comes to engineering stuff in practice. So hopefully I get some good news from Raytheon!

My cousin Simona is about 11 days off from giving birth to my... I guess second nephew? Bah I'm not sure how that works but I'm gonna call my self an aunty anyways :) She'll be coming over to Perth sometime in August and I can't wait to meet my nephew! It's funny... I'm an only child, and none of my friends have had young siblings, so I've really only seen about 3 babies (apart from the ones you see in strollers in shops), and I've never actually held one! I can't wait to hold him!

Our house hunting has been going pretty well, and Matt's put an offer down on a house we're really interested in. Hopefully that goes well because it'd be fantastic to finally get our foot in the real estate door. Plus it's pretty much now or never cause house prices are apparently on the rise again pretty soon :|

So that's what's been going on for me, lots of nice things to think about :) I'm really enjoying my holidays and I'm taking it REALLY easy. I might be tutoring Kym's bro at some math, and I may be helping out Amy with some work at Video Ezy, but apart from that and my game, it's been smooth sailing for me these holidays :)

Pet Shop

I've recently started making a game. I don't actually know why I started, but I just thought of a cute little idea and realised that I'd probably be able to make it if I put my mind to it. It's still in the VERY early stages, and is just a prototype at the moment, but I can already tell that it's gonna be fun to play just from what I've got working right now.

The game's gonna be called something along the lines of Pet Shop, and it's all about putting together pet bundles. An attribute will appear in the middle of the board, and then you have to place it in a pen. The point will be to get all the attributes of a pet (so the animal, the house, the toy, and the food) together in a pen (each blue area is a pen), which will then get you money (or points I guess). There's also stuff you can't do, like put a bird and a cat together, in which case you'll loose everything that's in the pen with the conflicting animals.

I'm still trying to figure out the game play exactly, but there'll be a time delay that lets you move the conflicting animals away from each other before they fight. I'm also trying to figure out some other details like how the points will work, when and how you loose lives, how you can flush the pens etc. Hopefully that'll all fall into place :)

Matt's been doing the graphics as I've been going along, and we've got a fish and a steak so far :) I really like what he's done and I think it's gonna look really cute when we're done with it. Please ignore the ugliness of the title and the white background etc, it's still a working progress!

So I'll keep posting about my progress and hopefully I'll have a prototype to put on here pretty soon. Watch this space :)

Exams... are... OVER!!! YAY!!!

Just had my last exam yesterday and it feels so good to be finished :) I was really happy with how AI, Communication Systems and Circuits and Electronic Systems went, but I'm really worried about my Embedded Systems exam (which was a 2nd year, open book exam, so that was unexpected!). I'll post about my results, which should come out in about a month.

So that's it for the semester :) Although I'm still trying to figure out my stupid enrollment. The uni canceled a unit I was enrolled in (Neural Computation, which I'm actually really upset about), and so now I have to re enroll with either Functional Programming, Concurrent Programming (which is also probably canceled, thus no unit web page), and Human Computer Interaction (which sounds like a slack off unit). Please feel free to give me any suggestions. I'm hoping to pick concurrent, but I'm not getting my hopes up since I'm pretty sure it's not going to be run *sigh*. I need to organise a meeting with a course adviser about the whole mess.

So I've just had a relaxing day cleaning up my study, going for my run (I've been slacking off lately!), shopping (bought some nice speakers for Matt's new LCD tv), and going out to dinner with a few friends. Tomorrow I'm gonna go pay off my enrollment for polemoves intermediate (starting Saturday woohoo!), do a bit more shopping (I've been deprived, OK?), get my hair cut/coloured (so overdue - my colour is about half way down my head), and start on my game!

It's nice to actually be able to think about all this stuff without feeling guilty about not studying for exams!

Optical Switching Tute

Just got an email from one of the CUDOS committee letting me know that I'm one of the 30 students from 3rd and 4th year engineering, physics and science being flown to Sydney for a workshop on optical switching. Yay! It's in September so it's yonks away but it's definitely something I'll be looking forward to next semester.

I really have no idea what it's going to be about, but I guess that's the point. I'm sure it'll be all about how what we've learned in uni is going to be redundant quite soon - but I'm pretty used to getting told that given that I'm doing computer science aswell :| But I'm really interested to find out what it's all about because I've just done a unit called Circuits and Electronic Systems 3 (my exam for that is this Friday... AHH!). I've just spent the whole semester learning about MOSFET's (and to a lesser extent bipolar) transistors, so I'm full bottle on the current uses, speed limitations, etc. This workshop is about the research being done into optical switching which is faster than current technology. How exciting! (look - it's exciting for me, OK?)

As an added bonus the retreat is in Coogee beach in Sydney, which is the next beach up from Bondi, so I can't wait for that :)

Anyway back to exam study :)