My Spare Time

I need to handle my spare time better. For several years, I often worked on Pyxelation (my games program) and its predecessors in my spare time. But now I find I might have to abandon that project. Currently Mat Hopwood is developing his own Silverlight Game Engine, of which he claims that he can reuse much of its code for the Pyxelation Game Engine. But I might have to pay him $8000 to develop that engine. What's the point of spending all that money for a project that may never make any money? There are over 200 game creation systems registered with SourceForge, and they're all open source. That means that most of them are probably free. How do you compete with free? Instead of paying Mat to develop the engine, I propose to make Pyxelation open source and develop the engine myself. After I have lots of code written, I can recruit people who have some spare time (students) to help out with Pyxelation. Next month I intend to email Mat and ask him how his game engine is coming along.

There are alternatives to Pyxelation (which is very time-consuming). I can write up my Computaverse idea for the layman. Computaverse is my theory that our universe is a computer simulation that runs on a computer composed of giant 3D lattices of logic gates. Or I can design a simulation of the human brain, but that project is most likely a non-starter. My latest idea, MyChat, is also probably a non-starter. They say that necessity is the mother of invention. My goal was to stay in touch with my sister, who lives on the other side of the continent. I'm not very good with talking on the phone, and she's not very good with email. My solution was a chat application, that sits on top of digital content such as blogs, photos, and social networking data. So I can chat in real-time with my sister, and the digital content gives us something to chat about. Not exactly an earthshaking killer app. Also she's not a very good typist.

Today I quit my computer teaching job, which I have held on Thursday afternoons for over a year. I'm not cut out for jobs which involve working with people. I might up my other job from 3 days a week to 5 days a week. But that still leaves Sundays, a whole day of spare time to fill up. On Saturdays I read the newspaper for over 2 hours, and then often go back to bed. In March my employer might move west about one mile, to Tomken + Matheson (still easily accessible by public transportation). Normally I either eat lunch at McDonald's, or go hungry all day (McDonald's food is bad for you). I'm half-hoping there are no fast food joints within easy walking distance of the new location, which will help me lose weight.

I think I will have cup of coffee no. 3 after I post this. I wrote a weird email to my second/(third?) cousin Marsha, and CC-ed it to a bunch of people. I apologized to all those people, so that's all over and done with. My depression lifted today. Tomorrow at my main job I must fix a bug, and begin final testing of my current project there. That project has taken way too long. Before my depression lifted today, I was thinking dark thoughts about killing myself by hypothermia (it's supposed to be very cold tomorrow night). I still thought that I would probably call Ralph, my ex-brother-in-law, before doing the deed, and he would most likely talk me into making a beeline for the Emergency dept. at the Clarke. But I'm not depressed anymore. So now I will fuel up with caffeine, and commune with my blog readers, if any, some other time.