Sean Middleditch

I mentioned my desire to purchase an acoustic bass and a bouzouki. Again, it’ll probably be a little while before I can purchase either, and even then I can only afford one. I’m currently thinking about one of the following two instruments. I need to find the time to go to some local music stores and play them in person, see how well they sound.

Michael Kelly “Dragonfly” 4-string Acoustic Bass - approx $500

Trinity College Bouzouki & Case - approx $450

I’m still leaning towards the bass. I’d also still rather have an acoustic-only bass, but I can’t for the life of me find one in the same price range. Sure, with instruments you might get what you pay for, but I don’t have a lot of options given my income and current financial goals. (Like, as mentioned before, paying off my vehicle loan entirely.)

I might also go with the five-string version of the bass. It’s only $40 more than the four-string, and five-strings are certainly popular these days. I’ll need to find a dealer that offers the five-string with frets, though - I don’t think I could handle playing without frets given my current musical talents.

Pushed out a new ZMP Draft today. I added a sound package.

It’s pretty simplistic, but should be quite usable. It has two main commands: sound.music and sound.play. The sound.music commands set a background sound to play on loop, with some controls for fading in/out/between tracks. The sound.play command just plays a single song with a limited number of loops. There’s also a sound.stop command to stop all sounds started with sound.play.

While there are certainly many more things one could do with sound, I don’t think a MUD really needs any more. Positional sound and the like certainly seems like massive over-kill. I think the only possible feature that might be useful would be individual volume control for each sound. I might add that in.

The specification mandates Ogg Vorbis sound files. I’m doing this for two reasons. The first is that without specifying a format, many clients may not support the sound format used by the MUD server, defeating the purpose of using a standardized package to begin with. The second reason to to help make sure servers are always using a free and non-patent-encumbered format, ensuring that any client will be legally allowed to play the sounds.

That was surprisingly very quick. I’m already feeling pretty good, except for some unexplained fatigue and a head-ache. That might be due to a flu bug that my family now has, though. If it’s not one thing, it’s another… ;-)

My inner ear infection is acting up again. What that basically means is that the world is spinning, I’m having a lot of trouble balancing, I get quesy whenever I sit up, and reading tends to be difficult. The only reason I’m on the computer at all is because I’d rather gouge my eyeballs out with a hot, jagged spoon than lay in a bed bored and near lifeless.

Hopefully this outbreak doesn’t last too long.

For anyone interested in the medical side, it’s a form of the herpes virus. Since that tends to freak people out, do note that things like the chicken pox are caused by a form of herpes - the virus comes in many forms beyond the commonly known STD. I have had chicken pox many years ago, and I do get cold sores, so the most likely explanation is that the virus responsible for one of the two moved into my inner ear somehow.

It started about a year or two ago. Think I blogged about it then, too. Right now it’s nowhere near as bad as at first. The first outbreak, according to the ear specialist I went to, usually lasts about a month to many years. I was very lucky in that mine lasted about two weeks. I had a second outbreak last summer, but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad. This one is about as bad the one I had over the summer.

Just as with other forms of herpes, there’s no cure. There’s no medication to reduce the outbreaks or lesson their impact. It’s pretty much just me being miserable until it’s over.

What really scares me is that if the virus can move from my mouth or skin to my inner ear, then just how easy is it to move into the brain? The herpes virus can cause massive tissue damage to the brain. I could be left with a drastically altered personality, greatly reduced cognitive capabilities, or loss of short-term memory. The loss of short-term memory is especially terrifying. Without your short-term memory you have no way to commit anything to long-term memory. Both my general knowledge and my life memories would be locked into what I had at the time the virus struck.

Let’s hope I never have to worry about that.

I’ve decided that I want to buy an acoustic bass and a bouzouki (octave mandolin).

While my bass is fun, it’s an electric only bass, and is really only good if you want to play electric bass music. Which, for my tastes, mostly means rock music. Which isn’t fun to play all by yourself, because the bass is an accompanying instrument. Sure, there are some great bass-driven songs out there, and many have sweet bass solos, but it’s still a pretty limited field, at least for my rather narrow musical tastes.

An accoustic bass, on the other hand, lends itself far better to being played solo, and doesn’t require you to lug an amp and a power source around with you if you want to play somewhere besides your home. There’s also a lot more songs for the acoustic bass that I enjoy. So far I haven’t been able to find an affordable acoustic-only bass, although I have found some affordable electric/acoustic basses. I don’t really want a combination instrument, though; especially if I decide to take the instrument to rennassaince faires or the LARP field.

My mandolin I thoroughly enjoy, but it is an electric/acoustic instrument, and while it’s currently one of the best electric mandolins on the market, it’s only average at best in the acoustics department. I also rather like deeper bass sounds. That’s why I’m thinking about the bouzouki. I guess E Muzeki might have something to do with it, too. (They make some of the absolutely most enchanting and enjoyable music I’ve heard.) Finding an affordable bouzouki is even harder than finding an acoustic bass.

The biggest problem I have with finding a nice bouzouki is that nobody in the area carries any. Elderly Instruments in Lansing does, but I’m lazy and don’t want to drive that far. ;-) The few affordable bouzoukis I can find are by factories/makers I don’t recognize (like Trinity College) so it’s hard for me to gauge their quality. I could buy from a real craftsman, but those suckers are $2,000-$10,000. The high end of my price range right now is $500.

I can also only really justify one new instrument right now. Hell, I can’t even justify one, but I’ll get over that. Two is just not going to happen, though. Between an acoustic bass and a bouzouki, I’m leaning towards the bass. I should wait until I’m a little better on the mandolin before I spend money on a bouzouki. While one could argue (easily) that I’m better on the mandolin than the bass (and I’m not that good on the mandolon at all yet), I have trouble even practicing on the bass since it’s an electric instrument I don’t enjoy playing. Having an acoustic bass would be more fun, let me practice the bass more, and as a consequence let me be more capable of playing the electric bass songs I want to learn. (All of which are way beyond my skill level.)

I have most of the details of my table-top game’s spell system figured out; now it’s just writing all the spells. (This also applies to AweMUD, to an extent, although the AweMUD version will be modified to simplify the user experience while retaining variety.)

Basically, spells are composed of a seed and, optionally, modifiers. A spell seed is a base effect with relatively limited applicability. For example, most seeds can only affect other creatures by touch. In order to get any sort of range a spell modifier must be applied. Modifiers increase the power level of a spell and, thus, the difficulty of casting the spell. Additionally, modifiers must be learned just like a spell seed, so a caster is very unlikely to know all available modifiers.

What will make the system interesting is a mix of seeds and creative modifiers. For example, there won’t just be a spell modifier to add range to a spell; there will be a handful of different types of range modifiers, with several levels of each. For example, one modifier will be the Bolt modifier - this causes a bow of pure energy to appear in the caster’s hands and requires a successful archery shot to hit the target. The Improved Bolt modifier would be the same effect, but with a larger range. Another range modifier would be the Ball modifier, which requires a throw check. Other range modifiers would be things like a ray which must be aimed or any creature in sight.

Area modifiers would make the seeds affect more than a single creature. Areas must be simple radiuses, turn rays into cones, sonic range (anything that can clearly hear the point of impact), and so on. Power modifiers would increase damage and such.

Then special modifiers would be added for more interesting scenarios. One example would be the Chain modifier which allows you to link multiple seeds together, letting later seeds take affect only if the prior seed failed. Then would be the Combine modifier, which causes all effects to occur, but allows the target(s) to resist them all on a single roll (and also fail to resist them on a single roll), and the Simultaneous modifier which causes all seeds to go off at once, but requiring the target(s) to resist each individually. Other modifiers might be the Delay modifier, Ignore modifier (making the spell not affect certain creatures/people), and so on.

Casters will have an easier time casting “researched” spells, which are basically prebuilt seed/modifier combinations. The Fireball spell, which would be the Fire seed with the Ball modifier, Lesser Range modifier, and Lesser Power modifier, will be easier to cast than if the caster simply took the seed and modifiers and combined them during casting. This is mainly to give players the incentive to right down spells and refer to them by a consistent name, thus making play more efficient.

For AweMUD, I’m planning on just making pre-scripted spells built using the above system. At some later date I might let players build their own spells as well. Letting players build their own spells shouldn’t be difficult, but I’d much rather encourage the use of pre-built spells for user interface simplification.

I currently owe around $8,000 on my Ranger. I’ve been saving up, putting money into my savings account, for a while now. I like to have a couple thousand bucks put away just in case of emergency (be that a real need for money or me finding something really really cool I want to buy ~_^ ). I’ve recently decided, though, that I’m going to keep my savings buffer a little low for a while, and instead concentrate on paying off my vehicle loan early. I’ve currently got just a little under three years left, not including all that oh-so wonderful interest. The sooner I pay it off, the less interest I have to pay, and the sooner I’ll be officially debt-free.

Having no debt might mean that I have more money to spend on school, or maybe being able to find a new place to live.

Just if anyone is wondering why I’m not online as much anymore, I no longer have GAIM connected to any of my personal accounts while at work. I do have one personal account up, but I’m only telling special people about it, and so far those people number zero. ;-)

If it’s something important, call me. If you don’t know my number, then your problem couldn’t possibly be important enough for me to really care. :P

I do check my personal email, so you can get a hold of me that way, too.

When I get home, I’m spending a lot of time playing my instruments or working or working on non-computer-game related stuff, so don’t be surprised if I’m not online in the evenings that much anymore, either.

I wrote a small properties framework for C++, that will soonishly be put into AweMUD.

It’s just a set of templates, really, that binds getter and setter methods on a class, has code to convert any (used) type to and from a string, store a little bit of meta-information, and store the properties in a map for each class.

The main use of this at first is going to be OLC (On-Line Creation) in AweMUD. Builders will be able to get a list of all properties on an entity and their value, and be able to change any of those, using a clean and simple command interface. This could eventually be used for saving/loading entities as well, although I’m not sure it’s a good idea to use there.

I think the part of the framework I dislike the most is the PropertyLink template class I need to be able to provide type safety and also an abstract interface. The IProperty type is a non-templated class, which is necessary to deal with inherited types, which the Entity tree in AweMUD uses a lot. So this also means that a pointer to the object must be stored in IProperty, since you can’t pass a pointer to its methods, as without a template there’d be no type safety. So there’s a class that binds an actual interface, an interface class that the system uses to access those properties, but a new object has to be allocated whenever you lookup a property that binds an object to the property class. I don’t like that allocation as it could be a performance problem.

The only other options, though, are to lose type safety (which I definitely don’t want to do) or to do runtime type checking (which is also a performance problem).

Ah well. The important part for now is that it works, and works very well, and is easy to extend and adapt.

Got the new treadmill assembled and installed finally on Saturday. We realized that we completely forgot about needing to find a place to put the damn thing… the place the bike was in just wasn’t going to cut it. Putting it nearby wasn’t good because it was on a not-very-strong part of the floor over the basement. The basement would have been an ideal place for it, but there was essentially no way in hell we’d ever be able to get it into the stairwell, much less actually get it down the stairs. (It’s heavy.)

So, we have put it in a not so great spot aesthetically (right next to my sister’s desk - lucky her) but it’s on a reinforced part of the floor and folds out of the way easily enough.

Works great. 15 minutes of jogging on that thing at one of its lower settings gave me a better workout than 45 minutes on the bike at a jaunty speed. Yay-ness.