It’s been two and a half years since my last post. Perhaps a big part of that is because I have been focusing on my job. Since I am a programmer at work, it becomes hard to want to work on my home programming projects.
However, Microsoft just released launched their 2010 products, and it’s time to brush off my trusty old card game, and upgrade it to .Net 4.0.
In August of 2007, I was laid-off from my job at Harland Clarke (formerly Liberty Check). This was my second time being laid-off.
The first time was in August of 2003. At that time, the job market was very bleak. That, coupled with the fact that I did not yet have my degree, created a very stressful time for me.
Fortunately, a position opened up in the same department I was working in, and I was brought back before my unemployment became official. In the end, I was gone from work for 5 weeks, without any interruption in employment at Liberty. When talking with people about it, they would refer to it as a 5 week vacation. Too bad I couldn’t have enjoyed it.
This time was entirely different. I won’t say that it was completely worry-free, but I can say that I did enjoy much of it. First, my resume looked much nicer with the degree I earned (I graduated in 2005). Also, the job market was much better. On average, I must have been interviewing about 3-4 time a week. And finally, the last 4 years have given me the opportunity to develop skills in VB.Net, ASP, and SQL, all desirable skills right now.
All told, I was between jobs for about 5 months. In December, I started work at HealthPartners as a web developer. It is a contract-to-hire, and the contract will last about 3 months. Things are going well there, and I fully expect to be hired in March.
Several years ago, I made a computer card game called SevenUp. It’s a game my family played when I was a child, and I have always loved the game. As it turns out, SevenUp is not the real name of the game, that’s just what we called it. The real name is just Sevens, or Fan Tan.
In any case, I wanted to make the game for the computer, and as I was programming in Delphi at the time, Delphi being the best programming tool in it’s day, I wrote it in Delphi. There is a link to the game on the right side of this page, and at the top of this post, for you to download. I would love to upgrade the game, but I am afraid that I have long since lost the source code for it. Any updates to the game will require a complete rewrite. And that is my intention.
When I was writing this program, I searched the web for some pre-packaged card deck component that I could use. I found one that I really liked. It was a component called TPlayingCard by Simon Fitch, and I gave him credit in the documentation for the game.
As time moved on, Microsoft came out with Visual Studio .Net, and it included the C# language. It pained me to admit it, but I liked it better than Delphi. And of course, the first project I set out to make was my favorite card game, Sevens. My strategy for presenting the cards changed a little, however, and instead of compiling a card deck into the program, I chose to write a wrapper for the Cards.dll that shipped with Windows.
The wrapper worked wonderfully, and I even improved on the algorithm I used for playing the game. I never finished the game, however, because school became a priority for me. Then, after I graduated, I became lazy (as indicated in my previous post).
During this lazy period, Microsoft came out with their latest OS, Vista. Vista was different from Windows XP in a number of ways, but the one difference that was relevant to my card game was that it doesn’t ship with Cards.dll. Instead, it has a CardGames.dll, which is used by the card games that ship with Vista.
So, my dilemma is, do I stick with old technology and port the Cards.dll with my game? Do I find another card component that works with .Net? Or do I try to find a way to make use of the CardGames.dll that ships with Vista?
I would love to learn to make use of the latest resources, but alas, I have search the web for any information on CardGames.dll, and have found nothing. So I tried peaking into the dll myself, and what I found is not promising. It seems that the CardGames.dll file was made specifically for the the games that ship with Vista. I don’t think that the dll is a general purpose library, like the Cards.dll was. It is still possible that it may contain some general purpose functions, but at this time I don’t feel it is worth the effort.
As for finding another card component, I don’t look forward to the research process. Having to test a number of different components to see which ones I like. Cluttering my hard drive with half a dozen packages that I will never use again, along with the test apps I will need to write to test them with. And if the one I like happens not to be free, having to pay for the licensing for it.
I think that for the short term, I will port the Cards.dll from Windows XP. Just so I can finish the program. Of course, then my target audience will be pre-Vista Windows users ( I am sure that Microsoft would not want the Cards.dll to be bundled with other peoples games).
There is a fourth option. There are Starter Kits for Visual Studio .Net. One of the starter kits is a blackjack card game, and the cards can be adapted for other games. Unfortunately, the cards are not bundled in objects, the way I would want them to be, and so it would be a major effort to make the cards workable for me. Still, if I can get the game working with the old Cards.dll first, perhaps I can come back later and retrofit the starter kit cards into my game.
All the possibilities…
It’s been over two years since my last post, so I thought I should post an update.
My last class went well, and I graduated in the spring of ‘05. It was such a relief to be done with school, that I quit work on all of my projects (as you can tell by the two year gap). I have not made any progress on my card game program, I haven’t done any more family history research, and I haven’t written more than two pages of any of my novels. Whenever I sit down at the computer, I fire up a computer game, and zone out.
However, I am slowly starting to wake up after my hiatus. I find myself daydreaming of story ideas for my novels, and I have installed the latest version of Visual Studio, and have been tinkering around with some small programs. Perhaps I can get back to work on some of these projects. I hope to get back to updating this blog on something of a regular basis.
My next post will be about some of the issues with my card game. After that, perhaps I’ll jot down some of my story ideas.
Until then…
I haven’t posted here since December. The good news is that I finished my last paper for my History course. I still have a final exam to take, so I will need to study for that, but it is a lot easier to study than to write (for me, anyway).
Now I have one last class to finish before graduating. German Folklore. It is a fun class so far. We are reading the complete works of the Brothers Grimm. At the end of this course I will need to write a 5-6 page paper about some topic relating to fairy tales. That, an two take-home exams, and I am done with school. Then maybe I can get back to some of the projects I mentioned here in earlier posts (Beck is starting to bug me for more of her novel already).
My final for the Internet Programming class was on Thursday, and I just finished my paper for German Medieval Literature. Now I can turn my attentions to World History. I sent in a paper for that class about a week ago. I now have five papers left, and I have until February to do them. Yikes! At least I can concentrate on this one class for the next month. That’s when my next class starts. German Folklore.
I started this blog in the hopes that it would help me organize my thoughts for all my several projects. I guess that is not happening. But I can still report my progress when I get the chance. Once I can turn my attention back to my novel, perhaps I will try using the blog that way. A novel is a much longer work, and I may need a sounding board…
Well, until my next blog, auf wiedersehen.
Working full time, having a kid in football, and taking three classes is taking all my spare time. I have some reading or homework assignment due all the time. I can barely catch my breath.
My German Literature class doesn’t have written assignment to hand in, but there are reading assignments every week, with group discussions in class. Internet Programming has a program assignment due each week. They are not usually too hard, but last week’s was a bear. And of course, World History (the correspondence course), since the assignments don’t have a due date, it is hard to sit down and do those. But the class does have a deadline, and with so many papers to write in so little time, I have to force myself to work on them.
So, it’s no surprise that I have done very little work on my novels, and no work at all on my own programming projects. But I did get a little done on my spy novel. I finally wrote the first piece of dialog in the story. It’s nothing fancy, or for that matter, not an important piece of dialog. But as I have a problem with writing dialog, it was a great first step. Chapter one is just about done.
Look at the date. It’s been over a month since I last blogged. Where does the time go?
Well, I have sent in my first homework assignment, and am waiting for it to be returned, graded. In the mean time, I have started work on my next assignment. This one is on the law documents of ancient civilizations. It sounds more in-depth then it really is. It’s really a comparative essay.
My co-worker (groupie? fan? agent?) is pressing me for the first chapter of my book. She has set a deadline for it. Conflicting deadlines. Just what this blog was meant to address. But then, if I don’t make use of it, how is it supposed to help?
I have a two week vacation coming up, so I hope to make use of that to catch up on my writing. But that’s just another way of postponing it, isn’t it? So I had better get going at it now.
One of my projects that I forgot to mention was genealogy. I have been working on my family history on and off for about 15 years. I haven’t done anything with it for about 5 years now, which is why it slipped my mind. But, I may catch the bug again. Or I may get a call from some distant cousin that I didn’t know I had. So I will add this to my list of works.
Now, getting back to those Egyptians…
I got back to my school assignment today. My paper is about 80% complete now. I found that I don’t have a lot to say about Egyptian creation myths, though. I am trying to make a connection between the creation myths, and the sociological agenda of the authors of the myths. I presented some (what I believe are) good points for the Hebrew and Hindu myths, and passing observation for the Japanese myth. But the Egyptians are either too subtle for me, or they just didn’t use their myths the way I expected them to. How dare they!