Tag Archives: Goals (met and un-)

Long-awaited Granny Squares Design Going Live

Years, folks. Years. That weird fabric texture background is finally going away.

Ever since I’ve thrown myself full-tilt at Future Proof Games, I’ve let my older side projects run as they are with no updates from me unless something was catastrophically wrong.

A lot has changed on the web since Granny Square Colors got a major update from me, though: tablets and smartphones are even more popular among the GSC user base, Internet Explorer isn’t the worst thing to develop for anymore, and I’m a way better architect and coder than I was a handful of years ago.

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Belly Dance Is Back!

Last December, Nayna found herself without a dance studio, making it rather difficult to teach class. All of her students–me being just shy of one year and ready to move to intermediate–dispersed woefully.

We spent all of 2011 nagging the hell out of her.

For some reason, Greg-the-cat doesn't like jinglies.Ten months later (?!), she’s back with an email to the masses the day before classes began. So tonight I dug my hip scarf out from the back of my underwear drawer and giddily bounced my way to the pole-dancing studio where she held class tonight.

It was awesome. It was amazing. It was like the first time, except with that fun disjointed experience of your mind knowing what to do and your body almost sure it remembers how to follow. If I want to move up to intermediate (which I totally do), I’ve got to get all that in sync before I get bored and wander off.

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Brain Twist: .NET MVC 3, Entity Framework 4.1, and TDD

Talk about taking a large bite.

In the interests of pushing my .NET knowledge, I began migrating the Geist character sheet project that I’d started in Django to .NET MVC 3. I hadn’t done MVC in .NET since MVC 1 was beta’d, but hey, MVC is MVC is MVC. Right?

So in the interests of making things more interesting and more testable, I decided to dive into the Entity Framework 4. My beginning read of POJOs in Action, along with my previous experience with .netTears–I mean, .netTiers–had me generally familiar with the concepts of entities, contexts, and repositories.

Kicker is, POJOs is just a book (and one I’ve barely dived into), and .netTears uses code generation, meaning I could get away with treating it as just a very hefty ORM in the applications it was in. Generate and go.

Getting my fingers in it was a whole ‘nother experience.

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Time for the Unscheduled

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I know an increasing number of folks now who are either unemployed or self-employed, and I find that as envious as I am of their ability to make excellent use of their time, I have to actively work to avoid being burned by their lack of sense of time.

Or self-burning:

Me: Hey, So-and-So, did you hear back about that project proposal you submitted a while back?
So-and-So: No. Maybe I should check on that.
Me: Oh. It’s been, like, months.
So-and-So: Yeah… It’d be nice to get that project.
Me: Like… someday?

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Project Complete: Bir’day Blanket!

In a desperate crush this weekend, I finished Greg’s blanket. It wasn’t that I was four months late finishing it, it was that I was so. tired. of basketweave.

If I had to do one more damn repeat, I was probably going to put the thing on hiatus, silly as that would have been.

The finished product is long enough for Greg to stretch out and pretend to sleep under:

Greg stretched out with the blanket.

Unfortunately, I have some of the eggplant yarn left. Anyone need a dice bag? If I can find a good contrasting color in my stash, I’ll probably do at least one of these.

I spend a half hour or so on Sunday night completely frogging (unraveling) my brown blanket and starting up again. I swear, the first row of crocheting (crocheting into the chain) is the worst and most fiddly. Plus, it was a 196 stitch chain, so that first row took forever. That’s wider than my arm span–this thing is going to be a blanket, not a throw.

Since then, though, it’s been smooth sailing; all the stitching is consistent (for me), my color and ball changes are proper, and I friggin’ know what stitch I’m doing.