To read more inane babble from the mouth of a man-thing, read the comments.
Future Dink
The future of Dink, and in turn The Dink Network, looks quite promising. It is unfortunate that the present seems so dreary and dead. It just seems like the winter air has frozen the creative wills of all who think of D-Mods, and some guy named Bubba is using these frozen wills as ice cubes in his Diet Coke. Why not just Coca Cola? I mean, being used to cool Diet Coke is so freaking degrading.
So, right, the Future of Dink. From what the developers of Windemere (sort of like Dink v2.0) are saying, it looks like everything will be much better in the future. After hundreds of man-thing-hours of work, a couple of developers have told me they've gotten to a major, monumental, ground-breaking and hell-quelling milestone in development: they have fonts working. Maybe we'll get a sprite or two by Christmas?
And what of the Future of The Dink Network? Good question. Right now I'm in the middle of testing a couple awesome features. The primary change is The Dink Network will turn into a pornography web site, dedicated solely to pornographic and sorta-pornographic D-Mods. Thank goodness for SimonK, otherwise we'd have like no content.
Actually, the major improvement will be the automation of file uploading and adding. Right now its sort of a pain in the ass; check e-mail, download file from e-mail, check file to see if its legit, upload file to multiple servers, and add file information and a news entry. Ok, that might not seem like a lot... but its a process that can take anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, and it just isn't very compelling to upload files in a... uh... reasonable timeframe. So, what will happen is the author of a file sends said file via a special web page. Then adding a file is almost like validating reviews, and everyone would be happy. Right now I have it working, except automatic mirroring to imgoingbed.com, which is sort of a pain because I'll have to use SFTP, which is Socializing Ferrets Treated Poorly. And convincing mistreated Ferrets to carry files around for you is actually quite difficult.
redink1's Not In The Red, But He Is Wearing A Red Tie
I have a job.
...
It is an odd concept, I assure you. I was hired by a rather large corporation in mid-late December as an intern to fling some Perl code at a wall in the men's bathroom. All I did was send in my resume, and *bang*, I was hired without even as much as an interview. I've been going to work an average of sixteen hours a week this past month, and so far its been really fun and great.
This also means that I have a lot less free time. I'm also enrolled in four classes (all Computer Science) at college this semester, a total of 14 credits. And it doesn't help matters that all four seem to assign a hefty bit of assignments and homework.
Another positive aspect is I have a bit of money in my bank account, and that will increase over time instead of decreasing rudely. So I won't have to beg people for donations for a while, not that we have any incredible expenditures at the moment anyway now that we don't use Fileburst any more.
Luck By Any Other Name
Today a friend and I entered into a programming contest that was sponsored here on campus, and it was focused on the Microsoft .NET Framework. We were joined by a third, previously team-less, member shortly after we arrived for check-in. All told, there were 5 teams; four having 3 people and one having 1 person.
We were given a list of 10 problems to solve... and the vast majority were rather dull. Two involved some boring Active Directory object, and another two involved reading and displaying some boring database stuff. Our team focused on three problems. One was a console application that parsed data in some way (the third team member opted to do a 'first four digits of your driver's license based on your last name' program). Nothing special, but it worked nice. We had a bit of trouble porting it from C++ to C#. And why 'Managed C++' has 'C++' in the name is beyond my limited understanding.
Another problem was retrieving information from a web service for some purpose. We opted for a weather service, where you enter your zip code and it displays all of your weather information. After some set up problems (the original web service we were going to use was broken, and the second one took a while to figure out how to use), we got it working rather nice. It would even come up with a dialog box saying something like 'Clippy has found that you live in a very cold place. Would you like Clippy to help you write a letter to a moving company?' when the temperature was below freezing.
The other project involved combining two of the problems, a graphical display of a sorting algorithm and a program implementing GDI+ (basically graphics).
All told, we spent about 5 hours doing the above. The greatest challenge was to think of an idea to implement.
After dinner and judging was complete 2 hours later, the results were in: somehow we ended up with 2nd place. When the contest was first mentioned, wild prizes including Tablet PCs, Pocket PCs, and X-Boxes were talked of. Unfortunatly, these prizes of wonder did not show up, and instead I got a wireless router and a wireless nic for a laptop. I suppose it would be cool, if I had a laptop. But alas, it is still rather nice.
Closing Word
And so, I bid you goodbye, and apologize for any groaning that may have erupted from your refueling oraface while reading some of my attempts at bizarre humor.
Cow.
Red Tie is a word morph of Tired. Tired -> Tie Red -> Red Tie.
