This post is the first in a series of “quick blogs” I’m going to write, in an attempt to document progress I’m making in various areas (to try to keep myself accountable for being productive). I’ve decided that on any night that I don’t have anything planned, I’m going to set up a “fallback activity” to, well, fall back on… one activity for each night of the week. Here’s my tentative plan:
- Sunday: Visit family, relax, read, play games
- Monday: Game Programming
- Tuesday: Write music
- Wednesday: Wire the studio, other electronics (non-computer) projects
- Thursday: Work on web sites (Ragtrader, KBMOD, etc.)
- Friday: PC Building / set up workshop
- Saturday: Housework, brew beer, play games, go to Pittsburgh
Of course any sort of scheduled activity with friends/family/band/etc. will override this list, and I can swap out activities as the need arises. It’s just a set of guidelines really, to keep me from sitting around watching Netflix when I could be doing something real.
First installment: Game Programming Night, turned OS Reinstall Night
Writing a decent game is still on my list of life-long goals, so I decided to start working on it little by little. Game programming night actually started early in the day when I found a tutorial on programming with Allegro, a C++ library for game making. Really useful stuff there. I skimmed the first few tutorials while at work, then once I got home (after making camp-style bacon, hardboiled eggs and a huge salad for dinner) I started watching the videos.
From there I tried to get Allegro installed, but the version in the Ubuntu repositories is old (go figure) so I decided I would use this as an excuse to stop putting off an Arch Linux reinstall. About an hour later, I was back in a comfortable, minimalist Openbox environment (with Xsnow thrown in for good measure). I got Allegro installed, got some of the tutorial code to compile, and then I installed and tinkerd around a bit with Aseprite, a sprite editor meant for use with Allegro. Maybe next week I’ll make and post a few sprites on here. I’ve already got a couple game ideas in mind.
Next up: music writing night. (The rest of these posts will be shorter.)

















