Migration Complete

Hey guys,

Steve here.

I just wanted to inform everyone that – as of last week, my site’s migration is officially complete. I have also initiated a follower migration. While I cannot affirm that it has been successful, due to some technical issues I was having, I no longer see them on the old site (now hosted at sssjournal.wordpress.com).

I never received a confirmation email from WordPress.com stating that the follower migration was complete. If you follow and are getting this, mind dropping in a comment to let me know that it worked?

Thanks!

Starting Over

Hey guys,
Steve here.
I Want To Start Over.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with this blog going forward. As those who have been with me from the beginning know, I’ve had this blog for six and a half years. Which is to say, I started this blog when I was in fifth grade… and, (at least mostly when you look at the big picture), maintained it almost solidly until I was nearly through with my junior year of high school.
As you can imagine, that’s a lot of growing and maturing. Some of you may not know this, but when this blog first began, it was a place where I’d post pretty much every single day, about “How My Day Went”. And I kid you not, as indicated by the quotations, that’s precisely what I titled every single one of those posts. In addition, I don’t think I really got it right on the first post I ever wrote. It was titled “My First Post!!! Welcome”, and consisted of the following two sentences:
“hi everyone and welcome to my weblog (or blog)! This is a blog about Steven Daugherty! hope you enjoy!”
It wasn’t until 2013 that the blog really began to take off. I stopped with the repetitive “How My Day Went” posts, switching over to the more conventional periodic update, also adding more site content. And for the past four years, that’s been the pattern this site has followed.
As I said though, I’ve recently been doing a lot of thinking. The result is that a lot of that content has been removed, though obviously not the several hundred blog posts – and even though there exists the option to wipe them all out of existence with essentially one click, I don’t particularly feel like doing so. Deleting a bunch of pages was one thing, but given the fact that most of my recent posts have taken around a half hour to write, I can only guess at the total amount of time I spent writing all of them.
I did this partly because I feel like I’ve grown out of some of that which inspired the removed content, though chiefly because of the fact that I feel like making a fresh start. From trying to establish schedules of when to blog, to (without saying so) trying to gear my posts towards specific subject matters such as coding and technology or life by making a bunch of consecutive posts about them, I just feel like all the recent reforms I’ve tried to make to this blog have fallen short. I just feel like I’ve been doing the blogging thing all wrong; trying to make it into something it can never be. Maybe it’s because I’ve striven to write every x days or, and this is what I personally believe, I’ve tried to create an image of myself that only partially exists.
Most of the time I present a witty persona, or write about something technological, or write about something great I’ve learned or achieved, or perhaps discuss life in a superficial way that generally describes only the highlights and the good things. Sometimes though, I feel like this is only stagnating my blog, even if it is providing readers with something they can enjoy, because it only gives me temporary enjoyment.
I am not implying that my life is bad below the surface, that I do not enjoy technology, and that I have been completely unhappy with my blog. After all, if these were the case, I hardly believe it would have been possible for me to sustain a blog for several years in those conditions. All I’m saying is… maybe I should write more freely. Maybe I should write whatever comes to mind, and stop attempting to craft it into conformity. That doesn’t mean this blog is going to get all depressing and dark or anything, it just means that I’m not always witty, geeky, and enthusiastic, and I think that in order to succeed, I should write even when I am not those things.
So welcome, all three hundred sixty of you, to my blog. I’m starting over. No limits this time.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

Hey Everyone: I figured out my blogging problem

Hey guys,
Steve here.

Hello everyone, here we go again. I would be skeptical, very much so, if all 330 odd people following this blog were to tell me that not a one of them were believing that this blog is dying, that I am no longer interested in maintaining it, or that it would be best for me not to continue because I will continue to frequently infrequent this blog. Surprisingly, it’s actually quite the opposite for me. Let me explain why.

No matter how many times I’ve acknowledged it, I never stopped trying to force myself to live up to some form of deadline or another. And I’ll be honest here, when I posted that I’d get something done, my biggest fear was that if I didn’t do it by the next post, it would cause people to lose at least some faith in me and believe that, perhaps, I was one of those “all talk” people, something which I do not want to be known for. For some reason, this sycle has repeated itself many a time over the last year, and I’ll explain it below:
1. I get excited about something, and blog about it.
2. In my excitement, I bang out a sentence that starts with something along the lines of: “In the next post”… “I will likely”… “I will”… you get the picture.
3. Life ends up getting in the way. A problem occurs, school work or otherwise occurs, or I lose motivation temporarily to complete what I said I would.
4. I hold off on the blog post, because I don’t want to post with some excuse as to why I didn’t do what I said I would.

I don’t know if I’ve talked about this subject in a previous post, but the fact that I can’t even remember that now is just another factor that has driven it home for me. See, I started this blog so I could write about whatever I want, whenever I want, and not follow a specific pattern. If I wanted to write a poem, I could. Then the next day, I could post a 400 word technical rant that had to do with the math involved in creating full 3d games, then I could follow that with a post about what a wonderful week I’d had. To an extent, I was… somewhat keeping this unbound routine, but I was adding something I wasn’t before. No, it’s not as I previously suspected, me blogging too much about programming and the like. It’s the fact that I hold myself to deadlines, and then fear failure when I can’t get them done.

That said, I’ll be breaking the sycle by writing just one more of those sentences, though I’ll surely hold to this one, or this blog would die whether I wanted it to or not. I will, not be giving myself deadlines on things I can’t be sure will be completed.

All that out of the way, I am glad to say it’s been a productive couple of months. In summary, I’ve actually started rewriting S Quad Racing in Python, am taking two dewel credit classes in school, and… life is good. These days, I’m still overworking my brain by trying to figure out math formulas for complex things such as rotated rectangles, polygon and triangle shaped surfaces and how they would be represented in a game, and all that fun stuff. In addition, I’ve actually started going to the gym this school year, which is at least somewhat of an improvement from last year.

I know that was quite short, at least by my standards, but another disadvantage with such long blogging breaks is that it’s real hard to come up with something longer than that because you obviously can’t remember everything about the last three months. Still, I think we’re quite up to speed, and I don’t only mean that as a pun to me getting back into working on an all new S Quad Racing version.

Before I go though, I should let you know that if you Go here, you can learn more about what the re-write of S Quad Racing in Python is allowing me to do, and what I’ve done so far. I wrote that page just a little over a week ago, so I have made a little bit of progress, but not too much. Either way, see you guys soon, and I must say it’s a great joy to be back.

Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.

So you thought I was gone…

Hey guys,
Steve here.

Let me compare myself to the Texas weather for a moment. Readers of my blog who don’t actually live here may not understand this, but there’s a pretty good chance you will.

Okay so it’s an El Nino winter here. That tends to mean higher precipitation amounts and cooler than normal temperatures. That’s what we were all expecting anyway. Some took it to mean lots of snow and arctic weather, others thought it would be cool and rainy. But due to the absense of cloud cover, it has been, hot for lack of a better word. And for a reason that I’m not quite sure of, it has hardly precipitated, in any form.

I might be somewhat of a weather geek/enthusiast, but that’s not why I shared that weird bit of Texan climatology. But I’ve noticed something as well. I’ve kept saying, [in my once-a-month blog postings], that I would get back to it, I’d be blogging “next week” or “more routinely”. I haven’t been doing this for too many years but even I know that for whatever reason, I tend to post more at the beginning of the year. On the contrary, I’m posting every 40 days give or take, and sticking to only one subject when I do. Sounds a bit like the dry and hot “El Nino” winter has come to reign over this blog, doesn’t it?

Moving on from that, 2016 has been a success so far, for me at least. Due to complications I may or may not have posted about here, I had to drop my BIM2 class. In its place, I switched to a Web Technology class, where you basically learn to program on the web, at least that’s what I can gather from my experience so far. Despite it being a full year class, (you have to be in there all school year to get credit for taking it), I was somehow able to switch into it for the second semester, and my guess is that I’ll have to finish the class in the first semester of next year.

Despite this not technically being an ideal change, I feel I’ve bennefitted much more from it than the class from which I was pulled. In just 5 weeks of being in that class, I’ve learned HTML, (though I already knew about 75% of it it seems), CSS, though that nearly bored me to tears due to its visually orientedness, PHP, and now I’m working on Java Script, which I find to be the most interesting of them all, due to it’s rather simplistic nature and from what I’ve heard it can do quite a bit.

Aside from school, I’m doing alright. On the coding side, because it’s been so long since my last post, I cannot remember everything, but I did work on S Quad Racing, releasing a semi-major update to my testers on Monday. One amusing bit, however, was the set of bugs that appeared in my crashing code. Firstly, due to a glitch with collision detection, once I crashed into my opponent, the sound played like 50 times. Secondly, when I fixed that and went to go another lap, I apparently spawned at the same spot as an opponent some how, so crashed and burned before driving even commenced.

And to make things even funnier, when crashing finally did work, instead of coming to a stop at the end of the race, for some reason the opponent kept going. I guess I rendered his breaks useless when I smashed into him? No seriously that’s actually never supposed to happen.

I still haven’t fixed the 3rd bug I mentioned, and here’s why. It’s been quite a long time since I played the breakout game I created, and Danny suggested I play it again on Monday night. I did so. And I regretted doing so. The ball movement was all kinds of messed up, so I realized after 3 months of playing other breakout games. So since last Monday, I’ve basically been rewriting the whole entire game. Firstly, it now has missions, and creating new ones is not in the least bit difficult. Secondly, it has paddles and balls which have multiple properties, giving me the opportunity to implement variety when it comes to different balls and paddles sold in the shop. And thirdly, it has forms of currency. Tradepoints, which can be obtained by doing almost anything, and Useless Balls (UB), which can be obtained by completing special bonuses, or with 1000 tradepoints from the shop. And, finally, the ball movement system is fixed. All the above mentioned have already been implemented into the game, and we’re going on 7 days now.

Yes, I know. I’ve gone on ramblings about games before and none have been released thus far. I also know that I have 2 other games in the works. But you’d be surprised how many game projects you can take on when you have no deadlines. Firstly you don’t have to stress about time, and secondly you can stay motivated to work on all three of them because you aren’t working for anyone. (S Quad Racing’s rewrite was a special case, that was mainly due to the entire code base being mangled).

That wraps up tonight’s post. I can’t tell you what to look forward to on next week’s post because I simply don’t know.

Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

Happy Steve Eve!

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Happy Steve Eve to you all! 🙂 For most of you, that name sounds familiar. But for those that haven’t been, enlightened, if you will, Steve Eve is the funny little name I came up with back in 2012 for the day before my birthday. The reason I even still remember that is the fact that this day actually causes more excitement than my birthday itself; mostly all of my friends and family that know about it aare “looking forward to steve eve.”
Anyways, with that aside, my party was on Saturday. It was pretty exciting. Basically, I had a mechanical bull, hamburgers, hotdogs, a lot, of cake, and the company of some great friends and family! Another cool thing is, that there had been a 70% chance of storms, but by the grace of god, there was no rain during the whole entire party! It only started raining as soon as we were all back inside the house!
Aside from the party I had a mostly pleasant week. Playing death match, (a more in depth review of the game will be coming in a future post), skyping my friends, counting down the days until my birthday, and going to school.
As for my actual birthday, that won’t be too exciting, as it is a school day. I’ll get to eat some very good food, though, and since my party was on Saturday, it’s all good.
Anyways, that’s about it for this post. Have a great steve eve!
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve!

getting back into it

Hey guys,
Steve here.

Few, that break went by fast… and here we are already half way done with the first school week of 2014… hard to believe, huh? I am going to get back into the swing of things (both in blogging, and school), seeing as how I haven’t produced a life update post in over a week now.
to tell you the truth, Newyears day was pretty much the only day I did anything in the last 4 or 5 days of Christmas break. On Wednesday (new years day), my mom, sister, and I went and saw MRs. Dawn again, and since she lives about 2 hours away, it took up our whole day. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were uneventful, however we all went to church on Sunday. As for Monday, that was the last chance I got to chill before… you guessed it… school. You know how I’ve been talking about playing swamp over the break? Well I didn’t realise this, but I spent in total 76 hours on swamp between Christmas day and January 6th. Yes, I actually spent the equivalent to 3 days and 3 nights streight on swamp, thuse only 14 of my 17 days weren’t spent on the game… talk about adicting games!
Back to my life, Tuesday was of course the start of school, and that is pretty much all I did Tuesday and yesterday, mainly because I was very tired after school and so I didn’t feel like doing anything else.
Also while on the subject of school, I can forget sleeping in until 7 on school mornings. My mom and dad switched schedules and job positions, so now I will have to start riding the bus to school in the morning. What does this mean for my sleep schedule? It means that from now on, I will have to get up at 5:45 on every school morning except Monday! On a posative note, mom and dad will be home every night (except I think Dad goes out of town on Monday nights so all except that night), and both will always be home on the weekends, so we get more family time.
On other news, unbelievably, something that would not normally be a good idea actually turned out to possibly save me a whole bunch of work. You know Stranded? well one day I decided that I wanted to take it to school with me and work on it when there was no work left for me to do in class, and so I put it on a flash drive. I believe that Stranded is still on that flash drive… but there is still the possibility that I deleted it. If I did, I will have to restart on the project… but if I don’t, I am looking at February 1 as a possible release date.
On the podcasting side of things, I didn’t do the podcast on Saturday because I was too lazy to create a campaign for swamping with Steve part ii. Fortunately, I created that campaign, and will be doing the podcast within the next couple days… after I come up with an intresting segment and tech tip to put in… and even that I’m starting to come up with ideas for.
On a final note, since school has started and there will be more going on, expect more frequent blog updates. I don’t update often during breaks, since I often take advantage of that time to relax and do absolutely nothing.

Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

P.S. It’s day 994 of the blog folks! We only have 6 days until the 1000th day! If you want to count down, see the “1000th day” widget on the sidebar.

life updates, and a new blog development

Hey guys,
Steve here.

I’m starting something new on my blog. It will happen every Monday, and is called Monday’s musings. On the Monday’s musings post, I will share my thoughts, opinions, and rants. These will not be life updates; although life updates will continue. Basically, a Monday’s Musings post will be for my thoughts and rants that have no part in my life update posts, and wouldn’t make sense in them. I hope you look forward to these new posts!

On to some other things, I did the podcast episode 15 Friday, and will do episode 16 today. As for that q9 series I was doing, I will have to do it differently. Instead of doing worlds now, I will do it level by level, but there are only 6 levels left. It will not be the same thing every time; the amount of action and excitement will increase. Well, I guess that gives me a game of the day for at least the next 5 or 6 episodes. Also, while still on the topic of pod casting, I will try to create a feed burner for the podcast. I hope it works so you can subscribe to the cast with a feed reader or something.

As for my life, I had a fun weekend. Although I didn’t go many places (due to the ice storm that I will tell you about later in the post), I did other fun things. For example, I did the podcast, baked cookies and a cookie cake with my mom, hung out with dad yesterday, and talked to friends on Skype and wrote this blog post today.
Although I appreciated the unexpected 3 day weekend, I don’t want to go to school tomorrow. That will bring back the stress, the work, the projects… and everything else that goes along with having to go to school. On a positive note, winter break is in two weeks. I seriously can’t wait for that! Oh and by the way, I finally composed a Christmas list, so I bet my parents and the rest of my family are happy.
On another note, my old vision teacher, and a family friend named Dawn has created a really great blog. I think you should check it out. The address is
http://dawnadams.org.

As for the winter storm, I definitely did not get ripped off. That storm was pretty extreme–it dumped 1 to 3 inches of ice and sleet, and from Thursday night to about an hour ago I think, temperatures did not go above 32. I caught a recording of this for the interesting segment of episode 15 of the podcast, and I also got one on the natural events page.

Well I guess that about concludes today’s post. I’ll be back tomorrow night with the first Monday’s Musings post. Please comment on tomorrows post when it comes out and tell me what you think.

Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

Frequent Blog Update #3… an extremely awesome tech discovery and Latest Life happenings of Steven D

Hey you guys,

Steve Here.

How did you like that blog post title? I hope you liked it a lot.

As my post said, I discovered an extremely awesome thing about my computer. It’s called windows speech recognition macros. Skipping all the techie stuff that is libel to turn non-techie followers and readers away from my blog, I’ll just tell you what the thing does in English terms.
Well, as you know, speech recognition itself will let you control your computer with your voice. Speech recognition macros is a way to enhance speech recognition so that you can make custom commands and use them to your liking. For example, I made my computer have a conversation with me, and best of all I recorded it. You can listen to it… non-techie people; there is no tech talk in this recording. So, here you go:

Listen offline

I hope you enjoy!

Now, switching topics, Let me tell you about my recent life happenings.
On Sunday, I had church. It was your average Sunday school, and service. Except one thing: we were like the “old people class at Sunday school” as quoted by some one at the church. Here we were, a whole bunch of teenagers chilling and drinking coffee.
Besides that, I also got my robot reference manual finished on Sunday, and Libby’s 5 friends left (In case I didn’t mention it in Saturday’s post my sister had friends over for a slumber party; it being her birthday weekend and all).
I didn’t do much else on Sunday, besides crashing for a bit, and Just hanging out really.
Yesterday, was when I found out that my computer could talk back to me. I went from not even knowing it could talk back to me (barely even knowing about speech recognition) at 9 in the morning to having sophisticated conversations with the machine. Please lord, whatever you do, don’t let me be the weird dude sitting in his office and having 5 hour long conversations with his computer about how the registry was acting up or how mad he got when his cat bit him or something. 🙂
So yeah, that is what I was doing on my free time Yesterday. I also had to get a hair cut, and a nice refreshing bottle of chocolate milk, but you know that’s a little beside the point.
As far as today goes, it was yet another school day. There was nothing much to talk about today.
Tomorrow, we’re supposed to get lots and lots of awesome rain. I can’t wait for that. Not only because we need that rain, but also because I like the sounds of rain. Here’s a little catchy poem I wrote about the forecast:

The forecast calls for rain,
this should help you grow your grain.
Rain is good for my brain,
though not for traveling by plain.
I like the pattering against my window pain,
but the dreary days drive me insane
Hope you enjoy my nice little forecast there…
Moving on, my mom’s cousin is coming to visit on Thursday, and I believe she’s staying for the weekend. We’re having a family get together on Sunday, partly because Libby’s birthday and the fact that my mom’s cousin will be here.
Also, I still have that upcoming orchestra concert, which my sister and dad will be missing because they’re flying to Florida for a goal ball tournament. Unlike mine, she gets to miss 2 or 3 days of school. Erg… why is she so lucky!
Although I kind of have to admit I’d rather go to school and get to attend my orchestra concert than miss two days and fail such an easy class.
Well, I guess that about wraps up today’s post. Talk to you soon.

Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

the Busy Life of Steven D

Hey guys,
Steve here.

Choir and orchestra concerts, sporting events, festivals, Halloween…

Okay so maybe I don’t have as much going on as you might’ve thought after reading the title of this post. I have been kind of busy this passed week though.

On Friday, I went to that goal ball tournament I told you I would be going to. I ended up playing on two teams because the Central Texas Avengers were short a player, and thus needed me to play for them. Of the games I played, (1 with the team I was origionally playing for and 2 with the Avengers), my team(s) won 2 of them. I can’t say that I did, because I was on a team of 3 or more people during the whole duration of the tournament. Here’s how the games went:
game 1–I played with Texas Goal ball, the team I was supposed to play with: we won.
game 2–I played with the Central Texas Avengers and we lost.
game 3–I played with the Avengers and we won.

So overall, if you ask me, I think we all did great. Now I’m sure you guys (being sited, or just craving for some form of media) are wanting the pics and video. I have already designed the goal ball 2013 page, and I could do 1 of 3 things, which I will sort out from nicest to meanest.
1–nicest: I could do all that work to get the picture code and video on to this post.
2–not too mean, not too nice: I could put the link for the page on this blog post.
3–making you do all the work: I could tell you to go to the nav bar and look for the page.

I pick the second choice. So, here’s the link:
page for goal ball tournament of 2013
Now, on to more important topics, Let’s talk about sports extravaganza.
When we arrived at the school for sports extravaganza on Saturday morning, it was really cold. Your’s truely, the sometimes full I am, chose to wear basketball shorts in 45 degree weather, with a 15 mile per hour wind blowing and the sun just barely coming up. I even to this day wonder why I had to do that.
Well anyway, after listening to the opening saramony, we started events. Instead of going on a long drawn out speech about the day, because I know that would bore you, I’ll just keep it short and simple.
I had standing long jump, 100 meter race, discus, lunch (that’s the best event ever), a goal ball demo for the audience that I participated in, 200 meter race, and shot put. As far as awards go, I got 3 gold and 2 silver metals. Impressing… right? 🙂
Now before I leave this topic, here’s a picture of me getting a first place award.
getting first place
Besides sports ex, I’ve been having quite a busy week. On Tuesday, my sister, mom and I went to my sister’s orchestra concert. It ended up sounding pretty good, but unfortunately I didn’t get recordings or video to put on the site.
Yesterday, my sister and I attended church, as we normally do every other Wednesday. And finally today, I had a concert of my own, but this time it was choir. My orchestra concert is November 7, so I’d better get that music down, huh?
Well tomorrow, my mom and sister are going to a haunted house with some friends of theirs’. I am not much of a fan of haunted houses, so I opted not to go. So tomorrow I’ll have free rein of the house…
On Saturday, we’ll have goal ball as is always done on Saturday. In case you’ve noticed that my dad hasn’t been a part of this post, it’s because he’s been at work and will be until Saturday when he gets the weekend off. He started this schedule 2 or 3 months ago, but I don’t remember whether or not I told you guys that. Well he’ll be coming to goal ball and coaching it, and joining the rest of us to go to a festival thing. I’m not exactly sure what the festival is, just in case you’re wondering why my description of it was so vage. Unfortunately, there is a possibility of rain on Saturday (I mean a good chance that it will. *crosses my fingers and hopes it doesn’t*
Well basicly, besides that festival, and the orchestra concert, there’s only one thing left to say.
October 28 will be the birthday of my sister, so be sure to wish her a good day. Don’t worry, I’ll try to pick on her as much as possible. 🙂 :)… just kitting.

Well, thanks for reading this post. I really hope you liked it…

Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.

P.S. this is post number 699. The next post will be 700, I can’t believe that. And, I reached 8000 views. You guys are really inspiring me to keep going. With the amount of views you’re givving me, likes, and followers, don’t expect me to quit any time soon.