Tag: church

An Exciting and Busy Week

Hey Guys,
Steve here.
Last week went by so fast, despite the fact that I was counting down the days until I could go to D Now. This year, D Now was very exciting, mostly like it’s been the last 3 years I’ve gone. However, there were some differences: we stayed at a camp this time, and there was not a game in the afternoon, and there were two mission projects. Still, I had a lot of fun.
First of all, we got a hilarious, speaker! For those of you who ever get bored in church, I promise you that if you were at D Now last weekend, that wouldn’t have happened. He had the croud busting out laughing every minute it seemed. Despite that fact, I got a lot out of the messages he preached.
I also enjoyed the worship services. The combination of a loud band and the fact that everyone around me was singing eliminated all hesitation I had to sing.
Besides the messages, which there were 4 of, I spent the weekend making friends and enjoying myself. I definitely look forward to D Now next year.
I was pretty tired after D Now ended on Sunday, and spent a few hours relaxing, before I returned to my home church for a Valentines dinner. Since it was a 3 day weekend, my friend came home with us, and spent the night. So as you can imagine, I had quite a busy weekend.
Moving on, I’ve done a lot of programming over the last week, except for the weekend of course. I’ve downloaded inform7, a language speciffically meant for coding interactive fiction games. This language is unlike PB, because the sintax is very close to that of human english. Check out this example of inform sintax:

[this is a comment. the end of comment is marked by the right bracket. But here we’re going to create a hallway.]
A coridor is a kind of room.
[we want to create a hallway. and saying that a hallway is a room is just a bit weird…]
the Hallway is a coridor. “you stand at the end of a lengthy coridor. It is relatively dark here, only a small percentage of the numerous lightbulbs dotting the cieling actually in working condition. Several unmarked doors line the carpeted walls, a card reader on each one. Save the occasional mysterious sound coming from one of the rooms, the coridor is completely scilent. At the far end of the coridor is a heavy looking shiny metal door. On the wall beside the door looks to be a key pad, but it’s too far away for you to clearly tell what it is.”

The first sentence, as said in the comment, defined a kind of room. The second one created that room, and the text in quotation marks represented the description that the player would read upon entering it, that being why I had to be so descriptive.
So even for a non-technical person, learning inform wouldn’t be all that hard. It’s harder for me, however, because it resembles no language I’ve ever worked with.
In other news, I downloaded BGT (Blastbay Game toolkit) a couple days ago. I’m not exactly sure why I did that (I was just a bit bored), but going back and looking at the manual from a semi-experienced coder point of view, I discovered that it actually makes some sence now. So who knows, I might learn that just so I have something else to use for coding games.
Of course, I did some coding in good old purebasic. I started to rewrite sQuad word, as the previous version is so buggy that there’s literally no way to fix it without dissecting all the code and reworking countless procedures and such; it would take much less time just to redo the thing. After coding on it for about 45 minutes I was able to create a fully functional file and edit menu, with all of the most basic of the basic features of a notepad. I added an autosaving feature as well, and got it up and working, bug free, on the first try.
That’s all for this post. I’ll blog again later. Also, since I was unable to do it this weekend, I’ll record the podcast for this week soon.
Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.

Another Birthday well spent

Hey guys,
Steve here.
As the title suggests, this was a good day. I’m pretty tired right now; not sure if it’s all that sugar I ate, or all the fun I had, or both… so I think I’m going to try and make this a short post.
I don’t know if this is coincidence, but this blog reached 10,000 views on my birthday! That’s a nice present… isn’t it?
Well anyway, after I posted on Sunday, not much happened–besides singing practice and church of course, as I said would happen.
On Monday, I went to school like normal, as well as on Tuesday, or Steve Eve. By the way, I hope you all had a wonderful Steve eve!
Waking up today was pleasant. for one, I got that extra 1 hour and 15 minutes of sleep, because my dad took me to school as aposed to the bus which comes and picks me up at 7:00. And for 2, I pigged out on a wonderful breakfast–a glazed donut, chocolate donut, a cinnamon roll, donut wholes, cake donut, 2 pigs in a blanket, and a nice big bottle of chocolate milk. And though I was very full afterward, I’ve gotta say that was the best breakfast I’ve had in quite a while.
Anyway, school was pretty boring today–but, I got a lot of happy birthday wishes though. And when I turned 15, (at 3:01 PM), my science teacher was giving a lecture on compound elements on the periodic table.
When I got home, however, I took a short break before we all (me, my mom, my dad, and my sister) went to stake n shake, where I had (you guessed it), chicken fingers and an m & m / cookies and cream shake.
After that, we went to church, where the youth leader through a small party–I had a cake, and cupcake, and they all sung happy birthday to me, me in cluded).
Finally after church, I came home, showered, and have been relaxing and reflecting over the day since then. On Friday night and Saturday, I’ll be having my birthday party down at the lake. And I know you’re probably wondering what I got–nothing just yet. I’m waiting to open my presents until the party itself.
Well I guess that concludes this post, since I’ve got to go to bed. I really enjoyed this birthday; and though I’m a bit sad that it’s over, I can rest assured that more birthdays are to come in the future, and I still have a party to look forward to. Good night to you all, and happy Day of the Best!
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

good and bad news, along with current life events

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Yes, you read that right. Today is one of the rare occurrences of bad news on this blog… so I guess I’ll tell you the bad news right now just to get it out of the way.
You know Swamp? The game I’ve been addicted to for about a year now? Well due to the fact that there are so many hackers, attacks, and other unwanted things happening within the game, Aprone (swamp’s creator) is making it a paid game. I won’t have to pay for single player, but if I want multiplayer, that’ll be $24 per year.
I have a visa gift card, so hopefully that will work. If so, I might consider paying for swamp. But if not… well I’d better step up my game (quite literally) and program some audio games worth selling.
Speaking of audio games, the good news I mentioned earlier is about Trash, the card game that I am programming for the blind. let me tell you how much progress I’ve done on that.
-I completed the player system, testing it out to be sure it works. Now, you can draw, place cards at the desired position, junk, and draw from the junk pile.
-mostly completed the computer player system. The only thing I need to do for the computer player system is to add the draw from junk pile procedure, but I figure that’ll be easy.
-began the process of adding sounds. I’ve already added a deck shuffling sound for when you start the game and the deck is shuffled, but I don’t think I’ll add any more sounds until I’m completely done with all the other stuff.
Speaking of sounds, I found my flash drive of sounds, which I believe contains over 1000 sound affects. That’s good news for future games.
Moving on to my life, we’re well into spring break now. To start off the break, my friend Oscar from church came over to spend the night. It was another surprise my parents threw at me–one minute I was on the computer, chatting with Danny over skype, the next I was scrambling to clean my room and the bathroom so they didn’t look like a complete mess when Oscar came.
And three hours later, my mom and I picked up Oscar, and him and I spent the rest of the night playing wii, and hanging out.
On Saturday, I had goal ball practice, however Libby didn’t go because she went to the mall with the church youth group to ice skate (yet another event that I was going to, but didn’t figure that out until after my last update, I think). Anyway, Oscar came to goal ball as well, so he got to see my awesome skill!
Right after goal ball, Oscar, my dad, and I met up with Libby and the rest of the youth group at the mall, where I attempted, but failed, at ice skating. But hey, It’s not really about how good I was, it was about hanging with friends, (at least that’s what I hope). But seriously, even though I was ice skating along the wall, I still managed to slip 3 or 4 times, but luckily I didn’t fall.
Skipping ahead, after ice skating, we all went to in and out burger for lunch, before heading our separate ways and going home. Oscar got to hang out with me for a few more hours–and for dinner, 2 hours after we ate lunch, we had more burgers and fries. But hey, there’s no such thing as too many burgers or fries in my book :).
After Oscar left, my Saturday night went a little something like this. Lay on the couch, watching from the side lines as the rest of my family played Yahtzee on the wii, as my head pounded and throbbed, feeling as though someone knocked it with a baseball bat or something. I’m not sure why my head hurt so bad, but luckily it was gone in about 2 hours.
Besides church, Sunday was uneventful. And as for Monday, the only thing I did outside the house was go out for lunch with my sister, mom, and dad. And today, besides a lot of programming, I didn’t do much of anything.
But aside from getting out of the house, my last 3 days have been filled with Skyping my friends, and playing my games, all day, and until 2 or 3 in the morning.
Ah. Isn’t it fun to be a teenager?
Anyway, that’s about it for today’s post. I know you’re sad because you don’t get to read any more of my words at the moment, but you could always:
-read previous posts, like posts before you started following this blog.
-eagerly await my next post.
–but all joking aside, I hope you enjoyed tonight’s post. And remember last night’s Monday’s musings post–I wasn’t lying. I really do enjoy writing these posts.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

A couple things to be excited about

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Since the last time I posted a blog update (not counting the Monday’s musings post), I’ve began to work on yet another sQuad product. As you know, sQuad word is about ready for release. I won’t say that again, because you’ve heard that, what, three times now?
Anyway, There’s still an annoying bug where when you have “show version number” checked, the version number will overlap the text you’re typing, so until I fix that and test it with my friend at school I won’t be able to release it.
Meanwhile, I’ve started on something else as was previously mentioned, a game for the blind. Now you sighted folks, I wouldn’t recommend playing this because I haven’t tested it, and probably won’t test it, with my sighted friends, because I want it to be an audio game. However, if you have a deck of cards and want to play it, or want to program it for sighted users, you can do so. The game is called Trash. But since I’m not too good at explaining stuff and don’t want to spend over half this blog post explaining the game, I’ll give you a link to learn more about it yourself:
http://www.wikihow.com/Play-Trash
I hope to get that game finished by this weekend or next week, but we’ll see. Also, as a last note on software I’m creating or helping create, I’ll hopefully release ultra pad if we can just get rid of that bug. I think it’ll be easy though.
In other news, I’ve been doing well the past few days. If I wasn’t programming, I was reading, eating, at school, in bed, or at church. And listen up fellow bloggers, you’re gonna like this. In the book I’m reading, though it’s about zombies, blogging is a pretty big part of society. You can get a blogging license, upgrade it depending on how good and experienced you are, and lots of people look to the blogging community, because we tell the uncensored truth.
Like even when the zombies started rising and attacking people, people looked to bloggers, because bloggers would tell them how it was. They didn’t have to lie or cover anything up.
As far as the future goes, it’s almost spring break. If I can just wait one day, it will finally be here. It doesn’t seem like it was a year ago that spring break last occurred, but I guess time just flies by sometimes. As for what I plan to do over the break, I have a few things planned. Chill, forget about school, program, Skype, church, and whatever else unexpected things my parents throw at me if any.
Speaking of which, that trip we took to the lake last weekend, I didn’t find out about that until Thursday night, when my mom brought it up in a conversation, as if she expected me to have already known about it. I was pretty shocked.
As for my birthday, I’ve decided I want a family dinner, because I’ve ran out of ideas for a party, and it doesn’t sound very appealing to me this year for some reason. I haven’t decided what I want for my birthday yet, but I’m working on that. As for your part, remember to mark Steve eve (March 25) and the day of the best (March 26) on your calendar. And for you readers who haven’t clicked the follow button yet (you’re still awesome anyway), Mark April 21 as well, because the blog will be turning 3 on that day, and I’ll be putting an annual report. And for you followers, though you’ll get the report in your inbox, you can mark that day as another milestone for one of your favorite blogs, and think back to the previous years and look forward to the next ones to come.
But we aren’t quite there yet, so we still have a few more posts to go until then.
I hope you enjoyed this post!
Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.

An exciting end to a long blogging break

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Woe! It’s already been almost 3 weeks since my last blog update. I mean the only evidence that I still exist (to you guys anyway) is my Monday’s Musings posts, but even those get scheduled sometimes if something bugs me enough on another week day. Don’t worry, this will not be an often occurance–even I need a break from the blog for a while. I think my break is over, so expect more life updates in the future.
As is with all way overdue life updates, I have a lot of stufff to tell you about. First, let’s start with d now, since it was the first thing that happened after my blog post.
As all d nows are, this one was quite enjoyable. On Friday afternoon (valentines day), I only had time to go home, pack, eat some candy, before leaving to go to the host home (the home I would be staying at for the weekend). Basically, the host homes were divided by gender and grade level, so the 6th grade boys would be in one, the 6th grade girls in another, and it would be that way for all the grade levels from 6 to 12. Anyways, shortly after arriving at the host home, getting to know the people I would be staying with, we all went to the church, where we had fajitas for dinner, and then played a getting to know game.
The rest of our Friday night consisted of worship and church service, going back to the host home, small groups discussion (a time to discuss what we learned from the service, but that ended up being small groups comity because I kept telling jokes and making people laugh), snack, and then just chill time until it was time to go to bed.
On Saturday morning, we awoke to a breakfast of breakfast tacos, before having quiet time (a time to study the bible). Then, we headed to the church where we had another worship service, lunch, and finally our mission project. A mission project is when we go out and do work, and it’s separated into host homes as well. Our group had to go and pick up trash (I forget where we went).
After the mission project, instead of a scavenger hunt, we did random acts of kindness. In that game, each group would drive around doing random acts of kindness for people, and taking pictures of it. I believe that the winner would be the group with the most pictures.
Finally, it was time for dinner, and then my friend Joseph and I spent the free time after dinner reading the bible.
After another church service Saturday night, we had small groups discussion once again, but I was more serious this time. Then, Joseph and I read the bible some more until bed.
On Sunday morning, we had another quiet time, before going to the church to have breakfast, a Sunday school service which ended up being people telling about their experiences from the weekend, and then a final worship service. After that it was time to go home.
Although I didn’t want to go home, I had a wonderful time at D Now. It was a great time for me to connect with friends, and get closer to god. I really look forward to going next year.
Now that you know about d Now, let me tell you about sQuad word. On Sunday, I found out that my friend Mason was also making a word pad. He had some stuff in his word pad that I didn’t know how to do, and I had stuff in my notepad that he didn’t know how to do. So, we decided to colaborate, combining our word pads to create ultrapad. Thus, sQuad word is now known as ultrapad, and is just about ready for release, except one small bug that is easily fixable. I don’t have a definant release date at this time.
As for my last 3 weeks, not much has happened, that being one of the reasons I haven’t blogged in a while. This weekend though, my family and I went up to my papa and nana’s lake house, and spent yesterday and last night there, because my dad had to help Papa with something.
Also, there is a winter storm warning in affect. It’s in the 20’s right now, sleeting, and the temperatures are still falling. This is really hard to believe considering it was in the upper 70’ss 24 hours ago.
On a final note, I have a few events to tell you about.
For one, it’s Steven D awareness month. Yes, I’m so awesome, I named this month after myself, so everyone could be aware of my awesomeness. 🙂
Also, Steve eve, and my birthday are coming up. Steve eve is the day before my birthday. Steve eve is on March 25, and my birthday is March 26.
And finally, on April 21, this blog will turn 3 years old, thus meaning I will have been blogging for 3 years!
On a last note, this blog is almost up to 10000 views (9,755 at the moment). Pretty cool… huh?
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
P.s. Glad to be blogging again. 🙂

A great Christmas!

Hey guys,
Steve here.

Before we get started, I have an important thing to tell you followers of this blog. For some reason, “how my day went” posts from last year have been appearing on my blog this year. When I did the daily entries, I sometimes forgot to do them that day, and typed them up the next day and changed the publish time to the day it was origionally supposed to publish on. For example:

I forgot to post the journal entry on December 26, 2012. So on December 27, I wrote it up, went to the “date published” section of my new posts page, and told it to say that it had been published on December 26, 2012 so that people who were new visitors of my blog would think I never forgot to post the how my day went entries. Unfortunately, it has come to my attention that I selected 2013 on the publish year, instead of 2012, thus you have been getting random posts in your in box. I will do my best to make sure this doesn’t happen anymore, so you can continue to enjoy my normal content without any annoying interruptions.

With that taken care of, let me tell you about my rather intresting last 7 days or so. On Wednesday, I posted that life update, as I’m sure you have found out by now. I won’t talk about that day, since I’m sure I did in that post.
Thursday was not really exciting. It was an early release day at my school, but I didn’t have my computer, so I had a hard time finding stuff to do… but I survived :).
Friday was exciting. First of all, it marked the start of winter break! Also on Friday, my church youth group had a camp out. As for the camp out, I told the church people, and my sister that it was going to rain, but they did it anyway (it was fun, and I wanted it to happen, but I was giving them a heads up). Turns out, I was right. We were awakened in the middle of the night to pounding rain, and intense lightning. We ended up having to get up at 4 in the morning, in the freezing cold rain, and walk back to the church.

On Saturday, me, Libby, and dad attended a christmas party that my that my dad’s step mother’s side of the family set up. It ended up being pretty fun… but I did learn one thing:
Don’t eat two two inch blocks of solid fudge. You’ll feel sick!

Sunday and Monday weren’t too exciting. Those days were filled with ever growing excitement for the coming holiday, and on Sunday our Christmas church service.

On Tuesday, my dad’s dad’s side of the family had a party. Man, I’m not sure who made dinner, but that person can cook some roast beef! After enjoying that roast beef, we opened presents and generally had a good time.

After the Christmas party, me, my sister, my mom, and my dad had our Christmas celebration. We opened our presents Christmas eve night, because my mom was going to work the next day and if we had waited we would’ve had to get up at 4 in the morning, something I wouldn’t have minded, but mom and dad would’ve.

Christmas was pretty uneventful. Since my dad’s side of the family had their celebrations, and my mom’s will have theirs in January (my great grandma and great uncle will be coming down), we just went to Apple Bee’s.

As for today, it has gone well. I haven’t done much of anything, besides messing with the stuff I got for Christmas.

Now that we have the life update out of the way, let me tell you what I got for Christmas.
1. an olympus me51s high quality stereo microphone. My Spanish teacher called me James Bond for making my IPhone a wireless microphone for my computer–just wait until he finds out about this 1 inch wide, 1 half inch thick microphone that can pick up noise from a long distance away.
2. Digital air drumb sticks. My parents didn’t want me to have a big old drumb set, because it would make lots of tremendously loud noise, so they got me these drumb sticks that make sound. I haven’t explored them yet, however I will after writing this post.
3. a new laptop. Since my other one broke, I got a new one. Want to know some intresting facts?
fact 1. I can do the podcast using the internal microphone on this one, because it is high quality and will not pick up too much computer noise.
fact 2. The first program I downloaded was swamp, my favorite zombie first person shooter game.
back to my list:
4. a miniature bowling set. It is about the size of a laptop computer, and is actually quite fun. You pull on a little button (It feels like a button, but you pull instead of push) to set up the pins, and it comes with a small ramp to roll the ball off of.
5. Head phones. I got two pares of them, and I still have a working pare. Looks like I won’t have to buy any in the near future.
6. sweat pants. I got 2 or 3 pares, so I could say that I won’t need to buy any more of those either.
7. a remote control car. It is really cool, and is fast, and can pop wheelies.
8. a robot called the doom raiser. It walks around, and shoots phome discs at people… pretty much raising doom.
9. gift cards, and money. You can never go wrong with that.
10. t-shirts. I already have a lot, but some more comfortable clothes can’t hurt.
11. a talking coin counter. It looks like a jar, but the lid has a slot for dropping coines, and buttons for checking how much money is in the jar, and adding or subtracting to the ammount. When you slip a coin into the jar, it tells you something like “10 cents” or “1 cent,” and then gives you the total amount.

I don’t believe I left anything out… but if I did I will put it in on another post.

I guess that about wraps up today’s post, because that’s about all I have to day. Otherwise, I hope you and your family had a merry Christmas, and enjoy your new year. I look forward to another great year of posting–and be sure to expect an annual stats report on December 31.

Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

how my day went

Today, I got up, and we had breakfast at the church. Then, we hung out in the youth room, then had Sunday school. Then, we had another little worship survice, then DNow ended. So, my mom came and picked me up, and I got in the car to find my cousin Thomas because he came over for Libby while I was gone. While we were in there, we told our stories of what happened while we were separated. Also, I learned that my cousin’s dogs attacked and killed the cat, Dink. Then, we dropped Thomas off and went home, ate lunch, and got ready for goalball while my mom went to the store. Then, Dad took us to goalball. After that, we just ate dinner, and hung out around the house and played on the computer. Then, I showered and got on the blog. That is all I did today.

how my day went

Today, I got up and ate breakfast. Then, we had quiet time, and went up to the church for a worship survice. Then, we had lunch, and folded clothes for the poor. Then, we had a digital scavengure hunt that you would take pictures of various things to earn points. When we got back to joseph’s house, we learned that we got 720 points in the hunt, then ate dinner. After that, Joseph read to me from the bible until we went to the church again and had another survice. Then, we had small groups (I fell asleep in) 🙂
Then, we ate cookies, milk, and pizza rolls for a snack, then I showered and got on the blog. That is all I did today.

how my day went

today, I got up and went to school like normal. Then, I came home and played outside for a while, then layed in my bed for a few minutes. Then, I went to dNow registration, which lasted until 8, then I came home, ate dinner, took some headache metasin, then watched amarican idol. Then, I got in the shower, then got on the blog. That is all I did today.