A Successful Tournament

Hey guys,
Steve here.

I went through with it this time. I told you guys I’d be back to this blogging thing and… here I am 5 days later. Five long days, might I add, which were filled with stressful travel, painful but fun Goal Ball, and now school, I guess.

My first ever out of state Goal Ball tournament was a thrilling experience to say the least. As you may recall, last week I was both excited and nervous about it; the excitement was justified, the nervousness not so much. Out of all four games my team and I played, we won four.

Of course, there were nerves involved, two of the games we won by only three points, and most nerve racking of them all, the last game in which we played for Gold, we won by only one point. The game that I neglected to mention, we won twelve to four.

Despite Goal Ball being a bit of a pain in the butt… and the chest and the arms and the legs and the stomach… you get the picture, I really enjoy playing it and hope to go to another one of those tournaments again soon. But please, for the sake of my sanity, can we just get there without the airports? I think those were more stressful than the tournament itself.

That aside, life has resumed as normal. We returned to Texas yesterday afternoon, welcomed by dreary skies and the pattering of a dismal rainfall, a perfect match for the feelings provoked by the prospect of another daunting set of consecutive school days. Lucky for me, my week will only last three days. On Thursday, I’m traveling to the Texas School for the Blind for a weekend long program that familiarizes the blind with city travel. That’s right, city travel, no airports this time. Anyways, I’ll be there from Thursday until Sunday. I’m pretty excited about this one, because with it being based on city travel, I’ll basically be exploring the city of Austin for a few days, and from what I can gather it’s quite large, and there are numerous things to do there.

In the mean time, while I’m living the good old normal life for a few short days, I’ll get some work done on my projects. Also, if Danny and I can get some technical issues sorted out, we might be able to record a podcast. I know it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of those, but just as I have this blog I plan to go back to that at some point; if not this week, then perhaps when I’m not so busy.

That concludes tonight’s post. Depending on how much I get done code wise, I’ll give a progress update on my games when I blog next week. I probably won’t be posting until Sunday or Monday, because not much is likely to happen in the next three days.

Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.

intresting weather, and a life update

Hey guys,
Steve here.

There is a winter storm warning in affect for Texas?
Yeah, you read that right. Tomorrow into Monday afternoon, there is the potential for 1 to 2 inches of sleet and ice accumulations mainly along and west of the Interstate 35 corridor; I am shocked. The winter storm, as of now, could cause power outages, extremely hazardous if not impossible travel conditions, and hopefully no school, but we’ll have to see about that.
I will continue to update you guys on this situation, and maybe post some stuff on the weather forecast page

–life–

My life has been good the past several days. I am now a level 13 on the game I’ve been playing, and would be a level 14 perhaps if I wouldn’t quit making such stupid decisions that get me killed. Some of those include fighting enemies that are one to two levels above me and stupidest of all fighting enemies when my hit points (health) are below fifty.
Besides the game, I have been working more on Stranded, but kind of taking it easy. I have created that avoid the Rpg board, but unfortunately there are still parts of it that need touching up, and the process of cleaning the thing up is very confusing (you would have to use the program I’m using to create it to get what I’m talking about).
On other news, I’m in a pretty good mood today. This is probably due to the fact that I just had coffee and got up so nothing has happened, and there’s at least a 50% chance we won’t go to school on Monday, and a 15 to 20% chance we won’t go on Tuesday either. The main reason however, is the fact that I have a weekend to look forward to, and a short school week that is going to be at most two days long, before a nice five day break, even if it is not the longest break you could get.
Finally, if you’re wanting more information about what has happened in the past two or three days, you have come to the right blog post. Thursday was a pretty normal day; after going to school, I was able to just relax and play my game, not worrying about homework or anything like that. Yesterday, after going to school and getting home in all that cold weather, I was presented with a nice surprise. My mom, being the good mom she is, made me hot coco and fresh baked chocolate chip cookies for a snack. Plus, I was able to come home to a warm and good smelling house.
The rest of yesterday consisted of playing hogwarts, crashing for a wile with my cat (he must’ve been feeling tired as well), and then taking a nice warm bath.
I can’t say much about today, because it just started. I know that me, my sister, and dad are going bowling around noon with the whole goal ball team, and after that it will more than likely become an afternoon of chillaxing. Tomorrow is expected to be extremely cold and stormy (mainly in the afternoon), and I’m looking forward to that. I will also continue to update the weather forecasts page (the one I gave a link to on the top of the post) with weather forecasts, that way you aren’t bugged by like 3 blog posts in 24 hours.
I guess that about wraps up today’s post. I suppose I’ll see you in a couple days.

Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

Looking Ahead to a Busy Weekend

Hey guys,
Steve here.

I know it hasn’t been but two days since I last updated my blog, but I figured that since my only chance to write a real good thorough update wouldn’t be until Sunday, for I haven’t but a few hours today, and the latter portion of Saturday at which there is a highly promising chance I will be unmotivated to write a long and well-written post since that will be quite a busy day.
I am in a relatively great mood today. Though I am at school right now, the first 3 hours of the day I get to spend typing furiously on my keyboard and surfing the internet, two of my favorite hobbies. Today is an early release day at my school; and since the sighted folks of my school are taking a test that has not been accommodated for a blind individual, I get three hours to relax in a comfortable chair and have a good time on the computer. I haven’t the whole day to relax; all things must come to an end and unfortunately that test is one of them. At 11:15, which is no more than 50 minutes away, I must return to the real world, which is to say English class. I am not, of course, dreading this; because although we’re reading Shakespeare and doing work, I will be able to talk to friends. Not only that, but in an hours’ time after I go to English class, it will be time to go home, and I can eat lunch and get on my computer once again… and this time it will be my personal computer that has all my games on it.
Now on to what this post is mainly about, looking ahead, there are some quite busy days that lie ahead of me. Tomorrow, although I will be returning to the normal school routine, my dad will be picking me up at around 1:15. Speaking of which, I should probably email both my orchestra and science teachers to let them know I will not be attending their classes tomorrow. 6th and 7th periods will be the only ones I miss since they both happen to be scheduled after 1:15. Not that I’m mad that I’m getting picked up; for it gives me the excuse to miss out on two classes. What teenager, whether smart or not, would miss the chance to do that?
Now on to the reason I’m getting picked up. I have a goal ball tournament scheduled for Friday night, and we have to be ready and at the high school we’ll be playing at. It is nor mine or my sister Libby’s school, or the school of anyone we know. It is just a school that lets the goal ball coaches host the tournament, and also sports extravaganza which I will be attending on Saturday. I will talk more about that later on in this post though. Anyways, I have done this tournament many a time before, and can link to the posts that tell about my experiences from 2011 and 2012, and also a page with images and video about the tournament. Here they are:
post 1 although this is in audio post format, it will describe both the goal ball tournament and sports extravaganza in 2011.
post 2
This is for 2012
goal ball 2012, the page with images and video
So reading this post, you should get a general idea of what kind of posts and media this tournament will cause me to write. I will write that post on Sunday, so stay in tuned.
Now as I said a while ago, I will tell you about sports extravaganza, which I also said that I would be going to on Saturday. In sports extravaganza, blind individuals from all over Texas, and I think even people from out of state come to the high school we had our tournament the night before, and some organizations sponser an all-day track and field event for the blind. And though the event is mainly centered around outdoor events, there is also a goal ball demonstration after lunch, which they provide to you. I can honestly say that every time I’ve gone it’s been an awesome experience for not only me to enjoy, but the rest of my family as well.
The event usually ends around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and leaves me pretty tired do to all the fun activities I did. That is the reason I said I’d probably not be motivated to write a post as I am doing now Saturday afternoon.
Well, now that I have that out of the way, I should probably tell you podcast updates. As you know if you’ve been viewing the site for the past 3 days, the podcast has yet to be posted. I have come upon a decision on the game. It is called q9, and is an action packed game where you guide a small alien back to his space ship. It’s a relatively long game, and is filled with hazardous pits, annoying squeaky bats that make you really want to kill them, vicious creatures that want nothing more than to tare poor old Q9 to shreds and eat him all up. So, as q9, your goal is to run through the worlds and levels killing enemies and jumping pits. More will be described in the podcast episode.
I also have another podcast episode to do on Sunday, and the game for this will either be Death match, or adventure at C: another action game but that is slightly more difficult than q9.
More about these games will be on their respective podcasts.

Well, I must finally end this blog post… so see you Sunday.

Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.

Future milestones, and a look into the passed

Hey guys,
Steve here.

Cooler weather, rain, goalball, computer registry errors…

I suppose I could end the post here… right? Well not really. A blog post that is less than a sentence, in my book, is classified as a twitter or facebook update; both of which I refuse to mess with.
My last week was stressful yet kind of fun at the same time. It was boring and exciting as well. Unlike the last couple posts, I refuse to use the one plane word “good” to describe my week, for it is not true about all 7 days of it.
So, basicly here is how those days went.
Monday was, as you know, a day off of school. Tuesday through Friday were school days. In English class, we began to read Shakespeare. Though I have been at this blogging/writing business, my writing skills remain well below those of Shakespeare. So beyond that, we’re also doing a booklet project in social studies which I am all but finished with. In this we had 5 action pages, where we would describe stuff (we’re covering the American revolution and Brittan’s 13 colonies… just historical stuff like that) so the events would be like the Proclamation of 1763, the tea act, the stamp act, the townshend acts etc etc. You would also have to copy a cause and effect chart, look up 8 key people and what they did in the revolution, and define vocabulary words. I’m on the vocab part and will have that finished tomorrow.
By the way, while on the subject of school, I made all A’s on my report card. the lowest grade was a 90 (I don’t remember what class), and the highest was a 100 in choir class.
Now if you’re wondering about the weekend, here’s how that was.
Saturday was a whole day devoted to goalball. I feel as though I am a broken record when talking of my Saturdays; for they mostly seem to be all about goal ball. There is of course, no problem with that; goal ball is a really good sport, and I do have a tournament coming up on Friday. If I manage to get my mom to video tape or snap pictures of the games, I will create a goalball 2013 page for it.
Now back to the passed, also known as Sunday, that was a day of computer registry cleaning and relaxation and church. In the morning was when me, my sister and Dad went to church, after which I came home to get on my computer as I usually do on days like this. Unfortunately, my machine refused to cooperate–freezes, slow coming on, and even some instances where it wouldn’t come on at all and I was forced to run it in safe mode.
Well yesterday, deciding I’d had enough, I downloaded 3 registry cleaners so I could have a variety. Come to find out I had 2,800 registry errors, as stated by one program that was not quite as friendly with my screen reader (the program that uses speech output to describe what events are occurring or the text being transmitted to my computer screen). The program that wasn’t screen reader friendly was reg cure pro. So, I used c cleaner and AML registry cleaner which both proclaimed that I had 291 errors. I’m not sure what was right.
Well, skipping the rest since I know that non computer orianted people are probably hitting the exit button on there web browser or trying any means of escape from reading my blog, I’ll just tell you the end result. My computer hasn’t froze up since 24 hours ago when I finished the registry cleaning, and it seems to be going a lot faster.

Well that wraps up my last week of life. However, my podcast isn’t posted, but me and my cohost Devin ran into trouble.
I am not exactly sure what type of internet router I have, and you need to forward ports or something on the router in order to connect to multi player games or otherwise connect to someone else’s computer via remote access. Unfortunately, you must know the kind of router and how to forward ports or you’re basicly just out of luck. So, there’s this program called hamachi which overwrites that rule and lets you connect to other computers anyway via secure vpns (vertual private networks). Well this program has been malfunctioning, thus disabling Devin and I to test or play Death Match, the game of the podcast. I’m thinking about doing a different game until we get Death match figured out, so this podcast can be done.
By the way sorry for that confusing rant about computers I did there.

Well, I guess that about wraps up today’s post, so…

Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.
P.S. We’re coming onto both the 700th post and the 1000th day! This blog is truely reaching some stunning milestones! Keep reading, and I will definately keep updating.

my life as I think I know it

Hey guys,
How u doin’?

Well I’m doing good…

I haven’t written in this blog lately, have I? Well, the last thing I posted was about the podcast, and a life update, but that was Wednesday; you probably don’t know my current life situation. For all you know, I could be posting this blog post on a high tech supercomputer while sitting on a strange planet in a parelell universe… well not exactly.
Whether or not this disappoints you, I gotta tell you…
things have gone normal for me.

On Thursday, I had school, but got to get out early for a doctors appointment.
Friday was normal, like a tipical Friday should go…
Saturday, the whole day was dedicated to goal ball. There were two two hour long practices, and when ended we had to go to coach Kristie’s house to talk about teams for our upcoming torniment.
Sunday (yesterday), I spent playing my game and on skype… I even computered myself out later in the day and had to do something else.
Today has been your average Monday… not good, but not bad either.
As far as future plans go, I can’t think of anything out of the ordinary I will be doing over the next few days. Well besides talking on skype and smashing zombies anyway.

Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.

Updates, part 2

Hey you guys,
Steve again.

As I promised, I am finishing the blog update.

Like I said, I am here to talk about the program I am creating. It’s a utility called Swamp campaign creator, (listen to podcast episode 4 and 5 to hear some recordings of swamp being played). Basicly, swamp is a game where you walk around a town killing zombies. To learn more, go to Jemery Kaldobsky’s games website where the game is stored along with some useful info and other software. Well, there is more to swamp than just killing zombies. There is a thing called “campaigns,” which are custom adventures players can script that will run in swamp. For example, one who wanted to script a campaign could make something from an egg hunt campaign, to a more complicated mission or even an episode series of missions.
Unfortunately, there is a catch. That is that you have to learn the scripting language in order to create campaigns, which unmotivated me to even create a campaign, despite how cool it sounded. So, I created, or recreated the swamp campaign creator. Let me tell you some history of this project.

About a year ago, a guy from the audio games .net forum decided to create the swamp campaign creator. I was one of the first to try this out, and found that there were some major faults:
1. The thing didn’t allow you to create zombies in your campaign.
2. The campaign didn’t write to any file, so it didn’t type any script.
3. The way he coded it, all the script would’ve been put on one line, and that is prohibited in the swamp campaign scripting language.
4. I accidently removed the program from my computer, and when I tried to get it again, the thing was gone and replaced with a message that he was going to update it and that the link had been removed.

Let me just say, this happened 6 months ago, the audio games thread it was posted on has been dead for 2 months now, and I got tired of waiting honestly because I asked a question or 2 about it and never got a response. That’s why I recreated it. I will not put it on the audio games forum at this time, well just in case he ends up updating it in the future.
For now, I will just post a link to the software so people who play swamp and visit my site can try it out:
Download the latest swamp campaign creator
Information about what this program does to
aid the process of campaign creation can be found in the help file.

Now on to some other life things that happened that I left out in last night’s post:

I got these cool head phones. They are not only noise canseling, but they have a lot of base and good quality. I’m really enjoying them, especially when playing my games because they can penpoint enemies and items better.
Also, me, my dad, my sister, and Grandpa went to the rangers game today. They lost 1 to nothing, and the game ended real fast because noone was hitting runs or anything. It just seemed like it was back to back outs from the time we got there to when we left, but it was still exciting to watch anyway.

Well, I guess that about wraps up my blog update. I will hopefully do the podcast tomorrow, seen as how I went practicly streight from goalball to the Rangers game.

Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

how my day went

Today, I got up very early because my mom and dad were at work. When I woke up, I just played with the kitties for a while, laid on the couch, then ate breakfast. I spent the rest of the morning playing on the computer, listening to my book, taking a shower, then getting ready for goalball. Then, I ate lunch, and hung out with my sister until my dad got home. Then, I just listened to my book until it was time for goalball. Me, Dad, and Libby went to goalball, had practice for 2 hours, then me and dad dropped libby off at her friend Madison’s house. Not to much later, I joined my sister and her friend at her house while my dad went home to lay down, and the treo of us ate some burgers and fries for dinner. Then, we spent the rest of the evening watching full house, before I posted my journal. That is all I did today.