Wow, first post in like a year. I apologize for letting down some faithful readers of my old blog. At least I did a wordpress update and splurged on some security features for this site. I’ll look at some plugins and finally setting up a subscription service again next.
I’m sitting in a cozy little downtown apartment typing this on a Macbook Pro, listening to some Smashing Pumpkins on youtube while the food is on the stove in my little kitchen. The work week is finished, capped by another Cisco exam. Things are newly good. But boy, what a slog it was getting there. I spent much of the winter in a sleeping bag on the floor with two electric space heaters barely keeping it above zero during the night. What happened?
I freed myself from living on the dole for a year by scoring a job in IT in the spring of 2019. At the time, I was sharing a house with two distant relatives who’d recently gotten into each other’s hair. They owned the house but didn’t live there. I was paying to stay. When it got to threats about auctioning off the house while I was still living in it (that’s how nice my family is), I packed all my things and had them put into storage. From then on, I crashed on the floor, living out of an old Army duffel bag, still shaping up for work every morning.
Like all amateur strategists, they didn’t commit with the auction thing nor with anything else. It was just psychological warfare. Nobody bothered to fix anything about the house including the heating. So it got close and closer to zero at night. So I got electric heating. I’m pretty sure I got pneumonia. Then I got an apartment.
It was a stroke of luck. Downtown, affordable, nice. I signed two days after first seeing it. I moved in there with three paper boxes, a duffel bag and a mattress. The taxi driver ripped me off. But I had a flat. Paying the deposit almost killed me. I managed.
Then Corona hit.
It’s going on three months of home office now. At times, it drove me up the wall. I got depressed. I had difficulty concentrating. I still didn’t have any furniture because I couldn’t take my stuff out of storage. I didn’t have a way to wash my clothes except by hand. I love cooking my own food, but sometimes I lived on the Viet Cong diet – rice in the morning, rice in the evening.
It kicked into overdrive when another school block started (I’m doing computer science). Germany is a little behind the curve on the digital things, a little not quite state-of-the-art. So the Corona school block has pretty much been “here are some links, please teach yourself, exam on Sunday. Have a lot of fun!” I mean, that’s madness at the best of times, but these aren’t the best of times.
I’m doing better now, though.
Trying to be objective, I’m a much better programmer now than ever. I’m doing GUI programming on Windows in C#, LDAP queries, crypto and regex in Python on Linux, and fixing PHP scripts in between. I’ve gained some serious C++ muscle as well. I never quite put C++ down because I still expect to do some Unreal development.
While most of my life was in storage, I’ve had a lot of time to look at things from a distance. That can be really helpful. I still don’t have my workstation PC, but I’ve looked at Scout’s Journey from all angles in my mind, over and over. Suffice to say I got a number of clues. I’m going to make some changes, pare it down a lot. Both the gameplay and the script need a lot of editing. It’s been a humungous collection of ideas. Time to cut it down, make it more compact without losing the essence. Time to flex that muscle.
Time to jump back in.