Landed on my feet

After the weeks of exile in the cottage we made it inside our house again just as the snow arrives.
Even though some work remains to get the house in order (after rewiring all the electricity that turned out to be from 1939) we can live there and we've gotten the heat up. Like I wrote yesterday I'm making progress with coding again and I hope to be able to turn around the emerging slump in subscriptions now.

During renovation I purchased a best of cd with Electric Light Orchestra since I thought I liked some of their songs twenty/thirty years ago - and I did. I usually mix them up with Supertramp and REO Speedwagon. Turns out they made a whole album with Olivia Newton John, so I've kind of started listening to both those. Remember
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m1UWSD-FaA ?

A day with sounds

Today is free from meetings, panic bugs or customer support issues so I finally get to do some focused programming. Gurubear has made good progress with ambient sounds so I plan to add support for them and do some tweaks on spot sounds as well during the day.

The Mol Rehan home server crashed tonight (again). Fortunately we have already sent some crash logs to Sun Microsystems to look at and I expect an answer within a few days. Hopefully they have a solution as well.

Not what I needed

I love synchronicity. Random pieces of data that suddenly match in time and seem to make sense or have a deeper meaning. As most of you probably understand I am itching to get back to work full time.

Now, I also like to purchase budget games in malls. Lately in the evenings I've been playing Enter the Matrix from 2003, which is about the time that we started developing Wurm Online. I play on Easy so that I can see what the game is about without wasting too much time. Incidentally the game has a nice focus mode where you are more powerful and everything moves in bullet time. Enter the Matrix is actually the only game beside Wurm that I know of that calls a feature "focus".

I don't fail often at Easy even though I play sloppily. Now, this time I did fail and I didn't like what I saw:

Yes yes yes. I know. I am doing my best!


Oh, and apparently Wurm has a face:
http://www.pixolator.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=32442

Increased decay

Yep, again. Bleh. Nobody likes it and that makes me feel bad, so I'm sorry.

The game is supposed to have the capability to handle 500 simultaneous players. I wrote some about it here:
http://wurmonline.com/forum/index.php?topic=8361.180

Been renovating the kitchen 24/7. Pretty exhausted and battered. I expect to get the furniture up on monday so that we can move in. Fetching it now from IKEA. Only the floor remains now and it should be laid down on sunday by Rickard Nyren the floor expert.

Don't panic over the decay. At least you'll get skills getting new items. The big difference is that you have to use them up more quickly and that goes for everyone so at least its fair.

Enjoy the weekend!

Client team at full strength

I have now finally received the NDA from Brent, aka Teslas. The client team now consists of 8 people and is at full strength which feels very good.

I'm at work fixing a few bugs and restarting for maintenance but I thought I'd show you what I am facing this afternoon:

I have to get this done by the weekend. The cottage we borrow is getting cold:)

I made a lot of progress tearing down things yesterday though. This is how it looked then:

No place for a ten months old. Actually it was a pretty ugly kitchen even before, not suited for a thirty-eight year old either.

A you can see there used to be a wall in the middle of the room where the door is. It took forever for the hired guys to tear it down. We also discovered the surprise pipe for the radiators in the wall just in front of the door so we had to call the plumber.

I've never renovated a kitchen before and even though I'm not young anymore I can feel the adult points ticking in as I detach the stove fan, figure out how to turn off the water and move the sink, or drill a hole in the concrete to the basement. No wonder those carpenter guys got their children ten years before me.

Evening work this week

I started a renovation project in my house a week ago that has escalated beyond imagination. The idea was to simply open a door to the garden but just as with every other project like this the whole kitchen now has to be renovated. I can't afford this so I have to do most of it myself.

Since the house is pretty much uninhabitable until this is fixed I better get on it right away since we have small children and its really starting to wear on us. This means that I'll be away most of the week and do whatever work I can in the evenings.

Meanwhile, play Wurm and enjoy!

Wurm is on the frontpage again!

Thanks go out to the regional newspaper Östgöta Correspondenten (corren.se) for featuring Wurm on its frontpage here in the Motala edition! Seems we didn't make it to the online version but paper is fun enough.

Here are some photos I took of it (click for a larger version):

Glad that they point out that the picture is arranged.