Aug 19, 2006

Aug 19, 2006: The full edition is now available! I went to Rice Lake as expected, even taking some photos. I added two new songs to my collection. My new hard drive has been installed. I've also been involved with Wikipedia for some time. I also found that the price of water my parents have been claiming can't be right and I've got the math to prove it. I've made a few updates to the "about me" section - music and major issues. 96 days and still counting, but not much juice left. 7 more dreams have been recalled, one of which is so well-recalled (98% in tact story and dream, 99% scenery, a record), it's a new dream story.

#1 My 2D game's full edition is now available: At long last the full edition has been released! I was almost about to abandon Regnow due to a long list of issues I'm having with them, many of which resolved. The big one is that inputs use black text and since the background color isn't defined, a dark gray background is used making it otherwise very hard to read. It forces me to type everything in Notepad/Wordpad and use some copy paste to transfer it. The fix is so simple, it takes but a minute to do. I don't see why they can't add this to the control panel's style sheet:

input, select, textarea
{
   background-color: #ffffff;
}

All they need to do is copy this little bit of code and paste it into their stylesheet and save it. It could take but 30 seconds to do so, a minute on the long end (if you have to use an FTP program to do it). This just makes it annoying to work with. They even state that PNG files aren't accepted. Wrong! The boxshot image uses a PNG file and it was accepted as is and otherwise works and displays just fine. I'm using the -30, 0, 0 offset (in degrees from facing the "box" head on). The big upside that prevented me from abandoning them was their fast response times. Although I wished they had 24/7 support, it's still sufficient in most cases. As I tend to assign numbers to almost everything, this table gives a rough breakdown of the various aspects and their compatibilities (in times better than neutral - negative means times worse than neutral (in the positive form)):

Feature	COM*	Pros and cons
Control panel	-20**	Pros: The general layout is acceptable, but could still use some work. Cons: The black text on the dark gray background due to not having the background color defined is annoying. There are almost no descriptions on what many of the fields even mean or what they're for. This resulted in a long-lasting E-mail conversation going into the third or fourth reply before getting all the information I need.
Response times	12	Pros: The speedy responses make a big impact. In some days, I had sent E-mail responses. Cons: They aren't available during the night nor on weekends which has a considerable negative impact.
Order processing system	14	Pros: The system is easy and quite straight forward and provides many more options than I first thought. Cons: Including an image (a screenshot) into the document causes the text to get all right-aligned and not wrap around the image***. Due to the design, I'm unable to have a link to both the EXE and the key - they have to be redownloaded as a ZIP file in order for it to work properly (especially if an external website links to the order form).
Getting sales	-4	Pros: It processes sales quite well. Cons: Sales can only be processed through my website, of which gets so little traffic (1 unique visitor every two days). I can't use the affiliate system because banners are required†.
Overall	1.2‡	See above for each section

Table footnotes:
* COM is the compatibility. Do note that there is a 10% margin of error on these values.
** This is the main thing that otherwise would've made me abandon Regnow - it's so low.
*** When I used a 320x240 scaled down screenshot, all the text was positioned to the right half of the area without the text wrapping around it in any form leaving a lot of white space. If I used a 640x480 image, the text would all be aligned to a width equal to that of the longest, widest word which means, instead of reading decent paragraphs, you'd see one to three words per line rather than about 20 to 30 and it makes for hard reading. Yet, there's a whole lot of white space all around it that the text could go into. I otherwise had to delete the image to prevent this.
^† Because I don't have any banners nor do I know what really goes into them, this isn't possible. I actually do have banners, but they're at least 4 years old and otherwise useless for this (even irrelevent to my website) and I haven't updated them due to negative motive. It also costs a ton to advertise as well so I need to find cheaper alternatives (and I have a few tricks up my sleeve).
^‡ It may seem like it should be 2.1 rather than 1.2, this is actually based on a geometric average. -20 means 0.05 and -4 means 0.25. When multiplying all these numbers, you get exactly 2.1. Because four numbers are multiplied, you take the fourth root (aka a biquadratic root) of this and you get 1.2038.... Due to the margin of error, only two significant figures are possible. If you had all 2's, you wouldn't get an overall average of 16, but rather 2. If you alternated between 2's and 8's, the average would be 4 instead of 256. Unlike normal averages (2+3+1+5 then divide by the number of numbers added), the operations are upgraded. Instead of add, it's multiply. Instead of divide, it's roots.

#2 Rice Lake: On August 9, I went to Rice Lake as expected. Despite the water being rather cold, it's the extremely high compatibility and the very long time frames between chances that I get to go swimming that didn't deter me, not even storms. The fact that the water was wavy also added to it even further and I even convinced my dad to leave earlier. I took a few photos as well. I posted the two best-looking ones:

Photo #1: This is what the main area looks like. This is what I saw when I first got there. There were a few there at the time. Some were on jet skis, others in boats, some fishing, a few swimming. The grass in the foreground is well-cut and well-maintained (I saw few weeds). Although very hard to see, there were thunderheads all around, but the sky here was otherwise clear.

Photo #2: In this photo, you can see me in the water. You can also see the rock-lined edge, which extends 2 feet up from the water's surface. I used this to work out a few trig calculations to judge how far I was out. At the furthest out, nearly twice that of what you see in this photo, the rocks area spanned 0.7° of my field of view with 0.5° (20% margin of error on these; - using the Moon as a guide at 1820 arcseconds (~0.503°)) of that above where my eye level was (1.5 feet; 10% margin of error. I was about 160 feet from shore (probably more around 200 or so). Being that far out, I could still touch bottom. All I could really hear was the wind blowing, but otherwise things like those at the barbeque could be barely be heard. The exception was if someone was using a jet ski or something.

To counter the cold part of it, I often ran around at a fairly high speed. There was a slope of about a 4:1 grade that I could dash down. Yep, even barefoot, I've reached 13 mph in a mad dash. I didn't want to get too fast as there were a few rocks along the way and other objects such as a grill (the reason for going there - a barbeque for the club my parents go to).
#3 Two new songs - 1000 plays in 2 days: It's been a long time since I last got any new songs. Since I was bored having to wait for responses to my issues with Regnow, I took out the Genesis. Although I first played Sonic 3 & Knuckles and drowned the fox several dozen times, I took out "Taz: Escape from Mars" and began playing it knowing that there were two songs I wanted off of it. Due to not having a sound test, I had to play through the game otherwise in full since they were towards the end of the game. The first level of the Haunted Castle world as well as the first level of the Marvin's House world were the two songs. Yep, as soon as I got them, one of them was already into the quadruple play counts area within the second day. The one is the "Haunted Castle" one. I first just had to crop them to get the seemless looping, but at 100,000 Hz, 24-bit, it's of extreme quality. There are two unique firsts in this case. Unlike many of my other songs, anything slower than true speed is not strongly liked. It sounds best from 110 to 130% true speed. While typing this, I had it on 125% true speed (playing at 125,000 Hz sample rate, compared to the recorded 100,000). The second, only known with the Haunted Castle one, is that it's the only song that is liked faster than normal where a spike occurs past 1000. The beginning part is only about 30 for the compatibility, but on the fourth and final part (last 20 seconds at true speed), it hovers around 200 and the last 8 beats (of 136) is where the spike past 1000 occurs, reaching 1070 at the very highest. Most times it doesn't reach 1000. I haven't gone in-depth with the Marvin's House one yet, but the last part of two is the best. The big minus with these two songs is that the bass is rather high. I had to tune it down quite a ways, but not so much so that I can't hear it. The other song, Marvin's House (first area) has only got a brief start and isn't liked as much, but it's already got more plays than most would do in a month. I have yet to go in depth for these songs.
#4 Cockatiels laid eggs, lots of them: Starting since late July (I forgot to mention it earlier), one of the cockatiels has laid eggs. Slowly over time, the total egg count has increased from just one to 9. The eggs are about 3/4 of an inch at the longest and about a half inch in diameter at the widest. I haven't gotten a good look at them so the margin of error is quite high - 25%. One of the eggs got broken, however leaving 8 unbroken eggs. By the time I update my website again (around August 30 or so), they should be hatched. I wonder what newborn cockatiels look like. I don't expect much in the way of feathers, but I do expect them to be quite small.
#5 New hard drive: In the last update, I mentioned that I was seeking after a new hard drive. Well, I got one and 6 days later, it arrived. 250 GB capacity, 16 MB cache, SATA II interface, 7200 RPM, it uses the new perpendicular recording technology, and it's from Seagate instead of Maxtor (the Barracuda line). I got it for $80, not including shipping and taxes. Although I have no real need for that high of a capacity, it was cheapest by the unit, under 30¢ per gigabyte. To many, they don't see "250 GB" in Windows Explorer, but rather something like "232 GB". I was expecting that. However, I ended up with 46 MB more than what I was expecting. 250 GB, for hard drives, means 250,000,000,000 bytes, not 268,435,456,000. Instead, I see it as 250,048,479,232 bytes. With this, I had to run backup, reinstall Windows, drivers, software, and all that. For the fun of it though, I ran gwscan on the old hard drive to completely erase it. Guess what. Nope, not code 0000 as I've had several times earlier, but rather code 0586 and there were indeed errors. I've also noticed that Windows starts up about 40% faster as well. The real benchmark comes from using XVI and saving a huge file (like 300 MB) and timing how long it takes to save it. With my two new songs, likely to get transferred to my MP3 player and probably, for testing, adding my remix of Winter Zone combining the best of two versions of it that I have.
#6 Messing with Wikipedia: Again, due to recent boredom and having to wait for responses, and with the forums otherwise inactive, I began messing around with Wikipedia adding a few new articles and new sections. One new article covers consumer fireworks where I uploaded a few of my photos I had. I also wrote details about Taz: Escape from Mars since I played it recently and posting a few of my screenshots from 2002 and 2003 of Super Monkey Ball 2. I'm otherwise rarely on Wikipedia.
#7 Water cost 10 to 13¢ per gallon - I've proven my parents' claim wrong: My parents, three times in a row, have claimed that water costs 10, 10, and 13¢ per gallon. From many users reporting to me, I did a little investigation myself. I've proven my parents' claim wrong beyond reasonable doubt. I took out all the evidence I could - mostly numbers and approximate monthly water usage, and compared it to how much they were actually paying. Running the numbers, I found it it be one tenth of what was expected making it 1 to 1.3¢ per gallon. I think it's probably because they otherwise cannot read or notice the small dot between the 1 and 3. From what I've been told, it's actually more around 0.3¢ per gallon, a quarter of what my calculations are showing. I've checked and rechecked them and it does check out to be 1 to 1.3¢ per gallon. Despite that, I still, overall, have negative motive for taking showers. The full details (including the calculations I used), are in the new, updated "major issues" section of category 4. It turns out that the cost is actually the third-strongest influence.
#8 Updates to the "about me" section: Without updates since February of 2006 or even December of 2005 and mentioned often in my new forum, I decided to update a few of the details on the music-related pages. Having updated it to include details from the latest events, I then thought about the various E-mails and messages I've gotten for the price of water and ran some calculations. Even here, I've updated this section entirely. Some of the other things, however, haven't been updated.
#9 7 new dreams recalled: I have 7 more dreams recalled. One of them is so well-recalled, it's on the stories category. Two dreams have a page worth in detail, and the second two written pages, but the equivelent of 3 pages. The scenery is a stunning 99% in tact, a record. This means that details to the very finest are described with only a very few very minor details left out (due to being forgotten). The story is 98% in tact along with the dream itself. It's another first-place tie for the most well-recalled dream. Although less story is recalled, the scenery makes up for it (and then some). On top of that, it's also a fun dream too and one extremely well-liked averaging quadruple digits times better than neutral.
#10 Resolving the UV mapping issue - using Blender: Since MED has no way of reliably scaling UV maps to what I need, I looked into Blender, another modelling program, to see if it is worth using to resolve my UV mapping issue. The user interface is what really sent me away. It is so confusing, that it quite easily drops my compatibility to -120. This is so low that, even if I had the feature, the impact it would have wouldn't be enough to bring motive above netural, even with a huge 100x positive impact (which would put it at -1.2). Without being able to do this, I have negative motive for working on anything beyond simple cubes and boring planning for George Game 13. If only I knew of another alternative (without having to pay anything - aka open source).
#11 96 days and still going: I'm now passing 3 months straight of the same song on a single source - my MP3 player. It's hard to believe - 96 days without changing songs and rarely even changing the speed and whatever speed changes I have are all within a narrow range. I'm at long last gettings signs of getting bored of it and I may be switching soon. Let's see if I can break the 100 mark, a good milestone.
#12 Drowning the fox, again: Okay, so it's splash, 30 seconds, fox drowns, I get a new one, splash, and so on for a few dozen times. Of course, I add variations such as using debug mode to add spikes for the fox to play with and meaninglessly jump up into. It's the high-grade stupidity that makes it all so funny. Sure, 32 pixels of water to jump up with no obstacles and the fox still doesn't come out and just drowns. Of course, I could add spikes and I could just keep jumping up into them. Putting the fox into all sorts of traps, get it crushed, send it to the pits (even pools of lava), or fall far enough to fall completely offscreen (at around 31 pixels per frame - the rings are 16, spaced 24 (to help compare)). The character starts falling or running off screen when moving faster than 24 pixels per frame on a given axis. With Hyper Sonic, getting this fast is fairly easy. By using Knuckles in Ice Cap Zone act 1 at the very start and climbing the wall on the far right, you can experience this after climbing up the mountain a bit. Most of the time, I'm playing as Sonic with Tails in some water level so that I can drown the fox. I've only been with Sonic since around 2003.
#13 Winter Zone remix on MP3 player: Being so strongly on my mind, I wanted to add my remix of Winter Zone version 1 to my MP3 player. From this, I also got a benchmark on my hard drive's write speed. At the very fastest, it wrote at 55 megabytes per second (with, strangely, 20% CPU usage). Due to working with 400 MB WAV files, I got a good deal on how fast the hard drive can go. Given that it's only using 20% of the CPU, I wonder if I've reached the limit of the interface, since this is the same top speed I had with the other hard drive (but no CPU usage values known). It could also be the program used (XVI32, a hex edittor). The entire contents of the file were loaded into memory (and with 1.5 GB, a 400 MB file isn't that much of a big deal). Why such a huge WAV file? It's 16-bit format with WAV and the length of the song is hovering around 2 hours at 80% true speed. Why 2 hours instead of the base 15 minutes? It's a 50-lap version. I've only listened to it for a very brief time (two seconds at the most, usually one second per speed), to make sure they transferred properly and sounded correct, then it was back to Battle Zone to continue on the massive record. This will not affect the record, however, as it's way too brief to even be considered listing to the song.

Aug 2, 2006

Aug 2, 2006: At long last my 2D game is released (but not the full edition due to account activation issues with Regnow)! I also set up a forum as well. My hard drive has been making some strange sounds so I have to get a new one, although I have had intentions of it. I can, at long last, go back to Wal-mart after 20 months of not being able to! I have just two recalled dreams. I also got Zonealarm Pro. I saw a high-detail online game for the first time. The 5-year anniversary of using forums has also came. Windows XP Pro also blue-screened for the first time since I had it.

#1 My 2D game is now available!: Now for the moment of truth for my 2D game. The Supernatural Olympics is now available, but only the free edition. Where's the full edition? I ran into a major inconvienience with Regnow with account activation and is going to mean a delay of a few days because of it. I've tested what other bugs I could find and fixed any I found. Ever since I began saving the "time played" counter, I've realized that I've got 7 hours' worth. I have about 5 hours' worth from that (300 minutes) in the final testing phase. At $12.95 per license and free updates within the version (updates likely spanning a whole year), it's worth it. Each sale gives me $11 after taking out the fees for each sale at Regnow (6.9% plus a dollar). Taking in 30% for income tax (a raw estimate, I have no idea what it is), that leaves me with $7.75 per sale. For 100 sales, that's $775, a lot to me. I wonder how it'll go. It's wonder how far it has come. From January 2005, it was nothing more than pressing a key to change a very few settings and doing nothing but watching the scene whiz by like it wasn't there. It was extremely simple, even simpler than the first Atari games. Then, after a years' worth of time (more around 3 to 4 months given the standard 40-hour work week), it gradually evolved into a fully functional and playable game. It's hard to believe how far it has come and there are still many more enhancements to come, especially when Gamestudio releases Lite-C. I also updated the more-details document for the game, including the screenshots. The save/load system bug has been fixed and extensively tested. Before, after 5 saves, it would error twice, a 40% chance of failure. Now, after 90 saves, the probability of a success given this is something like 1.08047E-20, an astronomically small number. That's a zero, a dot, 19 zeros in a row after that, then 108047 at the end. That's tiny! You're more likely to win the lottery twice in a row in consecutive drawings than have a failure and comfortably rare. All thanks to the error log system I made, the forum members, Gamestudio's debug system, and my custom-made debug mode system. I did find some other bugs related to it, but they were minor and nothing like this. As it turned out, it's the "fix the bug in full and have it save everything" option so it turned out to be a better deal than I thought. Now that the game has finally been released, I'm now starting on the update to version 2.5 to include the major features I have intended to do earlier. When I signed up for Regnow's service, there were three steps. The first was filling out a form. The second is clicking a link within an E-mail to electronically sign the agreement. The third step is where I'm given information on how to contact a representative. I got this information and proceeded, but since it was afterhours, I had to wait. Since by the time they open up, I'd have been sleeping for two hours and when I woke up, they'd be closed. This is the severe inconvienience that is preventing me from having the full edition available. It caused my compatibility with the service to drop from a strong 80 times better than neutral to only 1.1 times better than neutral, pretty much right on neutral. I may even have to use a completely different service in order to sell my game - download.com was my original intent.
#2 My new forum has been set up: I first looked into the details. I then explained them in my blog in great depth. I wanted a forum. I got a forum and it's set up. Nope, not 5 days to install it, 15 minutes and even that was long as I first ended up installing it in the wrong directory. I had to uninstall it and reinstall it into the right directory. I then spent about 5 hours setting everything up. August is my most unlucky month.
#3 Hard drive making weird sounds - replacing it is in order!: Since early June, my hard drive has been making this high-frequency sound. At first, I didn't think it was anything significant besides the usual rattling. As time went on, the sounds got louder and louder. I found it suspicious and ran some tests. If I run Winzip to ZIP up some of my AVIs and BMP files, I can get the high-frequency sound to occur. Winzip is both CPU and hard drive intensive. If I run my 3D game or benchmark tester program, which is very CPU intensive, I don't get the sound, even after ten minutes of it. I do get the sound when my benchmark tester program is creating the objects, of which use hard disk activity, but not otherwise. While idling, I don't get it (and from typing this). From listening to the case at different angles, it points to the hard drive. I have such strong evidence that something is going on with the hard drive. Rather than getting the bigger monitor I was after, of which I rejected getting as I felt as if I needed the funds, I'll end up having to get a replacement hard drive. However, getting the upgraded hard drive has been on my list of upgrades for quite some time. This means having to reinstall Windows and everything else again within a shorter notice, not even 50 days. I normally do it after 4 to 9 months on average. So far, I've done a big chunk of the backup. Since I've been wanting to do a cleanup, getting rid of a bunch of BMP files from all those animations I've done, I went off and did that. Rather than 13.9 GB of free space, I now have 18.7 GB and that's from zipping up a few dozen AVIs and over 10,000 BMP files. Yep, 1600 to 1 compression on those AVIs with Winzip. I have yet to wonder why no codec could do that good without any lossy effects. The BMPs tend to compress 150 to 1 and for 10,000 of them, it really adds up. I only have a 40 GB hard drive at the moment. Taking out the 4 GB file from GoBack, I'd have more free space than used space. What kind of hard drive am I seeking after? SATA, about 160 to 250 GB capacity (the cheapest price per gigabyte, just 30¢), 16 MB cache, and that's otherwise it. Although I'll have no need for that much capacity, since it's cheapest by the unit and I think that, since the bits are closer together, it results in a faster transfer speed. With 160 GB capacity, the bits are half as distant from each other than my 40 GB hard drive and I suspect at least twice as fast transferring. 250 GB has the bits 40% as distant allowing for 150% faster transferring. This assumes a nonfragmented hard drive and that all the files are lined up very nicely. Speed is what I'm after. The hard drive is the slowest component.
#4 Finally I can go to Wal-mart again!: It's been 20 months or so since I last was in any Wal-mart. Earlier, the older Wal-mart had mirrors all over the place blocking 99% of my access. The only area I could go was maybe just the first 40 square feet into the entrance and not any further. Now that the Wal-mart Supercenter has been opened up, there are no mirrors at all on the ceiling. Although there are some, it's nothing compared to the old one. Rather than 99% of the store being blocked, it's maybe just 2% at the high end and this store has double the area. The ceiling is 18 feet high instead of about 11 (if I recall correctly - back then I didn't know my 45-degree-angle trick). Rather than something like 250 by 150 feet of area, this new one is more around 400 by 250 feet. I was amazed at how big it is and is the largest building in town after the mall (and maybe Menard's), in terms of floor space that is.
#5 5-year anniversary of using forums: On July 23, 2001 (±1 day), I started using forums. I officially registered on August 2, 2001. This was at the HowStuffWorks forums, when they were available back then. Now that it's August 2, 2006, 5 years later, this is my 5-year anniversary of using forums. When I last had a vacation, I never heard of forums (or pretty much even the internet).
#6 First time I ever saw an online PC game: When I think of online games, I tend to think of something like chess, checkers, or those simple flash games. Until July 24, 2006, I've never seen any big ones. My sister came over with this game called "Ragnarok Online". To me, it looked just like any other typical PC game. It was, indeed, an online game. I otherwise only watched here and there. When I think of online games in this fashion, I think of slow and low-graphics and often unreliable with unexplained jerks due to the internet connection stalling or the ISP gets flooded with traffic. Although I didn't get to watch it much, I didn't notice much in the way of slowness (the frame rate was smooth for the level of detail I saw, I'd otherwise have expected maybe 3 fps for that level of detail (and taking several minutes to download levels and things on 1 Mbps DSL (hours on dial-up)), let alone the characters and other things there may be. To this day, the newest online game I'm actually played was sometime in 2005 and it was nothing more than a simple one-player flash game. The last time I played a multiplayer online game was even further back in 2004 and was simple chess and checkers, games so simple, my dial-up connection wouldn't have been a problem. Unlike my childhood days where I would play some of the newest games around and was otherwise keeping up with technology and games, I've fallen way behind in how things are nowadays. During the last year, it's only been about 24 hours' total play time. In my childhood days, I'd go through that much play time in just two days!
#7 I got Zonealarm Pro: Since the free edition license of Zonealarm is only for home use and not for business use (as from selling my 2D game), I got Zonealarm Pro. I was originally looking into Zonealarm antispyware, but since it didn't have a 2-year subscription option, of which I don't like those subscription things, and that there was a special discount going on, I went with Zonealarm Pro since it had the antispyware feature, 2-year subscription, and other features I found useful.
#8 Windows XP blue-screened for the first time: I've had Windows XP Pro since early February of 2006. Within the last update, I had the first case of Windows XP showing the ever-famed blue screen of death. It's the first time I've seen it. As from my bug-hunting technique, I recall quite precisely what I was doing before this happened. After publishing my 2D game then using Molebox to pack it up, I began editting the summary of the EXE. I right-clicked on the EXE file and selected properties. I then went to the summary tab, clicked "advanced", then began inputting fields as neccessary. When I was done, I clicked the apply button then Windows XP blue-screened saying of a stop error and rebooted. Yep, another error report for Microsoft to look into. GIMP is more unstable than XP is, given GIMP has crashed on me almost 40 times, XP just once.
#9 Almost no dreams recalled: Unlike many of my other updates, I hardly have any dreams recalled, just two. One of the dreams is both bizarre and a bit scary.

Daily Events

Aug 1: Still no dream! I first cleaned out the forums then ate watching the news. Since I almost always watch the news, I figure that I'd optimize my time by eating during this time. I recleaned the forums then started updating my website. I added a few more headlines and added the first of two dreams. I then decided to sign up for Regnow so I could sell my 2D game. That all went well until the last step of registration - account activation. I got the details just fine, but, since it was afterhours, (7:20 PM or so), I couldn't. By calculations, I'd have otherwise went to bed before they opened up and when I wake up, they'd have just closed. Without this, I can't activate the account and I otherwise can't sell the game. What a major inconvienience. They even state they strive for satisfaction. From this, my compatibility with their services dropped from a very strong 80 times better than neutral to almost right on neutral (1.1 times better, nothing considerable, but at least it's not below neutral) and I may even use a different service. Grr am I so dissatisfied.... This, however, won't stop me from releasing the free edition. You just wouldn't be able to use the full edition. Fortunately, it's not spanning the weekend so I have some luck there. I wonder if the bad luck of August is getting at me already. I sent them an E-mail about this mishap. I then swapped between the forums and updating my website, completing all but 4 of the daily entries, now 5 since I went to bed rather early. I switched songs on my computer again. From Desert Zone, I'm now listening to Baby Looney Tune's ending theme song, the one without the lyrics (and especially the whistling). The compatibility is around 700 with the spikes reaching just past 1000. I predict about 5 days' worth given this. The song on my MP3 player, Battle Zone, still hasn't changed, despite 80 days of it and theoretically another 20 to go. Despite this, I still "want" to listen to it, still muting TV ads just to hear it. If above 100 is rarely seen, who knows what 3190 could do, being about 32 times better and that I can sustain it for 1000 times longer. I also ran backup while watching two hours' TV. Woke up at 3:15 PM and went to bed at 5:53 AM.
Aug 2: Around 11:00 AM, while I was sleeping, my dad came in my room to reset a circuit breaker. This didn't happen once, but twice. I went back to sleep right after in both cases, spread only 3 minutes apart. In both cases (during this and after officially waking up), I didn't get a dream recalled. I woke up quite drowsy, completing all but one of the daily entries. I responded to some E-mails at the start and only briefly cleaned out the forums. The news came on and I watched it. I was otherwise too tired to continue, almost falling asleep twice while watching the news. I went back to bed. I woke up again and started to eat. I finished the update to my website releasing both the 2D game and the forums. Upon the second wake-up phase, I had a runny nose and was drowsy. I thought I caught a cold. I watched TV at the end while waiting for my MP3 player's battery to charge up. Woke up at 4:00 PM, went to bed at 6:12 PM, woke up again at 8:02 PM then went to bed again at 4:28 AM.
Aug 4: Finally, I managed to recall a dream, a whole page of detail too, but only the last two-thirds of it. I first cleaned out the forums briefly, including my new ones, and checked my E-mail. I watched some TV and ate. I then returned to the forums. From comments/suggestions on the Gamestudio forums, I added another feature for the future plans part of my 2D game. A huge chunk of the day was spent on the forums. I got a response from Regnow, and it's both good and bad. Good as in I can activate the account without bothering about being awake at the wrong times. Bad as in it means a further delay as I was only given alternatives. Another good is that, whether or not I get a response using E-mails, I should be able to very early about 25 hours from the time I went to bed today. The ugly is that it's the weekend and may result in a further two-day delay (That's why I seriously hate weekends, -700 compatibility for things like this). I have many positive reviews over my 2D game. Before, when I released the 2.2 version (a beta), I had an average review rating of about 8 out of 10 on average. This time, it increased to a 9 out of 10. That's a good improvement. Users seemed impressed on the stability and how bug-free the game was. I also ordered the new hard drive. For details, see news item #5. This means I'll be down for a day. Woke up at 4:57 PM and went to bed at 8:12 AM.
Aug 5: Despite having gone an entire week without recalling a dream, I just recalled the second one in a row, again a whole page in details, but otherwise covering the whole dream rather than leaving out beginning 1/3 of it. I woke up to starting cleaning out the forums, but constantly got connection errors. I then was completely unable to connect so I ate instead. I was given a pizza from Pizza Hut, but, since it was cold, I couldn't degrease it and with the way pizzas are, degreasing it is almost required. I didn't eat it for this reason. I, after eating one of my usual pizzas, still couldn't connect at all so I watched TV. I did so for about 2 1/2 hours. From there, I tried processing another song, but Audacity kept crashing every time I had repeat set to 29 (for 30 loops). I first thought it was version 1.2.4 causing trouble as I had trouble with it earlier when playing (and converting) WAV files (to MP3) in that they were being cut short. I installed 1.2.3 again and the same thing happened twice in a row. To work around it, I ran the repeat effect twice, one for 5 and another for 4 (6 loops then 5 loops of these 6 still giving 30). I quickly got bored of it and tried to connect again, of which I was able to. I finished up cleaning up the forums. When I checked my E-mail, I found that my account at Regnow has been activated. August bad luck got to me again though - the server was down at Regnow so I couldn't do anything. Then, on top of that, it'll take two business days to process it. It's the start of the weekend so that means a 4-day delay. That's provided I can even visit Regnow as it is and that no other problems come up. Other than that, so far, so good. By 7:00 AM, I took a shower so I could go grocery shopping. This was part of my plan to adding the last few hours I need so I can go to Rice Lake. I went to the new Wal-mart Supercenter. It's nice to be able to go again after 20 months of not being able to go. I returned home to put stuff away and went to bed 5 minutes afterwards. I got graham crackers. Woke up at 5:59 PM and went to bed at 11:40 AM.
Aug 6: I went a week without recalling a dream and this is now the third dream in a row recalled! Regnow was up and running so I looked into using them and ran into another problem. A boxshot is required, but I have no idea what it even is. Given the "200x200 pixels" notation, it's almost certainly an image, but an image of what? There's absolutely no explanations at all to what it is. I then looked it up in the dictionary at dictionary.com but there is no such word. You guessed it, it's another delay.... Much worse is that I'm forced to use Notepad or Wordpad to type in the various details needed. Why? The text is black and the background is dark gray due to the fact that the background color has not been defined. Drop down menus also have this, but I'm only able to read them from having each option highlighted one by one (which takes twice as long to process). This is ultra annoying. This happens when a website doesn't bother to define the background color. Sure it may be white to them, but they don't take into consideration that users can choose various styles. I run into this more often then you think: about 1 in 6 websites. The second major thing, of three, was running tests for the Howwhatwhy forums. Strangely enough, after each new reply was made, it took 2.6 seconds longer to display the "your post has been entered" notice from UBB.threads. At one point, it was taking past 40 seconds, almost as if the server just stalled. That's long enough that I could open a new can of my lemonade, remove the top lid thing, drink it all, and have it half way through being crushed. Lastly, I began listing some of my old computer hardware doing nothing but colleting dust, on ebay. It was otherwise nothing but the forums. Woke up at 10:25 PM and went to bed at 3:37 PM.
Aug 7: No dream this time. The bulk of the day was spent on the forums. Since I found out what a boxshot is, I began making one. I spent about 4 hours modelling one. It looks quite close to a real box you'd find on a store shelf. I did notice that the color used was wrong - it should've been dark gray (303030) rather than pure black (000000). Besides this, nothing major happened. I got the E-mail I was after, but the part about the black text on the dark gray background still remains. Because of it, I sent another E-mail with 5 more screenshots showing what effect certain things have. Woke up at 2:07 AM and went to bed at 6:14 PM.
Aug 8: I first cleaned out the forums and checked my E-mail. I then made a few minor modifications to the box shot. I ate afterwards then began writing the descriptions for the game for Regnow and processing some of the stuff. I still had several questions and I'm almost done. I have one last E-mail question left at the moment and I'd be set. Almost the entire day was spent on the forums. The four exceptions are eating, setting up stuff on Regnow to what I could do, watching the news, and updaing the details about me and music on my website. My MP3 player is still going at battle Zone, it should now be 12 weeks. During the last 1/6 of the day, I swtiched songs on my computer to Desert Zone. Tomorrow is Rice Lake and almost one year to the day when I last went swimming. Woke up at 2:48 AM and went to bed at 7:59 PM.
Aug 9: Today's the day! I first cleaned out the forums then ate. I got the response from Regnow, again, I'm not getting anywhere. They're saying that the black text/dark gray background could be editted in the style manager - that applies to the order page and not the control panel. Now they're also saying they don't accept PNG files. Oddly enough, I was able to use one just fine My compatibility is now hovering at -1.1, and I may just abandon Regnow as it is unless these issues/annoyances get resolved in some form. They even state that my satisfaction is their top priority - it's seems that the opposite is true, knowing my compatibility went negative. Further details are in news item #1 above. I recleaned the forums then went to take a shower. When done, I installed a hitch and prepared to go. I left almost right on 4:00 PM. For further details on my trip to Rice Lake (including photos), see news item #2. My computer is at Desert Zone at 88% true speed with my MP3 player, lke it has been for over 12 weeks, still at Battle Zone. I've had 57.5% true speed running for quite a while now. Woke up at 5:55 AM and went to bed at 10:38 PM.
Aug 10: Yay, one more dream to add. I first cleaned out the forums. Regnow's compatibility is still right on that neutral mark. The speed of their replies is really helping. I still don't see why they don't bother adding a simple thing to the stylesheet to fix the issue I'm having. I even, get this, gave them the piece of code they need to add in order to change fix it so they just need to merely copy paste it. What's so hard about adding that? For further details on this, see news item #1. While my pizza was cooking, I thought of a nice concept for a banner for my 2D game. My new hard drive finally came after 6 days and I ran backup again. It took much longer than I thought and I took out the Genesis and played through Sonic 3 & Knuckles in full. That's starting from Zone 1 and getting through the game in full (to Zone 14), including all chaos and super emeralds, and drowning the stupid fox. The game is quite easy and I only lost two lives. Although I had debug mode enabled, I only used it to have fun with the fox, especially when the "stage clear" screen comes up after beating the boss at the end. I didn't use it to actually help or cheat. I'm still new to the game so I don't quite know the layout of the levels, especially those outside my favorites. With Super Sonic, everything got really easy. Around 3 PM, while eating, someone came over to fix the broken ice maker in the freezer. I just showed him/her around as needed. Tomorrow, I install the hard drive and reinstall everything. I was awake much later as I was running gwscan on the old hard drive. Oddly enough, my system was going into power-save mode and gwscan didn't run at all which added 90 minutes to the total time. I also ended up with a very slow one. It may be because the hard drive had errors on it. Gwscan gave error code 0586. I've always seen 0000. It's strong evidence pointing to the hard drive being at fault. I wonder what that error code represents. Woke up at 9:45 AM and went to bed at 5:24 AM.
Aug 11: What a dream! 2 pages of detail with otherwise the entire scenery entirely recalled! See news item #9 for further details about this record-setting dream. I spent 110 minutes writing it, longer due to my mind drifting off numerous times. I installed the new hard drive. I had trouble with screws, again, and when hooked up, I started formatting it. It formats 3 times faster than my old hard drive. By the time it was done with the 40 GB hard drive, my new one was half done and it's 250 GB. While the format took place and Windows was installing, I ate. I continued installing stuff until severe storms struck. One lightning strike caused the power to go out and trip one circuit on the circuit breaker (I had my computer off). From 11:30 or so to 11:44 PM (16 1/4 minutes actual time), the power was completely out. When that was over, I continued installing things. At the end, I checked my E-mail and things, but not the forums (except my forums where I had to censor out bad words that made it through the word censors. Those two p-words aren't actually filtered out (only in quoted replies), these are real bad words TV programs replace with a beep sound of about 800 Hz or so (a pure sine wave). While all this installing was going on, I played Sonic more, mainly to just drown the fox. Woke up at 2:55 PM and went to bed at 6:07 AM (±1 minute).
Aug 12: Yay for another dream recalled. It's not anywhere near as good as the previous one, but still okay. I first cleaned out the forums. My parents were out doing stuff and asked them if they would get me Domino's. They did and I ate then. When done, I returned to the forums and went on. As to finding an alternative to the UV mapping issue with MED so I can continue on with George Game 13, I checked out Blender. Blender has a compatility of -120, almost the lowest I've had for any software program. Even the large urge to having the UV mapping issue fixed in full (and done easily) is not good enough to counter the big boost it may have as the compatibility would still be negative. For further details on this, see news item #10. With nothing much on TV and since it's the weekend (I hate weekends), I have to wait until Monday before I get a response. I should've reached the 90-day mark with Battle Zone on my MP3 player. Despite the 3-month streak, I still have moderately high motive for listening to it (especially when ads with whistling or are extremely annoying come on where I have over 20,000 times the motive to muting the TV ad to hear the song, such huge numbers that, even for me, are hard to comprehend. My computer is still playing Desert Zone. Woke up at 1:10 PM and went to bed at 2:33 AM (±1 minute).
Aug 13: 3 dreams in a row recalled, again. This one is somewhat better than the last one with the same amount of detail (the story especially is decent). I first cleaned out the forums. With nothing going on, I got bored for some time. I finished my pizza I got yesterday. With nothing on on TV for hours and the forums otherwise dead (inactive), I was getting very bored. I soon got around to making a few updates to my website. When I got to updating my blog, since I didn't have the camera readily available, to get the photos from Rice Lake (5 attempts to far, each failed due to bad timing and forgetting about it entirely). Without these, I lost motive quickly. Through more boredom, and I question I posted on Howwhatwhy, I went on Wikipedia and added an article about consumer fireworks in general using some of my photos. This otherwise finished up the day. Woke up at 2:03 PM and went to bed at 5:45 AM (±1 minute).
Aug 15: This time no dream was recalled. I first cleaned out the forums and checked for a response to my question at Regnow. Compatibility is still hovering around neutral, but 1.1 really isn't much (note that it's positive rather than negative). The speed of responses is really helping. With the forums otherwise inactive, I ate. I recleaned the forums and with the forums otherwise inactive and nothing on on TV for several hours, again, boredom struck. Before I start on the 2.5 update, I'd like to know how the sales go. With otherwise nothing to do I could've updated my website, but I'd like to get the full edition released so I had something very worthy to add, besides Rice Lake, I took out the Genesis again and starting to drown the fox again. I then had the idea to get those two songs off "Taz: Escape from Mars", another Sega Genesis game I have. I played through it to get to the levels I was after. For further details, see news item #3. The only other thing is that I finally managed to get the camera so I can transfer those photos I took when I went to Rice Lake. It's been something like 93 days by now and still counting. My computer started off with OWTLI, but changed to the new song, "Haunted Castle" as I'm calling it (after the world name in the game). I've been playing it at 125% true speed. Nothing else otherwise occurred. Woke up at 4:16 PM and went to bed at 7:51 AM.
Aug 16: First it was eating and watching some TV. Then it was cleaning out the forums and checking my E-mail for any responses. Now all but two issues are resolved. The black text on dark gray background issue still hasn't been fixed yet and the part about getting sales is the other. Neither of which, now, won't stop me from releasing the full edition. When that was done, I began sorting coins to separate pennies from the other coins. I now have a penny from 1910's as the oldest. My previous was in the 1920's. I recleaned the forums when done, about two hours later. I had about 6000 coins to process (even checking dates). With nothing going on again, I went to Wikipedia to check on things and added a new article about the game "Taz: Escape from Mars" since I recently played it. I also uploaded a few screenshots as well from my collection and added them to the details about Super Monkey Ball 2 and the glitches and secrets section. When done with that, I began updating my website. Unlike with the other updates, I took numerous screenshots as part of my "how I update my website" article on my website for the next update. I'm up to 8 screenshots so far. I've only done most of the headlines. Winamp logged 18 GB in the "bytes read" column in Windows Task Manager (not included by default, but can be configured to be included). That's what happens when very high quality WAV files are played (125,000 Hz, mono, 24-bit) for hours on end. I'm wondering if that uses a 64-bit integerical variable or a 64-bit floating point variable. Woke up at 4:44 PM and went to bed at 9:20 AM.
Aug 17: I first ate then watched TV until 1:00 AM. I then cleaned out the forums and continued on with my usual. I got a brief start on updating my dream journal, but motive, although quite well into the positive territory, gave way to addeing my remix of Winter Zone to my MP3 player, the 50-laps special version. It took twice as long to convert the gigantic WAV files to MP3 than it did to actually create them, including the 40 minutes to put together the 50-laps edition and another 8 on top of that to speed up the song to work around the bug with my MP3 player discovered clear back in February. It took so long, I drowned 180 foxes on Sonic 3 (40 seconds per fox) and otherwise messed around in Hydrocity act 2. Woke up at 8:50 PM and went to bed at 11:42 AM.
Aug 18: No dream, again. Most of the day was spent working on my website, a whole 13 hours even. Although I have cleaned out the forums and had a head-to-head close match at a hangman game on my new forums, almost the entire day was spent updating my website, a good 3 to 4 hours working on making the map for my most well-recalled dream. I watched some TV, but only while eating. Release of the full edition is tomorrow, along with heading for the grocery store. Woke up at 9:22 PM and went to bed at 1:07 PM.
Aug 19: I first ate. I then cleaned out the forums and checked my E-mail. I realized I haven't checked my Hotmail in 4 days! I finished updating my website and released the full edition. I did a test order right away and found that I uploaded the wrong ZIP file. I quickly uploaded the correct ZIP file and ran another test order to verify that it was indeed the correct one. Much of the day was spent on the forums. I did take a shower in an effort to go to the grocery store, but since no one was available and was too tired by the time someone was, I have to go tomorrow. I'm still at Battle Zone and Haunted Castle. Woke up at 11:25 PM and went to bed at 2:55 PM.
Aug 20: I first cleaned out the forums. Since the pizza cooker tray was not washed, I couldn't have one of my pizzas. Since there was no milk, Hamburger Helper wasn't entirely possible. I pigged out on some French bread until I could. I had no sales when I cleaned out the forums. I expected this due to a major lack of traffic to my website and that it's the only method I can sell my game by. I continued playing Sonic 3 - drowning that fox in the game's bluest water - Launch Base 2. I went grocery-shopping at the Wal-mart Supercenter. When I came back, I had the first sale, of which didn't seem to be so decent. It's setup the way it should be, but runs in free edition mode. I've tested it so I know it works. Other than drowning the fox and the forums, nothing else happened. Woke up at 2:43 AM and went to bed at 7:42 PM.
Aug 21: I first cleaned out the forums. I then ate. While watching TV, one car ad with a sand castle in front and a car in the background, I noticed that the car appears out of nowhere appearing when the waves crash on shore which removes the sand castle. This is only physically possible if two video sequences are stitched together in a special way, much like I crop WAV files for seemless looping. This just gives you an idea how observant I tend to be. I returned to the forums and when recleaned, I was back at Sonic drowning even more foxes. I periodically checked the forums for anything new. I also rechecked my E-mail and may have bad news. They're saying that site certification is needed, but seems to only apply to using affiliates, of which I'm unable to use at the moment as I don't have banner ads available (the ones I do have are 4+ years old and even irrelevent to my website, let alone my game). There are numerous concerns over this. The first is that affiliate-tracking stuff needs to be added. This is impossible with Gamestudio projects as I'd need to modify the backend of Gamestudio. The other that it seems that it seems to need to be the primary focus of it, of which my website is far from it. My blog and dream journal, together without images included, use more space than my entire 2D game's description even with the several 100KB+ screenshots included. Then, having the idea of recording the sounds of the fox-drowning stuff, I began forming a template reproducable where I can record this stuff. I got a good start on it then the news came on. I watched the news then continued fine-tuning my system going to bed when almost done. The entire system does work, but needs adjusting. My MP3 player is still at Battle Zone but at 60% true speed, the very best. My computer is still at Haunted Castle. I should have 3000 plays by now where 70 and 110 to 125% of the true speed are the best for Haunted Castle. Woke up at 4:37 AM and went to bed at 8:58 PM.
Aug 22: Still no dream recalled. Today is my most unlucky day of the year. I first ate. When done, I cleaned out the forums and checked my E-mails. Next, I tried modifying the key to assist the user having trouble with the key, generating a new one. I supposedly finished it and began to upload it. I first had to create a password-protected directory. That took a little while and uploaded a harmless LOG file as a test subject. I first wasn't getting the username/password prompt and noticed I forgot the "/" at the end. I then got it and entered the username and password as intended. It wasn't accepted for some reason. I thought I had a typo. I try again and the same thing happened. I then copy the password, typed in Notepad to make sure of this. Nope, I try changing the password as a test, typed it in Notepad as a test then used nothing but copy paste. When accessing the test file, I manually typed in the user name, since I can see and easily copy it, and I paste the password I copied directly into the change password fields. Strangely enough, it still didn't work so I try another test password and it worked without further difficulty. I reset it and it didn't work. By using copy paste for the password, there's no way it's possible for an incorrect password and even copying and pasting the user name and pasted that didn't work. Bug found! I contacted the help desk about this, having to keep clicking the "OK" button on the "domain name mismatch" dialogs that keep popping up (and there's about a dozen of them to click through). With nothing else going on, I continued drowning more foxes. When the news was on, I watched it as usual. I returned to the forums to check for anything new. The internet suddenly died at 6:33 PM so I had to do something else. I thought of getting 24-bit editions of Desert Zone and OWTLI, my top 2 most listened to songs. This went successfully. They sound only about 5% better, but at least it adds up. Battle Zone is still going on on my MP3 player and Haunted Castle was still playing on my computer. From a response I got about the site certification, I found out that site certification is not required. That's two cases of bad luck - passwords not working right and the internet suddenly dying. Woke up at 7:30 AM (±40 minutes) and went to bed at 9:55 PM.
Aug 23: Finally a dream recalled! It has almost no story, but a few scenes recalled. I first ate. I also watched "The Death Star" for the 12th time (just like music, it's the massive compatibility that allows for it and I'd likely watch it again). I then began to clean out the forums and check the response. I got an unhelpful response from the help desk - use the FAQ and tutorials. They are not understanding. Then, at the worst of times, the internet goes down being completely unable to connect. From there I played Skullmonkeys after Bubsy since I found the disk. When done, I tried connecting to the net again but without success. I began playing the original Spyro, the first release of the game. This game doesn't have the double-jump bug the second one does and it takes the fun out of it. I then continued with two other things occurring. The first was getting my mom's new laptop (from Ebay) set up for the internet. It's the first time I've actually used any modern laptop. The last time was one with an 8 MB hard drive a black and white display (two colors), which was around when Windows 3.1 was still a future version of Windows. It's so old, today's computers, even budget systems, are like supercomputers to it. I mainly just had to install drivers, but the CD drive wasn't working right and I needed to use a few test CD's (my old backup CD's for one). I returned to Spyro. The other thing, of which I find weird and very suspicious, was that I got a phone call from a stranger (website fan) just past midnight. Details are in news item #11 in the September 2006 blog. This is one bizarre thing I don't get. My computer is still at Haunted Castle and I otherwise didn't add much to the play count, barely even 100 instead of my usual 500 to 1000, depending on the average speed and time spent on my computer. Woke up at 8:50 AM and went to bed at 1:28 AM.
Aug 24: I woke up due to a nose bleed. It was also storming so I couldn't use my computer. This continued for 8 hours. I couldn't even play my games either. Boredom shot up a lot from this. Some of the storms were dropping hail stones with a diameter of compact disks (4 1/2 inches) - that's huge! I thought baseball-sized hail was the largest it could get. This wasn't, however, in my home area. On top of that, even tornado warnings were issued, several of them (where a dozen counties had warnings). What a storm! From when I woke up to clear until the news was on at 5:00 M, the storms were active. I watched the news and when done, since all storms finally cleared from my area, I went online. The first thing I did was clean out the forums, my forums taking priority from the case of the faulty key file. I cleaned up any left over errors and went from there. With the highest priority stuff cleared (where my motive was close to even triple that of anything else making me able to keep at it 9 times longer than anything else), I continued with the rest of my daily routine. With that done with, I began playing Spyro again, since nothing was on on TV. I finished the game and began going after 100% completion. I cleared the first 3 worlds 100% and just started the fourth. While the ending credits played, I refreshed my forums and nothing new happened. I started the 100% completion part after that turning off my computer. I should now have 100 days straight of Battle Zone on a single source, my MP3 player. Woke up at 9:27 AM (±2 minutes) and went to bed at 3:33 AM.
Aug 25: I woke up around 10:30 AM due to a nosebleed and went back to bed. When I officially woke up, I cleaned out the forums first. I then ate while watching the news. I recleaned the forums and since nothing was going on, both the forums and TV, I continued playing Spyro. I made the 100% completion (120% according to the game after everything is completed. When done with, I took out Frogger thinking of two songs on it, one not mentioned before - Cactus Point (from the level name it comes on). The "infinite lives" cheat code was pretty much required. Retro level 5 needed about 25 lives to finish. Lily islands took close to 60 and some levels took over 200 (uncanny crusher and most especially the last level of the desert world (taking close to 300). I did get the two songs I was after though. Other than this and still counting onto the 100 for my MP3 player, nothing else happened. Woke up at 2:02 PM and went to bed at 7:51 AM.
Aug 26: I woke up drowsy due to getting only 6 hours' sleep. I was about to go to bed again until my dad mentioned getting pizza. I ended up getting Domino's. Unlike the few previous days, much of the day was spent on the forums or watching TV. Since Tom and Jerry was on all day, I got about 4 hours' worth of TV. It wasn't just that though. I also watched Mythbusters, the special outtakes version. This is where I learned my experimentation techniques from that I use often in Gamestudio to get the fastest and the best, even how I've proven some claims wrong. I switched songs on my computer as well stopping at 4100 plays of Haunted Castle. Now it's Cactus point. From 80 to 90% of the true speed is the best, especially 85% of which I ended the day on. Yep, that should be about 250 loops, about what most would be able to handle in a year at the high end. My MP3 player is still at Battle Zone with a moderate urge to change songs, likely to be Cactus Point, of which I have yet to add. Much above 100% and much below 70% (low end not yet established) aren't worth it so my standard 50 to 125% would be used on my MP3 player if I do add it. Woke up at 3:32 PM and went to bed at 7:06 AM.
Aug 28: Just 2 things describe the day: forums and BMP. The forums are the obvious part. What about BMP? I made a small program in Gamestudio to generate a palette (approximating that of all colors in the 16-bit palette). I did this to prove whether or not Gamestudio could actually write BMP files from C-script. After working out the few bugs I had, I opened the output in several graphics edittors and it indeed could open. Yep, it indeed can. For further details on this, see news item #9 in the September 2006 blog. I spent a good chunk of the day making a video of my 2D game, as suggested on the Gamestudio forums. I first had several test subjects to make sure the system would work. Then it was some practice runs and later the real thing. When done, I began processing it, but encountered a problem with Virtual Dub. First, 60 fps is too high of a frame rate. My intent was 20 fps. Because Virtual Dub deleted frames rather than merging them when trying to reduce the frame count, which causes it to look and behave weird, I needed to merge the frames. Since Virtual Dub didn't have this feature and I don't know of any such plug-ins and that I've proven Gamestudio could write BMP files, I wrote a little program to do just that. Yep, it's yet another use of that well-known color-averaging formula of mine. It produced the exact effect I envisioned - it runs at 20 fps, but feels like 60 fps. Further details, in greater depth are in news item #9 in the September 2006 blog. I, at long last, also changed songs on my MP3 player, after a massive 107 days. I changed to my remix of Winter Zone that I added to my MP3 player a few days ago. My speed I'm using is constantly changing as I haven't found a good one. Cactus Point, however, still lays on my computer at the same 85% true speed. Woke up at 5:46 PM and went to bed at 10:50 AM.
Aug 29: Finally I got another dream! It used 3/4 of a page in details. I've got bad news though - my only sale I got was refunded now putting me back at zero again. The reason was said to be that the order itself was fraudulent. Upon seeing the reason, I got scared and worried as I thought it was the customer wanting a refund because they found the product fraudulent which I didn't think it could be. After all, it's all as stated it would be. Although the key file was defective for that user (and the same key worked fine on another computer from the same user), I did resolve the issue. I'm beginning to suspect Molebox is the problem as it seems to have many issues, some present in some computers while not in others. For details (and evidence), see news item #10 in the September 2006 blog. This bothered me all day giving me bad feelings. As usual, it was the forums and TV. I firstt cleaned out the forums since nothing was on on TV for a while. When semi-decent stuff was on, that's when I ate. When done eating, I returned to the forums. When nothing was going on, I took out Frogger again now completing it 100% (all levels and golden frogs cleared). I reprocessed the forums periodically. When Frogger was completed in full and since otherwise nothing was going on on the forums, I began processing Cactus Point for my MP3 player. Since the record has been set at 107 days straight and is no longer being added to (from switching to my Winter Zone remix), I had no reason not to and now it's my current song. What a terrible day, haunted by that refunded notice almost all day.... Woke up at 6:49 PM and went to bed at 9:32 AM.
Aug 30: Yay, a dream, but one not strongly liked, although quite weird. I first ate then watched some TV - space stuff. I then cleaned out the forums. Webhost E-mail is still apparently down. As to that refunded order, it seems as if the order itself was fraudulent taking a lot of my worries and scaredness away. From seeing that, my motive had a -55 affector on it making me no longer want to further develop it, but after seeing this, this affector was removed (becoming a 1, meaning no change putting my motive back at neutral). When done with that, I began playing Final Fantasy 1 from Final Fantasy Origins. I also changed speeds for my song, now at 87.5% true speed. The speed on my MP3 player is around 60 to 90% true speed. Other than this, nothing else worthy occurred. While in bed, I discovered that, if that compatibility spike of 3190 was 6000, I'd, in theory, last for a year. Cactus Point spikes at 1250 so I expect only a few days straight, about 15. Woke up at 8:41 PM and went to bed at 10:53 AM (±2 minutes).
Aug 31: Yep, another dream, third one in a row. The day has three parts. The first was watching TV and eating. When done, I cleaned out the forums as usual. I then continued on with FF1 for the remainder of the day. I just reached Melmond, level 15 then continued onward with continuous battles with an enemy called "Piscodemon" to level 16 before going to bed. Tomorrow is September, a neutral-luck month. I'm still at Cactus Point though. Woke up at 9:24 PM and went to bed at 1:48 PM.

Go to another time:
Earlier than 2005: Earlier than Nov 2004 | Nov 2004 (and late Oct 2004) | Dec 2004

Year 2005: January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | November | December

Year 2006: January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | November | December

Year 2007: January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | November | December

Year 2008: January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | November | December

Year 2009: January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | November | December

Year 2010: Yet to arrive....

The news entry headlines in bold are color-coded for a reason. They tell how big the event was for the headlines and how good my day was for the daily entries. From May 2006 onward, a slightly different system is used, of which has triple the precision. For dates prior to this that use color coding, from the white color, skipping two to red and so on is used. Here's what each color represents (for updates to before May of 2006):

	Extremely major event / Very good day
	Extremely major event / Very good day
	Major event / Good day


	Somewhat major event / Somewhat good day


	Normal event / Average day


	Somewhat minor event / Somewhat bad day


	Minor event / Bad day


	Extremely minor event / Very bad day
	Extremely minor event / Very bad day

Footnotes:
None