Fangamer

And when home = Kokomo, IN, that means sporadic dial-up internet access! In addition to that, I had to leave my laptop behind at the Apple Store in Tucson since it was having some power/screen issues. Anyone want to buy a 1st gen Macbook with a new screen/topcase?

Anyway, since my laptop is in the shop, no banner updates today, and not a lot else to say except some random updates…

• Got a call from the Axelrod office, got the appointment pushed back to Jan 4. Doh! Oh well, like I said, more time to get interfaces/code finished up.
• Ryan is making good progress on the code, apparently, though my internet access prevents me from seeing it. I guess he’s gotten a lot of the core permissions codified. Neat! It might not sound difficult, but trust me, it’s complicated…we’re gonna have quite a system going, and almost none of it will be visible to the end users. I’ll let Ryan talk more about that though.
• The Ruby Challenge seems to be going well — there are at least a handful of people who are either interested or actively participating. I don’t know how to say this without sounding self-aggrandizing, but if you’re a developer and you want to build up your skills/portfolio, this is really a rare opportunity. Kinda like how Jeffman is building a reputation for himself as a legendary hackman in real-time over on the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation project, our hackers may eventually find themselves held in such high esteem that they will act out scenes from Highlander in order to decide who will earn the undying love and attention of millions of video game fans. Ruby is the dog which binds them together…Code is the weapon which separates them! Who will be the last hacker standing?
  
• I sat around on Camille’s laptop last night and tapped out a good chunk of the XHTML for the main forum page. It’s fun planning out classes and id’s and nesting and junk…I suppose it’s just the cross-browserly CSS which makes it unpleasant, heh. But really, in the end, I’m hoping to have the style so cleanly separated from the design that almost anyone will be able to design their own custom template. Perhaps, if we get all of the major projects out of the way, that’s one of the projects we’ll eventually pursue: a custom forum theme-builder that people can use to generate templates and send them to each other. No sense focusing on that right now, though, because there’s an insane amount of work to get done first.

Anyway, back to Home Alone and mom’s cookies and a 1,000 watt Christmas tree. Merry Christmas to all — I’ll be back in Tucson (and, thus, back in action) on the 28th, so expect more news next week!