Intermittence

(Ten whole days since my last post. My fan base must be reconsidering their loyalties…)

I’m still trying to stoke the fires of my imagination. This process isn’t exactly proceeding at a breakneck pace.

A while back, I solicited ideas or phrases to incorporate into short pieces of fiction. I’ve decided to take a slightly different tack and use them to write a piece of interactive fiction. If you’ve ever played the old text-only adventure Zork, you know what I’m talking about. If not, well, then I think (and hope) you’re in for a surprise.

A piece of interactive fiction is a literary work, but one in which the reader is an active participant. They often include some sort of exploration and puzzle-solving, though this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. Some of the best works of IF (as it’s referred to by those in the know) use the interactivity to draw out the reader, to involve them in a way that static fiction cannot.

In any case, that’s what I’m working on now. Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, so I’m working on a few projects at the moment. One’s almost done, and another is just starting.

• I’ve just about finished a promotional site for an album by Carrianne Berryhill, a friend of ours. It’s just a one-page sort of thing, with tasteful captions and simple design, and all that’s left is to include some clips from several tracks and a PayPal ‘Buy Now!’ button. It should be done this weekend.
• The other project intimidates me with its scope, though I know that it’s do-able. It’s the rewriting of a database application to run in a web browser, to facilitate the day-to-day business of a small trucking company. The original program is written in a system with which I have no experience, although the code looks straightforward enough that I should be able to diagram the program flow with little trouble. At the very least, I need to break it into functional elements this weekend and start assembling the data model…

Interesting stuff, no?

Well, how about this? With $29 worth of cables and adapters, I was able to plug my MacBook into our 42” Sony HD television and watch a movie last night on the big screen. Sure, we have a DVD player, but you can’t plug a 320GB hard drive into a DVD player and have your entire movie collection at your fingertips, can you? With the MacBook, it’s a snap. Now, I want to see what happens with I re-boot the laptop into Windows XP and try playing Neverwinter Nights on the television. That could be cool…