The semi-job that I have is continuing. A lot of the time I am waiting for information from my employers about what exactly they want me to do. When I get it, I can usually be fairly efficient in finishing it. But that does leave me with time on my hands.
I have a policy that I have to get out of my place at least once a day. But I think I may have to amend that. Yesterday, my one time out was to go do some stair-training. (I think it will help with the Death Race.) But by the end of the day, I felt rather squirrely; there was absolutely no socialization. So today, after the usual Wednesday evening run club, I made sure to join my fellow runners for dinner at Royal Pizza. I feel much more mentally balanced now.
Of course, yesterday, I didn’t even talk to anyone over the phone. In fact it was pretty much a day off for me, because I didn’t even work on my own program. Instead I played a game of Railroad Tycoon 3. I purchased the game a year ago, but never got around to playing it. When I finally did, I found it wasn’t exactly working with the latest operating systems and/or processors, and there were no official updates. Six year old game. Fortunately I found a torrent that had a version that did work. It even waived the requirement that the CD be in the drive. I don’t know about the ethics of this, but I did legally pay for the game.
Speaking of ethics though, the game doesn’t really promote good ethics. There is a separation between the player and the company he is running. Both have their own money. But there is absolutely no penalty for insider trading. In fact it is encouraged. One of the best ways for your train company to buy another company is to use the player’s cash to buy a lot of shares in it, so that when your company tries to buy it for an inflated price, the stockholder vote is more likely to go correctly. And then the player makes a good profit at the expense of his own company. And always buy stock in your own company before you make the company buy back its stock. Yeah, I feel like I’m with Goldman Sachs.

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
-Theodore Roosevelt

But I am continuing work on my own program. My current issue is that when I have the program fill in more details of an existing map (increase granularity, I call it) there are changes that don’t look right. I found a small peninsula was disappearing in the test map I was using. The increase in granularity shouldn’t be doing that. After adding in some debugging features I found the problem was that I was changing the heights of everything to be more within a set range, but I wasn’t including the sea level in that change. I have an idea of what I need to do to fix it.