I’ve been working on learning how to program in Cocoa. I’ve got a book on it and I’ve been slowly going through it. It’s hard to devote time to it though. I seem to have collected too many hobbies. I reached the point where I know enough to be dangerous. I’ve started writing a program. It could go better, but I have no instructor to ask questions. That’s the problem with book learning.
The program I’ve been trying to create is different than the one I’ve been working on for the past twelve years. I decided to try and make a Sudoku solver. Something with an actual user interface as opposed to the one I have that needs me to babysit every step in the debugger.
Progress died a quiet death last week. I found that someone has written a Sudoku solver that does everything that I wanted mine to do. And more. It’s hard to feel motivated when someone has already finished the race.
So instead of continuing that line of attack, I installed Diablo II on my computer and started playing that.
Why, yes, that game is five years old.
I first played it when it came out, when a co-worker brought in a copy and let everyone use it. I played it after work on a Windows machine and enjoyed it. Eventually the guilt got to me and I purchased my own copy of the battle chest version that had the expansion. That was about the last time I ever played the game.
On Saturday I finally cracked it open and installed it on my Mac. I played a few levels and tried to remember how everything worked. Good times.
Then I did an experiment. I took the saved games from years ago from a different platform and copied them into the appropriate folder. To my pleasant surprise, they worked. I could use my old character and finish the expansion without going through the whole rigamarole from scratch. Of course I have forgotten how to use my high-level character effectively. So maybe I should start from scratch…
I can’t completely blame that other Sudoku program for this. On Friday I started as a player in a new D&D campaign that was based off of Diablo II. It’s fun. Basically a black and white morality game where you go around and kill things. Simplicity. D&D at its core. It brought back memories, so I decided to try the original.