Better Kid Days
I’ve written before about how it was kind of tough for me to bond with Christopher when he was younger, so I’m happy to say that recently I’ve been doing a little better in that regard. I took the day off from work on Thursday to give Sara a parenting break, so I had the kids ALL DAY and aside from a few expected hiccups, we had a lot of fun and they didn’t manage to stress me out as much as they sometimes do. It’s neat seeing David and Matthew each developing their own unique personalities because it gives me a way to relate to them one-on-one, which was a big part of how my relationship improved with Christopher.
Relics & Espers
The last couple of days I’ve really been yearning for some video games, so last night after I got all of the kids to bed instead of doing anything productive, I curled up in bed and fired up the SNES Classic and blew about three hours playing games! Specifically I landed on Final Fantasy 3 (VI in Japan) which was probably my second favorite behind FF2 (IV), and even though I knew it wasn’t the kind of game that I could just play a little and then walk away, it was fun to revisit because I couldn’t even tell you the last time I played it!
Plus, unlike FF2 that I could likely beat with my eyes closed, I don’t remember a lot of the nuances from FF3 so I’m getting to relive those all over again, which is cool. I finally turned it off around 3am at the part where you play through the three mini-quests after Sabin disappears in the river on your way back to Narshe … should be interesting to see how much of a time sink it ends up being in the weeks to come… 😛
Coding Revisited
Right now I’m working on kind of a unique task at work in that I’m basically rewriting a bunch of scripts that I originally wrote ten years ago. I mentioned this briefly the other day on my micro-blog – it’s really weird to look at code that I wrote in PHP and MySQL because at the time they were all that I knew, and now I’m porting them into Visual Studio to use the Microsoft tools that the system I currently develop on is based around. None of it was necessarily wrong the way I did it a decade ago – it’s just different because I literally wrote everything in Notepad whereas now I have much better tools and an actual framework to do the job under!
Case in point – I’m sure that I spent weeks writing the first version, whereas I maybe spent six hours total this week and I’m about half done already? I suppose that’s what experience will do for you. 😀