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Minutiae of the Moment
In making an as-yet-unpublished essay for the site, I started writing down what, exactly, are the projects I would like to spend my freetime on in the near future...here's the list, in a very rough order matching that in which I'd like to tackle them. (These are all the fairly concrete, often computer-oriented projects, and don't include vacations I'd like to take, some personal-growth issues I have, and other stuff like that.)

• (retroactively addded:) update the Atari 2600 online graphics editors PlayerPal and PlayfieldPal
• Create a javascript-based editor for upcoming Manuel Rotschkar's upcoming "Crazy Balloon" port for the Atari 2600
• Write this one hourstracking and display mini-webapp for Dylan he asked for except the jerk hasn't called me back yet.
• Let the sidebar entries have their own comments box as well as an upload image feature for sidebar contributors.
• Figure out my 401K situation once and for all (making sure I've located and/or collated all the ones from my old jobs)
• Backup my data directory with my DVD burner and put it someplace away from my 2 computers
• Get kisrael.com, kirkjerk.com, and alienbill.com all moved to my new webhost and cancel my accounts with the old webhosts--and clean out all the comments spam
• Get all these digital photos of my Aunt's off of floppies and onto harddrives and CD-ROMs.
• Clean out the boxes and to-thrift-store stuff etc from my back room
• Extend some more sidebar invites
• Clean up my gmail
• Take care of all the little things haunting the TODO list on my Palm pilot, including getting the title of my old car properly transferred to my cousins. And in general stop cruft from forming in my Palm TODO list. And sort out all the random little text bits I have in there while I'm at it.
• Make this webapp I've talked about with LAN3 that would easily let you take remove linebreaks from text that was formatted to 80 columns, and possibly do some other reformatting tricks.
• Go through my CDs and make MP3s of "all the good songs".
• Finish summarizing mundane journal on a monthly basis so I can figure out where 2002 and 2003 went.
• Gather quotes from 2004 for use in quote-o-matic viewer.
• Get regular videogame get-togethers going to go along with my friend's regular "psychotronic movie night".
• Finish playing through Halo 2 on "Easy" mode
• Make "Albert Camus' The Myth Of Sisyphus: the Game" for the 2600
• Investigate making port of old Compute's Gazette game "Heatseeker", first in Java, then for the 2600
• Learn to make Electronic Music and transcribe the basslines and beats that I always come back to when humming and bopping along.
• Update my online photoalbums.
• Consider making 2600 port of old Vic-20 game "Cosmic Jailbreak"
• Revamp my "k/db" online database program, professionalizing it, maybe porting it to Java, and seeing if it could be as useful to some other people as it has been for me in its Perl/CGI form.
• Clean out and reorganize C:\Data, in particluar add more stuff to the "kirkarchive" structure, as well as make sure my photo archives are as organized as they should be.
• Clean out the kisrael.com backlog.
• Learn some new frontend technologies...get better at making professional looking HTML sites, find out if Perl or Java is a better bet for some desktop apps I've been playing around with. Possibly revamp kisrael.com a bit.
• Make and publicize a version of good old pixeltime.
• Make and publicize a multiplayer online version of the game "Eat Poop You Cat" (kind of like "telephone" except it alternates between writing a caption for the cartoon you've been handed and writing an illustration for the sentence you just received.)
• Redo my startpage kirkzilla (Actually added this just to cross it off right away)
• 2600 Drumpad Program
• 2600 music dev kit
• Make a version of my k/stencil app that people can play with and have a loveblender contest with it.
• play with making posters of old video game characters
• Possible...think about making a frontend to MAME that's more keyboardless friendly than the ones I've seen...if it doesn't already exist.
• Make a features page linking to all my java/processing projects.
• Tool to go over old comments on kisrael.com, especially to highlight comments that were made after the entry passed from the front page.
• RSS feed and LJ connection for kisrael.com
• General utility for renaming files en masse, like photos named after their containing directory.
• Add bookmark database thingy to my personal startpage.
• Make a "you should check out these sites" bookmarks page on kisrael
• kisrael.com feature: "this day on kisrael.com" showing the entries for this date in previous years.
• Some kind of simtunes like program.
• Redo getting rid of the comments spam, and some kind of easier way of clearing it out via the web, or maybe connected to a filter service
• Love Blender improvements:
  • "Comment On This" link (Easy)
  • Prettier Link Codes (Easy-Medium)
  • Workshop (Medium)
  • My Favorites (Medium, but requires...)
  • Login (Medium-Hard)
  • Forgot Password recovery (Easy, just need to link...)
  • Edit/Delete Previous Work (Medium-Hard)
  • Avatars (Hard)
  • Member Since / Work Count (Easy-Medium)
  • Theme/Word of the Week (Easy-Medium)
  • Remove Survey
• kisrael restrospect should work on "second tueesday of april" type logic as well
• Game idea: gesture based multiplayer online games, ala PacPix, where you draw litle attacking arrows and defending lines (or maybe something w/ X O and square standing for rock scissors paper)
• a 3D view of Time passing through a Conway Life game
• Sierpinski triangle applet; or maybe ports of more of my Palm PocketC stuff

UPDATE: August 12, 2008 I came back to this page, struck out more stuff I had done, and started using italics to indicate things I no longer care about, either the context has changed, or my level of interest.

The list probably isn't complete, but it is a good start. So when I complain about not having enough freetime for "projects", this is what I'd like to be doing.

Maybe I should make a special link to this page, and update it, so that every thing I get done gets crossed out once I do it.

I think I do carry this not-particularly well-founded belief that if I just get this stuff done, my life would bliss and easy from then on in. Heh, though having that kind of freetime would be pretty blissful...

It's funny, when I think about what I really want from vacation time, it's not to go some place nice and isolated and get away from things...it's being someplace with a good net connection and getting lots of time to work on this kind of stuff and still goof off a bit.

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Quote of the Moment

I think prime numbers are like life.
They are very logical but you could never work out the rules,
Even if you spent all your time thinking about them.