Matt Hackmann

MattHackmann

The thoughts and goings-on of some programmer dude.

Peace, Quiet and Solitude

I am in the realizing that it's been nearly a month since I last blogged anything, granted this comes on the heels of an unusually active period for me. But, hey. Nothing terribly exciting has happened, so there it is.

I decided that last week would be a pretty good week to blow a whole bunch of my paid vacation time... after all, the best day of the year happened to fall in that week (hint: my birthday). It was nice to just forget about the world around me and piddle around quietly the way I used to back in the days when I was without work. I churned out no less than three distinct (but wholly unfinished) projects.

The first of these is a UX re-imagining for my ongoing project, the Music Page. Now that I am a far better JavaScript guru than I was when this was originally written, I've decided to take a completely different approach in terms of user presentation (though, the underlying functionality is pretty much the same).

Another thing I did was start in on learning some more HTML5 canvas stuffs, as it provides a pretty sweet opportunity for gaming purposes. I started messing around with coding a simple drawing framework and, at the behest of my osu! fanatical brother, began attempting a clone of sorts for that. Ultimately, I made some good progress and the canvas object is certainly a powerful tool, but there are some simple things that it simply can't do that keeps Flash at the advantage (I'm looking at you, per blit alpha).

Other than these few programming things and a goodly amount of time with my nose in books, it was a slothful week to be sure. But, then again, that's the whole point of "vacation."

Tune in this weekend as I head to yet another anime con.