It’s only Wednesday and the last entry I made technically was on Tuesday, even though it was really Monday night. Oh well. The date on each entry doesn’t lie.

I wonder what I was doing yesterday that didn’t allow me to update.

Oh, right! I went back to Cranberry yesterday to bring my car to my dad to see if he knew anything about why it was being so weird. Turns out it was a pretty decently easy fix, so I’m now car-ful again. Sweet.

There was something I was gonna write about, but I totally forgot it.

Oh, there’s a weird semi-”project” due today. He gave us one of those new Excel spreadsheets (*.xlsx) full of fictional grades for fictional students (who absolutely suck, by the way), and the assignment was that we were supposed to write a bunch of macros that compute the averages of everything and then give a final course grade where tests and programs are each 40% of the final grade and homework and quizzes were 20% combined. It didn’t take me too entirely long (about an hour) and it’s pretty nifty. It’s still not as fun as the animation project he gave us.

I don’t think I ever wrote anything here about the animation project. He gave us all these little cat icons (called “NekoCat”… shudder) and we had to use them to animate the cat doing something. I kinda went overboard.

You can click where you want the cat to go and he runs around… you can make the cat jump up onto the newspaper dispenser thingy… to demonstrate depth he can run behind the pole… and if you click in the right place on the pole he can wall jump off the pole onto the newspaper dispenser. There are idle animations (pictured above) and clouds, and if you press escape a menu comes up and you can look at the about dialog or the hints dialog, both of which include animation and transparency.

To be honest, I didn’t realize that VB had that sort of funkiness to it. I guess it’s .NET, really, but everything’s completely smooth because it automatically uses double buffering. You can just set forms to automatically be double buffered. I didn’t use a single picturebox; every sprite is blitted directly to the form. Nifty.

Anyway, sorry. I’m a huge nerd. Oh, but the program won the contest thingy in the class and I got a nice little bag which I’m now using for my music and mutes. You know, so I don’t have to use Tim’s anymore. And stuff.

I guess that’s all I have for today. I might update later tonight if I feel like I need a break from the Algorithms and Data Structures project. Hahaha… right, like I’m going to start that before the day before it’s due.