Greetings

Hello =] Long time no post.

It's been a busy summer, I was taking two classes online: Environmental Biology, and Calculus 1. Last week I took the finals and I earned an A in both classes! Woot! Calculus is pretty neat, I've been using it to calculate rates of change, like if you're filling up a balloon with 100 cubic cm of air per second, how fast is the radius of the ballon changing at 5 seconds, and for calculating area and volume between curves, taking a curve on a 2d plane and revolving it around an axis to create a 3d object and finding it's volume was particularly fun. Drawing the objects and visualizing them made it a more creative task than most math can be.

Just a few hours after taking the finals, the Ludum Dare 48 hour game programming competition started. This was LD 12, and the theme was 'The Tower'. I wasn't too hot on the theme and was a bit mentally exhausted from the tests, so I didn't spend much time on it in the first half, and almost quit, but in the end I finished a game! This one is actually pretty challenging, it's a tetris clone with numbers and math operators in the blocks, so the object is to form equations. I posted the game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2008/08/10/teenage-mathant-ninja-tower/

Well, I've got a couple weeks to relax now, I'll do some biking. Maia and I are going to Burning Man in a couple weeks, this is her first time and we're very excited, we're going to be camping with some other UCSD burners at Mad Flava.

After burning man, I'll be coming right back to classes, I've got calculus 2, physics:mechanics, economics, piano and yoga.

Oh, and I didn't mention this before, but a few weeks ago, Maia and I brewed up 5 gallons of beer! It's been fermenting, and two nights ago we had our first homebrew. It's good! This is the first of our Ombrew Organic, and is specifically a Pale Ale. It was a fun experience, and we'll be making a Red Ale in September.

The other growth in our lives, our garden of eating, is also doing well. We applied compost and mulch covering to the plants a couple weeks ago, and we've been getting many tomatoes, zuccini, jalapenos and kidney beans. We also got our first japanese eggplant (or ichiban) and some onions, which appeared quite randomly, are almost ready.

Alright, I've got 57 Ludum Dare games to judge (as all entrants do), back to the grind! Ciao!