Ohayou gozaimasu!

I slept in today. Last night I was bad and stayed up until 3AM. I was feeling jovial and I couldn’t simply sleep. Instead I went on VOCALOID Discord and I gifted a bunch of Nitro to people.

Nitro is a perk that people get for supporting Discord. It allows them to use any emoticons from any other servers, and it gives them a badge in their profile. I think it might do other things as well, but those are the two that I can remember. The one I’m really interested is being able to use emoticons from any server.

When I’m sending private messages to my friend J, I always want to use :mikuxd: emoticon, but typing that just results in text. No emoticon.

If I had Nitro, I would be able to use emoticons from Vocaloid Club Discord in VOCALOID Discord, which would be nice. Also There are some nice emoticons on the PPDXXX Discord server which I would like to use in the VOCALOID Discord server.

PPDXXX is a community made clone of Project Diva. It runs on Windows PCs. It basically plays a youtube video in the background, and Project Diva style targets and melody icons appear in the foreground. Anybody can make a new song chart and share it. Because of this flexibility, there are hundreds if not thousands more songs available in PPDXXX than in any commercial SEGA Project Diva game.

I haven’t tried it yet. I have only seen videos of it played. It even has a multiplayer, something Project Diva does not. Very cool indeed.

Today’s the last full day to work on Jepurdee! It’s going to be a challenge to get it finished in time, but I’ll pull through!

The one thing I’m worried about is that our home wifi will crap out in the middle of the game, and nobody’s buzzers will function correctly. I’m almost sure this is going to be an issue at least once.

I’m planning on putting the jepurdee server on Heroku. This way, connecting to wifi is optional. Because of the Heroku plan, I do need to be sure and buy a higher quality server than their free tier. I’m worried about memory exhaustion with their free tier. I don’t think my server is too resource intensive, but I want wiggle room.

The amount of websockets connections that the player’s phones will be making is going to be more than I’ve ever tested. I don’t have the capability of testing more than 3 or 4 simultaneous connections.

I’m going to go ahead and buy jepurdee.com. $8.46 for the first year, and 11 something after that. I need to buy it right away so I can make sure DNS is all sorted out by tomorrow night.

I got paid from my dad more than I was expecting. I think he threw in a Christmas bonus without telling me.

He bought the construction workers lunch on Friday. Longhorn BBQ, which I think is a big deal for most people. They ate leftovers last night for dinner. K & E, B & J, A & H were all there. And D is even home for the holiday!

We laughed and had fun playing games and eating. I wasn’t really hungry because I had a huge lunr. 4 potatos (potato wedges), 1 1/2 cup rice (uncooked measurement), and brussel sprouts. I didn’t eat all the rice and brussel sprouts. I was so full from the potatos that I could not.

I played Mario Kart 8 for the first time. That’s a fun game. Some of the cars karts are really exquisite. It’s funny how one of the karts is an actual licensed Mercedes! I think I will try to play that game again when we have a chance.

I also played Fortnite for the first time. That’s a fun game as well. Interestingly enough, nobody actually gets killed in that game. Instead, people get beamed out of the game. It’s sorta refreshing as a concept.

The gameplay is very interesting. As long as you have items, you can just build fortesses near instantaneously. D. is really good at that game. He got 1st place 2 out of 3 games he played.

Sniping is a lot of fun in that game. I got some good shots off with the sniper rifle. I might just solely use a sniper rifle if I play again.

One of the things that blew me away was the lightsabers in Fortnite. D. went up against someone with a lightsaber, and they kept blocking his shots with the weapon. The animations were evocative of a real Jedi; It was really something to see. They kept blocking D’s bullets and retreating as they did so.

They seemed invincible, but D. kept throwing bullets at them and they went down. David said they tired and couldn’t block the shots anymore. What a game!

Next round, D found a lightsaber for himself. The saber allowed D to block or attack, or do an evading roll. The lightsaver was incredibly effective in close quarter battle!

David eventually found another player with a lightsaber. Lightsaber vs. lightsaber made for an intense fight! They clashed over and over until finally D. emerged as the victor. Originally he fought with Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, but upgraded to Kylo Ren’s saber which were his prize for coming out victorious.

Jepurdee.com is mine! I wonder if Jeopardy! will try and sue me now? LOL. If that happens, I’ll just turn it into good publicity for my other projects. I don’t think it will though. There is already jeopardylabs.com which seems to be a community made Jeopardy website. I almost could use that isntead of my project… Fuck no. I spent three months of my life working on Jepurdee, I’m not just going to flake on the day before we play it!

I do have some worries that I’ll have to abandon the buzzers during the game. It’s not a big deal if that happens, just buzzing will be lame if that happens because players will have to raise their hand instead of pressing the buzz button on their phone. I did build a mechanism which simply lets me as the host pick who buzzed in. I put a lot of work into the buzzers, so I’d prefer that we can use them.

So yeah, I got more money than I was expecting. I’m reacting to that by spending a bunch of it on gifts for my Discord buddies. I should really invest the money instead. I’m not rolling in dough now, I simply have $100 more than I was expecting. I’m still in debt up to my eyeballs.

I still have to worry about affording groceries next month. I should be looking at my budgeting software and making spending decisions based on that, not on the amount of money in my bank account.

Yikes. Now I feel bad. I was a bad boy indeed last night. I shouldn’t have even bought jepurdee.com right now. I shouldn’t buy a Heroku subscription either. Ugh.

I need to make more money! And I want to use my skills to do so. I looked around on bounty source for some projects which pay, but most of the available boundies require a high level of specialization in a project, and offer way too little money for the effort.

The most interesting bounty I saw was bounty to create a calendar app for the open source project OwnCloud. The requirements called for appointment scheduling, external calendar synchronization, a modern UI… The bounty amount is $100. Totally not worth, given the time requirements that would take to implement. Not to mention all the research that would be required to make an OwnCloud app.

It makes sense that one person who wants a calendar in OwnCloud would be paying only $100. $100 is a reasonable cost for a subscription to a cloud based calendar app. However, it’s only one person chipping in $100, which makes the overall total only $100. That isn’t enough to pay a developer for their time.

Most projects on Bountysource are like that. Occasionally I’ll see a bounty that looks to be worth the price. $2000 for a cryptography feature implementation for example. Unfortunately, crypto is not my forte, and I don’t plan on picking that up for freelance work.

I would pick up crypto if I had a salary. Then I can pace myself, learn it well, and implement something good. Not that I would roll my own crypto… I mean impelment someone else’s crypto into a project. I know that rolling my own crypto is a no-no in this industry.

That’s a highly specialized field. I’m not that kind of programmer. I’m the web developer/designer type of programmer, not the algorithm/mathy type of programmer.

I dropped out of Advent of Code this year. I think I mentioned that already. Maybe next year I’ll have more time on my hands. This year, Jepurdee came first.

And it’s a good thing I did drop out of AoC, otherwise I would be even further behind than I am now!

One day until showtime. Wow. Time flies. I got this though. I didn’t procrastinate. I was working on Jepurdee every day I had the ability to do so. I just have final Jepurdee to complete. The part where the players submit their questions and their wagers is the last piece of the puzzle.

I’ve got it all designed in my head already, which is 90% of the battle. The remaining 10% of writing the code is usually pretty simple.

I’m going to be using websockets, just like I did with the Buzzer components. The players will click submit, and their phone will emit their wager. Then I’ll reveal the answer, and the players will do the same.

Actually, I don’t think I’m adding a submit button for the players. Whatever they enter in their text box will simply auto-submit when I click the time up button.

Ooo I’m excited. Jepurdee has a lot more features than a lot of the Jeopardy clones out there. I’m hoping for some wows when I present!

There’s a lot of things that are unfinished. Host features like editing games and such. Those will have to wait until later to get implemented. Right now I’m only finishing the things that are 100% necessary to put on a good show!

I’m looking at my budgeting software. I’m seeing a lot of interest charges. Not good! I have three credit cards. One is maxed out, and the other two have hundreds of dollars charged to them. I’m paying 21-23% interest rates on each one, so it’s in my best interest to pay them off ASAP!

I cut one of my credit cards up. I didn’t want the temptation of using it anymore. That one is sitting at $400 right now. That’s the one I’ll be paying off first.

I just gotta do some work. I gotta produce value for people! I’ve been thinking more about fixing phones and reselling them on eBay. I think I want to do that with some of the paycheck money I just received. Buy a broken phone and a replacement screen and do the same thing I did with my phone.

Also I want to sell this Samsung Galaxy S8+ that I was using when I was on my parent’s plan. I could get a couple hundy from it.

I’m grateful for the World Wide Web. In some ways I consider myself raised by the internet. I was highly influenced by it, and I wouldn’t be the person I am today if not for the internet.

The internet has limitless potential on advancing humankind, enabling entrepreneurs, and sharing information. It’s the internet that I plan on leveraging to thrust myself into financial stability!

I’m grateful for recycled electronics. My left mouse button gave out yesterday. Thankfully, I have a box of old recycled mice which I can draw from, and instantly be back in business!

Really, if I were a thriftmeister, I could have an almost free computer setup. Thrift stores and Recycle Techs get free PCs all the time, and resell them for dirt cheap. Or I could advertise computer recycling on CraigsList and drive around offering free pickup for old computer components. I could literally make a living doing just that, if I wanted it bad enough.

But I don’t. I want to do e-Commere and web dev! That’s what I like to do!

I’m grateful for Steve Jobs. I’m just kidding. Well I might as well go along with that because I can’t think of anything else. I have this inspirational quote by Steve Jobs which I have on my wall.

The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.

I’m grateful for that mentality. It’s very true. I could be experiencing the drudgery of a factory job, and be miserable, and my work reflects that misery. Or, I could do what I love, be super poor, but be happy!

I’ll choose happiness any day!

Excelsior!