Just Random Thoughts

I don’t have a central theme to this post. It’s just a musing or a ramble. I like many others have been in lock down and suffering from mental helath issues. I have fourtunately had a good mental health team around me and they have ensured that I am getting medication. The difference a set of good eds makes is unbeliveable. This time last year I was struggling to get up in the morning and then spent the day struggling to think.The meds made me sluggish. The new meds have allowed me to be more motivated and helped to focus on getting stuff done. Like getting on with my coding learning. I had a hiccup with the meds last week and the difference is striking.

I have also cut a lot of social media out of my life as well. I still have profiles, but I have deleted the apps from my phone. This has resulted in me haveing no clue about whta is occuring outside of my curated instagram feed. I don’t get embroiled in any agrugemnets that my head can’t let lie. I feel a sense of guilt I guess because there are things occuring in the world stage which are huge like the ‘Black Live Matter’ demonstrations, the covid response , and lifting of the restrictions. I feel like I should be more vocal about these things and recognise thaat my ability to just turn off socail media, speaks volumes about the level of my ‘priviledges’. Lots of people don’t get to just ‘turn off’ these issues when it gets to be too much.

I don’t have much to add to any of the debates as I don’t know enough about the problems. So I’m reading and listening to podcasts, in order to better understand. I try to amke my kids aware of the inequalities in the world, but I worry that I’ll bog them down in the rot and not have anything positive to show them. I’ll bumble and ramble along I guess and make a mess of things here and there, but I hope I remeber to tidy upafter myself and that my actions cause more good in the world than harm. I want to do more than hope. I want to make the world around me, and that spreads out from me a better place. It’s overwhelming the amount to be done. But I will try to take it on piece by piece. I feel that my major contribution will be in how I bring my kids up, and how they then influence the world.

I’ve rambled enough here. I’ll shush and things.

Not Pong

Today I put all of my coding knowledge together and coded this emulation of pong. It’s not finished but the difficult parts are done. The bats move and collision detection is sorted. I need to add scoring and to fancy it up with bell and whistles.

I’m on to learning about Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). This is the bit I have been looking forward to. From here I can programme a lot of things. My first goal is to rte code the not_Pong using OOP.

Below behold the game.

This is my emulation of pong in processing

A little colour

A more colourful sketch than I have been doing of late.

This uses FOR loops to draw the squares along the x axis; and another to draw the squares on the y axis.

The colour is controlled by the mouse movement. Long details below.

The colour in processing is by default set up as (red, green,blue). It's basically colour mixing with light.

The red component in the sketch is defined by the distance of the x co -ordinate of the mouse minus the x value of the square on the grid it is over , expressed as an absolute. ( which means its a positive number at all times. ).

The green component is defined by the y coordinate of the mouse minus the y value of the square it is over expressed as an absolute.

The blue component is defined by the mouse's x coordinate minus the width divided by two expressed as an absolute.

Yeah I know. My brain did that many many many times. But now I know what it all means and how it works. So I can actually write this stuff. Yay elastic brain learning.

boolean functions mainly

I’m making good progress with my learning in processing. Much to the irritation of my children. I like to advise them in great detail of how and why I have made such and such a coding decision and what happened and how I overcame the dreadful situation. They are 10 and 7 and really just want to play minecraft.

Today I was covering the use of loops. WHILE and FOR loops. I have done this before,but I actually know what I’m doing as opposed to knowing how to do it. Below is my work from today. (I’m still trying to work out how to embed the entire digital work in a smaller window. I’ll figure it out eventually and put these all in a gallery.)