What's Stopping You?

I had a very exciting week. I went to San Antonio to play with the All-State Band, and let me tell you, it was one of the most amazing things I've ever done. To have a gigantic band of 160 be perfectly in-tune gives me goosebumps, and we could play with such power as to make other musicians' jaws drop. When I left, however, I went to a retreat in New Braunfels right afterward, and I was in a very bad way. To have to leave such a great thing was hard, and I wished to have stayed there forever playing music. And then I asked myself, Why don't I? What's to stop me from becoming a hermit and playing music all day if that's what makes me happiest? I decided that wasn't the best life ever, but I'd be a masterful musician if I did. And that's how masters are created, I realized. It's the lifelong dedication to one art that produces the awe-inspiring works that we always gush over. It's important right now for me to be in school so that I can get a broad knowledge base and be educated, etc., but after I just want to dedicate myself to what makes me happy. That's what Steve Jobs did, didn't he? Maybe I'll dedicate myself to Java development. And maybe I won't. . . .

Esta Lengua que Hablamos

This past week, our Spanish 6 class has been translating a play into English to display while we act it out. Great arguments have erupted over how to translate it. Some students are content with a bland, literal translation. I, however, am insistent upon imparting the same music that emanates from the Spanish rendition. There is no fun in reading the sentence, "He went to the river and saw a girl fall in." Would you not rather read, "As he passed the river, he saw a woman tumble in"? This particularity applies to Java in that I've realized that there is a kind of pattern to Java language, and I feel like there is a certain flow that I prefer to have, especially with consistent indentation and the like. It annoys me when people use spaces to introduce a separate statement, or when people use spaces in an equation, like "x + y" instead of "x+y." Perhaps it is my OCD kicking in, but I feel like I perform better when I have this coding to help me see the code and figure out what is being executed.

If I were a Game Designer...

I'd be downright miserable. Last week, we wrote Pong, a game that at its face seems easy. But given all the classes and methods that we had to do, it was three days to even write the framework. And when it comes to debugging, forget about it. If one thing is slightly off, the game won't work at all. It took time at home with me poring through a bunch of code to figure out what was wrong. Besides being a headache, the fruit of all that labor was just a crappy little game. I have serious respect for the people that created Skyrim.