Chaswick.net

So next year’s NFL schedule has been released.  Below you can find the information on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 2009 NFL schedule.  I’ll update this post as I have time to analyze it, but it looks like a very tough road to hoe this year, competition-wise.   The NFC East and AFC east, combined with the NFC south represent the most competitive three divisions in football, hands down.  Coach Morris has his work cut out for him.  Also apparent is that almost all games are 1:00 pm starts, and our division play is densely packed at the end of the season.  And, we once again have a favorable bye week.  Week 1 is September 13th, 2009.

Week 1  Dallas at Tampa
Week 2  Tampa at Buffalo
Week 3  NY Giants at Tampa
Week 4  Tampa at Washington
Week 5  Tampa at Philadelphia
Week 6  Carolina at Tampa
Week 7  New England at Tampa
Week 8  Bye
Week 9  Green Bay at Tampa
Week 10  Tampa at Miami
Week 11  New Orleans at Tampa
Week 12  Tampa at Atlanta
Week 13  Tampa at Carolina
Week 14  NY Jets at Tampa
Week 15  Tampa at Seattle
Week 16  Tampa at New Orleans
Week 17  Atlanta at Tampa

I’ll get this out of the way up front:  When the economy was wonderful and I had tons of money to spare, I tried Quizno’s and, quite frankly, didn’t like it.  It seemed expensive, and while the quality of the ingredients seem O.K. the flavor of the sandwiches did not appeal to me.  At this same time, I hardly ever went to Subway.  Now that I am on a bit of a tighter budget, the $5 foot long deals really stood out to me.  We have ordered them at work several times since the ad campaign started, and all of us were impressed with what we got.  They were essentially the same sandwiches as always, but cheap!  When I saw an ad last week for the Quizno’s torpedo, I decided we should try that the next time we ordered lunch out. And for the record, my co-workers and I (used to) work at a Chinese restaurant, so at least we know something about food and value.

What a disappointment.  Now, I figured that the sandwich would be thinner from what I saw on the commercial, but I still figured it would be a good deal.  Turns out I was wrong.  They are essentially overstuffed, greasy bread sticks.  The amount of meat is negligible, most of the flavor comes from the sauce and the cheese.  We ordered the Beef, Bacon and Cheddar, the Italian, and the Turkey and Bacon torpedoes.  The sandwiches weren’t even wrapped like on TV.  They were cut in half (so that initially I thought a mistake had been made as the roll was only 8 inches long) and the bread was only crunchy in the way that old toast soaked in grease (think old grilled cheese) might be.

Final verdict:  Subway, no contest.  For $5 bucks you can easily make two meals out of the sandwich, and you can actually see the meat.  Quizno’s $4 offering left me and my two co-reviewers hungry and dissatisfied.  All three of us decided we would never order this again.  If this is as competitive as Quiznos can get my intuition about them heading down the tubes will prove to be fact.  I always thought they were over-hyped and at least in terms of value they cannot even come close to competing for your dollar.

A friend of mine introduced me to this fun little web based flash time waster called My Brute. Try it for free by battling my character now at http://chaswick.mybrute.com. It’s fun and takes next to no effort!

So I cleaned up some memory leaks that I figured would probably be trouble later.  I may still have one or two lying around, but it is order of magnitudes better now.  I used Visual Leak Detector for assistance.  New updates include extracting the level into a view port so that levels bigger than the screen can be accommodated by a moving window.  This was actually surprisingly easy to do.  It acts as a translator, taking the level-relative locations of cells and glyphs and turning them into screen relative points.  Also added rudimentary random level generation, as you can see in the new flash movie.  Currently it generates randomly sized square rooms with an open end in the center bottom.  Expect more complicated layouts in the future.  The walls also have hit points, like entities do, but the whole hitpoint / combat system is just a place holder for more complicated stuff.  Like, metal swords breaking down wooden walls, but only scratching concrete ones.  I also started setting up the game logic to accomodate multiple levels, as evident from the debug “level respawn” feature in the video.

Next up in the development track, items that entities can pick up, carry, and use.  I’d like to get jack equipped with some kind of ability to temporarily boost his speed.  His framework is all set up for that already, but I need to decide how to give him the choice on when/how to activate it.  As for the player, I’d like to get him wielding a weapon (or not, at a button press).