Yet Another Programming Dream

Last night I had another vivid and detailed programming dream, although this time with a particularly bizarre twist.

The project was to develop an XML schema for describing an arbitrary game in terms of events, game states, player states, and operations on those states triggered by events. As you can see, I remember a fair amount of detail regarding what I developed in the dream. I don’t have time for it now, what with E90 (major programming project), Advanced Graphics (3 more moderate programming assignments), and Senior Conference (1 major programming assignment). Maybe someday I’ll whip up a proof-of-concept for GameML.

At this point, it probably just sounds really geeky. Allow me to describe the situation, and you will understand how it enters the world of the bizarre. First, this was more than just arbitrary programming: it was a programming competition. Second, just to make things more difficult, the competition was held underwater. Specifically, in a swimming pool, because I kept wondering what the chlorine would do to my laptop. My laptop was apparently waterproofed as long as I kept it upright underwater. I guess there were holes on the bottom or something.

The audience consisted of the random people in the pool and on the pool deck. My competitor was Chakotay, from Star Trek: Voyager, but played by Merry the hobbit (from the books, not as Dominic Monaghan from the movies). So there was a very short guy with a tattoo on his forehead and wearing a Voyager/early DS9/Generations-era uniform, sitting cross-legged on the bottom of a pool typing away furiously on a laptop.

I definitely remember having to come up for air every once and a while, but not as often as I would need to in reality. Unfortunately, I woke up before the competition ended, so I don’t know whether I won or not…


Comments

6 responses to “Yet Another Programming Dream”

  1. Oh, cool.

    I’ve actually had thoughts in the past about developing some sort of XML schema for walkthroughs/FAQs; the markup could then be run through an XSLT stylesheet to produce nicely-formatted text files or web pages or LaTeX or the like. I’ll perhaps start prototyping FAQML right around the time when I actually get around to writing a walkthrough for something, which will hopefully happen someday!

  2. OK, you definitely have been coding waaaaaaaaaaay too much.

  3. Dude, question: where did you and Emery get your Star Trek from?

  4. The magic hard drive in the sky?

  5. I just meant, did you buy DVDs or did you download? Because I’m also interested in procuring Trek, but not at $100+ per season…

  6. I own Seasons 5, 6, and 7 of TNG and Season 3 of DS9 on DVD. Probably shouldn’t have blown so much of my limited college funds, but hey, it made me feel nice and morally responsible ;o).

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