A significant portion of my responsibilities as Praktikant this year involve programming using Pascal. Though Pascal is simple to learn and very well documented (a blessing for someone with scant programming experience), I have opted to use a more modern language for my hobbyist projects. And so far, Python has been wonderful.

My first project using python was to create a Connect Four clone. Since the rules and outcomes were already generously provided by Milton Bradley, I could focus on learning my way around the python syntax and functionality. After an couple afternoons of work, two players could face each other in brutal text-based, four-in-a-row combat on the 6x7 grid battlefield.

Basking in a glow of self-given praise, I sought forth to my next grand development. Unfortunately, I quickly ran into the problem of not knowing where to start. I settled to scale down my plans and create a small tool that may one day find itself mingling with other small tools who start thinking they ought to band together and form themselves a Game.

The aptly named City Builder is a tool that aspires to take a group of wealth-distributed people and a plot of terrain, and place those to-be citizens in according to the cost and value of the land. Wealthy will clump together around the more valuable pieces of land, while the poorer citizens will be fored to the outskirts. I hope to implement some randomness in the distribution that could provide for some interesting town developments.

I’ll post the source to Github as I work on it. Github has the feature of displaying update day “streaks”. As someone who loves increasing arbitrary numbers, I cannot dare to let my streak crash down to 0.

The Daily Commit is a way of encouraging daily updates to City Builder and other future projects, by providing a platform for small but regular posts about their development. [edit 9/24/13 ended due to constantly changing projects. I hope to continue to post regularly, but having a daily commitment was a little too much structure for my scattered planning]

The citizens of City await their newly valued homes!

Three layer banana cream pie: dulce de leche (Alton Brown’s recipe), sliced ripe bananas, cream cheese filling. Mostly adapted from this recipe from Food Network.

More pretty photos –>

Having no idea what dulce de leche was before this, I was surprised to find out it can be made with just sugar, milk and heat. Taking Mr. Brown’s advice, I also included vanilla and baking soda (which I assume attributed to its success). A splash of top shelf bourbon was added to give the DDL a little more depth. Chilled overnight along with your standard graham cracker pie crust (butter, sugar, graham).

Cream cheese filling followed Ms. Valladolid’s recipe with the addition of a little Kahlua, for color and fun. I could (and did) eat that stuff straight.

Between the forced straining of DDL and the lack of electric mixer or food processor, my forearm is sore.