So yeah. I haven't been around in a while. Lots of ups and downs in the four years (and two months) since I last posted. Posts are just getting less and less frequent, eh?

I have like 13 pages of posts, dating back to 2010, and that was when I was deemed an "old bean". So I've been here for over 11 years. Or at least I've been *a* member. Not always an active one.

Since joining, I've produced a whopping 0 games, 0 applications, contributed to (mostly) 0 projects, and have felt absolutely unaccomplished. There was Deep Freeze, a project by me and another on here, and it took… third place, I think it was? It was a fun little puzzle game, and it fizzled out after the end of the competition. There was a top-down Zelda/Boktai inspired framework I started and then stopped after getting stumped at adding… Bomberman mechanics (the grid-based bomb placement, and how the flames work). Yeah. It was going to be a fun little blend of various game mechanics that could work together or separate, and make it easy to just create all sorts of games. But I stopped.

I've recently picked it up and resumed work on it for a new project, working on it with a friend, so yeah, it was fun picking up code from 2014-2015. Being smart enough to comment on *most* of it definitely helped me out. But I kick myself for every line I didn't comment, lol.

Otherwise not much has changed on the home side of things. I own (well, pay for) a small personal Minecraft server (again) that none of my friends go on anymore ;_;

For work, I've jumped around a bit, again. In the previous posts, I had jumped around after dealing with a bankruptcy and a trashy job, but since then I had some interesting times…

At the end of working at Home Depot, I had been trying to work out my next plan of attack to get more cash. I had picked up a second job after a year or so, working at Stop & Shop, a supermarket, as a cashier. The manager was… interesting to say the least. Not many liked her. I didn't, either.

It came to a head when I got injured at Home Depot, the same day I was supposed to rush to my other job. If any of you ever knows about the LifeProof brand of flooring materials, it's HEAVY. Like seriously. Well, an employee was rolling up a cart from the warehouse to the customer service counter, to put orders on shelves in the back, and one of the boxes came loose, rolling a bit (momentum made a SQUARE box roll, as would be my luck), and it happened to hit my lower left leg, from the left side. Making it bend, at a roughly right angle, perpendicular to how your knee should ever bend. It's the second time in my life I hurt my left leg/knee in the same way, and it hurt like crazy. The manager at Stop & Shop was furious that I wasn't making it in, and was like "why did I even hire you?"… Yeah, Injured, unable to walk, but it's my fault, right?

In any case, during recovery, I couldn't stand for a long period of time. I separated with the grocery store on good terms, and eventually, I returned, but only as a greeter at Home Depot as while they allowed a pregnant lady to sit at the counter when being a cashier or working special services (online orders and stuff), I apparently couldn't sit, and a chair would be in the way. That is the only issue I personally had with the place.

During the time out from work, I had finally scored an interview with Altice, a cable company servicing New York, among other things, and had gotten an offer while there. So, I quit Home Depot, and switched to Altice, doing tech support.

And billing support.

Ang general customer service.

I joined after the Dolans removed themselves from the company and the french took over! And condensed everything. I was only there for a year, and I don't miss it. It was kinda fun, kinda engaged me, but we were forced to use tools a certain way, instead of letting us use our ability to help people, and use tools as TOOLS, not mandatory parts of our job. Any tool can be a hammer, but not every tool should be used as one. No need to cycle through every tool in your arsenal, if you know you only need a screwdriver.

But, they snagged me on some technicalities, and out I went. Jobless, trying to get something new, I came across a few things, and finally am doing credit card fraud investigations!

I love it here so far, management has a brain, HR has a brain, the company is engaging and it feels less cheesy than other places. I had ideas and suggestions, and the VP of my department actually set aside time for a meeting and addressed stuff, and listened to me. Funny story for that, too…

So, a few months in, and I picked up on how to conduct an investigation, finding a LOT of redundant things. There was also a lot of copying and pasting, and I found my hands moderately sore from all of the typing (combined with all of the typing I do at home with socializing and any coding stuff, gaming, etc).

So, after narrowing down how much redundancy I type, I first made a giant text file, in various apps, that I copy/paste from. Kinda simple, but took up space. Well, I took enough time doing this that I finally decided, in my free time, to build a tool in HTML and Javascript. And because I like making things pretty, I worked in CSS. It was pretty neat.

I like seeing how long I take on cases, so I added a timer with color-changing numbers for when I consider myself running late on a case. Then I added some more 'premade' lines of text that I commonly used. Then I added checkboxes and toggles to generate summaries easily.

And then I presented the tool to my team leader and VP and promptly released it to the team I'm on.

I'm seeing if I can't get permission to have it uploaded to show off; nothing super proprietary is there, it's more or less a glorified notepad with buttons, but it works amazingly!

Also, I've been working on a game, using a framework I started to develop back in 2015. Feels strange going through old code, but I'm glad I commented most of the code. I'm kicking myself on anything I didn't comment on though, as sometimes it makes things a bit more tricky for me.

Anyway, that's all for now!