So I'm doing a project at work where I had to learn Silverlight (its a newer software that works sort of like Flash, if you watched the olympics online you were probably looking at silverlight) and its about all I do lately.

Its going to be a pretty cool project.  It involves 2 large LCD monitors (32") with multitouch technology as well as a 10,000 dollar 1080p projector thats going to be projecting information on the wall.  My app lets you zoom in an out of things, rotate portions of the screen around, overall very cool and fancier than I normally am able to make, since I normally focus on straight normal code.

To learn all of this code faster, I've been working on a project for dndorks.com which will involved users being able to upload map images, character tokens, and manipulate and manage a full battle for 4th edition D&D, and I've been making sure a lot of the technology I use for it is stuff I can use at work so that everything I do at work and at home compliment each other.

The end result was I programmed at work from 7am to 6pm Friday, then the rest of the night was a blur, I think I had dinner with my gf, programmed a bit more on dndorks.com, and studied up for my D&D game on Saturday.

Saturday I had a great game of D&D from 11am to 5pm.  I ran my first skill challenge in the 3 weeks of 4th edition D&D we've had, it went great. 

I'm not sure how other DMs are running the skill challenges, but I explained the obstacle in their way, then went around the group asking what they wanted to do and had them tie it into a skill.  I let them use any skill they wanted, emphasizing how they were overcoming the blizzard to get to their destination.  I told them each roll was an hour, and went around the table until they succeeded or failed.  One guy said he wanted to make a religion check to start singing hyms about pilgrims who had faced similar dire odds, I let him, and because he succeeded I gave everyone  a +2 to their endurance checks for the rest of the skill challenge.  I thought it was fun, and more importantly, "added" to the roleplaying, instead of taking away, which some people seem to have experienced.  Overall, it was a good game, and now that everyone is getting a handle on the combat, we had 3 full combats taking about 50% of the playtime, as opposed to 2 combats taking up 60-70% of the playtime, so hopefully in the future we'll continue to be able to do more roleplaying and still have fun combats.

The rest of my Saturday was spent programming, from about 6pm to nearly midnight, then most of Sunday from about 10:30 am  until 8:30pm, at which point I switched to coloring the newest webcomic on dndorks: http://dndorks.com/comics/1_12_2009.aspx  which involves the two gamers dating each other having their first real crisis in their relationship.  I also managed to do and fold all of the laundry yesterday, so thats good.

I feel like it was a very productive weekend, but I didn't have very much "me" time. :(  I'm going to take a few days off after this big project is completed (unless I fail, in which case I'll have a lot of days off. ;)), and I'm really looking forward to it.  As it is, I used to look forward to weekends or getting off work, but at this point, even if I go out to dinner or what not in the back of my head I'm just thinking that its only a temporary stop until I'm back programming again.