It seems that my Time To MegaHAL, or TTM, is about six weeks.

I’ll explain. What generally happens is this:

1. I start a new job, and meet a whole new bunch of people.
2. After about six weeks, someone suddenly mentions “hey, you’re that MegaHAL guy”!

It happened just today. My new boss, at a job I started six weeks ago, suddenly made the connection when a good friend of his published an interesting post about cobe, an optimised and much improved reverse-engineered rewrite of MegaHAL, written in Python and using SQLite as a storage back-end. A nice piece of work, although I’m a bit ashamed that someone had to wade through my 16-year-old vanilla C code to try to figure our what the bloody hell is going on :)

Of course, this will probably help to knock me out of my summertime hiatus. Things have been quite on the blogging front lately, what with moving into our new house just prior to Christmas and starting a new job first thing in the New Year. Now that our new place is looking more like a home and less like a cardboard box wholesaler, it’s time to sit back, take stock and figure out what’s next.

For me, that’s as follows:

• Send out a final “Occasional Jason” missive to my mailing list, winding up my six-month sabbatical.
• Work on a commercial version of the well-received Professor Lazybones and the Cellular Automata Game Engine.
• Release MegaHAL.10.
• Get LaggyDash, my Global Game Jam entry, to some level of completeness.

Although, really, the first item on the list should really be “get more sleep, and exercise”.

Exciting times!