On Thursday I got talking to one of the guys at Tai Chi and I found out why the form they are teaching me is so different from the one I learnt in Norwich. It’s the old frame and Kenny was teaching the new frame. Apparently the new frame is more complicated and is generally taught after the old frame. I learnt a little bit more of the 19-point form. I haven’t been practising enough again. However, I have an excuse.

On Friday we had loads of guests come down and went to a Manga all-nighter at The Other Cinema in Soho. I saw Spriggan, Perfect Blue, Patlabor II and, against my choice, Spriggan again. They were planning to show Macross Plus, but somebody fucked up and they couldn’t, when asked everybody else voted Spriggan (which I had seen on another screen). It was a ker-azy ride, felt pretty crazed in the morning and the next day. But free breakfast of croissant made it easier. Plus it was cool to see lots of people and meet some more Hype people (Silas).

Rich, who had been staying for the week, Martin and Miles left on Saturday evening after sleep and Full English Breakfast in Chelsea, but Greg stayed until today. I told him that I was thinking of messing around with SDL a bit and we cranked the API out. We managed to get a basic rotating sprite (blit-tastic) demo running on his machine built under MinGW and mine with Apple’s Project Builder. MinGW is ace BTW and combined with Bloodshed’s Dev-C++ IDE provides everything we need. For anyone else out there pissed-off with DevStudio I highly recommend it. Greg is basically ditching M$ tools, something I did a while ago with the leap to the Mac, but it’s really, really nice to have alternatives that are free and better. Then we decided to stick the code in CVS so we could continue working on it remotely. I’ve never really used CVS properly and it’s a bit mad, but it should be very useful for our purposes. At least all the IDEs integrate with it, if in interestingly different ways.

Developing a single piece of code which compiles on both my OS X machine and Greg’s Win98 machine was immensely satisfying. It’s clearly the way forward. Well done, SDL guys!