It’s a new month and after a lengthy downfall of snow here, the day was gorgeous.  A healthy portion of the snow that fell melted and even for my short jaunt outside to go to the store put a smile on my face at how nice it was out.

If that alone wasn’t enough to put a nice ribbon on the end of February, Canada won 14 gold medals in the Vancouver Olympic Games (and 7 silver and 5 bronze).  I can only imagine the Olympic crowd at the end of the Olympic hockey game as Canada won against the U.S. 3-2 (Closing ceremonies followed that game).

For me, however, it’s been a little difficult to be particularly happy or excited.  Contracted the flu a few days ago and I feel like I’ve been hit by a fleet of trucks.  Beware the warning signs – sore throat, headache, and mild muscle pain.  I don’t even want to discuss the bathroom issues!   After that, it hits.  Hot and cold flashes, low grade to high grade fevers, and the nose blowing starts.   I’ve gone through a box of tissues and 5 rolls of toilet paper alone just blowing my nose.  If you grind your teeth in your sleep (like I do), the jaw pain upon waking up is no picnic either.  My jaw doesn’t normally hurt but with all the other aches and pains I’ve experienced I shouldn’t be surprised that my jaw would too.

In any event, none of it has stopped me from delving into C# programming some more.  I’m not a great programmer (not even a good one), but I do enjoy it.  The only problems I’ve experienced with it are the lack of things to do.  I don’t just code for the sake of coding.  I have to have a reason for doing it, otherwise I feel like I’m accomplishing nothing.  Well, this time, I found a reason.

I’ve been playing Mass Effect 2 to death (I’ve beaten the game four times over – even once on Insanity [won't do that again, either]) but there have been details that I didn’t like about the characters I used.  Usually in relation to their Mass Effect background (I imported my ME games).  So I went back to Mass Effect with the intent of building a character I like with all of the accomplishments I wanted from ME – strictly for the purpose of importing him into ME2.

I discovered this wonderful resource for ME gamers – Teryx’s Mass Effect Checklist.  Unfortunately for me, I can’t effectively use it.  It’s in a pdf format but I don’t have a working printer (it’s six pages in length designed for printing on both sides of the paper thus 3-pages both sides).  However, I do have a dual monitor setup.  As a result, that led me to start programming.  I have a very early stage, operational program that uses all of the information from Teryx’s hard work in a small program that I can run on my other monitor.

I made XML file versions of all the information in the ME Checklist pdf that the program uses (read-only).  It is interactive and allows you to [manually] keep track of what you’ve found/done/have yet to do.  This program does *not* hook into the game and keep track for you.  Like I said, I’m not that good of a programmer (although, I have to admit, that’d be pretty sweet).  It doesn’t have the ability to save or load stats yet and I’m still working on the Planetary Checklist portion but it works well so far.

If you look at the screenshots, in the planetary checklist, don’t get your hopes up… the red crosshair that is there is static.  If I get ambitious, I’ll photoshop the image to remove it.  I wouldn’t even know where to begin to draw a usable crosshair like that one in the game.  Seems like it’d be too much work for a small utility like this anyway.