I got an unexpected message from somebody I met in Chengdu. She was working at the hostel and going to university there, and we got along well. She was in Suzhou for New Years, and we figured now was a good time to meet up.

Tuesday morning I went to Suhou, checked into my hotel in the 观前街 area, and met up. It was a rainy day – We wandered around, got some coffee at a American-themed coffee bar run by a Taiwanese guy and watched Big Lebowski on their TV, met up with a friend of her’s who’s a nurse at a local hospital, then got hot pot and went to Ellen’s to play bar dice over some drinks.

The bar dice this time were different, as everyone rolled the dice as many times as they wanted before placing claims, which led to a bit more strategy as you could continue rolling to get say 3-4 ones or a bunch of another number. We also played another game which entailed lining up six cups and filling half of them half-way with the drink of choice (that night it was a weak whisky-coke) then rolling a die to determine which cup you had to drink. You kept rolling until you got an empty cup. You would take that empty cup and fill it up as much as you wanted. I had to drink a lot, but the troubles for me was more the soda than the whisky – they were very weak drinks and I don’t drink much soda anymore. Reminded me of early college with these sorts of drinking games, and I ended the night with a stomach ache. Can’t figure out how they handle so much sugar and carbonation.

Then today I met up with my french friend and his from-Suzhou fiance, went to 北寺塔 and the Suzhou Museum (I’ve raved about this museum before) and then had a great dinner at their place.

Job Search

I’m getting worried and anxious at this point about getting a job I’ll like. I feel like I’m qualified for an entry level software position but it doesn’t look like there’s many opportunities around Milwaukee for the languages I’m familiar with. Beyond programming I’d like to find something maybe in sales or corporate relations dealing with China, but that would be a bit harder.

There was a company I should be getting a call from next week, a cancer startup from Chicago. It would be a good company to work for if things go well since it’s using modern technology (Elixir!) to solve interesting problems and the staff looks really diverse. For this call I’d be talking to someone that has technical experience so it should go better than the Foxconn interview.

Coding

Things are getting spicy with labyrinth-site – check the development branch. Finally there’s another person contributing to the code, and he’s working on getting a nice dockerfile set up. Soon it’ll be ready for beta.

Beyond this I’m playing around with making a private runescape server, but no luck there beyond wrestling with Java.

Things I’m Liking

• Old School Runescape: This is the MMO of my childhood, around the 12-14 year old period. I had a lot of time to spend grinding back then, but now this game looks more like a time waster, especially for the end of my time in China. But that didn’t stop me from playing a few hours, and looking into botting the game. It’s old enough where some easy frameworks exist, and the game would be much more fun and guilt-free if I could watch my avatar grinding away on his own while I do my own stuff. Might have to find a private server for this. There’s also a pretty simple protocol for clients communicating with the server, 317.
• Swampletics: A well-made Old School Runescape grind, but limited to a certain part of the world. This guy has spent more than 7000 hours maxing out another character, so watching his thought process in trying to prepare for certain challenges with limited resources. It’s nice to watch these videos instead of playing myself.