Before you can run, you must walk. And before you can walk, you must be shepherded around the living room like some kind of slobbering meat puppet in a desperate attempt to give your limbs some semblance of self-awareness. I have done some YouTube searching and found the most basic of Visual Basic tutorials, the Hello World program, put into video form. This video, and others like it, will be my shepherds until I can gain a little bit of self-sufficiency. Upon viewing the video, I've actually found that a lot of the knowledge from that high school class came back pretty quickly. I feel pretty confident in skipping past some of the basics, such as if/then statements and the like, and jumping into something slightly more intermediate. Time permitting, I'm going to start working on a character of some sort, probably no more than a series of jumbled pixels as I'm no great artist, and try giving him some properties using online tutorials as guidance. First will probably be movement properties, assigned to the arrow keys.

For those fresh programmers like me who are just getting started, I've found this guy's YouTube tutorials to be very helpful. He does Objective C and Android tutorials too, and they seem pretty good.

Finally, I'm also downloading the XNA SDK and I'll be dabbling with that a bit on the advising of the lovely Fobwashed, who is running a similar blog and has great things to say about the accessibility of the platform. As mentioned earlier, the internet here is shit, so that download won't be complete for a little bit. Probably doesn't help that I'm simultaneously downloading tons of games from Steam, but I digress.

That's about it for today's update, as other than a few super basic programs (like the Hello World program in the above video) I haven't really been able to get a lot of time with the computer. With Hurricane Irene supposedly touching down near us this weekend, not to mention the fact that I'm moving on Monday and starting classes Tuesday, it could be a bit of a stretch to get much done, but I'll try to release a more substantial update by the week's end.