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Another Year

2008-06-05T06:48:00Z

Another year has passed, and I’m now 27 years old. Because of the date of my wedding being my birthday, I’ve also been married for two years now. Neither event was that big of a deal this year with the busy life I/we lead. Jenn and I were not blessed with a week in Cali this time around (Last year we went to Disneyland for our anniversary), but rather a stressful week of study and homework.

This year my father came in to send the day with us on my birthday. We spent the day talking, and playing Wii. Dad seemed to take a shine to the Wii, and had a good time. I also spoke with my brother for an hour or so, and got a chance to catch up with my sister and my mother. Later in the evening we went out for dinner before my father left to head back.

School

School is going the same as it ever was. I’m taking summer session classes, which means that I’m cramming sixteen weeks of class into six short weeks. It’s not exactly something I’m loving. Currently I’m taking Intro to East Asian Culture, which is interesting, but not enjoyable at this speed.

With regard to my general academic progress, I’m still fairly tired of school. I’m still not convinced that it’s worth the time and potential professional sacrifices. I’m going to keep at it until there’s an avenue to the bay area open to me, but this bullshit is getting so taxing. I can’t take two more years of insipid undergrads. The other day I actually overheard some girl on her phone say: “.. and like, then I noticed that, like, I didn’t have underwear on! … I know!” /sigh

I still haven’t decided for sure what I’m planning to do, but… yea… I’m pretty done with this part of the country.

Photography

The photography is going well, I think. I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback, and Jenn stopped complaining about me wasting my money on the camera a while ago. It’s annoying that I’ve not had a lot of spare time to go hunting interesting pictures, but a lot of my initiative is eaten up by school and work. I’m looking forward to going on my trip to Japan and getting a lot of good photos. I’m planning on getting a Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED-IF AF-S VR DX Zoom lens before the trip, which is a compact and versatile, albeit slow, zoom lens. Should prove useful, and with that purchase I will have officially spent more on lenses than I did on my camera.

I’m planning on trying to take a photography trip this weekend if the weather isn’t crappy, maybe I’ll get some pics at the cascades or something. Last weekend we went to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center, and I got some nice shots. The cats are amazing, and the trip is well worth it.

Here’s one of the cats, a really sweet white tiger that they have there:

Video Games

I’ve quit wow fairly cold turkey. It just wasn’t worth the time investment to play with a bunch of folks I didn’t know, and working on content I’ve already beaten. I felt bad about flaking out of my guild, who were about to make me a class leader and an officer, but I think it’s for the best.

I’ve taken up playing GH3 and Smash Brothers with a couple friends every week, and I’ve been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 with Tim. I wish I could play more varied games, but with my Warcraft singularity it was easy to slack off on hardware upgrades. RIght now I’m looking at about $1200 or so to get my computers to the place I want them, and I won’t have that scratch till after Japan. Once I upgrade I have a list of games I hope to play; Bioshock, C&C3, Age of Conan, Supream Commander, crysis, the list goes on and on…

I’ve also been playing a lot with Rupture, which is a kind of cross platform gaming aggregation platform thing I’ve talked about before. THey’ve made some big strides, and it’s starting to shape up really nice. They also got picked up by EA this week, so congrats to the team on that one, you guys deserve it!

Japan

As I mentioned a couple times in this post, I’m heading to Japan this summer finally! Brett (old roommate, good friend) and I are heading to Japan for two weeks in August. We’ve not set things hard in stone yet, so if you have any strong suggestions on places we should plan on making a priority (that aren’t on my Japan List ) let me know!

I’m really excited for the trip to Japan, it’s going to be the first trip I’ve made outside the country that wasn’t contained within the sterile walls of some sort of resort. We’re planning on getting train passes, and seeing a lot of varied places.

So the rest of the summer should be very taxing, but will end in a large amount of awesome. I can deal with that.

What a week.

2008-05-22T03:58:00Z

Sunday Night - worked on failed hard drive whil trying to research for a paper that was due on Monday. sleep at ~4am
Monday Night - Read over 100 pages of East Asian History text in prep for a quiz, sleep ~3:30am.
Tuesday - Quiz in class… 90%
Tuesday Night - Composed 5 page research paper on Yoritomo, complete with accompaning 3-5 minute speech over his life. sleep ~4:30am
Wednesday - Up an hour early to revise paper, head to class give speech and turn in paper. After class/work sneak in some gaming time.
Wednesday Night - review and do homework for the past two days and study past two weeks of material in prep for the Midterm tomorrow.
Thursday - Midterm.
Thursday Night - Sanity time, TF2, relaxation. Then homework.
Friday Night - Clean house for mother’s visit.
Saturday - Mother’s birthday visit.
Sunday - Visiting Exotic Feline Rescue w/ Jenn.
Monday - furiously reading 270 page book before classes this week, also need to write a 3 page response paper by Friday.

I don’t know that I have the proper amount of alcohol to get through these summer classes. :P

Game of the Week: EverydayShooter

2008-05-21T12:00:00Z

EverydayShooter

Where: Steam
Cost: $10
Demo: None
Play Time: 10+ hours depending on the person.
Platform: PC

The Indie game of the week this week is EverydayShooter

EverydayShooter (ES) is a really neat little smup that I found on steam the other day. ES is a fairly simple game at first glance, until you reach the second level and realize that the combo system completely changes with every level, and while they clue you into the secret on the first, the rest of the levels are yours to decipher. But, it’s more than a simple change in combo mechanics… in fact it almost feels like each different level is a completely different game. The mechanics change, the art and music change, the rules change, the only thing that’s constant is your dot and your ability to shoot.

The game’s levels are mostly survival challenges, as you proceed to the next level once the alloted time is up. I think it would have been nice to have some bosses thrown in the mix, but I’ve not beaten the game yet, so maybe I’ve just yet to see any.

I’m having a lot of fun with this game, and I’m not even very good at these games (smups) if you have access to Steam I would highly recommend picking this gem up.

Well, this week is already looking to be a great one.

2008-05-19T13:24:00Z

That’s the disk with 400gb of music and encoded dvd rips (of stuff I own, so that’s just going to be a week of re-encoding). Sigh.

Here’s hoping that running it over and over will eventually fix all the problems.

Mid-Expansion Crisis.

2008-05-17T23:02:00Z

I had gotten pretty heavy into Warcraft again, but this last week due to a combination of falling behind in my school work, and a sense of futility based on my participation in the current content I’ve had to reexamine a few things.

So to review:

I’m taking summer classes, and as a result I don’t have ample time to raid anymore. (My guild’s raiding times are 4 hours M-Th).
The next expansion will make the majority of the work I’m doing now meaningless, and that expansion is due in a few months.
The guild I’m in doesn’t seem to have the chops to show me anything that I’ve not seen already in the game, and even though they are nice guys, I can’t see wasting my time in that way as a good thing.

So, since there’s no real use to my playing right now, I’m going to call it quits. I’ve taken up TF2 and various indie games in the meantime… oh and yea… doing my homework! :)

I may still play a bit on the weekends, but I’m done raiding for several hours a night for sure.

Game of the Week: Noitu Love 2

2008-05-16T00:41:00Z

Hey look it’s the game of the week! I know, I know… it’s more like game of the month at this point, but I have a busy life, get off my back!

Noitu Love 2: Devolution

Where: http://www.konjak.org/
Cost: $20
Demo: Demo Download Here
Play Time: 4-8 hours depending on the person.
Platform: PC

The Indie game of the week this week is Noitu Love 2: Devolution.

Noitu Love 2 (NL2) is a cool little project created almost entirely by Joakim Sandberg, who also worked on Aquaria, a game I’ve been meaning to pick up for some time. Joakim did all the art, game design and music for the game, and his attention to detail and gaming chops are very evident in this installment.

The primary game mode uses the wasd keys to control your character, and the mouse to attack. As you’re moving around you use the mouse to click on enemies which instantly sends your character to them to attack. this keeps the action quick and the attacks precise.

The game features seven vastly different maps ranging from ancient japan to a robotics factory. Each level is detailed and unique and exceptionally replayable. The game also features a grading system, further encouraging the desire to replay levels to get all A’s.

The game is fun, fast passed, and littered with great boss characters. The original music for every level is great and catchy. One of the best 2d pixel art games I’ve played in a long time.

I don’t really have any real critisms other than that the third character you can unlock is fairly lame, and unfun to play. I hear some people have trouble getting it to play, but I’ve not had any problems.

I highly recommend giving the demo a spin, and purchasing the full version. It’s a great little $20 game.

The post in which I'm emo and hate everything.

2008-03-20T23:45:00Z

I know I missed last week’s Indie game of the week, I’m working on a two game article for this week! I was far too busy last week playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl (SSBB) to do much in the way of writing.

Speaking of which, my Nintendo Friend Code for SSBB is 0044-2462-1847. If you add me, let me know in the comments or in an email.

Meanwhile, in the life of Brian, things have been fairly sedate. Last week my wife left me alone for a few days, while she traveled down to her mother’s place in Texas. I spent most of the time playing games, most notably SSBB. The week was a wonderful, momentary reprieve from school as it was spring break.

<rant>

This break sort of helped crystallize my contempt for the state of my education. I’m 40 credits (34 after this semester) away from a degree in Informatics. At this point I’ve pretty much given up on that ever being considered even remotely close to a “real” computing degree. At one point it was sold to me as such. However, more and more as I take the classes and get A’s without study or having to read material, I have come to decide that, for someone like me, that it’s become a form of academic masturbation. I go to class, get taught something over the course of a semester that would have taken me a week to learn on my own. Get a decent grade. Learn nothing of consequence. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I ‘should’ be done in Christmas of 2009, assuming that they decide to teach the classes that I need to take (another sore spot) to graduate. Then I’ll finally have a degree that feels like it will be about as useful for getting a job as a philosophy degree.

So, right now I have about two years of classwork at the tune of about $10k-$14k. For a degree that I’m not convinced will be that useful (I know that any degree has a level of intrinsic usefulness), and during the interim the majority of my motivation (to work on learning things that are useful, like Ruby or Python) and free time get sucked into worrying about classes, and completing inane projects or tests.

I think the catalyst for this rant was yet another ping from friends about interest in a really cool job, but I’m stuck here so it’s not even remotely an option. Don’t misread, I’m happy at Socialtext and have no plans on going anywhere anytime soon, it’s just an example of doors being closed before I even have a chance to really consider them because of my commitment to getting this inane degree.

I’m going to keep plugging away at this for now, but man it’s really starting to wear on my nerves…. and, the 19 year old undergrads are not helping.

</rant>

I’ve started playing Warcraft a bit again. I’m not enjoying the parts that I used to. I transfered to the Blackrock server to raid with a guild that raids late night, and was at the same progression level (Read: they had killed all the same bosses) that I was at with my old guild that broke up. However, about 3 days after I transfered the guild died, and became a different guild. I’m fairly pissed off about the whole situation. I was sold a guild raiding at a certain level, and got a guild learning content I’m used to sleeping through. It’s very frustrating, and I find the only reason I play is to kill time, which is a bad sign. I’m going to try and figure something out, for the current time I’m happy with working on collecting gold so I can get my druid’s Epic Flight Form.

I have been working at ways to keep me plugged in at work, without getting distracted by the mundane distractions of working at home. I’ve found music to be a great hook into staying focused, however for it to properly mask the distractions, it has to be at a level where Jenn can no longer study. So either I sit in silence constantly distracted and getting nothing done, or Jenn hates me and gets nothing done. I have some portable Sony MDR-066s that I use when I’m out and about but they fail for serious listening as their small size make them convenient, but their sound reproduction is fairly lame. So, I decided to look into some really nice isolating headphones. I decided on some Sennheiser HD 280 Pros and I look forward to having a pair of really nice headphones that I can crank up without driving Jenn insane.

Indie Games

2008-03-07T08:44:00Z

I think that I am going to start blogging once a week spotlighting some random, cool Indie Game that I’ve found. There are a lot of bad ass little games being developed by brilliant people, and the whole Indie movement has become pretty amazing with the advent of Steam, 360Live, WiiWare and PSN.

If you happen to see some cool Indie game, drop me a line and I’ll look at it, and probably write about here. Yay for small innovative games. They make me happy.

Synaesthete

Where: Download Full game Here
Cost: Free.
Play Time: Few hours.
Platform: PC

The Indie game of the week this week is Synaesthete.

At it’s core Synaesthete is a combination of rhythm button mashing and dungeon crawling with a dash of zen. The basic game play model is that you maneuver your avatar through a surreal, almost tron-esque landscape with your left hand, while pattern matching with your right hand. You need to keep the beat and pattern match along to the trance/electronica beat in order to shoot lasers at the stampede of hostile abstract creatures.

Visually, the game is awe-inspiring. Playing through this game on a big screen with the sound up was a quick way to lose myself in a sensory experience that lasted for an hour or longer. The music is great, I left a few of the songs from the levels looping for a while because they were just that catchy.

The story of the game doesn’t change much, the environment and songs become far less forgiving, and there are some very fun boss battles.

Where does the game fall a little short?

I would say first off in the difficulty of the first two difficulty levels could use a little tweaking. The unlockable 72bpm mode is much harder and the shift in difficulty was a little annoying. It’s not impossible by any means, but I’m a fan of linear difficulty progression.
I also think that the more complex rhythm matching at times seems overly complex and annoying. Granted, you do not need to hit every note, and in fact are encouraged not to hit every note. However, at times it feels a little unresponsive and frustrating.
The landscapes and environment, while initially amazing and beautiful can become redundant and simple and will lose some of their visual punch, but I felt that only distracted from the experience slightly.

Do any of the minor faults in this student project detract from it’s overall class, quality or demand to be played? Not in the least. Give it a run if you can, it’s well worth your time.

Speaking of Rupture...

2008-02-07T17:09:00Z

Rupture is a company that runs a gaming aggregation site. I’ve been beta testing the service since it debuted, mostly because the mash-up of social software and video games makes me giddy.

The company was started by Shawn Fanning of Napster and SnoCap fame. Their first incarnation was simply a Worldof Warcraft social networking site. However, with the advent of the Armory their web 2.0 societal niche was co-opted! Never one to give up on an idea, they revamped the service, made it game agnostic and relaunched the site as less of a social network, and more of a front end for displaying all the gaming data event points in your online life.

Currently, the site is still in heavy beta, but they currently support:

Steam Accounts
World of Warcraft Characters
XBL Accounts
Halo3 Accounts

If anyone is interested in getting in on the beta, let me know. I have the hookup. I’m people who know people!

Rocking out.

2008-02-07T16:32:00Z

So, I’ve been avoiding games like Guitar Hero for a while, mostly because the concept looked annoying and unfun. ( See: Guitar Queer-O and Zero Puntuation: Guitar Hero III ) However, I love me some rhythm games… so I was up for trying them out.

I was out in San Fransisco last week doing the Socialtext Face-to-Face thing, and I got invited by a friend of Jenn’s to head to Sunnyvale and play some Rockband. Unfortunately, I already had plans and couldn’t go, so that was sad times.

However, I had plans to hang out with some folks in the city, and they were talking like us playing Rockband would be a requirement. So, I took some downtime to head up to the city from Palo Alto and hang out with the Rupture folks and play some Rockband, which is a bad-ass, social version of Guitar Hero.

I grabbed the bass, because if I ever had to learn an instrument it would be electric bass, and Pat got us going. I picked it up fairly quick (according to the people in the office, who are not really ones to kiss my ass) and had a lot of fun. In short order Pat conned me out of the guitar/bass and put me on drums. I picked those up pretty quick as well, and managed not to wipe us out even once, which is above par I guess? I don’t really know.

We went out to dinner and came back and played some more. All in all, I had a great time,which arguably probably had far more to do with the Rupture guys being awesome, and less about the awesomeness of Rockband.

I got home and decided that since Rockband for the Wii was only just announced, it will be a while before they release the game for a console that I don’t have to go buy. So, I picked up Guitar Hero III for the Wii, despite sound bugs. I’m having a lot of fun with it, and look forward spreading the fun around. Not that any people in town care. But still!

I’m not very good yet, but I beat it on easy 5 starring most of the songs. I’ve not been able to beat Blood Rain yet, because it’s insane. The Dragonforce song is insane in a fun way, but Blood Rain is hard in a makes-me-want-to-smash-the-controller kind of a way, which is far less ideal.

The UI of Rockband is FAR superior to that of GH3. I can’t count how many times I’ve fumbled a note glancing at the UI off to the side in GH3. Meh.

I got my camera finally.

2008-01-13T08:17:00Z

Today I went into Roberts intent on striking some sort of bargain for a D80. I’d gotten tired of waiting patiently for my dammed camera.

I’ve been waiting on D80 body, but they have been in short supply. Sounds like Nikon is hoarding them in order to repackage them with the new VR lens at some point in the future, or something. I talked with the owners and we struck a deal for D80 kit, and they bought the kit lens back for the difference between the kit price and the body only price, effectively selling me a body for the retail price. So, rock on Roberts++, I’m glad I was able to give them my business, even if it took forever.

I spent some time playing with the camera for a few hours today and upped some photos I took around the house. The weather was pretty overcast and boring, so there wasn’t much outside to test shoot. But the cats were good enough. After Jenn went to bed I figured out some more controls, and look forward to poking at things more tomorrow.

For some reason this is my favorite shot of the day:

New Years Best Intentions.

2008-01-10T03:38:00Z

The following are plans for this Year, I don’t know that any of them will actually succeed, but I always try.

Learning

Finish Rails Introductory Learning.
Create something useful, not work related in Rails.
Learn at least some Python
Learn how to deal with Managed Code better (svn,svk,etc)

School

+20 Credits by the end of the year.
4.00 average for the year.

Hobbies

Pick a DSLR camera and start taking pictures again.
Beat the games that I own that I have gotten near the end of and then stopped playing.

Personal Care

Bike once a week at minimum.
Lose some weight.
Start climbing again.
Start cooking again.

Other

Make it to Japan this year.
Make plans to travel to Ireland (and maybe other countries) in ‘09

Small changes.

2008-01-03T10:01:00Z

I’m in ur Mephisto, hackin ur pluginz

I spent several hours tonight correcting and fixing the way I was pulling a lot of data from various places like twitter, last.fm and flickr for my dynamic sidebar. A lot of the old stuff was lame javascript stuff and flash applets, and it was making the page load pretty craptastic.

I tracked down some simple plugins for twitter and last.fm that pull data from the rest apis and display it as simple text. And, I think they worked pretty good, with a little hacking. Since Mephisto is a rails app I was able to dive in and correct a few things, like the fact that the last.fm plugin caches for 24 hours, and I wanted it to display my recent tracks, as well as that the twitter plugin was way out of whack and needed some updates from when twitter phased out the relative_time from it’s API etc.

As a result of my work my page looks better (in my opinion) and the load time has dropped from ~10s to ~1s given a cache of the page. So that makes me happy.

Rails.

On the subject of rails learning, I’m moving right along. Things seem to be coming a little more naturally. I’m far from being able to realistically code something complex on my own, but little by little. I’m still working through Agile Rails Dev, albeit slower than I would have liked. I took a lot of Resting time over break.

Home work

We spent a few days tearing down Jenn’s bathroom so we could paint it quick the other day. Jenn did most of the work when it came to tearing down and painting, but I sure hand stuff to painters well!

During the tear down, we noticed that in lieu of electrical boxes (those metal boxes that you can mount switches and lights upon) they had just punched a hole in the wall and pulled an electrical line through the wall. Then they attached the fixture with some random screws into the wall (studs are for wusses), wired that shit up and called it a day.

So when we went to replace them with something that’s not ugly as sin, we were kind of SOL. as we have nothing to actually mount it to. My bathroom is even better, in Jenn’s the random hole is in the center of the wall, but in mine they punched a hole off center, and then cut a hole in the back of the fixture to jury rig that shit right up.

So painful. I’ll post pics later. We’re having a guy come give an estimate on some electrical boxes for mounting this weekend.

Camera.

So the saga of the camera continues.

I put in an order for my lenses (AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR and AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8D ) last month because when I went to buy them the first time they didn’t have any. So I put in the order and asked if I needed to worry about the camera, “Oh no, we always have D80s” was the response to that. So, I ordered my lenses and I moved on, not worrying about the camera itself.

However, last week I went in since one of the lenses had come in, and found that both had been in for a week+ which kind of annoyed me, but whatever. So, I ask for a D80 (body only) (I’m after a body only because the lens that comes with the camera ( AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED is not Vibration Reduction, and so is not really worth the $300+ it tacks onto the price of the camera, IMO. The lens I ordered is VR, but it doesn’t work w/o a camera! :P) and they don’t have one. Ok, that’s fine, when will you get one? Should be Saturday. Ok, fine, I can wait 3 days or so.

Saturday comes and goes, and no camera. I call today three times (so far) trying to get an answer from someone, with no luck. And, no call back, how rude (they did call back before now)! It’s beginning to get really frustrating. It should not be this hard to give business to local merchants! :(

Oh, yea. Mac Hall goodness.

2007-12-14T06:11:00Z

I totally forgot to mention that I rule and scored one of the 500 prints of the Machall Finale Strip that the guys signed. I’m going to get a real frame for it eventually, but I want to flatten it first.

Sweet.

I should finish framing and hanging my webcomic signed art. So far I have:

Penny Arcade Poster signed by Gabe and Tycho, with artwork done by Gabe.
Penny Arcade Poster signed by Gabe and Tycho.
Sketch of Piro done by Fred (MegaTokyo).
Real Life Comic Print signed by Greg.
PvP Print (91/100) Signed by Scott K.
Penny Arcade Laser Cell Art Dr. Raven Dark Tlon (96/750)
Mac Hall “Leather Working” Print
Mac Hall “Childish Things” Signed Print (491/500)

I Love Finals Week, and other stories.

2007-12-11T10:07:00Z

Lots of things going on, nothing of much substance, so I won’t pretend this is that interesting.

I have a few days left to finish my Neural Network for Intro AI. It is mostly done, aside from some obnoxious behavior in the learning, but I think I have tracked down the cause.
My AI Final Will start 12am Thursday and end at 7pm on Friday. Fun stuff.
I think that while mildly interesting when used in conjunction to game playing and puzzle solving; I generally find AI boring and tedious most of the time, and will not be pursuing it. Just my opinion.
This coming weekend Tim will be coming down for video games and other chicanery. I’m looking forward to a weekend of drunken relaxing and amusing gaming.
Joe finished his last paper today, and barring some insane twist, he should be a bona fide graduate now. What a sellout.
I will have my D80 in a week or two. It will be good times.
I dove in to Rails and Ruby hardcore for a few days, much to the detriment of my neural network’s progress, but that’s not important. I like Ruby/Rails so far and hope to continue my learning once this stupid week is done.

In more somber news, I’ll be staying here this Christmas season because Jenn’s oldest (13+ years) cat Cleo has an overactive thyroid. This means she has to undergo a procedure in Indy next week where she’ll be injected in Radio-Iodine, and isolated for about a week in Indy. Jenn’s taking it pretty hard, but we found out today that the cancer (overactive thyroid = cancer in cats I guess?) hasn’t spread at all, so the treatment should save her. If you have any interest in this stuff you can read about what’s going on at http://radiocat.com Needless to say we aren’t going to leave while the cats in recovery, but Jenn’s mother is planning on coming to visit, so that will be cool.

My holiday plans are pretty much completely up in the air right now, as I really haven’t had the mental energy to figure out where and how available I’ll be… but I’ll figure it out next week.