The specific examples brought up in Atwood’s latest post seem to lambaste the clueless user incapable of reading a simple set of instructions:

Our formatting rules aren’t complicated. You can get a lot done with a bunch of simple paragraphs. We use Markdown, which offers basic formatting conventions that ape ASCII conventions. On top of that, we offer a real-time preview of how your question will look once submitted, directly under the question entry area. But none of that seemed to work for this particular asker, who, apparently, was totally satisfied with obviously broken formatting — even though a few choice carriage returns would have worked wonders, and been immediately visible in the live preview. -Jeff Atwood

The problem with this is that it is followed by a diagram indicating a small set of instructions at the lower right of an input box. He highlights this instruction panel with many red arrows and asserts UI designers see the question page this way. The first issue with this is that English speaking UI designer should be well aware people read from top to bottom, left to right when reading text or scanning a document. The second issue is that when viewing content your eye tends to drift away from negative space towards the heaviest or most complicated elements, and in this case it is the toolbar above the edit pane and “How to Ask” box directly above the formatting rules. I would argue your average person would read the “How to Ask” heading before (and probably instead of) the “Formatting Reference” heading.

In fact, an interesting eye tracking study was done in which it was determined people scan pages in an F shaped pattern very quickly. This would quite precisely miss the red arrows completely and utterly. In this instance F is for the failure of the instruction placement Jeff clearly wishes people would read. Another issue is that even if I saw it, I probably wouldn’t read it. According to this resource by the same group, bullet lists would work better than the blob of instructions presented.

The toolbar type element is so typical that visually it may be noticed first by a novice computer user, but it will likely be skimmed over by an average or expert computer user (much as all pop ups are viewed and worried about by novice users “YOUR COMPUTER HAS BECOME INFECTED, CLICK HERE TO BUY OUR SOFTWARE.”) The toolbar will almost invariably be ignored until your typical user has a problem that needs solving. If they don’t believe they have a problem they won’t inspect it further, so issues like not pressing enter twice to make a new line wouldn’t even be considered toolbar-related issues.

There is an entirely different set of issues which has not been touched on here, however, and that is that people probably won’t read any of that stuff because they’ll see an input box and immediately “satisfice”. If they have a question that is immediately where they will begin typing information. People come to a website with a problem or looking for specific information and they set about the task in a goal-oriented manner ignoring almost everything else.

The goal might be to read a blog article, or it might be to find an image, or it may be to ask for advice on a technical website, or to read an answer. Some users will come to the same site with different goals and you will find that they scan the page very lightly until they find key words or phrases or input fields which match the type of result they are after, at this point the “good enough” mentality kicks in and they stop exploring alternatives or seeking new information until an unbearable problem crops up in which case they may begrudgingly look for more information or alternatively a different solution somewhere else.

Desktop application UI design is a bit different in that you aren’t directly competing with the entire world for a user’s attention at every step in the process. When you’re working with the web as your medium you have to accept all the user expectations that come bundled with that, the internet is a big place and your users are trained to not read everything from the get go. Your formatting rules box has no hope in hell of being immediately noticed no matter how many imaginary red arrows you draw around it.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the formatting rules weren’t so arbitrary. That extra information exists and is useful for people interested in it, but for somebody who doesn’t care if they can make some text bold I guarantee they will skip it. This knowledge of behavior is incredibly valuable information because if you know what your user is going to do you can stop bitching about all the arbitrary rules you’ve set up and actually focus on making the user experience better. Those formatting rules are getting in the way of the relatively simple task of asking a question, so the right approach shouldn’t be how to make the user read those rules, but rather, how to make the system understand the user. There are certainly more complex tasks which may require technical training of a user, but the common tasks a system has been built for should be immediately obvious.

One of the main points of contention Jeff outlines in his post surrounds this set of rules:

Formatting Reference:
indent code by 4 spaces
don’t want colorization? Use <pre>
to linebreak use 2 spaces at end
> blockquote
backtick escapes `like _this_`

If I press enter on my keyboard I expect a new line, this seems pretty basic. If I have to press enter twice, that is a hidden trick that breaks everything I know about pressing enter in a text box and it is making it more difficult for me to ask my question in a logical way. Let’s not even consider the fact that a space could indicate hitting the space bar, so the instructions are confusingly worded.

Block quotes really should be a parse-able discovery, it isn’t so hard to detect an entire paragraph or series of paragraphs which make up such a block quote.

The specific failure example involves an ordered list of elements, this should also be discernible through parsing. Use of numbers, an asterisk, a dash, or a plus to precede several lines in sequence is a strong indication that a list is being used. There isn’t a compelling reason to require contrived markup for such a list in a system where entering them may be common (I often use lists in describing a set of steps to resolve an issue).

I’ll be fair, though, it seems that he realizes the instructions would need to be moved to be read (even if earlier he states UI designers seem to want people to look where they just plain will not):

More and more, I’m thinking we need to put the formatting help — for new users only — directly in their line of sight. That is, pre-populate the question entry area with some example formatting that is typical of the average question. Nothing complicated. But at least then it’d be in the one — and apparently the only one — place myopic users are willing to look. Right in front of their freakin’ faces.

But even so, I feel a vital point is lost in attempting to contrive new and annoying ways of forcing your user base to read something they shouldn’t have to. This is assuming they would even read it if you put it right in the text box. Default text gets erased, so it may actually be more difficult for a struggling user to find.

It is well and fine to provide instructions and to provide buttons to click to automate the creation of these control structures, but it makes more sense to simply detect behaviors where it is simple to (like in text processing) and to account for these. Always provide a way to turn this off or to cancel it, but at least try to find the natural solution before falling back on contrived markup for commonly expressed problems. Even if we can’t make things as intuitive as we would prefer due to time constraints or technical limitations it pays to avoid blaming your loyal user base for being daft or oblivious.

I always try to “stay hungry”, and this means that I am always looking for something better. I won’t allow myself to starve by refusing to eat what’s in front of me, but I also don’t take the easy way out by being satisfied by what I have. Life is too short, if I were to allow myself to grow fat and placid in my comfort I would be deeply dissatisfied. There is something in me that looks for difficulty to overcome and reaches for it.

I wasn’t really happy with university for a number of reasons, one of those was that it seemed to promote the bare minimum effort. I remember spending over 100 hours researching and working on a network-enabled painting application (custom GUI, tablet support, network support, custom painting engine) and getting 2% higher than another group who put in 10 hours on a basic application built on existing tech which checked for updates to software (connected to an existing online database and checked the registry, very simple). Another reason (enabled by the first) was that many people subscribed to the “good enough” belief, which I believe is detrimental to learning and growth.

The return on investment for caring about learning in an institution which is meant to promote growth is too low for any other successful strategy than passive indifference. This is the sad truth of university as an undergrad.

Time constraints are an important consideration in any task, I am not advocating that you over-extend yourself or allow perfectionism to creep in. I am also not suggesting you avoid shortcuts which may save time and money. The issue I am trying to get at here is that there is a point at which people seem to turn off their brains and accept an end result without question. This is really the crux of the issue. Even if you cannot invest time in looking into something, at least be aware it could be done better and do a quick mental evaluation of time considerations. You may be able to save time by approaching things a different way. Tradition is a dangerous beast.

This same attitude of indifference towards progress also means you never look for better solutions. When you stop striving for more you stop growing. It doesn’t really matter what the work is for, if you are making someone else money and are not content with your employment you change that, don’t ever stop caring about what you do because that is suicide. Why bother living if 8 hours of every day may as well have been flushed down the toilet? Take pride in your work if for no other reason than you may become a stronger person for it.

Really you should be taking pride in everything you do. You don’t have to be satisfied with the end result, but do be satisfied with the work you put into it. I’m not there yet, I’m human and there are some days when it’s hard to really put yourself into anything. Some impossible goals are still worth striving for.

Don’t give up to indifference.

Three months is a long time to give anyone notice that you are leaving. That’s about the amount of time I figured it would take me to complete a large project I was in the middle of, and I wanted to be sure no other large projects were assigned to me immediately following this one. Being the architect of most of the in-house tools we use I figured it would be best to allow ample time to find a replacement or alternative strategies moving forward. I’m not sure giving a full three months notice was necessary, it may have simply added a false sense of security for the managers knowing the date was a ways off. Regardless, I’m hopeful and optimistic moving forward, and I’m glad to be leaving on excellent terms with my current employer.

So, at the start of this month I began assembling my portfolio and my resume and sent out several applications. I’ve had a few nibbles which may develop into work opportunities, but nothing is certain yet. I’m hoping to get a few more of my projects together in a presentable format over the next weekend so I that have more than two finished games on my portfolio. It’s still a work in progress, though I suppose it will be until the day I die.

I’m really looking forward to moving out of Regina. I’ve been mentally prepared to move for a while now, always thinking “I can’t really make too many permanent connections because this is only temporary.” I would advise against this mentality as it kind of puts you into an unhappy limbo where you stop yourself from forming or maintaining personal relationships. On the other hand, I really wanted to be free of any excuses to move on and I achieved that. The entire sleep apnea problem/horror story made this a lot easier because it essentially wiped my slate clear, I’m not really happy about that, but it’s in the past. I’ve also had an excellent opportunity to single-mindedly focus on becoming an instrument of my craft. I’ve read more programming books in the past year than in all of my university career. I’ve been writing code full time as well, which has provided an excellent opportunity to apply what I’ve been learning as I go along.

Though I feel stronger at my trade than I’ve ever been it is funny that the better you get at something, the smaller you feel. I am confident in my abilities; I am a strong programmer and am good at what I do. At the same time I feel humbled. This may sound like a paradox, how can you feel confident and humbled? It’s difficult to describe. I see the limits of my abilities and the vastness of potential knowledge. I also know that I don’t even fully grasp the situation, so I’m not even aware of the true depths of my ignorance. That is humbling. On the other hand, I know from experience that I am a capable problem solver and am better than average. Other developers at work consider me an expert.

It is strange that I was considered an expert by my peers in university, high-school, and grade-school. I look back and am amazed at just how little I knew then. I can’t be completely certain of my own skill even now, but at least by comparison I am improved. The new me is stronger, and tomorrow I’ll be stronger still. It’s thrilling. To look around and realize that there are others who are levels above me is equally thrilling.

Onward!

Code made to be thrown away may be written in almost any manner successfully (prototypes and import scripts for unique systems come to mind.) I am speaking of long-lasting or large systems as I describe my views below.

There are no appropriate times for quick patches at the expense of system integrity. Sometimes hard-coding a value is a legitimate solution to an immediate concern. When you find yourself hard-coding several values maybe it’s time to refactor. The worst thing you can do when traveling the wrong direction is to keep going. You’ve got to turn around. Quick and dirty fixes accumulate and build off of each other if they are not properly dealt with they usually cost more time to maintain than they ever saved.

“[A duct-tape programmer] is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff. He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner.” -Joel Spolsky

The duct-tape programmer may have a fine strategy for go-karts, but I would really prefer the second group build my formula 1 race car. If I’m in the middle of a race, sometimes duct tape is a good temporary solution for minor emergencies, but it is not what I want the entire chassis made out of. It should not be what holds the wheels on.

“When you are done, you might have a messy go-cart, but it’ll sure as hell fly.” -Joel Spolsky

I don’t believe expert developers make messy go-carts. I do believe there will always be some rough edges. There will always be something that could be a bit more flexible. Some things may not make it, and other things may not be polished. That said, the result of an expert’s work shouldn’t be messy. Elegance is what we strive for, acceptable is what we usually achieve. A mess is the mark of an amateur.

In the development process you may make a hundred little messes as you go, but I have found it faster to clean as I go than to simply let them build up. A writer will go over the last sentence and attempt to clean it up, then the last paragraph and so on. Gradually they increase the scope of consideration until it seems to fit well and they continue writing from that point. The process is iterative, but also incremental.

I believe good programmers must also do this incremental iterative editing. To fall back on the writing analogy, it would be a daunting task (possibly requiring a re-write) if you never re-worked the sub-sections and left all editing to be done upon completion of the work. In this way, even if you do not have time to complete a module to perfection (as is often the case), it should at least be beyond the state of a “mess”.

One of the primary theories of why the “un-sinkable” Titanic sank involved weak rivets and unskilled riveters. The combination of bad materials and poorly skilled rivet workers was certainly a concern, but at the end of the day they got it done. They made a marvelous looking ship that would appear to function in day to day use. This “get it done even if it is messy” attitude is the “virtue” being touted by Joel Spolsky.

“Many of the rivets studied by the scientists — recovered from the Titanic’s resting place two miles down in the North Atlantic by divers over two decades — were found to be riddled with high concentrations of slag. A glassy residue of smelting, slag can make rivets brittle and prone to fracture…

In their research, the scientists, who are metallurgists, found that good riveting took great skill. The iron had to be heated to a precise cherry red color and beaten by the right combination of hammer blows. Mediocre work could hide problems.” -New York Times

Other factors were at play with the Titanic. An out-dated rudder design would have made it more difficult to steer out of the way of dangerous obstacles. Clinging to simpler, older methods may not always be a good idea. A simple rudder design may have worked fine on a smaller ship, but as scale increases you cannot always simply take what you were doing and make it bigger. For this same reason C is not always the appropriate solution, object oriented languages such as C++ shouldn’t be ruled out simply because they can be misused to increase complexity.

It may be that 1,517 people died because of poor materials, inappropriate design considerations, and inexpert craftsmanship being used in the face of a deadline. Note the use of the word inexpert. The riveters were capable of working and getting the project done. The ship held together. Unfortunately this isn’t good enough when stressing a system over time.

With software development stresses are typically thought of as performance and user/data scaling related. I also consider the stresses applied to expanding existing systems and fitting in new ones during the development and maintenance process. Over time the ability to intelligently re-factor and avoid ending up with a mess becomes more important.

Can you afford to hire inexpert programmers to build the foundations of your business? Will your marketing guys call your product un-sinkable?

Let me be clear in explaining that I understand there is a bottom line. But even if it does not cause human casualties, the collapse of a large software project does have real repercussions. Careers are ended when software developers do not take their responsibilities seriously (or when they are told to ignore them by the people who pay them). Management is left to wonder why something which appeared to work fell apart at the seams.

The facade the user interface presents can be very convincing. A solid user interface usually means the users believe the entire system is solid. People attach their expectations to what they can observe readily, but as experts we need to see more and be proactive in maintaining quality throughout the project right to its core.

“Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

The argument I often hear in defense of the “bottom line” is that “customers don’t care how it is made as long as it works.” This is true, but there are hidden dangers to poor construction which may result from the single-minded desire to deliver. If good development practices are not observed on important systems the technical issues will overcome any possible short-term time savings. Good software development should not involve sacrificing features for architecture, or sacrificing architecture for features. A balance can exist without resorting to wild extremes in either direction.

The fact that customers don’t care how a product is built is not a valid excuse for poor craftsmanship. A chair which appears to work properly, but falls apart after a year of use reflects poorly on the craftsman.

It is not enough to deliver a product that works well. People who argue that it is good enough are short-sighted. We must deliver products that can grow well to match future requirements. We must ensure we are careful in building solutions which do not contain rotten cores lest they collapse in on themselves. Getting performance anxiety and over-thinking problems may be a problem for people more interested in architecture than solutions, but you can be a thoughtful and productive developer, the two are not mutually exclusive!

Solid development goes hand in hand with a reliable product. You want your business to rely on reliable products. If it does not, you may find yourself wondering why you’re clutching at wreckage.

Duct-tape may be excellent, but I just don’t trust it well enough to hold all my rivets in place.

When someone utters the phrase ASAP they are suggesting it is urgent, but not that you should drop other urgent matters to do it. The problem with this is that it is tough to prioritize several minor emergencies without any further context. ASAP might end up being three days from now if you’ve got other urgent tasks that require attention as well, but someone who suggests that you get to something ASAP rarely means you should tackle it in three days. They may be upset when they inform you on the second day that they have a meeting in an hour and need that work done now.

The problem with an ASAP task is compounded by the fact that the type of person who requests them rarely bestows just one. How do you prioritize two tasks that need to be done as soon as possible? How do you prioritize three? The task list becomes muddy and impossible to complete satisfactorily and is really indicative of bad management more than anything else, but that doesn’t make it less stressful.

Ideally the phrase would be abolished and managers would never utter it in a professional environment, but inevitably you will be tasked with an ASAP project. When this happens, don’t just nod and grumble. Try to determine the real time frame required (if there is one). It is surprising how often a task gets over-emphasized for no tangible reason; the only thing this accomplishes is added stress. Invite them to help you prioritize the task correctly in sequence within your to do list if it isn’t immediately obvious how the task should fit into your personal schedule.

Using a shared task list and project management tool like basecamp can be extremely valuable in eliminating the stressful free fall of an environment where every task “must be done as soon as possible.”

I recently worked on a work project with another developer who implements top down. I’ve worked on large projects with many people before, but I was working pretty low-level in the guts of game code and my stuff had to interface with existing material. In school I worked on multi-person projects, but nearly always ended up carrying the bulk of the code on my shoulders and directing development efforts in my own way. This is in contrast to developing a system from scratch with another developer in a roughly 50/50 situation.

I was shocked when I encountered a form in which only half of the fields actually did anything. Of course I’ve done pen and paper or Photoshop mock-ups of interfaces before building them, but it is rare that I will lay an interface down before making sure I’ve got all the things it is supposed to be interfacing with done (or at least done to a testable state so that the interface can interact with my code). Or, if I do, I’ll incrementally add on to the interface as I go.

I don’t trust myself and so I always work in such a way that an incomplete portion of the system is blatantly obvious, especially when there is danger of something being missed as in a half-working interface with no indication as to which half is working. This top-down approach to implementation struck me like a whip and put me on edge. I found myself wondering how much of what I was looking at worked and how much of it was simply frosting over an abyss. It made me uneasy. The same would be true if I were looking at a class structure and found that the dependencies of that class did not exist.

I feel much safer building a system by top-down analysis (to avoid interfaces not matching up) and bottom up programming because you’ve got a pretty good idea of how things fit together and you stay grounded with working sub-systems. I can’t really envision how working the other way around could build a reliable system, it seems like you would be stuck patching up holes hidden by the facade you initially created and hoping you got them all before the deadline.

Any thoughts?

I was thinking as I rode about the differences between myself and my siblings. Both of them are very extroverted people which is a stark contrast to my more introverted personality. I am certainly comfortable in social situations, but I do not seek them, and I entertain myself with a number of seclusive hobbies which I have developed intently over the years. My brother frequently attends and hosts parties and seems to have plans every day with people, the few days this is not the case he’ll be online playing games with voice chat. My sister is similar. Both have near perfect eyesight.

We actively avoid stress as a way of managing our sanity. It seems natural that if the very act of looking out your window is a strain on your brain trying to make sense of the blurry menagerie of colours that you will avoid doing that consciously or not. You will more likely read a book, draw, or try to work out something which you can set in front of you and deal with. You are less likely to deal with fast moving objects in team sports, or to enjoy socializing with large groups of blurry loud figures.

It becomes easier to be an introvert when there is only a meter of space in front of you which is crystal clear and the rest of the world descends into a blurry haze beyond you.

If this sounds stark and frightening, it isn’t meant to be. I love my life. I love who I am and my abilities and passions. I do believe that the few developmental years I spent before I got glasses shaped me in some fundamental ways, but I think that will serve me better than it could have possibly hurt. I do not know if I would have spent as much time drawing or reading or programming and learning to enjoy myself. It might be that it wouldn’t have made a difference. In any case, you cannot live on what might have been. I only know who I am right now.

If you want to think of something stark and frightening consider the farsighted person who can only see at a distance what they can never hold and examine closely. They can’t even see the details of their own hands. Frustration at anything closer than your arm span would certainly reward looking and casting outward for stimulation. The closer it is, the harder to grasp, what kind of futility would that be to deal with on a daily basis?

Me? I’m just glad we invented glasses, I think I’ll be wearing mine next time I go for a bike ride.

Pandora’s Jar is actually a patchwork of technology used to
rip “Timeshift” music from the US available only Pandora music player based on the music genome project. Pandora itself is a very interesting service in that it dissects songs in far more detail than simple genre and goes on to describe all of the musical qualities of each individual song. Users then log into the service and indicate what songs they know they like (and dislike) and Pandora checks all of those qualities against every other song in its database and begins playing more similar music by different bands that you may also enjoy based on your selection. The service is fairly intuitive and works very well for introducing obscure, but very good new bands to your music library.

The installation process for the all-mighty jar if you are not a US citizen (even if you are) is daunting at best, but I’ve got it up and running and I wanted to outline the general steps required in one place for anyone else trying to get it going.

1) Download and install firefox version 2.0.0.9. You can have it run alongside 3.0 so just make sure you install it in a DIFFERENT directory. Let’s do “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox2\”
2) In windows go to start->run and paste this in there and make sure firefox is closed before you click ok: “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox2\firefox.exe” -profilemanager
3) Create a new profile call it firefox2
4) Open firefox with that profile selected. Now all changes we make will affect only this profile and we can re-open firefox 3 with your old profile without any problems.
5) Get the FoxyProxy Extension for firefox 2.
6) Get the GreaseMonkey Extension
7) Get the Flash Switcher Extension (you will need to open that .xpi file with firefox 2)
8) Install pandorajar.user.js into GreaseMonkey
9) Use Flash Switcher to swap for version 8.0 of flash
10) Download TOR (just get the Windows stable release)
11) Install TOR, de-select the torbutton, but install all other components.
12) Open the torrc file (in your start menu if you installed with default options it will be start->programs->Vidalia Bundle->Tor->torrc or you can just browse to the file) and add this to the end of it to ensure only US hosts (note, feel free to add your own if you know of any exit nodes that are US, you can see them in the TOR viewer if you look for them):
StrictExitNodes 1
ExitNodes nixnix,moria1,moria2,inap1,torxmission,augrime,err,sasquatch,
foundry,peertechdata,whistlersmother,BostonUCompSci,lefkada,agrippator,
moria5,bettyboop,MrRelay,A1D7DB57EFA57ACA20,Butterfly,myrnaloy,
jalopy,cjb,torftw,ArikaYumemiya,redpin,eapple,stugsDOTcom,MasterMindZ,
random,AscendedDaniel,Trusno1,mushin,Unnamed,Insytez,pickaproxy,
illuminata,anduin,NOYB,vwglobaltoadcom,codemonkeysorg,
hyperfocusedTOR,WeAreAHedge
13) Open up Tools->FoxyProxy->options within firefox and hit “Add New Proxy”
14) Set the proxy name to Tor in the General Tab
15) In Proxy Details select Manual Proxy Configuration, set host name to localhost and port to 9050, check SOCKS proxy and choose v5
16) In the Patterns tab add these patterns:
Pattern Name: Pandora1 URL pattern: *pandora.com/ Whitelist Wildcards
Pattern Name: Pandora2 URL pattern: http://www.pandora.com/radio/xmlrpc* Whitelist Wildcards
Pattern Name: Pandora3 URL pattern: *pandora.com/?cmd=mini Whitelist Wildcards
17) hit ok and set the Mode to Use proxies based on their pre-defined patterns and properties
18) Download and extract Pandora’s Jar if that link does not work get the latest version from the hak5 forums
19) Ensure you have the latest version of java
20) Within your pandora’s jar folder create an mp3 folder if one does not already exist (this is the default folder for mp3’s to be saved in but it is not included in the zip so will need to be created.)
21) Run Vidalia (TOR)
22) Run pandora.bat and if your browser does not open up in firefox 2.0.0.9 then open firefox up and navigate to http://localhost:8085/ after the java applet is running (note sometimes it won’t work because your java applet hasn’t started yet so just refresh the browser in that case. Other times tor might be routed wrong through Sweden or France or something in which case you should choose Use a New Identity within TOR or restart it if you are not viewing it within the vidalia interface)
23) Within the Pandora’s Jar web interface set songs before reload to something like 40 so that it only reloads as much as it has to (there is a chance on every reload that the flash won’t load through the proxy right). Set cruise control to on and cddb lookup to off (it won’t work through a proxy because the slow download misnames the files, I’ll go into that step next.)
24) Remember way at the beginning we set up that profile for our firefox2 pandora changes? Well, we don’t want firefox 2 as our default browser, so let us create a firefox 2 link that we can simply open up and use with that profile. Right click within your Pandora’s Jar folder and choose New->Shortcut
25) Enter this as the shortcut address “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox2\firefox.exe” -P firefox2 -no-remote
26) Now in windows open Start->Run and enter “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -profilemanager
27) Select your default profile and open firefox, this should open up firefox 3 with your old settings.
28) Wherever you have a firefox shortcut OTHER than within the pandora’s jar folder change the path from “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox2\” to “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\” and voila, we’re in buisness.

Great, so with only 29 steps we’ve got Pandora’s Jar up and running. Oh, and this is assuming you already have an account with pandora, if you do not, go to pandora.com and sign up…

But we are not done yet because chances are if you’re running through a proxy then Pandora’s Jar won’t be downloading the files with the right names. The way it works on my computer is that the first song file is a garbage file completely empty, the second file contains the first song, but is named as the second song. The third file contains the second song but is named as the third song and so on.

So at any given moment it is playing a song that it thinks it has just saved, but it has really saved the song previous to the one you are listening to. This kind of sucks because it forces you to rename each song individually after it is downloaded, however we can get around this with the next steps:

29) Download the Pandora Renamer application I wrote
30) Download ID3 TagIT
31) Once you’ve finished downloading a batch of songs to your pandora’s jar mp3 folder and have closed firefox move the Pandora Renamer to that folder and run the program.
32) Run ID3 TagIT and navigate to the folder you just ran Pandora Renamer in.
33) Select all the mp3s and then choose ‘ID3-Functions’ and then ‘Tag Ver. 2 -> filename’
34) For the format field enter ‘<A> - <T>’ and ensure you have Rebuild filename from original filename checked.
35) Hit ok and then all your files are properly named, then hit save changes.
36) Move your songs elsewhere and delete them from the Pandora’s Jar mp3 folder.

And grats, we’re done!

As you can see, just a couple super simple steps and you too can rip music from Pandora!

Only 10 seperate downloads:
FoxyProxy
GreaseMonkey
FlashSwitcher
FireFox
TOR
Java
ID3 TagIT
GreaseMonkey Pandora Script
Pandora’s Jar
Pandora Renamer

(3 of those listed above being completely seperate app/script packages for pandora’s jar specifically including one I had to write personally) and precise rolled-back version numbers for several of those apps as well as very specific configuration for most of them and we are set!

Simple as pie. If this was helpful to you and worked send a couple bucks my way. I think that this could definitly save someone a few hours of effort and I want to go grab a slurpee and I have no change on me.

This comes as a bit of a relief because things have been looking bad for a long time now, it’s been over a year since I last posted anything and there is a good reason for that. Even when I was still posting I was sinking into a depressive and difficult state and those were some of my last documented attempts to reach out to the world until now. Right now I am tired, but I’m hopeful for the first time in months. I feel ready to start talking to friends I’ve neglected for the past year or two, though the withdrawing process has been a long and gradual one. Some people may not even notice the change except upon reflection of earlier years, it’s been so steady and so gradual that I nearly had myself convinced that I have always been a tired and hopeless disappointment.

Potential is a cruel word.

Dates are all completely fuzzy for me as I’ve been in a daze (and still am despite my excitement) but I’ll spin you my tale and hope that others read this and understand how easy it is to lose so much to such a simple problem. It started in the middle high school when I switched from Johnson to Campbell at the beginning of grade 11. It was 2002 or 2001 I’m 22 now in 2008 and so this has been creeping for my entire adulthood up until now. I remember going to bed later and having troubles waking up. I remember I had always been 15 minutes early for school (hard to believe, but it’s true) until around this time when I slowly started to slip… Soon it was 10 minutes, then 5 minutes early, then running in just on time, then a few minutes late and a couple times missing the first class entirely. When I did make it to English, my first class of the morning one of the semesters (time is fuzzy) I remember sleeping with my head perched on my two arms while sitting straight up. I remember resting my eyes because of lack of sleep and missing entire portions of the class. I remember not having time in the mornings to eat proper breakfasts because I was sleeping in too late.

Those problems were to look mild in later years, but grade 12 continued a slow decent and I ended up graduating from high school with a 66.7% average (or something very near, I know it was just over a percent higher than the 65% minimum required to get into the University Faculty of Science.) This is a heavy contrast to the 80-85% average grade 9 and 10 at Johnson. At the time it was easily attributed to switching my high school mid-way, which probably accounted for some of it… But even back then sleep was beginning to be an issue. I know that my father had to wake me up some days by literally filling a glass with water and throwing it on me. I acquired an automatic reflex of sitting up quickly when I heard the doorknob opening after the first few times, though I would still be really out of it and half asleep. Eventually he caught on that when he left I just laid down again and resumed sleep (which he thought was consciously done though it was not as I have no recollection of having done this unless I was actually kept awake long enough to clue into my surroundings.) This caused me to automatically sit up quickly to a zesty morning splash of water in my face. Refreshing.

I have never been a punctual person. I’m a thorough and calculating individual and I used to get things done, but sometimes a day late or so. My marks would reflect this, but I still managed 70% - 80% averages even with 10-20% deductions for late hand-ins. I was never great at math and I was never a 95% average student, though some individual classes of interest I did do this well in (grade 10 science I had a 97% and I am certain of this.) But even though I’ve always procrastinated a bit and been a little too easy going the issue of sleep began to crop up and was easily disguised by that long-standing and difficult, but not life-threatening issue.

After grade 12 I immediately entered the faculty of science and the faculty of art for a double major at the University of Regina in Computer Science and Visual Art. University life treated me kindly at first and I only really flagged due to laziness and adjustment time at the beginning. Class schedules were fairly lax and allowed for a more flexible sleeping schedule.

After my first semester I had decent but not stellar marks and my parents were unhappy with my 68 average from the five course load I took (I was working 30 hour workweeks at the time as well and so I believe I had myself over-extended anyway), I was as well, and endeavored to do better, as a result they told me I had to pay for university myself next semester and so I had to drop out of most of my classes for funding reasons and only took cs 170 and another class (two classes total) which allowed me to get an 85% or so in my cs course and do decently in the other class I did take. I then worked two full-time jobs simultaneously during the summer break (sometimes logging 20 hours a day for several consecutive days giving myself only 4 hour breaks between jobs.) After that summer my parents helped pay a bit more for university and along with my own cash I managed to fund a four course load (which was more manageable) and I did a little better than before with the only really bad mark being Math. Next semester I took four more courses and decided to take a break from Math to flunk Statistics instead. By this point my ability to concentrate was notably waning, even the liberal sleep schedule wasn’t really helping me and I often felt absolutely tired during the day. Sometimes I would skip a class to stay in the CS lounge and work on personal projects which required less focus which is a primary reason for my statistics issues… That and the professor actually literally put me to sleep a few times, though he put people without sleeping issues to sleep as well. His monotone voice did -not- help things Garry Larsen, if you are reading this, you’re a smart dude, but even if I were at my most alert it is very difficult to find you interesting enough to focus on. It is an impossible task with a sleeping disorder (which was probably mild at this point, though noticeable.)

The next summer I took my Math 110 and passed it (woot.)

The next year I began noticeably struggling in my courses. I always did decently in my CS courses, but even those became more difficult as time went on with exceptions being project courses in which I would often dedicate too many hours while getting way too few marks for the ambitiousness and scope and completeness of the projects. I got many of my 300 level courses out of the way this year and just scraped a 65 average or so. This is where years start to get blurry.

I believe it was this next summer that I arranged my work-term with the Visual Resource Center of the UofR. The work term started well and ended decently, though I had started coming into work later more frequently as a result of troubles waking up. I began to require multiple alarm clocks and noticed my ability to turn off the alarms without being aware of the situation. I was still pretty optimistic most of the time, but had begun to fall into a bit of a funk because I realized I’d begun to alienate myself from my friends. I believe this was the end of 2005 that depression began to set in as a result of not getting out of the house nearly at all and doing very little with friends. Despite beginning to fail a bit I was still charismatic and hard-working while I was on task. I also had gathered quite a bit of knowledge through sheer force of will and enjoyment of my craft (programming) and networking has always come easy to me even at my worst. As a result I managed to secure a position with Electronic Arts and left my funk behind for a bit as excitement caught me up and I went to work at the largest electronic publisher in the industry for their Black Box team. This is also, coincidentally when I started my blog… You can see from my tone back then that I wasn’t deeply troubled and kept myself incredibly busy, but sleep was an issue.

I started work with a bang, impressed my master (sort of had an apprentice thing going on with one of the busiest and most important programmers in the company) and really just kept rolling out the awesome. I kicked it into high-gear all over the deepest of the deep absolutely lowest level memory management game code and popped up some nice highest of the high-end share point website custom applications etc. After a while living in Vancouver, towards the last month and a half of my term I really started crashing, having difficulty waking myself up to go to a job I loved, having difficulty concentrating on working at new tasks etc. 30 days of rain did not help. I still did alright the days I went, and I managed to keep myself under the radar mostly I think. I realized I was having some serious problems about this time but I was worried and afraid because I was kinda supposed to be living my dream and I was actually so drained I could not rise to the occasion.

This is something I have never ever admitted to because it caused me a deep and upsetting shame (it still does even to this day). I did not even attend the last two weeks of my coop term. Some of you may ask how the fuck that even happens. I loved my job, I loved the people I worked for and with and I loved the environment and everything. But I could not drag myself out of bed and even slept entire days away at times. This is most definitely when my depression started on… I kept in good relations with everyone I worked with, but my position was so ambiguous that nobody knew who was managing me. Typically I work very, very well unmanaged and it would not have even been an issue.

At the start of my term there were two weeks where I had no manager, no goals, no projects. I worked my ass off every day reading for hours about ea coding standards, multi-threaded programming (papers released by the company), familiarizing myself with the code-base and CVS system and compiling the project (which is a feat on a multi-million line application.) I even took on a goofy task to change the colour of all the cars to red when it was given by a fellow programmer (Shane I believe his name was.)

I went on lunches with the other programmers and asked every two days if there was someone I should be talking to or something specific to do before I was eventually handed over to an advanced programmer (Martin) who gave me my first tasks dealing with the in-house Playstation 2 development station/compiler which I completed without direction.

Things were going well and I was asked to work on the Sharepoint site (a web-based management tool) which I was less than thrilled working with. Producers and other managers arranged me to work on it because of past experience and my ability to interact with other people well. I designed and re-designed that site a few times with conflicting directions from various managers and I was acting as the sole admin for the site. I did my job well, but this distracted from my programming duties and Martin understood that I was working with that.

After a few layoffs during one of the months I was left without any clear manager and with no other contacts to deal with for the sharepoint site, I had been having notable issues getting to work by 11:00 even (which is late-ish to come in, but flex time allowed for it) and I felt constantly fatigued. I was given a task by Martin to make a memory reporting application which I did, though a tool called Game Talk did not appear to work exactly right to implement it and so I ended up needing to use the older “bFunk” networking engine we had (which I was supposed to have replaced by the end of my coop term, but did not because of difficulties with getting clear instructions on use from the dude who made Game Talk and because it just didn’t seem to send messages from game to tool like bFunk did. I’m sure it could have worked, but there aren’t exactly docs for these types of things sometimes and in this case, the few examples there were did not contain relevant info so I was forced to dig and dither for a month or so which was disheartening when combined with the sharepoint duties being confused and with my sleep issues.) I put a lot of work into the project and ended up with a tool that worked but didn’t have a great interface and so I was unhappy with it and I wasn’t sure how to go about getting more info about what I needed to work on because the fellow was fairly busy and unapproachable and didn’t seem to understand or have the time to understand what I needed to do.

Anyway, long story short, I was kind of in limbo with a project that I was supposed to be working on (and was working on) but with a lack of focus because of a constant numbing fatigue, I’d spend a couple hours zoned out at times reading code before realizing I wasn’t even really taking it in right. This is a HUGE difference from the beginning when I was cranking out compatible code on a weekly basis with complex functionality and using existing functions of very complex systems to seamlessly integrate my work. Between being in sharepoint limbo and on a difficult project with no easily accessable information (or if it was, an inability to actually concentrate enough to grok it) and constantly sleeping in too much I slid out of my coop term as silently as possible hoping only to leave my best first impression with those who I had worked with. I spoke with Jeff, the fellow who had interviewed me at the end and he said he regretted letting management take me onto the sharepoint project which I agreed with. He didn’t have the whole story, but it’s clear that he understood that I wasn’t exactly happy and he knew I wasn’t doing nearly as well at the end as I started and knew I got lost in the cracks though he blamed management and not me which is at least partially right. I was essentially in a work environment where I reported to nobody and so no huge alarms sounded when I was afk for the last bit. My parents called EA wondering where I was, which stressed me out incredibly because I was trying not to draw attention to my issues and I’m certain that would have at least tipped them off (really I should have told them about my sleeping issues, but it’s really hard to do that when you’re in a coop position trying to impress. I was doing my best to fix the problem but it just wasn’t working.)

From the perspective of sleeping for days at a time without being missed, Martin was actually on holidays for basically the last two months of my term, the website stuff would have accounted for a lot of my lack of coordinating with him anyway, and the site had so many revolving door managers that I was the most reliable one working on it anyway. I’m sure people wondered and questioned where I was at times, but nobody directly working with me was actually around or checking in or even watching closely and so it was easy for a kid with deepening depression and sleep issues to slip through the cracks. It would have been more healthy if I had worked with a team on something most certainly towards the end, the solitary work environment was a contributing factor to my depression. It was interesting because I was singled out to work on solitary tasks and trusted to do so (and I did my best not to break that trust, though events conspired against me I suppose and I was too ashamed to say anything about my worsening situation.)

Even still, I genuinely believe that I gave my best and even with a sloppy finish I am convinced EA got their salary’s worth out of the code I did produce. Despite feeling upset about my attendance issues towards the end, they got a lot of good work out of me even if you do not give any understanding towards a sleep disorder and deepening depression.

Moving back to Regina was hard on me, I left behind someone I cared for, a job that I cared about (though it was causing me stress near the end due to sleep issues and feeling like I was lost in the cracks.) University classes are kind of blurry, I don’t have a good recollection of what I was doing, but I know I was working on a website which I was working slowly on and it ended up getting me sued (though I wasn’t being paid and the entire situation was rediculous as it was stressful. Definitely not something that I should have been sued over considering the circumstances, but also something that had I been awake I could have had done much faster anyway.) This added to my depression and really set me in a deep dark place where I was always tired, always sleeping and when I was awake I was feeling terrible about myself. To add insult to injury I was having very, very severe issues waking up on time and was constantly called lazy by my parents which I ended up internalizing. To be fair, they were not inaccurate and they couldn’t have known better really, but it still hurt and added to my unhappiness. It got to the point where I was afraid to come home and would stay in the CS lounge all day. I would avoid classes sometimes by driving to a parking lot and sleeping in my car because I was so rediculously tired. I would sleep in the CS lounge sometimes too if nobody else was around and I could get away with it. I would sometimes hide in my room afraid to draw attention to myself because I was hoping my parents would leave the house and forget about me so I could sleep. I didn’t want to feel the terrible guilt about shorting myself, my parents and everyone who depended on me and so it became difficult to talk to friends, difficult to tell the truth about my marks or my activities…

I was so deeply ashamed of how “lazy” I had become. I had failed so many people and I just wanted to withdraw from the world because I knew I couldn’t do anything. This is not a dramatization, I could -not- do anything. If it involved being awake and concentrating for extended periods it was right out the window, just not possible. It got to the point where I couldn’t do anything I even liked doing because I was too tired. I could play games for a couple hours before needing a nap, and sometimes would force myself to stay up even when tired if it was something I could do that was engaging, but simple (such as building a warcraft 3 map which is about as tough as working on javascript webpages, but was also fun enough and gathered a following so it made me feel worthwhile.)

I managed to care for a puppy because it slept odd hours like me anyway (when it was little at least) and so i could feed it milk and such when nobody else had the energy to. It made little difference to me when I was awake or not because regardless of how much sleep I got I was always tired. I slept sometimes very little and sometimes 15 hour unbroken stretches and I always felt just as tired. Why I felt like this was a mystery, I didn’t know what was wrong and assumed other people had to deal with the same feelings and issues I had and that they were just better at it and were stronger, better people because of it. I saw myself as weak and useless and lazy because other people could stay awake all day and clean their rooms and go to work and school and go out with friends. It had been a few years since I had truly felt awake and I forgot the feeling. I didn’t and still do not know what it feels like to be awake. I sit here at 1:00 AM feeling a bit more tired than usual, but usual tiredness is unbearable and so this is only a little more than unbearable.

I do not remember time or events very well for the past year. Since near the end of my coop term at Vancouver my memory crackles like the static of a half-tuned television.

I saw Dr. Stephen Bester, my family doctor at about this time and I mentioned that I felt very unhappy and had a lack of energy and did not enjoy doing things I used to. I told him that I felt half awake and half alive, but that I thought it was just because I hadn’t really gotten out of the house and done anything for a while. I didn’t really think of my tiredness at this point as the primary issue… It may have caused my unhappiness, but when you feel so genuinely worthless and you can’t reason out any way to convince yourself otherwise that becomes a primary concern. He thought so too and decided to try me out on Effexor which I believe was a good diagnosis to get things rolling. He did the best with the information he had.

I remember walking to school and seeing everything vibrantly for the first time in my adult life. It faded after the first week and I still do not know if it was the placebo effect or not, I began to worry that was all it was and that I was going crazy as the Effexor made me slowly stop caring about life. I was now able to lay in bed and not care about life as much. This was a bit of an improvement, but I was still always tired, still being untruthful about school and jobs and such because even though I was being treated I felt I should be doing better and I wasn’t. I didn’t know much about depression at this point and so I assumed I was on the best thing and that I was just failing. This was made no better by my mother telling me in frustration at one point after finding me in one of my many lies that “all the medication in the world won’t fix you!” That was and still is one of the most painful things I’ve ever heard and it really destroyed me for a while. I don’t blame her for saying it, I’d be easily as frustrated and was actually telling myself much worse daily anyway as I talked myself deeper. I would build upon my unhappiness by dwelling on it and expand upon any little criticism with 10 of my own.

One of the most terrible things about depression, chemically caused or otherwise is that you begin to become unhappy that you are so unhappy. You begin to fear that you will never feel better. Hearing those words really hammered me on such a level that I can’t get it across in any way. I know I cannot relate to the feeling of a father losing his only son. It is with this example that I hope you understand that you cannot possibly understand many of my own feelings. This is a deadly type of sorrow, impossible to relate to personally unless you have experienced real clinical depression with no definable source and no perceived cure.

I have had seriously suicidal thoughts in my life twice now and I believe I will never again experience them. Suicide is not a crime of passion. It is a crime of conviction and hopeless acceptance of unbearable events outside of your own abilities. For me, I felt that I would never feel alive again and I knew that I was letting down everyone who knew me, I accepted that I had failed on such fundamental levels to even care for myself and that the best thing for everyone around me would be to end my life rather than continue to drag down everyone I ever loved. This feeling was based on faulty assumptions, but that made it no less real. Things can change, but at the time and for a long time after it did not seem that they would or could and so for a long while I felt that even though I was not suicidal my thought processes that brought me to that point weren’t exactly crazy or unreasonable, just desperate.

I was hesitantly, but willingly institutionalized on the advice of my psychiatrist referred by my family doctor and ended up spending almost 3 months in the mental ward.

I know that I was there for a long period of time, but I seriously have only bits of memory from the place. I was so dead tired most of the time and I was also very unhappy, very unsettled, and had mood altering drugs (which I completely believe added to my troubles initially when I started on Effexor, but did help at the later stages of my decent into depression.)

One of the most cruel things about being in a mental ward with good insight and knowledge about the problem you are diagnosed with is that you are able to rationally and wholly plot out your decent into madness on such a level that you truly feel crazy while also feeling like an impostor. I could describe and theorize on my reasons for feeling shitty and my reasons for having panic attacks and freaking out on epic levels, I could map out my feelings fairly well, I could even joke about my issues but I could not, for all of the effort I had in me, snap out of it. That was one of the most frustrating things about being mentally ill… I was most definitely depressed, but I do not believe that it was due to a chemical imbalance anymore.

I have since stopped taking all anxiety and depression medications and I feel perfectly fine now that I have another diagnosis for my sleeping issues, which were eventually determined to be a factor. I know that they helped me out when I was at my lowest, I had a serious case of the blues. Effexor probably just put me into the hole a bit faster, but I would have ended up there anyway. I’m all for mood altering medications when they are required and I do not regret my compliance in taking anything. I also now believe in the monster “Depression” because it is a real and almost tangible thing. It can devour you whole and leave you in such a downward spiral that it destroys your life. My particular case has another root, but depression can most definitely be brought on by completely chemical changes and so I know that it is just as real for some people who do not have another root cause. I have seen it. That might not sound like much, but I thought it was something you could will yourself out of or reason yourself out of and it is not. In my case, reasoning myself out of depression was actually just causing more depression because from every angle of view I was physically and mentally unable to do things that I used to love for no apparent reason to such a degree that everything seemed hopeless. I couldn’t pin it on any accident or injury and I had nothing that I knew of that I could work towards and that left me without hope especially after medications only seemed to help mildly.

I always knew I had troubles with waking up, but I never knew the reason. My parents were the only ones who knew the true extent of this and the zeal with which we all described that particular aspect must have made it sound contrived. I mean, being able to turn off 3 alarms and sleep without recollection of doing it sounds completely over the top and exaggerated, but not one word of it was. I believe that might have been why my sleeping issues were not truly taken seriously until my psychiatrist poked me hard with a pencil, shook me and called my name without response or even memory of the event. To this day I still do not remember him doing it, but after a lot of concentrating I do recall a light poking on my back, but I had felt like it was in a dream until he told me about it and I reflected and I do not remember my name being called.

I have been routinely called lazy by my parents for years for failure to wake up on prompting and alarms and only being half-believed that when I turned off my alarms and went back to bed I would have no recollection upon waking up later. The incredulity of completely sub-conscious reactions of complex nature due to complete tiredness has always been a factor and it was no different with doctors. Even when my parents were describing my issues with sleep I do not believe they even completely believed that I was not aware of having woken up several times. I know sometimes I would be aware of waking up, setting my alarm clock ahead 5 minutes and sleeping again, but many times I actually lacked any remembrance of the first 30 seconds to 2 minutes of being up. Despite this, I was prescribed a wakeful drug called Modafanil which helped vaguely, though I still managed to sleep entire days and nights away while on 100 mg (the max dosage) of this medication (which is replacing amphetamines for use in long hour army missions up to 80 hours in length and which is unable to keep me awake for 5 hours sometimes.)

After a while they got sick of me in the mental ward and I was discharged with a referral to a sleep clinic where I went with a completed sleep log dictating 10-15 hour straight sleep periods with frequent daytime naps wherever I was not working and had the chance (this is including my parents consistently waking me up and forcing me out of bed for the day.) I constantly felt sleep deprived and had troubles staying awake for even a few hours at a time especially when I first got home.

Getting regular hours while being forced awake during the day helped me keep those hours a bit better, but it was more a tolerance for pain than a regular schedule. I would feel absolutely brain dead, like a wet blanket was over my brain at all times except for maybe the first hour or two after waking and even then I could fall back asleep nearly immediately when I had the chance.

The advice I and my parents were given was to avoid naps during the day and try to get 12 hours of sleep a night, I was told that this was possibly my actual nightly requirement for sleep despite the fact that I frequently reminded the doctor that I could easily sleep a 12 hour night and wake un-rested. At this point many of you are clue-ing in to the fact that I do indeed have a sleep quality issue and that no amount of sleeping seems to help. you would be right, but it took a lot of work to set up an appointment and no amount of convincing was able to actually get me taken 100% seriously about my sleeping issues, I was written off as depressed with an anxiety disorder, though I must admit it looked very much like these issues I can’t seriously fault my psychiatrist for the diagnosis because that’s exactly what I had, though there was a deeper reason for it that had nothing to do with traumatic events or injury or regularly out of whack chemicals. I do, however wonder how the first sleep specialist managed to mitigate all the symptoms and issues I was referring to and assume it was a schedule issue above any possible sleep quality issue (which he vaguely mentioned as a possibility.)

Anyway, we were put on the 1.5 year Regina, Saskatchewan sleep clinic wait list.

As my mom said, if we had to wait that long myself and both my parents would have been living in the mental ward because I was seriously driving them crazy. They all over my ass at every moment of every day about not sleeping and staying awake during the day… It felt like I was being subject to sleep deprivation torture. We decided to hit up a private clinic though it would cost 1000$ out of pocket (which my parents graciously paid for) and we had to travel to Calgary. I may have unfairly painted my parents as nagging and cruel, that was not my intention, but this is written from my point of view and at times even though they were doing their best and have always supported me it has been very hard on them. They are really great and I would probably not be alive today if not for their tenacity and willingness to do anything they believed they could do to help me.

Here I am in Calgary finally with the proof I need to show that I have been getting nearly no effective sleep for about two years. I have severe sleep apnea and just in the quick overview of the test results that I observed I saw common occurrences of 15 seconds of breathing steadily followed by 45 second periods of an inability to intake new air followed by the same several times in a row. During a 2 minute period many times a night I would only breathe for 30 seconds holding my breath the other 1 minute 30 seconds. This is not an exaggeration. Each time this occurs oxygen levels drop sometimes significantly and my brainwaves would spike, legs would quiver slightly as I gasped for oxygen and completely disrupted my sleep each occurrence. This would happen sometimes several times a minute for shorter breath holding (of 15 seconds or so) and the episodes would be very frequent sometimes with breathing disruption several times in a row after only 5 to 15 seconds of regular breathing. At times I would be fine for about 10 minutes or so, but then I would drop back into irregular breathing and oxygen deprivation cycles.

That alone is bad, it means that I very rarely get more than 10-20 minutes of sleep at a time before it gets disrupted severely and consistently for a stretch of minutes. When you combine this with being forced to stay awake during the day without naps as per instruction originally and during quite a bit of my stay at the mental ward (with people forcing you to get up and remain awake) it makes for a situation almost identical to traditional sleep torture where a prisoner would be forced to remain awake for long hours only to be allowed to sleep for a couple minutes before being woken and interrogated. Even when I was not being awakened by a person or kept awake by someone, my own body would continually keep my brain in a wakeful state, slapping it if it ever got comfortable.

In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep… Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.

-Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister from 1977-83

This describes the last two years of my life accurately.

I then proceeded to wait in lines for a combined 8 hours to purchase a Wii. I’ve played it a bit so far and can honestly say it is a really cool system. Wii sports will really get you moving, but Zelda you can play laying down which is nice, it shows the range of game play. I don’t think I’d like having to be standing and swinging my sword vigorously for 60 hours or however long Zelda: Twilight Princess takes to beat. But on the other hand, you can really get into it with bowling where you pretty much have to stand as if you’re really bowling to play. I also just ordered my replacement straps from Nintendo (they had a recall because straps would break sending the remote sailing through your TV.) Let me suggest if you also have a Wii that you get your straps replaced.

I’ve been holding off on playing it too much because of exams, but those are almost over. I also handed in my art printing class prints, I finished 4 new original prints in the past two days, though two of those were “mono prints” which take less time. It was a lot of work. I’ll scan them and put them up after I get them back on Monday (I think I get them back then.)

I’m excited, Eragon is out in theaters and I would love to see it. The books have their problems, but an awesome movie with a dragon as a main character in main-stream media is rare. I’ll probably be going tonight to see it, but if not, it will be soon.

And one last snippet of news from my life, I’m headed to Abbotsford near Vancouver to see Kess. I’m excited, it’s been a long time since we’ve last seen each other. I leave on the 26th of December and get back on the 6th of January. I’ll miss my brother’s birthday by a couple days so will have to remember to call, but hopefully there will be cake left when I get back.

I invite anyone interested to play a Missile Commander type game I created called DarkSkyFire. It is amusing, hopefully you enjoy it. The purpose was to finish it quickly, it took a total of 24 hours to polish and completely finish. Jeff Cliff might be porting it to Linux. Press space or enter to bring up a buy menu and to pause the game.

Unfortunately I can’t claim to have won any placings in the games. At S-Lan I won Quake 3 and my team won CS:Source, I also got second in a few things. Baselan, no such thing. Our CS team got 4th out of 9. In Quake 3 I got third, and unfortunately they ran a few tournaments I wanted to play during those two. Good fun anyway, got to hang out with my clan… While I didn’t win any tournaments, I did win the massive doorprize. In a draw with 1/230 odds of winning I came out on top and got myself a new laptop… I’ll sell it of course, but I was damn happy. They got a video of me winning it and I was freakin’ out happy. Very cool feeling.

Couple this with my winning a $400 processor at an R-Dot and I’m doing fairly well for these lans. The R-Dot draw was 1/90 or so. This is my 4th lan, I’ve been to 2 R-Dots (Regina), 1 S-Lan (Saskatoon) and 1 Baselan (Winnipeg) so 2/4 major prizes isn’t terrible.

I have intensely weird luck both positive and negative.

I mentioned a slight lag, it might be a little jostling at first, but you get used to it and it is very minor. Obviously a full-blown Cintique would be a better choice if I had the cash, but unfortunately it isn’t built into a laptop last I checked… It also costs over twice as much as this entire laptop cost me though it’s a much larger screen I don’t know if that’s a feature when you’re taking it everywhere with you. The 14.1″ screen on this laptop is sufficient. The drawing surface is as wide as my 9″x12″ Intuous and is a couple inches shorter so it’s good for drawing space. I’ll probably end up using this as my primary digital painting computer, and might use my Intuous for some stuff, it’s hard to say. There’s something much more immediate and “real” about seeing your lines under your pen as you draw, it feels more like pushing ink onto paper than manipulating an image from afar and I really like that. I really wish they had some more artist-geared solutions with 512 levels of sensitivity even if it didn’t have tilt… I have a feeling Wacom is doing this (gearing down the power to 256 levels and no tilt) so it doesn’t compete with their professional graphics solution the Cintique. This makes sense, but sucks in the meanwhile… I heard that it’s possible the restriction is in software and that the hardware is capable of more, but I don’t know much about it.

Anyway, I’m glad the laptop got here, it took about two weeks and was shipped some place in New Hampshire and then back to New York where it originated before being sent out again, this time to the proper location. It was a long wait, I am pretty used to having a laptop so in the past week I’ve been drawing more than I have in a while… That combined with my printmaking course has kept me productive in that regard though I do miss having a laptop to fiddle with electronic stuffs at any time I choose.

Karma claimed my desktop computer’s hard drive yesterday… Luckily I had a secondary hard drive and was able to back everything of importance up to that. My main hard drive is throwing cyclical redundancy errors as I painfully pull my music out of it’s dying and tightening grip… Hopefully I get all or most of it before it croaks for good. This strange series of electronic failure has me in the interesting position of having two completely blank installations of windows with which to build a development environment in my image. PHP, MySQL, Visual Studio, Visual Assist X, Project Line Counter, Tortis CVS, PHP Designer, Nero, Avast!, AdAware, Smart FTP, Putty, Photoshop CS, Firefox, Limewire, iTunes, Xfire, Trillian, Gtalk, and Counterstrike Source all require installation… I’m sure I forgot quite a bit and will discover those things as I go to do something and find I need another program.

And my iPod is indeed on it’s last few spins. The hard drive clicks and opening/closing it seemed to help except that now I can’t bump it even a little bit or it skips.

Some recent art stuffs:
Raptor Smiles
Derv Print

I have some more as well, but it’s not stuff I’d share with everyone. I’ve got a print of that first image which awaits a scan and some love, but I await Photoshop. The second one is a finished print scanned in all its glory.

The laptop I have ordered is a Toshiba R25 tablet pc (convertable.) I’m looking forward to it though it only has 256 levels of pressure sensitivity, the ability to draw on the screen will rock for digital painting.

My mic still doesn’t work and I still don’t know why. Probably lack of contact, but I don’t know how I’ll fix it without damaging something and since my headphones still work I am not going to dismantal them…

I feel impotent without my laptop in the meanwhile.

This has been a terrible day for electronics. First, my 2 year old laptop’s monitor started flickering less than a week ago due to a flaky connection… Which made me uncomfortable, but I figured it wasn’t a big deal, if it disconnected I’d figure out how to re-connect it. But today the laptop ran out of batteries and shut down while it was plugged in. I unplugged it and plugged it back in because I figured maybe the connection wasn’t making good contact for some reason, and when I turn on my laptop again it starts getting warnings in the bottom left: “USB socket detected an excess of power” which kept popping up. At this point I’m thinking “oh, shit” and so I restart hoping it isn’t actually a serious issue but dreading that it may be. I power it up again and the network device stops working, same USB error and the computer is trudging along very slowly… I restart one last time hoping it’s all just a bad dream that my computer will wake up from… Network works, computer loads quickly, everything looks fine and I get a message from a cs:s buddy so I know that it’s all good… But a moment later my computer hangs completely.

The screen is frozen and the computer fan stops.

I power up again… Fan spins a moment, leds come to life, power surges through it’s electronic guts, a barely audible whine as the screen flickers black and… The fan stops, the screen stays black, near silence but the leds are still on including the power indicator. It refuses to boot even hours later after cooling down. With the warranty already being void (due to it being a one year warranty and me owning the laptop for two years) I decide to open it up and take a look… The process takes about 45 minutes to unscrew everything so I can get any kind of look at the thing… No apparent physical damage, but then I’d need a big smoking crater in the motherboard to notice anyway… I was mostly hoping I could get at the monitor cord, but it was the hardest part to disassemble and I couldn’t see any way of doing so without completely destroying the machine beyond hope of even salvaging pieces.

So my laptop died. I guess I’ll take it in stride, these things happen, sure it sucks that it’s only 2 years old and I spent 1500 on it, but it’s paid off, and I don’t have cash for another one, but I can wait if I have to… It just really sucks.
So I’m without a laptop and my class is in an hour, I turn on my iPod and turn on the tunes. My headset literally breaks in half. Luckily none of the cords appear damaged, it’s just the physical headset which has broken… I have literally done nothing but place it on my head, but it’s designed in such a way that metallic arms place pressure on small plastic portions, and so one of the sides with the plastic broke off due to regular use. At least it still plays… But then my iPod starts skipping and then stops playing tracks for a moment. I turn it off and pray it will work later.

I still haven’t turned it on again, but I’m going to charge it fully and try it on a lucky day, this just isn’t a good time having experienced laptop failure. But for all I know, my laptop and U2 Edition iPod are both dead. So I’m carrying a decommissioned iPod plugged into two halves of a set of 130 dollar headphones and lugging around a completely dead laptop which is now missing several screws.

I get home, tape up my headphones so they are in one piece now, and I log in to play some counterstrike source to take my mind off the three different pieces of damaged equipment and as lady luck would have it, my headset’s microphone is broken.

Awesome.

This is just today, not to mention in the past month or so my desktop’s power supply literally blew up. It smelled of burnt plastic and everything. Also, my digital camera which was slowly on the way out (coming with us on several backpacking trips) gave it’s last breath a few months ago.

My parents, however, are incredibly supportive. My dad recently upgraded his laptop and gave my younger brother his two year old laptop (it was bought at the same time mine was) and we are using the fact that I never got a free laptop as an excuse to help me out with getting one now. As an added bonus I’m planning on a pressure sensitive tablet pc which will allow me to draw directly on the screen with pressure sensitivity and everything… So I’m stoked about that. Any suggestions for a good tablet pc with good pressure sensitivity and good tilt support would be welcome… I’m looking at under $2200 Canadian.

It was like being in a hellish limbo of pain as I had to keep walking to get out of the wilderness. Tylenol and Advil helped significantly and when their effects wore off I felt it. On the last day I took 8 Tylenol and 8 Advil and since those are the daily limits I decided not to take more for the final two kilometers or so of the trip which was all, inconveniently, downhill. I remember crying as I hobbled down the mountain, but I was determined to finish and get out of there. Every step reminded me of why I had to take the next to get off the mountain. We got to the car in the dark and drove down to the other trailhead (we parked four kilometers away from the start of the trip because our circuit didn’t take us right back to the same trailhead) where we stayed the night. I couldn’t walk down to the stream to get water for food and so I lay in the tent hungry and in pain hoping I could sleep away the hours before we left so that we could drive up to a food place and I wouldn’t have to walk to it. I tried to imagine that the lake wouldn’t have good water anyway because there were too many horses nearby and they probably pooped in it, but that was only to keep me from moving my leg.

That night was terrible; I woke up with severe knee pains several times and then couldn’t sleep for an hour before the sun came up. I got out of the tent and sat outside until Drew and Aidan woke up. When we started driving back the rough road jostled my knee painfully at each rock in the road, even stretched out along the back seat I couldn’t find a very comfortable position for it and when the car shuddered for the first 20 kilometers of our drive, it shook at my knee and gave me this constant pain. I remember telling Drew that I had better things to do with my time than fake an injury when he asked how my knee could hurt when I wasn’t walking on it, but to be fair he and Aidan were both concerned during the hike. I would have rather been drawing. I brought a sketch book and opened it some days, but I think I’ve learned that hiking is better remembered for inspiration than used as inspiration during the trip.

Despite how painful moving from one place to another was during the hike, it was a beautiful place. I really enjoyed seeing the top of each pass and I liked our campgrounds, each one was different and more remote from the previous ones. The only other person we saw during the trip once we began along the path was a trailblazer hired by the parks to cut logs. He had luckily done some along the path we were planning on, but he warned that there was a rough path until we got to the area he did. We counted 64 logs along the path before running across the section he had just done. Aidan and I both appreciated the number immediately.

It was a good hike other than the injury though, and I am glad I went on it with Drew and Aidan. I don’t spend nearly enough time with my friends lately and it was great to see them both again. These hikes are important to me for that reason specifically. Aidan lives in Kingston which is a good distance from me and Drew, but I plan on living in Vancouver which is on the opposite side of the country. I hope that we can continue to get together once a year at least. It’s hard when two of your best friends become remote and that’s the main reason why these trips are important to me. I really hope, for that reason alone, that I can continue to go on these trips, but I honestly doubt my ability to continue as I worry about the health of my knees. I don’t want to have problems walking up the stairs in 10 years. Oh, check out their photos and their thoughs on our journey as well: (Drew | Aidan)

This leads me to what exactly is wrong with them. My dad checked it out at first and he gave me a rather accurate description of what was wrong, mentioning fluid buildup and telling me that my ligaments were intact and that nothing was broken. His suggestion was a tensor bandage and ice. I went to our family doctor and he told me a very similar tale. He mentioned that there may have been a softening of the cartilage under my kneecap and that there was fluid buildup, but that my tendons were intact and there didn’t seem to be a break. He put pressure above my kneecaps and told me to gently tighten my quads (but to be careful because it might hurt.) Indeed, a grating noise sounded from my left kneecap and my right kneecap hurt a little. He suggested it was from repetitive strain from carrying a heavy pack for too long on rough terrain.

I was prescribed something called Diclofenac which has some serious warnings in it’s warning section: “take with food”, “don’t lie down for 30 minutes”, “in some rare cases may cause (rarely fatal) bleeding from the stomach or intestines”, “may result in serious (possible fatal) heart attacks and strokes.” It’s used for arthritis pain, cancer patients, and joint injuries involving swelling. It’s like a much, much stronger version of Advil with way more side effects.

Anyway, hopefully my knee won’t hurt anymore in a few weeks and then hopefully beyond that my joint recovers from this injury over the next few months to the point where it will not easily relapse.

Otherwise, I’m ready to head back to work on web pages and other things before school starts again on the 5th. Pirates of the Caribbean tonight with my brother, I’m excited I’ve wanted to see this for a while.

Stay frosty.

I have just completed what can only be described as a month and a half long “crunch time” working on the late and great “Dragon Canvas.” It is meant to be a networkable drawing/collaboration tool. So far it has drawing functionality and only 3 known bugs. I shudder in a cold sweat at night, tossing and turning under my covers as I imagine how many unknown bugs lay waiting. It does not, however have network functionality. This doesn’t imply I didn’t work on network functionality, however. Yes, on the last day before the project was due (and on my second all-nighter in a row with only 3 hours of sleep during the span) I deliriously coded… Something. I have been avoiding it in the week or so since the project was initially shown to class.

The project group we had consisted of myself, Jeff Cliff, Nathan Anderson and Jeff Seliske. Of those, Jeff Cliff is the only other one who submitted a meaningful quantity of effort throughout the project’s duration (other than myself of course). Nathan Anderson did his best right near the end and submitted a number of very important bug fixes in G2tM, he also did contribute a bit steadily throughout the project. Jeff Seliske is what I call “a lazy sack of useless shit.” Where Nathan admitted he hadn’t been doing much throughout the project and where Nathan attempted to help out quite a bit near the end, Jeff Seliske pretended to be working hard the whole time. What his portion of the code was supposed to do was to provide cross-platform tablet support for our project. Besides being windows proprietary his code (all 140 lines of it) did no more than direct, un-checked calls to another library called bbTablet which itself was a wrapper for win32. Keep in mind he had a month and a half to do this. That’s less than 4 lines of code a day, and the stuff that he did submit was not complicated. I admit that if he had done what we asked of him, it could be described as difficult… But it was much less complicated than what I was dealing with, and less undefined than what Jeff Cliff was working with. So what did I do? I had to re-write every line of code he had sent us. I added on to it, made it work better, made it simpler to implement. It ended up at 250 lines of code… How long did it take me to finish this? One hour. One hour from telling him that his work was sub-par to making it work properly in our program. I’ll let that fact speak for itself, the implications are there.

The terribly ironic thing in all of this is, I think he may end up with a better mark than me in the class as a whole. He did marginally better in assignments (getting an extra couple percent in some of them) and did a bit better in the midterm. All the while sponging off the work me and Jeff Cliff did on the project. I told the professor about Jeff Seliske, but he basically admitted that groups were going to be marked the same anyway. I wasn’t telling the prof for reasons of knocking the marks down… I really don’t care about marks, ironic as the situation is. What I was complaining about was for the sake of recognition and proper credit for work done. It gets under my skin when Jeff Seliske speaks about the tablet code as if it was some hard feat. He wouldn’t know, he didn’t do it, and to claim that it was a particular way for him to go about integrating it into the project completely undermines the work I have done integrating and making sure it worked with all the other things I had made. I’m not doing poorly in this class, but the fact that I can work my ass off on this project while he sits back and puts in marginally more effort on assignments and studying for tests while totally neglecting his duties to our project and I’m the only one who loses anything out of the deal is ridiculous.

At least I know he’s not a good programmer and that while I have lots in my portfolio, he’ll only have this (and it’s practically a lie for him to even associate his name with it.) That fact alone is all that really matters when we both have our degrees and go into the job market looking for work. Well, between that and myself having worked on two AAA commercial titles at least I think that I have the advantage. The fact that he’s something like 26 right now and entered university in 1998 speaks volumes about his ability. If I sound angry, it’s not really that. It’s more like finding out you have a fat tick that’s been feeding off of you for a number of days… Only imagine that it’s a month and a half and imagine that instead of killing it, you accidentally drop it and it lands and gets lost in some tall grass and gets away free and clear.

After printing off all the code for our project (it was a total of 138 pages… It’s all sitting in a 2.5 inch 3 ring binder) here is the rundown:
Jeff Seliske: 0 pages
Nathan Anderson: 4 pages
Jeff Cliff: 14 pages
Michael Hamilton: 120 pages

Keep in mind each page is 66 lines of code (this counts line breaks for really long lines that had to be wrapped. Also, some are shorter at the end of the files as a page might not be totally full, but most are that long.) Even 14 pages is a significant chunk of work. Jeff Seliske probably wrote a total of 2 pages of code, but what he wrote was unfit for any use and had to be re-done and fixed as there were real bugs that could be encountered by using his code as was.

What we ended up with is a good start to what will ultimately be a longer project for me. It sounds like I’ll be doing it alone as Jeff Cliff views it as a failed project. I personally got every section I was slated to do done and so that probably accounts for the differing perspectives. He recognizes it’s a great accomplishment but doesn’t believe we succeeded in what we were aiming for. Personally I didn’t actually expect any help at all from the group and so as a result, the fact that I got my section done and other sections that were not part of my workload complete means that I succeeded personally where our group may have faltered. I would accept Jeff Cliff’s help on the future of this project, I would also accept Nathan’s help though I wouldn’t expect him to do much and he isn’t interested in helping out anyway. I would not accept Jeff Seliske’s “help” the last thing I need is for him to sponge off profits this project might generate as well as the marks he has already gotten.

I hope to develop this for another year or so before releasing anything, but I might submit screenshots when I fix the current bugs and get networking going. This project has been a huge amount of work, but I’m happy with it so far. I think it has great potential.

In other news, we have a trip to Redlodge, Montana coming up. Drew, Aidan, and I are going on a week-long backpacking trip in the mountains. This is the death march I alluded to in the title of this post. I imagine it will be no less than intense, possibly fatal. Hence the unofficial name of the trip.

Also, I just purchased and finished Terry Goodkind’s latest addendum to his series “the Sword of Truth”, the book was called Phantom and I enjoyed it. I got it Friday evening and finished it yesterday at night… I guess that would be three days.

-Me and Nathan just did the 10 second count-down and blocked J2 (Jeff Seliske) together. Somewhere, in a distant place, an angel has grown wings and fairies rejoice.

First, let me address the spam bots of the world, I have a “mark all as spam” button and your comments won’t get onto my site no matter how many hundreds of thousands you send.

Next, let me address friends and loved ones. Your comments are always appreciated, I am notified of every message via Google and will not accidentally destroy yours. That said, the only reason I don’t have a spam protection system is because I value your time and would hate for you to have to take even one more step in order to leave a comment. I want it to be painless for you, I don’t mind deleting hundreds of spambot messages if that’ll save you five seconds of your day when you spend the time to leave me a message.

Next let me give you an update on the situation with Jaco and Squareflo. It’s a go. The partnership didn’t pan out quite as expected and I find myself still happily making sites with them (going so far as a partnership for the current site we are working at). The Textbook Xchange is currently alive and well. It allows you to exchange (or xchange which is like an edgier, hipper version of the previously mentioned activity. Yes, I understand using the word hip negates itself.) So they’re happy about that. And new projects are being worked on, I’ll talk about them when they are finished.

Jumping into the realm of computer science, my group project for CS 372 is also going well. We currently have multiple layers of a drawing canvas set up in what is internally called a “ClusterStack”; though of course, that name isn’t really relevant anyway as once the code gets compiled everything turns into assembly, and then binary anyway so the internal class name doesn’t really make it into the program. If you don’t know what project I refer to, let me just say that it will hopefully become and Open Canvas replacement. I’m excited about and am working very hard on this project so hopefully it is at least a convincing prototype by the end of class. So far the project’s compiling code is entirely mine and sits at 5000 lines. Group members are currently helping out, I’m helping with the networking now quite a bit to make sure it gets done and implemented. I’ve always kept my distance from networking stuff, so I’m glad to dabble in it. It’s the one major area of programming that I haven’t really even looked at before today. I’ve dabbled in graphics, sound, databases, and general code but this is a first for me as far as real networking goes.

I alluded to speaking about books at the beginning of my online journal post. Let me first say that if your entire reason for reading this post is to read about the latest books I’ve been reading, you are going to be painfully disappointed by this particular entry. Let me refer you to the previous two posts of my online journal which deal entirely (and coincidentally) with this topic. I posted those many days ago, but haven’t read any books lately so it’s still current. If, however, you are here to read about my relationship with and my view on books you might be in for a pleasant surprise… Unless you are the type of person who dislikes those who disagree with their world perspective and you also have a different opinion than I do. In that case you’re probably going to dislike a lot of things about a lot of people and I don’t really value you anyway so you may think what you like.

I’ve enjoyed books for most of my life. I remember being genuinely excited in grade school when the book fair came around. Lots of kids loved the funky erasers or the posters or the garishly coloured folders, but I always focused on the books. Back then I liked reading goosebumps. In fact, I read and owned the first 52 in the series. Technically they are probably still mine; however I believe my brother or sister has them in their closet. I relinquished goosebumps after I had outgrown it, but I still enjoyed the fast pace and the really neat situations which were written about. It was imaginative and I enjoyed most of them thoroughly. In fact, “Ghost Next Door” had a very similar plotline to M. Night Shyamalan’s hit movie “6th Sense” which I find amusing on some level I can’t really define.

Over the years my tastes have shifted from “horror” to pure fantasy. I love dragons and wizards and alternate worlds. Like many fantasy readers I enjoy and am up to date with the wheel of time and the sword of truth series. Lately I’ve been enjoying deeper fantasy than your typical “wizards and warriors” story provides. Subtle urban fantasy, or grunge fantasy like Charles De Lint and China Miéville provide is what really gets to me lately. It’s hard to describe De Lint’s writing style, but if it were a texture, I would liken it to rough bark against clay. Miéville reminds me of rusty metallic pipes against low-grade, rock-filled concrete.

I typically go through cycles of reading, art, and programming. Sometimes I spend time writing things, though I really haven’t focused on it as much as I would if I had an unlimited amount of time. Of course, if I had an unlimited amount of time, I would focus on everything much more than I would if I had a finite amount of time so the statement is a silly and obvious one to make, but it’s there anyway. I enjoy books, certainly, but not to the point of exclusion from other things. You can only wrap yourself so deeply in fantasy before you realize that you’ve got other things you should be doing… But it’s addictive anyway. I don’t understand how some people can read so much and produce so little.

Reading is great for inspiration. A good book is like fuel for my creative battery. I read, store, and feed off the creative elements and continue on my next cycle to churn out processed ideas filtered through my own imagination. Typically this manifests itself as art, a programming concept, or as writing in the rare occasion. It may sound like a cliché approach to creation, and it is.

Everything is derivative.

12. Dragon Champion - EE knight | 371 pages
13. The Fall of Reach(Halo) - Eric Nylund | 352 pages

these books total pages: 723
Total pages with my other books: 6704

Dragon Champion was a neat book, I liked it quite a bit, but then I like dragons quite a bit too. It’s spoken from the point of view of a dragon and follows its life from being a hatchling on the egg shelf to growing up into a full fledged dragon falling in love. It’s really cool.

Fall of Reach, while not a great book is readable. I enjoyed it anyway, it gave me an insight into the Halo universe.

Here is a list of the 11 books I’ve read during the period of time from when I left for Vancouver until today.

1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling | 607 pages
2. Eldest - Christopher Paolini | 668 pages
3. Winter’s Heart - Robert Jordan | 656 pages
4. Furies of Calderon - Jim Butcher | 502 pages
5. The Fifth Sorceress - Robert Newcomb | 668 pages
6. King Rat - China Mieville | 318 pages
7. Chainfire - Terry Goodkind | 748 pages
8. Forests of the Heart - Charles de Lint | 397 pages
9. Year’s Best Fantasy 3 - Edited by: David G. Hartwell | 492 pages
10. The Barbed Rose - Gail Dayton | 436 pages
11. The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown | 489 pages

That’s a total of 5981 pages in about 3/4 of a year.

My 5 favourites from best to least best:
1. King Rat - China Mieville
2. Forests of the Heart - Charles de Lint
3. Winter’s heart - Robert Jordan
4. Chainfire - Terry Goodkind
5. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling

I would like to suggest nobody read The Fifth Sorceress. It is bad. It insults the reader’s intelligence at every opportunity and is generally a pain to read, I only finished it because I don’t like having unread books in my collection. I got it for christmas so at least I didn’t spend money on it. I would say Furies of Calderon is a weak book too, but it held my interest, I just wouldn’t re-read it or buy the sequels.

Eldest is a very derivative work, but it’s also entertaining. It’s childish, but I still enjoy it for it’s subject and ideas.

I enjoyed The Barbed Rose just as I enjoyed The Compass Rose. They are both fantasy books with strong romance undertones and while I don’t read romance normally I do enjoy this series.]

Charles de Lint is a very classy writer, his skill at writing is amazing. Probably the best author I have read lately.

China Meivelle is edgy and reminds me of Charles de Lint in the quality of his work, but he definitly has a different feel.

I’d reccomend both of those authors if you are looking for something to read.

Why, thank you.

This year has been a big year for me. I’m turning 21 and That’s a change for me. I can’t say exactly what it is that separates 21 from 20, it just feels much older. I guess I have done a lot of maturing this year though, so I suppose that makes sense.

I got my first job in the industry this past year (temporary coop position, but still important), so that was a huge step for me. I didn’t expect it so soon, and certainly not with EA. I wanted it surely, I applied for a coop at EA (along with other places) only a few months before I got the job and my original application wasn’t responded to. And so I accepted the job I was offered with my university for my first coop term (well, I had my choice between National Defense Candada and my local University’s Visual Resource Center. I picked my university because it meant I could stay close to family and friends and the pay was the same.)

Looking back, I’m glad I got a chance to work my first coop job before being accepted at EA. Thanks again DJ, it wouldn’t be possible at this point in my life without your help. Once I was there though, i was on my own and I performed. You got me that opportunity though, so thanks again, I only hope I can repay you someday, or maybe just help another young ambitious person get in. I’m not in the position yet, but I think that’s what I’ll do if I can.

Ever since I was 11 I wanted to be a game programmer. I studied and read all the books I could on programming and I got my dad to promise to play every game I ever made. That was a big deal to me. My dad likes computers and I’ve always admired him, so I suppose it’s to be expected that I would also like them. But neither my brother nor my sister have that relationship and so I treasure it. It’s important to me because he and I both have an understanding that my siblings will never share. A little selfish, maybe, but that’s life.

So I got my first big break into the gaming industry and seeing my name in the credits of Need for Speed: Most Wanted is just amazing. Truly, to see my name listed among so many talented and intelligent individuals envokes a difficult feeling to classify. I’m humbled, I’ve met so many amazing game developers this past year and it really puts things in perspective. I have so much to learn in the two years left in university (and indeed, the many years left during my lifetime) but I am optimistic. I miss my friends in Vancouver at EA and in other places. I miss the rain, I miss the mountains and the ocean. I miss the girl I met there.

But I’m also happy to have moved back to Regina in a sense as well. I have other friends and my family near me again. I feel sort of drawn between two places, it’s hard to live at either place now because of what I’m missing when I leave. But I’m so happy that my life is on track. I hope I can keep the momentum, I want to. I’ll fight to.

Yes, this past year has been good to me, I’ll do my best to make sure this year is not the height of success, but rather just another stepping stone on the path I plan on continuing down.

Jaco actually mentioned my blog today. I don’t think I’ve spoken about Jaco before, but he’s a great guy and I’m not just saying this because he might read this someday. I met Jaco because I had a job at the VRC at the U of R. So it’s funny how things work together like that. If I had gotten to EA when I wanted to, I doubt I’d have met him.

Let me back up a bit. Jaco was walking by my desk at the VRC one day and noticed code all over the screen and a website under development. It was my first serious work in PHP and he expressed interest in some backend work for a site. I didn’t get my hopes up for more work because I didn’t really know him at the time, but Jaco is an excellent graphic and webpage designer and he is quite busy running his own printing/design buisness as well as various webpage aspirations. I’d find this out soon enough.

So he took me out of the basement of the VRC and… well… he didn’t have an office at that point, so we worked apart or in his house sometimes. But now he has an office so I work there sometimes. We’ve collaborated to make two websites so far with more on the way hopefully. He’s in the process of starting up a new webpage design company as a partnership with another fellow who has hired another programmer without consulting Jaco. I have no plans set in stone, but I’ve been offered informally another coop with EA when I’m done my university and I would like to take that up. I can’t fault them for picking someone more “permenant” but on the other hand I’d have loved to be a part of the company if only for two years, it shows such potential. Maybe I’ll just invest in it as it starts if that’s possible. It’s too early to decide things like that, so I’ll have to wait and see.

Whatever happens with future jobs either coming or not coming is not a big deal to me. It is important, but not monumental. Jaco has helped me establish a solid and complete two webpages with professional designs and purposes. In a way he has been helpful in the webpage buisness much as DJ Randal has helped me get a foot in the door with EA.

So I’m not sure what the future holds for the website jobs, I hope I get the chance to keep working with Jaco. I am confident in my skills, and while I understand possible motivations to finding another programmer at the possibility of me leaving in two years, I can’t help but think that it’s their loss picking someone else over me. I’m a little dissapointed, but only because the expectation of at least one more feature webpage project was almost tangible.

Now that is not a sure thing and I can’t help but feel a tinge of loss. As a sub-contractor it’s relatively no-strings-attached as far as work goes. One job does not ensure a second, and so I wouldn’t be crushed if things don’t pan out. I’d probably strike off and gather some of my own work. I’ve already recieved two possible jobs, but then, I think they were forwarded to Jaco which would be a shame if I never got the chance to work on the projects. Such is the peril of working alone, but I prefer more risk as long as it allows for substantially more reward. This is not to say that I would be adverse to working for the new company, but I’d need a good share in the company. Partnership would be good, but It didn’t sound like Jaco was interested in that which is fine. Again, it isn’t good buisness sense to partner with someone who has plans on leaving two years down the line. If I were to start a web design company today I would ensure I had a good technical mind, a good design mind, and a very solid people’s person to deal with the buisness sense on the front lines. Projects without one of those three elements usually fail when computers are involved. Knock out the design guys and you have an unusable product. Knock out the buisness/promoter and you have no publicity or end up getting screwed by people who have buisness savvy. Knock out the programmer and you have no product, only pictures.

That’s a general statement, I think that if Jaco and this other fellow actually have a good programmer on staff they should do fine. It’s just hard for me to trust a random face, there are so many people out there who put on a good front but fall apart and can’t produce cohesive applications on their own.

I rarely trust other people with code unless I’ve seen some of their projects and can verify that they are quality choices. The people I would trust to write a portion of a program with me are limited to a fist full (minus anyone at EA, every single one of them was brilliant, personable, and good at their trade.) It’s part of the reason why I program, draw, and write. I like to be able to run a project start to finish if I have the time. It’s just easier to depend on myself than it is to rely on someone else when it comes down to it. This isn’t the reason I do those things. I just like making things. But the convenience of being able to do art and programming to some capacity is not to be underestimated.

Oh, and yeah, I really do mean it when I say I promise nothing for responses on this blog. I type when I feel the need to and if I don’t it could be months between posts. Might be a day or a week, this shouldn’t be a chore. I let it become one for a little while and I’m done that now. This is supposed to be a place to dump my thoughts, not a required journalistic documentation of my life.

That said, it’s encouraging to get comments from friends and casual observers.

Also, been losing in CAL lately. I tense up during matches because our roster changes each match (due to people flaking out) and it’s distressing, but I think I’m over it. We’ll see this coming monday when we play again. I feel good about this one.

Thanks for 21 good years so far. Let’s hope the next 21 are just as productive. Tomorrow, June 17, is in 1 hour.

Good night all.

After I get back I intend on selling the car which would mean that I would no longer have to pay hundreds of dollars a month to drive around. This would also mean that I will either buy a new car soon or will just rely on public transport. However I have been thinking that since I do not like public transport in Regina, I don’t like spending lots of money on vehicles, and it snows in the winter which makes it impossible to bike all year long I’ll probably just invent an alternate form of transportation and use that. I’m thinking of a wormhole generator, or possibly transportation by frisbee. Wish me luck.

Now that is real ultimate power.

For the record, the phrase “I’m blogging this” bothers me to no end. In fact, I think mention of the word “blog” kills a fairy every time it’s muttered.

*edit: Two down.

I’ve noticed posting patterns in technical forums for programmers where many people seem to have lost their ability to google common answers. I’ve also noticed tons of “wouldn’t this be cool” instead of “this is what I’ve done that’s cool.” Oh, there are definitely cool projects posted on forums, but generally you hear about the finished product rather than the work in progress. My point is that the ratio of projects that start as an announcement on a public forum to finished projects is unsurprisingly high. It’s for this reason that forums exist purely as amusement for me, they’re a sort of “hypothetical if” universe where people try to use words to speak louder than actions. Usually it ends in a clamoring of opinion until the thread spins off-course and gets locked or neglected. It’s an interesting social game, not a serious place of gathering.

That said, today I made a rant in response to something a person I know in real life posted. It was on my university’s computer science student society’s (CSSS) forum, so the setting is slightly different. Though most of what I’ve said holds true, the only real difference between this forum and others is that there aren’t many flame wars because everyone knows each other. This rambling so far has been the set-up for the set-up of my post. Now on to the meat and potatoes.

There is a CSSS Grad Banquet open to members, staff, and alumni. It costs $25 for a student, $35 for a regular guest, and $280 for an 8 person table. The guest of honor is Dr. Larry Symes and it sounds like a reasonable deal for students as the meal alone is worth $30 a head. Here was the first response to this event :

200232298
50$ per couple or 25$ per single? That’s simply insane.
If I ever graduate there’s no way in hell I’m paying 25$ for a meal. What total bourgois nonsense. If I had the 50$ to spend on such nonsense I’d much rather give it to oxfam or unicef or somewhere instead, where it could probably last someone for two or more months.
Course, I don’t really have 50$ to spare.

Then again I don’t view “networking” as a morally acceptable goal, so mabye I’m missing out.

He was called on it

Falconias
if I had that kind of money i would fork out…it is a good meal. I mean, we’re forking out 2500 bucks a semester for tuition…25 bucks a ticket is quite reasonable for this kind of event. And networking is how you get a job and if you’re not interested in a good paying job, 200232298, why are you forking out 20,000 dollars for school that you aparantly don’t want to use? In this context I find you calling this borgois nonsense in very poor taste.

And then the response:

200232298
“And networking is how you get a job”
That’s called cronyism. And it’s exactly how racist hiring policies are implimented. Whatever happened to matching the right job to the right candidate? FIFO? Getting the job candidate that will provide the greatest benifit to the least cost? What exactly does the entire feild of human resources accomplish, then? What is the point to going to classes and working our [censored] off to drill knowledge into our heads if all that matters in getting a job is who you know? Networking is how to [censored] exactly the same people that the csss should be supporting: computer science students.

“if I had that kind of money i would fork out…it is a good meal. I mean, we’re forking out 2500 bucks a semester for tuition…25 bucks a ticket is quite reasonable for this kind of event.”
Besides that, the ‘well, we’re paying X for Y, X is larger than e, why not spend e on Z’ argument is fallacious on so many levels. First of all, I made just enough over summer to go to university OR pay rent OR eat+ buy books+etc. Luckily I’ve been able to cut a few corners and obtain a new loan but spending 25$ is just more than I can take for a meal. What are the benifits of this dinner that so vastly outweigh the huge cost?
Would you pay 125$ for the same dinner? What about 500$? I mean it’s nothing compared to our 20000$ tuition.

“200232298, why are you forking out 20,000 dollars for school that you aparantly don’t want to use?”
Mabye I think that becoming educated outweighs the cost of 10,000 hours of labour nevermind the amount of hours of study time? Not for the sake of being placed in some workplace, but for the sake of education in itself? I have and will continue to use what I’ve gained here, regardless of whether I find employment in the feild. Mabye because I feel I have a moral obligation to make the attempt?

“In this context I find you calling this borgois nonsense in very poor taste.”
This is pure pomp, fluff and appearance. Pure useless distraction. This meal accomplishes nothing, and wastes resources. I’d say that is pretty bourgois.

He has some very good and insightful points mixed in with some crazy buildup. I won’t run down everything, but here is one example of a pro and a negative:
Good Point-Besides that, the ‘well, we’re paying X for Y, X is larger than e, why not spend e on Z’ argument is fallacious on so many levels.
Extended into a “Straw Man Fallacy”-Would you pay 125$ for the same dinner? What about 500$? I mean it’s nothing compared to our 20000$ tuition.

Beyond that there’s the obvious points brought up by another poster, I’ll summarize:
-It is really hard to tell from a 20 minute interview (if your interview lasts that long) if a person will fit in. It is also hard to judge a persons skills from a 20 minute interview, people can mess up because they are nervous, and others can answer all the questions right but only because they are very good interviewees and not because they possess all the right knowledge. So really the best way to higher people is through “networking”, getting to know someone in a social environment, finding out information about them and what they know while both of you are relaxed and have lots of time.
-Also as for school, I hope you realise at least 50% (in my opinion way more) of what we learn in school is completely useless. I have found that companies that higher based on acedemic performance generally don’t get the best employees.

Another response from 200232298 to a comment from someone else.

200232298
“I bet you’re fun at parties.”
I don’t “party.” I actually try to accomplish things with my life, and capital.

Now, here’s the big response. As with many rants, this covers quite a wide spectrum of things I’ve observed. It may be a bit rambling, and it may not address everything said, but it’s about as inclusive of my views on the subject as I can be. What “the subject” is should be derived from the entire rant, this is no formal paper with a clear description of what is being described in the first paragraph. It’s my brain spooging all over the keyboard in an attempt to pull together a cohesive thought. Think of it as rough-sketching in written form.

Grab a drink and a snack and sit back.

M2tM
Let me come in and say that networking is important in getting a good job. Let me also say that it isn’t just who you know over what you know, but a combination of the two. You have to know competent people and be competent yourself.

The idea is to put a bunch of competent people with similar interests in a room and get them chummy with each other then each one comes away with more contacts and more inroads into the industries they are aiming at.

Let me also say this: sometimes things cost money. Some things are worth it, other things are not. The important thing is to realize that just because it looks like a lot of money for a meal, there are other things surrounding the event that had to be paid for. Your money goes into food AND catering. Not only that, but even if you paid $25 and some organization kept all of it and gave you nothing but the opportunity to meet these people, it would -still- be a good deal.

It isn’t like you’re buying concert tickets for a band. This is a very real, and very cheap investment in your future. If it costs $25 to meet people working in the field who could very well land you a $50,000 job or better, would you call that a waste of resources? Not only that, but you could have a genuinely good time in the process.

In Vancouver there have been times when a bunch of the programmers would go out for lunch, sometimes lunch costs $25, but I can guarantee the experience is worth so much more than the paltry amount I’ve spent on the food. Besides the obvious benefits of networking, I’m paying for an experience. As long as I’m having a good time, and as long as I’ll have enough money to pay for rent and food and anything else required to live comfortably, that experience is worth every dollar.

I’m quite surprised, 200232298, you never struck me as a material person. I didn’t know that you valued $25 to such an extent as to exclude yourself from having fun and possibly doing better in the future. Ultimately money is worthless. We all die, and if you die with 2 million dollars, you’re still decomposing the next year the same as someone who made 2 million but spent it all before they died. That said, it’s also important to make money when you can and in as smart a way as possible. This involves getting to know people who happen to be doing the same things you want to get into when you graduate and that process is called networking.

If you are in University in a specific field you should probably have a “dream job” picked out that you would like to work at and that would pay enough money to live. If there is no such job then you had better re-think your life goals and look into finding something that you like to do that you can make money at. Possibly switch your major to something along the lines of the job you’re thinking of. If you have a dream job in mind then having fun and making money can be the same thing. Ultimately you need money to live even though I said it’s worthless, that’s only if you have enough to get by. There is a point called the “poverty line” at which point money becomes the focus of all of your life’s problems. Even if you are below this line, you can still do your best to spend money in a smart way and set yourself up for opportunities. If you are above this line then money should not concern you unless you don’t have enough to do something that is really important for you. If you don’t have enough money to do something really important then you should be doing your dream job better, be having more fun, and make more money. There are highs and lows, but overall, you should like what you do. This may involve working for yourself, or switching companies, but there is always a way to make more money doing what you want to do.

I have two goals in life
1: Have fun
2: Ensure my ability to have fun in the future.

Whenever an event comes along that excludes number one, but ensures number two concretely I usually bear it. University courses are a good example, I wouldn’t call calculus “fun” but it certainly ensures my ability to have more fun in the future than I would be able to without my CS degree.

Let me further say that these are not selfish goals. If you have family, or a spouse to provide for then you should probably extend goals one and two:
1: Keep my family having fun
2: Ensure my family can have fun in the future.

But let me make a clear distinction here: You have a duty to the people who invest their emotions in you. They are entitled to your resources just as you are entitled to theirs. When it comes down to it, we are social creatures and we need these bonds. We are both (you and me, 200232298) at a time in our lives when we can’t afford to donate to unicef. I can’t afford to give money to charities when I need to invest all of my effort and money into making my future a success.

If it came down to investing $25 to help out someone who is not entitled to your resources (anybody not in your life) or furthering your own life and you had to choose one or the other, you had better value yourself above the person you don’t know. If you don’t, who will? The person you gave money to? Forget it, they feel they have an entitlement to your donation or they wouldn’t accept it. And if you feel entitled to something you don’t necessarily feel the need to support your contributor unless you know them intimately and it’s a mutual relationship.

I’m not saying it’s wrong to donate to charities, I am saying that it’s wrong to give money to people if it means denying yourself an opportunity to do better. If you can do both at the same time, or if you have so much money that you don’t need every dollar to have fun and the people who you are closest to are all in the same situation, only THEN can you afford to donate money to a charity. What it comes down to is this: If you gave all your money to charities then you would become dependant on those charities yourself and as such you would end up working much harder later on in your life to support yourself.

You could give $25 to unicef today, or invest it in your future and have a good time too and give $1000 instead when you’re in a better financial position. If I remember you played your overlords legacy account in a similar fashion to the “attack with 25 soldiers now instead of investing it in a larger military strike later.” If you’ll recall, everyone else shot past you and soon your attacks became irrelevant as someone with 100,000 soldiers being attacked by 25 was nothing. You don’t want to become irrelevant. The point is to find a balance between immediate spendatures and long-term investments.

Basically to sum it all up, networking is one of the cheapest and best ways to get into the job you want. Spending a little money now could end up making you a lot of money later. Giving money away when you can’t afford it is foolish and helps nobody, better to get into a position where you can afford it and make a real difference. And beyond that, value experiences more than money because when you die all the money in the world will not make your life relevant or meaningful. Inheritance of your unused resources might be nice, but you ultimately leave your mark in the way of impressions you’ve had on other people.

What are you going to remember? The small amount of money you saved in not going to an event, or the great time you had when you did go, and the people you met, and the opportunities that have potentially impacted your life for years to come. Obviously spend your money on the most important things, but you are suggesting a better use for $25 is to give it away and that just is not the case here.

That’s my rant of the day.

I still love work at EA, it’s a great work environment with a quick pace and lots to do. I’ve found time to work on my own project as well, it’s nothing big and I do it all from my home during my hours. It’s lots of fun, is entirely 2d, and will hopefully be a ton of fun to play. I’m being coy with what I have done so far because I want to present it only when it is ready. I can tell you that I have the characters displaying on the screen at this point in a way I would describe as “fairly unique” and the combat system is fully planned, though not implemented. I need to do collision detection (and a lot of other things) first, but I’m well on track.

I’ve been playing dota lately, and counter strike: source as well. But I’ve toned down my playing in favor of finishing up the latest book in the wheel of time series and working on my game. Of course, let’s not forget EA, but I’m talking purely about extracurricular activities.

All in all, I’m feeling good, I’m totally healthy, and life is good.

Catch you on the flip-side,

Mike

Standing in line I had a strange encounter with a kid. Ebi had headed to our car to pick up her bag which was forgotten in the scramble to get into the theatre in time and was not present for the exchange. As for the kid, he was standing in the next line over and started hissing at me. I shit you not; he looked at me and just started hissing. I was somewhat unprepared for this behavior and was uncertain what the correct and acceptable mode of response was in this social situation. The whole encounter was further confused by the fact that I was not on “home turf” and so for all I knew this was some form of Mission town greeting. Figuring this must be some sort of communication I decided that it might seem rude to ignore it and I began hissing back. We had this exchange for a solid minute before Ebi got back and looked at the two of us strangely.

The movie itself was pretty good, I wasn’t disappointed.

Tonight we were walking down the street and saw a man in a fuzzy purple coat. It looked very much like a shag carpet which was fashionably draped over him in the form of a jacket, and was quite puffy. There wasn’t much else to the situation, but I took notice, it isn’t every day you see a coat quite that flamboyant.

A minute later we stopped and looked in the window of a hotel to see the end of a magic act. Costumes were gaudy and the stage was small, but it was interesting to see. The purpose or mystery of the trick itself was unclear as we didn’t see the setup, but there was a woman who got out of a box as the crowd cheered. We were standing next to another couple who were also peering in the window. Moments later the man with the purple coat came and looked in as well. There were five of us just looking in the window all standing silent and hunched in the chill wind. The man in the purple coat noticed I was shying around the side of the building so as not to be noticed by the people in the room and directly addressed me to let me know they probably couldn’t even see us (due to blinds and the lighting in the room.)

I have a knack for getting random people to talk to me. It happens on busses and in lines, or when I pass hobos. Maybe I just seem approachable, I’m not quite sure. The other day I had a fifteen minute talk with an old lawyer who got on the bus. He told me about things he was working on and about people he knew and about the joys and sorrows of being in his profession.

It’s kind of surreal. You sit on a bus and usually just look at your feet, or vacantly out the window. Around you are people mere inches away trying to go about their own business, and it’s rare for conversation between strangers to occur. Well, at least it seems to be rare for most people, maybe it isn’t, but this is my speculation.

A fellow programmer spoke with me the other day, his name was Brice and he worked for the company Radical. I didn’t incite the talk; he just sat down and started talking. He told me about his past projects and what he was working on next. He told me where he came from and how he got here and I shared a portion of my experiences with him in return.

From a young age we’re told not to speak with strangers (with good reason.) It seems that rule stays in place for some as they age. Some people live their own lives unknown and unnoticed because they will not talk with the person sitting next to them. They have their own little space and do their best not to breach someone else’s. I think part of the reason for my being approachable is that I make an effort not to count the lines on the road as we roll steadily towards our final destination.

Anyhow, the game rocks and if you get it you can see my name in the credits (which is kind of neat considering this is one of EA’s flagship titles and each iteration of the series has a history of selling millions of copies.) I haven’t checked out the online game play so I’ll probably be looking into that tonight, I’m also interested in actually playing some of the story mode because I’ve seen a few intro videos, but have not ever had my volume up so I haven’t heard what the hell the actors are talking about. I also want to see what’s in the manual simply because I’ve always liked checking out what’s packaged with games and I haven’t seen anything package-wise with NFS:MW yet.

Anyhow, yay for my first commercial game!

If you’ve kept my original statement in mind, you might be wondering what brought me to this conclusion, and more importantly, why I’m sharing it with you now as opposed to some other arbitrary time. Let me detail my most recently conjured set of mental conjunctions and you might have some idea of why it struck me as odd.

I’ll outline my stream of thought in jot-note form, a hyphen (-) indicates a thought, an asterisk indicates an action (*):

-It’s dark for this time of day
-I guess that’s because it’s getting closer to winter
-Winter is cold
-It’s somewhat chilly out
-Glad I brought my coat
*I look down
-I am glad my mom re-touched my coat before I left, it looks almost new again
-The leather has a few rips, but they aren’t easily noticeable
*I feel my coat
-Lamb skin is soft
-I wonder how they treated and prepared the leather
*I feel my hand
-It feels similar to my own skin, that’s neat
-I remember reading about a vampire who happened to own a book bound in human skin
-It seems strange that a vampire would take time to bound a book in leather
-I wonder who would have prepared the leather if not the vampire
-It would be strange if there was a leather company today that used human skin
-I wonder how they would go about getting the rights to it
-I guess a body donated to science doesn’t use the skin anyway
-Would the market support human skin clothing
-Would human skin work well for something like that
-What about public outcry
-Is there an untapped market in the satanist/goth/occult crowd for human skin garments?
-Would demand be enough to make it worthwhile
-Grizzly old man skin coats don’t seem that appealing
-This whole topic is creeping me out

And then I had a physical headache because I grossed myself out. So, no, those weird things I say are not random thoughts, they have been arrived at by some sort of connection. For the record, most of my thought patterns don’t end in wearing grizzled-old-man-hide.

I’m doing well for all who are wondering, I’m also headed to Regina, I’ll be in town from December 26th to the 31st inclusive. Shoot me an e-mail if you want to chillax at some point.

Ciao for now

2005 Members : Approx 525
2005 Dealer Tables : 56
2005 Rooms : Approx 350

2005 Artshow Artists: 40
2005 Artshow Pieces : 463
2005 Artshow Sales : 234
2005 Artshow Total Sales : $12,209.54

525 people spent $12,209.54 US dollars in three days on nothing but artwork, it’s got a rough mean average of $23.25 spent per person and that means that artists got a mean average of $218 each (in reality, most artists did not do this well and the money was mostly given to the more skilled ones, but it does show that money was to be had for those willing to draw well for it). It is important to mention that there are cons which are easily twice as large as this one, but they tend to the center of the US rather than a coast.

Now, this being said, we didn’t even expect to stay on Sunday, but were convinced by one of the artists (Ray is his name) to set up because we had some good art. Easily said, but all I had on me was a mechanical pencil, a blue pencil, and a sketchbook and all Ebi had was a regular pencil and a sketchbook. No colours or inking pens between us and the standard was colour artwork for “Con Badges” (little name badges with the person’s character drawn on them.) Compare our equipment to other people with $1500 marker sets or even just plain pencil crayons or even to people with inking pens and we were looking a little sparse and ill-prepared. Not only this, but neither of us brought any of our artwork and it was standard to flip through an artist’s prints and purchase some of those, or at least get a feel for the quality of work.

Luckily what we did have was rock-bottom prices and enough skill to stand out (Ebi more than myself by a wide margin.) We were also kindly lent a micron box set by one known as Toast. This definitely helped.

Our goal was to recoup our entrance fees and to subsidize the gas and we did not fail. We ended up with a combined total of approximately $115 (keeping in mind this is US money that’s pretty good for a few hours of drawing especially considering that was the wrap-up day and most of the people buying art had left.) I’ll confess I only made $15 in total and the rest was Ebi, but it was still fun.

Our next scheduled event is “Howloween” which will be much smaller (probably just over 100 people, we’ll see), but also much closer (the Seattle conference was about 3 to 3.5 hours away, this one is about 30 minutes.) It’s a bit more of a party and a bit less of a conference style meet, but there should still be dealer’s tables and the like so I’m planning on going prepared.

Back on the point of meeting hobos, one was so bold as to inquire through yellowed rotting teeth, “Eh, eh. Hey, do you have any spare change?” I truthfully replied “no” because I value all of my change equally and none of it is really spare if I’m planning on using it at some point. Others were quiet with signs of despair, some referencing god, others a lack of one. Still, some sit with busted-up guitars missing strings while they sing off-beat tunes and attempt to earn their pittance.

Hobos are a lot like entrepreneurs who are really bad at their job. I mean, they work for themselves and they come up with their own business strategy (or, just steal another hobos) and they often burn out due to long hours and stress. Possibly the best hobo-gig I saw to date involves a man in a wheelchair spinning in circles crying loudly with a sign that says “liver cancer, please god help.” He had cancer, was crippled, and was crying in a very convincing manner. If you’re looking for the pity-change, that’s definitely the way to go.

Today, however, I walked past the first hobo who asked me for change and then past two hobos on opposite ends of the street with the same message on a sign which read “not on welfare, please help.” They both got negative creativity points and a bronze star instead of a gold one. After passing them I ran into one of the more interesting groups of bums.

I walked past, did a double take and read the sign: “Need money for weed.”

This was easily the best sign I’ve seen to date. No pity, no false promises of moving or trying to pick themselves up… This was just an honest call for weed. I told them they had an awesome sign. One of the three said “Thank you, it took me months to come up with.” I replied “well, obviously you’ve worked your whole life to get to this point and make it.” He laughed because we were both being good natured and I said “good luck with the weed thing, but don’t you guys need food too?” He responded, and quite insightfully pointed out that: “You can’t smoke food.”

Reading this literally, yes, you can smoke bacon and other meats, but obviously not in the manner implied. This is definitely one of my favorite hobo quotes so far because it’s both true and absurd. You really can’t smoke food, but I can imagine a bunch of hobos sitting on a corner after acquiring that which they desired most and after about 20 minutes realizing their folly. They forgot the munchies.

That’s from last Friday up until today. So basically, I’m getting out of my house lots and doing stuff.

I’ve met a compatible female person which is nifty in itself. I really haven’t gotten to know many people in this way and I’m rather picky about who it is that I share myself with, so it’s not often that I find someone I really get along with. I’m rather odd, but I’m comfortable with that and the point of this is that I’ve found someone else who is as well. We’re still getting to know each other so I don’t want to say too much, but I’m happy at the moment which is good.

I’ve been missing my friends quite a bit, but things move at such a quick pace that there really isn’t much time to think about it. I do ask that if you see me online and you’ve got a moment, send a ‘hi’ my way. I’m only on when I’m available. I wanted to specifically mention Drew and Aidan, you guys rock. I am sort of used to missing Aidan, but at least I can look forward to his visits to Regina when I’m there. Now I’m not in Regina either and so it’s a bit tougher. If you look at our distribution it’s actually pretty crazy. Aidan’s on one end of the country, Drew is in the middle, and I’m way on the other coast. You guys know your friendship means a lot to me, so please don’t be a stranger online.

I started reading a book as a follow-up to Eragon, this one is called Eldest and is written much in the same way Harry Potter has been. It’s not precisely a young reader’s book, it’s a bit more mature, but it is definitely an easy read. I really enjoy it because of the fact that a dragon is one of the main characters and that’s pretty rare in a book. It’s a standard template for a fantasy novel.

A young man grows up in a small town and knows very little about the world. Some spectacular event occurs and kills all his family (in this case all but his cousin.) That young man is very down to earth and is sort of a woodsman type character, or at least they spend time in the woods which helps them set out on a trek avoiding an enemy that is chasing them. An old storyteller or some family friend turns out to have a complicated past and is actually a wizard in disguise (go figure) who helps out the main character acting as a mentor. There is an evil wizard who seems to hold an iron grip on the land and the main character is destined to kill that ruler.

This is the basic premise of such series as the Wheel of Time, the Sword of Truth, Harry Potter, countless individual novels and Eragon. But Eragon has a sentient dragon which makes it cooler. The only thing that really bugs me about Eragon is that the main human character’s name is just Dragon with the ‘D’ swapped for an ‘E’, *bleh*, *spit*, no.

My apartment is sticking together (not stickily, I mean nothing is messy yet) so that’s good. I guess I’m tired of writing for now, so I’ll leave you with a quote I managed to use today when someone at work mentioned a lab instructor at their university who was particularly inept:

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

I’ll try and update a bit more frequently but I promise NOTHING!

>:o

I’ve also come across a really short, but quite depressing little bit of news. Apparently someone felt the need to convert the bible into a 100-minute version. Basically something you can read in a couple hours. This new bible would be targeted at people who want to read the bible, but do not have time to.

I am not, and never will be religious, but things like this are what’s wrong with our world. If you’re going to believe in something, I don’t think it’s right to get a Coles Notes on it and base your beliefs around that. There should be some deeper connection, shouldn’t there? It shouldn’t be something you rush or ask for a summary of, or pick up and drop off on a whim. If you’re going to seriously believe in something and you’ll base that belief on faith and not fact or science, I really think that it’s important to understand what it is that the religion you subscribe to is about. If you’re not going to bother reading the full manual, I hardly see how you can claim to actually be of that religion. It would be like if I said I wanted to be an artist and then I got a “learn how to draw cartoon faces” book and called it a day because I didn’t have enough time to do it properly.

Do it or don’t do it, but don’t fuck around wasting time by saving it. That sounds like an oxymoron, but really, when you save time by doing something really important half-assed all you do is throw that time out the window. Half-assed gets you nowhere in the grand scheme of things and it’s a growing epidemic that people think it’s worthwhile to do something quickly rather than well. If it really interested a person, they’d make time to do it properly, anything else is deception to make you feel better about yourself. You can’t appreciate what you rush yourself through for the sake of completion.
There are things that don’t really matter that just need to be done which you can half-ass your way through, but if you’re going to try and tackle something of magnitude take pride in it.
-Mike Out

I’m going to work on having more good weekends. I really liked how laid back everything was. I’ll keep that up.

Mike has fallen off the face of the earth (also known as Vancouver). I am endeavoring to not follow suit. -Aidan

So, I bet a bunch of you are wondering if I died or not on the mountain drive here… A few of you may think I actually fell off the edge of the Earth, but that’s not physically possible. I will, however assure you that it is entirely possible to fall off the face of a mountain and that for all intensive purposes, I may have. I am pleased to report that this is not the case and that I am, in fact, quite well. I won’t be filling you in on all the details of my trip up here because, frankly, 24 hours of driving gets quite monotonous and to accurately describe it would be equally boring. This isn’t even taking into account all of the furniture shopping and the hours of driving to and from various IKEA locations across the Greater Vancouver Area. I will mention that my parents were a humungous help in the whole ordeal, from paying off the landlord (it was a close one, some German guys almost got the place, but my dad applied some monetary grease and got the wheels turning,) to buying me a fridge full of supplies, to moving my stuff up here and getting me a new bed and dresser. Really, I can’t thank them enough.

I did say I won’t be filling you in on all the details, but that certainly doesn’t mean I can’t clobber you with some of them. I’d like to pay tribute to the most mystical attraction I have ever been to. “The Enchanted Forest” is the absolute worst thing I have ever witnessed and paid money for. It was like walking through a garden of rejected clay creations from the special education course… The surreal thing was that there was a well-made castle wall and a really smoothly laid out path and everything else was quite well done, but the actual concrete figures were… Just look for yourself:

Spencer, the ‘Special’ Elf

Todd, the Mongoloid Troll

Dirty Christopher Robin

Bob, the Brutal Bear

Honestly, that’s a level of consistent bad you just can’t forge. You might wonder why we stopped here on the way to Vancouver, well, my mom remembered the place from her childhood. Her parents never took her to things like this, but for some odd reason they took her to this. Punishment? I don’t know. It was special for her anyway, but I shudder when I recall this line, and I quote, “this is a lot better than I remember.” We all agreed it was horrible, but I can’t imagine a level of horrible that would bring about something so bad that -this- was better in comparison.

Anyhow, magical transvestite monkey spanking concrete statues aside it was an uneventful trip here. Oh, we were busy getting things ready and it seemed like the days stretched on and on, but that was all work and nobody likes to read about work.

Anyhow, suffice to say we made my appartment look awesome through a lot of hard work, wall plaster, and grout which we accidentally also put on the walls.

Now, to catch you up to date to where my parents ship off I present the sentence of awesome:

Bridges and gondolas with wolves and bears and checking out where I work and touring an aquarium.

Well, now that we have that out of our system you know exactly what I did up until the 6th. That’s when I really started working at EA and living in Vancouver. It’s the date my parents started the long drive back to the flatlands and I began life on my own in the mountains by the ocean.

How do you know when you’re doing well in this world? Well, you get up at some point on Friday when you feel like you’ve done enough for the day, go to the 19th floor of your building and have cake and beer with some of the most genius programmers and creative artists in the industry. After having some jovial conversation you head outside to meet the most spectacular sunset cascading over the mountains causing all the buildings around you to glow magnificently in the crisp (from a recent rain) Vancouver air. The mix of having such a cool job and living in such a cool city is just awesome. My job is cool, too. I’m an SE (software engineer) on the 12th floor of EA. We’ll probably shuffle to the 18th floor soon, but I have a spectacular view as I sit right next to the window and can see the ships in the harbor.

Anyhow, I look forward to each day of work. I do my best, I work hard, and I have fun basking in it all. That sums up the EA experience for my first couple weeks. Things change fast here too. The pace… It’s just amazing. You can be working on one thing and then a moment later be asked to do something totally different if the situation calls for it. It’s probably one of the quickest changing industries out there. I love every minute of it.

Last weekend I went to a “Furry Meet.” Many of you are probably squinting and re-reading that sentence and haven’t even gotten to this one yet, so I’ll wait.

…

Anyhow, I met some of the strangest people I think I’ve ever been around. Some of them I liked, some of them I got along with, but wouldn’t regularly hang out with, and one person was actually kind of creepy. Not in an immediately threatening manner, just sort of in a “there’s something wrong with that guy” way. I met a group of 5 or so people I got along with great and I think I’ll consider them all friends now. I’ll probably talk more about them in the future, but this is getting rambly as is so I’ll just give you the rough details and we can flesh things out later. We all doodled in my sketchbook for quite a while and went for a walk. Got some funny looks because one girl had a tail and another was wearing a collar, but it was the most fun I’ve had walking around randomly in a long time.

Speaking of friends, I’ve been making a few at EA which is great. I haven’t met a single person employed there that I had any sort of personality conflict with. Normally when I think of “Human Resources” I picture some nasty, angry person who really isn’t human at all and doesn’t understand decency. I’m pleased to say that at EA, that is not the case. Every single person I have met is really a great person and the HR people are actually quite helpful. I mentioned HR specifically because of past experience with some really bad HR people. Experiences that make you wonder whether “Human Resources” meant that they were there to use you like raw ore as opposed to providing you with help. Dwelling on that put aside, the SE’s and the Artists, everyone is great. I’ve made friends with the new coop students I was hired with and am getting to know several of the other employees. It’s a young company, so most of the people I work with aren’t really that old.

There are a ton of Michaels who work here. Well over 8 that I have met so far.

Now, as far as an excuse for why this wasn’t posted earlier:
It was a big job posting all those pictures and I originally meant to do more of an explanation, but I soon found that the task was big enough to make me want to spend time doing other things. It was kind of intimidating and every day that I spent procrastinating on posting this was another day’s worth the experience I felt the need to cram into this huge blog post. It was basically piling up and I just didn’t want to deal with it.

So, in the interests of moving forward, I ditched the idea of doing a super-comprehensive post which would have probably been super-boring as well and instead glossed over most of the things I’ve done so far and have basically just used this to ‘catch up’ with my life. Now I’ll continue posting regular blog info as per the old schedule (which is to say that they will be sporadic and will not follow a schedule, but will appear relatively often.)

It’s not like I love the province or the city. I don’t really hold any ties to the geography except that it’s oddly flat and I like coming from an odd place. The people I have met, however, are another story. I’ll miss slurpee runs with Drew, meeting up with Aidan during holidays, playing guitar with Steven Ratushniak on occasion and borrowing his dad’s books for months at a time, CSSS functions (and everyone in the CSSS), M:tG at Chris’s house, bugging Nathan Anderson, my family and pretty much everyone else I’ve met and had good times with.

I’ll be on my own in a big city, not just like alone in my room but separated by some 1 729.73 kilometers from all familiar faces in my life. Am I scared? Not really. I’m sure I’ll be fine, I just have to stay “On Point” and do my best to follow my dream (best advice given to me ever. A young African American told me on the bus on the way to Chicago about various gangs and such and told me to stay “On Point” to avoid getting shanked in the back or something.)

Anyhow, I think this is the last sort of fleighty/sappy blog entry I’ll do for a while. I’ll be lightening the tone quite a bit in future entries, just let me have this last little moment to myself before I become chipper again. Oh, and I’m leaving this Friday for those who were wondering.

Best of luck to all my friends, I’m not the only one with dreams and ambitions coming true so congrats to all of you who are making steps daily towards your goals.

-M2tM

I suppose I should have been doing this all along. Why hang on to stuff that isn’t important? What’s the point?

When you have two bins. Keep and give away, and you have a limited amount of space you really learn to prioritize. There isn’t really any “storage if I ever happened to want this at some point” bin. Well, that’s not entirely true. I do get to keep my books in a couple boxes in the garage. That book collection means a lot to me, but it would be silly to cart it across the country and back again in 8 months if/when I move back. I say if/when because of the sleight possibility of doing my university courses in Vancouver instead, but this is only a small possibility. Chances are I’ll be headed back in 8 months.

My life’s possessions:
-Car
-Laptop Computer (Compaq x1150 or something)
-Desktop Computer
-Digital Camera (it’s seen better days)
-Drawing Tablet
-iPod
-Snowboard
-Art Supplies
-Textbooks
-Novel Collection
-Clothing
-Masks On my Wall (I have a bunch of wooden masks)
-Sword / Dagger
-Toolkit with hammers and stuff
-Lots of software
-Assorted pens/pencils/rulers/assorted junk in drawer
-Memories from days past… Blanket, stuffed animal, old scout sash, old photos and stuff. I’ll be leaving this at home and people can do with it what they wish.

That’s basically all the stuff I own. I don’t know what else to say except that it fits in like… 6 smallish boxes (minus the snowboard, the car, and the masks. I’m sure I’ll have more boxes with the masks properly packed.)

I think it’s finally sinking in that I won’t see my friends or family for 8 months or so. I’m starting to wish I hung out a bit more often with them during the summer, but then I realized that I don’t hang out much. The only person I do hang out with on a regular basis is Drew (and I do hang out with Aiden when he is in town.) I’ve got an assortment of other good friends as well, and plenty of acquaintances, but aside from group gatherings I don’t usually see them. I like most people in the CSSS, for example, and I have plenty of people I would consider good friends. However, I don’t really hang out with any of them often (except during the school year when I’m in the CSSS room most days and I do talk with them lots to be fair.)

Maybe a move will be good for me, I’ll get out there and maybe crack my introverted shell I’ve built up without realizing it. I’m probably the most social loner I know… But change is good and I’m looking forward to it.

I’m signed up for the ultimate lan: 9 in Winnipeg which I was really looking forward to, but I don’t think I’ll be able to go. It’s happening the weekend before I leave which I do have off, but I will probably spend that time getting ready for the trip or saying goodbye to my friends (read: partying.)

I just returned my $250 parking pass, now I have to go down and cancel all of my classes I’m signed up for, and then I have to get myself totally figured out at the coop office. I talked briefly to Eric Exner (who is in charge of things) and he’s pretty happy for me. He said something to the effect of “making this work out for sure” which is reassuring because I was worried about the difficulties of taking three coop terms back to back (this is an 8 month term which counts as two.)

No rest for the weary.

My aspirations would hopefully lead me to work in the games industry, a thankless profession of ruthless business, long hours, and relatively low pay for the work which is done.

All joking cynacism aside, I’m super pumped. Apparantly I have like a 12 day turnaround time on my life goals… I think I expected more of a battle. Huge kudos goes out to my good friend DJ without whome I’m sure it would be much more of a struggle to be seen.

Hi Mike,

The interviews went well yesterday as both NFS and NBA are interested.

Can you give me a call when you get this to discuss?

Thanks,
*********

…

…

Yes!

EA contacted me again about the interview. They said that I will be having not one, but two phone interviews. One with the Need for Speed team and the second with the NBA team. I’m rediculously pumped. I’ve been getting my resume together and I did a new speedpainting to add something recent to my art section. I really hope they like my programming and my art projects. The interview’s today, so I don’t have much time left to get ready.

Plans for the next week? I don’t really know. All I know is that I’m going to be really busy doing website projects for the next little while, and if EA hires me I’ll be doing a big move down to Vancouver. I know a few people from a forum who live down there, I might get a chance to meet them if I go. I still have to talk with Aidan about that spa website we get to do… I’ll probably do that tomorrow weather permitting.

Today I checked out the Italian Star Delhi and got perhapse the most delicious sandwitch ever. It’s been a while since I’ve been there and I figured it would be a neat treat. They’ve got a really cool little shop set up with all sorts of spicy meats and italian spices. If you’re ever in Regina, I suggest swinging by.

I guess that’s all I have to say for now,

ttfn

Hi Mike,

I work at Electronic Arts Canada along with **** **** and would like to schedule a phone interview for you regarding a coop position. I just wanted to find out your schedule this week so that I can schedule the itnerview as well as the number that you can be reached at for the interview. As well, could you confirm with me that you would be able to start this September?

Looking forward to talking to you!

Well, it’s safe to say I’m really excited about this. I mean, it’s my goal to become a game programmer and this is definitly heading in the right direction. I’m shaking physically with glee. Jiggling if you will. Jiggling with glee, that’s no small task for someone with no body fat, but that’s what I’m doing.

So basically I’ll be letting my nerves get to me until the interview, but hopefully I can pull off a certain amount of calm… Enough to remember my name and some other things they might ask. This job is going to be different from most of the other ones I’ve applied to (most, but not all) in the questions they might ask. I don’t really know what to expect for questions, but I am guessing most will be based on my experience and how well I work in a group. Usually I’ve been going for customer service positions to scrape cash for University (which I’m actually quite good at) so I know the drum for those.

This is probably going to be a sleightly different beat. My current coop job’s interview is probably closer to what theirs will be like. One difference is that I’ll be talking with someone more in-tune with the technology (not that my current employer is not up to date on stuff, just not into the inner workings of the computer), so I would assume the questions will be more targeted. Maybe I’m stressing too much, I mean, I’ve been doing this kind of stuff for a while and I don’t think there’s a ton I can do to prepare. I’ll be doing my best to be mentally ready anyway. Right now I’m a bundle of nerves, hopefully I can calm myself down a bit.

Nothing’s certain yet…

Wish me luck.

-Michael Hamilton

____

In other news, I’ve been living off M&M meats for the past few months while living at home alone. <plug>It’s a great place to buy individual quick-to-prepare meals. </plug> What happens every summer is my parents escape this world and live at our cottage while I work in the city. It’s a setup I enjoy quite a bit, I get to feel like I’m living alone but I don’t have to pay rent or living expenses (well, I do, but it goes towards University. I’m quite grateful to my parents, without them this would be tough as hell.) Basically I live in this large house in the nice area of town all alone for an entire 3-4 months of the year.

Despite this awesome setup, I don’t really make use of it. I mean, I rarely have people over because I’m a pretty introverted person (always working on my own projects or procrastination) and I never leave my room except to use the washroom and prepare meals. I would probably be perfectly happy living in a shack with a shower, toilet, fridge, stove, bed, and a 1337 computer rig with a good connection to the net. But, then again, I haven’t had the opportunity to live in such a shack so I couldn’t rightly tell you. Obviously it would need to be kept clean and would need to be well organized (two concepts I usually seem to overlook in my habits.) I’d definitly have to do some adjusting… I’m over-analyzing this now.

Sometimes I worry about the length at which I go on about things which don’t require it.

Anyhow, aside from that and other webpage stuff, I’ve decided to pick up on a game project I’m technically a part of, but haven’t really contributed to yet due to laziness + a backpacking trip(the one I stubbed my toe on and hiked 37.5 km on)+working on websites for people (finally know CSS half solidly so I can make sites my colleagues won’t laugh at me for.) I suppose I shot out a bunch of interesting (crazy) ideas for the game as far as content and stats go so they put me in charge of that in a vague sense (as in they didn’t have a clue what they wanted me to do to begin with.) Anyhow, I don’t know if this will make their game or not, but it will certainly make my text based tester which may end up with network support. Right now I’ve got a ton of ideas, and I have the database layout sort of fleshed out along with some of the interaction functions and most of the derived stat equations figured out to make this “stat engine”. I will have a history section to the stat engine as well which isn’t worked out yet and it will basically record a history of player growth and accomplishments over time. I think it will be a very neat feature and will have to think hard on how to implement it.

It’s looking nice (what I have written down) and I’m really excited so I think I’ll be doing this for at least a few months in my spare time. I’ll be focusing on making it as stand-alone as possible with an easy to use interface and a very modular design so we can plug it into the other project as well if they like it. I’ve really come to realize how handy it is to have a very well-laid plan before you begin on implementation which is why I’ve decided to actually do some planning before coding.

Some nifty ideas I have include a unique spell system which allows for custom spell creation and multiple simultaneous spell casts (which cost more mana and have huge possible side effects on a fail, but which cast much quicker and can deal extra damage.) Also dreamed up is a weapon/armor forging system which allows skilled gold/blacksmiths to imbue skills into the items they craft. This custom spell/item creation system will be unique (to my knowledge) in that it won’t be just creating an item from a list from set ingredients, but rather a “this is what I want to make” and then how much it costs to make and wield is calculated from that method.

I already have the system roughed out on paper and I am confident it will be do-able… I think this will be an awesome base for a mmorpg project. It all depends on how much free time I end up with…

I suppose that depends on what I do with the time that should be work time and how much procrastination occurs. (Obviously if I am always procrastinating, I won’t ever have time for anything because I’ll be much too busy avoiding doing things to actually work on projects.)

You see, I stubbed the toe next to my big toe on my left foot (explained because I don’t know the technical name for that particular toe, and even if I did, you probably don’t… Index toe next to the thumb toe? See, no clue.) When I did, I didn’t notice because we were too busy hiking through a bog… Perhaps I should backtrack… It all happened on a backpack track… >>

We’d been hiking for hours across rough BC terrain… Our goal? The Earl Grey Pass in the Purcell Wilderness Area! Anyhow, we’ve been slogging through streams and bogs and stepping on logs and mogs (not really any mogs, and no, that’s not a real word and I know it isn’t so don’t bother looking it up) and then I ram my foot into a big stone.

And that’s how it happened. Shortly after, my toenail turned blackish-red from blood buildup under the nail, but there wasn’t much I could do being stuck in the middle of nowhere. Apparently what you’re supposed to do is get a hot needle and release the pressure immediately by puncturing the nail and drawing the blood. That’s the only real way to save the nail.

Since I didn’t have a hot needle and I didn’t feel like getting a toe infection from having bog water slog inside the wound I decided to leave it. And, weeks later, it eventually peeled off. No pain or anything, just this disembodied toenail. It was kind of neat, and kind of disturbing. Sublime. A piece of my foot was sitting on the desk… I threw it out after a few moments of thought and continued with my evening.

I played quite a bit of CS:S, not all night, but a few hours. I watched Family Guy twice, and I had two suppers. I contemplated starting a drawing and got around to it at about 7:00 in the morning which meant I didn’t have time for anything but a doodle session before getting ready for and going to work at 8:30. All in all, it was a nice night and a totally pointless one to stay up for.

Looking at this objectively, I think my sleeping schedule could use some adjusting…

Naw, I get my best work done between 12:30 and 3:30 in the morning.

Also, just recently Aidan secured a website development contract for the both of us to work on. I can’t say much about it, but I’m quite excited to have the job. Me and Aidan will have quite a bit of work to do, but I’ve been developing my skills working on some smaller sites and I’m certain this one will be a great site when we finish. This will be my 4th “professional” backend to a website I’ll have done.

Aside from this website project I also have another commissioned project I will be working on with a masters student. I submit my proposal on Wednesday (though I already have the job) and I’ll be working on it into Mid-September.

These two projects combined with my (and Jaco’s) crossfiring website and my (but not Jaco’s) surrealist coop work term site, the Visual Resource Center should help build an impressive portfolio to attain future projects with.

Very odd how things work out, I mean, the moment I start developing sites with php and MySQL the contracts just keep rolling in. I got each one of these jobs through a different and completely unrelated source as well, so it’s really odd that they are all converging on this summer…

Hopefully this is just the beginning of contract work and hopefully I can do this instead of getting a “real” job (by real, I mean crappy.) I suppose as long as I produce quickly, and produce well I should be able to find more work. I’m building a library of code, so sites just keep getting quicker and nicer. I’m really excited about this one me and Aidan are working on. We’ll be doing something I haven’t done before: E-Commerce. It should be a neat little gallomp into the unknown, but I’ve never been one to worry about learning new things.

Keep it real,

M2tM

Yet, I have no castle or large domain at this moment in time… No great successes to reflect fondly on (at least not of such scale as I would like), and no massive web of contacts.

My blog stands despite this and I’m quite glad to have it.

I have Aidan to thank for setting me up with a blog of my very own. I suppose I should start by dazzling you all with my wit, but I have none to spare (it’s presently busy on other tasks) so I suppose I’ll have to drag you through some of my reflections all wit aside. Perhaps some form of introduction is due as well.

My name is Michael Robert Hamilton and I am (at least, as far as I know) a 20 year old Computer Science/Visual Arts student at the UofR. My aspirations would hopefully lead me to work in the games industry, a thankless profession of ruthless business, long hours, and relatively low pay for the work which is done. What drives me is the wish to create something wonderful, and I suppose that’s as good a reason as any (and better than most) to do something.

“What have you done so far?” You might ask. To answer that properly would take a fair bit of writing. I mean, it’s a really unfair and vague question which you’ve just asked me to answer. I would assume the answer you are looking for is short, concise, and simple to understand. Unfortunately I can’t provide you with that kind of answer.

I mean, if I were to ask what you have done so far (which I would never do, for it is a question which demands an awful lot of time and it is rude to demand time from strangers without giving something of value in return… I suppose it is even ruder to do so to friends) I’m certain you’d find it difficult to find where to begin. I mean, our lives are not as flat and simple as to answer such a broad question of origin and accomplishment in a paragraph, or even a novel. For in the telling of the tale, the answer itself must change as it is being told. We are living things as are our roots (not to suggest we are trees) and our perceptions. Since history is perceived in the present and we are constantly changing, it is my opinion that our history (and thus the answer to what we have done so far) is something which you cannot quite pin down. As with all things worth reflecting on, it is not a static and unchanging beast.

I won’t claim to have the skill to answer your question (you rude people), but I will certainly attempt to keep you up to date on the progress of that answer. Maybe I’ll come to meet my goals and maybe not. But I’ll certainly try. I want what I’ve done so far to help what I will do in the future. I guess that’s about as much as I can hope for.

So, I suppose that’s the aim of this blog. To help form an answer to the question of what I have done so far.

That doesn’t tell you much about me as a person (aside from the fact that I use too many words and over-analyze things.) But I hope there is plenty of time for me to tell you about myself in the near future. For now I suppose I’ll leave off on this note.

“You are only as wonderful as the people around you perceive you to be.”

But being wonderful is overrated and won’t bring you happiness, wealth, or enlightenment.