Muted Vision

Well, I went to Baselan in Winnipeg this weekend. Had a great time, rode my pwnies into town, hit up the pubs, pugs, and scrims, rolled some noobs and had a big slice of nubcake for dessert. Good times.

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.

So my new laptop arrived today. It rocks hard. It’s a tablet convertible pc (Toshiba R25-S3503) and while it may not be the absolute fastest machine on the block, it is amazing for it’s drawing capabilities… It only has 256 levels of pressure sensitivity and no tilt recognition… Honestly I rarely use tilt with my 9×12 Intuous so that’s not a big deal, the pressure sensitivity is a little noticeable, and the barely perceptible lag in the cursor is there though it seems to accurately capture everything. The drawing in Open Canvas is lame because it seems not to pick up the line until a certain pressure threshold is achieved so we get a weird gap between one line and another… But I am happy to report that it works properly in Dragon Canvas so it isn’t a hardware issue.

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.

My father and I opened up my iPod today, banged it against things, disconnected everything and reconnected it. Then when it looked like it wasn’t going to work after we snapped it back together, it sat around for a minute and a half sulking (or whatever electronics do when they don’t work) and then it sprang to life. It has now successfully updated with all of my songs and plays them. I’m immensely happy… But I was worried for a while, it seemed like the hard drive was totally dead so let’s hope this lasts.

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.

Sometimes things happen in life that you just have to talk about, that’s part of the reason why I have this thoughtcast. When I have something I need to say, I can shout it out here and the world will know that I have said it. This is one of those times. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

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.

So I injured my knee(s) during the “Masochistic- possibly- death- inducing- trudge through Hell” as Drew so aptly named it. Masochistic is definitely a term that would describe the four day journey. We ended up hiking 25 kilometers for 12 hours through the hardest, roughest terrain of the trip on the last day, but that isn’t when my knee started hurting. Beginning of the second day, already a good distance in my knee started complaining and every step began to hurt. I’m not saying “oh, it was a little painful” I’m talking sharp, stabbing pain on every rough step and a constant dull ache otherwise. We hiked about 5 or 6 hours on the two days leading up to the last long day, so I ended up hiking almost 24 hours on an injured knee.

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 am writing to you (the world) again, rejoice!

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.

I was recently (as in just now) informed of a contest on live journal by Jamie (Jeff Cliff’s mate) which involves me posting anything I want about books. While I dislike live journal, there is a prize involved, and I am not one to turn down the opportunity at a book-related prize so I will participate anyway. I do, however, appreciate the fact that live journal makes use of the word “Journal” instead of the b word I dislike so much, but that’s about as far as my respect for that site goes. I liken it to “my space”, only with more emo and less dynamic content. There are some exceptions.

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.

I totally forgot I had read two other books in Vancouver. One of them belonged to Key and the other I left behind so it could be read.

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.

Many people who know me also know about my book collection. I like reading and collecting fantasy (any good books really, but primarily fantasy.) I generally read at least a few books a year. Some years I read a lot, other years maybe one or two books.

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.

“Happy birthday!” you say.

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.