Blorb

Autotrace

2005-02-08T16:18:00.000-05:00

..::Web Interface to autotrace::..

If you ever find yourself working with vector graphics (ie Illustrator), this is a handy-dandy web-tool for you to check out. Hee hee!

The Real World Doesn't Use a Joystick

2005-01-12T11:26:00.000-05:00

Wired News: Real World Doesn't Use a Joystick

Interesting read. The article discusses how gamers think with their "gaming brain" in the "real world". I've certainly had that happen to me before. I remember one morning years ago, after having played a LOT of Half-Life, thinking that it was a beautiful day on my way to work, and that I should quicksave before something came along and ruined it. I felt a silly about it at the time, but I thought about it some more, and really it makes sense.

After I read a good book, especially if I've been reading for a couple of hours, my brain also gets into this residual contemplation mode, where I'm, for all intents and purposes, somewhere between the real world and the imaginary one. Eventually I transition fully, but there's definitely a bit of an overlap. Same thing can happen with a movie sometimes, though, because movies lack the interaction and length that books (reading does require a certain amount of imagination) and games have to offer, the duration is much shorter.

I think it's safe to say that this is a function of the way the brain learns things and analyzes the world. I'm sure that things have worked this way for a long time. What concerns me is that the Wired article doesn't take the thinking quite that far, and just leaves it at:

"Some people can't get their minds out of the gaming world."

I worry that some fool is going to come along and claim this as evidence that violent video games are turning children into killers that can't tell fantasy from reality. I think it's lack of parental responsibility that turns children into violent psychopaths, and that it's the assholes trying to play the blame game that can't tell fantasy from reality.

If only I could roll them up with my katamari... *glee*

Blogging Slacker

2005-01-11T17:35:00.000-05:00

Wow. Been so long. Where do I begin? Let's see...

Christmas was memorable. On the Wednesday before Christmas, a huge snowstorm hit Bloomington. We got about 2 feet of snow in two days. I thought it was kinda fun having that much snow. It was like having the town to ourselves, as everyone was already gone for the holidays. Very isolated. I don't think I could deal with that for too long, but for a few days, it was fun to pretend Erika and I were the only people left on earth.

Columbus, OH had it even worse. They got less snow, but also got a lot of ice. The Granville region (where Erika's family lives, just east of Columbus proper) got hit hard. Many people didn't have any electricity for a week because of all the downed trees. We went over there on Saturday, prepared to huddle for warmth. Luckily, Erika's aunt's power came back on that night, and we were able to stay somewhere with heat. Her mom's place didn't get juice until Monday. We hung out there until Tuesday and came back to Bloomington.

Played a lot of Sly Cooper 2 over the holidays. I think I played just a bit more than Erika did, but she did quite a few of the missions and was there to watch me do most of the rest. Very fun game. Good production values, just difficult enough to be fun without being frustrating. I felt kind of the same way about Price of Persia, though Sly 2 is far less linear. Anyway, I think we beat Sly 2 by the time the New Year rolled around.

New Year's pretty... low key. I got to see Christiane, which is always nice. A couple of people came over for New Year's Eve, and we all just kinda hung out.

Started back up at work the next week. It's definitely been fun. We've been doing a lot to get everything done and ready for a release. We keep crossing items off the final to-do list, but the damned thing is like a hydra!

In other news, my friends Jim and Robyn are getting married. Jim (finally!) proposed over the holiday season. They're having the ceremony in the Bahamas in April. Awesome. Hope Erika and I get to go! It's really up to the ticket prices at the moment.

Last bit of info: Appleseed is coming! Yay!!! Unfortunately, I don't know when it'll hit Bloomington. Looks like the nearest theater is in Chicago. Might need to road-trip.

Movies

2004-12-21T00:39:00.000-05:00

I've come to the conclusion that I'm not much of a movie fan any more. Sure, I enjoy an entertaining flick as much as the next guy. However, I have found that I can no longer watch than 2 movies a weekend. Maybe I've always been like that, but I know several people that seem capable of watching movies all day long. I just can't do it. It's not interactive enough. Video games have spoiled me good.

I hit my quota for the week tonight. Just got back from "A Series of Unfortunate Events". Pretty good. I was amused. We saw "Ocean's 12" last night. Also good, but in a very different way. Obviously. Movies I saw this year that I thought were really great:

The Incredibles (probably my favorite of the year)
Spider-Man 2
Shaun of the Dead
Farenheit 911
The Returner (from 2002, but it's awesome!)
Hero

Other notables include:

Win A Date With Tad Hamilton
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Hellboy (fun, but the ending was anti-climactic)
Shrek 2
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (go Emma Watson!)
Around the World in 80 Days
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Alien Vs Predator

I was just flipping through IMDB to see if there was anything I had forgotten, and there were quite a few that I would have preferred to remain blissfully ignorant of.

Oh well. I think the banana bread that Erika and I are making is almost done. Time to go sample.

Graduation

2004-12-18T00:40:00.000-05:00

Erika is graduating with a Masters from the IU School of Journalism. She undergoes commencement in about 10 hours. Her grandmother, aunt, and two cousins are here. Her mom, dad, and stepdad are due to arrive in the morning. Pretty unreal, but I'm proud of her. With any luck, I'll be able to stand up and applaud for her when they call her school. She dragged me to pilates class a couple of days ago. My hips are so sore that I can't stop complaining about it. I'm not meant to have muscles there. Feels like all I have are really angry nerve endings.

Work at the SCS continues apace. Apparently they've got me working on some of the most complicated pieces of the site. I'm not sure if Cliff and Karen are being sarcastic or not, but it's not so bad. And this is while I'm trying to reacquaint myself with the more complex aspects of HTML as well as learning the intricacies of PHP. The novelty of OS X is starting to wear off. It's sometimes a little difficult to toggle between windows in the same application. And when I have about a dozen BBEdit windows open with no quick way to switch between them, it becomes somewhat burdensome. Perhaps I'll figure out the necessary keyboard shortcuts with time, though it doesn't look to be the case.

Gaming-wise, I've been blowing a bit of time on America's Army. Still my favorite multiplayer game. I should really work on my sniper qualification. Played a few rounds of pistol match tonight and it was way fun. I've also been playing Spider-Man 2 on the Gamecube. I'm close to collecting all of the skyscraper tokens. 7 or 8 left to go! And I'm still working my way through Tales of Symphonia. It's a great anime-style RPG. Fun gameplay, nice story, and good character development. The only problem is you can't really play it in short bursts. Oh, and I think I may have hooked Erika's cousin Alan on Katamari Damacy. Another Namco game, this time on the PS2. The game is insane-o weird, but addictively fun. Only the Japanese could come up with something so outrageously bizarre.

What are my plans for New Year's?

Free the Mallocs!

2004-12-15T11:41:00.000-05:00

I was representing BASES at an IU Computer Science Career Fair once when I saw a student wearing a t-shirt that said "Free the Mallocs!" For the Luddites out there, "malloc" is a keyword in the C programming language that allows you to allocate memory for a chunk of data. You were supposed to call "free" when you were done with that piece of memory so that it wouldn't be floating out there wasting system resources and potentially corrupting other applications. Hence "free the mallocs", a good programming practice from back in the day. Apparently I was the only one to get that joke at the career fair.

At any rate, the reason this came up again was because my good friend Terry had a birthday last weekend, and she wanted people to get together and write letters to political prisoners on behalf of Amnesty International. So if you have a half an hour to an hour to spare, I encourage you to write one. They're supposed to be short. Less than a page, and there's boiler plate text for you to copy. It's not brain surgery.

Day 3 at work progresses. Things are going well. Cliff is back from New York, so I might actually have to start getting work done now. Owen Hall is a pretty old building, and I'm sitting right next to one of the old-school radiators. Old-school in the strictest sense of the word. I think that thing is older than I am. Cliff is installing Mandrake 10.1 on his new Athlon64 machine. I'm back and forth between updating an accounting report and trying to figure out how to customize OS X to its fullest extent. I like my new job. I like it a lot.

One more digression before I "open Apple"-tab back to work. Did any of you catch the Legend of EarthSea on the Sci-Fi channel? I thought it was alright, though I didn't catch the end of the second show. Danny Glover was pretty cool. Then again, I never read the books. Those books are one of Erika's favorites, and she was a little miffed that they altered the story as much as they did. On a somewhat related note, the new Battlestar Galactica series has seriously piqued my attention. I loved the original, and I'd like to see what they've done with the new version. I know that Starbuck is a girl now. Weird.

Ok. The end. Back to the grind.

Slackin'

2004-12-13T18:16:00.000-05:00

Just finished my first day at the SCS. I spent most of the day setting up accounts and trying to figure things out. I'm not quite sure what the procedure is for getting files out of CVS in order to test my changes. I was trying to mirror the site locally, but to no avail. Pieces of it were missing. I'm pretty sure I picked up the correct trees from CVS. I'd like to figure this out before Cliff gets back on Wednesday. Grrr.

My new work machine is pretty nifty though. Mac G5 on OS X Panther. Mmmm. Tasty. I think I have things twiddled to where I want them. It takes some getting used to, especially since, in the past month, I had already been working heavily with Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Mandrake Linux. Now I get to add OS X to my list.

As you can see, I didn't post at all last week. Spent all of my time at work trying to get ready to leave, and I know I still didn't get to finish everything. Hope Steve and the gang aren't too mad about that... I think I got the biggies. We had an inter-department party on Thursday. Ate lots of food and bowled all afternoon. I broke 100 on the second game! (Scored 120-something...) Went out for my last meal with the gang at the Chinese buffet on Friday. Spent just as much time saying goodbye as I did trying to get work done. I find that I miss everybody there already. (It's 18:15 and I'm in the new office all alone.)

Had plenty to blog about last week. Two of my friends broke up after a year and half of living together. They were getting pretty serious, too. Maybe too serious? Also, one of my friends at BASES "resigned" out of the blue on my last day of work. It all sounded a little fishy, as in we're not sure it was entirely voluntary. Hope he's alright.

With all of this stuff going on, what the heck was I doing? Well, I helped my cousin George put together his new motherboard, CPU, and cooling fan. I spent the rest of the time playing Temple of Elemental Evil and Vampire: Bloodlines. Both games are of somewhat dubious quality, but fun as hell. Damn you Troika!

Uh oh. Gotta go. Going to meet some folks for dinner to celebrate my first Monday back in town.

Gotta Go To Bed Earlier!

2004-12-03T02:49:00.000-05:00

I spent most of the night setting up Apache, MySQL, and PHP on my old P2-400. I really wish I could have done it through Linux instead of Windows 2000, but Mandrake just hasn't been acting that reliable.

For instance, I'm getting some serious weirdness with Firefox. If I run normally, it crashes when the JavaVM tries to start up. However, if I run Firefox as root, there's no problem. I checked the permissions, and they all seem good as far as I can tell. Grrr. One of these day's I'll move to Slackware and hopefully things will go better.

Apache was a breeze to set up. I had to do next to nothing to get it up and running. Just download and install. I think I tweaked the conf file to hook PHP up. Adding PHP to Apache wasn't too hard either, though it took a little more doing because I needed to set up php.ini. MySQL was giving me trouble, but I think it's because I don't know how to use it right. It's working now, though, for the most part. I'm using phpMyAdmin to set up MySQL. Having some weird issues with regards to logging in as root. Part of the problem was that I'm running MySQL 4.1, which uses a different password hashing algorithm than previous versions. But it's in a semi-precarious state of functional now.

Anyway, I gotta stop staying up until 3am playing on the computer. The kicker is, I'm not even playing any games! I poked around with Close Combat 2 for about 15 minutes tonight. I breezed through the tutorial and that was it. Before tonight, I haven't played a game since... Half-Life 2 on Sunday. I think something's wrong with me.

Well, time to go to bed.

Mini-Update / StumbleUpon

2004-12-01T02:45:00.000-05:00

I've been wasting my time all day with a new toy for the internet. See StumbleUpon. I've always wanted something like this for when the same three sites on the internet start to look really boring.

Long Time No Update

2004-11-29T23:07:00.000-05:00

Hmmm. Been a whole week since I've updated. What have I been up to?

After I got off of work on Tuesday, I went back to Bloomington and Erika made a delicious dinner for us both. Then we went over to Matt Hottell's and played Pirates of the Spanish Main with Matt, Julie, and Chris. A great game. Unfortunately, I had 4 too many beers and got mad at Erika because she started attacking me. Actually, everybody at the table came after me with their ships. All because I was the only one that picked three ships instead of two + crew. I won anyway, but it seemed like a hollow victory. I still feel really bad about yelling at Erika.

We went to Dallas for Thanksgiving on Wednesday morning. We shopped some and ate A LOT. So much for the exercise I was getting before I left! Erika and I both picked up a couple of video games to while away the time between meals. We got to go to Fry's, which was cool, but not as cool as I had remembered it. May have been because my previous visit there was cut short, or it might have been because it was the Friday after Thanksgiving, and everyone and their monkey's uncle were out shopping.

My mom was thinking about opening a new restaurant in Plano, but my dad talked her out of it. Not sure if that's good or bad. There was certainly quite a bit of risk involved, but my mom seemed to really want to do it.

Speaking of family, we need to get my brother Dave out of Texas. I think it's making him crazy. Help would be much appreciated.

We left the State of Oversized Churches early Saturday morning, and got back in time to lounge about all afternoon and digest the copious quantities of food we consumed. We also did a little Christmas shopping and put up the fake Christmas tree I've had for something like 7 or 8 years. Man, that thing's starting to look a little sparse.

On Sunday, Erika and I slept in, had a late breakfast, moped around some, had some leftovers for a small lunch, raided the Super Target, got some groceries, and then met up with Robin and Austin for dinner at the Great Wall. Where we again gorged ourselves on Chinese food.

Austin and I went over to Cliff's to play Halo 2 a bit after dinner. I have to admit, the game's pretty fun. I wish I could dual-wield in Half-Life 2. Cliff is trying to talk me into getting an Xbox, and it's almost working... Damn his persuasive arguments!

Alright. That's it for tonight. Hopefully a bit less empty fluff in the next update.

In Other News...

2004-11-22T20:34:00.000-05:00

I quit my job today.

I've been with ACNielsen BASES for the past six years, since I graduated from college. My last day is December 10th. After that, I'll be starting up with IU's School of Continuing Studies doing web development with my buddy Cliff.

There are several factors involved in my leaving BASES, but the two biggest reasons are because Erika had no job opportunities in Cincinnati, and we didn't think we really wanted to live in there long term.

It's a little... weird, quitting the first job I've ever had. I'll definitely miss some of the people I've worked with at BASES. Hopefully we'll be able to stay in touch somewhat. They should all get blogs too, so we can find out what's going on with them at our convenience.

Blogging is such a great technology for "pull" social interaction, as opposed to the "push" methodology. People can come here whenever they want to find out about my life. They don't have to wait for me to send them an e-mail or call them or something. And if they comment on a post, I can comment back or get in touch with them directly. (Am I pimping the comments a little too hard here? Be honest.)

Er. I digress.

Anyway, if you're reading this, don't forget to update your contacts list. My BASES email address will no longer work after the 10th. Well, it might, but I won't be getting any of the messages. You can reach me at my Gmail account from here on out.

p.s.(My wife is hot!)

p.p.s.(I think maybe I have Attention Deficit Disorder.)

Knowledge of Good and Evil

2004-11-22T19:30:00.000-05:00

The first in our Philosophy series...

What is Good, and what is Evil? Are there absolute definitions for these two terms? Can Good and Evil be generalized, or is it a cultural thing? Obviously morals are subjective, but there is definitely a general consensus. For example, murder is evil. Stealing is evil. Helping other people in need is good.

So I've come up with a General Theory of Morality and I hope to put it to the test here.

Good is defined here as the sacrifice of self for others in a community. Conversely, Evil is defined as the sacrifice of others in that community for one's self.

While most people look at Good and Evil as part of religion, I tried to approach this definition by looking at things that societies consider good and evil. From there, I looked at why a society would come to those conclusions. I think this theory generalizes it pretty well.

Over the course of the development of human society, we can look at morality as another set of laws governing social interaction. These rules were agreed upon by groups of people living together in order to overcome obstacles and grow the community.

As humanity evolved socially from families to tribes to towns to cities to nations, the people in those societies needed rules and re-assurances that people would act in a somewhat predictable manner. In other words, you needed to know that some stranger on the street is not going to want to club you over the head and take your stuff.

So Good came about as a way to encourage people to work together and advance their community. Evil is discouraged in turn because it would disrupt the community.

Let's take a simple case: Theft. People might try to justify it in different ways, but stealing is generally agreed upon as wrong. It's Evil. Why? Well, if stealing is not discouraged in a community, there is no trust within that community, which hampers social interaction within the group. Inevitably, the lack of trust would cause that community to fracture. Thus, in order for a group of people to advance their society, they need to discourage behavior contrary to its growth and encourage behavior that would further the culture.

[Blog getting long, so one last thing for now.]

It's important to note that even though this is a general theory of morality, it is still applied in a subjective, relative sense. For instance, I think it's safe to say that killing someone to take their belongings is Evil. However, killing someone to defend your country is not quite so clear cut. The distinction there really depends on how you define "community". If you define community as humanity in general, then you'd probably think that war is evil. If you define your community as your country, versus some other community, then you probably don't have much of a problem with war.

That's enough for now. I can take this further depending on comments...

Working the Weekend

2004-11-20T11:06:00.000-05:00

Meant to post something more than that test yesterday, but things got a smidgeon out of control at work and I was too tired by the time I finally made it back to Bloomington to do much. Went off to dinner at the Encore right after I got in to town. (Had some crazy tofu and noodle dish. Dug the tofu. Little unsure about the noodles.)

Erika, Ryan, Matt H and I decided that we'd run over to the Movie Gallery and rent a movie. I think we rented Saved and Bubba Ho-Tep, but we didn't watch either of them. Instead, Matt and I ran back to his place and picked up a bunch of his DVDs and brought them back to our place. We ended up watching HellBoy. Ryan hadn't seen it yet, and the rest of us enjoyed it enough to watch it again. I still think they rushed through the ending, making for an anti-climactic experience.

Well, I'm ostensibly testing a release for work over Citrix, but I'm feeling a bit less than motivated. After I finish testing the release, I'm supposed to help Erika clean, in preparation for the arrival of her brother and grandmother later today. They're bringing furniture. A shrunk. Yeah.

I'd better get cracking. Next post: Something Philosophical. Or a review of Half-Life 2.

This Is A Test

2004-11-19T17:06:00.000-05:00

This is a test of the Mail-to-Blogger Email Posting System. This is only
a test. In the event of an actual post, there would be something worth
reading here. But there's not. Move on.

Post II

2004-11-18T23:51:00.000-05:00

I am so prolific.

Peformed the aforementioned twiddling on my settings. Will probably change them again soon. I'm supposed to be finishing up an access control DLL for work. It'll be used in all of our apps to lock users out if they're running the wrong version. Pretty basic stuff, really. Well, except that I can't remember how to use data readers in VB.Net.

Obviously blogging is time much better spent. Wonder what Erika will think of me having a blog. Maybe she'll get one too.

In the meantime, check out my friend Rachel's blog. She's a far better writer, what with having a Ph. D in English and all.. SMRT.

---

Got a gmail account today. I've been wanting one for months now. A billion thanks to Matt Hottel for sending me the invite. Oh, the things I could do with a gig of mail storage. Actually, what interests me is not so much the high capacity as it is Google's alternative take on e-mail. Ought to be good. Time will tell.

A'ight. Back to the grind.

First Post!!

2004-11-18T23:15:00.000-05:00

W00t!

It's been a busy week, but I finally broke down and got myself a blog. Of course, this would be rather meaningless if no one ever read the blog. So if you're here, please post a comment on how to best pimp my new blog.

Going to go twiddle with the settings now. First thing any geek does with a new toy...