Last night after the race was called I went to sleep genuinely proud of my country.
America, f*ck yeah
"Make sure you get out and vote tomorrow, especially you younger people. You guys are overwhelmingly Democratic (yay!) but you're also notoriously unreliable (boo!) so if you think you're going to be in line for a long time and you're going to get bored, bring a book, bring a DS, bring a PSP, bring a deck of cards, bring your cellphone and liveblog or Twitter the whole thing . . . just don't get out of line and don't leave without voting!"
I've already seen reports about lines that are 2+ hours long for early voters. I'm sure tomorrow is going to be a mess too. Whatever it takes, whoever you're voting for, make sure you stay in line and vote.
Star Wars: Force Unleashed has been hyped up something fierce over the last year. Impressive physics engine, great AI, destructible environments — it has it all. Plus you play as Vader's apprentice which means you've got all kinds of deliciously evil force powers. The game had so much going for it and it came so close to living up to the hype, so close.
Force Unleashed takes place between Episode 3 and Episode 4 when Vader is going around hunting down the last of the Jedi. The plot starts out simple: hunt down Jedi. But from there it evolves into something epic. This isn't some stand-alone story that really doesn't matter and would be better left untold (I'm looking at you, Clone Wars), no the plot is one of the strongest parts of the game and enough to make you put up with the shortfalls.
I think the issues I had with the game could be summed up with "it lacked polish." It really feels like the game needed to stay in development for two or three more months and needed (a lot) more play-testing. The physics engine sometimes backfires (things getting suck in walls, specifically things you needed) and the controls seemed to not always respond as I expected them to (block felt very sluggish, to such a degree I gave up on using it). Not to mention the Star Destroyer battle which is a massively poor-designed battle. Kiera can attest to the swear-fests that this game caused, it got messy.
However if you're willing to look pass the glitches the game is actually very enjoyable. Nothing tops playing a Sith-in-training running around and killing everyone in sight. The combos you can pull off are a lot of fun, and towards the end your force powers actually feel powerful (in the past Star Wars games force powers have frequently felt…neutered). Mind you, it takes a lot of work to look pass the glitches, but if you can you're in for a great ride. Certainly one of the best Star Wars games in years.
"Yes."
More details after I settle in after a nice long vacation.
Woah, yeah, new site design. I’ve been griping about the old design for some time and finally sat myself down and set a deadline to get a new design out. The old layout punished me for posting too often or for posts that were short, which lead me to put off posting until I had a lot to talk about, which lead to neglect (well that and my general laziness). It was good-looking, but didn't work so well as a blog. Live and learn.
Of course with a new design comes a new back-end. This one is written on the PHP framework I've spent the past year falling in love with: Code Igniter. Up until a week ago I going to use Chyrp but I found it’s documentation severely lacking. There was no way I’d complete the update to the new design by my self-imposed deadline of labor day.
With this new design I’ve switched to using MobileMe for my photo gallery. The interface is pretty slick and it’s a lot easier to manage since it’s integrated with iPhoto. The latest addition to my gallery will always appear on the front-page. Along with photo gallery updates I've tied my Google shared items feed into the sidebar on the front-page. Odds are the links I share will be pretty interesting, so check them out.
I decided, as many others have, not to go out of my way to support IE6. It’s six years old now and time for that thorn in every web-developer’s side to die. This means if you’re viewing this site in IE6 the header will look a bit messed up since it doesn’t support transparent PNGs properly. Update your browser and the header will look much better.
The new design, Canvas, is still a work in progress and I’ll be tweaking things over the next month or so, but I’d say this is pretty close to what I have in mind overall. Pardon the dust.
More often than not a film is hyped up before it is released so much that there is no way it can live up to expectations. I feared The Dark Knight was going to fall into this category — everyone was going on and on about how Heath Ledger was simply amazing. Of course my concern didn’t stop me from cyber-stalking this film for over a year.
Fortunately this film didn’t disappoint me at all, in fact it blew me away (as, judging from it’s box office performance, it did for many others). It wasn’t without flaws but it deserves all the praise it’s been getting. The Dark Knight wasn’t just a simple superhero movie that relied on fancy CGI and action scenes to distract the audience from a lack of any substance (in fact aside from Two-Face there was very minimal CGI). The characters were real, their decisions believable, and the themes running throughout the movie very serious. Never did the film really seem to drag on, never did the humor of the Joker distract from the seriously dark tone.
And let me tell you, seeing it on the IMAX was beautiful.
As a bonus the trailer for Watchmen was attached to The Dark Knight. I honestly think the trailer was just created to show fans of the original comic to have faith, that they aren’t going to screw it up (here’s looking at you, Transformers). Bonus points for the Smashing Pumpkins music. They’ll have to take some liberties if it is to work well as a movie, but so far the trailer has at least got me hyped for it, giving me something to look forward to now that The Dark Knight has been released.
Other media of note: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog. Joss Whedon, Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Houser), Nathan Fillian, and Felicia Day in a three-part mini-series that’s reminiscent of the Buffy Musical episode, but so much better. Worth a buy on iTunes, it really doesn’t get much better than this folks.
Of course I got the iPhone 3G, I am an Apple whore. Hardware-wise I’m very impressed — the 3G speeds are a welcome relief from the old EDGE network, and the GPS works very well. The software (v2.0) leaves a bit to be desired though, it really feels like it was really a beta release and the next version will iron out all the bugs. Bugs aside the Application Store for the phone has impressed me especially considering the great software out within the first month of it opening. Super Monkey Ball is a blast.
I started up D&D again with some friends from work. We ran a quick demo campaign to try out the new fourth edition and it went very well. They’ve certainly learned from the mistakes of 3.5 and streamlined a lot of things making the game much more fun with less book-searching for obscure rules. We’re starting a full campaign next week.
One week till Otakon an one month till vacation in South Carolina, woo.
When I started work for the NSSF the complexity of what I did was pretty simple — just dealing with a simple news web site and a few registration sites tailored to the three meets NSSF runs. This lead to our processes being just enough to "get the job done". Most people working with me from the foundation didn’t have experience with things like formal test procedures, requirements, etc, so they didn’t really see the benefit in these things. Also with the projects being relatively small it was hard to justify the overhead. A lack of process put extra stress on me though — frequent was the massive midnight change to something that had to go out tomorrow, and then the next-day cleanup because I didn’t have time to test it fully.
However one thing has begun to change all this — customers.
Now HeadCount (the meet registration system I developed for NSSF) has people using it besides just them. Where in the past they were willing to take some flack if I pushed out a change that caused some errors when people registered for NSSF’s own meets, now we have to answer to other people. Having to answer to other people who paid for your service changes things.
The change I’m implementing, and probably the most important, is how we test. I’m moving away from their old mentality of "yeah, I played around with it and it looks good, publish it" to a more formal process. Now we have a dedicated bug tracker, an SVN repository, and I’m working on test procedures that have to followed before we push anything out to the live server. It will add some more work for me and one or two people at NSSF, but in the end it’s worth it, and hell it should have been done years ago.
Although, I’m kind of happy that I didn’t try to do it earlier. Had I done it even a year or two ago I would have been stuck setting up a lot on my own. However now, thanks to the Web2.0/Ruby-on-Rails/omg-API rush, I’ve found two web-based solutions to take care of the larger things needed for this kind of process. Lighthouse is an excellent bug tracking application, and Beanstalk is a great SVN repository host with a web front-end. And of course thanks to web developers waking up and realizing APIs are good, the two applications can sync up and make my life even easier.
Coincidentally a few days back Scott Stevenson wrote about an upcoming SVN client app I hadn’t heard about, Versions. Right now the best SVN app on the mac is probably svnX. While it gets the job done, it’s klunky. It doesn’t really feel like a "real" mac application. Versions is the first mac SVN application that actually looks like it will make using SVN pleasant on the mac. Sounds like a beta should be out soon, I’m really forward to trying it out.
I think there is just something with this time of the year — it’s like the bad drivers come out in full force. This time last year a guy ran a red light and hit me. This year? Rear-ended by a Trailblazer — and he won.
I was driving down 202 during morning traffic last Wednesday, which with all the construction is pretty much stop-go for the first three miles. Traffic sped up as we passed the construction and we got up to maybe 20mph when we had to stop again; anyone who drives 202 in the morning knows the pattern, you always have to slow down again in the same spot (a spot of frequent accidents, I might add). Apparently the guy tailgating behind me in a Trailblazer didn’t know how this works cause he didn’t stop. Hit me full force, threw me forward knocking off my glasses and I just missed the steering wheel.
Once you’ve had one accident you don’t get as frazzled the next time (although I wish there wasn’t a next time). I was without injury so I did the insurance/police thing. Guy admitted fault and was cited for unsafe speeds or somesuch. Was told to take the car in for repairs at the local auto body shop.
Damage looked bad, but not that bad. I was able to drive it home and then to the auto body shop with no issue. I guessed maybe 6k of damage but there was no way it’d be totaled, blueblook had it worth ~15k still.
So I headed down to Florida for the weekend to visit my mom (a much-needed vacation I’ve had planned for a few months). Literally right when I got picked up at the airport I got a call from my Progressive rep saying the car was totaled...$14k+ of damage. Damn it!
Fortunately since I had paid off the loan very early and it held its value very well I got a good-sized check for it. I already had a good idea of what car I’d want; Acura discontinued the RSX last year in favor of the redesigned Honda Civic SI. Pretty much the same car as the RSX just a bit faster and not a hatch-back. So called (shameless plug) Jeff at Robert’s Honda in Downingtown who was great when Kiera got her car. Set up an appointment for the first thing when I was back in PA on Monday.
He gave me a great deal on the car and I drove it away Wednesday night. With the check from Progressive I had to finance very little, which makes me feel good. It’s going to take some getting used to (it’s a six-speed as opposed to the five-speeds I’ve been driving my whole life) but I’m already loving it. It has more power than the RSX did and it feels roomier. It’s a bit more sporty than my normal taste (shiny silver metal pedals, etc) but not too over-the-top. Lets just hope no one decides to hit me for a while...
So, that’s the new baby. Name to be determined. Not happy that the RSX is gone; I loved that car, but I can’t complain about the new one — it’s great.
Ah, end of the year. Obligatory post of reflection time? You bet!
I’ll sum the year up as "win". "Drama" comes in a distant second. Saved a damsel in distress, got more time to video game (finally getting around to playing Diablo 2, Half Life 2), had a kick-ass (but short) vacation in New York, and got into Code Igniter (PHP framework) that’s made web programming fun again.
I got back into working for the NSSF towards the end of the year, and the first fruit of my labor was finished by the end of December. Head Count is the culmination of writing online registration pages for the NSSF since college. Head Count eliminates the need for me to re-code their online registration every year and allows them to market this service to people beyond themselves, without my intervention. Basically it allows meet directors to set up a meet on their own and automate online entries — and it’s highly customizable. I used Code Igniter for it, meaning it’s a nice and clean MVC set up. Two months, and a lot of work, but it was worth it.
Work at ’Heed has been wonderful, although busy at times. I’ve finally been given roles there that allow me to show what I can do, as opposed to just being a generic low-level code monkey. I’ve even been considered for positions well beyond what I should be doing for my age/length with company (I turned them down since I want to keep coding and not do management, but cool none-the-less).
Continuing with the win, Kiera got me a wonderful xmas present - a canvas print of Samus (the main character from the Metroid video game series). It’s hanging next to our computers in the bedroom, and will look wonderful in the new office when we move (we’ve decided to be dorks and populate it with a tasteful amount of video-game and anime decorations).
I also got the first two issues of The Absolute Sandman. It’s a reissue of the Sandman series, there will be four issues total. Unlike the last run it isn’t just a repacking - they’ve gone back and massively touched up all of the pages brining new life to the comic. See halfway down the page here.
My only new years resolution for this year: become a better programmer. Don’t get me wrong, I know my stuff, but I have plenty of room to grow and more languages I’d like to get into. Something like learning (and using) Python this year would be great.
