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.

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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.

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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.

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So I'll keep this spoiler free. The new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, is coming out in '08. Sumer. What's interesting is the WB has been doing a lot of viral online marketing -- lots of little web sites (like Why So Serious) that drop clues leading to other sites which lead to things in real life hidden in a city, etc. They've gone all-out. What is more interesting, and the reason for this post, is they just rewarded those keeping up with everything.

In six IMAX theaters across the nation tonight they just showed the opening seven minutes of the film to a small (~200) group of people. I managed to be among them, along with Kiera. You don't see Batman, but you get to see the Joker. Obviously it's too early to tell, but from what you get to see I think they just might beat out Jack Nicholson's performance as the first Joker. Definitely darker, not so "wacky crazy uncle." Just a dark sense of humor and no regard for human lives. Which I'm all for.

The trailer is supposed to come out next week with I am Legend. Can't wait.

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Summer was great and fall has been pretty good so far too. Parties, vacations, turkey, new operating system, fun games. Overall not too shabby.

We had a Halloween party that went really well. The decorations turned out perfectly – lots of fake moss on the kitchen table and lots of spooky-looking candles (took a long time to burn them to look right). Even did the candle on the skull thing. We watched Dead Alive (zombies vs lawn mower — pure bad zombie movie bliss), played some DDR, and pumpkin bowled. Felicity and Ross even showed up.

My Aunt Susan owns a place up in Lake Placid, NY and let us stay there the first weekend in November. Nice little town on a beautiful lake. It was part of a lodge so there were amenities out the wazoo. Valet parking, game room in the basement (with a bowling alley), heated pool. Lots of wonderful restaurants around the place too, one of which served the best Pumpkin Spiced Ale I've ever tasted. Really we just tried to do as little as possible all weekend, which was great and just what we needed.

Thanksgiving was way too much food in one day. No offense to mum, but I'm glad she moved to Florida, I don't know how we would have dealt having to eat three Thanksgiving dinners. Two (Kiera's parents, Dad) is enough. Lots of tasties though so I guess I can't really complain about that.

Enough life-stuff though; there are two things that came out in the past few months which I feel are worth digressing about for a bit. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and Assassin's Creed...

Leopard

After a little over two years since the last Mac OS X release, Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) came out in October. Of course I had it the day it came out (yay to Apple's free same-day delivery). So what do I think of it? Certainly worth the upgrade.

The new Finder alone is what makes the upgrade worthwhile. While I'm not a big fan of the new dock or menubar (I guess they had to show off the spiffy new Core Animation somewhere, but still, meh) the Finder itself has finally gotten an overhaul and feels like a modern OS X application. It's responsive and doesn't hiccup when dealing with network shares like it used to. It can generate file-previews for almost any type now (which makes browsing a directory of videos very easy) and QuickLook is handy when one just wants to quickly see what is in a file. Coverflow is a bit flashy and I haven't found a use for it yet, but it's a cool way to browse through a directory of images on occasion.

Time Machine is, while not anything amazing, something I'm sure many people will come to forget how they lived without. Built-in easy to use backups - plug in an external hard drive, say yes to a dialog box, and you're done. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

Spotlight has been updated, or fixed, depending on how you look at it. It's safe to say this is what it should have been when it was first released. The speed has been improved so it's truly instantaneous (used to get sluggish when you had a lot of data). Plus it now acts as an application launcher; just type in the first few letters of the program you want to launch and hit enter - programs are the default "top result" when you search. I now see why QuickSilver users love their program.

And on top of all that, it's faster. Just like every other Mac OS X release before this one, the OS runs faster on the same hardware. It's not like Vista where your machine will probably run slower than it did with XP. They added lots of features, but they didn't add bloat, which is just as important as adding features.

So yeah, if you have a Mac, go get Leopard.

Assassin's Creed

Assassin's Creed finally came out. When I saw the first trailer for this last year it was the nail in the coffin and I finally got an Xbox 360 (Gears of War had just came out, so I figured why not). I'm a bit torn about how I feel about it. Overall I can safely say it's lots of fun but not without disappointment.

It's obvious that the game engine itself has gotten all the attention, all the polish. I love the control interface and it's a blast to just run around in the incredibly huge world and do random stuff. The combat system is very enjoyable too. It's not just graphics, far from it, it's the way you interact with the world. Walking through a crowd you'll try to gently push people out of the way, running though it you'll bump into one and possibly trip. It's one of the most realistic virtual worlds I've seen.

Unfortunately it seems like they didn't put much thought into the plot, specifically missions, in the game. It gets a bit repetitive: go to a new city, climb 10 or so high buildings to get a good view of the place, do 7 or so missions (which are always the same in each city – pickpocket some guy, beat him up, listen in on his conversation, or help some dumbass find some flags he's dropped) then go kill the "boss" for that area. Your boss tells you good job, you get a new weapon or ability, repeat.

Honestly if it weren't for the amazing interaction within the world the game wouldn't have much to offer. As it stands, as long as you enjoy just playing around in the game and you can look past the repetition, it's very enjoyable. Maybe Assassin's Creed 2, if they make it, will be better since they already have an amazing engine in place and they can focus on some variety in the plot.

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What I Did On My Summer Vacation, By Curtis.

Or something like that.

Indeed, as an adult (god, I'm old?) my definition of summer vacation isn't as well-defined as the little ones’, marked by the deadline of summer-reading requirements and summer vacation reports, but I'm still young enough (damn it!) to have that feeling that summer is over around the same time theirs is. The sight of those yellow moving roadblocks transporting them to school instills a feeling of ending in me.

Fortunately before this feeling got a hold in my mind, I managed to have a blast. Although frequently busy, I'd be willing to say this was a wonderful summer. A Best Summer, even.

Fast forwarding though some drama at the beginning of summer Kiera and I started dating. But you knew that already; I'm sure I already gushed about it way too much and you're tired of hearing it. "Yes, you're happy, that's nice" you say as you wish to stab me in the eye after hearing about it for the millionth time. Understandable and I'll spare your ear.

However after said unsaid drama things started to improve, dramatically. Trips to the beach (I still burn easily and get a farmer's tan without wearing a shirt, how the hell??) and nights of geekery occupied what time we had. Which wasn't much, considering we were preparing for Otakon. We had decided to go as Death and Dream from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. We stole Mike to be Destiny too. We weren't going to settle for half-arse costume though, which meant we spent most weekends for two months tracking down fabric and supplies for the costumes. She tacked most of the fabric-related work, and I tackled Destiny's book, a task taking much more time than we ever imagined (I am a perfectionist after all). We got the costumes done the week of the convention (see, Katie, it can be done!) and they were a hit. We got stopped no less than twenty-five times at the convention, and we only wore the costumes for one day. Other than that Otakon was pretty standard -- saw some cool costumes, watched some anime, generally dorked out with friends. A fun time was had by all.

After Otakon the shock came that I'd have my weekends and evenings free, no longer worrying about making kick-arse costumes. Diablo 2 came in to fill a good chunk of this time. I never played it back when it came out, and with Kiera being an old addict of it, I decided to pick up a legit copy off of Amazon and play online with her. It felt like playing World of Warcraft again, only in 2d top-down mode. A very odd feeling.

The end of August marked an event we had been waiting for since the beginning of summer -- PAX. PAX is a gaming convention in Seattle Washington started by the creators of the Penny Arcade online comic. It has basically replaced E3 as the biggest gaming convention in the states (30,000 people). And boy, it didn’t disappoint. I got to play Metroid Prime 3 there (it didn't come out until the Tuesday after), saw an exclusive demo of Assassin's Creed (the reason I bought an Xbox 360 last year, even though the game comes out this November), got to hear Will Wheaton speak, and went to an excellent concert Saturday night. While we were there we even did some touristy things like the Seattle Underground tour and dining in the Space Needle. That vacation was just what I needed.

Other highlights include some good movies such as Stardust, a film by Neil Gaiman, and Bourne Ultimatum, a dare-I-say-perfect ending to the trilogy. Transformers was the highlight in the category of crap -- it absolutely killed my childhood. Don't see it, don't even bother pirating it.

I finally got around to reading the Watchmen graphic novel. If you're into graphic novels you've probably read it, but just incase you're a loser like me here is a reminder.

I picked up Metroid Prime 3 on Tuesday. It's everything I've hoped for. The controls just feel right. I was intending to pick up BioShock because of all the fuss people are making over it (the demo was fun) but I hesitate now that I've played Metroid. I just don't want to use the dual analog control scheme ever again after this. It feels like I'm back on my computer using a keyboard/mouse, only now my computer is a Wii and my monitor is a nice TV. I can't speak to its length yet but it says I have 25% of the map explored and I've been playing for maybe eight hours or so. Not the 40hrs+ I got out of Zelda, but still solid for what's essentially an FPS. The plot is enough to hold it together, but it doesn't seem to be anything epic -- I'm pretty sure I know where it's going. However I don't feel insulted like I did with Gears of War, where I left the game thinking "plot, what plot?"

So yeah, wonderful summer.

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I’m now with a truly amazing woman: Kiera. She’s everything I’ve dreamed about but thought I’d never find.

I’m happier than I ever remember being.

No silly little post can do this feeling justice.

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As of today iTunes is now selling DRM free music. All of the music managed by EMI is being sold DRM free, and at a higher bitrate. It isn't all the music out there, but it's a start, and we need to show that it's a step in the right direction.

I know lots of people who have said they don't want to pay for music because it's laced with DRM or because it's low quality. They'd be more than happy to pay for music if they didn't have to worry about those. Guess what? They listened and what you want is here. Music with no DRM at basically CD quality (256 AAC format) is now available for purchase.

Time to put your money where your mouth is. Buying this DRM free music is the only way to show the RIAA that this is what we want and encourage the other labels to follow suit. I sure as hell intend to check and see if a track is DRM free on iTunes before I try to get it elsewhere from now on.

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No, this isn't a tribute to a Dave Matthews song I used to like in high school. As much as I wish this entry was driven by an overwhelming desire to be nostalgic and reminisce about my long-forgotten younger years it's not.

Instead I'll be ranting about how nothing good ever came out of Texas, and how one of said undesirable things thought it'd be a great idea to run a red light.

From what I can gather from his driving apparently red means go down there. Clearly we Yanks are backwards in our ways. He was in the left-hand turning lane which did not have the green seeing as opposing traffic (among this traffic was me) had the green. This didn't faze him though -- he was determined to get where he was going with the utmost efficiency, even if that meant disregarding our admittedly backwards and confusing traffic lights. Fortunately we both weren't going too fast, maybe 10mph each, but we were going fast enough to damage my car pretty well -- 4.4k in damage. It didn't look it, but there was some structural damage to the unibody, things had shifted a bit to the left.

He was driving a rental car from Budget. Uncharacteristically Budget's insurance (typically slow from what I've been told) has already accepted responsibility for everything, so I don't have to pay the deductible and all out of pocket. Quite a refreshing change from the normal horror stories I hear about insurance claims. Progressive has made the whole process as painless as possible. I'm impressed, and much like Amy, can now say I actually like my insurance company.

It's going to take two weeks total to fix my car -- being ready on the 21st of May. Quick, I suppose, for the amount of work they have to do, but still far too long to have to spend in a Chrysler Sebring. Especially with gas prices so high. Ugh.

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Also part of the problem is the site’s layout, I think. While I put a lot of time into it, and I still consider it a wonderful design (perhaps one of my best), it does have its problems. Most notable is the way I present entries. It isn’t your traditional blog-type web site with multiple recent entries on the front page, all easily readable for anyone who has missed out on an update or two. Instead with just the most recent entry on the front page, just a summary of said entry in fact, it feels as if I’m obligated to both update infrequently enough so people don’t miss an update and write nice long worth-while updates. I feel as if I shouldn’t just post quick links to other interesting sites as it’s a waste of space and would possibly prevent people from seeing the more important entry written days before that.

After a year and a half I think it’s time for a redesign. I’ve had the itch to do so for some time, and I think it’s about time I scratch it. I don’t know how long it will take me to make a new design, or even if it will be all-new or just trying to fix the problems with the current design. I just think something has to be done before I accidentally let this site wither away.

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