My brain makes things explode.
Posts tagged blog
Work, Stress, and LCAR
Aug 27th
Aaaand, not surprisingly, here I am again, after paid little to no attention to my blog in gods know how long. Work’s been long and tiring recently, and it’s showing no signs of letting up any time soon – I suspect it’ll be a good while before I’m able to get a good amount of work on games done. It’s rather stressful, but at the same time, calming. Maybe it’s because I don’t have time to over-think life at the moment, but who knows.
Alright, so some nice things (and some not-so-nice things) have happened recently. Firstly, I’ve left KBFail for the umpteenth time, and I have no intention of going back. I’ve also switched (again) to using my iMac, and I’m hoping to stick with it this time around – it runs WoW decently enough, and I’ve found myself playing few games recently (Before it hits your mind, though I’m likely too late as it is, it is not because of WoW. I haven’t been playing that much, either), instead opting to do research, mentally prepare for my transition, trying to be a slightly more cheerful person, and working on development.
On the note of development, I’m still in a rut. I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to firmly put my mind to some tasks and force myself to push through and to apply myself to my goals – which is definitely an improvement. I’m starting to work out again, trying to get my body into better shape (again in preparation for my transition), eating healthier, and drinking less soda on the health side of things, while I’m trying to push through my distaste for my awful programmer art and trying to at least create semi-decent placeholders to allow myself to work on projects that I’ve been wanting to work on, such as LCAR.
And that brings me to the next topic: LCAR. The project is still very much in planning, and I’m considering taking it to another level. I’m currently considering the implications of investing in an iPad for development purposes – not only would it give me a better platform on which I could create programmer art (I may suck with a pen/paper, but I’m still better with it than with a mouse), but I have a new platform to target. I’m still working it out to try to determine whether or not I think it would be a worthwhile investment, and I’ll keep you posted on that. If I do get it, I intend to get the Torque engines targetting iOS (currently only iTGB, though iTGE is being worked on), and I intend to distribute LCAR on the iPad as well as my already-determined Mac and Windows releases. I think it’ll be pretty interesting, and we’ll have to see where it goes.
And for my last topic, I am going to be attending Casual Connect in Seattle, WA next year, mostly because I really want to meet the TorquePowered team. This is gonig to be my first time going out in public as.. well, me. I got some great encouragement from Mich Perry on the Torque team, and I’m confident that I, at the very least, am not going to have rotten fruit thrown at me for being what I am. At least, not from the Torque team – I can’t vouch for the rest of Seattle (:P). If anybody else is coming, or has suggestions for places to stay, I’m all ears. Looks like, on top of my development goals, I have a lot of work to do if I’m to be comfortable going out in public, and if I want to pass.
Wish me luck!
I’m not dead. I promise. So can I please eat your brains?
Mar 16th
Well, I haven’t exactly blogged much of anything in the past couple weeks, mostly because I’ve been side-tracked with a couple projects, such as the new website for the Keyboard-Failure IRC network (http://www.kbfail.net- or point your IRC client of choice to irc://irc.kbfail.net). You can see the new theme (which I think is a major improvement over the pink-background, black-text spawned by the lack of any desire to work to give KBFail a real theme/system. What can I say? We’re all lazy.) by going to the development page: http://minalien.dynalias.net/kbfail/. Guess when I get around to working on it, I’m going to install the newest Release Candidate of SMF for development/testing of the new site, and I’ll probably get around to rebuilding my old mod to integrate Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter (which I use on this blog) sometime soon, too. Gods, I wish SMF were object-oriented. :P
It seems that I do actually have somebody paying attention to the Direct3D Pong tutorial series I’ve been writing. I kind of shrugged off doing much more work on the project because I didn’t think anybody was bothering to read it, but a recent tweet shows me that there is at least one person reading it. That, for me, is plenty – so @Ogreman, you can look forward to the next tutorial in the series to come along (hopefully) by the end of this weekend.
I’ve been going through some.. personal issues. Anybody familiar with my past will probably know what I’m talking about, so I’ll just kinda leave the details at that. Suffice to say that life is a pain in the ass, but I’m (uncharacteristically) looking toward the brighter side of things and moving forward with life. On the lighter side of things, my plans to visit Erin in Phoenix are going through, so I’ll be blissfully free of work and hanging out with a friend. I’ve been acting very out-of-character for me, recently. I mean, social activity? Something seriously has to be wrong with me. I think I broke my head. D:
Recently renewed my subscription to Safari Books Online – I pay for the $40-ish unlimited subscription, but they’ve got a $20-ish (monthly) ten-books-per-month plan. Very useful, and I highly recommend it for anybody who deals with technology on a hobby basis. Large collection of full books on there, ready for you to read on your computer at home, or even in mobile-optimized forms on your iPhone or (if you’re one of the cool kids, like me) Android or other smartphone. Anyway, I’ve been reading up and studying for the CCNA certifications, which I’m hoping I will be able to take on-base without first going through the “NCO” courses. In the worst case scenario, I’ll just find somewhere closeby off-base, probably in Los Angeles, to take it on my own. They’ve got a full collection of Cisco networking books, programming (including game programming) books for a large selection of languages (Obj-C, C, C++, C#, Ruby, Java, HTML/XHTML, PHP, ASP.NET.. you name it, it’s there). For those who can afford it and will use it, it’s much cheaper than buying each of the books separately, and much more legal (and less of a pain in the ass for searching) than downloading the books on your favorite torrent client.
All Set
Dec 29th
Alright, so, got WordPress set up (again), got my GeSHi and OpenID plugins installed, got things set up to try to block spammy comments, and, most importantly, I found a pretty interesting theme for the blog. Now I just need to work on the TorqueScript language file for the GeSHi plugin (CodeColorer, specifically) and make sure my Gravatar is working properly, and everything should be green for me to start writing up some development tutorials.