A beautiful thing just happened...




I'm working on my game, and was getting to the point where I wanted to work on making more rooms. I decided I'd better take a closer look at the "source material", so I fired up Applewin, my trustly Apple ][+ emulator, and launched Beyond Castle Wolfenstein.

That's a damn fun game. I played a little bit of it, showing my pass to unsuspecting Nazi guards and then shooting them in the back as they turned away. When rooms were quiet, I'd copy the layout into my own game.

At some point I was switching back and forth between the games, and my mind got a little confused, because when I moved into the next room in MY game, my mind said "Ok, be ready to shoot any bad guys you see." Which is silly, since I don't even have the concept of an enemy in my game yet. The fact that I kind of tricked my brain I guess means that my game doesn't completely suck. It was neat. We'll see how it turns out, but I'm making good progress every day.

In other news, we've got a packed weekend and it's only Wednesday! Dinner and hopefully going out with people on Friday night. Saturday, we're going to help my boy Baditude move into his new pad. Saturday night we're going to dinner and a play with my parents. Sunday we're going to a workboy BBQ, and then ANOTHER BBQ hosted by friends of Diana family. Lookin' forward to it.

Diana's school started. It's exciting to hear about all the new kids and stuff. She's going to have a ton of work, but she seems really fired up so far on how she's been reaching her kids. I'm proud of her. Just hope she doesn't flame out...

Within the past week, I think I've heard 3 or 4 references to "Soylent Green". I didn't know what it was until recently, but http://en.wikipedia.com hooked me up with the info. I'm becoming a big fan of that site. For those you haven't heard of it, it's an on online reference, like an encyclopedia, but the content is generated by users. If you browse an article and find something that is incorrect or missing, you can add it yourself (it somehow gets reviewed by peers, I'm assuming). Pretty neat.

It's a good example of a concept that was written about in Wired magazine recently. The article was basically about the birth of the web. At the beginning, it was a big question of who was going to basically be "in charge" of presenting information to the consumer-based audience. The existing paradigm was that of cable television, and the thought was the the internet was going to be like a cable company, with a fat provider on one end, feeding thousands of channels to users. But with the advent of browsers, it turned the public from consumers of television to producers of information, which is really a huge leap. All of a sudden, we have people writing down and posting all sorts of information collectively, for no other reason than to be helpful to others. If you can look past the spam and adware and porn and viruses and hackers, the Internet is really a good thing.

Anyhoo.

The other night, I was making myself a drink of vanilla vodka on the rocks. I filled my glass with ice, and then filled it most of the way with vodka. I noticed there was only a tiny bit of vodka left, so I poured the rest of it in. I guess there was more than I thought, 'cause I found myself with a glass filled all the way to the brim, so I ended up dumping some out. When Diana asked what I was doing, I explained that because I drink it slow, I didn't want the ice to melt and cause my drink to overflow. She immediately laughed a little laugh and reminded me why I need not worry about it. THIS is why I love her.

I've been working on some game-programming stuff lately. It's been a ton of fun. The driving force is re-creating the original Castle Wolfenstein (not the 3D one, but the original for the Apple ][), but I'm going to add my own twists to it, if possible. Right now, I have an animated character running around a (randomly generated) maze of rooms (each room is one full screen, and exiting north, south, east, or west loads a new room). Not much, but I've spent a lot of time cleaning up the code so that it's a good foundation to be added to.

The hardest part of game-programming for me personally isn't learning new technology, but just having the patience to spend months on a single project. I recently checked out my old hard drive and found about half-a-dozen started projects (including the Wolfenstein one). So, we'll see how it goes.

SYL

Somehow, as Diana is working on my computer, I've found myself watching "Tommy Lee Goest to College" for the last hour. It's a show about Tommy Lee going and living the college life at the University of Nebraska.

On the one hand, it's kind of entertaining. Tommy seems like a really nice, honest, relatively likeable guy (wife-beating notwithstanding, I suppose). So on the one hand, it's kind of fun to watch him struggle through the same things we had to struggle through when we were going through college.

On the other hand, and I'm just realizing this now, it's really, really sad. Poor Tommy has had a pretty solid life of drugs and booze, and watching him struggle through some pretty basic concepts (I'm sorry, but atomic number and weight, protons and neutrons, etc, is really only one step up from 1+1 after it's been explained once) is pretty sad.

He's also trying out for the drumline, and failing miserably (I guess the 4-drum marching thing isn't the same as a kit), and showing a little of his rage. And I realized just how much he's being set up for failure. It's really just not fair, and at some point, it just must get humiliating (since he really seems to be trying, and eager to learn).

Poor guy.

Maybe only slightly less pathetic than me watching it for the last hour, I spose.

While I love the performance of my cable provider (Adelphia), I'm a little disappointed that they only provide 10 megs of webspace (which you can get for free from geocities and other free hosting sites). Also, in spite of never using my adelphia email address, I get a ton of spam on it. I wonder if they do any spam blocking at all.

In any case, I found the last three chess games I emailed to myself, and watched through 'em. I think they all end in really weird checkmates. So I offer them here for your review:

Game1

Game2

Game3


Not a whole lot of news. I put bigger Kauai pictures up (at the expense of the Montana pictures). They are here. Some of the full sized ones are missing because Adelphia seems to cut off my FTP sessions intermittently and the transfers fail. Or maybe it's an XP SP2 thing. Anyhoo.

Work is going well. Diana is gearing up for school, having pre-school meetings and stuff all week. We're back in the market for landscapers, if anyone out there knows one, or even someone who had landscaping done. The first draft of plans we got done by our ex-landscape designer were a joke. Maybe I'll take a picture and post 'em. The short story is that we gave her over a month to draw up plans for us, so that we'd have 'em by the time we went on vacation so we could review them then. She promised over and over that they'd be done. But then flaked on a number of things, like measuring the property, and by the time our deadline rolled around, she gave us plans that were clearly drawn up in half an hour before the meeting. Not only were there big blank white places in the design ("What goes here?" asked Diana. "Well, you could put some bushes or a tree or something," she said, drawing some scribbles in the white space), but what was there were things that we really didn't like (like a low gate across our driveway that opened and closed when you drove in and out.

So, back to the drawing board. Diana nor I really know how to even get started hiring people to do stuff like that for us, so if you have any ideas, please let me know. One good idea we got was to go to model homes and pick up pamphlets from the landscapers that worked there. That seemed like a good idea. I guess other than that, it's find friends with recommendations, or let our fingers do the walking or something.

Work calls.

Two points of note.

Remember I posted about the young lady who veered into my lane and got really pissed at me? I wrote an email to the San Diego transit people. I never got a response back from them, but when I drove to work this morning, I noticed there is a fresh, fat white line running the length of the turn, clearly defining the lanes all the way through the turn. I'll go ahead and take credit for it. I rule!

On the way back from Hawaii, very early on Tuesday morning (like, 4am), we were closing in on California when the captain came on. He apoligized for waking us up, but wanted to point out that out the right side of the plane, you could see the space shuttle re-entering the atmosphere. The fucking Space Shuttle! Diana and I were on the left side of the plane, and since I'd previously woken up the lady on the aisle to go to the bathroom, for some reason I didn't want to bother her again to get up and go to the other side of the plane. So we didn't see it.

Want to guess what the biggest regret in my life is? That.

Shitballs.

So, back from Kauai.

All in all, we had a really good time. We had a couple of days doing active stuff, like hiking, tubing, zip-lining and site-seeing, and the rest of the days were spent on various beaches, snorkling and book-reading and napping. It was all really great.

Some highlights for me were swimming with sea turtles. We overheard some people saying they were out feeding, and we headed out. Soon enough, we came upon a group of about 10 turtles, ranging in size from two to five feet long (pretty big!) They looked so old and peaceful as they munched on the seagrass.

One of the first days there we did a tubing adventure. There are old aquaducts that have been dug down the gentle slope of the mountains that feed water to fields below. We joined a big group of people in an adventure tour thing, and got driven up to the top, hopped in our tubes, and lazed our way down. The waterway passed through a series of tunnels, the smallest being a few hundred yards, the longest was 0.6 miles. Each tunnel was about 10 feet wide, and the roof was probably only 3-5 feet overhead, so it was pretty cramped. It was fun.

The latter part of the trip we shared a house rented by Diana's family on the north shore, walking distance from a nice beach and snorkling spot. It was fun to be on vacation with her family, and I'm especially happy to hang out a little more with Alicia's boyfriend David before he heads back to Sweden.

I took a lot of pictures, and will get those online soon.

Some points of note:

I love my new camera! It's so small that it was no problem to take anywhere. I'm glad I bought a 1 gig card, as I could go for a week taking lots of high-res, high-quality (compression wise, not artistic wise :) pictures, and not worry about filling up the card. Lots of people get upset when they buy something that doesn't work well. I find myself getting oppositely happy when I buy something that works well for me. And here I am.

Now that I'm taking more pictures, I'm looking for webspace. With Yahoo and Google throwing me email storage like it's free, I expected to find somewhere I could host files for free. There are some picture-sharing sites, but I was hoping for a little more general purpose area. I haven't found any good free online options. I don’t think I'm interested in doing my own hosting on my home computer for a variety of reasons. Paying for webspace might be the best option. Still searching for a happy place.

I read "Under the Banner of Heaven" over my vacation. As the afterword notes, the book began as a look into religious fundamentalism and fanaticism in general, but morphed into a looking into specifically Mormon fundamentalism, with specific note as to how this has been a key factor in some high-profile crimes (the Elizabeth Smart abduction, as well as the Lafferty brothers murders), as well as reconciling Joseph Smith's (and/or God's) view of polygamy vs. the United States governments view (which seems to be a major reason for the split of many fundamentalists from the main faith). In order to get a better view into the orgins of Mormon fundamentalist factions, some history of the Mormon church and it's early leaders is presented (which was then hotly debated in the eplilogue, where the author prints an official Church reaction to the book before (the first revision) came out, as well as the authors response to the Church response). I was pretty enthralled by the book, especially knowing a few Mormons. I wish I'd read it before driving from Page to Las Vegas, as that road winds through some sort of hotbed of polygamist country.

From my limited view of Mormonism (which consists solely of anecdotes and urban legends, a very brief perusal of the Book of Mormon, reading "Under the Banner of Heaven", and years of friendship and aquantainceship with a few Mormans), I've come to the conclusion that I'm *highly* skeptical of the revelations of Joseph Smith and the basis of the religion. I don’t see how anyone buys into it (or many other religions/beliefs, for that matter).

HOWEVER, I'm certainly not prepared to argue meaningfully against it, considering its current popularity, it's obviously exploding growth and my own lack or knowledge. In addition, I suppose there are things that I believe in my own version of Faith, and far be it from me to deny others their beliefs what I certainly can't explain my own. I do know that, without exception, all the Mormons I've ever known have been Good People: honest, friendly, hard working and dependable. To paraphrase some quote in Under the Banner, I think the world would be a much better place with more Mormons.... just without the Mormonism. :)

And that's all I have to say about that.

With that book finished, I started re-reading the "Song of Fire and Ice" series with book one, "A Game of Thrones". It's my second reading, and I am so damn fired up on this book it's silly. I absolutely love it. For those not in the know, it's a story about political power struggles in a land and time of kings and knights and legends. There are some elements of Tolkein-esque magic and monsters, but the vast bulk of the story is about families and alliances, backstabbing, power-struggles and so forth. As I said, I'm enjoying it more my second time reading through it, simply because there are so many characters and interweaving plotlines... the first time through was great, but a little overwhelming. Each chapter is told from the point of view of one of eight major characters, who share their own points of view on multiple story arcs, with dozens of other major and minor characters. It sounds a little mind-boggling, and it is, to a certain degree, but it also is skillfully done and works well. Book four (of a reported six or seven total volumes) is coming out soon, so I'm going to try to power through one-three as fast as I can.

I don’t remember what else I wanted to write about, so I'm done.