Doing Things Differently

For the last couple of days I’ve had a post ready to go well before it got posted, it was just setting in the scheduler and got published on the right day at 9am.  However, today is a little bit unorganized so I’m only writing this hours before it is to go live.

If you’ve never heard the song “Appreciation and the Bomb” by The Spill Canvas, then you probably didn’t get the title of this post.  The chorus is:

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that we never feel the heat until we get burned. But we try so hard not to die, sometimes we forget to appreciate life.

Those lyrics are true for the most part.  For many of us, we spend all of our days working at a job to make someone else rich, and then don’t have time for the good things in life.

Lately, I’ve been trying so hard to survive on what I have, that I’ve kind of thrown a few things to the wayside and they’ve come back to bite me pretty hard.  Sadly to say, as of right now, once I return home from PAX East, I probably won’t have a home to stay at.

The room mates and I had a discussion (over SMS messaging because, frankly, I haven’t been home) and we decided it was probably best if we just all went our own ways.  Chris and his fiancé will probably get a place of their own.  Al’s trying to decide whether he wants to go back to where he is from or stay in town.  Right now, I’m too busy with everything else happening I haven’t had much time to really decide what I want to do.

With a lot of things falling apart here, I’ve started to think more and more about moving out west and just starting a new life and new name for myself out in Vancouver.  It would probably take a lot of motivation for me to really just push and do it, but it might happen.  I still haven’t even looked at how much a place would cost or if I could even get a job there, but I’ve thought about the idea of moving there.

I wish I could really talk about many of the other things happening in my life, but with the way everything is going right now, I have to just keep things to myself for once.  Most of my close friends have heard bits and pieces, but I don’t think anyone has fully realized the full picture.

Back on the topic of PAX East, I’m still super excited about going.  DJDatz has looked into prices of vans for the trip, so that we all have a little more space, which is a good thing.  Tehflakes had his ticket purchased for him by Xiantayne which was nice.  Tehflakes still needs to go to the passport office tomorrow, so I hope he gets that done in time.  I’m thinking I may want to get my enhanced drivers license if I’m going to be the one driving across the border, but, unfortunately, I don’t want to buy a new license and then move a couple of weeks later.  That just doesn’t make any fiscal sense.

I’m really looking forward to getting some vacation and just time to myself sometime next month.  Unfortunately, the next day I’ll probably get rest is Family Day, which is the day in which NOTHING is open.  I hate that holiday.

If you have any suggestions for things to do on Family Day, please leave them in the comments.  I’m interested to see what weird things may come up.

Since a few months after graduating college, I’ve had to deal with a few people that are a little lacking in the logic department.  Don’t get me wrong, these may be people that are intelligent in a different sense, but not by any definition I would use.

Anyways, for the last 5 years I’ve kept my cool and just responded like a fairly normal person.  I say fairly because we all know that sometimes I’m not quite normal at all.  Recently, however, my email etiquette has gone out the window with these people and I’ve found myself using quotes from Yoda, Spock and others to help prove the point. 

Unfortunately, they don’t quite get it.

I figure, as long as I don’t start sending XKCD comics to them (like how to read a flow chart – in flow chart form) or anything crazy like that, I should be on the safe side, right?  I highly doubt they would even understand it even if I drew it out for them, but that is a risk I just don’t want to take.

If you think of anything else I should try in the email threads, let me know in the comments below.  Maybe some of the more satisfying ones will come in future emails.

For years now, I have been asked on several occasions to give a presentation I started writing several years ago entitled “5 Things Business Applications Could Learn from Video Games”, with samples written in C#.  Over the years this presentation has gone through many iterations, but still has not seen the light of day.  The reason?  I often write for myself, and don’t plan on these things being all that public.  But before I continue further, I want to go back and talk about the origins of this presentation.

Several years ago when I was in High School and I had to prove myself to some more senior students in my class, I worked on a few games as tinker projects.  At the time I was the junior competitor for all of our programming competitions, and my two senior partners usually had more say in the code included in the competition projects.  However, I was always allowed to review, refine and refactor the code to optimize it for the competition since that was my skill.  I was often left to the Quality Assurance part of the code, and was required to watch for any mistyped code and missing assignment operators or improper binary comparisons. 

Over the years, the more senior partner left our group, and we were left with only 2 members in our group.  My then senior partner was working on a 3D Game Engine with automatic terrain generation using height maps, and I was working on modifications to the Quake series of games.  At the time, Direct X was in its beta stages for its Visual Basic components and was being brought in to business applications, and I was working on a side project to assist some VB Developers in bringing some of their 2D projects into another dimension.  The program they were developing was based on AutoCAD which has its own programming language called LISP. 

This was where the presentation originated, and was designed for if I ever had to give a presentation for my Advanced C++ programming class.  Unfortunately, this class didn’t have such a presentation component and the slides were put away.  The first item I learned from Game Development was something I had also learned from AutoCAD – give your user a method for quick access to commands in a language they would understand.  I mean, since I was always living in a Command Line Interface (CLI) this came as a no brainer to me.  If I told a user that they could jump through 5 wizard screens or simply type in 1 command in regular English, which do you think they would do?

In the years past since this first item was entered into Powerpoint, several things have come and gone – Humanized’s Enso, Vista/Win7 Start Menu Search, Powershell, etc.  All these things have taken that thought and realized it.  However, many applications still lack these features.  I mean, wouldn’t you just love a bar at the top of Outlook which you could just type “Schedule Quality Assurance for 1 hour meeting on January 20 at 9 am RE: Quality Assurance Meeting” and then Outlook does the dirty work for you and just has you confirm it?

Unfortunately, many people don’t see the benefit in this and just disregard it.  It is this unenthused response that has stopped me from delivering any other part of the presentation.  Every now and then I look at my source slide set and code samples and update them for the latest technology, but I still haven’t ever delivered the presentation.

Each year I keep saying I’m going to give the presentation, but never do.  I think one day this presentation may actually see the light of day, but for now, it will remain in storage.

If you follow me on Twitter you may have recently seen a whole bunch of back and forth with my gaming friends about a geek’s paradise called PAX.  This year, the creators of this wonderful tradeshow have decided to grace the east coast with their presence.  This new addition makes it easier for those of us with limited budgets to travel to the conference without having to finance it like a house or a car.

In hearing everyone’s wishes to go this year, I decided to offer up my vehicle for the road trip, saving us all on travel costs.  Now, if anyone knows this group well, you would know there was one member of the group who will always say he wants to be included, but flakes out at the last minute.  Right now, he is on the fence about going, and I’m sure he’ll be missed if he doesn’t come.  I mean, we don’t really like making fun of him behind his back, and would much prefer that he was there to hear it in person

So far, I’m pretty much ready to go.  I ordered my ticket online and paid the extra for shipping cause I’m crazy like that.  Xiantayne has reserved a hotel room for us at the Sheraton Boston, which is right beside the conference center.  Keadin has arranged to stay at a different residence, probably because he is more likely to party harder than the rest of us.  (In comparison, we are much older than him and actually require sleep to function.  Well, most of us anyways.) DjDATZ is all prepped and keeps suggesting that we get a larger vehicle for the trip so that there is room for everyone.

There are still about 65 days before the conference, so who knows what will change in this time.  Will Xiantayne and Tehflakes get their passports in time?  Will Keadin do something stupid and end up in the hospital?  Will DjDATZ get his wish and we roll into PAX in an RV?  Only time will tell.

Keep checking back for updates on our PAX preparations, because I’m sure this tale will take some whacky turns.

This weekend a couple of my friends got into my car and went on a road trip to Hamilton to the house of Xiantayne and his family for a game of Epic Munchkin with the possibility of playing some Zombies!!! afterwards.

Oddly, getting to his house was the easiest part of the night. Even though I showed up a little late because I accidentally got off the 407 too soon and was stuck in slower traffic than I needed to be,  we weren’t too late.

After the initial introductions, we decided that we were going to play Munchkin with the 7(!!!) add on packs, which gave us way too many cards for only having 4 players.  I think it was a good idea that we didn’t add in Star Munchkin as well.

If you’ve ever played Munchkin with me, you know that there is a standard rule amongst all my friends – don’t let me succeed at anything I attempt.  What that means, is that no matter how well I play, you have to target me if you can.  If I have a piece of armor and you’re a thief – steal it.  Am I fighting a monster I’d easily stomp?  Increase its level as high as you can, or simply make me unable to fight it.

There is a twist to that rule, and that is that you also can’t trust me.  Do you need my help for any reason?  If you do, watch out.  I may be willing to help you, and you may actually need my help to defeat the monster or run away.  However, with the first rule in affect, others will try and screw us both up.  If you think you’re safe and you can get away and just leave me as a sacrifice, think again.  I often have a card or two up my sleeve to take anyone else down with me.

During the game, I somehow managed to get to level 5 with 4 bonus giving me the ability to fight monsters level 8 and below.  On the other hand, two of my competitors could face 3 Level 20 monsters and still get the Orc bonus of an extra level for beating the monsters by 10 points.  Yes, something similar to this did happen, and tons of treasure was passed around, but they made sure that I didn’t get any of it out of ‘Charity’.  Anyways, needless to say – I lost, badly.  Lucky Xiantayne won the game by a hair, with the luck of his orc abilities giving him the winning edge.

After Munchkin was all packed up, we got into a quick game of Zombies!!! and as we were all close to escaping through the Helipad, I threw my typical curveball and committed suicide to take out second place from winning (I, at the time, was 1 dice roll from winning).  However, that move turned for the worse when everybody died and ended up back at the starting point.  We then decided to just end the game early, and pack up for the night.

In the spirit of a geek fest, Xiantayne showed us his Zombie pictures from Hallowe’en and I have to say, his make-up was awesome.

After getting everything together, I noticed that my phone was completely dead.  Now, this normally wouldn’t be an issue, but we forgot our other GPS unit and were relying on the cell phones internal GPS to help us make sure we turned onto the correct street.  Sure enough, I missed the turn and we ended up getting lost in Hamilton.  Now, in most cities you could just turn around, get back to where you came from, and you’d be back on your way in no time.  However, Hamilton is not a regular city.  With one-way streets at almost every turn, we soon found ourselves getting farther and farther from our target location.  30 minutes of going around, over, under and beside our target highway, we finally got onto the highway… but in the wrong direction.  This meant I had to get off the highway, turn around, and get back on the right direction.  Again, this is Hamilton, where the one-way street roams free.  Lucky for us, we managed to get back on our proper route without any problems.

This little traffic mistake ended up costing us a little sleep at night, but we made it home without any other incident.  In the end, I learned a couple of key lessons.  Number 1 – your friends will always stab you in the front with a smile on their face.  Number 2 – just because you thought you could get there from here, doesn’t mean you can get back.

In the future, I think I’m going to suggest we don’t hold game nights in any city where it might take me 3 hours to get home.

Every year, I always state I’m going to blog more, and usually I start of doing well, but then I just stop due to lack of time in the day for it.

This time, I’m going at it a little differently.  This year, I have a netbook and an internet stick.

Now, I tend to have to write stuff professionally all the time, but I don’t usually get to put my personal touches into the writing.  This is one of the reasons I hate writing and reading so much, I don’t get to really do it the way I want to.  This blog is going to be a lot more ‘me’.

So, turn back every morning at 9am for a new blog post (they are on a timer, and I plan on having a few ready to go well before the publish date).  In order to protect my privacy a little, stories will probably be delayed a couple of days.

Let me know what stories you like, and those you don’t, cause I’d like to hear what you’re interested in.