Blade Edge

Computer software | Video production | My life in general

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Blast From The Past – Part II

January 3rd, 2005 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So here we go again If you missed the first Blast From The Past, be sure to check it out!

And that brings us to the end of 2001. Wow. Okay I’ve just wasted a whole freaking hour on this – I’m gonna go play some GameCube. Enjoy.

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The 21st Century, version 5

January 2nd, 2005 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So happy new years to everyone and all.

I’m kinda excited about this year. I haven’t had a really big year since 2001 (when I joined GI, joined GDNet, wrote for a book, restarted the NJ IGDA chapter, joined the IGDA, and some other stuff) but I think this one will see some more personal milestones, especially in terms of GDNet and GI – I’m really excited in the direction both companies are moving. Plus I think my Blade Edge endeavor will finally start paying off.

So yea, I’m looking forward to this new year, and I hope I can look back on this entry and say “Gee how right I was”. We’ll see.

Anyways that’s my $.02 for the day I guess… Katana’s still chugging along (as always). I keep getting ppl asking me whether I’m going to release it when I’m finally done with it, and that’s still up in the air. If I do it’ll probably be LGPL or some sort, to give back to all the great libs I’m using in it. So write it down as a maybe for now. I still have to finish it after all!

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Yey Ebay

December 30th, 2004 · Personal, Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

I don’t really know why I’ve never used Ebay before. Thinking back, I can’t come up with any real good reason, except maybe it’s because I’ve always had this thing against used stuff. I can’t explain it really but buying a used item never really made sense to me. I don’t even know when I came to my senses either and realized that I didn’t care whether the item was used, as long as I paid less for it than I normally would. Perhaps the main thing about used items to me, actually, is the fact that I hate scuffed up and battered and scraped up (et al) stuff. When I buy something I usually take care of it properly – for instance I go nuts when my sisters leave one of my DVDs lying out atop the DVD player. For cripes sakes.

So I guess I’ve finally overcome my aversion somewhat, although I’m still looking very carefully at the items I’m buying to make sure they don’t look to bad. Today I got some good deals – bought that KDS electronic cd organizer I was asking abotu in the Lounge a few days ago for $5.50 (not counting S&H) – that’s way cheaper than the original $150 MSRP! I also bought another Belkin 4-port USB hub for $25 (total), which was a few bucks cheaper than the one I have now that I got from Circuit City. So yea. Yey Ebay!

In other news I also purchased my laptop today. I was going to wait until Jan but they had a special offer that ended today that gave me an upgrade to 512MB of RAM for free, which saved me a cool $100. It was a fiasco purchasing the damn thing tho – my parent’s credit cards both were denied by Sony’s site. I finally had to use my Mom’s debit card. Thank god my parents are so cool. I’m going to be paying $200-$300/mo on top of my rent for it. That’s about 2/3 my monthly income so not too bad.

On the programming side of things I’ve decided to strip out Katana’s message system and replace it with callbacks. It’ll still act like a message system, but instead of the messages being dispatched and then checked whenever, the message will invoke a function that’s handled immediatly. I hate to do this but it’s such a pain in the ass to debug the engine without spending time on building in tools to track the messages. It’ll be much easier when I can just step through everything rather than having to place a breakpoint in the message handler somwhere in order to “catch” the message when it’s finally handled. So it’s back to Enterprise Architect – I’m going to draw up a new set of UML diagrams to impliment this new system and code it tomorrow.

I’m starting to get real impatient with the time it’s taking me to do all this crap. This is my first real engine using advanced C++ techniques so I knew it would be a rocky road but I was hoping to be making games with it by now. Although I did take a long break from programming from around May to like October, so that accounts for a lot too. But still. Hmph. Ah well, at least I haven’t made any serious steps backwards or anything. Everything I’ve stripped out and replaced has been an improvement, and I’m always learning. I just hope by the time I’m actually done with this I’ll still wanna make games

So hopefully my new laptop will be here next week! YAY!!1

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Progress (?)

December 29th, 2004 · Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So it’s the middle of the week, which means vacation is pretty much half over, so I figured I might as well post an update.

Nothing major lately. I’ve been working on Katana for about 2-4 hours a day since Monday and made some good progress – the listbox widget is almost debugged finally. It’s been tougher than I thought. I figured since I don’t have to coach this week I’d have more time to program, but it seems that I can’t really prioritize all the other stuff I’m doing over something else, so instead of programming more, I’ve been programming a bit more while also doing a bit more of everything else I normally do. So, not the major time gains I was expecting but… what can you do huh? I’m spread pretty thin after all. Plus I got a slew of new GameCube games, like Need For Speed Underground 2, which is currently occupying a large slice of my time. It’s just too cool.

So that’s that for now. More to come.

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New laptop

December 26th, 2004 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So I finally approached my dad today about buying my new laptop. I was hoping I would have enough money to just buy it, but a few minor traffic tickets will quickly drain your account 😛 Can I help it if I drive really really fast? Ah well. Anyways my original intent in asking my dad was so that I could use his credit card to finance my purchase. I was planning on paying half up front to save myself from having to pay too much interest, and then paying my parents monthly the remainder of the cost. I have no credit (I just use a debit card) so that’s why I had to ask my parents. Turns out tho that my parents are actually owed credit from their credit card company, so they could buy the laptop without having to pay interest, so it would be like I was just borrowing money from them and paying them back. Cool! So they’ve agreed to help me out, mainly cause I never borrow money from them, this is pretty much the first time in my life.

I’m going to wait until the first week or so of Jan to purchase it, since I’m still spending money on personal xmas gifts thanks to tons of gift cards I got this holiday. I need to let my finances balance back out before I decide how to go about this so that I still have enough money left over for any emergencies (traffic tickets? *cough*)

I’m buying a Sony VAIO S series laptop. The first laptop I ever bought was a VAIO as well, and I haven’t had a single issue with it whatsoever. Plus I just like the way they look. Here are my main specs:

LCD Display:
13.3″ WXGA TFT with XBRITE LCD Technology and ATI Mobility RADEON 9700 Graphic Chipset
Processor:
Intel Pentium M Processor 735 (Processor speed 1.70A GHz, 2 MB L2 Cache, 400 MHz FSB)
Memory:
512 MB DDR-SDRAM (DDR333, 256 MBx2)
Hard Drive:
40 GB Hard Disk Drive
Wireless Lan:
Wireless LAN
Optical Drive:
CD-RW_DVD drive
Operating System:
Microsoft Windows XP Pro Edition SP2
Battery:
Lithium-ion Double Capacity Battery (BPL2)

That all comes to just under $2k.

I was originally planning on building a desktop and then getting another laptop in the spring, but that idea fell through when I realized I couldn’t take my current laptop to GDC with its cracked screen. So I’ve swapped my plans.

Anyways I’m psyched – can’t wait for next month, which luckily isn’t too far away now

Oh yea, didn’t go skiing today – tried waking up early to go but it wasn’t happening. Ah well. Still got lift tickets to burn so I’ll make it out sometime.

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Teh Loot!!1!11

December 25th, 2004 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well, Christmas is officially over, that is, if you consider the scope of Christmas to be that one single day on which Jesus Christ was born. But I consider that narrow-minded thinking these days. In the present age, Christmas isn’t over until you’ve spent all your gift cards! And judging by the size of my wallet, I think I can stretch out Christmas for another week or two. Wahoo!

Anyways today was awesome, of course. The routine for my family is that we open presents in the morning from 7-9am, then we head over to my grandmothers house 5 minutes away for breakfast with the rest of the family. Then it’s back to our house where all the family members meet up for presents from like 1-3pm. Then it’s over to my aunt’s and uncle’s about 10 minutes away for dinner around 6pm.

My oldest cousin (the only cousin older than me) announced today that she and her boyfriend were engaged. That was exciting. Her boyfriend Kip is a great guy, and to be honest I was kind of getting impatient myself as to how long they were going to drag out their relationship before tying the knot. Whoohoo! Wedding!

Anyways I got a nice haul this year:

Here’s the complete list:

  • Star Wars: Clone Wars Volume 5 (Dark Horse Comics)
  • Star Wars Encyclopedia (it’s old, but I’m a collector)
  • Wet Wipes travel pack (I have a funny family)
  • Target toiletries bag (seems one of my aunts got lazy this year – everyone got one)
  • DVD & Video Guide 2005
  • ACT II popcorn (looooove popcorn…)
  • LOTR 2005 mini calendar
  • $50 w/wallet
  • Various chocolate candies
  • A bunch of Atomic Fireballs
  • Lennox ornaments (family tradition – everyone gets em)
  • $100 origami kimono (my grandmother at work)
  • Nautica hat (I’m gonna use it when I’m on my uncle’s boat)
  • Huge peppermint stick
  • $100 ThinkGeek gift certificate (WHHOOOOOHOOO!)
  • Batteries and book light
  • The Day After Tomorrow Widescreen
  • Soul Caliber II
  • Pikmin
  • Slipper socks
  • Live Strong bracelet
  • Smartass traffic cone (see below)
  • Various clothing items

Here’s a closer look at the cone and kimono:

Welp, that’s the story. I have to get to sleep, hitting the slopes tomorrow for the first time this season. Psyched.

Peace.

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Rats, No Fighting

December 22nd, 2004 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well, I was hoping to have posted up pics and movies of me sword fighting with my buddies, but I still haven’t fixed my shinai and one of my friends had to work that night and my other friend hasn’t gotten a new shinai… so it seems we’re out of commission for a bit. Damn.

Anyways I’ve started getting gifts from my gymnastics students this week. it’s such a great job bonus . I’m nice an cozy right now under a fleece blanket one of my kids gave me. Besides that it’s mostly food and gift cards. Good stuff. Not as much loot this year as last year tho, so that kinda stinks.

I need to update my SDL libraries and dependencies. Such a pain in the ass, updating. I’ll get to it tomorrow, amongst some more last minute xmas shopping, the horrible procrastinator that I am.

Well… I still haven’t cleaned out my P22 since the last time I was at the range about a week or two ago, so I think I’m gonna do that before bed.

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Damn Straight

December 20th, 2004 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

What’s your name?

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Tis the Season to be Busy

December 18th, 2004 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So yea, things have been rather hectic lately with the onset of xmas (1 week!! whoo!!). Today I finished almost all my shopping. I’m getting a lot of gift cards this year, since I’m too lazy to look for individual gifts. Plus I just plain suck at finding things people like. Best to just give em cash or a gift card so they can go out and satisfy themselves.

I managed to program for like 5 hours this week, and that was just Wed night. I actually got Katana to compile clean again with the List Box widget code in place, so that was nice. The widget itself still needs to be debugged however.

I saw House of Flying Daggers friday night – what an awesome movie. Zhang Zhiyi is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. The movie had some awesome fight scenes, and as always the originality of the fighting was superb. My favorite was the bamboo forest. You’d immediatly think of the scene from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it wasn’t like that at all. The story was great too, with lots of twists, only all the twists happened within like the last 30 minutes of the movie, which was pretty crazy.

Oh yea, me and my friends started swordfighting again. We use bamboo training swords called Shinai and we pad up in hockey helmets and lacross/hockey gear and just go at each other. We broke/damaged two shinais that night alone, we were swinging so hard. I have a couple bruises and rashes. I had my digicam but totally forgot about it. I’ll definetly take pics and videos this tuesday when we fight again.

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Medieval Times

December 12th, 2004 · Personal

HEALTHY VS. UNHEALTHY EXERCISE

Why do you exercise? How do you know if you are engaging in healthy exercise, or unhealthy exercise?  Did you know that unhealthy exercise was even a thing???

There are lots of myths in our society about exercise-that you can never exercise too much, that you should only do a certain kind of workout or it doesn’t “count”, that exercise should be a priority above all else.  In an effort to encourage ourselves and others to engage in activity as part of a healthy lifestyle, we have WAY overcorrected and created a shame-based culture around exercise.  We feel ashamed that we’re not moving enough, and/or we create a rigid work-out routine and feel like a failure the moment we deviate from it, read more.

As a Licensed Professional Counselor-Supervisor and Certified Eating Disorder Specialist, I talk about exercise A LOT.  Over time, some themes have emerged in these discussions.

Unhealthy exercise tends to involve rules and rigidity, be joyless, shame-based, and shame inducing. Unhealthy relationships with exercise tend to not be sustainable over long periods of time.  We burn out.  We all know what happens then.  We end up feeling badly about ourselves, and the cycle begins again.

On the other hand, healthy exercise tends to be flexible and fulfilling.  It varies in the type of movement we are doing and the amount of time we are devoting to that activity.  This allows us to have a long-term relationship with movement, although our activity may look very different over time depending on our season of life.

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