More Random Thoughts & Trivia : [main] [2005] [2004] [2003] [earlier]

As if I wasn't busy enough with Galacticus and some other secret projects!

For years I have toyed with the idea of building an electric car (or converting an older gas powered sedan) for the purpose of having a cheap commuter vehicle that is fun to own/drive and doesn't make me look like a dweeb (for example, an old diesel subaru converted to bio-diesel would, in my opinion, make anyone look like a dweeb). Sure, I could go out and buy a Prius or a Lexus Hybrid, and I did consider that, but really what fun is that (besides I don't really need a 5th full size car)?

Recently I dug up some old books that I had bought detailing custom car projects and conversions and became interested in the concept once again. At this point I began talking to mechanics and auto body people that I know in the area to find out who could help design and build this car. The response has been a lot more positive than I expected and I already have excellent leads - people that can work on the frame and body and some other things I am not comfortable doing myself.

I have an project page up with some early design notes, inspirational pics, etc. Check it out!

WHOOO! There is a NEW Rammstein album coming out soon. I have been sooooo addicted to Rammstein lately. I had always enjoyed the band in the past but actually what brought on the current "listen to them daily" addiction was staying up really late one Saturday night (actually more like early Sunday morning) and seeing some of the videos on this public access heavy metal show. First stop after waking up was the local record store to get the latest albums.

Anyway, be sure and check out the first video released from the album, Benzin! Oh, here are some free old videos. And if you are wondering what the hell the songs are about (since it's all in German) then this site has some pretty good translations.

Good question from a reader.

Well, at my recent class reunion one of my classmates seemed to recall that I had played Dungeons and Dragons™ way back then. I barely remembered that myself (of course I *remember* it as I have a near photographic memory, by 'barely remembered' I mean the information was neatly filed away and ignored :) ) as I am more of a sci-fi fan than a fantasy nut. Once I got home I went to the storage unit, found the box marked 'gaming material' and dug out my old manuals, figures, dice, and reference materials. The kids love the stuff so now I am thinking about running some simple adventures for them. 'Tori is totally into the game, Victor, well, at 12 you would *think* he would like it but nope, some Yu-gi-oooo thing is more interesting, maybe after playing some he'll be more interested (since he is at least interested enough to try). :)

Been thinking about which adventure to run these past couple of weeks and I think that starting them with Basic D&D Keep on the Borderlands would be best. It is after all that very game I started with when I was like 12 and it spawned years of imagination and creative thinking (albeit in the sci-fi realm, but that was the start).

At least I am pretty sure they are. To normal people they look like normal heavy duty leather work gloves, but I tested them today and I can still type. Barely. I was performing needed repairs to a deck and on the final board there were several stripped screws. What to do? Why get a mallet and chisel of course. Striking with the force to snap a 4" deck screw the first several yielded quickly. Then, on the second to last screw... WHACK! Mallet slipped off the chisel head and landed right on my thumb! It (my thumb) is now 3 times bigger than it should be, but thanks to my +2 Gauntlets of Arcadius it's not broken.

And I can still type.

Barely.

And it's this really cool Purple color.

In Purple I am stunning!

Now that I increased the hits to my site from cia.gov by 178% I should explain! It's not a real terrorist school, it's a school of terrorist fish. I've had this fish tank for a few years now and I thought the platy fish and tetra's were rather, well, boring. So I went out and purchased some Zebra Danoi's to "kick it up a notch", BAM!

The ZD's immediately formed a terrorist youth gang and they are swimming around herding fish that are 20 times their size (the ZD's are very young, about 1/6th of an inch long, while some of the other fish are a couple inches long, 2 years old, and super fat from overfeeding).

At the same time I purchased some Blue and Gold platy's hoping they will breed with the Red ones I already have (and make like Green or Purple or Orange fishies). Live bearer fish are sooooooo cool. :)

Had my 20 year class reunion this past Saturday. It turned out to be pretty damn fun! :) I met up with a bunch of folks I had not seen since high school, and some that I had not seen since college. I noticed a couple of funny things about the whole thing. It appeared that of the people attending I had the second longest hair (counting women and men), the longest hair belonged to my wife. I am no tech-geek, but I also noticed that most people there are not that into technology (this is NOT a bad thing), it seemed that many classmates had chosen careers that were not particularly technical in nature (beyond using cell phones or the internet), this included many of my classmates from college placement computer science, etc.

Oh, I had been threatening to shave all my hair off after the reunion. Well. Family and friends have talked me out of doing that. For now. Next time I'll just do it without telling anyone first, so *beware* you may just see me arriving at a meeting spear-bald and wearing a 3-piece suit (oh, the horror!!!). ;-)

I'm sure it's a temporary feeling. I have a 20 year high school reunion this weekend, so I am in this business meeting today and someone asks if I going (chatty smalltalk, and they didn't specify "20 year" reunion). Anyway this other woman in the room decides to participate in the smalltalk and says "Oh, I have my 10 year reunion next year too, what does it feel like to be out of school that long?"

I kinda stare at the woman for a moment, probably an icy stare, and respond "It's actually my 20 year reunion."

She blinks and says "Oh my GOD! I didn't know you were so *OLD*!"

Like, I guess I should be happy that this 27-ish woman *thought* I was her age, but something about it just makes me feel old. I think I need a fast motorcycle and a new mistress. Yeah, that is just the thing to help me feel better! :-)

I found the motorcycle I want, well, a three-wheeler with two seats (gotta plan for that future mistress y'know)! This T-Rex is soooooo cool.

I've been totally addicted to this new site where people post stories about how they got fired/laid off. It's called simply fired and is an affiliate with some new job search site. I'm not even sure why I am reading so many of the stories there, they are all pretty pathetic and many are the same, I guess I just have this dream to get laid off someday (preferably when the weather is nice) and have some time off. :) Of course if my current plan (WARPED STUDIOS) works out I won't need to be laid off since I will effectively be 'retired' from working for others.

Well, we're back! Kids had a great time, competition was tough and most of the Portland team ranked 3rd or lower in their events (but mostly the Portland skaters still placed :) ).

We did the tourist thing while in Anaheim, hitting Knott's Berry Farm, DisneyLand, AdventureCity and then stopping at Universal Studio's on the way out. We'll be posting a whole trip page soon!

BTW, it's going to be awhile until I get to many emails, I covered the stuff forwarded to my sidekick pretty well during the trip but 2 weeks away has given me a backlog of nearly 1,200 e-mail messages between this site, warped, and for-the-future to read/respond to.

The kids are getting excited about their upcoming trip to Worlds! This time both Tori and Victor are skating in various events *and* there are other people from our home rink going along! Should be a pretty cool trip, last year we went to Worlds in Minneapolis and that was a great trip. This year we plan on driving rather than taking the train so we can take extra days to explore Reno/Carson City and a few other places with the kids, plus my mother-in-law will get a chance to see different parts of the country. I'll keep everyone posted on the number of speeding tickets I get with our new black sports sedan. ;)

The only bummer about this trip is that I won't actually be skating. Earlier in the year I had hoped to have enough practice time to get ready, and I even signed up with a new coach and things are going really well with getting back into skating. However, with writing and starting a new company I just couldn't get enough practice time to be competitive. I'm probably missing skating in the adult championships in Las Vegas this Fall too (though if my wife and friends skate I might go along for support - and be working off a wireless laptop in between events/parties). :-)

My mother-in-law is arriving on an interstellar fold-space passenger liner tomorrow evening at the starport and will be staying for 3 weeks. I volunteered to run interference and take her and the older kids to the Happy Kingdom by car for a few days, thus limiting alien presence for the rest of the family. Yes, this means my mother-in-law is a space alien.

Have I mentioned lately how much I *hate* open source? Actually, in truth I like the concept of open source, though on the .NET side it's usually called "shared source" (meaning some app or utility that comes with the original source code that the author has distributed for other people to use/extend/learn from). I really dig shared source, I have learned many new techniques from seeing other engineers source code, I routinely share interesting source code I write too, as long as it isn't something of a strategic value.

The current frustration is this project I have where I am supposed to be taking an encrypted data source from a java application and then decrypting it and authenticating the information. Sounds easy enough. It would be if the Java engineers were using standard packages. Turns out they are using this Open Source encryption provider that implements the encryption algorithm we decided to use. The problem is that 1) the OS provider does not correctly/fully implement all the features of the encryption algorithm and 2) well, there is this "Base64" encoding which turns everything into a specific set of characters, well, the Java implementation uses non-standard characters to map to. The funny thing about all this is that someone ported the Java stuff to C# and they did everything the right way - yes, meaning the C# and Java versions of this Open Source project are incompatible with each other!!!

I downloaded the Java source for this project and noticed in the code there was a comment that the developer deliberately ignored the spec on the encoding because "they felt their method was better". Uh, hello? Standards are not in place to be liked, they are there so idiots like you (open source bigots) don't waste the time of other people because you are all doing things your own "beter" way. Dumbasses.

And the Java engineers on this project whine about needing everything to be ISO standard? Give me a break! Bunch of lazy nitwits...

I was poking around doing some testing of the localization on my game, Galacticus, this morning and had been cycling through several languages I then swtiched over to Chinese to make sure the translations were fitting into the overall UI design for the game. One common mistake with localization is that the team forgets to account for varying phrase length/font height/etc when building a localized application. Anyway, after I was satisfied that Galacticus was doing quite well regarding the design accounting for non-English character sets I popped over to SQL Server Reporting Services to do a little admin work and BAM everything in that tool came up in Chinese too (I had not changed my system defaults).



It may not seem like much, but I was impressed that this random tool supported localization with zero effort on my part (I don't recall having the option of multi-language support during the installation process). Very often small things like this come up and make me really happy that I chose to develop Galacticus on a Microsoft server platform using C#/.NET rather than wasting my time with some silly Open Source platform and tools. Yeah, I know this isn't a popular opinion, while some people may like screwing around with OS software I myself prefer to get the job done with the most reliable and easy to use tools available.

Feel free to disagree, contact page awaits. :)

We took Ant and Tori to the "Day out with Thomas™" today, it was a great trip, right up until the end. Some nitwits went out onto a bridge and were sitting there apparently ignoring the big sign which said something like "Impaired Clearance Do Not Enter", that's right, 'Impaired Clearance'. Anyway, the train came around the corner and the engineer immediately began whistling and braking. Everyone on the observation deck watched the people - 2 teenaged or early 20's girls and a younger boy - sitting on the bridge, ignoring the oncoming train beyond making sure their towels and stuff were off the tracks. Too late they did realize they were in serious trouble (maybe it was the screeching brakes, or the constant whistle blasts or maybe they heard the engineer screaming 'get off the tracks') and they tried getting down onto a small protrusion below the track deck. Yes, three people trying to get out of the way of an oncoming train on a small wood beam.

It didn't work.

The passenger car behind Thomas was so wide that it over hung the bridge quite a bit, the car either struck the people or they just jumped out of fear, the two girls ended up falling 15-20 feet into about 2 feet of water, I didn't actually watch this part, I was making sure my kids were not watching, but one of the other passengers later said they went into the water face first and it looked like the car had struck one of the girls. The train finally stopped, about 50 feet too late (trains do not stop quickly). The engineer that was in the Thomas engine was absolutely ashen faced as he jumped into the observation car and headed back to help out, within half a minute the train crew had jumped off to aid the two girls - one appeared to have a hurt leg and the other hit her head/neck and was bleeding quite a bit, both were in shock. The boy they were with was still gripping the wood trestle and the train eventually had to back up so the emergency workers could get to him.

While the train was stopped 3 other idiots, and a dog, actually tried to walk out onto the bridge from the other end. Yes. Really. Walking out onto a 300 foot bridge with a train sitting on one end of it. Someone from the train crew yelled at them and they sheepishly turned around and went back across.

In the end it appeared that the two girls, while possibly hurt very seriously, would eventually be ok. I can't believe how stupid some people can be to actually venture out onto a railroad bridge (most of these bridges are marked with 'no trespassing' signs). The fact that trains are really big and heavy and do not stop fast seems like common sense to me, and to go out on a bridge with tourist excursions every 30 minutes? Like, well, duh! It's horrible they got hurt and this accident happened, but you know, I really hope they are held liable for the therapy the train crew is going to need after trying, and failing, to stop in time (I saw the look on the engineers face, the guy was horrified, I can't even imagine seeing an accident like that from his vantage point :( ). Oh, and liable for trespassing on railroad property too.

Solar power and the Pacific NorthWest isn't the best match!

For my newly constructed ponds I decided to *finally* order a solar powered pump. The concept is a great idea, but the product I purchased, well, is somewhat lacking for the local environment. Seems the pump requires nearly 100% output from the solar cell to actually function. 100% output requires direct sunlight, if it's overcast (common in Oregon) or if ~5% of the cell is in shade the pump doesn't bloody well work! In fact, on a typical Oregon Summer day this pump will probably work from about 11 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon, and only if there are no clouds in the sky.

Disgusted with the performance, I ended up pulling one of our older pumps out of the garage and used it instead. I still need to get an electrician out to run a permanent GFCI drop so I can stop using an extension cord to the other drop (that is on the other side of the house).

I've considered buying a few more solar cells and maybe a battery system to power the pump and all the landscape lighting 24x7. Dunno. Still thinking about a final solution weighing environmental concerns with laziness (the $$$ is irrelevant, what's a few hundred bucks one way or the other).

An amusing interaction with a neighbor the other day. I had stopped to get the mail at the central mail boxes and there was a neighbor there from down the street - someone I recognized as living nearby, didn't actually know them. Anyway, there we are checking the mail and they ask "What church do you go to?". I stare blankly and reply with something like "huh?". They said the music I was listening too sounded like what they sing at their church, it was the prelude to a song and had a lot of "praise jesus" and phrases like that.

I smiled, suddenly realizing their assumption and what was coming next.

No sooner had they expressed an interest in the song had it really started. I was listening to Ministry, of course, some circa '92 album, and the song was "Psalm:69". Grinding guitar riffs and a screaming..."Drinking the blood of Jesus, drinking it right from his veins..." blared out of the car stereo. The neighbor was mortified at the change in lyrics. I mentioned, as a parting joke, that I was a New-Roman, not a Christian then jumped in the car and took off.

I'm sure they think I am some sort of devil worshipper or something. Whatever they think is probably 100% inaccurate.

Anyway, I thought that was pretty damn funny...

...at least that's what I thought! I removed the ponds in my backyard a few weeks back and created a childrens play area and rock garden in their place. Well, bright and early Saturday I went out to finish the last part of the rock garden only to find the whole area was this muddy swamp, which, as I watched was becoming an actual lake. Fearing the worst (like I screwed up something digging elsewhere in the yard a couple of days ago) I began investigating and rapidly discovered vast water saturated areas elsewhere in the yard. Using amazing detective-like skills I soon discovered that the water was running underground from a neighbors place, then going further upslope their neighbor, then their neighbor. Turns out that a water main broke about 4 houses up and no one between the water main and myself noticed. Not even the people with the 2 small poodles that were swimming around in their backyard 6" deep lake yapping their fool heads off like poodles drowning in puddles! :)

Anyway, my weekend plans to complete the rock garden were quickly squashed. I did get a bunch of work done on Galacticus though while the yard dried out, so all is good in the end!

Yep, I am annoyed with the ongoing saga of dealing with junior coders and their dull and predictable mistakes. I know, I know, I was once young and stupid too, well maybe not THAT stupid! Being Spring and all the last thing I want to be doing is analyzing 'what went wrong'; I would much rather be out and about working on gardens or relaxing at the Japanese gardens/waterfront/etc. You can read all about one annoying incident in the May 17th update below. Other incidents are even more stupid and frustrating (for me) and I would rather forget the whole thing.

Oh, speaking of being annoyed I also updated my Galacticus Game Development Log. :-)

A few days at home, no pressing work. So what do I do? Why tear up half the lawn and put in a rock garden! Starting with a path made out of pavers dug up previously when we removed our ponds I created a winding path from deck to patio. Then I filled in the areas that used to be grass with river rock and gravel. Finishing touch was a new stone bench placed under our Japanese Maple. Looks pretty cool though I realized I neglected to add in any lighting and I will need to go back and do that soon.

I may be sore from moving 800 pounds of river rock, 300 pounds of pavers, and 120 pounds of gravel but the result is worth it. Now we have a low maintenance back yard with plenty of planters and color.

I know the exact date/time/words of the conversation that lead to this weeks frustration. Back in February a junior engineer asked more of a design driven question that spawned this conversation:

"This code is hard to understand, why is it all in the same control? Wouldn't it be better to have it in two controls?" asked the junior engineer "It's all common functionality for both the registration and profile editing process. Why do something twice that can be written/tested once?" I replied "Why wasn't it broken into two controls? That would be easier." stated the junior engineer "No, because that would make it harder to maintain and debug, since everything is the same but behaves slightly different due to the state - new profile vs. editing an old profile - we put it in one control. I don't want the code split into two controls as that would be poor design and complicate maintenance and testing in the future." I answered "Oh, I think it's harder to understand. There are too many variations." whined the junior engineer "Well, there are only two actual paths through the code. It should be quite clear. One is to create a new profile through registration, and the other is to edit your profile once registered. All the fields are required for both and the business rules are well documented as to the expected behavior for each case." I said "Oh, cool. I didn't see comments." they replied, heading off to their desk

Stupid me, I thought that was the end of it, mistakenly assuming that they would go off and read the comments and return if there were any questions. It seemed that they understood why the code was designed that way and accepted it.

Well, 3 months later I am spending 2 freakin' days gluing the two parts back together because the nitwit went and split the code into two seperate controls. Then recently (one might say predictably) a different junior engineer went and totally screwed things up changing one control and not the other (assuming themselves that this code was identical to 4 other projects that use the same design).

Victoria took part in her ballet schools end of the year recital/show today. She had a blast as a Grade 1 with the dance and presentation of basic skills. As usual were problems with the music and overall organization, but that's to be expected with ballet - nothing like the well oiled machines of a figure skating competition. ;) (ok, to be honest life is totally defined by chaos - ballet, skating, and karate - none of the activities are particularly well organized)

Yep, my SideKick II finally arrived!

It's a big improvement over my old generation 1 black and white device (2.5 years old). So far I am impressed by the speakerphone capabilities and general user improvements on the device. Oh, and I already doubled my high score on the asteroids clone game that comes on the Sidekicks. :-) One thing I am NOT impressed with is the overall form factor - I really liked the styling of the original device alot, this one has a similar design but it's not quite as cool as the original (no kids in the mall are going to mistake this device for a tri-corder :( ).

No, I'm not working on a new Toddler IM app! My 2 year old has taken to sending cryptic IM messages to me those rare times when I am in the office. Sometimes his mother helps with the typing, but he knows how to type some things like "ma" and "da" and send the message.

The conversations when he has typing help usually go something like this:

Mom types :


I respond :


Mom types :


I respond :


Ant types :


I respond :

Heh, 05.05.05, that is a fun date to write. Though not as fun as 01.02.03.

On a (slightly) more serious note, wow, I discovered a brand new pet peeve this morning. I am apparently sensitive to how words are used, pretty surprising from someone who mostly publishes text as "first drafts", eh? ;)

I was in a meeting and was asked how realistic a delivery date/timeline was for a project was, and if I was confident to meet it. I replied "sure" to which I was immediately barraged by comments that my answer was "too ambiguous". "Sure" is "ambiguous"?! Come on people, if English is your native language please make an effort to learn it!!!

From the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, the main entry for "sure" links to many unambiguous synonyms in the definitions, for example: "indisputable", "inevitable", and "reliable". While all the entries for "sure" had some relevance to how I used it, entries 5 ("admitting of no doubt") and 6 ("bound to happen") are particularly unambiguous when answering a question with "sure".

I know many of you coders out there know my opinion of Open Source Software. Y'know, someone sent me a link to a truly worthy Open Source project. Yeah, I can't believe I actually said that either! But you see, there is a petition to IBM to convince them to Open Source OS/2!

Now I have no delusions that OS/2 would ever be widely used, but y'know, the Object Oriented WorkPlace Shell and the elegant (though not always pretty) interface to the operating system was amazing. I was impressed by OS/2's stability too, back when I was developing on it the OS on my dev system used to remain up for 8-9 months between reboots. I can destroy Linux in about a week, and my Windows Server OS dev systems typically need rebooting every 6-7 weeks. Heck, even when I was using a pre-release test version of OS/2 2.99 there was this one-two week period I had to reinstall the OS like 17 times and NOT ONCE did I reinstall a single application. YES, that is right, reinstalled the OS and all the applications that were already installed simply ran! 13 years later freakin' Windows XP can't do that!!!

If OS/2 were ever Open Sourced, I bet I would find the motivation to gain access to the hard drive of my failed OS/2 Warp dev system to get to the source/binaries/content of games I developed for the platform under the original Warped Studios

...I finally learned what "420 friendly" means. All this time I thought it was some fascist code word, since April 20th was Hitler's birthday. Well, that and a lot of the peeps I heard saying things like "I'm 420 friendly" were H2 or Lexus driving GOP fascists, so you can understand the assumption with that!

Anyway, it's kinda embarrassing, and a little disappointing, learning in my mid 30's that "420 friendly" was actually some pot-smokers code word. Nothing to do with fascists at all!

I think I probably know a lot of potheads, though I would sooner vote the fascist party line than try pot (I hate drugs, never tried any variety, and while I have sympathy for addicts I really can't stand people that (ab)use drugs). I do plan to try some sort of illegal drug during my life, the current plan is, and I am completely serious about this, to try whatever is in fashion when I am 83 years old (hopefully it won't kill me). :)

I guess I am not 420 Friendly after all!! ;)

Update - ok, apparently a lot of you readers are "420 friendly", I guess I should explain that when I said I can't stand people that "use" drugs I meant "abuse". I guess I should have made it clear in the original posting that if you are a recreational user my comments don't apply. sorry. :(

I was spending a nice rainy Saturday morning doing what many Portlanders (aka Puddletowners) do, I was helping support the local economy at Powell's Books (the legendary Gigantonormous book destination). While cruising through the environmental section when I happened on a brand new, glossy copy of Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging! Apparently the books have been reprinted for the 30th anniversary of Ecotopia's first publication.

One thing I found interesting was the history of the initial publication and the expectations for the book as told by the author, Ernest Callenbach. The short essay at the back of the book, written in 2004, was rather insightful and I personally found it interesting enough to go back and re-read my old copies of the book. If you haven't read these books and are interested in social, environmental, or political issues go buy/borrow them now! Yes, some of the story is pretty damn corny, and some seems to be written by someone in a pot-smoking fog, as a whole both books are very interesting. :-)

For those of you who may wish to live in Ecotopia, or are interesting in working toward some of the ideals in the books, check out my project, Pacifica Ecovillage!

Nah, this isn't another tribute to the Spring mini-skirts, though that would be cool too! ;-) We just got through with a couple of days working in the yard. We dismantled and filled in 3 ponds and a creek, ripped up lawn and accent lighting, planted some potted trees that were root-bound, trimmed some bushes, and prepped the area for the new ponds and waterfall we are putting in.

We decided to move the ponds because the trees we put the originals under were really plant/fish unfriendly and the space was rather cramped for routine maintenance. The new design incorporates two preformed pools with a custom creek/waterfall running between them in a nice wide open area. Should have most of the work done in a couple of weekends. Right now our yard looks like a mud soaked construction zone, it's pretty cool!!! :-)

I took this religion test and was kinda surprised by the results. Check it out, I am most like a Hindu but Paganism, Atheism, and Judaism rank pretty high. I was most surprised by the Judaism score, the Christianity score being single digit seems a little whacked too (all the questions were loaded in that regard and focused on one single little concept). ;)

You scored as Hinduism. Your views are most similar to those of... Hinduism! Do some research on Hinduism and possibly consider becoming Hindu, if you aren't already. Hinduism 71% Judaism 58% Buddhism 54% Atheism 54% Paganism 42% Satanism 42% Islam 38% Agnosticism 21% Christianity 8% Which religion is the right one for you? (new version) created with QuizFarm.com

The test is, of course, totally wrong. BTW, I found the test on a friends' blog.

It may not be located in Belize, but I bet it will be cheap! I heard on the news today that the US Government is about to sell/auction a poorly designed asset on e-Bay. The facility might not be good for nuclear waste storage, but damn, the tunnels and underground facilities will make a great Evil Genius Lair®! I'm already saving my pennies! As an added bonus the US Government will finance additional resource wars with the sale revenue. Total win-win situation!

Here is a picture of my new Yucca Mountain Evil Genius Lair®! Being located just 90 miles North of Las Vegas makes it perfect - high stakes gambling, fine restaurants, clubs/shows, and pretty women are vital elements to being a good Evil Genius! The existing tunnels will have to be expanded of course, but it will make an awesome lair. I think one really big chamber will be needed for growing food (if there is a siege the lair must be 100% sustainable) and wells to tap into geothermal energy can be easily added. I didn't see any really good sport car garages/exits in the public plans so that might need to be added too, as well as possibly paving the construction road for high speed returns to the secret lair entrance. I plan to have my lair online within a couple of years!

Victor and Tori took part in another skating competition. Victor got first in FS 4 technical against the book. Tori placed 3rd in technical in a group of 6 girls then first in Drama (2nd time with her new routine) and Character Spotlight. Not too many other skaters from our rink travelled the 300+ miles round trip to the competition so it wasn't as exciting and fun as it could have been but we managed to have fun! :)

Warped Studios is really taking off! We have a super solid business plan and have decided to focus on multiplayer gaming on the Microsoft Mobile Device market! Why "Microsoft" you ask? Well, it's pretty simple, C#/.NET is an awesome platform that allows us to create games for mobile AND desktop clients with very little extra work. It took me about 4-5 hours to initially port the C++ version of Atomic Space Navy (basic game and content, not the full demo application) to C# on for the .NET Compact Framework! Besides C#/.NET being such a joy to work in, the MS Mobile market is currently wide open to new content which makes it a good business decision. The remaining reason, well I think most of you have heard my opinion of Open Source Applications/Operating Systems at one point or another (with a few notable exceptions they SUCK)!

Note - I do like "shared source" and frequently will use examples from other .NET coders to learn something new (like grabbing a basic tutorial for a web service and combining it with screen saver code to write a server monitor for Galacticus). Alas I have not had much time to contribute to shared source, I plan to release some interesting localization code and other utilities in the near future (future being some undetermined period in the future when Warped is stable and I am free from my current day job hell :) ).

While the focus is the mobile device platform that does not mean Galacticus is far from a dead project. Galacticus remains my fav hobby project and I am still making daily progress toward a closed alpha test! Whoooo!

We were at Victor's all-district school band concert the other day and they finished with all bands (6-12th grades) trying to coordinate the song "America", complete with a student singer. Even a year ago when such a song was played in big crowds almost everyone stood, now, I noticed only half a dozen people stood out of an audience of ~250 parents! I'm pretty sure two of them had stood to video tape the bands better as they were panning cameras back and forth.

Sign a petition to bring back jingoism! Oh, and after signing head over and get an appropriate bumper sticker to show your support!

Victoria took part in an annual skating competition at one of the local rinks and nailed 3 gold medals for technical, interpretive, and drama. The drama routine was brand new and her coach did a great job coming up with a dramatic routine for the Romeo & Juliet music in just a couple weeks. Victoria did a great job learning the new routine and the performance was so good that... *GASP* ...one of the judges actually clapped after she finished! (yeah, judges are not supposed to do that ;) )

Pictures are kinda unnecesary, just check out these old ones : skating pics.

... and ruining a classic film. All in one single 30 second commercial. Way to go you stupid, fascist corporate dweebs! ;-)

How did they do this you ask? Well, let me tell you. The new Pepsi commercial starts with a scene from the original Spartacus with some Roman soldiers arriving at a hillside encampment with slaves sitting out in the sun in chains (y'know one of the final parts of the Spartacus movie right after the slave army was crushed and they were about to be marched back to Rome).

It quickly cuts to a newly inserted dumbass actor in place of Marcus Licinius Crassus (originally played by Sir Laurence Olivier) who says something like 'someone left their lunch at the last rest stop, it had the name Spartacvs on it'.

This is when it cuts back to the original movie and the slaves stand declaring "I'm Spartacus" in turn (implying of course that it's their Pepsi).

Then it cuts back to the new dumbass actor (in place of Crassus) and one of the other Roman soldiers says, under his breath, "uh, I'm Spartacus" while eyeing the Pepsi can. The dumbass actor in place of Crassus then responds "I am Spartacus" and proceeds to drink the Pepsi.

The camera then cuts back to the original footage and Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) is weeping. Presumably because everyone wanted *HIS* Pepsi and some Roman soldier 'stole' it from him by declaring himself Spartacus.

I am calling Pepsi Corporation first thing in the morning and will boycott all their products and the products of their subordinate corporations from now on. This disgusting slavery-loving-classic-movie-bashing commercial just cannot be apologised for!!!

By the way, if you are one of the fascists that actually liked this commercial, found it amusing, or have no clue why something like it is bad ... well, DON'T BOTHER WRITING TO TELL ME because I really don't care to hear from people like you and I still hear from (and am sufficiently amused by) enough people like you because of my American Taekwondo Association opinion.

My new bumpersticker (and web banner). I designed it myself after getting sick of seeing all the "marriage =" bumperstickers on peoples vehicles since the last national election cycle. My design makes everyone mad and I love it!

• Gays hate it because it specifies ">= 1" for each gender (they like ">= 0" on one side or the other).
• Christians hate it because it's, well, polyfidelity (monotheism, monogamy, they're just a "mono" crowd).
• Mormons and Muslims hate it 'cuz the male side is ">= 1" rather than "= 1" (neither of those groups seems to have a problem with the female side being ">= 1" ;) ).
• Normals hate it because they think 'poly people' are either swingers, Mormon, or Muslim.
• Poly people seem a little irritated and are quick to point out they don't really believe in traditional marriage.
• Swingers (some anyway) don't believe in long term relationships with multiple people.
• Oh, and dumb people don't like it 'cuz they don't understand algebra.

Victor scored a second place in his school science fair competition. He built a Savonius style wind turbine from plans almost 100% by himself! The only thing he really needed help with was debugging the system when it failed to produce power - which actually turned out to be really, really frustrating but that is one of those parenting stories for another time. The project was certainly a learning success even if it won't solve any energy problems (it only generated .1mV). :-)

Next stop, district level presentation! Oh, if you would like to build your own turbine download the plans.

Update 3/10/2005 - the district science fair was crazy. Tons of kids with displays, probably understaffed with the volunteer judges. When we got there Victor produced the wire windings for the generator from his pocket and had no way to attach them to the turbine or fix the connection when he broke then untangling the mess. Why he took the turbine apart the day of a science fair remains a mystery (he doesn't know). Hehe, kinda typical behavior of a 12 year old. At least the two judges were more impressed in the demonstration and his ability to answer questions than simply seeing a working wind turbine, and that is really the point anyway.

Progress on Galacticus has slowed a bit at the beginning of the new year. This was to be expected with all the projects I am leading at my day job and I had actually planned ahead that things would slow down on the game around the first of the year. Even so I had really hoped to be in a closed Alpha Test by this time with the game, it's really frustrating to be so close to testing on this game and never quite getting it out there! Heck, if I totally quit my day job to work on this thing it could probably be through testing and released by the end of April (assuming starting on the game full time today) ... yes it really is that close. :(

For those interested in Alpha Testing, for now you can contact me here or keep checking Warped Studios for an application to be announced!

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