Longshot

New Location

2005-08-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

I'm closing this up, as in, no longer updating it. Go here, to my new site instead.

Camping

2005-07-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

So you want to go "camping" huh? Lets see, just slap some wheels on your house and tow it to somewhere remote. Set up your portable satellite reciever, watch some crap like "Will and Grace" while eating a reheated a tv dinner from your microwave. Then, finally go outside (gasp!) and make a fire with purchased firewood, sit around it for an hour (too smokey, don't want to get smelly), then go back inside to catch the end of Law and Order, and sleep in a bed with a matress and sheets.

That is not camping, that is closer to a boring barbeque in your back yard. These disgustingly big "campers" should banned from camp grounds. Unless you have some medical condition, there is no reason why you should go camping with a camper. Camping is supposed to be a way to escape the life sucking inventions of society and get back (as close as you can) to nature. How can you do this when you're bringing all the nastiness of society with you?

On a related note, we hiked a trail to the beach, despite it being closed due to "High Water". I thought of it as sort exciting. No one else would attempt the trail and here we were sloshing through knee deep black water lurking with who knows what. On the way back we met a family headed in the same direction, and spotting our bare, soaked feet, inquired as to how deep the water actually was. We told them and they (rather, the parental units) decided to turn back and just drive. When given the option of braving a possibly dangerous and flooded trail, what kind of person would decide to drive? A lazy person with a dying sense of adventure!

There are too many of these people around, pulling their 8 ton campers, driving to the beach, and resigning themselves to dull, predictable lives. Don't be one of them.

Tough Competition

2005-06-29T00:29:00.000-07:00

What a strange night. We were partying in a massive house with no bedrooms and extremely large hallways and suddenly, we knew. Someone had been murdrered. Murdered in one of the rooms, with one of the giant weapons. It was never clear who had been murdered, or how the murderer was able to heft such massive metal weapons, but all of us there knew someone had. And that murderous someone was one of us.

In our frantic rush to find the criminal in our midst, we began throwing accusations left and right, dashing from room to room. Each time learning a bit more about the crime and getting closer to solving it.

As the night wore on, tempers were running hot. The tension among us was great. We all were narrowing down who the murderer was, what weapon they used, and what room the murder was committed. I soon realized only Ms. Scarlet posed a real threat to me, as Peacock and White were strangely immobile and Green and Plum were asking the wrong questions and not putting the answers to good use.

Scarlet and I were both hot on the tail of the murder, Green and Plum blundering about behind us. She and I were at the top of our game, each clue we found and didn't find brought us closer to the truth. We raced down halls, knowing that what lay around the next corner would bring us to murderer. While we were both matched equally, there could only be one to solve the crime. And both of us desperately wanted, rather, knew, we would be that one.

Scarlet and I stood before the Conservatory. I knew this was where the murder had been committed. If I could get in, I could solve the murder. Scarlet knew this too, I could see it in her eyes. We both made a dash for the room that would yield the truth. My hand closed around the doorknob, I had made it! But my joy was quickly squashed. Right then, goddamn Plum bumbled into me, thoroughly excited at some useless discovery his rotund little body had made. I tried to brush him away, but the man was persistent. I saw Scarlet slam Conservatory door behind her as Plum pulled me away into the Hall. It was over. I had been close, but not close enough. While Plum told me things I had known the entire night, Scarlet solved the crime.

Scarlet plays a surprisingly mean game of Clue.

because it hurt no one

2005-06-23T21:26:00.000-07:00

I saw Batman Begins, with fine (actually, very fine) company. Twas a fine film, pretty much everything that can be said has been said (it's good, dark, adult, etc). (SPOILER AHEAD!) I have really only one qualm: how in the hell were Batman and that villan fellow able to stand next to the microwave generator (this thing was vaporizing water from great distances) without being thoroughly cooked?

My thighs are mightier than most tree trunks. Why? I've biked regularly (around 8 miles, 5 days a week) for the whole year (also, many tree trunks aren't that thick). While my current workout is fine, I want to push further. I want to get to the point where I can beat cars during non rush hours, where I can outperform any other mode of transportation for in city destinations. To do this, I've started riding more in the mornings with a chum of mine. Together, we'll grow thigh muscles as thick as redwoods.

If I had grandkids now, they'd be bored out of their minds. I've got nothing to tell them. As of now, my life has been relatively uneventful. This is bad. To begin to remedy this problem, next summer, when OIT boots me from the dorms, I'll rent a shed for my crap, get on my bike, and just start pedaling. Across Oregon. I'll ride off into the sunset, and come back in time for the next fall term to begin. I'll visit friends and family and scenic vistas along the way, have adventures, thwart villans, kill werewolfs, party with shady characters in shady places, and all that good stuff. Grandkids'll love it.

A while back I made a 3 minute movie preview for a class project with some chums. Making that movie preview was some of the most fun I've had, ever. Film production, we found, is intensely time consuming, and intensely fun. To try and relive these glory days, I've begun work on a short story, which I will turn into a script featuring plot twists and snappy dialogue. I'll round up my whole gang of chums and shoot it, edit it, and (hopefully) enjoy it. Should this future film turn out any good, I'll upload it and show you all. That oldmovie preview I've got uploaded already, but there's no way in hell I'm going to show you that.

This is probably one of my longer posts, and I hate long blog posts, mainly because they are boring. So we'll stop this drudgery here and now.

I lied

2005-06-06T22:12:00.000-07:00

Because that's the kind of person I am. I know I said I'd number these, but who even cares. First, I will entreat you to a variety of interesting content, to lure you into reading more of this blog and more often:
Best Comics Ever
A Contest Everyone Should Enter
Erm, that's about it. On a related note, things are looking up, and it only rains when I decide to ride my bike.

Should I decide to retreat into the creative wasteland in my brain, I may yield forth more god awful comics. And here's a comic close to my heart.

Normally, I don't watch, play, or listen to crap. However, for the sake of the laugh, I watched El Chupacabra with some friends. It is the worst movie I've ever seen, but hilarious just the same.

And to redeem myself for even mentioning such an abomination as El Chupacabra, go watch the excellent 28 Days Later. It is an extremely well shot film, has a lot of charm and is very intense. I love the British. First the BBC and now 28 Days Later, can it get any better?

I'll let you know when it does.

0

2005-05-09T22:18:00.000-07:00

Thinking up titles is tiring, so I'm just going to use numbers. You know, in the name of great justice.

I took the AP Physics C test, or rather, the AP Physics C test shredded my brain and descrated the remains. It's a damn hard test.

Also, I have reached the point in my game programming skills that I can make whatever game I want (save an MMORPG - everyone knows those are impossible). However, the journey I've completed to get me to this point has zapped all the creative game ideas I was flowing with. So here I am, immense power in me, and nothing to use it on.

When I sit down to make a game, and nothing comes to me, I end up playing warcraft 3 (or more recently, Guild Wars - more about that in a future post). This practice is quick becoming a terrible waste of time. So I turn to you, dear readers (the whole pair of you), if you have any cool game ideas let me know. If I feel passionate about any of them, I'll make em.

It was brought to my attention that Hutterites exist in South Dakota. Hutterites! Also, they're SPREADING! What are Hutterites? Who cares.

Gator Attack

2005-05-02T21:19:00.000-07:00

I was riding my bike to work, like I do everyday, it's a 2.5 trip through a mild urban jungle, and I was ATTACKED!

As I peddled over the bridge, this rickety excuse for a car pulled up alongside me long enough for a thug in the backseat to throw a full gatorade bottle at me. It hit me in the side and made me wonder about idiocy of humanity. I retaliated as best I could with my middle finger.

But I could do better! I peddled fast enough to catch up with the piece of crap on four wheels. I then leapt on the back of the car, and kicked out the back window. Glass flew everywhere and my fists followed suit. With the thugs in the back dispatched, I knocked out the two in the front, capitalizing on my element of surprise, and took command of the thugmobile. Pulling a high risk u-turn in the middle of an intersection I raced back onto the bridge, braced the unconscious driver's foot against the gas peddle, angled the car towards the bridge railing, and jumped out of the drivers window in an explosion of glass. I am too cool to roll down the window first, or even to open the door.

I rolled to my feet in time to see the bits of metal twist and fly as the car punched through the railing and into the water. I walked back to my bike and headed on to work. No one violently donates gatorade to me without proper repayment.

(Note: only two of the above paragraphs are true.)

And so time passed

2005-04-24T01:01:00.000-07:00

It's almost been a month since the last update. I intend not to let that happen again.

I went to disneyland, spent a fortune trying to eat there (it's $400 for a frito), rode rides, ran around, got sunburned. I did this with the high school band, a group of people whom 99% of which I like. It was good times. While we were down there, we attended Disney's Magical Music Days (can't have a school sponsored trip without some kind of educational experience).

At 2:00pm, we all met under the toon town bridge and went through all the little doors and passage ways you never notice or see while in the main area of the park. We ended up behind disneyland where there is warehouses and bits of rides and burned out fireworks everywhere. This was where the recording studio was. We went in, played music to movies, recorded it to film, laughed at our mistakes.

The most striking part of the whole thing was the conductor who led us during the recording session. We were informed by him multiple times that he made so much money he had train tracks installed to his house. This way a train, filled with money, could just deposit the cash right on his lawn. Each time he told us this, he grinned smugly. He was a pompous ass, but he knew what he was talking about when it came down to musicianmanship. Many kids hated him, some liked him. I could have done without the continual money train comments.

In conclusion, I like movie production. Directing, filming, editing, it's all great fun.

Deep in the pits of hell...

2005-03-29T22:07:00.000-08:00

Symbian OS crawled and fought it's way into the world of cell phones. What is Symbian, you might ask? It's worse than drugs, worse than dropping your icecream cone, worse even the being caught watching Barney over the age of 7.

More specifically it is an operating system designed for higher end cell phones. If you really want to look into it, google it. Hopefully, this is as far as you'll go.

Up until today, I just forcefully disliked Symbian, for these reasons:

Documentation is poor and sparse. See a potentially useful function and want to know how it works? You can find it in the online symbian developer library, but most function and class explanations are limited to 3 sentences, and I have yet to see an example of how to use the said function.

This problem flares again when your program crashes and you get a cryptic error message, like "KERN-EXE 0" or "USER 4" or "ALLOC: 0x14a4h3". And that's all you'll get. You can of course look these codes up at the ever so unhelpful online dev library, but again, their explanation is limited to 1 to 2 sentences and no example of how and when they occur is given.

The App, UI, Document, and view design pattern is odd. Pretty much every program you write MUST follow this. Symbian requires it (you can skip the view part though). There is no real main() function and limited control over frame updates; and this leads to hackish work arounds.

No std::string, and it's replacement is god awful. The Symbian dev team also decided std::string was unsuitable and replaced it with 300 confusing versions designed to accomplish the same purpose (also designed, apparently, to increase your risk of insanity). They go as follows: TBuf, TBuf8, TBuf16, TBufC, TBufC8, TBufC16, TPtr, TPtr8, TPtr16, TPtrC, TPtrC8, TPtrC16, TDes, TDesC, TDesC8, TDesC16, HBuf, ...and so on. This is all just to accomplish common string related tasks. Something is clearly wrong with your design if it takes about 20000 classes to encompass SIMPLE STRING FUNCTIONALITY.

The emulator is too slow. When you go to test your symbian code on the emulator, it takes 13 full seconds just to start the emulator in debug mode. Imagine having to wait 13 seconds everytime you want to step through your program or even just run it to see your changes. Don't think it's that bad? Just count to 13 before you start your program next time it's done compiling and continue doing that forever.

Even with all that crap I was able to cope, but now, things have changed. I got a new cpu and motherboard, in hopes I could drop the emulator start up time. Not only did it stay about the same (12 seconds now, w00t?), but now my computer has decided to instantly restart whenever any Symbian network code is run. It can be my own code or symbian's official stuff, no difference. I uninstalled and reinstalled everything from drivers to SDKs to no avail.

Symbian OS should return to the hell of its birth.

This is just scratching the surface of the crap one must go through to develop for this damn platform. I loathe it, if you try it, you'll loathe it too. I briefly worked with BREW (a competing platform) and found that that limited experience was much more enjoyable than working with the demon called symbian. Soon, I'll get down and dirty with BREW too, and we'll see if I still like it as much then...

In short, developing for Symbian OS is like taking a spork and carving out your eye.

I haven't had any good time yet

2005-03-19T22:24:00.000-08:00

Actually I have, I'm just lazy and out of ideas, so no new comics. Instead, I bring you: 1) Good news and 2) Strange news.

1) I ended up winning second place in the games category with my little boat racing game. This scored me an ATI Radeon x850 XT PE (a $550 value) among other things. Since this tasty graphics card is PCI-e and my current motherboard is not, a new and beastly computer is in my future.

You can see, the official results of the contest, and also download and play the game (it's pretty buggy, forgive me), here (you'll have to scroll down a bit, and yes, that ugly face is me).

2) Gotta love the Japanese.

All in good time

2005-03-05T14:08:00.000-08:00

Alright, I'm no longer busy with that boat racing thing. I should have a new comic up soon. It'll be weird, like the rest, and involve asphalt, or not.

In the meantime, contemplate the idea of "Sun Flavored Ice Cream."

At least it runs

2005-02-28T01:58:00.000-08:00

After about 8 hours coding and modelling and texturing and headaching, I've finished my entry. It ended up turning into a boat racing game. Pretty soon I'll have a OpenGL port so all goobers that read this can play it. Anyway, here are a few sneak preview screen shots.

As you can see, it features that boat from the previous post. Also, I got fairly elaborate. It's got particle systems, fog, a computer AI racer, collision detection, reflections, animated water, and randomly generated environments and race courses. This is probably the 2nd game I've completed (I don't count my previous OpenGL ES "game" as completed).

Straight from the garage

2005-02-26T22:25:00.000-08:00

Cover your eyes!

Ocean Fun!

2005-02-19T13:42:00.000-08:00

Why are there no new comics? 1) I am lazy. 2) I've been working on this:

Screenie 1
Screenie 2

What is this nonsense? It's gold baby, gold. A couple months ago I submitted a stinkier version of this to www.gamedev.net's OpenGL ES contest. And it won second place, mostly because there were only three people in my category. This weekend rush job scored me a nice prize, I think with a few improvements, I might have a chance at winning a prize in a similiar contest. The deadline is February 28th, and when I submit it, I'll release a windows version so that even you can go through the same torture these contest judges have been through.

Today!

2005-02-05T01:16:00.000-08:00

Behold, a Wacko.

Hey, it made me chuckle

2005-02-01T23:42:00.000-08:00

So, you better chuckle too, maggot (you know the drill by now): Crime!

A step away from veggies

2005-01-30T23:05:00.000-08:00

So, candles it is (burn the high-res with a click): So Hot

Not a good idea

2005-01-30T13:51:00.000-08:00

So, I made another: Absorbtion!

Minus ten points!

2005-01-30T13:39:00.000-08:00

"New Game" (comic wants you to click)

And you thought it couldn't get any worse...

2005-01-29T23:47:00.000-08:00

"Friends 2" (Click for zeh comic)

Two posts in one day = COMIC TIME

2005-01-29T23:03:00.000-08:00

Behold, a piece entitled: "Friends"

This is not the first post

2005-01-29T21:56:00.000-08:00

This is the second post. The first post is obviously not this one. The first one featured candy and free money and stuff. You missed it. Obviously. Loser. Don't look where there is nothing to be found.