Today we had our first house cleaning day. Since just telling people to keep things clean and clean up after themselves never seemed to work, I decided to schedule a work day to clean house. Each person in the house got a personalized list of cleaning tasks to perform based on their relative abilities. And as our house cleaning mascot I chose the cute, responsible, and powerful Mahoro from Mahoromatic. Clean thoughts and a clean house, that’s Mahoro’s way!
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After twittering my thumbs, so to speak, I finally joined twitter. I thought the stream of updates on Facebook was bad enough, oh boy! In any case, my plan is to explore and learn. So far I like it for blogging little stuff that I don’t really want to write a full entry about anyway. Duh, I suppose that’s what it was made for in the first place.
Link: blueZhift on Twitter
Seemingly yesterday, when my first daughter was born, her first and only interactions with a computer was through a Mac game called Baby Smash. She’d bang the keyboard with tiny little hands and interesting shapes and sounds would appear on the screen. Later I wrote a clone called Baby Mush for my OS/2 PC so that she could do the same there. Fast forward to the present to witness me discussing World of Warcraft strategies with my second daughter and her desire for a Builder’s Club account on Roblox! In no time at all, my babies no longer just bang the keyboard, they’re using it to create and play in virtual worlds all over the net with friends from school, around the corner, and across the ocean.
As technology enthusiast and professional, I think it’s pretty cool that they’ve reached the stage where we begin to enjoy some of my favorite things together. In a lot of ways they’re way ahead of me, fearlessly exploring these new worlds and trying to reshape them. Of course, I’m not too wild about this additional evidence that my time is passing, but I can’t wait to start setting up accounts the accounts for us! I’m reminded of a scene from the anime series .hack//Sign in which the character Bear is meeting up with his son in the MMO game, The World. Their meeting wasn’t so great, but I hope that in the future our massive clan, though separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, will join forces on some instanced battlefield to pwn mobs and claim leet loots!
Another Anime Central has come and gone. It’s been over a week since the con and while I had a pretty good time, I am still left a little unsastified. I think I feel that way mainly because I missed a couple of the events that I had most looked forward to, the Soap Bubble dance, and Cosplay Karaoke. I missed them both for the same reason, there were just too many people at the con! I also had some personal drama to contend with…*sigh*
I think the con was run better than last year, big kudos to all of the volunteer staffers! But Anime Central, at over 16K attendees has probably outgrown its current digs. It either needs to move to a bigger convention center, *cough*McCormick*cough*Chicago*cough*, or institute an attendance cap of maybe about 10K.
On the plus side, my Mikuru and Shuichi cosplays were successful. Indeed the Mikuru was successful enough to have drunk guys hitting on me Saturday night. That was scary and weird all at the same time. I think I’ve gained a new appreciation for what women have to put up with all of the time.
And I had a good time talking and hanging out with some old and new con friends. The masquerade and its MCs were great. No overload on yaoi jokes/skits this year, yay! Saw lots of awesome AMVs. Â Lots of good cosplay was to be had everywhere, but it was so crowded that I didn’t get as many pics as last year. So I end with the best Zero I’ve seen and a link to my ACen 2009 Pics.
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It’s been about 7 months since my last convention, so I’m really excited that Anime Central starts less than 48 hours from now! As usual, I’ve got last minute stuff to do, but nothing too bad. I can’t believe I actually got my hand embroidery work done weeks ago. So I think I’m pretty good to go costume wise. The real challenge will be getting everyone to the hotel and them managing costumes and activities.
Also this week marks the opening of the new Star Trek movie. I’m a long time Trekker, so I’m definitely going to see this! I just haven’t decided the where and when. Right now I’m leaning towards a late night show at the Muvico near the convention center after a pre-con meetup.
It should be a lot of fun if I can just manage the logistics. I have so much fun at these cons, I just wish my wife could enjoy them as much as I. But she tends to be a rather serious person, so just letting go isn’t really in her nature. Oh well, at least she tolerates my hobbies somewhat and since the kids like them too, I guess she’s just out numbered!^^ Yes, I’m a baaaad man.
When Sun was bought out by Oracle, many wondered what was going to happen to things like Java, MySQL, and VirtualBox. Well given the way trying to upgrade to version 2.2.2 on Windows XP totally nuked my working installation of 2.1.4 which I can now neither remove or repair, I think I’ll be saying buh bye to VirtualBox and hello to VMWare.
The VBox 2.2.2 install runs and then rolls back. This has been described in the VirtualBox forums, but the solution there doesn’t work for me. Not only that, running the old 2.1.4 installer in Repair mode does the same thing. So rather than waste anymore time, I’m simply noting it here. Yeah I could login and post to the forum but after wasting half a day on this problem, I’d rather just switch to VMWare which we use at work anyway. It’s a real shame when you can’t get the installer to work right. Color me annoyed…
Update: Since I’m a glutton for punishment and loathe defeat, I searched the VBox web site and found in the wiki a link to Microsoft’s Installer Cleanup tool. After running the tool I ran the 2.2.2 installer again. Like the first time I ran it, it hung at the very end. But while the installer is botched, apparently it installed enough of VirtualBox for it to work. So at least it works now even though as far as Windows is concerned the installation was interrupted. Now only slightly annoyed.
While sales of 360s in Japan are probably better than the original Xbox, they still pale compared to the Wii and even the beleagured PS3. So I guess it’s time to bring out the big guns, moe! Click the pic for the story on Kotaku. This is the first time I’ve seen a console tan used in any official advertising.
During the Free Realms beta, I had some pretty bad performance problems that at the time I thought probably were the result of server load and restricted bandwidth. So at the end of the beta I decided to see if the problem had been fixed and created a new character. Initially I didn’t see much improvement, but I didn’t want to give up without a fight. So I decided to see if updating my video drivers would do the trick. Yup, that was the problem! Once I’d upgraded the drivers for my cheapy Nvidia GeForce 7300LE, it was smooth sailing in Free Realms.
Now I can see what all of the fuss and hype was all about with the distraction of hurky jerky performance. While I find some of the character designs, trolls I’m lookin at you, creepy, on the whole Free Realms is a beautiful virtual world. And as an MMO enthusiast, I must say that I like being able to just explore the world without either a random battle, or unwanted MOB aggro. I can travel the world and explore in safety.
To me, Free Realms is what Wordscraper on Facebook is to my wife. I can jump in and experience some pretty laid back fun at my own pace. So I’m looking forward to seeing more of what it has to offer.
I finally managed not to miss Free Comic Book Day today. A neighbor told me about First Aid Comics, the only comics shop in my neighborhood a few weeks ago. So I marked the calendar and told the kids, who, as it turns out, already knew about it.
We’re a mostly manga household, so I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be to American style comic books. Well never fear, they love them! First Aid Comics isn’t a huge store, but it has a good selection and friendly staff. I bought a copy of The New Avengers #50, and got freebies Resident Evil #1, Blackest Night, and Hack/Slash Slice Hard. I was into the Avengers as a kid, so I looking forward to seeing what the New Avengers have to offer.
I’m definitely going to return in the future. I feel like I’ve been reintroduced to another part of my childhood!
Last Sunday, the sermon at my church was based in Revelation Chapter 20 in the Bible. Revelation is a book full of vivid imagery of the return of Christ, war, judgement, salvation, and the end of the world. That vivid imagery is what made Revelation one of my favorite books of the Bible to read when I was a kid. This Sunday, while trying to construct and explore these images and their underlying meaning, particularly for my own personal end times, it suddenly struck me that maybe it can be compared to an instanced dungeon. After church, I began bouncing this idea off of my fellow congregants, but alas, no one else there knew what an instanced dungeon was. Not too many WoW players at my church, *sigh*. So I write of it here.
In a massively online mulitiplayer game, MMO, there may be thousands or even millions of players spread out over dozens or hundreds of servers. Even with a large number of servers, it isn’t feasible for a lot of player to play the same special content, i.e. a dungeon, at the same time. To solve this problem, each player or group of players gets their own copy, or instance, of that dungeon. That way everyone gets a chance to play special quests or challenges.
I believe that at death, when we go to be with God, we are pulled out of time. I think of this as a change of perspective really to one where time no longer passes as we experience on this side of reality. So in Heaven, there is no waiting for those who died after you to arrive. When you die, you’re at the end of the story, boom, everyone who ever lived is there just like the vision John describes in the book of Revelation. Our individual deaths are like getting an instanced dungeon of the book of Revelation. But since God has more than enough servers and CPU cycles (LOL), I guess only the dying part is truly instanced for each person. Everyone gets to share the experience of John’s vision together.
Somewhere along the line, I went from being the premiere gamer in my household to dead last, even behind my 8 year old son in hours of gaming per week. Seeking to stop and reverse this alarming trend, I decided to spend a little time exploring the beta of a new MMO from SOE. While the game really looks good and I think has a lot of potential, it also reminded me of the great need for large betas. Not really a complaint or a slam. People too often forget that beta means test in the development world. And I should note that it made me hunt down and remove Zimbra Desktop which sucks down a lot of resources even when you are not using it. Just sitting there it had swiped 100MB of memory and I suspect it was responsible for some Firefox slowness and wonkiness I’d been seeing. So thanks SOE! Nothing like seeking gaming goodness to get one to do some digital housekeeping!
Back to gaming. Thanks to Google Reader, keeping up with gaming news from a variety of sources has gotten a lot easier. One source I discovered that way is Massively. Judging by the stories and the ads in the news stream, there are a buttload of MMOs, most free to play, out there now. It’s like the plague of list your Top 5 X applications on Facebook! From what I’ve read, most are not top quality, but for free, what do you expect? That aside, someone must be making money on this. Probably the game engine house most of these are probably using along with the server hosting facilities. It definitely bears further investigation. If computing horsepower of the magnitude needed to support the typical MMO, plus bandwidth is widely available and cheap, that just screams opportunity. And so far, at least, the economic downturn hasn’t greatly impacted the gaming industry.
Over the weekend I got a new AMV finished just in time for the Anime Central Anime Music Video  Contest!^^ This one has been in my head for a long time, so I’m very happy to finally complete it. I just hope I haven’t totally misjudged the content of the song. Now I’ve costumes to finish!
I finished filing our income tax returns last night. A precipitous drop in household income resulted in some deductions and credits we wouldn’t normally get leading to a nice refund this year rather than a tax bill like last. Normally, having a tax bill is considered to be a good thing, because if you take the money you would have gotten as a refund and invest it, you should get a higher return over the year than letting Uncle Sam hold on to it. But given what happened to my investments in 2008, I think this time around Uncle Sam was doing me a big favor, albeit accidentally!
Sadly, family commitments kept me away from Flourish! on Saturday. But I did get a lot of time to play around with Kubuntu in a VirtualBox VM. The main hiccups I had were VM issues more than anything else, like learning that I needed to install the guest tools and using ICH AC97 sound. I didn’t get host folder sharing to work before I gave up for the day.
Again, not issues with Kubuntu itself. My first impression is of a very polished desktop that a Windows user should be able to use right out of the box. My only complaint was not finding any way to move icons on the panel around. Somehow my K menu ended up on the right side of the screen rather than the left.
I’ll probably play around with Kubuntu some more, but first I want to jump into Processing. I downloaded the installation from Processing.org and had been hoping to attend the workshop at Flourish. Since that didn’t come to pass I’ll just have to poke about on my own, which is pretty much SOP for me anyway, and a lot of fun!
Software development is a world that is always changing, especially the world of open source software development. It takes a bit of effort just to keep up, so with that in mind I decided to go to Flourish! Open Source Conference at the University of Illinois at Chicago today.
I almost didn’t go because nothing on the schedule appeared to be directly related to my current projects. But after having been reminded of the conference by a coworker, I decided what the heck, it’ll probably be fun! And I was not disappointed.
I went to talks on Kubuntu, the Open Source Lab at Oregon State, the Processing development language and environment, and a couple on Android app and game development. I was particularly interested in the Kubuntu presentation because KDE apps have started showing up everywhere, including Windows. But the presentation that totally blew me away was Processing!
Processing allows artists to create incredible graphics and animation often with only a few lines of code. I’m really not doing it justice with this description, so please visit Processing.org. All I know is that I just discovered something that I may be able to use to better visualize the data in a big project I’m working on!
So my day at Flourish has paid off far more than I would have imagined. It really is a blessing to be able to do what you love for a living! I won’t be able to make the whole day tomorrow, but hopefully I can at least get there for the Processing workshop and afternoon panel.