Recently in Personal Category

Phew, the last few weeks have been a whirlwind!

I had the ARBP chat a while ago, and it went really well. Over 20 people showed up, and the hour long Q & A ended up lasting over two hours. I'm always happy to talk shop though, so it was a blast. Heck, some people even stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, coming all the way from Africa just to chat!

The book has been going really well. Amazon has been a bit... different... to work with, but as I get more used to dealing with them, I think things will go better. The book was listed as out of stock for ages because of a shipping snafu that we're still trying to rectify. But at least they got the new shipment of books and it's back in stock!

I went deer hunting last weekend with my dad. When I live in the area, I try to go with him every year -- but I've not actually carried a gun since I was about 15. This year I decided to try actually hunting again, and it's been fun. Unfortunately, it's also been exasperating since we're not seeing any deer. In fact, thus far the only deer either of us has seen was the one that strolled through the driveway while our guns were 10 yards away from both of us! We were outside, eating lunch and BSing -- not even remotely trying to be quiet. And a doe walked right in front of us... go figure! I told dad that I may hunt from the comfort of the cabin since that appears to be the only place we're seeing em! ;-P I'll be going up again this weekend, and really hope one of us gets a deer. I love venison. ;-)

Elissa and I ended up having to buy a new car this past week. Her 95 Escort needs a new heater core and we're not interested in putting that kind of labor into the car. So we got a 2007 Pontiac Vibe, and love it. We wanted another station wagon because they're so handy, and this one worked out perfect. 35 mpg, tons of cargo room, and I got it for a steal! And then the truck died. It's in the shop, being worked on for the past week... but it's looking like it's going to be a pretty spendy repair bill for it. Don't you love how car troubles seem to come in twos? I sure don't. But the truck is still in good enough shape where repairing it makes sense, so repair it I shall. The exhaust manifold's actuator rod broke and the PCM died. I was actually pretty lucky the vehicle was still in a drivable state when I got it in to the shop.

Life at 4D is going well. I've been switching gears off of my previous project, and starting to work on something I find a bit more exciting. I'm not certain how much of either project I can talk about at this point though. But I may babble on about it now and then regardless. :-P

Huttah! The books have arrived from the printer and the first batch of orders went out today. I'm very excited that things are finally starting to roll with actually getting the book into reader's hands. I worked on the thing for so long, I was starting to wonder if I'd ever finish it!

And to make matters more exciting, I've been invited by ARBP to speak about Ramblings on REALbasic next Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 8pm EST. So if you'd like to chat about the book or REALbasic, then please join me! I watched the chat with Geoff last month, and it's actually a pretty fun little setting. Should be a blast!

If you've not gotten your copy of Ramblings on REALbasic, you should order your copy today!

So I came down with a mystery illness at the beginning of last week. It started out feeling like a small tickle in the back of my throat. The following day it was a 100+ degree fever. After a few days of feeling like crap, the fever broke and I thought I was on the mend. Little did I know, round two was still in store. My mystery illness turned into a sinus infection over the weekend, and now I'm in more pain than I was when I had the fever. Blech!

I'm starting a new project at work, which has me considerably more excited. Since it's pre-release, I can't talk about it too much though. But once it starts getting into the public's hands, I can spout off about it a bit more.

I started playing Fallout 3 last week. I got the "game of the year" edition, which has all the downloadable content. So far it's been a fun game. Just like Oblivion, the world is very expansive. I've gotten reasonably far into the game (I finished the main storyline), but still feel like I've only scratched the surface of the content. The game should be a nice distraction in the evenings.

The book is going well -- it just got off the printing press last week and is being shipped to distributors currently. This means order fulfillment should be happening pretty quickly!

First, the soreness. Elissa and I are getting around to doing our fall tree planting. Every year, we try to add a few trees to the yard. Our goal is to have a fully wooded lot by the time our grandchildren inherit the house. ;-P We both love seeing trees, and that's the one downside to the area we built the house in. It used to be a corn field, so there's very little structure around.

This is the first time in my life I've actually bought a tree. I usually go out to the woods and dig them up. A lot less expensive, and a lot more work. But the survival rate of the transplants are usually about 50%. So this year, we decided would be our one year to get "real" trees, and we can go back to transplants next year. So we bought a weeping willow for the low spot in the yard (I suspect that willow will become sentient within a year, that's how fast it will grow). We also got a 2.5" autumn blaze maple tree, and a 6' blue spruce tree.

So I've been digging holes most of the week, and that's why I am sore. We have a vein of clay that runs under our yard in various spots, and where I dug the hole for the willow was dead-on. It took me almost 2.5 hours to dig that hole. The hole for the pine tree took forever because I had to move a sprinkler head about 15 feet, as well as dig a monster-sized hole. The maple tree was the only hole that wasn't horrible to dig.

The reason I'm so excited is because Fall is here! This is my favorite time of year, and the chief reason I wanted to move back to MN in the first place. Fall here is absolutely stunning, with all the trees changing colors, the farm harvests, the weather getting colder and winter just around the corner. Football season is starting up (please don't suck this year Vikes!), and baseball season is winding down (go Twins, go!) with hockey coming up quickly (wahoo Wild!).

So life around here is going pretty well!

Life has been both busy and bucolic as of late. Work keeps the majority of my time quite busy. Most things I do at work I can't really talk about in public because they've not been released yet. But once that changes, I'll be able to start babbling about work-related geek topics again. But in the meantime, I mostly just get to say "work is busy." :-P

When I'm not working, that's when all the crazy stuff happens. Take yesterday as an example. I was out gardening, trimming the irises back for the winter. And I almost cut my pinky finger off with the pruning shears. I wasn't watching very carefully, and I managed to do some pretty neat damage to my finger. So far, it's looking like I won't require stitches -- but just barely. And had I been paying even less attention than the little I was, I'd be fingerless because those shears are sharp!

In other crazy news, we had a party last weekend to celebrate our moving back to MN. It went really well. About 15-20 people showed up, and we played games (beanbag toss, badminton, boccie ball), drank beers and caught up. I had friends from college come up from the cities, cousins come up from Mankato, as well as friends local to the St Cloud area show up. It was awesome! Makes me want to have more parties. :-D

My work trip to France went alright, up until I got the flu. Let me tell you, international travel sucks to begin with. But it sucks harder when not feeling well!

So that's the past few weeks. What's on the horizon?

I've started doing some programming for fun again. I started a little side project this week to make a small video game. Once it gets a bit further along, I'll probably talk about it more. Right now there's not much to discuss as I've been working on the game engine, but not really the display functionality. I don't want to bore you unless I'm actually going to finish the game. :-P

Both Elissa and I are super excited the Fall is approaching. It's always been my favorite time of year, and I've talked it up to Lis so much during our relationship, I think my excitement has caught on. Her dad is coming up in a week or so to visit, and they're going up north to view the colors. It should be a blast, but I won't be able to join them -- saving up my vacation time for around Christmas.

I needed something to occupy my time for my upcoming trip to France. Since I canceled my World of Warcrack account, I can't rely on that for hours of entertainment. So I bought a copy of Bookworm Adventures 2. Talk about a game made just for me -- you wander around spelling words! It's sort of like Scrabble except with a storyline. How awesome is that? I'll tell you how awesome it is: I managed to spell "quaaludes" last night.

As usual, the Twins pitching proved to be in fine form, not even making it 5 innings into the game. Thank goodness we have good batters to recover from terrible pitchers -- we actually won the game! I sure hope that new stadium comes with a new pitching staff next year. Oh, and my fantasy team took a major hit this week: Morneau and Kubel are both injured, and I can't swap em until Monday. Blech.

We have a visitor here now -- our friend Jennifer is visiting for a few weeks. It's awesome to see her again, she was in our wedding as one of the bridesmaids. Unfortunately, her hubby Aaron couldn't come with her on this trip. Hopefully next time!

Cache is still doing great! We're trying to teach him a new trick, but this one has proved pretty difficult to confer. We're trying to teach him to play dead when we say "Bang", but since "lay down" is still pretty new, and "roll over" has yet to be understood, I suspect this one may take a while. Anyone have tips?

For whatever reason, my weekends have ceased to recharge me recently. I don't know what it is -- it's not like I did a ton of chasing this weekend. But I certainly woke up today going "wait, it's Monday already?"

I was, however, delighted to see my new office chair sitting in the office. Adam was nice enough to loan me a very nice spare he had sitting around in his basement. It's one of those black mesh, super expensive, totally awesome ones. Yay for friends!

I'm patiently waiting for October to come around so I can get Fallout 3 for the 360, but am also bored out of my skull in the gaming dept. I've reverted back to old arcade games from XBox Live, like Uno and Hexic. It's not that I don't enjoy them during my down time, but they're also not very captivating either.

Interesting REALbasic question for the day: now that IE can be entirely uninstalled from the OS with Windows 7, how does the HTMLViewer control react? Sure, it's nice to use the native rendering engine for each platform, but this makes two platforms out of three where the native rendering engine which RS has picked may not actually be present. Oops.

I head out to France this weekend for a week-long work trip. I wish Elissa could come along on this one, but it just wasn't in the stars this time around. Instead, we're getting a totally awesome visitor: Jennifer (one of Elissa's best friends) is coming to town! She gets in tomorrow, which is awesome. But I'm bummed that I will be out of town for the majority of her visit. :-( I get back late on the 29th from France, and I think Jennifer will be gone by then.

However, the following weekend (the 5th of Sept), we're having a party here at the house. It's a house-warming party, of sorts. Mostly just an excuse to play yard games, drink beer and have fun with friends. If you're interested in stopping by, either drop me a line or surprise me -- either way is fine with me. :-) The theme of the party is: California Sucks, Minnesota Rocks. I still have no idea how we will express this theme, but I'm sure we'll come up with something. :-P

So I finished Mass Effect this weekend, and I have to admit that I'm torn. It was a really fun game, but had a lot of lame to it.

Good

* Reasonably compelling characters that were actually fun to play. Even though I exclusively used Wrex and Talia through the entire game, I didn't find any characters I simply couldn't stand.

* Beautiful graphics.

Bad

* Abrupt termination of the storyline at the end really sucked. Here's this awesome story about how evil all these critters are. You kill ONE and then..well... oops, we're done. It looks like the producers ran out of money part of the way through the project and just gave up.

* I can travel all around the universe... and yet there's only about 20 places for me to go in it? And all of them are mild variations of one another? Lame. The graphics are so compelling, but the level design -- especially for indoor scenes, was laughably poor.

All told, I liked the game. It was well worth the "free" I paid for it. But it was still disappointingly short in terms of play time. My wish list for ways this game could have been different is actually pretty short:

1) Random level design for the worlds and bunkers.

and/or

2) Continue the storyline to an actual completion instead of copping out.

Had they done either one of these things, then I wouldn't feel the game was too short. #1 would allow me to keep exploring and completing random side quests. Oblivion did a great job of this. Mass Effect, not so much. Had they done #2, I think it would have added another few dozen hours to the play time.

Would anyone else like to share their thoughts on the game?

You can thank my friend Dana for such an entertaining question.

I traded in a few of my old N64 games and picked up a copy of Mass Effect for the 360. It sure is a pretty game, and it's been a lot of fun so far. It has the right amount of methodical tedium that I look for in an RPG. It also has auto-aim functionality, which I require in an FPS. I dig it!

I was hoping to get a copy of Fallout 3, but they wanted 55$ for a used copy (you can get it new for about 5$ more). If anyone has a copy they want to loan me, I'll pay for shipping. :-D

Cache has been a ton of fun to have around the house. He spends most of the work day hanging out with me in the office, sleeping. He's sleeping, not me. ;-) I really enjoy having a dog around the house again. After Charm died, I wasn't certain if I'd get another dog. But I'm glad I have. The cats are starting to handle life with Cache better. Miikka is still scared of him, but Pixel got over the changes pretty quickly. He's very gentle with the cats -- mostly curious, but never aggressive. So far, so good!

It sounds like I'll be heading back to France later this month for work. I'm hoping to take Lis with me on this trip so she can stop being so jealous of me. :-P Oh yeah, and it would be fun to have my wife along too!

Elissa and I are proud to announce that we have a new member of our little family. We picked up a 6 month-old black lab (mix) from the Tri-county humane society in St Cloud. The shelter had him named "Cash", but that's a pretty lame name if you ask me. So we named him -- while phonetically the same, it's significantly better: Cache. :-)

I don't have pictures of him on the computer yet, but I'm sure you'll be seeing plenty of him in the future. He's really playful, but at six months he's trainable. In fact, he came to us pretty well-trained already! He knows how to sit and stay, and he's great off the leash (never really strays far away and comes back to you when you call him). He pulls a bit on the leash, so we're working on that. He also doesn't dig the kennel, but he'll get over that with some work.

Both of us are super excited to have a dog, and he's been a blast to have around so far (though we've only had him since about 5pm today!). w00t!