BLAG Ramblings of a crazy old fool

HogSong, Mercurial, Best Weekend Ever.

So this was the best weekend in ever. Erin was down here for the week, and stayed over the weekend as well. After work on Friday (not a whole lot got accomplished due to the earthquake/tsunami in Japan), we started playing video games. And we kept playing video games. Until like 5AM. It was fantastic. Erin ragequit Gears of War because she couldn't beat the end guy (I heard he's hard...), played some cartoony RPG on the PS2, I played some DJ Hero (new high score on Kaskade - Move for Me!), and more. Honestly I don't remember the rest, the last few hours are kind of a blur. We totally should have played some old-school N64 Super Smash Brothers, but we forgot D: I missed out raiding with Eminence again, but I call worth it.

I also made Erin watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. She was not impressed. I believe her exact words were YOU BROKE MY MIND, and something about Stanley Kubrick only having 20-minute scenes of nothing important so he could pleasure himself. She rather enjoyed the Intermission though. Lawl. Also watched Gamer again (continuing the bad movie saga), and Tron: Legacy. Which is by far, one of the best movies ever made. She concurs. Finally found a DVD-quality copy of it to show. Definitely going to be the first movie I'll buy on DVD in quite a while. I tried to convince her to watch 2010, but she sadly would have none of that. Oh well! We also watched some Stargate: SG1 (The Fifth Race, one of the all-time best SG1 episodes ever). I also taught her some shell commands on linux! Mostly because she stole my laptop and then realized she couldn't use it ;D

On Sunday, we came up with the greatest idea ever. HOG SONG: The Pigging. For some reason, we have retarded nicknames for each other, and we are going to make them characters in a game. I looked into an XNA Developer subscription, and started up some character modelling in 3DSMAX. (Gotta love those student discounts...lol). I was going to join, but my Dreamspark account appears to have expired, and I'd have to screw around with getting DeVry to verify my student status (Technically, I think I'm on "leave"). Decided to leave that for another day and just get started. We decided on three main characters, Red Pig, Large Pig, and Mexi-Pig. Mexipig has fantastic abilities, like Taco Whirl, Piñata Bomb, Burrito Bash. Large Pig has Truffle Shuffle, Mud Bath, Suspender Bender. Red Pig has Scarlet Hooves, Crimson Squeal, and Blarney Stone. There are sooo many more, but this is just a preview. If I can convince Erin to give up her precious sketch pad and notebook, I'll scan in some of the concept art and throw up an except and some promo images. It is going to be Flantastic. Going for a free action RPG style for the Xbox Live Arcade; if it gets popular (lol), I might look and see what we can do to port it to Windows. This could be the start of something epic.

This morning started off just fantastic; my clocks were set correctly for Daylight Savings Time (RAAAGE), but my alarm was set half an hour too late for some reason. Managed to get a shower and get in just a few minutes late; not too bad. But by the time I had gotten there, I had several new work orders, emails, and voicemail messages waiting already. I set the Dukane system to update the clocks and the bells, and then set the VK system to update the media retrieval clocks and classroom CCMs. Then, my work done, I forgot about it. Turns out, only half the clocks decided to play nice. After messing around with the VK box for a while, I gave up and gave Jason a call about it. It was a pretty epic battle, very Tron-esque. Totally imagined light-cycle battles and such going on while I was fighting with that ancient software. (Which could be because we decided to watch Tron again last night...whatever ). Eventually we got that fixed for now (Apparently it will break again in a week when the software decides it actually is DST), but the rest of my morning was spent running around putting out fires for kids to take their Acuity tests (Hooray standardized testing?). Grabbed some lunch with Erin and Dani, then back to work. Found out the bell system actually didn't decide to want to work today, so I spent most of the rest of the afternoon dealing with that and scheduling issues from the VK box's morning antics. Longest day ever.

Tried to find some time to work on the site; managed to get mod_rewrite going (hooray!), so the blog now has fancy looking permalinks. Added the option over on the Eminence side, though I'm not quite ready to roll that SEO mod out yet. Need to do a full backup of the site/content, and actually upgrade to the newest phpBB version. Then I have to fix the theme which will undoubtedly break, and update the PHP hacks for the registration form, etc. Then I can try and add something that might break it. Though it would be nice for more of the site to get indexed than just the shoutbox That's another thing I need to work on, I had planned to add some pagination to the shoutbox page and make it a little more friendly to use. And get a mobile version of the site, or at least shoutbox, going. Most of the users pop on using smart phones anyway, if they aren't at home. Would be nice for me and several others to be able to chat on there.

Talked to Parker a bit about Subversion vs Mercurial; apparently a lot of folks are heading the Hg way. Think I might try it out myself; this Mercurial/PHP web interface looks pretty interesting. I've been wanting to get a nice repository solution setup for my projects; I'd tried to get SVN working on here, but never could find a nice front-end to manage it. Granted it can be done from the command-line, but with as many projects as I work on (and random code snippets that should be organized) it would be really nice to have a way to manage it. The topic of Epic came up and he warned me off. Apparently this article was written by a former Software Engineer there, which is the position I will ideally be applying for. Still, I think I want to give it a shot. The Windows Integration position seems interesting as well, and it's pretty close to my current job/experience. I'd love to find a PHP coding job, but so far I haven't found much luck, except at EarthIT. I haven't quite gotten around to applying there yet either. (I seem to be stuck in my ways, can't take that jump, for some reason.) I need to update my resume and start working on cover letters for these positions, see what comes back. I looked at Raven as well, which looks AWESOME, but I don't have the experience for something that isn't entry-level there. And of course, there are no entry-level openings. Erin suggested I might drop them a letter with a resume and see if they might have anything in the works. Worth a shot; I think working in a game design company would be about the coolest job ever. Can definitely see enjoying my work and loving what I do there. (Blizzard: I love you too. But you won't hire me )

Oh well. Time to stop procrastinating, I guess. Until next time!