Yes, I have another album in mind and in the works (conceptually, at least). Unlike the past few, however, this new album isn’t going to be new works. Instead, I’m going to recraft some old ideas (some of which are covers, too) into a single collection. Basically, between the rocking 4-piece instrumental rock stuff and the electronic grooves, I occasionally bust out an acoustic number here and there. I started my compositional hobby with just a single guitar with no accompaniment, and I like to return there now and then.

I’ve done many recordings of stuff you can play with a single guitar, but the record quality has always been all over the board as my situation and/or gear changed throughout the years. It seems worthy to make a single stop for that kind of music, and it makes even more sense to have them all share a consistent recording quality.

Thus, I’m going through my archives and picking out some golden oldies from the past (and maybe a few new ones) to give them a more polished treatment. No name has been chosen for this album o’ relaxed stringitude, but that’s the least of my worries right now: I haven’t even tried to play some of these pieces in years, so some practice is in order, for sure.

An amazing game currently lives on Xbox Live Arcade, just waiting for you to fork over $10 and enter its world. That game is called Fez, and you may remember it from concept screenshots five years ago. Sometimes, genius takes a while, right? I’ve spent a good portion of time with this cute, deceptively deep, “two-dimensional” platforming game over the last week, and I’ve just started getting to really know it. I’m not going to outright spoil anything, but I can’t be held responsible for describing something you didn’t want described, so play the game first!

After beginning a new game, you’re first presented with a framed interior room, and the star of the show, Gomez, sleeping on a bed. The graphics are pure retro goodness, low-rez, but highly stylized and unique. Gomez himself (itself?) is represented as a white marshmallow something or other with a cute red fez on top. He doesn’t speak or really make much sound at all, but he’s visually expressive and has charming little “wait” animations when you don’t move him for a few seconds.

The landscapes you traverse all feature the same blocky aesthetic, as if everything were made of cubes, but the mood and tone varies depending on where you go. Life abounds, with frogs and birds and inchworms taking up residence most places. Other areas are bereft of anything but a seemingly empty, cold temple, replete with odd statues and unintelligble writing on signs.

No matter where you go, however,  the sense of exploration, wonderment, and discovery you feel as you find new areas and warp between parts of the Fez universe is ever-present. One of the best things about the game is that it presents itself as a 2D/3D hybrid, brought together through an enjoyable gameplay mechanic that effectively quadruples the playing field of every level beyond its initial facade. Doors and passageways (and collectibles) hide and ensconce themselves in the 3 hidden views while you spin the world around trying to figure out how to exploit 3D space in a 2D plane to get to them.

None of the navigational problem-solving is too hard, but instead offers just enough challenge to make you feel like you’re accomplishing something. Actual puzzles are presented at times, and they’re often quite obscure and require some analytic brainpower. I’ve solved a few of them so far, but many still elude me, almost as if they are intentionally locked away until you gain a better understanding of the game as a whole, and not just the room they’re in. A unique, currently indecipherable language dots the landscape, even after “beating” the game. Those quotes are not there by accident, by the way. I’m hopeful I will eventually understand everything.

I really must mention the soundtrack, too, done by Disasterpeace. I’ve mentioned his name before, and even blogged about the pre-order for the soundtrack, so it’s no surprise how in love I am with the music in Fez. Each piece complements its scene (even dampening its volume when your character goes behind walls or inside rooms) pretty darn perfectly. I describe it as “melodically ambient chiptune” and that’s what I’m sticking with for now.

In short, the half-decade wait for Fez was well worth it. The only complaint I have is that the framerate drops noticeably during some levels, usually the larger ones, and is felt most strongly when transitioning between them. A minor complaint, but one that drags down the genius of Fez, regardless.

I can’t wait to have an in-depth discussion of this on TEM.

The Escort Mission is now live.

I’m in a podcast! Some friends of mine formed a little think tank/consortium/discussion group that gets together about once a week in the NebyooStudio to chat. My humble digital audio workstation powers up, microphones are properly checked, and games, television, movies, music, culture, or whatever else we want gets discussed, contorted, and hopefully hilariously dissected. Our opposing viewpoints both complement each other and diverge enough on the subjects we choose, which we hope makes for a good dialogue.

We’ve been having these kinds of discussions in a shared chat room online for years, but one day I realized that what we were doing was essentially like the gaming podcasts I’d been listening to. Both Chaz and Josh, the other two parts of our trio, have been listening to ‘casts for a long time, so I’m late to the party, but it was my idea to start our own! And they agreed! And here we are.

Check out our bloggy-blog for the deets on our new venture. We have two episodes recorded so far, with another coming up soon. Basically, I’m stoked and really enjoy the whole process. Despite being someone who does a lot of recording, I don’t normally record vocals, let alone only vocals, so it’s been a good learning process for my pro-am recording engineer side.

The domain and website of my namesake is dead. Nebyoolae.com, the online home I’ve held to show off my creative pursuits for nearly a decade, is now merely an A record on a DNS server pointing to my new cozy spot at Bandcamp.

The folks at BC make it ridiculously easy, and maybe even a little fun, to upload, organize, and even occasionally sell my work to the Internets. Their artist template is plain, but effective. It’s iconic without really being sophisticated. And a lot of music I’ve listened to lately has come from there. I dig them. I dig them so much that I realized my focus was to just provide access to the music I’ve done and…basically nothing else. Bandcamp does that better than I ever have.

My initial goal when I first got serious about web development was to create an online database of all my music (and even instrumental characteristics) so that it was accessible from anywhere and easily searchable. I then went ahead and did that. And it was good! But it was also never quite done, nor was it even used very much. I’ve written a lot of music and cataloging it was tedious. A lot of it was essentially detritus, having no association with an album, nor even a finished form. Lots of sketches got onto the site just for the sake of completion. Over the years I came to find that it’s just not worth keeping such detailed track of every idea I come up with.

In the middle of writing both Zoetic and the Impulse (OST), I decided to get more serious about selling my music and trying to be “pro”. Most of my web development is being done at work, so I’m less ambitious about personal projects. I have not lost my obsession with making and recording music, however. So I just did what a lot of people do: I outsourced. This blog here is my main “hey, I’m on the Internet” vehicle now, and Bandcamp takes care of the music. It’s a good deal.

Will nebyoolae.com ever become grounds for a future web project? It’s definitely possible with the ease my mind changes gears, but for now it’ll be used as the front door to what I’ve really wanted it to be all along: the music I’ve made that you should really give a listen to. Check it out, will ya?

This post is largely to say that my wife and I are safely back. We survived 2 11-hour plane trips, 2 2.5 hour train rides, and probably about 30 subway rides under and through two busy cities in Europe. All of those trips went pretty well save for the first plane ride from LAX to London. We couldn’t sleep on the airplane, so leaving at 5:30pm PST and landing at 3:30pm GMT (the next day!) was pretty wacky.

We saw lots of things that tourists saw. We took lots of pictures that tourists take. We ate at lots of places that tourists eat at. We also purchased lots of things that tourists purchase. We were tourists, you know.

I got about 1,000 pictures to sift through, as well as a few videos, so that’s gonna take a while. I think I’ll make a silly movie out of them all and write the music for it, too. Cuz that’s what I do. Robyn will most likely be more efficient than I and just post some highlights, which is all you really want.

It was a culture shock to be there, and it’s a culture shock to come back. It was totally worth it, though.

As mentioned in my previous post, the cover image for Zoetic was hastily thrown together the day of release as I was still waiting for the proper art from a cohort-in-creativity. Well, she finally finished it and it’s now been uploaded to Bandcamp. Thanks to Kathy for the art, yet again (this is her second cover art contribution for me, the first being for my video game remix album, Gamey Remix).

Introducing Zoetic, now available at Bandcamp!

About 10 years ago I created my first “real” album of original music. It was called Clocks Striking 13. No, it wasn’t an ode to 1984, as I had actually forgotten about that reference at the time. I really just thought it looked cool, and gave me a good visual to base a cover off of.

CS13 was just a bunch of actual, fully-realized instrumental rock compositions I’d cobbled together over the years and then was able to record and mix together in a month. I created it in Cakewalk Guitar Tracks 2 on a Windows XP machine, using a limited amount of drum loops and a cheap microphone to capture some live guitar. Bass was handled by recording guitar and then EQing it. The albums sounds pretty dated now, but I’m still proud that I pulled it off.

Fast-forward to August 2011. I’ve got quite a few more guitars, basses, and other musical playthings. I’m much more of a one-man band now. I use a Mac primarily, and my sequencer of choice is Logic. I’ve bought several sample packs and have a couple MIDI controllers for input. A nice multi-input audio interface sits under my LCD monitor and some large audio monitors festoon the sides of my desk, ready for output. A lot has changed in 10 years.

The beginning of Zoetic began like lots of other projects: my thoughts coalesce into a single vision at some point, and I realize I have a few sketches or ideas between the new things I’ve recorded here and there for fun and some failed projects of yesteryear. I think to myself, “I might have something here. I might have an album.” And thus a Google Doc detailing a tracklist is born.

My initial idea for the album was going to include some electronic or experimental stuff alongside the usual instrumental rock that my brain constantly develops. However, I ran into some creative trouble on anything that wasn’t my stock guitar/bass/drums combination, so those ideas either went to the Impulse (OST) or to the digital archive bin. Over the next 7 months, tracks got cut or added at my whim, finally ending up at that magical number 11. The garageband that is me in a room with some guitars, mics, and a sequencer chock full o’ samples was all I needed. Except for a few samples here and there (and the drums, obv), Zoetic is all me.

And it’s available on Bandcamp.

You could say that this is a post-neo-grunge album, minus lyrics, but sprinkled with vocals. I don’t often sing, and I rarely write lyrics, but I really felt like adding some vocal accompaniment was needed for this project. Thus, I dug into my reserves and found some vocal samples here and there that seemed to sweeten the mix. “New Settlement” probably uses them the best, actually seeming like a melody that goes along with the music, and not just padding. Initially, I had no vocals at all, but since adding them, I can’t imagine these pieces without them.

One last thing: much like my soundtrack for Impulse, I’m putting Zoetic up for actual money. I usually think that my music isn’t worth anything, but I’ve come to feel like that’s the wrong attitude. For people to take you seriously, you must first take yourself seriously. I’m going to start that by putting a nominal fee on the downloads of any album I make that ends up at Bandcamp. Anything else that is more of a “single” or throwaway idea that’s still worth sharing will go to SoundCloud for free listening/downloading. My personal site at nebyoolae.com will soon just be a jumping off point for these services, and I won’t be hosting every single song I have like I’ve been doing for years. BC and SC do their respective jobs better than I could ever do, and I’m gonna start supporting that.

In sum, go and enjoy the music I have made. I hope you do.

Making that profile on IndieGameMusic.com 3+ years ago finally paid off.

A few months ago I was approached by an independent developer who had created a new, free, space-themed puzzle game. He said he had placeholder music, but wanted original creations. He also wondered if I was interested in making said creations.

I responded politely, professionally, and most enthusiastically with what amounted to “Hell yes, sir”.

Now, I’ve never written music for an actual game before. I have written music for a fake game, Ebben Flow, which I envisioned, but never planned to make. Creating a game is tough business, and I doubt I have the skill and patience to create something that…substantial. Music, on the other hand, I can and have created in spades. Having someone else make the game so that I can score it is really the ideal plan, and that’s what’s so great about this.

Through the last quarter of 2011 I worked in spurts, creating 7 tracks of moody, spacey goodness, all for creating an environment suited to blasting a pod through the blackness of atmosphere in search of a green exit. Hopefully, anyone who plays it will think similarly. On that note, you should play it.

I’ve put up the soundtrack I created on Bandcamp, my first offering to them. For the first time (save for Pure Yellow Colour), I’m putting a price on my music. The price is not very high, but I feel like people take something more seriously if you put a price on it, like you think it’s good enough to part with some coin in order to see/hear/experience something. I’m loathe to do this, since I know everyone is conditioned to expect free stuff on the Internet (myself included), but I feel the price point is low enough to not be a barrier. There are a lot of great musicians on Bandcamp, too, and maybe I will be your rabbit hole. It’s what I’ve always dreamed about, really.

Thank you to Joel for contacting me, thank you to Apple for Logic, and thank you to the myriad sample and synth makers who create tools for making sound do my bidding.

The music playing in the background? It’s a pleasant mix of spaghetti western plus modern electronica. Darren Korb, the in-house composer, says he used Logic (and I can hear some Apple Loops in there, too) to sequence it. That gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling, being a fellow Logic user. However, there are two spare tracks, just guitar and voice, that really cut through the thick morass of distorted guitar, snappy synths, and breakbeats. They are technically simple, but they resonate emotionally, much more than the rest of the soundtrack. They’re also the only songs that one person could conceivably perform by themselves (the one exception being the track where the narrator hums the first piece’s melody).

Watch this video to see one of them, as well as a third piece that’s a mashup of the first and second one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGxgFxF47XY

Darren plays these songs in an open tuning, really giving them their characteristic “open-ness”, a sound that rings out because of all the open strings sustaining constantly. Now, I learned to play the two main songs, “Build That Wall” and “Home Sweet Home”, in regular tuning, mainly due to Internet tabs written as such and laziness on my part, and they still sound fine. You hear the music and sing the words, and you get the gist. For a quick accomplishment and bout of satisfaction, it gets the job done. Such renditions are not really “authentic,” though. You miss out on certain notes that shape the music in a distinctive way when you play them this way.

Retuning your guitar to play a couple songs is annoying, though, right? 99% of the popular music out there is written with the good ol’ EADGBE, and that makes it versatile when you just want to play a bunch of songs. I just want to be able to pick up the guitar and play a bunch of stuff without having to think about changing string tension. However, alternate tunings do mix up your way of thinking and can make you write and play differently. I think my first real dip into the world came via Soundgarden in the late 90s, a band that often writes things in alternate tunings. Whether this contributes to their unique sound or not is debatable, but it makes you think about composition in a new way. Each alternate tuning is like a portal to a different world of musical possibilities.

Years later, I wrote a song called The New Standard, which is written in open C tuning. I don’t play this song a lot when I’m noodling around. Can you guess why? ;-P It’s a great song, and something I never would have written in standard tuning, but needing to retune 5 out of 6 strings just to play it? Not going to happen often. This is the inherent risk in writing something in a non-standard way, no matter how fresh or novel the tune might be.

To sum up my point, Bastion’s spare guitar songs are beautiful. They’re largely beautiful because they lay a bare framework for a fantastic and melancholic voice. The guitar parts can be played in standard tuning, and I don’t think the fundamental core of the songs are lost. Playing them in their original open tuning, on the other hand, is what makes it truly distinct and will remain the only true, authentic versions.

That being said, I think I’ll stick to standard tuning for the time being.

General status level: good. Also, Happy Birthday to anyone who is celebrating today. With ~7 billion people in the world, many of you probably are.

FAMILY

We’ve had our rough collie, Penny, for over 2 months now. We haven’t taken her back this time, so things are going well, I guess. The lowest moment so far, besides the (still present) anxiety of moving from crating her every night to sleeping in our room, was when we met with an animal behaviorist. Penny is still not crazy about going outside and can be anywhere from concerning to exasperating depending on our current mental state. A neighbor recommended someone to us and we finally took her up on the suggestion.

At the end of a 2+ hour consultation, the behaviorist seemed quite worried and gave us a few options:

1. Get a more confident dog to act as a “service dog” for Penny, since she seems to follow other dogs for leadership when outside more than she follows us
2. Allow the behaviorist to take her to her ranch and do intensive flooding training, so as to continuously expose her to new environments, in the hopes that she’ll become less scared
3. Get rid of her :(

Obviously, she hesitantly brought up the last option, as it’s the most emotional. Still, the fact that she thought the training needed to “fix” our dog was probably outside our grasp due to our work/lifestyle was pretty sobering.

It’s been almost two weeks since our meeting with her and we’ve only decided on nixing 1 and 3. We’ve vacillated on 2 the whole time. Sure, it will probably help her, but it’s a big commitment, both emotionally and financially. And when she returns we’d have special training we’d need to do and get her other handlers (parents, dogsitters) to follow. It’s a lot to take in for someone who’s never had a dog before!

In the last week, however, I’ve walked her home from a dog park, and walked her to a major shopping center and back, with only sporadic trouble (pulling, spooking, etc.). In other words, with a little confidence in myself to be the leader and control her better, things are looking up. She’s still not exactly happy to be outside and I’m sure intensive training would help alleviate it, but I feel like by just being confident with her she mirrors my energy.

In other words, we haven’t made any decision on what we’re going to do, but we’ll both keep trying for now. Having a dog around the house is still somewhat weird, in that this “presence” is constantly around, being somewhat unpredictable. Everyday is a little better, but it’s hard to say whether I’ll ever be 100% fine with it.

READING

I read the Steve Jobs biography and enjoyed it. The criticism that it doesn’t always paint an in-depth picture of Jobs, but instead merely reports it, is somewhat valid. You see the good and the bad of Steve, but you never really know why. Even when pressed, he doesn’t articulate why he can be such an asshole, or why he felt that was the only way to get people to do great things. He controlled through fear instead of love, I guess. It was a great History of Apple at the very least.

Robyn started reading the Ender’s Game series at my behest and apparently loves it! This is surprising, but awesome. I got her all of the initial quartology for our anniversary, so she should be good for awhile.

ANNIVERSARY

Speaking of which, Robyn and I celebrated 2 years happily married last Monday. For lunch, we went to the Seaside forum, just as planned. We went to the new cafe on the second floor, which was just an empty construction hazard when we got married there. Both of us had very interesting sandwiches, she a butternut squash pannini, and I a tuna melt with red onions and carrots in the mix. For dinner, we hit up the 94th Aero Squadron, mainly because the 5 restaurants we tried before it were all closed on Monday evening (wtf?!). We had a nice, low-key meal while watching some ducks near the airport waddle around. I love her very much and am so glad to spend my life with her.

GAMING

The last major game I played and finished was Dead Island, a really engaging and visceral zombie eviscerating simulation that takes place on an infested land mass surrounded by water. I actually got really sick (food poisoning or flu, not sure) over the holidays and was playing it at the same time, making it all the more real. I did not eat anyone’s brain, however.

Long-form gaming is in the guise of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I waited a while for this to get cheap, but it’s worth full price. The MGS-style gameplay is fun and it’s rad to sneak around enemy encampments and try not to rambo it up. It’s a little choppy on my 2011 MBP, which detracts from the flow a bit, but still doable. Short-form gaming (the chaser, as it were) is Dustforce. Think Super Meat Boy, but with less emphasis on barely beating the level and instead more emphasis on beating the level with style. It’s a bit on the punishing side of the difficulty scale because it forces you to get reaaaally good at a few initial levels before opening up subsequent ones, but the gameplay (with a controller) is fun and almost Sonic or Tony Hawk in nature with its never-ending (if you’re good) combo mechanic.

On the iOS front, Hero Academy is devouring my soul. Take Dungeon Defender’s crystal guarding and add in a chess-like tactical game mechanic and you’ve got something I’m constantly checking on my phone. I’m so addicted I’ve got about 10 games going right now, half or more with random strangers. Asynchronous multiplayer on a portable device is perfect for my gaming style.

As far as board gaming goes, my friend Jawn came down from NorCal for a weekend and brought several from his ever-burgeoning collection. The main event was surely Eclipse, an epic space war. It took us about ~5 hours to get through it, which was about 1 hour per person, plus an hour of explanation. Games like this are experiences for me, meaning it’s fun to do once, but the thought of spending so much time on one game again feels kinda rough. Any game that complicated and with a million pieces to keep track of feels like it would work better as a video game. Still, hanging out with friends is paramount, so I’ll do it again if it comes up.

PROGRAMMING

The desire to do any programming that isn’t required by work is currently dead, just like it’s been for a while now. I have no idea when it will come back.

MUSICAL

December and January have not been productive, compositionally or recordingly. To be honest, having a puppy around takes up a lot of my time and mental space, leaving little for musical ambition. Penny seems pretty sensitive to music/sound and the one time I played guitar she actually growled and barked at me! Maybe she can get more comfortable if I play more, but I haven’t been in the mood to test the waters. I believe I’m going to make a more concerted effort in February (at least on the weekends) to try and get her used to it, but that remains to be seen.

One way or another, I’m going to be releasing the soundtrack to the indie game I scored last year in March 2012. I need to polish some stuff before saying it’s “done”, but for the most part it’s pretty solid (in my mind, at least). Look for it for cheap on Bandcamp around about then.

FOR THE ROAD

I began a massive decluttering of stuff in the music room downstairs recently. There’s junk all over the place as I reorganize and rid myself of things I’ve been keeping and moving from place to place for no real reason besides packratdom. How many black, grounded power cables does one person really need, anyway? And yet, it’s hard to just throw something away when I could put it in a container, all nicely zip-tied up. This is the disease, people. Learn to fight it! Keep only what you need, not what you think you’ll need some day in the year 6545 when you’re DEAD.

The current list is as so:

On the whole, it’s changed significantly since last time. A few songs got name changes and a few even got lopped right off. They didn’t actually get removed, but instead repurposed, something I do quite a lot. Other projects come up that need inspiration, or a song doesn’t work within the overall context of the album, so it gets stripped off as a single. When you write music so haphazardly, these kinds of things will happen.

A nice solid ten tunes for one album always feels nice, even if one of them is kind of a cutesy “throwaway”. I still enjoy listening to the rough drafts, even after repeated listenings, which means that Zoetic is pretty solid. Jamming a couple of them with friends worked out well, so I think I got something good here. There’s always parts here and there that I need to improve, which I will…eventually. Mixing and mastering is a pain for me, too. I hope to get it polished off to a tasteful shimmer before mid-March.

The hardest thing is just letting go and blogging for the sake of blogging. When I know there’s a very small chance I will get any direct feedback, my mind wanders and my focus wanes. I imagine myself speaking into a dark, empty cave, hearing only myself and the boredom and tedium of my thoughts.

For now, I will simply post some pictures that both sum up and don’t sum up at all the last few weeks, which encompassed my birthday, Christmas, and New Year’s.

Our collie, Penny, sees and reacts to the world in a different way than we do. Right now, she’s very skittish when outside. Outside has a bunch of unknown variables. Keeping her to a simple routine when we go on our walks, taking her along the same route to the same places, helps to keep her calm (relatively), but is no guarantee. Planes, cars, bikes, people, and other dogs are just some of the things she tends to tense up around.

When she’s calm, she walks at a constant pace, stopping sporadically to sniff and look around. When she’s in panic mode, triggered by something strange she can’t quite process, she walks much faster, tugging on the leash, heading back to our house. She won’t make eye contact and she’s not interested in treats or petting.

It all takes you back to being young and new to the world. There is so much stuff going on at all times, guys! In life, it seems like we just grow better and better at filtering out what we’re not focused on. Penny, on the other hand, does not seem to currently possess that ability. It takes little to freak her out, much like someone who is simply fearful of the unknown. It can be frustrating for her owners who are not flinching at every horn honk or vent noise.

Hopefully, this is a growing pain and she’ll be less terrified of the world outside our home some day soon :-)

Penny, asleep on our living room floor

Sundays are the day for a new beginning.

***

You may remember that we acquired a pooch almost 3 months ago. A 3 month-old, female, rough sable collie that we named Penny. You may also remember that after 2.5 days of absolute meltdown, we took her back to her original owner.

Sigh.

Not our proudest moment, for sure. A combination of lack of experience and anxious overwhelmingness drove us to a place not far outside of madness. We tried to take on a huge responsibility all by ourselves with oversensitive brains and failed hard. Our mind paralysis was absolute.

I remember the night before we were going to get back into the car and take this most likely frightened little baby back to her original home. I tried to take her on a walk to a grassy area in the middle of several rows of houses in our housing complex. She didn’t like leashes and would only walk and follow me without one, so after much frustration I gave up on restraining her and just hoped she wouldn’t run away. She didn’t.

She eventually followed me to the grassy area and we sat down on a bench in the middle. I quickly learned just how many other dogs existed in our neighborhood as I was soon surrounded by people and their pets. I introduced myself to a bunch of people I’d never met before, despite living there for 15 months. I met a bunch of dogs of all kinds. Penny didn’t bark, but she was definitely skittish and scared. I felt really popular. That popularity was tainted and short-lived, though. I couldn’t tell anyone that they would most likely never see Penny again. The moment was both blessed and cursed.

After returning home from Arizona a second time in a week the release of tension was immediate. Breathing became less labored and anxiety was extinguished. We both felt much better for weeks afterward. Perhaps we weren’t dog people, and it was better to realize this sooner than later. Being called by an obedience center to tell us we missed our first class stung, but it was better than the alternative.

However, a different feeling crept in once a month or so went by. The short-term relief was replaced by a marked decrease in Robyn’s confidence to take care of a dependent, pet or kid. We’ve talked about kids many, many times, and we both vacillate heavily on when to pursue them. The longer we wait, the more selfish we get. Getting a dog seemed like a good “practice” baby, except we failed miserably at that. How could we handle an actual kid that you can’t (without some truly disastrous consequences) take back?

Time went on and that feeling grew stronger in Robyn and even started to seep into me. I didn’t really want a dog, but I also didn’t want to feel like having a kid was this insurmountable obstacle. The bad thing was that the absence of Penny, when I really stopped to think about it, felt exactly like that. Lots of people have dogs and lots of people have kids, many in our own neighborhood, and yet we couldn’t seem to handle it. What was wrong with us? Was it too late to change our habits and behaviors? Were we just too selfish and set in our ways? Just imagining the dog being around set off anxiety triggers. And yet, there were so many good aspects of having a dog: going on walks, taking her to work, getting bagels in the morning, playing fetch, meeting people, etc. The reality of the times when that wasn’t what you were doing continued to cast a pall of panic over everything, however.

Left to my own devices, I would probably not do anything about it and just embrace bachelorhood. Robyn, on the other hand, hungered to get over this feeling, and finally decided to do something about it. I remained hesitant, but supportive.

Here we go again.

***

Peter the Anteater vs. Penny the Pant...Many?

About three months and a week after that fateful August weekend, we’re back where we were, except…things are different. For one, Penny is still with us. As I sit and write this she is safe in her crate at home, most likely sleeping. We’ve got a dogsitter coming by in the middle of the day to take her out so she can stretch, go to the bathroom, and play a little. We’ve got an appointment to get her spayed at the end of the week. She likes, and goes manually to, her crate, which we have situated next to the TV in the living room. She doesn’t bark much and she doesn’t chew on too many things. She’s (almost) potty-trained. She seems happy and content when inside our house.

She’s fairly petrified of everything outside, however :-\ We’re working on that.

Overall, this time around has been much, much better than last time. What’s different? This time we exploitedused family. Namely, Robyn’s parents, my mom, and Robyn’s brother and his girlfriend. Since it was Thanksgiving last week, Robyn decided it would be a good time to try again, as having a few extra people around to distract and entertain her was paramount to getting through the first few days. She drove out to Arizona with her parents, put Penny in the back of our Outback, and drove back to Anaheim with her. I used the days that she was in California, but not yet at our home, to collect my thoughts and do the kind of things I like to do when alone. It was kind of a bachelor party for one, but it was greatly needed. This little independent life, soon to be wandering around, not being able to communicate with us directly, requiring training (on both of our parts)…it’s a lot to add to one’s life when you’re not used to it. When they finally came down to our house the following Tuesday, I was anxious. You’re never quite ready for a change like this.

As can be seen by the picture above, she’s grown quite a bit. She acts pretty much like we remember her, but she’s much better about being on a leash, and going up and down our stairs. She won’t go down them as readily as she’ll go up them, but with a little nudge we can usually get her to climb down. She seems to understand “sit” quite well, and we’re working on “down”, “come”, and “stay”.

For the most part, she sits and lies around a lot. She doesn’t seem to like to do anything for more than a couple minutes, going from “let’s play!” to “I’m fine sitting here for a bit” in a moment’s notice. We wager she’s just not totally comfortable, having been taken (yet again) from a sandy, remote environment filled with lots of her own kind, to a semi-bustling suburban landscape, replete with cars, bikes, people, garbage trucks, and other dogs that aren’t like her. She’s taken to shaking a lot when we go too far from our house, obviously panic-stricken from being out of her comfort zone. She got away from us while we were testing a new, longer leash, and bolted straight for our house faster and faster as I ran to chase her. I was worried she’d wrap the leash around something and choke herself to death, but thankfully she just ran into an alcove between our house and the next, and pooped herself instead. The bath that came after that changed my very nature as a caretaker.

***

The paralyzing interest in her well-being when we’re at home hasn’t exactly depleted, but it’ll get better. I’m hopeful instead of doubtful now. I can’t really imagine taking her back anymore, even while I feel my whole life has been upset and I find it near-impossible to “let go” and just let her be. Last week was very unusual for us, and this week is the first “real” week in that we go to work and then come home like usual, only we have a puppy who is happy to see us and needs to go outside and eat and be played with for a while. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop at night when we try to go to sleep, as I’m just sure she’s going to start whining, crying, or barking. Thus far, every night has been the same, and she’s been totally silent. Maybe she really has learned, and pretty quickly, that this her new routine, and we’re going to wake up in the morning and repeat it all over again.

Maybe we really have learned, a little more slowly than she, that this is our new routine, too.

The situation: An idea, concept, or event is currently in limbo, with either no name or a temporary one that’s incredibly generic and/or automatically generated. It now needs some official nomenclature. It needs a name.

Names are a crazy thing. Lots of people who are not me probably have no problem with coming up with names. They just pull some magical title out of that place in their brain where such things lie dormant, waiting to be called upon. They probably don’t even think much about it. It’s not a process. It’s not a…well, a thing. Definitely not a thang.

You gotta name your kid. You gotta name your pet. You gotta name your computer, both internally and colloquially. You gotta name your RPG character. You gotta name your “New Folder” or “Untitled Document”. You gotta name “IMGFROMCAMERA923423.JPG” to something more useful. There are other things that don’t necessarily need names, but you might think they do, like your car,  your plant, your musical instrument, or your condition where you do something clumsily or endearingly (someone else’s probably got that for you, though).

For the things that really need a name, we use them as shorthand for reference, and they’re really useful, but they’re also a double-edged sword. On one hand, they’re a necessary and efficient tool that will become indelibly linked to the entity attached to it, and on the other hand they’re a necessary and efficient tool that will become indelibly linked to the entity attached to it. Gah!

OK, I’m not really that emotionally unstable about naming things, worrying that the wrong choice is going to create cataclysmic chaos and the downfall of man. That’s just silly. However, I can definitely get caught up in the act of naming, losing some minor amount of sleep and otherwise productive time going over the myriad avenues of titleship. Once you name something you gotta stick with it. Whether it’s a good name or not, I believe you should stick with it in the long run to maintain consistency and integrity. No one wants to have to relearn the name of something once learned if they can avoid it.

So, what do I need to name? As a musician, this comes up all the time: either a song or album. Yep. I may have entitled my latest production A Nebyoolaeous Experience, but I’m thinking I need to not rely so heavily on my creative and online namesake for lasting musical roadmarks. Not that I’m planning on abandoning my handle, but I’d like my songs and collections of songs to have a more personality-neutral bent. They blend better in the greater sonic soundscape that is the Internet. However, I also don’t want to go too far in the other direction where there be beige dragons and faceless NPCs walking from coordinate to coordinate in a loop, spewing the same lifeless line over and over.

Some previous album titles and how I came up with them:

• Clocks Striking 13 – I thought it sounded cool, in an edgy, dystopic future. Little did I remember that I was essentially stealing straight from the maw of Orwell with that one.
• Music Unsolicitedly Started Idiosyncratically for Karma, or M.U.S.I.K. - /deep breath. I really like to overthink things, don’t I?
• Ebben Flow - RPG music that massages a typical water-related characteristic (“Ebb and Flow”, get it?). Most RPGs aren’t much more creative.
• Majicking - My initials, MJC, as a gerund.
• Scraps - Short odds and ends from my mind.
• The Matic - Collection of themes. Yeeeeah.
• Gamey Mixture - A collection, or mixture, of video game remixes
• Adversapolis - A made-up Greek word that mixes “adversity” and “polis”, as it described the personal difficulties sung about on the album. I think I used the Internet to come up with this one.

As you can tell, I like to be clever, but often end up being cheesy. When your music largely consists of wordless instrumentals, the underlying theme to things can be hard to ascertain.

Thus, I’m on the prowl for a new moniker to go with Album #12. Inspiration can come from anywhere…I just need to find it.

Extreme positions, while useful in providing a clear, unadulterated opinion, just never seem useful in the vacuum of the post, speech, or article they reside in. They can only be understood in the greater context of the idea they describe. Thus, people commenting and saying “Man, your opinion is extreme and I don’t like it” or “Man, your opinion is extreme, and I like it” is also not useful to me, because it’s all extreme commenting with little to no nuance.

The author later admitted to recently having a very negative experience with #regions and that it may have influenced his extreme article. His admission is pretty predictable, as I find most extreme positions coming from an extremely one-sided environment that doesn’t easily allow for opinions that differ. Basically, he had to deal with some overwhelming use of the programming construct and it screwed with his day, and then he wrote a scathing screed against them. He doesn’t use #regions and his code is brilliant, so others who “abuse” them must be wrong.

I don’t believe using an IDE’s organizational tool to help you code is wrong or bad. The abuse of anything is always an issue and checking yourself before you wreck yourself is always useful. In other words, an article stating that you should try not to overuse an element that can lead to difficulty in understanding something later for both you and someone else would probably be more constructive. It would also probably just be disregarded by people because it’s not a strong, extreme position. It’s misconstrued as flaky or wishy-washy. A headline that says “Use C# Regions Sparingly, Wisely” is not as attention-grabbing as “C# REGIONS ARE ONLY USED BY JERKS”, and it never will be.

So it goes.

Why? iOS5 is out, people!

For the deep, invasive, and overly analytic take, I’d suggest checking out Ars Technica. For my shallow, roughshod, and scattershot review, read on.

NOTIFICATIONS

This is the biggie, right? No more modal dialog boxes popping up all in your face all the time like a whiny brat. Just a nice little rectangle that drops down from above, hangs out for a few seconds, and then disappears. If you miss it, just go to The Center and you can check out all your stuff. This is good. There is also more stuff on the lock screen, which can include all the same stuff, only without having to unlock your phone and go into the app. This is good. However, I can already see how all those notifications can get out of hand, much more likely than before when it was just one per screen real estate.

ICLOUD

I’m not sure I want to use iCloud full-on-like, but I’ll let them sync my Calendar and Photos for now. My Mail, Contacts, and Calendar are all in Google’s hands for now, and I have such a huge non-iTunes batch of music that syncing it all through iCloud seems like it would overpower their free 5GB limit. Using the Find My iPhone thingy is cool, though.

IMESSAGE

Brilliant. I need to discontinue my SMS plan since most of the people I text have iPhones. The few that don’t probably won’t make a big ding in my budget. Pairing it together with the existing Messages app was genius so that you don’t even have to think about it.

TWITTER INTEGRATION

Jury’s out on whether this will be useful because I use Echofon, and not the official app. The deep integration would be useful, but not so much that I feel the need to switch right now.

CAMERA

The minimal additions for cropping and enhancing photos is keen (and well overdue), otherwise it’s pretty much the same. Being able to get to it from the lock screen and being able to take a picture with the volume rocker is also overdue.

CUSTOM VIBRATIONS AND TEXT MESSAGE TONES

Sweet! I’ve been wanting to make new text message tones forever. The few originals that came with the iPhone 1-3GS were all right, but only 1 or 2 didn’t make me cringe. The batch that came with iOS4 were laughable: too long and way too much reverb. It’s like they were made by someone who lost a “Design the next round of iOS text message tones!” contest. Now, all that is moot because you can make your own, which I will soon. Being able to make custom vibration patterns is definitely one of those neat things I didn’t know I wanted, but know I can’t live without now.

EVERYTHING ELSE

I don’t really want a Newstand or Reminders app, but they are there and functional. The new Airport Utility is boss for people who use Airport Extremes/Expresses. There’s a bunch of other little system stuff that’s fun to play around with, too.

All in all, the hype is probably overrated in that iOS4->iOS5 is more incremental than revolutionary. The Notifications Center is long overdue, necessary, and awesome. iCloud will be useful if I change my stuff from Google to Apple, but I’m not sure I want to in totality. Everything else is neat, but not necessary. There’s no reason not to download it, however.

Do it!

99! 99! 99! Visions of senior year high school pep rallies come to mind all of a sudden.

My wife and I finally got around to going camping last weekend; it was something we’ve been wanting to do again for many years. A bunch of friends joined us up at William Heise County Park in Julian, CA, a wonderful little spot nestled deep within the windy roads about an hour or so north of our house. We’d been here about 5-6 years ago with just two other friends. This time, we were going to have five additional adults, including a 7 month-old baby, and a 2 year-old toddler. That’d be a grand total of 11 human beings; the max on our spot was 8. So, yeah. Thankfully, it wasn’t a problem.

Our newly-purchased 2011 Subaru Outback worked out really well. We were able to get several crates of supplies, sleeping bags, a tent, cots, a tarp, some backpacks, a couple coolers, and various other sundries, and still get 3 people in comfortably. I doubt I’d be able to accomplish that in my old Saturn Ion. Our friend Josh and we arrived at the campsite early enough to get all our sleeping arrangement squared away before night fall, so we were able to help everyone else set their stuff up once they got there.

Sleeping in a tent on an air mattress, while fully-clothed and in a sleeping bag, in 40 degree weather is a far cry from our warm and inviting bed back at home. However, we braved the nights and had a great weekend, too. There was lots of food prepared and eaten, including beans and weenies, breakfast sandwiches, tacos, pie, coffee, and (of course) smores. We chatted and played some nerd party games at night, all the while warming ourselves by the ever-crackling fire. It was really nice.

The neighboring campers were all nice, and one of them had a lively evening on Saturday tossing all matter of things into their fire, trying to start a forest firemake it as magnanimous as possible. We also went on a semi-grueling, but invigorating, hike at one point, and I unfortunately fell, tweaking my left wrist and tearing a hole in my jeans. That was not so nice. All in all, though, I think it was successful and people enjoyed themselves. Everyone pitched in to help on all accounts and things went smoothly.

The next time I go camping, however, I will definitely try to not also be on-call for work. I got an early morning support request, as well as a couple later in the day. That didn’t rule. I was having issues connecting to things and I didn’t know how to figure out the issues presented, so I had to contact my boss, which you usually hope to be your last resort. I guess you could say it was a little trial by fire when I least wanted it. It threatened to ruin the weekend when it really shouldn’t have been an issue, so I know now to do things differently in the future.

I’m kind of excited to go camping again someday soon, and not in another half-decade. Maybe Yosemite?

CONTEXT

The last time I played Minecraft was in late 2010, back when it was still alpha. There were a lot of bugs, but it was playable. My friends and I enjoyed exploring and surviving and building on our mutual friend’s multiplayer server for a couple weeks. It rocked!

As is usual with me, my interest waned the more I played and my initial projects finished. I saw what others were doing (both in-game and on the Internet) and my desire to build (in my opinion) lesser creations shriveled up. Logging on to the game seemed like more of a chore than a joy, and I eventually lost interest.

WHAT’S NEW

As time passes, your hobbies can change (hell, my wife and I even got back into World of Warcraft for a little while a couple months ago; it’s cyclical), and old interests can become new interests again. I’d followed the development of Minecraft loosely over the last year, and thought it’d be fun to try it out again.

Besides the simple passing of the time to renew interest, two major things changed this go-around to make it more fun for me: 1) I’m running the server, and 2) I set up the rendering of an isometric map of our world each day to show progress.

Being able to see what everyone has been up to each morning really helps improve the engagement with the world. Also, being able to teleport myself around, or change the time, or turn monsters on and off gives me that power trip I didn’t know I’d been missing.

Thankfully, a lot of the people who made playing this game back in 2010 a joy have returned to make it fun again. Several of my friends joined almost immediately and, through our combined efforts, took to constructing buildings and towers and mines and farms and lava-enveloped minecart tunnels and portals to the Nether and land bridges connecting everything. Even without the community element, building things like you had a bunch of digital Lego pieces is still really fun. Mining into the depths of the world to uncover hidden ore caches and abandoned mineshafts and ravines and lava or water deposits brings an exciting sense of discovery to your efforts. Co-operative multiplayer sandbox gaming is really fun when everyone pitches in here and there. Monsters add a bit of flavor, and I’m still for their inclusion, but we ended up turning them off again (just like last time) so that we could all spend more time enjoying the creative aspects, and less time fearful of the “game” elements.

It’s all new and shiny and fun again, but I know that’ll go away, as you can only build and explore so much. However, I hope to leave the server going indefinitely so that anyone can come in and have a look-see or try their hand at exploring and molding the world, even if it’s been a day or week or month. It’s a cube-based Internet bulletin board, really.

Big Giant Circles, the musical persona of Jimmy Hinson, just released his debut album. After listening to 1.2 tracks, I knew I had to have it. Bought, downloaded, and playing. It’s got contributions from everyone to Minecraft composer C418, to VVVVVVV maestro souleye, to my personal favorite songcrafter Disasterpeace.

Get it.

No longer do I drive a 2003 Saturn Ion 2. No longer do I drive the car that I once drove home, north on the 805, from my friend Kim’s place, in the rain, at 4 in the morning, and crashed into the guardrail as the road peaked the 8 below. No longer do I drive the car that pulled into a car port without hitting the posts holding it up at my old apartment hundreds of times. No longer do I drive the car I used to move from La Jolla to Tierrasanta to Santee. No longer do I drive the car I used to drive to the first date with the woman who would later become my wife. No, I no longer drive it. That car now sits at the Irvine Subaru dealership. In exchange, Robyn and I took home a brand spankin-new 2011 Outback, their “wagon” model.

You could say I was a little attached to “The Green Hornet”. Alas, it’s time for new, new, new!

The Outback is a different animal than my Saturn. You sit higher than someone in a sedan, but not as high as someone in a full-blown SUV or truck. It’s kind of nice. The steering wheel feels more substantial. It’s like I’m piloting a tank at times. The turning radius is really good, though, and it goes as fast as my old car, mainly because of its better engine. In essence, it’s a sweet car. While it will be driven by me in a “get to work and back” kind of way, it’s really our car, in that when you’re married and both need the specs of a certain kind of vehicle (cargo space, back leg room), you both end up using it. Robyn never liked driving my old car, so the Outback is a fresh start for both of us. Intertwined driving.

Why get a new car? Basically, my old (~8 years-old) Saturn was getting on in years and quality. The windshield had a crack, the AC was unreliable, the seats were stained, and it needed new front struts. It had been in an accident (described above), and was | | <– that close to being a total loss, so despite the remarkable skill of the body shop that worked on it, certain things never felt quite as good as they did before. Fixing all of these things could probably be measured in the > $1000 arena, which was about half the value of the car in total. Still, it ran fine otherwise, and was suitable for my needs (get to work and back, and occasionally visit friends/run errands). Of course, when you get married and also realize you don’t absolutely hate the idea of dependents (animals, children, etc.), you realize that it might be nice to have a vehicle that can comfortably transport these “life changers”. Also, have you seen the amount of back seat leg room Outbacks have? It’s a lot.

Regardless of the “family car” moniker that this new vehicle certainly deserves, it also has a lot of creature features my Saturn was woefully lacking. A list follows:

• Power windows and locks (Saturn had locks, but not windows)
• Moonroof
• Bluetooth
• A much larger trunk
• Cargo cover
• All-weather floor mats, trunk mat, and wipers
• Remote keyless entry
• Auto-dimming rearview mirror
• Rearview backup camera
• Heated seats
• Heated side mirrors
• Reclining back seats
• Power driver’s seat controls
• Outdoor temperature gauge
• Compass in rearview mirror
• Visors with extensions
• Continuously variable transmission (automatic + semi-manual)
• Cupholders in the doors
• Automatic head lights
• Radio mute button (it’s useful, people!)
• More configurable wiper speed
• Cruise control
• Curtain airbags
• Armrest between front seats
• Backseat privacy glass

There might be more, but that’s probably enough to get the point across.

It’s a new era. I don’t drive a sedan — I drive a wagon. Like, a station wagon. Like, something my parents may have driven in the 70s. Only it’s now 2011 and I’m 30. And I’m planning to have a family which may include a dog (we may retry this idea after our initial debacle — we’ll have to see) and a child. This car will be more useful for that future which has not yet become the present. I’m not usually one for putting a bunch of money down on something that is still potential (even if it’s planned potential), so I fought the decision a lot. I also miss my simple, beaten-up, and yet still useful car. Getting used to driving the Outback will largely be mental, not physical, as it drives a lot like the Prius, which I now have 4 years of experience driving. I am infinitely adaptable, however, so it will soon become second-nature. Until then, I’m going to hit Publish on this post and begin this new journey of car ownership, cursing the presence of a monthly loan payment I had abolished a few years ago (paying off my old car), and yet enjoying the wonderfulness of having a new vehicle again.

So…I’m working on a new album. The working title is Nebyoolaeous Experience, because I am a conceited pedant. I started tracking one piece, and then another, and then another…and now it’s starting to look like I might have a full-on collection of pieces to tie some rope around and call it an album. Hell yeah.

Yes, it’s going to have guitar, bass, and drums. It’s also going to have samples and synths. The genre is, as usual, instrumental rock and/or quirky electronica. In short, it’s going to have what I love about music, and what I am fairly proficient in. No vocals will be recorded, as that is something I’ve tried in the past and never been really satisfied with, and I’m OK with that. I like making music that I like listening to, which contains vocal stuff, is not lead by it.

It doesn’t have a theme…yet. For something like Average Town or Ebben Flow, there is a definite unifying theme, be it “make only chiptune music” or “write an RPG soundtrack”. Other times, I just have a bunch of ideas in my head at around the same time and those eventually, hopefully, get packaged together in that time-honored package of music called the album. This project may gain a theme later, but most likely it will just be a collection of tunes I think work together in sequence. Even if there’s no theme, the sequence of tracks is definitely important.

 THE PROCESS

It’s entirely possible I’ve gone through this before, but every time I do, I feel like I’m getting closer and closer to formalizing it. There’s even a nice list for you to reference!

For this album, much like all the rest, the beginning of the first song from it was a riff I’ve played for years, but never got it into its canonical release state. Until now, it’s just been a demo, otherwise known as a “song that never was”. The process of going from initial spark of idea to a demo to canon is lengthy and requires investment. As most artists probably can agree, ideas (at least when feeling creative) are plentiful, but finished concepts are not. Getting an idea to be regarded as canon in the Nebyooverse is not always the goal, but is definitely the dream.

What does it mean for a song to be in its canonical release state? Consult the following list:

1. It has been fully tracked in a sequencer. That means all live recordings are done and in their correct spot, and all synth/sampled instruments have been either programmed or played/recorded. It also means that the piece is at a consistent tempo and key signature, and that any changes to either of those two values are tracked appropriately. Ideas can start free-form and organic, but I like finished pieces to be like code: precise and modular.
2. It has been mixed to the best of my ability (this has always been a struggle).
3. It has been bounced to an MP3.
4. If it’s a single, it goes in the Singles directory, which has existed forever and contains any non-album track I deigned good enough to exist in perpetuity. If it’s part of an album, then it’s in the Name of Album directory, and has the track number prepended to its name.
5. If it’s a single, it can now be uploaded to a public website (nebyoolae.com, soundcloud.com, or maybe even bandcamp.com in the future). If it’s an album, I’ll wait until all tracks are canon, and then upload all individual tracks (as well as a package of them as a zip file for downloading from nebyoolae.com).
6. The song then gets archived away in a different directory, and then put into iTunes for listening. Initially, it will be synced to my iPhone so that I can listen to it in the car or wherever, but as with all music I will eventually get sick of hearing it and unsync until a future time when I miss hearing it.

Before any of that happens, however, a riff or idea that gets stuck in my head will most likely get a one-off recording using a portable audio recorder (iPod/iPhone), and/or a demo project in Logic as a synthy/sampley edition. A demo project that doesn’t use live recording will instead use a synth or sampled instrument to get the notes down so I don’t forget how the music goes. Most of the time, this is where an idea will stall. It may produce multiple demos, but none of those demos may actually ever become canon.

In the good cases, if I find I still want to explore/expand/finish it after some time has passed and several listens go by, I’ll flesh out things by doing a live recording, or just add more to the synth/sample lines, especially if it’s not meant to have live guitar/bass. In the awesome cases this leads to the list above and a true member of the Nebyooverse gets added. Whether the idea comes to fruition or not, I’m still happy. The act of creation is really satisfying, pushed to a zen state by the realization of these canon pieces.

FOR THE ROAD

I have four or five rough demos done so far. My favorite is the first track, which is heavily modeled after a session with drummer Russ and I jamming it to high heaven. It’s called “The Jam Bridge”, is a 12-bar blues piece in B, and I love it. Everyone else could deem it a colossal piece of crap and I’d still love it to bits. I will eventually feel this way about the rest of the album, and that’s when I know it’s done.

(Lyrics from memory)

[Musical intro]

She swings a string of pearls on the corner
The streetlight reflects the light in the water
The string, it snaps, and the pearls go sailing
And the splash and bounce and roll cross the wet street

As she bends to chase the pearls, a car pulls ’round the corner
She darts from the eyes of the panic-struck driver
Who’s racing to the delivery room
Cuz his wife is in the backseat, bustin’ out of her womb

[Musical interlude]

The sac breaks and out come the Siamese twins
Who grow up to become the first president
With two heads…are better than one

He puts his heads in his hands, says I have to put my heads together
I can become the best president ever
And not just president…fend for yourself

[Wordless chorus]

Signs his name, takes the blame
For all of the names with no shame
And at last, they adjourn and they leave
And in walks a man, with a broom, and a knife, and blood on his hands

And he sweeps everything under the rug
And goes home to his kids, and gives them a hug
But his wife was not there, she had just left a letter
That said “You’d be much better off without me”

[Musical interlude]

Now his wife took the train to her ex-lover’s funeral
Who died in the bathroom, hit his head on a urinal
When they got together, the knowledge was carnal
And the widow was at the funeral, and they had quite a catfight

And they fell into the hole where the casket was resting
And the preacher just left in the middle of the sermon
Cuz death was one thing, but women made him nervous
And he ran to his car and he pulled ’round the corner

[Wordless chorus]

When something in the street caught the light in his eyes
He pulled over, reached down, and picked up a pearl from the gutter
He didn’t know what to think; he brought it home and washed it in the sink
And he gave the pearl to Sister Mary Theresa
Who could not accept it, so she gave it to Lisa
A young prostitute who was missing a pearl
On the necklace that broke…late last night

[Wordless chorus...fade]

;-P

If you’re anything like me, the act of playing video games started young. My first real ensnarement by the disease that would later be known as vidiotry came in the form of Christmas morning, 1985. My dad and I played both Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda on a shiny new Nintendo Entertainment System. I was 5 years and 2 and a half weeks old. It basically changed my life.

Except for portable game systems, for most of my formative years (5-20) gaming meant sitting somewhere, looking at a TV screen, and pushing a directional pad and some buttons (if console) or moving/clicking on a mouse with one hand, fingers poised on a keyboard with the other (if PC).

Today, gaming is much more mainstream and accepted. What it means “to game” encompasses more avenues now. It could mean playing a quick game of Drop 7 on your iPhone to kill 5 minutes, loading up your saved game in Fallout: New Vegas and advancing the story for a few hours, moving a wand-like controller (or even your whole body) around to make an on-screen avatar do your bidding, or clicking on a virtual farm in a browser while perusing a social network.

THE POINT

However you gamed, you most likely did it yourself, actively. Of course, there’s something to be said for handing the reins to someone else, too. While I’ve done my fair share of active gaming, I also really enjoy passive gaming. Watching someone else play a game can be just as fun, if not more so in some cases.

There are several valid reasons for being a passive gamer. Maybe you weren’t as good at the game, and wanted someone with superior ability to play instead to minimize the frustration. Maybe you weren’t interested in actually thinking about how the game worked, but still wanted to see it in action. Maybe, in fact, you didn’t even have the game, but were interested in seeing it (and a trailer wasn’t enough). There were a lot of games released in the past few decades, and odds are you haven’t seen/played them all. You may also have enjoyed playing a game in your youth and wanted to revisit it later without (re)investing the time it takes to (re)learn the game again to enjoy it. Having a professional (or comedically unprofessional) tour would be nice, eh?

Enter: Let’s Play.

I think I remember seeing these kinds of videos pop up on SomethingAwful back in the day (man, I haven’t visited that site in a looooong time). In the time since I regularly visited that site, the idea seems to have spread to the General Internet, with the requisite web archive interface springing up. In fact, the LP Archive confirms my suspicions about its roots on its history page.

I can’t get enough of these videos! They satisfy both my curiosity for and laziness excuse against playing old (and some current) video games. Instead of slogging through an old game that I only have a passing interest in, I instead load up an LP and have someone else give me a tour. My curiosity is sated and I get some fun entertainment. It’s generally a win/win. Sometimes, it merely lights the fire I needed to try out the game for myself (like an extended, non-playable demo).

If you find this kind of thing as enjoyable as I do, keep in mind that not all LPs are videos, or have funny/useful audio commentary. Some people just use screenshots and text, which are not usually my bagatelle, but you may find interesting, anyway. Also, the LP Archive doesn’t contain all suchness of this sort, and a general YouTube search will find many more “unofficial” LPs.

FOR THE ROAD

Gaming can sometimes seem daunting to those who are not accustomed to its conventions. Picking up a controller and manipulating an avatar in a virtual environment can seem overwhelmingly difficult. In times when that’s the case, let someone else do it for you. Check out an LP today!

This makes me sad.

However,  a training stint at work a couple weeks ago allowed me to go into the office later than usual. With about an hour each morning of consciousness that wasn’t filled with watching Let’s Play videos while eating yogurt and drinking coffee, I turned to my trusty first acoustic guitar, Big Red, and the iPhone’s Voice Memos app. At one point, I even broke out my electric guitar and amp and noodled around, just like the old days. The former made my hands hurt more than I remember them doing in the past, but the latter felt free and easy. I’ve had roughly the same instruments, amps, and effects for over a decade, so I get sick of the same ol’ sound as it ends up existing on a recording, but when I’m playing live, it’s all good.

It felt good to just play, man.

I played old Nebyoolae songs. I played Pure Yellow Colour. I played pop and rock songs I’ve played countless times before. I just played. The physical act of strumming a guitar continues to calm the savage beast. It gets my mind going and makes me wish I had actually written something in the last 8 months. Maybe I will. Who knows? I’m fickle and I jump from creative project to creative project much too often, so it’s impossible to tell.

Regardless of when the next time I actually release some new music, I’m going to try to play at least a few times a week. I may be pushing 31 now, but I’m gonna keep the rock alive.

Deep within the myriad web tutorials, eBooks, and tinkering/spelunking of others’ projects on and with Ruby and Rails that I’ve penetrated with my curiosity comes an official announcement: I’ve embarked on my first, really real Ruby on Rails project.

Check out the following link. Although you can’t necessarily tell, this site is not built on a framework. It uses PHP for some light dynamic content, but there’s no databases or tables. The newsfeed is just one long HTML file, for Petra’s sake! The closest it comes to reusable coding practice is having a bunch of include files. Also, there is nary a touch of HTML5 or CSS3 modern goodness to see. Convention over configuration? DRY? Nope, son. The site as it stands is old-school web development.

I aim to change that.

That brings us to PYC on Rails, which will be a Rails 3 web app with a database and models and controllers and drop shadows that aren’t brought to you in image form. It’s gonna be all versioned nicely in Git and deployed using Capistrano. It’s gonna use Rubygems. It’s gonna be available on Github once it’s public so anyone can see how it was made and pick it apart.

Obviously, it’s not gonna be perfect, because it’s my first site and I’m bound to do stupid beginner things. However, when it’s done, it’s gonna be a great jumping off point from the, uh, zeroth site I, um, do(n’t?) have. Confidence++ when it’s done, which will hopefully lead to doing some awesome stuff on Morethingsneed.to once I’ve got a better idea how RoR works.

Web development in my free time? I’m back.

THE SETUP

That is a stack of World of Warcraft expansion boxes. In fact, it’s two of each expansion that currently exist. They were installed onto my computer earlier this year. Yesterday, they were all deleted.

Back in February, I got the novel idea to restart my World of Warcraft account (and my wife’s, too). A few days into some new trial characters led to us both being unhappy with all of the limitations and decided to resurrect our 6 year-old non-trial characters from their grave. She continued one of those characters and I started a new one. We hit 60 soon after and were at a crossroads: no more leveling or content was available in our plain, “vanilla” WoW. We needed to pony up some cash to continue the dopamine-rush of new and shiny. Also, we reaaaaaaally wanted flying mounts. Thus, refer to the above picture again.

THE REALITY

Getting back into WoW was awesome. So much had changed and it was really fun to get to know something familiar, yet different. Playing an MMO with a partner makes everything more enjoyable. We hacked and slashed and quested our way from 60 to 70 in a couple months. That’s not impressive compared to the average, but it was the pace that suited us. WoW could definitely feel repetitive, as you do the same kinds of quests in different zones and the same dungeons over and over, but being able to talk with someone else while doing it usually ameliorated the grind.

Then we didn’t sign in for a few weeks. And that familiar feeling came back: why am I playing this game again?

It’s simple, though. WoW is a timesink. It’s not the only kind of timesink there is, but it’s a popular one. It’s a carefully orchestrated set of tasks and rewards that string you along, taking your hours and presenting you with numbers that go up and fancy loot to improve your avatar’s appearance. It’s a spreadsheet with a chat application covered in fantastical vistas and aggressors with health and mana bars. The more you play, the more you get into it, but also the more you realize it’s a system that can be predicted and, if you want, perfected. There’s plenty to do and you’ll most likely never run out of goals. You just have to put the time into it.

However, after uninstalling it last night and canceling my account for the second time in 7 years, I realized the same thing as before: I’m tired of what the game has to offer. WoW has a rich backstory, but I don’t care about it. WoW has millions of people playing it simultaneously, but I don’t really interact with them. WoW has ultra-high-level dungeons, but I’m barely interested in getting to them. WoW has PvP, but I suck at it and don’t want to get better. WoW has a level cap of 85 and I’m only 70 right now, but the gameplay available to get there is repetitive and largely non-engaging. WoW costs $15/mo to have access to, and I don’t really want to pay that anymore.

Basically, once again, we’ve both realized the progress we could make in WoW is more valuable if applied to something else. That’s it. It doesn’t mean WoW isn’t fun or that it was a waste of time to play it. When we played with Josh now and then, the multiplayer aspect of the game was strengthened. Once he moved to Rift, the incentive to play died a little. MMOs are games that feel more important the more people are counting on you to be apart of it. Once the number of people dies down, desire does, as well.

THE TAKEHOME MESSAGE

Now that I have stopped investing in WoW, I can focus on programming, which I have started to do in my own time again after a bit of a vacation. I’m going through Agile Web Development with Rails (4th Edition), as suggested by Jimmy, and learning how to create a Ruby on Rails web app. I’ve dealt with Ruby and Rails tutorials before, so I’m not going in cold, but I’ve still never finished my own app from scratch before. The typing/copying code to understanding it ratio is getting a little higher than I’d like the more I go through the book, but I’m chalking it up to being horribly rusty. The more apps I make, the better I’ll understand it.

Also, my hard drive now has 27 additional gigabytes of space.

Over the last 8-9 months, a combination of two people painted four bathrooms, four bedrooms, a kitchen three (!) times, a living room, a loft, a downstairs hallway, and an entryway. We finished the last bedroom+bathroom (the master) this last weekend, which was actually the 1-yr anniversary of our house being built and our move-in. We didn’t necessarily plan it that way, but for it to happen like that is satisfying. Our house, once filled with bare white, is now a mixture of beige, creamy yellow, soft blues and greens, and soothing gray.

Since we’re part of an HOA the exterior color is pre-determined. This is actually good because we live in a three-story place, and climbing up to paint the second (let alone the third) floor sounds daunting. I already got my fix of death-defying painting while coating the inside walls that stretch past the second floor and through the third. Standing on ladders wielding a 20+ foot extension pole was fun in a “I’ll be glad when this is over” kind of way.

After all the painting was done, our house seemed pretty complete save for some furniture rearranging. We moved our old nightstands out of the bedroom, buying some new matching ones in their place. An entertainment center, replete with an LCD TV, an Apple TV, and a DVD player, got moved into the guest bedroom. My wife’s desk, previously perched high above in a no-purpose-room, became imbued with purpose as it moved into the vacant corner that was left. Finally, we moved two tall bookcases up to the same no-purpose-room, which is rapidly becoming the Furniture Graveyard Room. I think Craigslist is in our immediate future. The bedroom now seems bigger and more adult.

It’s good to complete projects…even if it takes nearly a year.

Overall, things are overwhelmingly positive. The building I work in has a security system, but I just wave a card and I can get through the doors I need to get through. All of the people seem fairly normal and nice and helpful, especially those who are on my specific team. The commute is a little worse in terms of traffic (I switched to a later schedule), but it’s shorter, so it averages out. Parking is now free and plentiful, and there’re tons of food options nearby (however, they can be busy during normal lunch hours). The cubicle I’m stationed at has nice furniture and there’s ample light and ventilation. My computer is speedy, and I continue to have dual monitors.

The actual work at this point has not been exceedingly difficult, as it’s largely knowledge transfer. I’ve sat down with a couple co-workers and picked their brains about where things are and the workflows required to make things happen. I’m not quite ready to make any changes to sites or assume full responsibility for anything, but I’m poking around here and there trying to familiarize myself with how things get done. I’ve even been to a meeting already (I don’t usually go to meetings much)! It’s a recurring one, and the people in it are fun, so I actually look forward to it.

One of the main developers is leaving soon, which royally sucks, because I won’t have the reliance to count on. Instead, I’ll probably subsume some responsibility in the coming months and have to teach it to the replacement person who eventually comes aboard.

One neat thing is that I may get to work on an iPhone app for the company, my first spearheaded project! It’s not a high priority and it’s currently vaporware, but I’ll be checking up on iOS development (again, for realsies this time).

Time will tell, as it always does, how well my sanity, seniority, and creative ambition fares as the days go by, but at this point I’m excited and happy.

My car is in the shop getting some work done, and I figured I’d just go and do the aforementioned thing for a while. This place is busy, so I had to actually go outside and grab a table instead of a nice leather-backed lounge seat. Getting here at 8:20am is apparently not early enough to stake out a desirable claim inside, which is something to note for any future endeavors of the like. People keep arriving and leaving with alarming regularity, making me wonder if I should reattempt a claim inside, but I think I’ll just stick to my table here.

The image of Sbux being a present-day oasis for the working (and non-working?) class is quite true. It feels homey, I guess, although it’s weird for me to use my computer out in public where others could see me and JUDGE. I know the judgement anxiety is irrational and no one really cares what I’m doing, but the all-seeing public eye nevertheless persists in my head.

I haven’t worked on a website besides little fixes here and there at my now-old job (!) in several months, and I feel rusty. Of course, the first time I load up http://nebyoolae/ to have a look-see, MySQL barfs about the damnable “mysql.sock” file yet again, a recurring bane of my existence. Also, since moving to my new computer I no longer have a version of Photoshop in which to create new graphics for things, which limits my options to improve some things. Also also, the wi-fi provided by Starbucks is very nice, but it sure ain’t as fast as the service we have at home.

OK, enough stalling. Time to actually start some work.

Thankfully, that isn’t going to happen because I got a new job!

Of course, it’s with the same company and the same kind of work, but in a different building in a different location and in a different department (new boss, too). The best parts about it (from a purely practical/selfish standpoint) are that it’s closer to my home, it’s full-time, and there’s no charge to park nearby like my current position. There are all great things!

I start mid-next week after a day-long orientation that all new employees have to go through. Technically, I’m not a new employee, but I’m a new full-time employee, so I qualify for this. A physical had to be done, as well as a TB test I still need to check the status of tomorrow. Due to some unforseen red tape, I may have to go back for a drug test, as well, but if so my reward is actually getting Friday off.

***

This is a big load off my mind, and off my wife’s mind. We have some money saved up in case of catastrophic employment loss, but this is far more ideal. Temping was a good way to get in, but I’m very happy to be turning into a full employee. Stability is one of those things that just makes all other aspects of your life that much better.

In case you’re not actually seeing this post in its natural habitat, Lazy in the Blog has the new look above. Let me explain why.

I’m always looking at user interfaces, observing the widgets and styles people concoct to connect the user to the system. I look at my personal websites and constantly see things I want to change, this cycling iterative process of creation, criticism, and recreation. I may not be an artist, but I know what I likewhat works. Even if I’m not able to construct the ideal thing that’s floating in my head, whatever I come up with is (hopefully) usable and visually appealing. When I come back to look at it later with a fresher mind, I’ll know what still needs to be done. Everything can always be better. Time and experience bring this philosophy to the forefront again and again.

This blog has gone through a few designs already in its young life. Nothing ever seems just right, so I keep trying new things. The current iteration is courtesy of Alive Themes. They call this particular theme Deep Blue. It’s cool, despite the blue really being more…warm. I suppose it relates to the deep blue of an ocean floor. The orange and gray contrast nicely. The design feels a bit heavy, in that it’s like you can feel the HTML and JS in the background weighing down the page just a little, slowing down the responsiveness. However, it’s good enough and I will work with it (at least until my wandering design ethic desires something new in the future (which it will)).

Normally, using a template is not my way. A developer and tinkerer are gonna want to make their own things, if feasible. I’ve surely made my own designs, including all of the HTML, CSS, and JS, so making a WordPress theme is not above my ability. Despite that realization, creating one from scratch is essentially like making a new website (minus the back-end logic), so it’s not something taken lightly. That’s why sometimes it’s better to let someone else tackle these things. When your site isn’t about making money or showing off your skills, and it’s just a place to put some thoughts, then I’m happy to handle the design reins over to someone else. At least, as a foundation. To be honest, I’ve already hacked this theme a bit to fix a bug and massage the layout to fit a wider-than-default logo because, well, it bugged me and needed to be done. I can’t stop every urge I have to fix things!

Templates are good ways to quickly get a nice-looking site up and running. There will always be drawbacks, though. In this case, the administration panel for the theme’s options locks many things down behind a paywall. Of course, if you know how themes work, you can get around this :-P The obvious conclusion of this kind of hacking through the back-door is a resounding “screw it, I’m going to roll my own.” That’s where my desire to make my own websites most likely came from originally. After going through the laborious process of making your own sites from scratch for several years, it’s nice to just grab a working copy without all of that labor. I’ll keep making my own sites from scratch when I want absolute control, but for this blog I think a template is the way to go for now.

In fact, to prove this point, a rather commendable bloke did a good deed and visited a bunch of the places mentioned in the game, photographing landmarks, to get a side-by-side comparison. It’s fascinating reading, and very interesting to find out how detailed Obsidian got as they modeled their post-apocalyptic hellscape.

My Fallout New Vegas Tour

Our family procured a Pentium-class Windows 3.1-running (soon after upgraded to 95) personal computer in 1995. All of a sudden there was reason to pause when thoughts turned to the purchase of a new video game. Since the PC was new and shiny, I probably sided with it for a while, purchasing gleaming discs of wonder that took anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes to install to the local hard drive. Then…sometimes there was the need for configuration. Actually, sometimes there was just the simple joy of configuration. I always have a desire to click on an “Options” or “Settings” or “Customize” button as soon as I have access to it. Let’s see what I can change, right? That in and of itself was a pleasurable game.

In the end, I probably ended up spending more money on computer games than console games throughout high school and even beyond college. The PlayStation and PlayStation 2 took up a large chunk of cash themselves for many years, as did the DS, which started to change the flow of money. However, it wasn’t until the time that my current console, the Xbox 360, came out that I kind of just stopped buying PC games. My most recent Windows system continued to age and need upgrades to keep up with the advancement of gaming software, which made buying games on a console less fraught with peril. Just pop it in and you’d know it would work, and run well. Coupling that with my switch of a Windows XP architecture to OS X for everyday computing, I started to forget about Microsoft-led personal computers as my main source of gaming entertainment.

The current makeup of computer technology in my house further accentuates this shift in gaming preference. There’s an aging Athlon XP PC downstairs, booted up solely to run a DDR emulator, and there’s a Dell Zino in the living room, largely woken from sleep to play NetFlix or DVDs. Except for a brief fling with the Nintendo Wii, I now primarily buy games for the 360, accomplishing all other computery-type things on my MacBook Pro. When a new game comes out that is cross-platform, I instinctively choose the Xbox because I know it’ll run well at 1080p and I won’t have to configure or install anything. Macs still aren’t often chosen as platforms for gaming, and the PCs we have aren’t top-of-the-line. It’s just easier to use the console, just like back in the NES days.

Occasionally, though, either Blizzard or Valve releases a new game and my Mac actually stands a chance at winning this contest. That game as of late is Portal 2. I played Portal, part of the Orange Box, on my Xbox 360, and it was glorious. Running any of the games in that collection on a 42″ HDTV is joy incarnate. Why, then, did I end up choosing to get the Steam version on my Mac (after previously pre-ordering it for Xbox 360 like clockwork)? Well, my new MBP, acquired earlier this year, is actually pretty decent, and even has a 3D accelerator card. This means Portal 2 may actually run well. Plus, it has a co-op mode that I’d like to play with others, and all my friends are getting it for PC/Mac, so it behooves me to follow suit if I want that to be a reality. Currently, the game’s data is pre-loaded through Steam, waiting for the unlock to engage from Valve. Not having to get a disc that then needs to hog my Xbox 360′s DVD tray is actually pretty nice, and if I want the HDTV treatment I can just grab a cable to connect my Mac to it.

This decision feels like an anomaly, not something that will be oft repeated. As good as my laptop may now be, the 360 will still usually run games at the highest settings (read: the only settings available) with little difficulty, while it’s more of a risk on the Mac. This fear, in lieu of a demo to remedy it, will probably keep me from making this a habit.

***

All right. Enough of this analysis. Portal 2 may actually come out today, people! Can’t wait to get home if that comes true.

I’ve been playing a lot of World of Warcraft. In fact, after hitting 60 on my current main with Robyn (she hit 60, too), we were left with a hollow feeling, no longer seeing that wonderful “XP” gain message when doing something that usually nets you some. Thus, with a boat load of Gamestop credit and some spare cash I’d been socking away for a Rock Band Fender Strat (Rock Band has not been on my radar for months, unfortunately), we purchased all three expansions, times 2. It was a lot of money, but it was essentially “free,” as all money was gained via selling old gaming software to Gamestop. I was just returning the favor, really.

Two words come to mind after venturing back into Azeroth, now with 3 serial numbers successfully entered: flying mount. OMG how much nicer the game is to play once you’re able to just. fly. ANYWHERE. No slowly riding around hills or slowly swimming through water for us. Sure there’re raised level caps, new dungeons, and new races to try out, but nothing compares to the power of flight, homes.

Josh says the journey from 60-85 is a bit rougher than 1-60. I still think we’ll prevail, regardless.

TINY WINGS

This is my current love/hate iPhone addiction. The game employs a fairly simple mechanic, sweetened by cute graphics and sound, that’s a joy to play. Each day the landscape changes and so it’s worth trying out for a few minutes no matter what. Unfortunately, the latest batch of objectives to complete has me stymied. I have reached Island 9, but I cannot clear Island 4 in fever mode nor hit 20 cloud taps while not in fever mode. I’ve tried so many times, and with each failure I feel the blood pressure rising and the desire to violently hurl my iPhone away from my person. It’s getting to the point where this seemingly endless frustration has me fancying a total deletion of the app due to its harmful effects.

And yet, it stays. And yet, I continue playing.

FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS

Yes, I already completed this one. However, there is DLC I haven’t tried, aaaaaaand since it’s been so long since I last played, I felt the need to start over and try a new build. Instead of the normal run-and-gun approach, I’m going the melee/sneak route. This goes against every strategy I usually employ, mainly due to its ineffectiveness/inefficiency. Still, I’m gonna give it a real go this time…until I give up on it. Regardless, I love the storyline and the environment. Like World of Warcraft, it’s a place I simply want to visit and revisit time and time again, even if to just hang out for a little bit each time.

• working a temp job (sorta like part-time)
• playing a lot of World of Warcraft
• buying expansions for World of Warcraft (this didn’t happen in college, but it was essentially like buying 8 months of game time (also, flying mounts, man!))
• not getting my hair cut (it is the longest it’s ever been)
• unrelenting, overt consumption with no motivation to create (this is more of a cycle, really)
• having no particular strong life direction
• playing DDR for main source of exercise, but more often doing nothing
• long-form blogging! (heh)

This list is not intended to complain or despair. Life is good. I mean, I’m happy and can pay my bills and I have no specific complaint about anything. Still, the anecdotal evidence of my circle of friends furthering their full-time careers and having kids seems to point toward me lagging behind in some kind of man-child, Peter Pan syndrome way. I’ve never wanted to “grow up,” really, honestly liking what life was like back in my early 20s. Few responsibilities and hedonism often unchecked. It’s fun. It’s stress-free for the most part. Going through a time-honored and time-tested routine each day with my wife is good. I love her. I love my friends, too.

Still. Society would tell me I’m in transition right now. This is a lull that’s not intended to last. Eventually, I will have a child to take care of and/or a job that’s more involved and character-building and stressful (that hopefully pays more for the added difficulty). Then I’ll move beyond this transitional period, put my play things away, and finally “grow up”.

Except it doesn’t have to be exactly that way…right?

It’s fairly common knowledge that Apple “overprices” things. That is, when you look at similarly specced computers from them and a typical PC dealer, Apple always tends to be higher. Those of us who use their products know about this and have accepted it, mainly because we like their products and are willing to pony up extra cash to have them. The easily replaceable components of their computers, however, not so much.

One component most people fixate on is memory. And we can all agree that Apple reaaaaally overprices their RAM. Thus, when I ordered my new MacBook Pro (and my old MacBook), I went with the default amount, knowing I’d upgrade it later for cheaper ($100 less expensive, in fact). I just recently ordered the RAM and it came in yesterday. Since I had already taken apart my old MB to upgrade it with no problems, so I figured this one wouldn’t be too hard. It wasn’t.

You flip it over, take out about a dozen Phillips screws, some long and most short, pry the cover off, and bam. You are now looking at the exciting insides of your expensive computer. The RAM is situated in the middle. I just pushed on the sides of the contraption holding them in and slipped the modules out. Easy as pie. I got the new ones out of their protective plastic containers and reversed the process.

With the new RAM in, I replaced the cover and screws, flipped it back over, and turned it back on. That reassuring Apple startup sound meant I had least done something not horribly wrong, and the desktop came up as quickly as ever. About This Mac for the win!

Since we all know that RAM doesn’t make your computer faster, but merely delays the journey to using the much slower hard drive as swap space instead of fast memory, my Mac doesn’t actually feel faster yet. However, when I go to try loading Logic Pro and a bunch of plugins/samples, I’m hoping it will not give me any more accursed “out of memory” issues, and maybe be a bit snappier than before.

Other than memory, a hard drive upgrade is all I can ever see improving on this machine. It’s got a 5400 RPM 500 GB drive, which is fine for my purposes. However, I’ve been hearing all the rage about SSDs lately, and as soon as a decent 256GB drive that isn’t $TEXAS comes out, I’ll probably jump on that. Until then, I’m gonna relish the extra memory breathing room I’ve created.

I tend to like the more clever Fools over at Blizzard who seem to have unlimited creativity in this department. Check out their new pitch-black dungeon and successful resurrection of Clippy.

2010 was a good year for me for web development. I got better at ASP.NET/C#. I learned some ruby. I made some significant progress on my personal websites. I got fairly seasoned with git.

2011, so far, has not seen these kinds of developments. I burned out a little. It’s been hard to get motivated again. This is a natural cycle for me. I aim to change this by moving forth to the part of said cycle where I ridiculously binge on 343423545 projects at once.

DOCKBLOCKED

One roadblock thus far has been my new computer. Usually, getting new tech is supposed to better your situation, not worsen it. Unfortunately, whenever I get a new machine I like to start from scratch instead of restoring a backup (e.g. Time Machine). The idea is that over time your computer builds up with application cruft, bits of code, settings, and applications you may have introduced that were useful for 5 minutes but then forgotten about. Backups save everything, for better or worse, and restoring it to a pristine specimen would just make it the same used vehicle you’ve been riding for years.

Instead, I like to begin with a blank OS install, install all my basic applications, and then configure them accordingly. I look at my old machine and filter out the stuff I barely/never used and skip them when copying stuff over. This leaves me with the newness of my latest tech acquisition, and (hopefully) none of the residue of the old one save for stuff I actually use. It’s a slight OCD way of going about it, but I like the process…the mind-clearing aspect of it all. The process, however, can take a while.

The last time I had to do this was 2007. That’s a long time. I was instantly reminded of that precious luxury I always say I’m going to utilize: make a list of all things I need to do to set up a new computer and actually use it. In the end, I usually just download the things that come to mind, copy over music/movies/pictures/documents, and then concurrently set up my main music composition/recording (Logic, sample libraries, plugins, etc.) and web development (Textmate, apache, php, cakephp, ruby, git, etc.) applications. My OS of choice, Mac OS X, comes with a lot of the web dev stuff built-in, but not all. Even when it’s automatically installed, I always seem to have to reconfigure something, spending a day or two on Google finding fixes for my specific situation. A minor revision in any of those applications can change how something works.

What would help this? Making a list of all of these things (they often reoccur each upgrade cycle) so that in the future I know what to look for, saving myself some frustration and time. I’ve gotten so far sometimes as actually making the list of things to install, but I never want to account for the intricacies of getting them all working. My forced amnesia of the past condemns me to repeat it, no?

Thankfully, I seem to have most of it all squared away. If I could just tear myself away from WoW and sometimes crushing self-doubt about my abilities as a programmer and designer I will again tackle the small pile of bugs in Redmine for both nebyoolae.com and nebyooweb.com. I’ve got an idea or two to make morethingsneed.to better, as well, but I’m not sure of the current status of it right now.

Regardless of all the set up woes and consternation, my new MacBook Pro continues to be the knees of a bee.

FOR THE ROAD

The new iPad 2 is reslickulously (to quote myself) sweet. It is everything you like about the iPhone, made bigger and better. If it could just shrink down into your pocket, it would cause the world to rejoice in unison.

It rained a hell of a lot last night and into the morning. Driving home from a friend’s place in the ensuing stormpocalype was unnerving. This is what happens to someone whose only serious car accident was while driving home at night in the rain. Every darkened vehicular journey becomes a bit of a PTSD-type situation. My wife and I got home safely, thankfully. Sleep found us both soon after.

I had a dream that involved a meeting between a bunch of people and some kind of alien/mutant race of creatures, like we were having peace talks with them. Sitting near one of these unidentified beings, I could see they were definitely humanoid, but had odd facial features, and were lumbering hulks. One of them was just to my left, translating what the others were saying for us. A friend of a friend later showed me, in a back room, the arsenal he had stockpiled just in case the aliens became aggressive. Later, just before waking up, I remembered observing that all hell had broken loose and the aliens had done just that. I woke up before anything really happened, but I was filled with a sense of dread all the same.

ON SATURDAY, OR HOW WE WALKED ON THE HIGHWAY

Currently, the main highway that connects our town to the rest of San Diego stops just short of actually entering it. You have to get off on one of two roads that then drive through the more residential or more commercial parts of it. Eventually, you connect back up with a different major highway. What this means is that we have to exit the faster avenue for the slower one several miles before our actual house, replete with 35-40 speed limits and several traffic lights.

Well, starting next weekend, that’ll all change, as they have extended the main highway all the way through town!

In fact, we even got to walk on the new highway extension that we will soon be driving on. Robyn, Lea, and I attended the Highway Extension party organized to celebrate this wondrous addition which, despite seeming pretty hick (i.e. making a big deal out of what urban city dwellers would probably consider mundane), was actually pretty fun. You don’t get to walk straight down (the wrong side!) of an actual highway very often, save for when you’re on TV or in a movie and your vehicle has broke down and the inevitable walk to a gas station 50 miles away ensues. Tons of people were there, and they had classic cars, food/vendor booths, and an official walk across the whole thing that started before we even got there. I even got interviewed on camera by some senior at SDSU for answering a couple softball questions about living in our town.

All in all, it was a nice way to spend a couple hours. People watching enjoyment was at a significant high, the weather kept its precipitation largely in its pocket, and I got to add something to my bucket list I’d never thought would be there.

I LOVE YOU, MAN(G)

Just saw the bromance comedy starring Paul Rudd and Jason Segel. It was formulaic and coarse in all the ways you’d guess, but it was still enjoyable. Paul Rudd is adorable (but Rashida Jones is more so), and Jason Segel is Marshall, single, before he meets Lilly. Also, they rock the Canada out of some Rush songs. What more could you ask for?

FOR THE ROAD

Still playing WoW. Both Robyn and I are at level 51. Still impressed occasionally with how they’ve changed up some of the quests in areas I visited many years ago, keeping the experience fairly fresh. I especially liked how Blizzard references one of their oldest games (The Three Vikings) in one of the quests now.

Obviously I’ve been doing some thinking about the social landscape as it exists online. Somewhat morose musings on the death of the Golden Age of LiveJournal naturally segue into the Social Web. Every website and application seems to have the trappings of extroversion. Buttons and links to send off your daily browsing and media consumption/creation habits to seemingly endless social networks exist everywhere. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but it can become overwhelming and have the unintended backlash of making me not want to share anything with anyone…ever.

The two (arguably) most popular places to share what you’ve done are Facebook and Twitter. I have an account on both. If you don’t know the username I use on Twitter, you can probably guess what it is (although I make my tweets private, for more flexibility in subject and tone). As for Facebook, I use my real name as it’s a bit more “public” (meaning some of my family uses it), but it’s still pretty locked down.

As for how often/how seriously I use them…well, that ebbs and flows. I don’t update Facebook; I update Twitter and it updates Facebook for me. Two birds, one stone. Sometimes I can go for a while without updating, merely consuming others’ updates. If I couldn’t post stream-of-consciousness sound bites like I do now at some point in the future, it would suck, but I’d live (and I even took a vacation from them both for a few weeks).

THE POINT

I don’t take the Social Web too seriously. Yes, I love to leverage the power of the Internet to share my music and words with my friends and strangers alike. Getting your name of project “out there” is necessary if you want an audience. I even enjoy filling out profiles for new sites, ameliorating the somewhat droll nature of them by putting in funny bits to amuse myself. I also enjoy occasionally buying domain names to use for projects present and future. But the real point of it all? Staking my claim.

Whether you think Facebook is the worst or best thing ever, it’s popular. And lots of people use it. People you know. Probably people you like. Thus, staking your claim (i.e. signing up for an account with a username/email that you want associated with you) is important. Otherwise, someone else might grab it and you’re out of luck until they reset the database. Not that I worry about people impersonating me or anything, but it’s nice to know I have access to the combination of letters that are associated with my identity on Website/Webapp X That May or May Not Be Popular Now or in the Future. It’s obsessive, sure, but it takes a small investment of time for a potential widespread gain.

I’m still hating myself a bit for not grabbing michaelchadwick.com when I had a chance.

Spoiler: It’s not there.

I know I’ve already groused about this, but keeping all of your friends’ blog updates on one domain is still something I miss.

Recently, it came to pass that I went on a little adventure.

I walked to a familiar area…and then pushed on past it to a somewhat less than familiar area. I broke from an obvious path to reach a clearing along a different path. Staring into, and across, the abyss can change your perspective a bit. Surveying the land, I took some pictures. Although it seemed like a secret place, a break in the plants and trees that was somehow remote, I’m sure many had trod there before. No matter! I was there now, and I was alone. Making my way back to the familiar lead me down yet another new path. The sun started to make me perspire, due to all the extra footwork. Eventually I returned to a well-worn road and I made my way back to where I began my trek.

All in all it was a fun jaunt. I got some exercise and I saw some things I hadn’t seen before. This need to “get away” and ignore the standard boundaries and restrictions wells up inside me sporadically, and this is how I process it. Nothing has really changed, and I reached no epiphanies, but I do feel a little energized…resuscitated, even.

Go on an adventure today, big or small. You’ll probably be glad you did.

I bet I’m not the only one who had this routine at some point.

I wasn’t super popular on LJ. I didn’t have 19684509686 friends on my list. Nor did I have 1352345246 people follow me. That was fine. I was still wealthy when it came to people reading me and habitually responding to things I wrote. For years I enjoyed this fairly consistent back-and-forth with both people I knew in real life and complete strangers that crossed the Strange Divide by merely having access to a computer which was on the Internet.

Sure, there was drama. I was a lot more personal with my thoughts and regularly talked about myself and others whether it was good or bad. I even went Full Dramatic back in November 2002, needlessly alarming friends and being my most absolutely wretched and attention-starved. A break of a few months did me better and since then I kept the worst demons at bay. While using online social media in any capacity is a double-edged sword of both benefiting from and becoming codependent upon the call-and-response with other people in a public (and sometimes private) forum, I really enjoyed the community I was apart of on LiveJournal. I openly admit that I really needed it sometimes to get through the relationship issues, personal anxiety, and lonely, boring days.

—

It is now 2011. I’ve been married for over a year. I co-own a house. In the near future I could be a father. Obviously, things have changed.

Some of the people I used to read on LiveJournal are still there. A lot stopped posting or left. They created their own blogs. They signed up with WordPress (hee hee) or Tumblr. A lot concurrently (some exclusively) post on Facebook or Twitter. While our need to express ourselves online hasn’t necessarily disappeared, the cohesion of my community is now fractured, and in many ways diluted.

Perhaps due to growing up, stabilizing ourselves with marriage or kids, or through simply losing interest, the desire to post in a longer format has greatly lessened. Perhaps I’m still just too egocentric and reliant on validation and obsess too much on this. For whatever the reason may be, the Golden Age of LiveJournal in my life has probably been over for a while. Even LiveJournal itself has changed, subjecting unpaid users (of which I’ve been for a long time now) to annoying ads it didn’t used to back when it was still small and less concerned with making a profit. This change was bound to happen, but it’s never swallowed without some mild difficulty.

I realize that the LJ community I so enjoyed for many years will not rematerialize. The landscape is different and it’s probably better to try to capitalize on what’s happening now, rather than always reminisce. It’s hard, though, when I read over old LJ posts and revisit old memories. My writing was much more effusive, absurd, and sometimes even manic then. When it comes to putting on a professional face, it probably does my name little good, but it’s actually really fun to read. The passion came from being an attention whore in front of a captive audience, that which does not exist anymore. Writing this blog into the endless space of the Greater Internet instead of the safe and inviting City of LiveJournal feels more pointless. My wheels spin, but no real traction is gained.

The zeros are sometimes followed by ones, and the ones sometimes zeros, but does it even compile?

In the meantime, I’ve largely had it anchored to the dining table, leveling up a character (or two (or three)) in World of Warcraft. When the game is running, the area of the laptop above the keyboard, right below the screen, gets pretty darn hot. I’ve been told by my wife that this is normal, but it actually makes the keys near the top somewhat unsettling to touch. This is not something I was used to on the MacBook. It got hot on the bottom, just like this one, but I never felt the heat bubble up to the actual keyboard. Hmmm.

As far as performance, it is a breath of a (sometimes disconcertingly hot) fresh air. The 1680 x 1050 screen is beautiful, things load noticeably faster, and I can actually run games at levels above “Low” without massive choppiness. Doubling up the RAM from 2 to 4 GB probably helps just as much as moving from a Core 2 Duo to an i7. Oh, and the inclusion of an actual 3D acceleration graphics card might have improved things, too. Maybe. I even set aside 100 GB for a Boot Camp install of Windows 7 which, despite crashing on shutdown/restart, works well otherwise.

The slick unibody design is nice and even though it’s a 15″ screen (compared to my old 13″) the weight of it hasn’t increased significantly. It was not cheap, but it was worth it. The resale value on my old one is much higher than I’d think, so I’ll hopefully get a not-insignificant amount for it, recouping quite a bit of my investment into the new one.

In the end, it’s still just a Mac. All the things that come with the purchase and use of a Mac continue to be true on this computer, just as they were before. I like the look, feel, and experience I get while using OS X and its associated programs. The specs aren’t state-of-the-art. The performance is not revolutionary. It is a visually pleasing, input responsive, solidly-made, somewhat overpriced laptop computer that is portable, yet powerful. It gets hot, which is a natural byproduct of energy consumption. It gets a bit too hot for my tastes and usage, but I’ll learn to deal with it. Overall, I am happy with my technology purchase and would recommend it to anyone who likes things that are good.

However, due to several recommendations, I picked up Patrick Rothfuss’s fantasy adventure “The Name of the Wind” for the iBooks app on my iPhone (a great way to get me to read, as my phone’s always with me) and finally finished today after a couple months of on-and-off consumption. To say it is “Harry Potter, but better” would not be terribly accurate, but it’s a start. Regardless, it’s gripping and well-written. Of course, it’s merely the setup book for the next one, called “Wise Man’s Fear,” which came out today.

A friend was gracious enough to go purchase me and some friends copies of it, and we’ll be taking them to the Mystery Galaxy Bookstore this Saturday to actually meet the author, listen to him do some reading, and have him sign our book. I’ve never gone to a book signing before, but I assume it will be filled with rabid fans who may or may not froth a bit too much at the mouth, much like any kind of convention filled with sometimes obsessed consumers. I liked the book a lot, and the Q&A about how the signing will work was amusing, but I am not OMG HOLY CRAP about meeting him. I suspect he will be a cool guy and it’ll be neat to meet him, though.

Moreover, I look forward to reading the next installment of the adventures of Kvothe! Don’t be surprised if I don’t finish it until the third book comes out.

EDIT: the book signing was great! Patrick is funny and kind. Woo.

I ordered it a scant few days after they were refreshed, ultimately goaded by some free* money that arrived in the mail. There was some hand-wringing about which model and what, if any, modifications to the stock specs I wanted. In the end, I went with the lower of two 15″ models (2.0 GHz quad-core CPU instead of 2.2/2.3), but beefed it up to the high-res, anti-glare screen. I gave up some HD space, CPU speed, and video card RAM, but saved $400. It’s hard to say whether it was worth it, since this is a machine I will be giving a lot of attention to for many years, but in the end it will be a significant upgrade to my current machine (2007-era white MacBook with integrated graphics technology that has no 3D-acceleration at all) and I will rationalize away any mistakes I made with my choice over time.

What should I do with my (soon-to-be) old machine? I’ve never upgraded my personal laptop before, so I don’t know what use it is to me. I guess you could say its ancestor was my old beige-box custom PC used through the end of college and several years afterward. Its fate post-MB-purchase was to become a largely dormant paperweight, occasionally used for running an open-source DDR clone and old Windows games. My wife has a recent MBP, so she doesn’t need it.

I could recycle it through Apple, netting a few hundred bucks. I could donate it and write it off, but that money would probably be less and I won’t get it until next year. I could sell it on Craigslist or Ebay, but I’d have to deal with all of the potential hassle both of those represent. I could just turn it off, put it away somewhere, and forget about it. I could launch it into the air and shoot it with a gun, skeet-style. Hmmm.

* Not actually free

About halfway done with Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind. You can tell how easily distracted I can be since despite the book being really good, I still go long stretches of time without reading it. The sequel comes out in about a week and I’m going to a book signing for it, so I should really hunker down on this.

GAMING

Playing WoW (again) still. It feels like it did many years ago. All the changes make things fresh and rediscovering things left dormant all this time is still fun. Thanks to the new dungeon-group-finder thingy I’m doing them waaaaay more often than I did before (read: more than almost never).

TELEVISION

Not watching anything new. Keeping up with The Office, The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, 30 Rock, and Community. Still catching the odd episode of TDS/CR here and there.

MUSIC

Relapsing into listening to only NES/SNES/GB chiptunes at work. I haven’t picked up a guitar in a while (again). Waiting for the new MBPs to come out before I delve back into working on Dumeh.

WEB DEV

Fixing bugs here and there on my main sites, but nothing new. I think I want to start a new project, but I’ve got no ideas and so my interest is currently low. At work I actually was able to build some custom Sharepoint Web Parts, which made me feel somewhat accomplished.

Bamph! Money from the sky.

The timing is incredible, too, because I hear that MacBook Pros are about to get a refresh in the next week or two. Jumping from my 2 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2 GB RAM to a nice and shiny i5 MacBook Pro with 8 GB RAM and an actual 3D-acceleration card could be swell. All of a sudden waiting to purchase one is excruciating, but I will restrain my wallet. It’s only prudent on something that is so obviously a want.

Still, though. How did the stars align so perfectly like that?

Making music is a way for me to express myself. It combines the somewhat mechanical method of constructing something new out of existing parts, but it also allows me to emotionally imbue something in a symbolic way. When words fail to properly display how I’m feeling, creating structured sound sometimes does the trick.

However, a lot of the time composition just feels like a way to keep the OCD demons away. I have a tendency to cycle between CREATION and CONSUMPTION. When the cycle hits CREATION, usually brought on by prolonged exposure to something creative (my own or someone else’s), I get a bit preoccupied with making something new, be it a website or a song or even just reorganizing an existing thing. Borderline obsession can be observed in many cases. All events and interactions not associated with creation can become bothersome and annoying. It’s nothing personal — I’m just born this way. OMG, did I just reference Lady Gaga? I think that’s a first in anything I’ve ever written ever.

Ahem.

The creative surge usually sees me staring at OS X’s Finder, going over folders and files, poring over existing assets to refresh myself with the past. I have a habit of “repackaging” old songs in new ways (taking singles and putting them into albums, removing certain songs from old albums because I now think they don’t belong or weren’t up to par). Since all of my “finished” stuff is still largely in what you could call permanent beta (none of it is published in an official manner), it affords me the liberty of playing the Ministry of Truth and altering whatever I wanted to be then to be what I want now. It’s a dangerous proclivity because it theoretically never ends, but I can’t help it. One way I’ve staved off the itch is to move all archived/in-process projects to an external hard drive so that I can’t (easily) endlessly fool with them, leaving only rendered projects (MP3s) on the local HD to listen to, but not actually edit.

THE POINT (I.E. TL;DR)

All this is to say that I think, after doing several big projects last year and taken several months off, I might be ready to get back on the musical horse (colt-rane?). I’ve digested my last couple projects (Gamey Mixture and The Matic) and am ready for something new. By new, I’m being figurative. My next project is to actually finish an old project never quite completed called Dumeh. What’s Dumeh? It’s my hyper-pretentious opus. Yeah, it’s me being all “I can make a three-part symphony!” and, uh, trying to make a three-part symphony. It’s existed in some form for too many years already, but I have neither had a) a real orchestra to play it or b) sufficiently awesome samples to render it.

Since having a real orchestra play it was probably never going to happen, several demos using lower-quality samples or just a single guitar have been made, but none feel official. Of all the things I’ve created, I think it’s the only one to have had not one, but two musician friends play/remix it in some way. That’s pretty sweet, and it is the kind of support that makes me think that it’s worth finishing to the point of being capital-D Done, archived away, and ultimate happy thoughts derived from.

Well, I purchased Native Instruments’ Komplete 7 Elements, as well as some extra Session Strings samples, and I aim to employ them in a reimagining of the piece. I think I might tweak the actual piece a bit, too, since it could probably use some updating. There’s just one problem: it’s probably the most complex piece in Logic I’ve ever tried to make. Record producers would most likely scoff at that claim, as they produce stuff with 99 tracks all day long, but Dumeh‘s 20 or so tracks, rife with virtual instruments and effects aplenty, is enough to bring my 4 year-old Mac to its knees frequently. Without freezing every single track save for the one I’m editing at the moment, it’s kind of a pain to work on.

THE REAL POINT I SWEAR (I.E. TL;DRTL;DR)

I wish I had a better Mac. One with an actual graphics card. One with more than 2 GB of RAM. One…with frickin’ laser bea…uh, wait. No.

New computers can be expensive. I could go refurb, of course, but it’d still be some non-chumpinated amount of cash money. Until I can save up the requisite amount of dollars, I may still try to piecemeal update Dumeh. I doubt it will get done anytime soon, but it’s my project for the year. I plan to finish it one way or another by the end of 2011. Replete with accurate traditional sheet music that could conceivably be played by an orchestra if that ever happens.

Plans have a way of unraveling, so I don’t put much stock in this one coming to fruition judging by the years and years that have gone by without a finished Dumeh. Still, you gotta try.

So I stopped checking both.

Initially, the withdrawal was significant. My phone seemed less useful, since it was the primary way of checking on both feeds multiple times a day. I kind of missed knowing what was going on. Still, the need subsided and life stayed largely the same. It didn’t make a big difference.

Earlier this week I started checking Twitter again, mainly out of a sense of curiosity, but also a sense of boredom. It felt good to be “home” again. I haven’t “gone back” to Facebook yet, though, but I know there are several people who use it and not Twitter, so I will probably return eventually.

What did I learn from all of this? One, that it’s good to take a break if you need it every once in a while. Two, that I lived without this source of “news” before and can again. Three, that Echofon is still far and away the best client for Twitter.

I wish this had been more enlightening, but it was not. Bah.

Of course, that’s because I’ve been doing 1040EZ Street, USA 12345 the whole time. Further still, I’ve used Turbo Tax’s online offering for many years now, and its gentle, if not sometimes overwhelmingly thorough, hand-holding always seems to make the whole process feel like little more than a glorified web form.

Last year I got married and I bought a house. Thus, 2010′s taxes were going to be a bit more complicated. Thankfully, though, Turbo Tax came through in spades again, rife with the same comforting hand-holding previously mentioned. It was even up-to-date on all of the housing questions we had, especially the new home-buyer credits. Technology is grand, I tell ya.

The whole rigmarole would have been perfect if it weren’t for our inability to E-File like usual (because of the aforementioned housing credit) and T-Tax’s moment of disability in allowing us to still E-File our state taxes, regardless. Instead, we had to actually print out the forms to mail them in. Like, on paper. Like, folded and placed into an envelope and affixed with a stamp. It was a dark 5 minutes as our nation’s resources were violated, slowly plodding out from the printer’s out hole.

At least they’re done, right? Well, they will be done…once we actually procure actual envelopes. Not sending any correspondence in the snail mail system causes your business envelope supply to situate itself in non-existent territory.

Trainyard
Lead the trains along a grid to get to their respective stations. Graphical style is gorgeous. The puzzles start out stupid-easy, but gently ramp up to some true Puzzleby von Whatenstein-level difficulty.

Mind Wall
From the makers of Dungeon Scroll (an awesome old-school dungeon crawler via Boggle), Mind Wall is an game that’s really more of an intelligence test masquerading as one. You have to fit the varied shapes that drop slowly toward a wall into the one place that it can safely fit. The multiplayer modes keep this on my phone past the initial somewhat short singleplayer mode.

I’m not sure why, but the ability to check out what’s going on in the land of Azeroth for free seemed like a good idea recently. Despite not playing for about 5-6 years, and not having any real desire to play again, I found myself creating a 10-day trial account.

“Robyn? I did a bad thing.”

There’s a lot of negative association with the World of Warcraft. Relationships have been torn asunder and lives have been ruined just because of this game. People completely zone out in a virtual world, using accomplishments they achieve there as placeholders for real world ones. Perspective can be lost easily. It’s crazy.

Back in 2005, I was playing regularly, as were several friends, and even my girlfriend. It was fun. It was a fun timesink, like a lot of other video games. I played several characters, my best reaching level 58 (the cap at the time was 60). I put a lot of hours into it, staying up late, plowing through quests and losing lots of sleep. WoW gives you lots to do, and it’s all carefully metered out so that it can eat through time like a sharp knife through hot butter. Each new quest and exciting reward is doled out carefully, ramping up the complexity and difficulty just right to keep you hooked.

“I want a Massively Parallel Online game.“

As much as I enjoyed playing, I never quite got over needing to group with other people. I’ve been a solo gamer most of my life, and the requirement of being in a group of other players, interacting in a structured manner that didn’t just consist of swearing at each other in a room was often more of a drag than a boon. It just wasn’t my style and I didn’t enjoy it as much as a short-term grouping of only a few people or just striking out on my own, uninhibited by others’ needs or desires. The instanced dungeons usually brought a grimace to my face instead of a gleaming smile. One exception that worked fine, though: playing as a pair with my girlfriend. We worked well as a team and it was easy enough to work with just one other person. After I stopped playing in June of 2005, a few months passed before I went back with her, got both of our characters to 40, purchased mounts, took a screenshot, and simultaneously quit for good.

Until now, of course.

“You can’t even trade as a trial account?!”

The trial account multiplied to two trial accounts as my wife, through some apprehension, joined me. My level 8 mage was a bit ahead of her newly minted level 1 hunter, but she could catch up quickly. A few hours later, she had. Of course, since we were both trial accounts, we couldn’t actually join a party together or trade with each other, so it was kind of a hassle. Today, we decided that it was worth unearthing our old accounts, making new characters, and redoing the 5 hours of leveling we had just done recently. Less than 3 hours later, we had gone from level 1 to level 10.

“Heh. I see they have an alarm function so that you can remind yourself to take a break.”

Not much has changed in the actual beginning areas, but the interface has many new tweaks and the general level of hand-holding has increased significantly. Not much need for mods since all the useful ones seem baked in now. Tutorial dialogs are everywhere, even instructing you on how to use time-honored keyboard input schemes (press WASD on your keyboard to move!). It’s more than I need since I remembered a lot of how the game is played, but I’m sure it’s great for the overal accessibility. Knowing where your next quest is located and being able to track it on a minimap, overhead map, and on-screen quest log is very helpful, however.

“Holy crap! That flying mount looks sweet. I want a flying mount.”

The game runs great on my 4 year-old MacBook, even at a decent resolution. As long as you’re not on the noob server, there isn’t any noticeable lag from the overwhelming presence of new players. The gameplay is repetitive, yet familiar and comforting, and doing quests with someone else in the room makes for fun times. In what may be a foolish prediction, we both aim to play for the month our credit cards have been charged, and make a decision as to whether we play further once it has elapsed. Just going through each zone to see how it’s changed from the ramifications of Cataclysm will be interesting, even without reaching the initial level cap of 60, let alone buying any of the expansions for more zones, classes, or level cap extensions.

“I saw a flower shop before logging out, so I sent you some :-)”

I gave a lot of crap to people who kept playing WoW after I quit in 2005. I’m sure I felt better than them for “kicking the addiction” and experiencing other things. A good friend of mine got really into it and we stopped talking often for several years. He has since stopped playing it nearly as much and we started hanging out again. WoW wasn’t the only reason for the lapse in communication, but it didn’t help. Even though I wasn’t playing, I was interested in the goings-on in the game, but at fairly shallow point my interest waned due to any recent experience.

It’s all kind of a double-edged sword. It’s a fun game that can and will dominate your interests, and to play it in moderation is the goal. Playing it at the expense of any other interest can and will make you seem uninteresting if the interest isn’t shared, and can have a negative effect on the balance of your life. Otherwise, the stigma is pretty overrated for most people who don’t have an alarmingly addictive personality.

Blizzard puts a lot of effort into the game’s visual and aural characteristics, and spends a lot of time making the world seem alive. It’s commendable. You want to hang out in their world and you want to see other people hang out in it and interact with them. Just don’t forget about the world outside Azeroth and you’ll be good. I plan to continue doing the other things I hold dear in addition to my rekindled interest in WoW. I will once again refrain from losing any jobs or getting completely lost in Blizzard’s online virtual world. That’s my goal, anyway.

Over the course of my history of computer programming (which stretches from the simplest markup language to full-on compiled languages), I’ve tried out a lot of things. When my family got its first personal computer, an AST rocking a 100MHz Pentium 1 processor and Windows 3.1 (MPC level 2, baby!), it came with QBASIC alongside its foundational copy of DOS 6. I remember playing Gorillas on it, later marveling at the source code, not really understanding how it all worked.

School had actually introduced me to HyperCard as part of a 7th grade computer literacy course before my run-in with QBASIC, but that was a higher-level language and didn’t get me into the nitty gritty of code, even though it did spark my interest in what would later become HTML. Near the end of high school I took an intro to C programming course, compiling source with gcc, and uploading my programs to a UNIX home directory. In college, I took a class on Java. And that was about it for direct school influence.

Thus, all the rest of my programming experience came via either work or personal projects. Using our family’s AST I built my first rudimentary website, lost to the annals of history. Many, many, many revisions later, we have what is largely nebyoolae.com and nebyooweb.com. Basic HTML was later joined with CSS. JavaScript, which became jQuery, was added in next, along with a MySQL database and PHP. The CakePHP framework now encapsulates both of their current forms. My Ruby and Ruby on Rails knowledge is still in its infancy, but it’s growing. In the last 15 years I’ve also used several scripting languages, as well as prettified text using various markup languages.

I still only speak English with any kind of fluency, though.

At work I picked up on ASP and even some Perl. More recently, I have picked up ASP.NET, C#, and today’s actual topic, Sharepoint.

OH RIGHT, SHAREPOINT WAS THE TOPIC

Microsoft’s Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) is basically a layer that sits on top of ASP.NET, providing additional functionality. It could be described as a sort of Content Management System (CMS) as it allows people to view, add, edit, and remove content like documents, pictures, and text, but it can also be shared with others, all in one central web application.

Before my current job, I’d heard of Sharepoint, but never used it. Now, I’ve installed it, configured it, branded it, and even begun to start customizing it. Unfortunately, Sharepoint only runs on Windows Server, and not client OSes like Windows 7. This makes developing for it slightly more of a hassle, especially if your network connection is slow or the remote server is slow to react to changes.

This problem seemed to have no recourse until I read a 3 year-old article.

Apparently, using some third-party trickery, you can sidestep the server OS requirement and do the impossible. Using additional guidance from here, I finally got SP installed and can get to Central Admin. This can make creating custom Web Parts easier since you can test them locally, removing the need to copy them to a server to see if they work.

However, I haven’t actually been able to successfully connect to a local web application created through Sharepoint’s CA. I give my user account full control, but when I input my credentials it refuses to accept them. And that’s only on Internet Explorer 8. Google Chrome has since started simply crashing when I try to access the web app, choking on something unknown.

Sigh.

It’s frustrating to have gotten this far only to be stuck. Computing is often riddled with issues like this, and it’s really easy to get dejected and just give up. I’ll keep trying to fix the problem, but for now it’s back to Post-Build Server Copying for development.

A friend of mine mentioned doing the RPM Challenge back in February of 2010. Much like MUSIK 2003 and MUSIK 2006, it was a month-long challenge to make some music. Instead of doing a song a day, which is quite a drain of one’s creativity, the RPM Challenge was just to make an album in a month, considered to be either 10 songs or 35+ minutes of music.

As a musician, I’m not always necessarily passionate about creating music. I can go through long stretches of time where I don’t think about making or playing anything. For some reason, maybe because it’d been 4 years since MUSIK 2006, I was intrigued by this idea of an album-in-a-month (which I’d actually sorta done in 2002 for Clocks Striking 13). Art needs constraints to produce actual work, and this seemed like a good restriction. The site wasn’t taking itself seriously, so I didn’t feel like there was too much pressure or SRS BIZNESS at hand, leaving me in a good state of mind to actually go through with the whole thing. A sample question from their FAQ sealed the deal:

Is it a good idea to record 35 minutes of jaw harp through a delay pedal while someone chants the names of all the fast food restaurants?
Yes.

My friend dropped out about a week into the project, but I pushed on. Although I was technically supposed to have written the material recorded during the month, I instead used it as an excuse to finally record my long-in-the-tooth pop album idea, Kaleidoscopic. The old name didn’t resonate now, so I thought of something new. Adversapolis is what I ended up going with, since it was a portmanteau of “adversity” and “people”,  the general theme of the album. I record myself singing sparingly, as it’s not my best instrument, but I wanted something accessible, so this album was going to have to have vocals as its prime draw (save for one instrumental track).

In the end, despite the kindness of people living in my house putting up with all the recording sessions and my general level of earnestness, I think the album is pretty much a failure. Mixing quality is at a significantly low point, some songs just plain turned out bad, and my singing is largely unremarkable, occasionally bordering on awful. In addition, the mindset I was in when I wrote these pieces was really different than when I recorded them. It all just seemed like I was trying to drum up a time and place that I no longer really identified with anymore.

To be a little more optimistic about it, Adversapolis had great potential. The riffs I wrote were good, and the lyrics decent. My actual recording/production skills are still amateur, however, and that combined with weak singing ability makes for something not all together pleasant.

Sigh.

At least I got it out of my system. For the most part, that’s all that’s important to me with music: it builds up inside over time and it just needs to get out in some meaningful way so I can move on.

I will not be doing the RPM Challenge this year. Good luck to all who attempt it, however, as it’s a great way to push yourself and potentially make something great.

I stopped LiveJournaling and I started a secret journal to keep the thoughts going, but privately. You could find it at journal.doc on my local computer’s hard drive, but it was password-protected. Good luck beating Microsoft Word security!

I just recently rediscovered this journal. Man. Times have changed.

I was really depressed, to say the least. My ex-girlfriend was constantly on my mind. We had actually started seeing each other again, doing this kinda-sorta-not-really relationship. It was a mistake, but at the time it was my only option and the masochism it was obviously generating was temporarily obscured by the pleasure of having a female companion again.

Unfortunately, the same overwhelmingly negative observations kept coming up: I feel alone, I don’t feel like my friends actually give a shit about me, I can’t trust my ex-girlfriend, I don’t think my ex-girlfriend actually cares about any of the things I care about, I really wish I could get a job, I’m so unmotivated to do anything and my life is pretty damn pointless. If I only Reddit had existed at the time and I knew of it!

Most of the entries still had a glimmer of hope, as I was a pessimistic optimist and all, but overall they were just individual windows into someone who had hit a personal rock bottom, stabbing at a text file with the vestiges of normalcy. Happiness was a goal (or was it?) that could never be attained, but was fought for mercilessly, even in the face of continued negativity.

The me back then was a sad sack. Of course, the demons inside that created that person still linger today. However, circumstances are ridiculously better so that the demons are kept at bay with ease. I have a job, I have a wife (!), and I even have a house. I have a steady group of friends that I don’t think merely tolerate me, but instead actually care about me, as I care about them. Any hardships that come my way now are not seen through the eyes of a single, completely aimless 22 year-old, but are filtered through Robyn and all that she has brought to my life. And that is a many splendored thing.

It seems hard to believe that I spent so much time back then obsessively dissecting relationships and beating myself up over one person. It was like a cancer, a disease, to be unable to enjoy anything because of that one person’s tacit, perceived disapproval. It’s not hard to believe, however, why a certain friend decided to distance themselves from me at the time. There was much fun sucked out of rooms because of my…condition at the time. The way I finally exploded online is pretty damn embarrassing. The things I did in that state were messy and childish. I wouldn’t take them back, however, because that was me being honest and raw. It doesn’t, however, mean that I can’t try to not let that kind of thing happen again.

My life from late 2004 to now has sure been a major improvement, so I don’t see that being too difficult.

Relating mostly to web development, here is a short list I’ve compiled off the top of my head:

• using old layout design patterns (e.g. <frame>)
• using <table> instead of <div>
• not using master page/view layouts
• in-line Javascript or CSS
• mixing tons of client-side code with server-side code in the same file
• not using external code files for functions
• redefining the same functions in multiple files
• hard-coding presentation markup in compiled classes
• creating all-new pages for a short amount of information
• label nomenclature inconsistency (i.e. calling it a “bar” here, but a “foo” there)
• using deprecated elements or attributes
• rendering basic functions broken if something the user can disable is turned off (i.e. Javascript)

Nothing here is revolutionary or unique and can be seen from the simplest script to the most complex enterprise application. Still, STOP IT OK GUYS.

A year-or-so ago I created my very first jQuery plugin. It was total crap sauce. Then, I created my second jQuery plugin and it’s kind of useful!

It’s called News List and it takes a simple little HTML structure and turns it into an auto-cycling slideshow of items. You see these things on the top of any kind of news site all the time, and they’re probably a lot more complicated and pretty than mine. But they were not created by me, and this one is!

Your eyes and minds can feast on it here.

Let’s see what I’ve been up to lately:

• Work: had a big meeting recently with my boss so I feel like we’re both caught up on things. That makes me feel good.
• Books: read some Wil Wheaton. That guy is a good writer, and makes me feel all warm and fuzzy about family and stuff.
• Games: simultaneously playing through both Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World on XBox Live’s Indie Game section. They’re like jumping back into the late 1980s and replaying Dragon Warrior N.
• Movies: saw Time-Traveler’s Wife. Better than your average chick-flick. Also saw Gantz, the live-action film. It was…the raddest bad movie I’ve seen in a while.
• House: nothing much. Still enjoying our masterful paint job, warts and all.
• Robyn: celebrated 1 year together as a married couple. The 1 year-and-three-days is pretty keen, too!
• Exercise: in my attempt to catch up with Robyn, who is now running 3x a week, my friend and I started playing racquetball again. We had stopped due to the court being closed for several weeks, but are now back on once a week. Otherwise, I started playing DDR again, as well. My skill has lessened significantly.
• Programming: a little burnt out, as I’ve been OCDing all over my web development projects lately. The massive overhaul of nebyooweb.com still needs some tweaking, as does nebyoolae.com, but I’m loathe to work on it right now. Still need to actually start work on my Ruby on Rails project. Almost done with the Ruby Koans.
• Vanity: my hair has gotten quite long (for me). It’s currently at the point of “this is too long and annoying, I should cut it”, but also nearing the “huh, I wonder what it would be like to have long-ish hair for a while” point.

That’s about it.

Robyn and I celebrated our one year wedding anniversary this weekend. Our actual dating anniversary is today, and it is our sixth. Robyn’s parents came down on Saturday and took us out for a celebratory dinner at the same place we went to for our rehearsal dinner. We got to eat great food. We got to eat it way earlier than we did at our rehearsal dinner (after 9pm). The waiter and owner remembered us and we all got to feel like rock stars for a few hours.

On our actual wedding anniversary, we got some sandwiches and drove to where we got married. There was a lot less hubbub this time. No throng of people, no makeup room, no walking down an aisle, and no picture taking. Just Robyn and me, and the memories.

Perched on the second floor, looking out at the ocean and the valiant attempts of surfers to ride some sub-standard waves, I got that infinite feeling. I know that way out there, miles and miles and miles beyond the horizon, was civilization. I couldn’t see that civilization with my naked eyes, though. All I could touch was the food I was eating, the ground below me, and the wall behind me. The weather was perfect, just like it had been on our wedding day. Of course, it’s not difficult for San Diego to churn out 72 with clear, blue skies, but after the marked precipitation of January 2010, this was a bit of a relief.

We finished our food as we reminisced a bit. Then we got up and walked around the front of the forum. People strolled along the beach, palm trees sashayed, and the love between husband and wife was as strong on day 365 as it was on day 1. It’s unfortunate that our six years together today is now overshadowed by our one year together as a married couple. All that time swallowed up by that piece of paper. I still wouldn’t trade it away for anything.

1. Logitech Revue keyboard/mouse combo. This is for our living room PC and will increase our desire to use it (we were using a separate keyboard and mouse before). It’s intended to be used with the Google TV, but it works fairly well without it, too
2. Just a Geek and Dancing Barefoot by Wil Wheaton. He’s been a writer/blogger for a long time and I figured it was time to finally read his dead-tree work.
3. Western Digital WD Elements 2TB external hard drive for my new Time Machine backup drive. I’ll be moving all my samples and music projects to my current, 640GB, external drive. I know it’s probably overkill, but I’m trying to make this somewhat future-proof.
4. Belkin 7-port USB hub. I’m using a pretty sweet HP one that has both USB and FW, but I realized I need the additional USB ports more than any FW ports. I only have the Firepod that needs FW, anyway, and my MacBook has one that will fulfill that need.
5. Native Instruments’ Komplete 7 Elements sample library. I’ve been desiring some new quality samples to play with, and getting Komplete 7 was $400 more, so hopefully this will tide me over for now.
6. The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto. Always good to have a paper reference when learning a new language.

It’ll take a bit to get 3-5 up and running as the initial time investment is not trivial, but hopefully it will invigorate me to create some music. 2011 has been musically dead so far, and I aim to change that.

While I’ve known about Git for a while, ever since More Things Need To, I didn’t start using it much until I bit the bullet and used it on my own sites. My workflow was disorganized and kinda heinous, but now I’m pretty good at using it personally (the next step is to use it at work!). Breaking down my workflow into manageable chunks that can then be referred back to (and used to recover when you make mistakes that blow things up) is really useful. Coding locally on one machine, pushing to a remote repository, and then pulling all of that code down to a local repository on a different machine is amazing.

Just through using it (and making mistakes) and reading stuff like Pro Git, I was able to get by. The Git Immersion tutorial, however, once followed, made me feel quite a bit more knowledgeable about several parts of Git. The step-by-step approach of explaining and giving clear instructions on what to type and what you should expect to see works for me quite well.

The more complex branching issues that arise from multiple participants in one repository are still a little scary, but one- and two-person programming situations seem pretty reasonable for now.

Unfortunately, I don’t spend much time there listening to people’s stuff and commenting on things, much like the rest of the Internet. Fortunately, others have done me a service and listened and downloaded (and even commented a few times) on the tracks I’ve uploaded. Check out my overall stats:

SoundCloud Stats 10/8/08-01/16/11

I’ve posted a few of these on Reddit, most likely spearheading the traffic seen here. I started linking things right about where the graph goes from 0 on the y-axis to the top of that massive spike. Still, though…Undereke has over 300 plays? Whoa. It’s long and guitar riff-heavy, so I didn’t think it would appeal as much. It must just be the unusual name, prompting a click to find out what the hell something called that would sound like.

A Kotaku article about someone gaining the “courage” to ignore video game music was published online recently.

A blogger I respect, Cruise Elroy, wrote a response to it.

I am now writing a blog post responding to both.

THE ANALYSIS

The former article recounts the experience of one person who went from lionizing video game music as canon to the video game playing experience, holding it as sacrosanct, to someone who now admits he will take the risk of dismissing it to multi-task with other audio sources, or none at all, rendering video game composers “non-essential”.

The response article admits that a knee-jerk intensely negative reaction to this was a bit off-the-mark, but after thinking it through concludes that his experience is not unique and poses a potentially mistaken and dangerous conclusion.

—

There is little “courage” to muting the volume on a video game, as it’s an option that is available and should be used if the player deems it worthy. I can see the slippery slope being gone down, though. Classifying the music in a video game as “non-essential” is a definite generalization, one that oversimplifies the issue.

I love video game music and listen to it all the time. If not actual music from a specific video game, then chiptune music made with (or made to sound like it was from) old video game hardware. More modern games eschew chips for actual recorded music with much better fidelity, which is great, too, but the NES/SNES era really cemented inside my brain. That era is my classical music, my classic rock, my “oldies”. Hearing current interpretations done using the technology of the 80s and 90s is often my jam.

But the question is not whether the music in video games is qualitatively “good”, as that is very subjective, but whether it is essential to the game playing experience. The answer to that is this: if you want to have the experience intended by the designers, you’ll listen to the music, and if you don’t care about that, then you might change the music or turn it off entirely. Both avenues are acceptable as there is no “right” way to play a game. They are open-ended bundles of interactions. There is an implicit acceptance that once you start modding the experience itself, you are OK with the result. The experience may be lesser for it, like when you don’t listen to the oftentimes amazing music composed for the game itself, or it may be fine (or even better if music distracts you from enjoying the other parts of the game).

Music holds a special place in my heart and mind, as it can soothe, excite, placate, intrigue, intimidate, and even emotionally move you in a way that can’t always be described. Not every game has the intent to have such integral and necessary audio, but I’m sure they all wish they had it. In general, I never turn off or change the music when playing a game, but that’s usually on a console or PC. When on a mobile phone, I’m usually not in an environment to have the full experience, so the audio’s volume is set low, or even off. That’s all right because I usually just want to amuse myself for a few minutes, not lose myself in something for hours. Games on this platform are often made with that in mind. I still have fun. Enough fun to warrant playing. But I’m not going to conclude that the music is now non-essential. It’s simply an option that I can use to heighten the experience if I choose.

Games are unique in that they not only give you sensory interactions of sight and hearing, like TV or movies, but they also give you control. Most of the time, that control becomes the primary reason for playing. We enjoy entering a world with rules and interacting with them. The graphics can make us want to see more or less of it. The writing can make us want to pay more or less attention to it. The music and sound can make us want to listen to more or less of it. These all come together to make a very unique, immersive experience. Take away any one of them and the whole thing is diminished in some way. It probably won’t invalidate the game entirely, but it is now lessened significantly.

THE CONCLUSION

To reiterate, is video game music essential? This broad question can only be answered in the context of a different question: was the specific video game designed to be enjoyed with particular music played along with it, and do you wish to have that prescribed experience? If so, then yes, it’s essential.

Maybe not every video game that has music needs the music it has because the graphics and gameplay are all that matter. On the other hand, play a well-designed video game with appropriate music and you’ll probably agree that the experience is better for it. However, in the aim to create a game that is enjoyable, there is no intrinsic need for music unless that is a component that makes it enjoyable. Whether music makes a game enjoyable is pretty subjective and has no definitive answer. Music itself is a complex concept that is much too deep to dissect in a simple blog post!

So don’t discount video game music. Some of it is trivial, but most of it is outstanding. Play a game with it on and off and see for yourself whether it makes a difference.

For some reason, when I initially installed it on my Site 5 host, I grabbed some non-stable release (1.0.2.devel.4232) to begin my experience with Redmine. Everything works fine, so it doesn’t really matter, but I’ve always thought I should install a more stable version. It would have bug fixes and new features, so why not?

A few weeks ago I grabbed the 1.0.5 release and tried upgrading, only to be met by an issue with the i18n Ruby gem. No matter how many times I installed it, running one of the upgrade steps helpfully reminded me I did not have it. I tried some general troubleshooting (reinstalling gem, checking Google, etc.), but couldn’t get it working. I gave up and went back to my dev release, which still happily worked.

Recently, Redmine’s development blog announced their 1.1.0 release, so I downloaded it, uploaded it to my server, and went through all of the upgrade steps again. Once I got to the end, I tried running the command that plagued me before, reaching the same result. Some more research led me to do some .bash_profile updates and some app/config/environment additions. Finally, the gem was recognized and I was on my way. Bringing up my browser and typing in my brand-spankin’ new subdomain into Google Chrome was surely going to get me back to work with actually using Redmine instead of just installing it. Right? Not yet.

My app instead spat out a message explaining that there was a missing file. I found a fix. Now my app just says it can’t start at all. Checking the Redmine app logs show nothing. Checking the main server Apache error logs was not helpful.

Grrrrrr.

UPDATE

As usual, a friend more wise in these ways helped me out. I had been neglecting to turn on Passenger support in an .htaccess file, so the server was using another technology to try and load Redmine. Once I added the right lines, it sprang to life.

I just checked everything and all my data appears to be intact. Back to managing projects!

Man Cave Jam

While I have one main, official collaboration under my belt (that of Pure Yellow Colour), I have met up with other musicians many times to do what we improvisers like to call “jamming”. Break out some instruments and start playing. Sometimes there’s a plan or some notes or words, but often it’s just one person starting to play something while the others try to join in. It’s a dance between a group of musicians that I can actually perform.

Occasionally, the jam session gets recorded. Rawly, of course, as we rarely had more than a single microphone sitting in the middle of a room trying to pick everyone up. Mixing and mastering doesn’t happen here. Just pure, unaltered, sometimes downright cacophonous audio. Some of the madness over the past 6 or so years is now up on a neat little mini-site I just put up. Check out the Man Cave Jam, if you wish.

As far as new web technology, I upgraded the time-honored JW Player to 5.4, skinned it, and added all of a band’s particular songs to a playlist. The whole site is done in the 1140 CSS Grid framework. This 12-column layout allows for a really flexible design that looks great on a 1280×800 MacBook screen, all the way down to an iPhone, carefully compressing space until it transforms from a desktop app to a mobile one right before your eyes. I’m still trying to get the kinks out of JW Player’s HTML5 support, so for now iDevices won’t get the sweet Flash player. You can still click on the “Download files” button next to each band and navigate some exciting default Apache file system hierarchies to get the files.

The exciting conclusion to Fallout: New Vegas was finally within my grasp last night. Be warned: there be spoilers abound.

THE FATE OF NEW VEGAS

For the record, I played on Normal difficulty, Hardcore mode. Most of my time was spent with Rex and Veronica as companions (halfway through until end), and I was more or less Morally Good (except to the NCR and Legion, whom I slaughtered with reckless abandon in the finale).

—

Once you reach the actual city of New Vegas, only after a long, enjoyable jaunt throughout the Mojave desert and its various settlements and denizens, you find there’s a power struggle going on. Sure, you’re already privy to the general rivalry between NCR and Caesar’s Legion for the Hoover Dam by the time you get there, but the factions involved in ruling this post-apocalyptic land are even more numerous than you once knew.

I had already logged about 40-50 hours into the game by the time I reached the Strip, but I ended up having another 30 or so to go once I started on New Vegas itself. The Boomers, Great Khans, Omertas, White Glove Society, and the Brotherhood of Steel all had their own quest lines to accomplish in addition to the main Mr. House one.

Unlike Fallout 3, it wasn’t as straightforward as finding your dad and helping save the land from an evil force. Instead, it was all about power. The power to rule New Vegas. All of these factions are vying for some kind of control and as a wronged courier mixed up in all of it, you can find a way to potentially turn the tide and take that control for yourself. The fates of the other factions are up to you.

In the end, I went for an independent New Vegas. After catching up to Benny, the guy who shoots you in the very beginning and a rogue casino employee bent on taking away power from the current ruler of The Strip, Mr. House, I initially start helping Mr. House exact revenge on the defector. He eventually runs away to Caesar’s Legion, whom I help long enough to get my revenge against him. After visiting all of the remaining factions to gauge their level of support or impedance, I team up with a very helpful robot, called Yes Man, that Benny used to further his cause. However, Yes Man ends up being quite amenable to helping your character go on a different path. With my help, Yes Man takes over Mr. House’s security robots so that I can use them as my own personal army. The NCR and Caesar’s Legion commence a semi-epic battle over Hoover Dam while I roll in pick them all off myself. In the end, I overthrow the leading general of the NCR and convince the Legion to retreat.

Now, I’m in control. And the credits roll, detailing the fate of all known significant players.

WOT I THINK

The header is stolen from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, but the conclusion is my own :-)

In the end, I enjoyed Fallout: New Vegas at least as much as Fallout 3, if not a little more. This was due mainly to all the advances and improvements between the two, like new items/weapons, addition of factions, Hardcore mode, and less running around in miles and miles of confusing underground sewers, which kind of plagued the former. The gameplay was largely the same, so it’s an even tie. The ending was exhilarating, and the many paths I could’ve taken yet leaves me wanting to replay it. Most likely due to my high Speech skill, I was able to talk my through a lot more battles, making the whole game seem more pacifistic than it probably defaults to. In fact, I talked my way through the final battle with the Legion, which can be, reportedly, very tough.

My gripes with the game are few, but significant. Despite the widely-held belief that the game is one of the buggiest ever, I did not experience this much. In 70 hours of playing, the game crashed my 360 twice. However, in the last 10 hours, it crashed three times, including once during the final quest. Annoying, but not game-breaking. I barely used any crafting, despite it being fairly deep, because either a) items that are comparable are too easy to get, or b) nothing you can craft is really worth it. In addition, there is just waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much stuff to pick up that you’ll never run out of anything.

Hardcore mode is pretty much a joke, as well. The nomenclature chosen does not mean what you think it might mean. Having to eat and drink fairly constantly did have an effect on the game, but it was minor. I still almost never slept. Broken limbs needing doctor’s bags or doctors was somewhat significant, but still minor (a perk gotten later lessened its effects even more). As predicted early on the only significant change in hardcore mode that changed my play style a bit was that Stimpacks (which you would spam like crazy in Fallout 3 while being shot at) don’t affect your HP immediately. Hit-and-run tactics needed to be employed a lot more than usual just to keep from being killed by certain enemies. Finally, I almost never sneaked except to steal some items (notably in one mission, detailed in a previous post), so Ramboing still works pretty well. The sniper rifle is still the best gun, though.

One thing that bothered me about both this game and its immediate predecessor are the words. You know, the text spoken by characters you meet and interact with constantly. In general, dialogue was fine, as lines are recorded clearly and the writing is tight, wasting few words. The voice acting was satisfactory for the most part, but also really inconsistent. Some people, like Felicia Day, did great and seemed to have fun recording her lines. Lots of NPCs just seemed bored and had flat readings. I hate seeing a line that ends with an exclamation mark and not hearing any exclamation. Very few voice actors for NPCs were used so you hear the same actor a lot, even for named characters that are supposed to be unique. Also, the writers continue to use a lot of swearing that just seems immature and unnecessary. I have no problem with swearing itself, but it’s a tool that needs to be used effectively.

FINALLY

Wow. I’ve been on-and-off playing this game since late October 2010. I didn’t reach the level cap, I didn’t visit every location, and I didn’t do all quests. There’s a lot of game I didn’t touch. And it still took me 2.5 months and 80 game hours to play. Thus, this is a deep game. With such a deep, complex game, there’s bound to be some inconsistency and bugs, and F:NV has those. But it’s also extremely engrossing to me, and I love just being in its world. I was sad to finish it, because it meant my initial experience was now shaped and now that experience can only be added to or amended, but never truly relived.

Oh, well. There’s always DLC.

NEBYOOWEB.COM

Nebyooweb.com

Nebyooweb.com (Nebyoolae + web; genius, I know) is my personal web development/design portfolio. If anyone wants to know how I build websites, then this is a good portal. This new version has quite a few changes.

It now has a web development blog on the front page (culled from this blog), with a little “Latest Project” widget, too. Sections include Projects, where descriptions of sites I’ve done exist, Resume for a more traditional view of my web development history, a short About page, and the ubiquitous Contact form.

The look of it has been completely revamped, going from a fixed width to a dynamic one based on the browser window. When I made the previous version, I wanted something that fit in a single, portrait window, so making it fixed-width made sense. Unfortunately, I usually use my computer at a high resolution, leaving a lot of unused whitespace visible, making the site seem overly empty. Using a liquid design makes sure that no part of the window looks so…barren.

I didn’t have a blog of any sort on the old site, and that was a mistake. Besides showing off what you’ve done, most people want to know you can talk about it, too. Making a separate dev blog just for this site was unnecessary when I was already making dev posts here. I found a PEAR component that would help me parse Lazy in the Blog’s public RSS feed for specific posts and then display them here. Mission accomplished.

The about page removed a lot of pretentious and unneeded cruft about the technologies I use. For the record, the site is built using PHP via the CakePHP 1.2 framework. It’s XHTML 1.0 compliant and uses mainly CSS2 with some CSS3 garnishes for flavor. User interaction here and there is accomplished with jQuery.

My resume got updated and the ways in which you can view it are new. Besides the carried-over text-only view, you can now change it to a PDF-printable version, perfect for printing to PDF if on a Mac, or using a plugin like CutePDF on Windows. Finally, a generic printable version that’s not as bare-bones as the text-only view has been added, for printing to paper. I spent a lot of time getting the neat transition animation to work, but it’s not optimized yet.

The contact form is pretty much the same, but it works with AJAX now, giving better feedback to the user about required fields and whether the message got sent or not.

All in all, I’m happy with the new look and added functionality. Using CSS3 is fun because it allows me to make rounded corners and shadows without having to make images in Photoshop. I’m not a great visual artist, so any programmatic tools to get around having to make little graphics is helpful.

NEBYOOLAE.COM

Nebyoolae.com

Whereas Nebyooweb.com is more consistent in look and color scheme, Nebyoolae.com has always been more of a playground. I started it as my “personal homepage” sometime back in the 1990s, and its focus has ebbed and flowed with each variation. Initially, it was probably more of a free-for-all, but then narrowed to just music. Later it added pictures and videos as I made them. Then it later got stripped back down to just music in 2003, as well as getting a dynamic overhaul when I changed everything to PHP and created a database for all of the music I’d created up to that point. Now I could more easily look up albums and songs and display them in more useful ways. I even made an administration side that allowed me to add and edit information without having to edit the database directly or raw HTML files. It was the first “modern” version of Nebyoolae.com.

Since then, I moved it from vanilla PHP to CakePHP, a framework that speeds up the creation of dynamic websites by doing a lot of the initial scaffolding. Most sites are just interfaces to a database, and frameworks know this and harness the conventions established by millions of web designers to formalize things so it can build a skeleton of your web site before you even begin to type anything. This, I like. Once all that was set up, I really needed to work on the user experience, which was the focus for the latest update.

The homepage is no longer a blog, but the main albums index. Blog entries still exist, but are now relegated to a small box, hidden until clicked on. They are parsed from the same RSS feed as Nebyooweb.com, just with a different category. While I think that blog entries are important, music should be the thrust of why people are here.

Song views never sat right with me, aesthetically. I just couldn’t figure out how I wanted to display all of the related information at the top. My latest design uses a faux-gradient style with a larger font that I really like. Song comments and ratings have been flawed for a while. The design was rough and the AJAX was minimal or wonky. Now, comments are added dynamically and ratings update correctly, all without refreshing the whole site. The song search function has been fixed and improved, as well. Start typing and it dynamically loads the songs that match below. A small delay is created before doing a lookup so that each 350ms period of combined keypresses, and not each individual one, is sent, limiting the DB queries.

The tag cloud was always a point of contention. Horizontal lists made things difficult to read, as it would look like one long, run-on sentence. My friend suggested I use columns of a few items each, with the remainder moving rightward to a new column until it wrapped onto the next line, which is what ended up making the cut. I still haven’t implemented a weighted tag display (showing, usually by size, a tag’s relative importance), which would be ideal, but that will come in a later variation.

The studio information page hasn’t changed, but the about page’s overall length got truncated, to minimize scrolling. I buffed up the description a bit, but made the gallery slideshow smaller. Images now change with a minor fade.

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

One thing that was not included in these revisions was any kind of significant update to the administrative side. The public-facing part was most important, since that’s what everyone sees, so I made it the focus.

Nebyooweb.com will be changed from CakePHP to Ruby on Rails and the resume transition will be optimized. Nebyoolae.com will most likely have its fixed-width design changed to a liquid one, and the Flash player for songs may change to HTML5 once that becomes more standardized. The color palette will also be reduced and made more consistent.

• Successfully finished a coding exercise dealing with basic class relationships and Ruby built-in methods set forth by my coding friend
• Wrote a small script to reverse a list of strings for the Lists page here on my blog
• Gone through a tutorial or two or three
• Going to a local Ruby meetup (tonight!)

Grasping the concepts of Ruby is mostly reaffirming basic programming ideals only with different syntax, so it’s going well. Using it with the web framework Rails will be more difficult, but is probably the best next step. My goal is to have created a Rails web app by the end of the month. This will help strengthen my ailing database skills, which have needed some sprucing up after several years of mainly front-end work.

A short list of concerts attended kept lengthening over the years on my old LJ, measuring almost 50 units in total. It was fun to update it when I went to a new one, although I haven’t been to one in (*checks*) 16 months. This is…kind of appalling.

Anywho. I took that old post and turned it into a WordPress Page. I figured other periods-of-time-that-can-be-chunked should be added as separate lists, too, so books, games, and movies are on the page, as well. Anytime I finish one of these things I’ll update it. Right now, besides the concert list, the page is woefully unfinished, so don’t think I’ve only begun watching movies, reading books, and playing games since a year or so ago.

Any comments or criticism are gladly welcomed.

I had just uploaded all the files and hit refresh on nebyooweb.com only to see a largely white screen and a scant few elements appearing. Where’s my website? I asked myself. An error message pointed me toward a library I was using for RSS parsing and I remembered at once what I needed to do. Unfortunately, when you share server space with others certain security measures have to be taken to make sure no one ruins things for others. Doubly unfortunately, this means currently I can’t install the dependency and nebyooweb.com is on hiatus until my host’s support can help me out (which they always end up doing, as they rule). My triumph of being done and showing off my new toy to the world is stunted and I will have to wait, however. Tonight’s failure will hopefully turn into tomorrow’s success.

A webplace space originally launched in February 2009, More Things Need To is a simple site. Much like Texts From Last Night or Bash.org, it’s a place where anyone can submit short humorous blurbs (the former being supposed funny texts, the latter being supposed funny chat logs). MTNT’s particular slant is that the blurb needs to be in the form “More X need(s) to Y”, which is the snowclone-like template of a joke that a friend and I have been using for many years. Eventually the idea to make our shared comedy a website so that we could keep track of them, and furthermore allow others to read them and contribute their own, came to fruition.

My friend, who is more acquainted with Ruby on Rails, decided to make the site with it as its server side back-end. The front-end design has been a more cooperative effort. A mobile version specifically targeting iPhones and iPods has been largely my effort. As he creates features or edits things, I sort of translate it to the small screen. Together MTNT has become a pretty solid little web app that we’ve enjoyed tinkering with for almost a year now.

MOBILE MTNT

Working on the mobile version has been fun as I find it enjoyable to take a more complicated layout and try to “minify” it for the restricted viewport of a phone. While I usually start a fresh desktop project off with a simple design, making it increasingly more complex as features are created, constructing a mobile version of a site goes in the other direction. Start with a complex site and begin increasingly stripping things until the app is down to its core components. Streamlined and svelte, much like the phone it’s probably being viewed on nowadays.

I’d like to take the idea a step further and make a free iPhone app out of MTNT, as well. There isn’t a heck of a lot of advantage to “appifying” the site, but that actually is an advantage in accomplishing said task: it shouldn’t be too much translation, and it will be a good first iPhone app exercise. The first step in making it work is to create a public API that it can call, but that’s currently on the backburner.

RECENT MTNT CHANGES

Some of the more recent additions to the site are a view of all users with their respective number of entries/votes/comments they’ve made, as well as an entry search function. They’ve been on the desktop version of the site for about a month, but the mobile version was just amended to use them last night. The buttons used when paging through entries were also updated to look more mobile-like and be more consistent with the form buttons already existing.

GETTING BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH RUBY

The Ruby back end of MTNT is still a bit of a mystery to me as I’ve mainly used ASP.NET and PHP. As I’ve updated my part of the site bits of Ruby here and there have surely entered my brain, but it has yet to coalesce into clear understanding. The syntax and flow of creating a website in Ruby still hasn’t clicked with me, but I’m taking steps to overcome this:

1. Immediately: Completing the Ruby Koans
2. Imminently: Redoing nebyooweb.com in Rails 3
3. Imminently: Attending a Ruby user conference/meetup
4. Eventually: Creating a Ruby gem (maybe)

Learning a whole new language, as well as a framework, is difficult. However, I’ve heard from multiple people how Ruby just “feels right” and once you’ve gotten over the learning curve using it is a pleasure. I hope this comes to pass.

Read the entire sordid tale here.

It’s always good to be home. Changes in routine and environment are often welcome, but nothing quite beats returning to that which is safe and known and comfortable. Lots of family and eating last week has turned into a bit of friends and less eating this week.

CHRISTMAS HAUL

So, what awesome stuff did I get this year? Besides the leftover Amazon gift card remainder from my birthday that has been increased due to another Amazon gift card from my mom for Christmas, I got several cool things.

First and foremost, a new car stereo. My Saturn is 7 years-old and until recently still been using the stock stereo. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it (except for some low-end crackle that’s annoying), but it had no auxiliary input. This meant having to use an RF adapter for my iPod (and later iPhone) if I wanted custom tunes that couldn’t be burned to a regular audio CD. The CD player wasn’t even working properly as skipping backwards on a disc often made the unit “crash” and hang for a minute or so before rebooting to the beginning of the CD. Now I can use the CD player as intended, and it takes CD-R and CD-RW with MP3s on it! But better than that is that it has a USB port so I can charge and play my iPhone directly through the stereo. Years of using less-than-ideal RF penance has finally paid off. Robyn saw where I hurt and bandaged me up good.

Robyn’s parents got us two cool things: 1) a Keurig coffeemaker, the kind that takes those single-serving K-cups (as well as a single-serving filtered coffee amount of your choice), and 2) an HP wifi printer that does double-sided printing without needing to flip the page. The latter has a touchscreen with tons of little apps like an iPhone that allow you to connect to certain services to print things from them, which is also pretty cool.

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I got lots of other cool things from lots of people, and it turned out to be a really swank Christmas.

After a fairly uneventful short work week, wherein the most exciting thing that happened was that the copier which usually sits directly behind me got pushed closer to me due to some leak that created a sizable puddle near it, I drove home from work for the last time in 2010. My way home was enhanced by a really incredible double rainbow in the sky. The illusion that I was driving ever nearer to it was cool, if a bit disappointing. I want that pot of gold.

I’m in OC now with Robyn and the in-laws. The drive up here was great because there was NO RAIN (doo duh doo dooooooo). Music was blasted, greasy fast food was eaten, and miles were put behind me as I drove through the night. Ominous clouds loomed overhead but, except for a 10-second spot half the way there, no precipitation was experienced.

We’re being ushered from the home for a cleaning lady who has just showed up, so it is time to end this road marker. More news as it develops.

I’ve always remembered enjoying rain. I don’t mind getting a little wet from sky-wise precipitation. Listening to it fall while ensconced inside with hot cocoa is a Hallmark moment I can still enjoy. However, when I have to drive in it or I’ve forgotten my umbrella during a torrential downpour then rain goes from “cool” to “ugh”.

My only car accident (save for backing into something or scraping a sidewalk) has been in the rain. I spun out on a highway, got nicked by another car, and crashed into a guardrail. Terrifying is the least of its attributes. So when I drive in the rain now and my car loses a bit of traction, my mind still kind of PTSDs a little. Last night, I was almost backed into and side-swiped within a minute of leaving my house. To say that my thoughts of impending doom are crystallizing into a hard chunk of fear diamond would be an understatement at times.

/breathes

Living in SoCal means not having to deal with this that often, so the past few days have been surreal. It’ll end soon…right?

That being said, and then this being said, I have started to read a little more thanks to the iBooks app on my iPhone. I tried out the Kindle app a while ago, but then my drive died. Choosing to pick it back up again via iBooks was pretty arbitrary, but the app coming with a free copy of Winnie-the-Pooh didn’t hurt.

I’ve since read several short stories (gotta start small so I don’t lost interest) by both Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut. My only long-form novel so far has been Ayn Rand’s Anthem. I’m about to finish a sample of Name of the Wind, a novel lauded by several of my friends, and I definitely want to read more once it’s over.

My only gripe with iBooks? No OS X/Win app! Amazon’s got the Kindle, Kindle Win/Mac app, and an iPhone app, and they all sync. Apple has dropped the ball on this one. For shame!

Despite a promising initial attempt to turn reading into a full-time hobby, I’ve lost a bit of focus, as predicted. I suspect with the portability of having nearly limitless books in my phone, however, that I’ll keep picking it up here and there. Progress, man.

From the evening of Wednesday, December 8th, until the evening of Sunday, December 12th, my birthday was just kinda around.

On Wednesday I went to dinner at Studio Diner with a small group of friends, much like I did last year. It’s a swell little joint that has probably blown up in popularity due to it being on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives show on the Food Network. Except for outside, where it was cold, the inside was pretty packed. We ordered a super sampler plate for all, and I got a nice ham and cheese melt with waffle fries. Someone else got an entire fish, fried up like it was the heart of Texas. We were all impressed. Two others split a banana split that was eventually passed around the table. Afterward, we all went to someone’s house and played with a Kinect. Dancing in Dancing Central leaves me sweaty and tired. I am old.

Thursday, my actual birthday day, was relatively light on activity. Robyn and I ordered pizza for dinner (Papa John’s website is quite awesome now), and she made cookies. Friday, after work some friends came over and we chatted and played Rock Band 3.

Saturday was the day of my official birthday party where I invite all people who live in the area (and even some who don’t (and they came!)) to hang out at our place for a while. Dozens of people showed up and it warmed the cold cockles of my heart. I got bunches of cards and gifts and it was chaos. Lots of people have kids and they like to run around and fall down on the floor. Kim actually came all the way from OC and brought her girlfriend and even her kids. Her boys are totally people now (i.e. they are almost 10 years-old and can have conversations and are not easily impressed by funny pictures on the wall). Other friends’ kids are not as old and either at the not-talking-at-all phase or at the laughs-at-all-things phase, so it was kind of nice. We played Super Mario Galaxy and Boom Blox on the Wii, as well as Rock Band, because Rock Band is still often played in a group setting. The game playing happened downstairs while the general-socializing-and-food-grazing occurred upstairs.

Once a good portion of the people left, there were still a few of us around so we generally just sat upstairs and chatted. I made some espresso-based hazelnut lattes, because I got one from Robyn, and they were good. I’m a barista now. Eventually everyone but Jimmy had left, so he, I, and Robyn went downstairs and played more Rock Band. This is significant because JIMMY WAS APART OF IT. He has not been too keen on it for a long while, so the fact that he voluntarily chose to be within its grasp is of note. Robyn went to bed around 10-ish and Jimmy and I played for another two hours until he left for the night.

Sunday was spent largely socializing with Robyn’s parents, her brother, and her brother’s girlfriend. First, we decorated cookies that Robyn had baked earlier in the day, and then I and her father opened our respective birthday gifts (yes, it was his birthday weekend, too). Our AirPort Express, used for wireless speakers and wireless printing, had bitten the bullet upon moving to our house, so the gift of a new one was welcome. We also got this handy picture hanger thinger, which will be used soon (primarily to hang the awesome custom art that Kim and her family made for me). After those activities had drawn to a close we all went to Piatti’s in La Jolla for dinner and ate way too much extremely awesome food. The risotto was especially good, and I should NOT have eaten it all. Robyn and I came home and were pretty blorg for the rest of the evening.

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And now it’s Monday, and I’m back at work. Awesome weekend was awesome.

The main layout is now liquid. There’s a new title, logo, and main nav links. There’s even a cheesy tagline :-P

I’ve updated the homepage to show all my projects instead of an intro message + random project. The blurb got moved to my about page, since it seems more relevant, and more professional there. The resume section has gotten the biggest update so far. The logic behind it is more sound, and there are format links for text, pdf-printable, and regular-printable. When you click the latter two, a sweet (though unoptimized at this point) jQuery animation transition “transforms” the page into that format. If you don’t have JS turned on, then it just does a normal HTTP request and uses the layout, so you get the format, but not the transition.

Even the contact form got some graphical updates as the form elements look cooler.

Things left to do:

• Add selected blog postings from here that have to do with web development
• Fix flash message position/animation
• I might still try to get wkhtmltopdf to work, but it may be too much work
• Write a capistrano recipe for deployment

Hopefully, as a friend said recently, this will actually improve my standing in the pantheon of web developers. If not, it was at least a fun exercise.

Welcome to machine

This is the state of my Gmail Inbox today, December 9th, 2010, my 30th birthday. Most of these came in last night, but you get the gist. Also, this is not the first year that I’ve gotten a flurry of birthday wishes from automated mail daemons, but it’s the first time I’ve posted about it on this blog.

Yes, I’m now 30 years-old. Not really that old for our time, but significant. It’s been an enjoyable stay, this existence here on Earth in our reality, and for the most part I can’t really complain with any gravitas. I have a sweet wife, a sweet house, and great friends and family. I’ve got both rhythm and music. I’m loved.

A retrospective on what’s occurred during my 29th year will have to wait until 2011, as I don’t want to shortchange the rest of 2010, but it’s been a good year.

Whereas “blueish” was my color scheme for nebyoolae.com, I decided to go with “greenish” as a foundation for nebyooweb.com. It started out really simple and has gotten a bit more complex, adding things like a contact form and the ability to sign up as a user to get at special areas, as it went through a couple iterations. Last night I started work on yet another iteration, and (as usual) it’s the best one yet. The new look is much better and the code will be refactored to a degree that contents me…for now.

The most recent version used a static layout set to about 800 or so pixels, which was really just an extension of what I’d done with the layout of nebyoolae.com at the time. Each site influences the other as I’m often developing them concurrently. For my latest attempt I figured I’d go with a liquid layout because I always use my computer at a resolution of 1280 x (1024 desktop/800 laptop) and all the empty space offended my design aesthetic. However, the drawback is you have to plan for the “flow” of things so that depending on how big the browser is and how many items are on the screen it still looks good. Seeing everything slide around as you change the dimensions of your browser is immensely satisfying for some reason, though.

I’ve always been a proponent of using pure CSS for graphical details (corners, gradients, shadows) just because it means I don’t have to create a separate graphic and future updates are more flexible. CSS3 is being taken advantage of as much as possible this time around, eschewing JS when I can, because I care less about coding for every possible browser possibility. It’s a bit elitist and lazy, but I use Google Chrome all day, which uses WebKit, and it rules. If I’m using the site as a way to possibly get jobs, do I still really want to work with someone who only uses IE 7? In the end, I may relent just to make the site more accessible, but for now I’m just gonna let it go.

Updating nebyooweb.com also means updating my resume, since it’s really just a prettier, more interactive representation of one. However, I still want a “regular” resume that can be easily copied/downloaded for all cases. My current CakePHP controller for handling my resumes needs updating, and the resume information itself really needs to be in a database, rather than hard-coded into the views (go ahead and shame me).

The problem with updating any existing site is that there’s rusty knowledge of how things work, and you’ve probably gotten better at coding since last maintaining it, and that means noticing crappy code. Unfortunately, I sometimes take shortcuts that produce a desired, if not always elegant, result. Wading through this a year later is a struggle, and the pangs of just starting the whole thing over burn ever bright. In fact, I will end up doing just that once I (re)start the Ruby on Rails version of nebyooweb.com. Learning a whole new language and way to construct a website is a harrowing task, as it first was when I turned nebyoolae.com from Generic PHP to CakePHP. Thankfully, I have a friend who is already knowledgeable and can help me out.

All this is to say that nebyooweb.com will be looking different soon, I really want to work on it instead of not working on it right now, and Redmine is great.

Regardless, it involves covering Chex cereal with a delightfully r0xsweet0 combination of melted butter, chocolate, vanilla, and peanut butter. See below:

Choco-butter-nilla-covered Chex(TM) cereal

Once that’s all mixed up but good, you take a bunch of powdered sugar, add it to the mix, and put it all in a big plastic bag.

You can see I've added a heap of cocai--uh, "powdered sugar" to the mix.

The fun part is now to take the bag and shake the ever-loving bejeezus out of it. Make funny faces and throw the bag in the air a few times for good measure, as well. When you’re done, it’ll look something like the next picture.

I think I've created some kind of new moon-rock sludge solution.

Finally, pour them out of a bag onto a surface to dry. You finally have the pile of shredded wheat briquettes you always wanted.

These things taste reaaaaaally good.

I’m going to go now and move our newly-created Muddie Buddies into an airtight container that I will then place in the fridge. They tasted pretty good slightly warm, but I’m curious what cold ones will be like.

Welp, until the next time I try to make something in the kitchen all by my lonesome, hold your breath. Wait. No. You’ll die. Don’t do that.

Part of my morning routine that I enjoy is tempering the blah feeling I have of getting up early and then walking into my office by making a “pit stop” of sorts at the nearby cafeteria. I’m at work, in a sense, but still not at work yet. Smelling the brewing coffee and pastries helps start my day.

Lunch is a far better example, however, because it’s a big 30-45 minute break of bliss. Temporarily mitigating the adverse effect of staring at a screen for 5 hours straight is just the beginning of what’s great about it. Currently, lunch consists of walking for about 5 minutes to a nearby cafeteria (not the one for breakfast), talking to the guy running the register for about 10 seconds while I order food, waiting for a few minutes, grabbing my food from a counter and then quietly sitting inside (or something outside) while I eat and read my iPhone or a weekly news publication. I don’t talk to anyone and I can do what I want without any guilt or real distraction. A lot of people would see this as anti-social (“why doesn’t he ever talk to anyone?”) or sad (“awww, he’s all alone”), but in reality it’s just me being me. That is, enjoying a peaceful, contented period of time by myself, not needing to interact and efficiently consuming nourishment. It’s the best part of the day, really.

Of course, this all means I spend about $10 a day, 5/7 days a week. The food isn’t very healthy, either (although I could be better about what I choose). I have mixed feelings about “letting go” like this, both health-wise and money-wise. Part of me just enjoys it because it’s enjoyable, doesn’t require me to think about food before leaving for work, and is a tradition of sorts I’ve developed. Part of me feels guilty because it’s not good for me and I could save money by taking my lunch, which is what I’d probably have to do if we had a child to support.

As usual there is no conclusion or lesson learned, and I’ll go on forever feeling conflicted. Most things in life are like this for me. The observation has now been made, though. And for that, there is some solace.

Robyn and I decided to decorate our house for Christmas today. We already had our 4′ fake tree up on an end table next to the living room window, a wreath was hung from the front door, and our stockings were hung on a nearby bookshelf, but we hadn’t put up any lights! Lights are what make any holiday worth its salt…worth its NaCl.

After putting up some rudimentary ornamentation on the porch stairs we then started adorning the living room window. We noticed the strand of lights was pretty long. Longer than was needed to secure the perimeter of the window itself…so we just kinda went crazy. Snaking the lights along the wall lead to going over the TV, over a bookcase, across the beam that tops the opening to our kitchen, and straight up the wall to the third floor finally stopping at the ceiling itself! Energized by our blatant disregard for restraint, we went to the store and got even more lights. The short wall behind our couch as well as part of the stairway leading from the living room to the front entryway is now bedecked with colorful illumination.

The video above is worth many more words than I just typed, but if you can’t/won’t watch moving pictures synchronized with my nerdy voice then my paragraphs have done their job.

This all could be because of the particular games I’ve chosen. Maybe I’m just not playing the right kind of game. Regardless, when a game gives you the option of either 1) blowing someone away to solve a conflict versus 2) sneaking around them I will most likely end up choosing option 1. Why? Unless I’m purposely trying to lengthen the game, it just takes too damn long to out-maneuver an enemy when I could out-gun them.

Sure, I will admit that donning some kind of camouflage and carefully, tensely, walking in a crouched stance through an environment infested by bad guys, narrowly escaping detection ends up being a more rewarding experience when you actually accomplish it. Viscerally, it’s not the same rush, but it’s a more complex, long-form felicity. However, in a game where there is a lot of conflict between you and the world, stealing your way through trouble eventually gets tiring. It really is easier to just pull out the machine gun or explosives and lay waste. You get the adrenaline of combat plus the efficiency of hubris, charging into a room and unloading all you got until the dust has settled. No analysis. Just success.

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Last night, that domineering philosophy failed me, though. If you don’t want to read about a non-primary mission in Fallout: New Vegas that has no real bearing on the plot (that I know of yet), then avoid the next few paragraphs.

Caravans roam the wasteland, visiting settlements that dot the land, and bringing goods to trade. The main organizing institution that manages most of them is the Crimson Caravan Company. At some point in the game, they want you to break into the Gun Runners facility, an organization that builds some serious weaponry, and steal their weapon schematics. There’s a guy named Isaac who fronts the public-facing part of the company, a gun store hosted by a robot, situated just outside the fenced and walled-in headquarters. He won’t give you a tour of the place, citing intellectual property paranoia. There’s one, and only one, locked gate that allows access to the front door of their establishment. Armed guards are on patrol, of course. The proprietor of the Crimson Caravan Company wants the job done…quietly. No alerting anyone, no deaths. In a word, stealthily. My plasma rifle and recon armor could’ve easily let me barge in, but that was not an option now.

All of the missions up to this point that necessitated violence have been Rambo-able. Gunning down any adversaries was not a problem. For once, I actually needed to think about how to approach my objective. The guards had a patrol that lead them away from the gate and front door, thankfully. The locked gate was of average difficulty, so my average lockpicking ability was up to the task. However, Isaac was always just around the corner, causing my Detect-o-Meter to keep registering as “[DETECTED]“. What to do? A long neglected single Stealth Boy, obviously!

For those who chose to sneak more than butcher, Stealth Boys essentially make you the Predator, replete with a “scrambled” visage. As soon as I applied the item to myself, my “[DETECTED]” went right to “[HIDDEN]“. I picked the lock, silently crept through the front door, found the schematics (among several useful weapons), and got out, just as my ‘Boy ran out. For once in my 42-or-so hours of playing, that acute nervousness with a subsequent rush of I-got-away-with-it came over me and I remembered how awesome it is to creep instead of annihilate.

Every once in a while it’s nice to have a mission like this. Making them sporadic makes them special. Games like Metal Gear Solid and Thief are fun because they’re almost completely comprised of moments like this, but the tenseness can wear on a person like me after awhile. If the game were only a few hours long, it might not be so bad. Usually, though, we’re talking tens of hours of gameplay, so back to Rambo I return since the game almost always allows for it. I just can’t bring myself to sneak around every corner when I’m given enough firepower to not.

In related news, Cazadores are scary as hell, require insane strategy to not end up being overwhelmed by a pack of them, and are SCARY AS HELL.

I had been suggested that I use 1Password a while ago. Since I was already used to using browser-based user/pass management, the thought of purchasing something to input them all over again was discouraging to say the least.

However, due to the good nature of a friend, I was gifted a Mac license of 1Password recently. The interface is slick as hell, and I found that it did a lot more than just give you a notepad to put passwords. The program is pro all the way and allows you to put in website logins, server accounts, financial information, and even identities. What’s even better is that it is now cross-platform, and with a little Dropbox magic, both Mac and Windows are synched. Change a password on my MacBook tonight, go to work tomorrow and Windows has the same thing. The icing is that both platforms have working Google Chrome plugins (my browser of choice) so that you just click a button and it enters your info into the website.

The reason it’s called 1Password is that now that I have all my info inputted correctly (which took a whole day) all I need to know is ONE PASSWORD. I made a crazy password as a master and that’s it. Start up the program (or access it via plugin), enter that skeleton key, and you’re in. What one should now do is generate a bunch of new passwords that are high quality and unique (unlike my crappy ones that I repeat all over the place), because you don’t need to remember them (which is why they end up being crappy and repeated). As long as you remember the master password, all the subsequent passwords can be as ridiculous as you want, which makes you more secure overall. This is something I didn’t realize until today when it was pointed out, and it really does change the way I think about creating passwords forever.

The only caveat is that the Windows version is obviously a port, design-wise, since the Mac version is so…Mac: in other words, it looks sweet as hell. Microsoft’s side looks much less appealing, but thankfully you won’t be looking at it much since you’ll basically just be interacting with it via browser plugin.

Initial investment is significant, so be prepared to put some time in to get the program full of personal information goodness. On the other hand, you could just fill it in as you use sites, slowly filling the holes. Either way, I highly recommend it. Agile Web Solutions is the developer, so check it out.

Friend looking over Julian valley

I had a friend (continue to) stand in front of a scenic overlook while we were perched atop a hill in Julian recently. He was standing there, most likely taking in the majesty of nature, and I figured it would make a good shot. I said to not move, he remained motionless and I clicked the button on the camera. The result was pretty good. Also, it was cold.

Well, it’s officially fall now. And it’s gotten pretty cold outside. Apparently, it was 36 degrees this morning. Our house has been in the low 60s, and…well, that’s still kind of cold. Both Robyn and I are exclaiming every five minutes of the frigid climate within our walls. We’re both wearing long pants and several layers on top. Our extremities are not happy. Time to turn on the heater, right?

/go_to_thermostat /move_slider_from_off_to_HEAT /wait /check_vents /listen /sigh

If my IRC commands didn’t clue you in, our heater doesn’t seem to be working. This is the first time we’ve tried to use it and so we have no previous experience to fall back on. It remains cold in the house. Thankfully, we have a warranty on everything for a year so we called in a service request and someone’s gonna investigate in a couple days. I’m really gonna miss this level of service come June of next year.

Until then, we continue to exclaim about the cold. Robyn’s gonna bake cookies just as an excuse to have the oven on. This idea, I cannot argue with, as it is absolute foolishness.

—

ALSO: It’s the end of NaBloPoMo. Except for some slacking on weekends, both Robyn and I have blogged at least once a day for an entire month. Go us! Now, let’s see if this keeps up.

To preface this, I use Mint.com to keep track of my finances. Yes, this means they most likely have hashes of all of my financial institution’s online website passwords. I try not to think about it. Why go through the hassle? Mint just makes it too easy. I can’t imagine ever wanting to not use them at this point.

I log on occasionally to check out the transactions I’ve been making, maybe annotate one here or there, and to make sure things are being categorized correctly. Even out of the gate Mint is pretty good at scrounging information from each individual piece of income or payment, with me having to fill in almost nothing. You can auto-filter things, too, so in the end it’s basically doing everything for me. The interface is really swank, too.

The only issue with it is that it doesn’t work with every single account I have, and it doesn’t work with every single account my wife has, either. Also, it doesn’t let you pay off credit cards via their website, so I still keep each individual site bookmarked for that monthly pay-off. But OTHERWISE IS THE GOOD.

Mortgages take a long time to pay off. Another payment is due in a couple days. Sigh.

I woke up at about the same time as the day before, venturing downstairs to see others already up. Coffee was brewed and leftover pancakes awaited my hungry stomach. Robyn threw our sheets in the wash and we all read for awhile. Once the wash was done and the sheets were in the dryer, we decided it was time to go. Josh ran through a checklist given to him by Matt and Molly so we had everything off or closed or whatever before we locked up and left.

Once packed and all tasks had been completed, we started down the 79, back to the 8, on our way home. About 10 minutes into our drive, we noticed a girl in an old Dodge Dart make a sudden U-turn right in front of us. Her front-right tire was horribly askew, making forward progress difficult, if not impossible. She kind of pulled over onto the curb as I honked at her a few times at Josh’s behest. She then pulled to a complete stop, as did we.

Josh got out of the car to go check on her. She was fine, but her car definitely was not. She was definitely freaked out, crying and making frustrated gestures, even while talking on Josh’s phone. We offered to take her to where she was going, but she politely refused. A tow truck was called, but we didn’t want her to wait alone, so we hung out, trying to slow cars down on either side, as her wreck was just around a blind curve, making it really easy for people to not see it until it was too late. Thankfully, everything turned out all right, her car was towed, and no one was hurt.

The rest of the drive was pretty non-eventful, experienced mainly by driving and staring out the window. Driving out of Julian is fun as there’re lots of windy roads to navigate, but it also requires you to be very attentive and watch your speed constantly. We arrived back home sometime before noon, dropped Josh off at his car, helped him get his things back into his car, and then said goodbye. We pulled into our garage, feeling relieved to be home, as always.

—

Julian weekends need to become a consistent thing, I say. The commune-like fashion where we all shared a place and help out with everything…it really works, at least for a short period of time. I like all the people, and I like the place, and I like the activities. I’m really grateful to know everyone involved and I look forward to the next time we do it.

After breakfast, I bundled up a bit to fight off the chill outside and excused myself to a swing perched below some trees. Maggie had gotten me the entire collection of Bone, a graphic novel, for a birthday a few years ago and I figured now was a good time to actually start reading it. Everyone else was inside where it was warm, reading and discussing things, but I knew I needed the quiet and focus of being outside alone to actually concentrate. After a couple hours Josh joined me outside, momentarily breaking my ability to concentrate, but once Matt came out to talk to him I was able to regain my reading composure.

We all went inside again after a bit and the lot of us went about making lunch in a mini-haphazard way, with most people making turkey sandwiches on the kitchen island and me making a peanut butter and banana jam sandwich. We again sat at the table, communing over food and chattery, which continued to be really fun.

Despite everyone’s ability to immediately get back to whatever they were reading once again, a plan to visit a nearby cider brewery was hatched. We all dressed for the windy and cold outside, drove to the brewery, bought some stuff, didn’t actually do a tasting, and then embarked on some treasure hunting. By that, I mean we did geocaching! Robyn and I did a few geocaches back at the last place we lived, but hadn’t even attempted it since then. We tried to find one at the brewery itself, but were unsuccessful. However, driving a few miles away to a cow pasture netted our first find. With the confidence imbued upon us all by this, we found three more afterward, even going as far as meeting the owner of one of them, mainly because their house was right next to the cache and there were instructions inside it to come on up and say hello. No one seemed to want to do that, but Lea and I were brave and curious enough to, and everyone else eventually followed along. The final cache was at a beautiful vista point, complete with a valley view and rolling clouds. It was really cold this whole time, so we were all happy to go back to the cabin and drink tea and cider.

Stereotypically, the three girls decided to knit, and the four guys decided to play a board game called Cosmic Encounter. Josh pored over the rules for a while and then finally taught us how to play. It’s a bit like Risk, except with lots of chance cards and more interesting battles. I’m thinking Jawn’d probably like it. Matt ended up winning the game in the end, but it was very close. Dinner was a scrumptious Costco tri-tip that Josh brought, along with a squash salad, and baked asparagus. Robyn single-handedly made a Pizookie and everyone agreed it was the bomb. We all agreed we were pretty damn full afterward, too.

Once dinner was over, Matt, Molly, Andy, and Lea all had to go to get to something the next morning, so we said our goodbyes. The rest of us chatted in the living room for a while and then watched A Life Aquatic since I’d never seen it before. Robyn went to bed near the beginning of it,  but Josh and I finished the movie after checking to make sure stuff on the outside deck wasn’t blowing away due to the crazy storm that had found its way into our territory. The wind and rain and thunder went all night, leaving only the wind to continue blowing in the morning.

Pulling up to the House that Matt and Molly and Others Built, we noticed no other cars besides our own and Matt and Molly’s. We were expecting at least one more since we were to meet Andy and Lea while up there. Lea was, in fact, there because she’d gotten a ride on an earlier day, and so we were happy to see her, since she had recently moved to Florida for family and it was kind of a mini homecoming. Andy showed up later and the weekend finally began. The mood was one of friendship and relaxation. Hanging out with friends during a traditional holiday time is rare for me, so this was something I had to acclimate myself to. All in all it was awesome and I really couldn’t have asked for a better time.

Josh suggested we finish round two of the beer-tasting we’d began about 8 months ago, and everyone obliged. He poured us weizens and doublebocks and even a lambic. My favorite, predictably, was the Chimay Red, but the doublebock called The Devestator was pretty good, too. We all had homemade turkey pot pie and mashed potatoes for dinner, a kind of post-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving meal, replete with much good conversation both important and flippant. After dinner was an amusing game of Cranium followed by conversation that eventually died down as we all started passing out or giving up and going to bed.

The quiet of Julian is palpable compared to the quiet of Santee. The ceiling fan made no noise and there were no vents making high-pitched whining sounds or alleyway talking. I didn’t think I’d fall asleep very quickly, but I did, and the first day in Julian was finished.

After scarfing down poultry, stuffing, sweet potatoes, sweeter potatoes, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, cheesy-bread, olives, pickles, and celery-walnut-pineapple jello, a bunch of us sat down to watch some MythBusters. Once that ended, we learned that Punkin Chunkin is an honest-to-god thing. We watched two straight hours of it, so we are very well aware of its existence now. During the spectacle I had both apple and pumpkin pie, along with some coffee.

My programming project, that of updating nebyoolae.com via fixing bugs and implementing various features, continues to spiral a bit out of control. I made progress on getting a link to produce a forced download of a file, but that file is empty, existing only in name, so it’s still not quite right. In the meantime, my attention drifts to what songs should be hidden, adjusting color schemes, and cleaning up godawful code that should probably just be scrapped. It’s a wide, long, very confusing rabbit hole this website business is.

Tomorrow: Julian!

I’ve tried two methods of implementation I found online (method 1, method 2), but neither seem to work, both resulting in a blank screen save for debug info. No file downloads, no request for the file is even made, nothing appears in logs, and no errors occur in the console. Debugging the parameters shows everything being correct and the file/folder where the media exists are accessible by my local machine, so I don’t know what’s up.

Thanksgiving 2010 is in precisely two days. As we do most often, Robyn and I will be going up to OC to have it with her family. It was really nice back in 2007(?) when my mom flew out to have it with us at the house we were renting at the time.

My 30th birthday is in precisely sixteen days. I’m not really afraid of/affected by turning 30, but it is generally regarded as a significant milestone. There’s nothing I really want to do or place I want to go. It’s just another day. OR IS IT???

Robyn and I are good. 1 year married this January. Work is…work. Our house is slowly getting painted. I play a lot of Fallout: New Vegas when I’m not learning the Rock Band 3 Pro Guitar. Finally saw the Godfather 2 and it was excellent. You may have heard of it, actually. I eat entirely too many peanut butter-filled pretzel bites (but they are soooooo good). Anamanaguchi’s soundtrack for the Scott Pilgrim XBLA game keeps my ears (and mind) humming lately. I almost snared a wedding gig for next October, but my price was too rich for their blood.

And so it goes.

Playing Fallout: New Vegas, “reading my book” as it is in our household, is simultaneously relaxing and nerve-wracking. When I’m doing fetch quests or conversing with NPCs, it is relaxing. When I’m in combat, it’s stressful. The enemies, even on Normal, are total bitches sometimes! Avid saving is needed.

I will finish exploring Vault 34, dammit.

EDIT (Next Day): I totally finished exploring Vault 34. Made it out by the skin of my teeth, nearly dead from radiation and with several broken limbs. Wooooo!