SpaceRodent

I have turned on comments to see what happens. Now I get to find out if anyone but me actually reads this.

My wife is a comic book writer and artist. She has two books out right now with the third coming soon (http://faminelands.com). She has been putting a lot of work into her website and I suggested she just pay someone to do that. She told me she investigated that option but didn’t find anyone that she liked.

I browse craigslist all the time and knew there were always a lot of people advertising web design so I told her I would look into it.

Turns out she was right. Most of the ads are really poorly done and quite a few don’t even have portfolios. I suspect a lot of them are folks who took a community college course on HTML and are now “web designers”.

I heard back from a few who said “their plate was full” or a nice way of saying they didn’t want to work on the site (then why are you advertising?).

Now that isn’t to say we didn’t find anybody. Some of the folks had real skill but also wanted $2k for a site redesign – I wasn’t willing to pay more than $500.

So for now I guess its up to her.

By the way if your a web designer please contact me:)

So I decided to bring back my blog. I was going over past entries and got a kick out of reading old entries. I have also decided to make a new and concerted effort to get into more programming…again.

That’s not to say I haven’t been programming but most of the programming I do is based around system administration. Now that I have an iPhone I think I want to cut my teeth on that platform. To that end I recently picked up a series of Apress books focusing on the mac platform.

• Learn C the Mac
• Learn Objective-C on the Mac
• Beginning iPhone Development Exploring the iPhone SDK

I took a C course and the University of Washington so I am pretty comfortable with that but I got the first book anyway to learn more about Xcode and how to use it most efficiently.

Hi Autumn – don’t forget to take notes on Day of the Dead.

Are you prepared for when Zombis come? My friends at work and I were discussing this. What do you need? Where would you go? Would you try to save anyone or go it alone?

Three Days, Three Ways should have options for this eventual problem. There needs to be a Zombi kit.

In my opinion the right guns need to be owned:

• .30-06 Hunting Rifle
• P90
• M4
• MP5
• SPAZ 12

Funny how I didn’t have Speakeasy when I worked there but I have it now. Speakeasy came through for me and now I have fast internet again. I got daily updates and the installation was seamless and on time. I got the Onelink DSL (6Mbs/768kbs) so its on a “naked pair”. They also give a static IP address. Now I can play WOW and Xbox Live again.

Clearwire – let me count the ways I hate you. So I was a Qwest user for many, many years. I loved them. Then around November ’07 the speed came crashing down. I went from 7Mbs to like 70kb! Everytime I would call I would get the same line: “Well the modem is synced at 7Mbps so that is what your getting”. It didn’t matter that their own speedtest tool (speedtest.qwest.net) showed I was getting 1/10th that.

Finally I had to move my home server to Slicehost and my mail over to google. I needed a new ISP. I would have gone to Comcast but I have Broadstripe (used to be Millennium Cable) in my area which is just slightly better than two cans and string.

I thought Clearwire was the ticket. It was GREAT for the first week and then it went to shit and stayed that way. I was getting 4,000ms ping times! I was seeing 80% packet loss. It took forever to just check my e-mail. After six weeks and escalating my ticket multiple times I was told, in March, it would be fixed in May! That was enough. I called them up to cancel and I have to pay a cancellation fee to get out of my contract (I know, my fault for signing one).

Even though they documented the crappy service they wouldn’t let me go for free. The customer person I was talking to was even arguing with me! Trying to convince me they have great service! She wanted me to transfer my service to someone else to avoid the early termination fee. I told her I wouldn’t wish Clearwire on my worst enemy. Their official line was since I was getting *some* connectivity they fulfilled their obligation since speeds are not guaranteed.

P.S. Fuck You Clearwire

My favorite RPG games of all time are Final Fantasy X and Shadow Hearts Covenant. Both were 50+ hour games and the stories were great. I preferred the combat in Shadow Hearts though. They had a ring with a clock hand that spun around and you had to hit a button when the hand was on a certain portion of the ring. There were many different ring configurations. In my opinion this added a bit of ‘twitch factor’ to an otherwise turn based game. I felt the story in Final Fantasy X was a little better and the graphics were of higher quality.

Now that I have a Xbox 360 again I was looking into what sort of RPGs are available. Since I already completed Oblivion prior to giving up my 360 that wasn’t in the running. I know that a Japanese RPG is a lot different than Oblivion (which I guess is an American RPG?) but lets pretend they are both in the same category (I think they are). So I was looking at Blue Dragon, Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey.

Okay Blue Dragon was just too cute for me and it starred kids. I really don’t like playing kids (yes I know the star of Final Fantasy X was a kid – well a teenager more like it). It also got very luke warm reviews. With regard to Eternal Sonata – I just wasn’t interested in the story what-so-ever. Finally I came to Lost Odyssey – which also had luke warm reviews but it had something…special?

The team behind Shadow Hearts Covenant and the writer of Final Fantasy were the ones who put Lost Odyssey together. For me, a match made in heaven. So I dug into the reviews – what were people saying? Well for the most part they didn’t like the random battles and folks felt it didn’t break new ground. More of the same – of my favorite games – sign me up! I did like the random battles of Shadow Hearts so that was no big deal. Okay what about the story?

A world where there was an industrial+magic revolution results in steampunk technology. Two countries go to war and have a massive battle that is interrupted by a meteor strike! Everyone is killed except our hero who has lost his memory – this is where the story starts. The introduction movie is really nice and you get introduced to combat right away.

My only complaint about the game is the dynamic texture system is little wonky. Sometime the characters are really blurred and the high resolution textures don’t load unless you zoom in using the left trigger.

All in all I recommend the game.

So it turns out I couldn’t live without my XBOX 360 and so I bought another one. This doesn’t mean and I have given up on programming but that I am looking for some balance.

I just found this via reddit.com and I think it is brilliant! Computer Programming Unplugged