Showcase

So my Dad's birthday is in a couple of days, and since he bought a new computer about a week ago, and has been making comments about not having played any games in a long time, we thought a good present might be a new pc game.

Games he has loved in the past include:

• Crystal Caves
  
• Dune (the first one, adventure/'rts' hybrid)
  
• Diablo 2
  
• Mario 64 + Sunshine
  
• Zork Series
  
• Myst + Riven
  

I know this thread doesn't have much content but the picture says it all really.

The bottom picture is Sydney normally the top picture was Sydney today.


I woke up at somewhere between 4 and 5am with red light streaming into my room, turns out there was a gigantic dust storm that settled on Sydney overnight, which is annoying because I only just washed my car windows yesterday..

Pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=sydney+red+dust <--best imo
http://au.news.yahoo.com/gallery/-/6093205/0
http://au.news.yahoo.com/gallery/-/6090451/0

Good times.

EDIT: Maybe this is common in other parts of the world /shrug apparently only happened once before here in Sydney. It also hit up and down the coast as well I have heard.

So two big things have happened over the last week.

#1 I ran the city 2 surf today. It's a fun run in Sydney, we had 75000 people there today. It's a 14km run that I've been wanting to run forever, my dad used to run it, my brother has run it a few times, my grandad still runs it and my aunt used to run it. So you can see it's sort of a family thing. Plus I used to be decent at long distance during the middle of high school, but dropped off until about December last year when I took up running again.

So crossing that line today was an incredible feeling, as it was a long term goal from the fitness initiative thread to get to this race and complete it.

I think now I'm going to move on from running for a bit, as I've been running fairly regularly since December and want to change it up a little. Looking at taking up cycling again.

#2 Teaching, this is my 4th year of uni and they decided they needed a tutor for web design, in the interaction design studio we run. I was only supposed to be helping out with tutorials on thursday and friday but the friday tutorial didn't cover everything the students need to know for assignment 1 and the tutor went home. So I gave a tutorial in the lab time to the students on css layout techniques, making it up as I went, and it was such an awesome feeling to see the passing of knowledge, and seeing them understand it etc.

There's no real point to this blog I guess, more of me recounting some stuff that I thought was cool recently, however if anyone here has run the city 2 surf in Sydney, or was even there today, do speak up

I didn’t initially mean to post this. I was originally writing this down to formalise my thoughts on an event that occurred in the last couple of hours. Halfway through I realised that it will probably 1)Do my good and 2)Might help someone else if I did post it. So here goes.


Pride

Pride should be a sin. Or at least, the excess of pride.Pride deserves its title as the deadliest sin. It undermines that which you are proud of. You begin to take the object of your pride for granted. You assume that it will remain so forever. You forget the hard work you put into it.

When this decay of that which you are proud grows too much, when you are forced to watch it fall apart, purely because you were too to see the damage that is occurring, you have a small moment of clarity. In an instant, you see the results of your excess pride. How hypocritical it was.

In my mind, I am a great person. I have my values and I uphold them. I accept when others’ values don’t match. I am the kind of person that if you really need someone or something, I can be relied upon. And I keep my word.

And for the last couple of years, this has been true. It has not been uncommon for friends to share significant secrets. Secrets that I have kept until now, and always will. I have heard the words “You come across as a guy who will keep a secret” many times.

Not always.

Tonight I not only broke my brother's trust, but also did this in a malicious manner. I don’t expect him to forgive me for a while. I doubt I will forgive myself. I won’t go into the details, because quite frankly I am still ashamed. It was the ultimate dickhead move.

It was a case of immediate regret. It was almost horror. The part of me that existed one and two years ago was aghast at what I had just allowed myself to do. Not even that, what I had made the conscious decision to do. It was definitely an in the heat of the moment action, but that doesn’t change anything for my brother.

Just yesterday, I found out someone was being dishonest and deceptive about something. I confronted them, and since they showed no remorse, we ended up in an argument. I was confident in my position of an honest person. Seconds after doing what I did tonight, this situation from yesterday came roaring into my mind. It makes great hypocrisy of my earlier pride and confidence.

And the greater the pride is, the greater the hypocrisy when it eventually falls.

I have learnt though. Going over what just happened I have been forced to evaluate not just the actions regarding keeping my word but also everything else in my life that I consider myself to be proud of. Already I can see examples of places where I am treading perilously close to the situation I just encountered and I feel almost purged in the humility I am currently feeling. The fact that I wrote the previous sentence is almost a case in itself. Watching for excess pride is a fine line to tread. Become too sure of your alertness and you have fallen into the trap while looking for it.

Beware hubris.

DISCLAIMER: This isn’t an emo piece. I’m not trying to proclaim that my life sucks, or that because I fucked up so bad and am now spiralling into a black spiral of death etc. I realise that what I have done is remediable over the long term. I am just trying to pass on advice to people that might not have come across the same thing yet, in the hope someone else can recognise the symptoms before they break something.

If you have had a similar experience, after which you gained a new appreciation for the danger of hubris, feel free to share.

For a couple of years.

I'm kind of locked into being here for another year (already 'paid' 4000 for this semester for uni so I might as well finish the year) but afterwards, I get the feeling if I don't leave and experience the world while sub 25, I'm going to regret it forever. I guess this isn't exactly rocket science.

I've lived in this same suburb my whole life, nothing really changes here, social dynamics are pretty much locked and where I see my friends from uni who live in other parts of Sydney have moved out, the vast majority of the people I know from high school (local high school) are still living at home. They're all of comparable ages.

What really brought this upon is that the professor who is supervising my honours work (Best supervisor I could ask for and an awesome guy) has dropped comments about sticking around afterwards to do a PhD. I only stayed to do honours because he approached me with a project he wanted worked on. And so now I am feeling a little worried about the prospects of trapped at uni. Because while I would love to do a PhD, it's not something I envision doing at this stage in my life.

Ok, let's make this interesting and less whiny.

If you did tertiary education, did you travel before completion, after completion or during?

If you've travelled, where would you recommend as a good place to live (Other than Australia )

Have you done a PhD or are you working on one? If so, why did you choose to do it (eg wanted to enter academia) and do you regret your timing?

I'm hoping that once the year is up and I spend the summer here I'll be travelling with the intention of experiencing a couple of different cultures (I've lead a pretty sheltered life in regards to location, 21 and I've left NSW a grand total of 3 times).

Words cannot describe how happy I am right now. I'm so happy I'm going to go out running once I finish typing this up. It's about to be a thunderstorm.

No this is not a girl thread.

Because this became so long (unintentional, sorry), tl;dr is I possibly landed my first web design client, and if I didn't I at least justified the last month of work I've been doing.




So I've been unemployed for about four and a half months now. I wasn't fired, I didn't quit, it was a simple case of the office was closing and the only way I could stay with the company was if I moved to Tasmania. Seeing as how I had no intention of getting seriously into geological exploration and analysis (I'm a design student who can program vba macros haha) I decided against this course of action. Oh and living in Tasmania would suck. Royally.

This was both good and bad news. Bad news because I'd just been given a pay rise and more permanent employment and good news because I've found that every time I get out of a job and struggle to get a new one, by the time I get to my new job my life tends to change significantly, and change is good. Especially good is the timing, it meant I had the last few weeks of semester with no obligations except uni. Naturally I decided to slack off for the first semester in 2 years and did only just above average in my last semester of coursework uni. Not the smartest move but I was pretty confident I'd get into the honours program regardless (I did, but the professor who will be supervising me was a bit disappointed. Tough luck.)

Fast forward to the beginning of December. I've finished uni, I've spent a month partying and bludging, putting on weight (Thankyou fitness initiative thread) and in general spending my money. Without employment or any stream of income. And no idea of how I'm going to pay the costs of living over the next year or so, let alone moving out.

Side information: I at this stage had about $2500~ and a 5 day holiday coming up in early-mid february with a 2 day road trip both sides and a tae kwon do training camp in late january to early february. Holiday paid for, training camp not. Without going into details this left me about 500 of spending money between early december and February 8th. If I wanted to come home on February 14th with no money, this was ok.

For the first half of december I was ok with procrastinating a little longer, but on the 15th I took a look at my lifestyle and realised it can't go on or I'm not going to achieve what I want to achieve in life. Plus I'll come home from my holiday with no money and that's not fun.

I've been focusing a lot of my studies towards web design and interface design over the past 2 years, both in and out of university. So naturally my goal has been for quite a while to start my own web design business. The issue is getting clients. There are a lot of people who can build websites. As a budding web designer, I have to convince company x that I can do a much better job at building a website than boss y's son on his hacked version of dreamweaver, and that they should pay me for it. On top of this, I need to let company x know that I exist, and I don't have any money for advertising.

So my bright idea on about december 15th was to write a scraper program that would read business data from the yellow pages and store it in a database. And then I would have a list of businesses who have websites and emails, have emails only, and have neither. I had no idea how to do this at the time but after about a week and a half of on and off work I had a very rudimentary scraper that did what I wanted.

I also got to work finishing the website that I'd been working on since I lost my last job (Had never been truly serious about it till now).

By the time I finish the scraper and my website (http://www.shadystudios.com.au btw) I still have no idea if this is going to work, if my emails will be labelled as spam and my server ips banned from sending emails ever again, if businesses will even bother reading the emails, what I'm going to write to entice them (I'm no marketing student) etc etc.

I'm also still in the habit of overengineering things, so after writing my scraper program I then proceeded to write an entire client management backend for my website. Tracks businesses that have been contacted, how they've been contacted, their website status and quality, a variety of thigns that really I didn't need because at this stage, I really needed to get at least 1 job finished by february and 1 job doesn't need a complicated client management system.

So a few days ago I stopped myself from tinkering on that and went to send out my emails.

Wait a second did I ever check if my site renders properly in ie6?

Shit. It doesn't. Ok I'll fix it.

Shit. This is going to take hours and I have no idea where to start it's completely fucked. (Note to zxk3, ie8.js doesn't support background-position: and background-repeat: for transparent pngs)

Sigh I'm going to have to rebuild it.

So yesterday and today I've been rebuilding it to render 1:1 in all browsers. And finally, after a month of preparatory work I finally started sending out emails to businesses whose emails I'd collected. Specifically to those who had an email and no website (I have to stagger the emails or 1) my webhost will cut my service and 2) I get labelled as spam).

I was hoping that out of 500 emails, I'd get 1 positive response.

Tonight, 2 hours after sending my first batch, I got my first response. I sent it out about 2 hours before close of business, and keep in mind I'm targetting small businesses so I wasn't expecting any responses till tomorrow and really wasn't going to try and hope for anything positive in the first 200 emails, let alone before next week.

"We are a medium size concrete construction company,
we are very interested in getting a web site to promote
our company.
Could someone please contact me -"

This whole thing worked beyond anything I expected. Even if I don't end up building these guys a website, I now know that my message is getting through, and people are biting.

And it means I can work for myself for the rest of my life.

This makes me incredibly happy. Heading towards financial independence, plus it's looking like I can afford to splurge a bit while I'm on holiday. And I get to work for myself. I am 100% against working for other people (as a means of main income, I'm not against helping people etc etc.) because it's basically a trade-off of time for money. The effort you expend during that time isn't really taken into account. This way if I work harder I get more done in less time and maximise my time:money tradeoff. Yay.

Yes, literally, I'm trying to build a bowl, and I'm looking for some advice/help.

This is however, no ordinary bowl. It needs to:

• Have a hole in the bottom that we can insert a small propellor into, that would then be attached to a motor.
  
• Be circular, however one 'side' needs to be flat, as it will be placed flush against a wall. So it needs to be as if we cut off a section of the bowl.
  
• Be watertight once we attach the propellor/motor.
  

Just wondering if anyone in Korea knows who this is?

http://wiki.d-addicts.com/Lee_Dong_Gun

There was a recent stabbing in Sydney, 1 guy dead other critically injured and I heard it was that guy's brother who died.

Just trying to get a guage of if this guy is actually popular or if my friend is overhyping the fact that it was somehow related to a 'TV Star'.

Obviously this isn't General-worthy, so I figured Blog is my best bet.

I've been meaning to update this with something else, but want my marks back before I post it + upload video of it working on youtube. For now though here's what I've been doing for 3D animation.

We had to create a character design for a 3D animation in the beginning of semester, then we've been learning rigging and animation techniques to apply to it for us to have a 30 second animation for the end of semester. I'm a bit behind (thank god we just got a 1 week extension) and I've only just finished my modelling/rigging. This is what I've got so far (just renders, no animation atm). My idea was to animate a logitech speaker.

Front:


There are aspects I'm not happy with, mainly the pixellation of the top 'line' of the face, and I forgot to make the rings surrounding the cones smoother, but modelling is onl 7% of the final mark so I'm not going back to fix that.

Cord & Side:


Lighting probably isn't the best in this shot, but w/e really. I'm happy enough with how the plug turned out.

Behind:


I like this shot quite a bit, but could do without the bad modelling on the metal that connects the speaker 'head' to the 'feet'.

My game from my previous entry is coming along pretty well. It's more of a programming accomplishment than a gameplay accomplishment though, which is disappointing to myself, but will get the marks I want.

I'll be posting videos of the assignment I mentioned at the beginning of this entry soon. They involve a few programs I and a friend made for a group task that allow 2-3 players to control a racing game with hand gestures (in front of a web cam). Coming soon!

I've always wanted to be a game designer. I went through high school, 'knowing' that my career would be in the games industry. I even planned to move out the instant I finished high school and go to a private college in another state that taught game design.

The best decision I ever made was to go to go to uni and do a bachelor in design computing, looking at an extra year for honours.

I'm pretty happy with how my degree is panning out, it covers a broad range of graphic design, 3D modelling and progamming all the while emphasising and focusing on design. That and the course only has 30 spots so I know everyone doing my course. Also means we're all on first-name basis with our lecturers which helps a lot I believe. I don't think I would be suited to 'conventional' university.

But back to my point, I wanted to be a game designer. So when told that my major work for programming this semester was to make a game, I was pretty happy. Has to be in Java (the language we're learning at the moment), and that's about the only limitation. I decided not to go innovative for this project, more to see if I could do what's been done before. I'll be picking up the small engine I'm developing now and changing it over the holidays to be more innovative then.

Current Progress is probably about 60%. Here's a screenshot of what I've got so far.


Presenting it in a week, submitting in a week and a half.

All of the above said, during the (ongoing) process of making this game, I've come to the realisation. While I still dream of becoming a game designer one day, I'm happy designing just about anything. Which (hopefully) gives me more options in the future.

And options are good.