Entries Tagged as 'Offtopic'

Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.

It’s been almost three weeks since my last post, and this is largely due to the evil that is final exams.  Or to be more precise, it’s due to the aftermath of it.  As any university student can tell you, final exams are a time where you are projected into a wasteland of caffeine and junk food, where you try to learn 4 months of material in a handful of days (or hours).  The re-emergence from this wasteland has for me been traditionally curtailed by starting work the immediate week following.

Having now passed all of my final final exams, I’m now done with the University of Waterloo forever.  Several weeks have now been spent arranging the particulars of my move to Washington, as well as soaking up some new releases.  Having thoroughly ignored both my blog and my massive list of RSS feeds for the last few weeks, I should be emerging from my cave to say, at least, something, with frequency somewhat better than ‘once a month’.

Don’t Touch That Dial

Post are currently lacking due to the prevailing Midterm Exams that we’re experiencing up here.  Word on the street is that it’s GDC next week.  Unfortunately, I’ll be in Cuba that week (last chance to do so before I move the USA), so I’ll be missing it until next year (with any luck).

So until after GDC ends, Ghostrazor will be on hiatus.  I’ve been working on some Game Concept docs, so in the off chance I do post something, it will likely be on one of those.

Facebook Games

Nabeel has a good write-up about the popularity of Facebook games (not very) over on his blog.  I’ll do a post on my thoughts about Facebook games when I finish with Chris Eliasmith’s patented Neurological Engineering Assignment of Insane Difficulty (Nothing like the sweet mix of Fourier transforms, Convolution Integrals, Monte Carlo Simulations, Matlab, Neuroanatomy, and Theoretical Neuroscience).

More Transparency

This past fall I mentioned that I was off to Microsoft to work in on Visio as a Program Manager.  I had a great time, and learned a lot from the excellent folks over there.  In fact, I liked Microsoft so much, I’ve decided to go back there full time.  At the end of June when I’m finished here at Waterloo, I’ll be packing up and leaving Toronto for the rainy shores of Redmond, Washington.  My new position will be as a Software Development Engineer in Xbox.com.  This will likely expose me to a lot of the new developments Microsoft is planning for the future, which obviously I won’t be able to talk about here.  I will make an effort to post any interesting things from inside Xbox that are safely scrubbed but may not have floated out through other channels, insofar as I am able to do so.

In the Name of the King

Apparently Jason Statham has been busy remaking the Lord of the Rings making a Dungeon Siege movie.  This is why I can’t have a real Hitman movie?  Because you wanted to run around in the forest with elves?  Shame on you Jason.  For shame.

Gone for the Weekend

I’ve got to be in Sea-Tac Airport at 5 am tomorrow morning. I’m flying home to Toronto for American Thanksgiving, which is ironically not celebrated in Canada. As such, the likelihood that I put up any posts is remote. Perhaps I will, in a Tryptophan and Carbohydrate-induced stupor, wander onto the interwebs and gibber maniacally into the network before Monday, but I wouldn’t commit a lot of money to the concept.

We’re Live!

And we’re back.  That wasn’t so bad.

Thanks to Reed and Brandon for the site access and the support.

As a side note, I’m moving all my RSS stuff into FeedBurner, so you may need to update your RSS feed.  If you don’t get any posts after this one, that’ll be why.

Kindle eBook reader not available in Canada

Yeah, this is off topic, but I when I’m not doing the video game thing, I’m reading books.  I read a LOT of books.

And I would really, really like an e-paper based eBook reader.  So today Amazon launched their new eBook reader, the Kindle.  It’s ugly as fuck, but they have some sweet wireless setup going on.  Unlike basically every other reader out there, the Kindle has a free, EV-DO based wireless network that allows you to browse, buy, and download eBooks from Amazon’s ever increasing collection (they plan to eventually make every book they carry available).  You can also grab newspaper, blogs, RSS feeds, etc.

Great, sign me up.  Take my $400 dollars, I don’t care that your device is hideous, it looks marvelous.  Wait a second, as per usual, Canada gets the raw end of the stick.  Despite the fact that Sprint and Bell Mobility have agreements with each other, Amazon’s Whispernet does not work outside of the 50 US States.

Ever wonder why Canada is a haven for piracy?  Maybe it’s because companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, and Apple - the premiere offerers of digital content - don’t fucking offer their services in Canada.  Remember prohibition?  If there’s a demand for something, it doesn’t matter if it’s illegal, people will obtain it.  And unlike prohibition, under which criminal organizations were still charging money for booze, digital content is free to steal.

I don’t know whether the issues are legal or economic, but once there’s a culture of theft that’s been established for a long time, it’s very difficult to legitimately offer content and expect the people you’ve been shirking in the past to expect to pay for your shit.

Slowy Joey

Apparently it takes a long time to switch domain registrars.

Due to shinannigans, Ghostrazor.com will not be unpacking until Wednesday this week, and it will probably do weird things at that point in time for a couple of days.  I’ll be updating the wordpress.com version and the new version at it’s new home in tandem so hopefully no downtime will actually occur.  Maybe.

Downtime

My blog is currently hosted with Wordpress.com

While it provides some nice features, it also puts in a lot of restrictions.  I can no longer tolerate these restrictions, and as such I’ll be rolling my own Wordpress offsite.  The practical upshot of this is Ghostrazor may be unavailable between now and Sunday.

When I’m back, I’ll put up a post on an exclusive Will Wright lecture.

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported