February 2006 Archives

What follows is a brain dump of recent Jake issues:

Xbox 360 – I haven’t played it much yet, but I must say that the level of detail in the PGR3 cities is pretty amazing. Las Vegas looks near photorealistic! Unfortunately my HDTV is in storage since we couldn’t fit it in the small apartment we recently moved in to. I’ve been playing it on my crappy 19” TV and just last night the picture started going out (everything was green). So, I’m toying with the idea of buying a 20-something inch 16:9 HDTV CRT... they cost about $500 or so.

WoW – I cancelled my Warcraft subscription a few days ago. The number of hours I was playing steadily decreased the closer I got to level 60. I figure I’ll start back up once the expansion comes out, but I really had no trouble breaking away from the game. It was a lot of fun and WELL worth the money, but I’m done with it for now.

Wisdom teeth – OUCH did that hurt! I got my wisdom teeth pulled a few weeks ago and well... I’m just glad I don’t have a second set that needs to come out! I was awake for the procedure (they had me on NOx) and that was pretty damn disturbing. I was screwed up in the head for the next day or so, it was just really wrong being aware of such a violent mistreatment of your body. I was hopped up on Vicodin for about a week, the pain lasted longer than I expected. Now I’ve got holes where my teeth once were... is that better?

Piano – I stopped practicing piano after my teeth were pulled. That first week, I was in no condition to practice. The second week, I had no excuse... I just wasn’t getting excited about the thought of doing it. It got so serious that I even thought about quitting lessons for a while! But I practiced on Monday night before my lesson and I found myself enjoying it again. And then my lesson went really well, my instructor suggested I stop working on specific songs for a while and just work on fingering exercises. That made everything fresh and new again and I ended up practicing for almost 2 hours that night! I also ordered a book from Amazon called The Virtuoso Pianist in Sixty Exercises by Hanon which contains exercises to increase finger strength/agility/etc. I got it today, and I’m looking forward to trying it out.

Less Than Me – I finally fixed up all the unfinished edges of my site that have been dangling since the move to Dreamhost and MT3.2. The About page is back, the Media Consumption page is back (I love that page, since it came about by accident and it looks pretty neat!), the Archives page is updated, and the sidebars are persistent through all of the archive pages. Also, I changed the monthly and category archive pages so that they’re sorted with ascending chronology, I think it makes more sense that way... but I could be crazy.

Narnia – I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. I wasn’t at all excited to see it since I know the story well and never found it all that compelling. But, hey, they made a really entertaining movie out of it! The children actors were believable, the animated animals looked very real, and the Braveheart-esque battle sequence walked a satisfactory line of violent but not bloody. I’m actually looking forward to the next one!

Grizzly Man – This was a pretty weird documentary. I liked it, but only kind of... In case you don’t know, it’s the real life story of a guy (Timothy Treadwell) who spent his summers living among bears in Alaska... until he gets eaten by one. Most of the footage is shot by himself, think the Blair Witch Project but for real and with bears instead of nothing. Treadwell was a pretty eccentric fella, which makes for some entertaining footage. The thing is, you’d think he was just stupid or crazy except that this lifestyle was a replacement for a past drug addition. With that in mind, it seems like he might have been better off with the bears, even if he did get eaten... It was a weird movie.

Harry Potter – I started reading The Half Blood Prince back in freaking November! Man, has this book been a drag. A while back, I thought how neat it would be to read the back-story of Voldemort’s rise to power... Apparently J.K. agreed with me, but then decided to present it more in the form of a school lecture... ugh. Does this book get better? I’m halfway through it, and I’m seriously thinking about stopping.

Well there you have it. The stuff I should have written about throughout the last two weeks, thrown into one long entry. Consider this your early birthday present...

I decided against a new HDTV since $500-$1000 is a hell of a lot of money to spend on a small TV. So instead I got the VGA cable ($40) so that I can attach the Xbox to my monitor which can run high def resolutions. Problem solved. And what a difference it makes! My PGR3 skill improved dramatically once on the monitor because now I can see the turns much further out.

Ok, ok, ok, I gotta calm down to get this out...

I asked Tomo (my boss) on Monday if I could work remotely from Hawaii and he said... YES! He has since talked to Japanese headquarters and they have approved it as well. Now they must submit the request to the executive board on Feb. 20th which according to Tomo has a 99.9% chance of approval! OMG!

I’ve been officially trying to move to Hawaii for seven years now. It’s been off and on (mostly off) but it’s been a long running dream to actually pull it off. I thought about going to the University of Hawaii back in ’99, but I decided I better put the quality of the school above the location. Since I graduated, I have occasionally searched for jobs and applied for a number of them... I even went to a tech job fair on Maui back in 2004 when I visited over Christmas. I recently found a new batch of jobs to apply for, which got me going on the process again. I figured I’d also let Tomo know that I plan to leave if I get a job offer, but I let him know that I’d keep working for this company if they let me work remotely. And to my delight, they are quite open to the idea!

I can’t even describe how excited I am, but at the same time I’m a little worried. I have history of making dreams come true only to discover that what I wanted wasn’t all that great after all... At least I don’t have a fantasy view of Hawaii, I know it’ll be tough and that’s part of what gets me excited. Life has been easy for me up to this point (yeah, I know, poor me) and I’m looking to struggle a bit! But is it really struggling in the land of perpetual summer? Whatever, I’m ready to go for it, I’m sure it’ll be a great learning experience!

Why don’t you come and visit sometime.

Dave and I hung out last night and fun was had by all (all two of us). He dropped by my office when he got off work and we went down to the fancy NW area to an Indian restaurant called Swagats. The food was good, they offered a dinner that came with a main entrée and a number of auxiliary dishes. I really appreciated the variety of tastes I was confronted with, two curry-stained thumbs up for that place.

After dinner we went back to my place to play on the ol’ Xbox 360. We started off with Perfect Dark Zero co-op, which was a lot of fun (except that we were playing the same levels that I’ve already beat). After that, we tried Kameo co-op which was surprisingly a lot of fun as well! The game doesn’t really seem co-op-y, but it worked really well. Then we each played a game of Geometry Wars and finally wrapped up the night with a four round boxing match with the Fight Night 3 demo.

Boxing was probably the most fun I had all night! We were both terrible at it, but I had a slight upper hand since I had played one match before against the CPU. The game started off and I was just brutalizing Dave’s boxer. I knocked him down a few times but then Dave figured out the dodge button. After that, the match leveled out quite a bit, I would swing at him, he’d dodge so I’d hit nothing but air, and then he’d come back with a solid punch to my head. It was seriously ugly, I felt sympathy for these poor boxing dudes. Anyway, the match ended and I just barely won by decision. Fun game, but I think I’ll just stick with the demo...

And then Dave went home and I practiced the piano and IMed my boss in Japan and THEN?!??!?! Bed.

I talked to Tomo last night and he said that the bigwigs are meeting on Wednesday (in Japan, Tuesday night here) to discuss my relocation. He said again that it is looking very good, but that he can't say for sure until they meet. So, five more days until I pee my pants (either in excitement or in devastation).

Kara and I have been discussing timelines if it happens, and it looks like we’ve settled on me flying out at the beginning of May to find a place and a car and generally get settled. Then she’ll fly out at the end of May once the lease is up on our apartment. We’re pretty sure we’re going to try to sell most of our stuff in the next few months, so let me know if you’re in the market for couches/HDTV/Jeep/Xbox/bed/dressers/bikes/etc.

I renamed a C++ function today by appending “-orig” to the name... the compiler did not like that at all. And that’s how I discovered that you can’t have dashes in function names, something you think I would have already known. I mentioned it to Billy like “isn’t that weird that I didn’t know that before?” and then I said that it’s like how you can’t start a function with a number, but this was news to him because he thought you could...

So apparently Billy and I are C++ noobs... and we get paid to do this?

Tomorrow I fly out to Orlando for a week, where I will be working at the PMA show running a cool demo that I put together. Basically it’s a digital camera that has a built in WIFI card, so you can wirelessly transfer images to your computer, pretty neat! Anyway, I’ll have the evenings free to play around, and I hope to make a return visit to Universal Studios' Islands of Adventure on my mostly free Saturday. I’m bringing my laptop on the trip, so I’m guessing I’ll be updating good ol’ LTM when I’m bored.

Kara's blog, Spicy Princess, has been unusable since I moved it over to the new host. However, she wasn't blogging so it didn't matter much. She told me a few days ago that she wants to start back up, so I got it up and running again. Check it out, she's actually posted something!

Billy's MSN Spaces account, birr, has been abandoned. He has now built his own site from the ground up over at http://eyepits.com. There's lots of fun pictures, like this one that we did at work. Oh, and why eyepits? This should explain EVERYTHING!