I was actually going to write a post. An honest to goodness post. But when I logged in I noticed i had about 3000 spam comments so I spent a couple hours deleting all of those and now it’s bed time. So instead of the brilliantly witty post I had half constructed in my mind you get this junk.

I’ve really been wanting to read more science fiction, ever since last fall when I realized I was so poorly read in that genre. In response I read Starship Troopers, The Forever War, and Flatland over Christmas break. Since then I haven’t really read anything. Last night I bought Watchmen, Wanted), and Dune. Wanted you might recognize as graphic novel that was adapted for the recent move with Angelina Jolie. “Watchmen” is probably the most widely praised super hero graphic novel and the only comic book to win the Huge Award. It is apparently being made into a movie and will come out next year.

That’s what I bought. Two graphic novels (comics) and one of the most important science fiction novels ever written. Don’t worry, I have a long list of books on my Amazon wish list.

That’s all for now. Perhaps I will post again soon and I’ll tell you about what I’ve been doing this summer.

You probably knew that raydenuni.com forwarded to here. You probably didn’t notice that sometime last week it stopped forward and instead presented a sexy portal linking you to here, OneFile, my gallery, and my new portfolio!

I have been putting portfolio related stuff on my blog, a link to my resume, a list of projects I’ve worked on, but I decided that the layout for my blog didn’t really match what I needed for my portfolio. I installed Radiant, a Ruby on Rails CMS, found a layout that worked, and began moving content over. I’ve been very pleased with how Radiant works. It’s very lightweight and intuitive. I could not have found it any easier to import a layout by hand. The portfolio site has been up around a week now and I like where its at. Go look at it.

While I have been royally ignoring this blog the past few weeks, I have actually been engaged in quite a bit of writing. It is mostly emails, but includes some other things. Today for example I sent an email to a former RIT student asking him about his experience. RIT is a school I’m looking at for grad school. I also sent an email to the graduate school admissions department asking about setting up meetings with faculty and various people for a visit I hope to pay them. And on top of that I sent an email to an InterVarsity member at RIT inquiring about staying with someone while I am there! Lots of emails there. As far as grad schools go, I also sent an email to someone at SMU asking for some info on their grad program.

Yesterday I wrote a long email to a professor about some aspects of our school that could be better. The day before I wrote an email to the Microsoft recruiter asking about getting on their interview schedule, which I did.

And that’s pretty much it for semi-long emails. I have also been working on my resume an explanation of who I am as a programmer. Two weeks ago I spent a bit of time organizing my portfolio and writing descriptions of projects I have worked on, which can be found in new the portfolio section of my site.

On top of all that I wrote an A paper for game theory last week.

If this isn’t enough evidence to convince you that I’ve been writing a lot lately, then I don’t know what is.

Why am I telling you this? I’ve been told I write well and this blog is partially to blame for that. It motivates me to write about a variety of topics from the woes of losing my hard drive to the philosophy of designing games to rants like this one. My ability to express myself through words and my confidence allows me to write emails to professors of prospectful schools, Microsoft recuiters, and write two page long self promotion.

I just thought I’d share that with you guys.

I finally got around to switching this over to Mephisto. It is running the default theme right now, which is very nice, but I’d like something a little more custom Hopefully I will get around to that soon. Let me know how as broyou like it. Comments should be working, something was not true for the last few months.

This also means all the static pages I had on my site are now gone. Expect to see those up shortly.

So this is running Mephisto a new blog/cms engine written by Rick Olson, technoweenie, and designed by Justin Palmer. It is meant to be a very light application for Rails hackers. After having trouble with Typo I decided to switch as I’ve used many plugins written by technoweenie and they are all excellent.

This is not on my main blog site yet because I want to make sure its stable, I’m sure it is, I want to look into changing the theme, and I need to figure out some configuration settings.

Stay posted.

So I was informed today that my blog throws errors when one tries to comment. If you have tried to comment in the last couple months and could not I apologize. If you tried to comment in the last couple months and couldn’t, shame on you for not telling me sooner.

I tried updating Typo to the brand new 4.0.0 but this ended up screwing around with my admin pages and reverting back to 2.6.0 didn’t fix it. Summary: I’m getting tired of Typo.

Mephisto to the rescue! This is a new blog engine with some cms capability from the talented team of Rick Olson(Development) and Justin Palmer(UI/Design). Rick Olson, better known as technoweenie, has been very helpful to me with my Rails development. He wrote several plugins that I use and has answered many of my questions on irc.

Unfortunately Mephisto requires a gem that Dreamhost does not have and I am not allowed to install gems. So I have to wait until my tech support request goes through to install Mephisto on my server. Mephisto is still in heavy development, so things might be hairy, but at the very least it should be interesting.

Ever have a joke that you think is absolutely hiliarious and you feel you must tell someone about it so they can enjoy it with you and if you don’t you’ll explode? So you try to tell someone but you get interrupted and they don’t hear the whole story. Then later you try to explain it again, but no one is listening to you at that point so you stop halfway through. Maybe you try once more, but your delivery is flat because this is the third time you’ve told them and its coming out all wrong and you know its not funny so you stop and forget it. The joke is still funny and you still think your friends would be better of hearing it, but you know you lost your chance.

I haven’t been writing on here lately. Sorry about that. I’m not driven to write. That is not to say I don’t have anything to say or tell you. I find something everyday I think I should post on here because its really cool, or its enlightening, or it will just brighten your day. Or I’ve thought of something that I think would be worth writing down. Or I’ve done something interesting or something interesting has happened to me but I’m not at a computer and I forget later and its lost. I do interesting things, in my opinion, and I think about important stuff, I just am not compelled to write it down in the same way I am not compelled to take pictures of what I’m doing. Look at almost any friend’s Facebook account. I would be that they have numerous pictures on their account, either that they took, or someone else tagged. I haven’t uploaded any, and only recently has someone tagged me. I enjoy pictures. I’m glad those pictures are up there, I just have little desire to take the pictures and upload them.

Among other news, I turned 21 two days ago. I had my first and second beer in the last two days. Beer tastes like carbonated water and I didn’t feel any effect. I’ve decided I must do a scientific test to see how many beers it takes me to get drunk. I started by drinking one last night, tomorrow I’ll drink two, and so on. My friends think this is a stupid, nerdy, plan.

So I’ve been home for a while now and haven’t posted much here. After my blog broke and I was unable to post for so long, I got in the habit of not posting. So here is a post in my traditional style, half schizophrenic, half update, half philosophy, and half bad math.

Job

I still don’t have a job. After a week of relaxing and goofing off I began looking for remote Ruby on Rails work and despite receiving several responses telling me they were very impressed with my resume, and my well written cover-letter, I only had one company interested in me. Unfortunately the man I spoke to was supposed to get back to me a week ago and has not. I have been doing a little bit of part-time work at Haverly, the company I worked last summer. The application I developed needed a few upgrades, but I want to do something more substatial this summer. Looking for work is depressing. It is much more fun to learn about stuff and work on my own projects!

Subversion

During my time at Rose, I have used CVS and Subversion on various projects. Most prominently SVN was used on the CMS I wrote winter quarter. Now it seems stupid to work on any significant project without some sort of version control and SVN is what everyone is using these days. Dreamhost, my web host, recently installed SVN but I was busy with school and never got around to installing it, thinking it would be difficult to administrate. I finally decided to play with it, bought a book, and have been learning a lot. If things go well, I will be giving some employees at Haverly a demo of SVN and trying to convince them they need to jump on the version control bandwagon. Fun stuff.

ShowCase

After mentioning working on my own project, I can’t forget to mention it. I finally found a Ruby on Rails project that is both interesting, not too large, yet challenging. Well, I don’t know about challenging. Mostly I just want a project I can work on and finish and have to show people. And that is what this project is, a web application for displaying your work. You could say it is a portfolio app. I don’t have anything to show yet, but I’m working on it. Probably the most difficult part of it would be creating a nice layout, but I managed to find a decent theme off OSWD.

Game Development

I can’t remember if I had written on here about a game I wanted to start developing. Well, I started learning some DirectX at the end of winter quarter and did a little at the beginning of spring quarter, but PLC took over my programming life and I stopped. I did buy a book with a couple of tutorial projects and I’m partway through the first one. I haven’t forgotten about this; I really need to get on the ball and start making games. It drives me crazy that I haven’t, but I never end up getting started. Once I finish working on ShowCase I hope I will begin working on this again. I’ll keep you posted.

Guild Wars

Speaking of games, I’ve been playing a few with friends now that I’m back home. Last summer we played Guild Wars and beat it. Guild Wars: Factions came out around the same time this year and we decided to play it again. Unfortunately this means it came out about two weeks before I finished finals and came home, so again, every bought the game before me. That’s ok, I don’t hate you guys for doing that to me TWICE.

Factions is very different from Prophecies, the name that everyone is calling the original. The campaign itself is shorter, by about half I think, and you level much faster. By the time I did the third mission I was level 20, the cap. At first we all thought this was a lot better than prophecies where you don’t usually hit level 20 until you reach the area where you ascend. But as we played I think we began to realize that the plot is pretty stupid. I don’t like it as much as the first one. And without the incentive to level up, we have began losing interest. From what I hear there are a bunch of new PvP options, including a 16v16 Alliance vs Alliance mode. This sounds like a LOT of fun, but you can’t ally with anyone until you’ve beaten the campaign I believe. Also, the campaign is very difficult. The last couple missions, as in the 3rd and 4th, have taken us several attempts to beat. Where has the magic gone? The missions in Factions are much more linear. You can’t get past certain places until you’ve complete your primary quests or beaten the next mission. This means that you can’t jump again and grab the elite skill you want and elite skills seem to be the only reason to complete the campaign I think. Like I said, the plot is boring, the cutscenes are terrible, and there is little reason to care about it.

I still feel that Guild Wars is a great game. I love the variety of skills available to you. Choosing skills from both professions and trying to come up with an effective build is a lot of fun. Doing everything as a party of 8 is great. The interaction between players is good. Factions just doesn’t seem to present well, in my opinion.

Hockey

I’m playing hockey again! Woot! Unfortunately its at an outdoor rink on unfinished cement. The floor is more slippery than… um… (insert imagined slippery object here). I can barely accelerate hard without losing grip and a hockey-stop is out of the question. This is really frustrating because the whole game slows down as people don’t bother to skate a little harder and grab the puck that is behind them. Instead they circle around and let someone else grab it. It is still a lot of fun to play though, even if I was terribly out of shape when I began to play. I’m doing better now after 5 weeks. I scored last game! Playing once a week is not enough though. I won’t say that I had forgotten how much I enjoy the game, but now that I’m playing again I am throughly enjoying myself and wish I could be playing more. There need to be more rinks close by.

Camping

I went hiking and camping with Todd, Lem, and Daniel up at the Punch Bowls last week for two days. It was a lot of fun. It was hot, sunny, there were bugs, and we were all very tired. But we had fun hiking and swiming in the pools. We followed the river all the way up climbing over rocks most of the way, and then climbing UP rocks at the very end. On the way back, we followed the trail the whole way and it took us less than 3 hours instead of the 7 we took going up. Understand that we had a long lunch and took a lot more breaks going up, but it was still impressive. It took us two hours to climb the last stretch going over large rocks and it took us 15 minutes to get back on the trail.

Pandora

Just this last week I began listening to Pandora. My roommate introduced me to it while at school but I never really listened to it. It is a web radio station built on top of the Music Genome Project. Some experts tag songs with certain attributes. When you create a station you pick some songs, or artists, and Pandora tries to pick songs with similar attributes. This is different than other web radio stations that try to pair what other people like to what you have said you like. Pandora shows no preference for more popular bands, it is simply based on what songs sound like. It is really quite excellent and its free to listen to. Supposedly by subscribing you can get rid of advertisements, but I haven’t seen or heard any ads yet. Go check it out.

Conclusion

That’s about all I have to say right now. Todd and Daniel are in South America on a mission trip so its a little lonely here right now. They will be gone for another two and a half weeks. This will give me time to work on my projects though.

P.S. I left my razor in Indiana so I haven’t really shaved since I got back. I think I must look pretty wild, but I keep getting positive comments about my beard. Odd.

My blog is back up and fully functional. I don’t exactly know what was wrong, but switching to the latest trunk version fixed it.

... I have for my future.

Today I was thinking about things I want to do in the future. These are perhaps things I cannot accomplish here at school due to the location, the circumstance, or the time. This is a short list of a few of those things.

Fam is a friend of mine from IRC. He has helped me learn PHP and write good, clean, standardized HTML. This inspired the “Fam Approved” icon I had temporarily put on a project last summer. At that time, he didn’t have much of a website, but he does now.

He has created several sets of beautiful icons, free to use by anyone and they have quickly gained popularity amongst the developer community. Fam just told me that he has “passed 8Gig of icons just from the one icon pack.”

A few applications and sites using the icons include:

• Ruby On Rails Workshops
• Framewerk
• Pathetic.org
• Rails Weenie

As well as many others. Go check out the icons!

Have you ever been sitting, or standing, somewhere and a brilliant thought comes to you? Perhaps it is an idea, a plan, a story, a joke. You want to write it down because you have been struck with brilliance and to not record this is to lose it forever! But alas, a keyboard (pen and paper is evil) is nowhere to be seen. You promise yourself you will remember and the next time you sit down at your computer you will write down your ideas and you just hope you can write as elegantly as you are currently thinking. You might try to not work out your thoughts, preferring them coming to you as you write, conveying a more raw and unpolished view. Or you might try to completely work out the thoughts on the spot hoping this might help you remember them when you eventually write them down. Unfortunately, you know as well as I, that it is a rare occurence where you actually remember to write this down. And if you do the epiphany is gone; the flash of brilliance is long past. You may try to rewrite your ideas but they are devoid of feeling and life.

This is the result of a thought I had several days ago and was unable to write until today.

After a little discussion of CMS and template design with Fam, this idea came up:

What if there were multiple templates for each blog post?

For example, if you wanted to post on a movie or a music album, you probably want to display a medium/large square image.

If you want to write on an article and plan to include some text, you would want to display a significant portion of the text as a block quote.

If you went on a trip and want to display some pictures, you might want to display nine thumbnails in the post as well as a link to the album.

What if you had a template for each of these posts? That way, when you go to create a new post, you signify what type of post it is, this brings up the appropriate template form, and will then correctly display the special information!

Silktide Sitescore is very cool. It ranks your website in various categories, such as: marketing, design, accessible, and experience.

It also gives you information on what phrases it guesses Google might find your site on.

Feedback on standards compliancy and various other important technical aspects are included.

My friend Todd has entered the world of blogging. Woot!