I’m still working at Digital Primates and loving what I do there. I haven’t had much time while on the job to study up for the Flex Developer’s Certification, so I do that as much as I can from home. I need to take a practice test or two to see where I would score if I took the actual test, and where I need to focus my studies to make sure I pass.

Over the last several months I have worked more with the Flex Framework than I have ever before. I am so used to doing things in pure AS2 an AS3, that I had to retrain myself to look for things in the framework that were already waiting for me to just use them. Some of the people at DP also have been a great help in this. I’d thank them all here, but I’d really be thanking everyone at the company, so thanks guys.

Moving on into the late summer, I am still working on my augmented reality project. My friend and now co-worker (he’s an intern at Digital Primates), Joe, is helping me work through the FLARToolkit. Making things make sense, and finding out where we can speed things up. Optimization was the main topic last week. This week it was me solo, but I was able to get DAZ3D models into our app. Definitely need more optimizing there (15 Meg for a model! jeesh!).

Oh, and I am also now a contributor to the FLARToolkit’s repo. Haven’t submitted anything yet, but I should before the next post. So with Podiobooks.com, this is the second open source project that I am currently active in.

I may get out another post before Gen Con, so stay tuned.

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Right now I am doing work with LifeSnapz, and have several roleplaying game writing contracts on deck. I am still looking at one full time employment opportunity, but I have at least one other possible large job that is definitely interesting. Note: Make that three others. Overall, I am really hoping to make this business work.

I am really enjoying being on my own with this. I still have some schedules set by other people, and I still need to meet those deadlines. The place that I work, and when I work though, are pretty much up to me. It is amazing how much I realized the commute and working in an office was taking out of me, now that I am not doing the 2-3 hours of commute a day, plus the hours in the office. I also get to see my kids a lot more, big huge plus there.

If any of you out there are needing Rich Internet Application (RIA), Flex/Flash, or web development work done, contact me through the comments if you don’t know my normal contact info. I’ll get some contact information or a form up soon. Just realized that I don’t have that up.

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Note the nugget of wisdom above for other contract and freelance workers. December, especially the last two weeks of December, is the worst time to find work over the entire year. I suppose that this year for many people that it is doubly so. So if you have the chance to grab a contract or three that will last you into January, do so early.

Here’s an almost disaster turned into a great customer service story. My machine is an HP Pavilion notebook, a dv7 series for those that are interested. I have had it for several months now, and earlier last week, the AC adapter started making strange noises. Today, I thought it would be a good time to call HP service to see what they would do about it. While on the call, the adapter stopped charging my notebook, and I couldn’t get it to work again. (I have since the call, but then, no power.) Let me just say that the HP support person was very helpful, almost too self deprecating, and she was quite efficient, even if her computer systems were slow. I was on the phone just about 20 minutes from the start of the call, to the end where they took my address and were shipping me the new AC adapter. A fairly short, and definitely productive, call and I will have the new AC adapter on December 26th via FedEx. The computer is under warranty, and I was thinking that they would need me to cross ship the old adapter, and so did the support person, but as we both found out, I don’t need to. I keep the one that is acting up, and get the new one later this week. Not that I am going to want to use the old one, but in case the new one shorts out, I can go to the old one for backup. Overall, I would continue buying HP products. A few years ago, I would not have said that. Good job HP.

Happy holidays!

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So yesterday I posted a question of do I keep up the hunt or not. Sleeping on it, I realized that I was not as comfortable with my current status to stop the hunt. Today, I am going to follow up with my recruiters and see where things stand. The interview was postponed, or so I assume, since I have not heard from the recruiter who was setting it up (bad form there, always keep your clients up to date).

I am going to take a step back though, since I have my freelance project that I need to get cracking on. Today will be mostly a work day, to get that project really started. I have a decent proof of concept working, I now need to get it past the prototype stage.

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Today I had yet another interview, and it went quite well. I have already been informed that they wanted me back for a second interview as soon as tomorrow. Though given the weather, and the fact that the recruiter called me earlier and said Monday was also possible, I am thinking it will be Monday.

The opportunity sounds like something I have been looking to do. It is about 50% coding/development, and with the other 50% being management of the teams, external resources, and client interactions. Definitely something I have done before, and also enjoyed doing. Lots of new development, since it is an advertising agency, and the projects are more short term. They use Subversion, which is cool, since I find Subversion to be a very very good thing for version control and asset management.

What else? Most of the Christmas shopping is done, and I have started on the freelance project, though mostly the planning, since coding it was a bit difficult with all the running around I had to do today. Oh, and for anyone wanting to find 10 South Lasalle in Chicago, Google Maps puts it about 10 blocks north of where it actually is. So I got very very cold walking around for a half hour trying to find the place I was needing to be. Good thing I had planned on getting lost. Though I hadn’t planned on getting that lost, or on being outside that long. Brrr.

Tomorrow, coding, and probably either staying inside, or heading to Panera. Depends on the weather where I do the coding.

I apologize for the lateness of the posting, the start of the interviewing was at 9:30am, so I had to be out of the house by 7:30am to make the right train.

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I still have my interview tomorrow, and I have another possible coming up soon. Things look really good right now. Thank you all for your support.

I will continue blogging for the forseeable future, but perhaps I can do it about things other than my job hunting. Here’s to hoping!

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I was able to get a few more things cleared off of my plate relating to the household that had needed doing for a while. Even cleaned up in the basement a bit.

As far as the coding front is going, I am still working on the id3 tagging AIR application, and have hit a snag with it. I can get the file loaded, I can *almost* read them, but not quite. So I need to dig into that a little deeper. I may just need to write the bit parsing myself. Right now I am working with Metaphile’s open source parsing classes, but I just can’t get them to pull in the data. It’s not helping that there isn’t any documentation and very little commenting in the code. I am reading the code, but there are a few spots that seem unfinished. I am probably missing something simple, rather than them actually being unfinished. So if anyone out there would like to help me out, I would appreciate the insight you could give me.

Lots of snow here today, driving was not fun. I hope tomorrow is clear. Oh, and that is one thing I need to mention. When your prospective employer emails you and asks if you want to reschedule because of the heavy snow, that is a really good sign that you want to work for them.

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As far as the job hunt goes, some of the leads that I had last Friday are panning out. I have an interview on Wednesday, and I am fairly sure it has a decent chance of turning into work. I am also working on another writing contract, we’ll see if that pans out as well.

As far as all the coding projects, other than the Game Cryer one, I restarted my id3 tagging AIR project, and I hope to have an iteration of it done by the end of the week. Unless of course I have some more paying work that gets in the way.

Here’s to hard work and hoping.

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Ok, Friday turned up some good leads, that I hope will turn something up today. I am going to be following up on them today. Today is also recruiter calling day; which I will start at 9:30am to give them time to get into the office and ready for the day.

From my experiences of many years as a contractor, I know that this time of year generally has a dearth of hirings. It should break open in January, but I need to be looking now, so that when the budgets open up for hiring, the employers already know who I am and want to hire me.

On an interesting note, I was able to get a small contract for writing fiction just by putting my name out there. It’s for 5,000 words, and something I should be able to do quickly. I just need to finish up the Flash work I am doing for the same client first; that I am working on today.

This last weekend I went to the Museum of Science and Industry, and it really helped recharge my brain. Lots of interesting things to see and do there that spark the imagination, and a great many things for kids to do. Much more than when I went just a few years ago. I recommend it, especially if you need to get out of the house and recharge your brain with ideas.

Not a whole lot since Friday on the job front other than what I listed above. I don’t want to list specifics, they never quite seem to pan out when I talk about them. The blogging’s over, so now on to the rest of my day!

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Here’s my plan for my work week:

• Get up and get the kids to school
• Once people are out of the house, make this daily blog and get things going on the computer.
• 9:30 am – start making recruiter and other phone calls. No one is really functioning in the office for phone calls at 9am.
• Get out of the house and do any running around that I need to do.
• Housework, I do some normally, but now that I am home I will be taking over much more of it.
• Continue coding – I have some personal projects that have been languishing due to lack of time, and now I have time to spare. I’ll post them here as I complete them.
• Write some fiction, which I may post here. This is more to break up my day, since coding straight I start to lose my creative edge. This gives it back to me.
• Back to coding
• Evening stuff
• Get kids to bed
• More coding, or time to relax
• Go to sleep at a reasonable hour, so that I can do it all again the next day. This one is also a key thing. Staying up until all hours means I sleep in the next day, and gets me in a habit of not doing the things needed doing. So I’ll be headed to bed early and waking up early.

That’s the plan I have currently. Suggestions are always welcome, but I think this one will work for me. I already have some good leads, and I hope that at least one of them pans out. I will of course, keep you all informed.

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As you might have gathered, I was just recently laid off. It was the second of the most recent round of cuts, and about a dozen people were let go, including some very senior staff. It seems that I was on the list of people that were compensated well, and they are trying to cut costs.

My intent on this new series of posts is to be positive about the job search, to get my name out there, and lastly, to give myself a routine during the day so that I keep moving forward with my life and career, rather than letting things stagnate. So you can expect this and other blog posts, once a day until I get a new job. They might continue after that, but how about we decide that after getting over this first hurdle. Getting the job. The one rule I have for these posts, is that they are positive. They may relay bad news, but I am going to strive to look on the bright side of things instead of wallowing in self pity or some nonsense like that. (I’ve already done that in my past, and let me tell you, it doesn’t work. It also has a tendency to make you stink. Which does not help your chances of getting a job.)

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The rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you, and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs
4. Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

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I’ve been a fan, but never actually finished Fallout, or Fallout 2. I dabbled in Fallout Tactics, but didn’t get much into it either. Fallout 3 though, it’s pretty much perfect for me. First person shooter, with the option to slow things down with V.A.T.S. when I feel the need, or just want to watch the cinematic glory of a something being blown apart by my combat shotgun, or stapled to a wall by my railroad gun. Exploration, the go anywhere, do anything, real life sort of feel, but with the option to fast travel if things start to get tedious humping around all over the place. Roleplaying, it’s there, better than most computer games that I have played, though still not anywhere near an actual role playing session, it is still definitely fun. I recommend buying up your Speech skill to get better options.

I usually play on the steam locomotive on my way in to the citadel. So I only have about an hour to play at a time, and with this time constraint, I am not feeling lost or that I can’t play it. You are able to save pretty much anywhere, and at any time. So things that take a while can be broken down into smaller chunks. However, when I have had hours at a time to play, just like in my youth, they dissipate into dust of the wasteland leaving me only memory, beautiful, blood soaked memory. I also like the “random” encounters. If they are random, I can’t tell, and that makes them awesome. The wasteland should be dangerous and fairly unpredictable, but once you get to know what to look for, you can handle it. The game does that well.

There are a few things that aren’t bad, but sometimes detract from the game. The biggest, is the computer cracking. I am not sure if the Science skill does anything with cracking computers, other than let you get into harder terminals. I think I have seen that the number of passwords you have to guess at goes down, but I am not sure. The thing that detracts, is that you have four guesses, but if you can’t get it in that, it locks you out, but if you log off before then, you get another four guesses. So I end up spending three cracking attempts, logging out, making three more. The character matching hints that it gives after each guess are slightly helpful, but sometimes when I do get the password, it seems like the hints that it was giving had nothing to do with the password at all. So before I detract from the game more by making this larger than the actual review, let me say that the cracking is optional for the most part, and it does not occur often enough to annoy. There, that’s that. I won’t talk about any other negatives, because frankly, I don’t have any others worth mentioning here. Sure there are some, but they pale in comparison to what the game does right.

The one thing I would really like to see in this game, and others like it, is what I call Limited MMO play. That’s where one person would host a server and up to, say, 32 to 64 people max, would be able to share the play in the world. I would love to play it multiplayer at the lan parties I hold.

While getting sustenance today, I spotted something, and that something fit so well into my hunger for all things Fallout, I had to get it. I don’t know if some marketing genius knew that Fallout 3 was going to be big, or if it was just a huge coincidence, but I don’t really care. I had to get it anyway. So I did.

It’s faintly orange pop flavored, not orange juice, but orange pop. It’s not bad at all, it’s actually a step up from the Red Bull and Diet Rockstar that I have had. It’s also 0 carb, or at least the version I got is. So if you want a drink that fits the theme while you play Fallout 3 to the wee hours of the morning, afternoon, or night, then check it out. It at least looks cool on your desk.

I originally posted this over on the Dirigible of Pain site: http://dirigibleofpain.com

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Overall, I have an awesome group that I play with. We’ve been playing for several years now, with a few players leaving and a few new ones coming in, but in general a very stable group. I was worried about the game on several levels, the characters gelling being one of them, since they didn’t last game with another GM. It looks like most of that was due to people having shifting schedules and not a change in the group dynamic itself. *whew*

So, the game. As I said, it went quite well, the players only stumbling a little on the rules here and there. Once they got the hang of one though, we didn’t need to revisit it. Magic is going to be interesting for a while. The setting was formerly a DnD setting, so right now the stunts are more or less patterned after the levels in DnD. Oh, the characters are about 10th level in DnD terms as far as power level goes. The Fate system made for a much more cinematic style of play. I started them out with a combat and not so heavy on the roleplaying, since it would teach the crunch in a quicker manner. The combat and spellcasting was excellent! There is one player in my group who always plays a caster, but has always interpreted spells in his own way and never the same way twice. Fate has allowed him to do what he wants with spells, and not to worry about some description somewhere. It totally worked.

My big surprise of the night was another character who was also playing a caster, this one a mage, and his description for his spells were awesome. I found myself realizing halfway through the night that I was still in DnD running mode and not in cinematic SotC mode, but he totally got it even though it was his first time playing. Casting spells that would put aspects on the scene like “Portal to the realm of earth” and at the same time another one of “Sucking Vortex” so that they could push the elemental creatures they were battling into the portal and get rid of them, but also using the Sucking Vortex aspect to help them do it. 100% recycled SotC awesome!

Whew, ok, that’s enough for now. Next game is next Wednesday, and if it relates to VAM playtesting and design I might post more about it. Unless you comment and ask for more anyway.

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I write when I can on it, but I feel that the thoughts I put down are disjointed and fragmentary. Nothing really solid or worthy of going into the game. I write them though, because if I don’t the good stuff won’t work itself to the surface.

Like yesterday, I finally got to talk with Mick on the phone for a while, and he and I came up with some cool ideas that might make it into the game. They are very Story Game-esque in their feel, but I think that the ideas add to the feel and flavor of the game. That didn’t come out quite right, so let me back up. I like immersion in my gaming, the kind where you become the character as much as you can in a tabletop game. Story Gaming breaks that for me, but it trades that for a movie or book style immersion, where you watch the characters and enjoy the story.

The two styles are not mutually exclusive in my mind, but they will take some finesse to get them to work. Ok, so what we came up with was a way for people playing VAM to not only play their characters, and for the GM to craft adventures for them, but to also have the players (GM included) have a say in how the overall story goes. With the players on the Hope side, and the GM on the Despair side, each side ends up playing poker for the fate of the story. Depending how the game is set up at the beginning of the campaign (since we want it to be run in several sessions at least, not just a one shot), the game could last a predetermined number of hands, or it could end when one side goes all in, and loses. Each hand would determine how ultimate outcome of the last set of games went, and it will flavor the next set of games until the next hand is played.

There is still a great deal to work out, and depending on how it fits with the rest of the feel of VAM, it may or may not even make the final cut. I’m not cutting it until we’ve tested it a bit though.

I got a little off track from where I started, but that just seems to be the way this year is going. I am hoping that I have some control over where it is headed, and I intend to try my darndest to get it going where I want it to go.

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