Holidays!

Holidays are over. This makes me sad. I did have a LOT of fun though.

For my vacation I drove to Maine, through various states to the South. I met a bunch of friends from online, and drank a lot of beer. So a very successful trip. I ended up traveling just under 9000 km in the span of a week and a half though, so I got pretty used to my car. Definitely worth it though.

I'll be posting more info on my trip later. I need to still go through all my pictures, and collect things together. Highlights include all the microbreweries I visited, the awesome lakes I hung out at in Maine, and the Creationist Museum.

One of the interesting side effects of my trip was essentially a huge upheaval to my sleep schedule. I think it was good though. While on the road I was getting bored fast, as driving is boring, so I was stopping for more breaks. This made my sleep schedule better for most of the driving legs. But I also traveled 2 time zones, so that messed with my sleep schedule... End result was a lot of craziness. It broke all my routines, which has opened me up to re-establish some better ones. Thus, over the next week or two, I'll be changing my sleep times. Plans are to wak3 up at 6am, swim, then head to work. Naps at Noon before eating lunch, and 5pm ish, before driving home. This will let me skip a lot of the traffic as well, which was something I liked back when my old routine was similar. I do have a family reunion this weekend, which may challenge my re-adjustment.

But I need to get back to work. I have quite a few things I need to finish up to catch up from my holiday. Hopefully I can make a post later this week, or early next with more trip details.

Excitement

I'm am getting very excited.
I am laying down more solid plans for my road trip to Maine. People are getting confirmed, and making orders for things from Canada. It will be a great time to actually meet some of these good friends. Plus, two weeks off work is always a good thing. At the rate things are going too, I'm going to need that holiday.

This week is hectic. My mothers birthday was Tuesday, and my father is having a big retirement party tonight. My sisters are all in town now, so I've been doing family stuff a lot this week, and have more planned. It should all be fun, but sheesh. I'll get to unwind and recover a little over the weekend, then rehearsals and Jazz festival starts picking up. I have to help plan / prepare for our annual Canada Day party (that anyone who is reading this is invited to). I think we're doing it Sunday afternoon / evening. Wait... hmm... I think I'm supposed to be playing on the free stage... I guess I'll miss a bit of my own party. Then it's Jazz festival week, which I think I'll be taking low key this year. Less concerts, save money for my trip to Maine. But as Jazz festival wraps up, I'll be hitting the road. So for the next about 4 weeks, I guess I don't really have much free time in evenings.

And all that may be made more difficult if I hear back from any of the places I sent my resume to. Now that I finished school, I applied to a couple companies I'd like to work for. Some farther places, like LA, and Vancouver. We'll see if I hear anything back. There is a local place or two I applied to that I think would help me learn more than my current job, and have better potential for promotions and such. It's all in the waiting stages now though, as I have to see if any of these companies are interested in me. I don't like the waiting stage. I talked to some people at the local places though, and I should have a good shot at getting in. It's a bit longer of a wait right now though, as the main hiring person is on holidays...

I somehow always manage to keep my life very busy.

Well

Summer apparently isn't here yet. What the heck. It's cold, miserable, and snowing in places. This is stupid. However, it has the nice side effect of my allergies being very minimal this year. It's been too cold for the pollens to spread. That is a nice thing.

So this weekend, my house had a big D&D session. It was quite a bit of fun. They finished up the Keep, and the last fight was very entertaining. We had people falling unconscious, some big hits, and it was very close. They did win though. On the way home, they got attacked by some Bandits though, and as I was setting it up, a friend stopped in unexpectedly. It worked out extremely well. The character builder had a example character that was about the right level, so I just printed him off a sheet, and setup the encounter as he was being attacked by the bandits, as the party came up to him. I think he had fun. But as the fight was wrapping up, something quite unexpected happened. The Rogue in the party decided to try to kill the newcomer, to steal his stuff. Everyone else in the party was against this. The rogue surprised him, and tried to use his daily power. He missed. He quickly started apologizing, and back pedaling. The Dwarf counterattacked, using his daily. He also missed, so it looked like it would be a stand still. Then I explained Action Points, and what the word "reliable" meant on his daily power. He got very excited, and used his action point to try to hit the rogue again with his daily. Critical Hit.

The attack had a max damage of a lot. The rogue is not known for his hit point pool. The rogue had also taken a couple hits in the fight, and wasn't full. He dropped to -20 or so, putting him fully dead, not just unconscious. It was awesome. They hauled his body back to town, and were very shocked to see how much it would cost to bring him back from the dead. There was a lot of negotiations going on at the table about if it was worth it. They hunted for black market temples that could put a curse on him as they brought him back too, so they could override his actions to try to prevent him from screwing up that big again. I thought it was a good idea, but didn't want to take that control away form the rogue, so didn't let it happen. He is in a fair bit of debt to everyone though, and it seems like they will be making him work if off for awhile. Very entertaining round. I have to prep some stuff tonight and tomorrow for the game this week though, as now that they finished that module, I don't know where I'll send them next. I have some ideas.

I said I'd let them adjust characters after the dungeon, as now they have some D&D experience in fourth edition, and can fix some of the things they didn't understand fully. They are jumping in deep though. One guy switched every single power and feat. One guy is debating just rolling a brand new character, of a different race and class. Next session will be pretty interesting.

So I might be having some big life changes happening soon. We'll see how quickly I hear back from some of my early week work here. I'll keep you updated.

It's been one week!

Since I last posted. There goes my good record.

So I'm participating in a triathlon team. I'm doing the swimming leg. I have to swim 500m as fast as possible. It's currently not very fast... But as a result, I've bee hitting the pool quite regularly. I've been enjoying it. I feel like I'm getting in better shape, and there is a cute lifeguard there in the mornings. =) It's quite refreshing to wake up and swim though. Hopefully I can make it through the triathlon swim. An interesting side effect is I'm sleeping better now. Maybe it's just the addition of another routine thing, maybe it's just the physical activity. I'm getting back to a good core sleep. I'm currently exhausted by my afternoon nap, I think I need to move it a little earlier, as it's pretty late currently. So I'll be making those tweaks in the next week. It's nice to have my polyphasic sleep back on a good track again.

So due to weather, I still haven't gotten any of my garden in the dirt yet. I did till the ground, but we are still getting frost warnings every night... Maybe I can actually plant this weekend. It's supposed to be nicer. I want my plants to get going! Quicker they start the quicker I can eat them.

So on the weekend, I was vacuuming the lawn. Yes, you heard me correctly. I had to borrow a shop-vac, and vacuumed the lawn. It's the first I've ever heard of anyone doing it. The story is an interesting one. Friday after work, I turned a bunch of dirt, and did a bit of weeding, and found a hole in our hose. The key thing from Friday was the backyard was great. Then, Saturday morning, I look out the back window, and see our patio table overturned. It had a glass top. Our backyard now had a section that was just covered with broken glass. Awesome. I was planning to mow the lawn that morning. Alas, I had to clean the glass up first. So I tried to pick up some of the biggest chunks, but pretty much all of it was crumbling further when I went to pick it up. It was a mess. So I tried sweeping it up, and raking it up, and collecting it in a dustpan. Those techniques did ok, but there was still a lot of glass it was missing. Only thing I could think of to try was vacuuming. Which, for the record, worked great! I am intending to spread some dirt in the area too, after mowing, just to make sure no small sharp edges are left.

So we were trying to figure out how our patio table decided to smash itself on our lawn. All I could figure was a) The Wind, and b) Young Hooligans. I thought the wind was pretty unlikely, as nothing else in the backyard looked moved, and the neighbours stuff was all fine, so I was forced to blame young hooligans. Around supper time, I answered the door, and it was our neighbour. He apologized for breaking our table, and I was confused. Did he jump the fence and smash it? He continued to explain. Apparently his dogs, in the morning, decided to break through the fence, and run around our yard. They ran into our table, knocking it over, and making a huge mess. (The dogs were fine). It did however leave me with a bit of an uneasy feeling. If those dogs can trash a patio table, they could easily take out roomies. (As the heaviest of the roomies, I suspect I'd have the best chance at survival). Our neighbour explained that he has now lined the fence with chicken wire, so they will have to break more than just weak boards to do it again, and he is intending to buy us a new table, which is nice. I'm glad he was honest, but at the same time, frustrated at those dogs. They bark all the time, and now they are damaging our property too? Sheesh.

I'll let you know my thoughts on the patio table our neighbour picks to replace it. I might just ask him to pick us up like a home depot gift card or something for the value of it, then we can pick it ourselves.

D&D Adventure Update!

So, my crew is having a blast.

They all took to D&D better than I even expected. Soeric started as the only one with a big backstory, and that hasn't changed, but Pamp, the rogue, has sure started to go crazy. As a rogue, he doesn't really get anything great on his minor action yet, so he constantly is trying to surprise people, scare people, and try crazy things. I've decided that I'll let him try to do pretty much anything he wants on his minor, as long as he can explain it to me. Then I'll determine what skill he has to check, and what the effect will be. I also don't let him do the same thing twice. So we have a little halfling rogue, running around trying to pants people, juggle, attempting comedic one lines, all sorts of interesting things to try to confuse the enemy. It's very entertaining.

The players just can't seem to have enough either. We were scheduled to play tonight (Thursday) after playing last Thursday, but on Sunday, Soeric suggested we play on Tuesday in addition too, and everyone was really into it. They also just got level 2 on Tuesday, and I caught my roomies spending easily a couple hours last night reading books, discussing feats, and strategies they want to try. They seem to be really enjoying it.

I started them in the dungeon delve book, just doing the first dungeon to see how they took to D&D. It quickly became apparent that they wanted a bigger story to go on. So I took the Keep of the Shadowfell adventure (which is free from Wizard's as a pdf) and basically replaced the first stretch of the adventure with the first dungeon delve. I swapped the young dragon at the end of the delve with Irontooth, and it worked out perfectly. So now I have them about to enter the keep, which I'm pretty excited for.

Should be a fun evening.

New Toy!

SO I picked up an Asus Eee PC 1000HE yesterday. I haven't been able to play with it as much as I want to. So far though, I'm reasonably impressed. The battery life does seem to be pretty good on it. I'm trying to condition the battery today, with full charge to full discharge usage, so I'll actually get some more real world-ish numbers. I do like seeing 30% battery left, 2:40 minutes. I'm just finishing my Ubuntu Netbook remix download, so tonight I'll likely be setting it up to dual boot, assuming I can find time somewhere between the Carbon Dating Service show, and 1 vs 100 Beta on Xbox live.

I came with some useful apps I wasn't expecting. Largely Skype. I've been working to install a couple other important apps, like Firefox, Media Player Classic, and so forth. I think I'll end up using this little thing more than I was planning. I still need to try watching some higher def content on it, to see how it handles it. I'm going to install and try some older 3d games on it too. Might run not too bad. I'm pretty excited to use this on a big road trip, like my Maine one I'm planning. Then on rest stops I can watch TV, play games, do whatever.

I need a good wifi coverage map for the North Eastern States... or to find a decent WEP cracker for a netbook...

Holy Spring Cleaning!

So I went on a cleaning binge. It was pretty satisfactory. I rearranged all the furniture in my room, and now have space to keep some of my music stuff up there. I'm hoping that will motivate me to practice more, as I really should. It also is now laid out to force me to keep it cleaner as well. Assuming I can keep up the habits I'm trying to form. I've decided I want to change some aspects of my life, and the organization / cleanliness of my room is one of them. It ties into others as well, as now I have enough floor space to do sit ups, and push ups, and potentially get somewhat back into shape.

My next goal, after the completion of my room cleaning, is to clean and reorganize our basement. It's not very great right now, and organizing it would open up a fair bit of space. We are planning to build a bigger gaming table too, for board games, and D&D, and it would likely go in the basement. It's too warm in the summer to not hang out in the basement. I essentially need to get permission from my roomies to junk a lot of stuff, then just have at 'er. I also had to wait until after today, as our garbage container was pretty full from my room cleaning.

All that said, I'm open to suggestions on a design for a good gaming table. We want shelves or drawers, somewhat light-weight, maybe modular? It would be great if we could put a cover on it too, to "pause" board games/D&D sessions. It might be quite the undertaking...

Adventure Begins!

So we had a ton of fun yesterday. At least I did. I hope everyone else did too. I forgot to snap pictures as it was going on though. Opps.

First fight my newbie friends got into was a bit rough. They didn't know how to work well as a team, or what their most effective moves were when. They ended up spread out all over the map, with no one in range of the heals that were available. Soeric the Avenger was knocked out, and a couple others were quite beat up at the end. I think it was a pretty good trial by fire start.

Second encounter was way too easy. They decimated the crew of 8 or 9 minions, and the 3 Kobold Slingers were getting horrible rolls to hit. It was a ton of fun for the encounter though, as the Sorcerer climbed a 8 foot wall, perched at the top of it, threw 2 aoe's to kill almost all the minions single-handedly, then promptly fell backwards off the wall. It was very entertaining.

Third encounter was about right for the difficulty. Maybe a touch too hard. They ended up pretty battered, but no one collapsed. A couple daily's were used, but not all, and very few action points. It is definitely seeming like the group needs more healing. I'm going to try to push some people to multiclass into something that gives a heal. There is only so much that Ghost Bear can do.

Timewise, things moved a bit slower than I expected. The first encounter was very long. I expected it to be long, but it was 3 hours or so, which was a bit longer than I planned for. The other 2 encounters were closer to the 1.5 hour mark. They had figured out how a lot of their moves worked, and some better planned strategies.

Overall, it was a good time. They didn't finish the little story I wanted to get done, they have 1 encounter left. But I might attach another encounter on, so that next session, we will get 2 encounters. Then head to town and do some shopping and such. Keeps the next session maybe a touch shorter. Hopefully they can level too, and we'll do the leveling process as well.

Beginning of an Adventure

So I'm pretty excited for Sunday. If you aren't geeky, you may want to stop reading now.

Sunday I'm starting as DM (Dungeon Master) for a D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) 4e (Fourth Edition) game. Man, geeks like Acronyms. I'm leading a group of D&D newbies. I think collectively as a group of players, they will have at most 20 hours of D&D play combined. I am a bit relieved because they are all video game RPG players, so some of the concepts they are familiar with. I should be pretty interesting.

It's also a wide mix of player styles. One guy has already submitted a character history, bio, and all sort of extra details that compete as one of the best back stories I've heard in D&D. One of the other players didn't even pick a close to appropriate name. Should make the group rather interesting as a group. I think a lot of crazy things will go down. It should be fun. I hope everyone has a good time.

I decided, since it's many of their first times playing, to not go too heavy into the story or role playing or anything. I'm intending the first session to be very combat heavy. I think they will connect to that quicker. After seeing how the first session goes, I'll decided if I want to hook them in to a bigger narrative, or just keep going with simple more one-shot style adventures.

I'll likely take pictures, and chronicle the adventure somewhat, as much for my own interest as any of my readers. So expect a summary next week sometime.

Progress!

So I deployed my first deployable build to the Xbox. I have the first 720p test map displayed, and the grid structure behind it loading correctly. I have the playable characters represented with some placeholders. Tonight I'll be attaching some basic controls to move the placeholders, and adding collisions, for locations you aren't allowed to move (and maybe some places that just slow you down, like hills?)

I got some pretty good progress yesterday, but need to make a lot of progress this week too. We have about 2 weeks until the deadline for submissions for the PAX 10. Hopefully by the end of next weekend, it's a a demo-able state. I might be hitting up a couple friends to start playtesting sometime this week, so be forewarned!

Hopefully I get the first 3d model sometime today, so I can retrofit my classes to support it. I'm a bit nervous about that. Hopefully it's as easy as I've tried to set it up to be. That is definitely my focus for this week though. Trying to free up some evenings to work on it, and I'll have to enforce a strict "Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard" policy. Hopefully I'll have a successful week!

Frustrated

So I write my final for my course in 2 days. I still do not know if they will be giving me my degree. I have been receiving invites to grad, and all that stuff, but no one has concretely told me if it's possible or not. So I'm studying, and hoping I'll be done school potentially forever come Friday.

And then, oh boy, do I get even more busy. I have a game project, Project Instant Ramen, that we are hoping to have in reasonable shape to submit to some competitions. The deadline for most of the competitions is the end of the month. We have quite a bit of work to do to make that deadline. The good thing is almost all our art assets, including 3d models and everything, sound like they are almost finished. Our script is past first draft, but by no means finished. A lot of the libraries I intend to use are somewhat built up. I have a lot of the pieces done / ready to go. It's just waiting on me to finish my course, so I can sink a lot of time into it, and get it going. My plan is to sink quite a few hours into it this weekend.

My other goal for the weekend is to get my sleep schedule adjusted for the summer. I get "trapped" in various requirements during the school year to allow me to attend class and work, and my body doesn't like all of them. It works still, but I know I could do better. I'll have to work it all out, and likely re-adapt somewhat. Done it before, and it'll be good to get back to a better schedule. My plan is as follows:
Up at 4am. Yoga, Breakfast, Shower, and so forth. Drive to work around 6:30-6:45. Nap at work, before starting anything, around 7am. Work, breaking for a nap around 2pm. More work, Drive home. Eat supper. Nap around 8pm. Up till 1am. I'm hoping I can lock in the 9pm to 1am range as time to work on Project Instant Ramen. My biggest concern with it, is for the next 2 or 3 weeks, I'll be logging roughly 13 hours of programming a day. I need to, as I have a lot I need to get finished, but that might be a bit stressful. That does leave my weekends code free. I may say like Tuesday Thursday, evening work on PIR, and Saturday Sunday, and take the other evenings as entertainment time to keep my sanity.

I'll keep you updated with how well it pans out.

Happy Broken Internet Day

April Fool's Day is one of my least favourite days in the world. You get exposed to pranks, that typically aren't funny, and are just annoying. Main annoying factor, the broken internet. Normally you should be thinking when you read anything on the internet, as nothing is guaranteed to be true, but on April Fool's Day that problem is magnified tenfold. You have to filter through so much crap to get to any nuggets of truth today, that it's easier to just give up and disconnect for the day. Now for a tech junkie like myself, fully disconnecting for a day is pretty hard.

But too much work to do, so this post is very short. I will update more after finals!

These are the days of my life

Oh boy. I was SICK.
So I missed 3 days of work, lost some weight, and had a very crummy start to the week. Feeling much better now, actually ate a normally sized meal last night. Things seem to be on the up and up. However, now I am behind on everything important. I have a big assignment due on Tuesday I've barely started. I have to make a Demolition Derby game. Currently it loads and displays the background... Obviously I have a little ways to go. So that will likely take most (if not all) of my time this weekend. Also, I need to get more work done on Project Instant Ramen (one of which tasks should be actually finding a name...). We are setting some targets for full demo versions. To enter for the PAX 10, we need to have a full working demo submittable by May 9th, which gives us just under 2 months to essentially finish. That means a lot more work. We have another one we're shooting for too, IndieCade, with a deadline of April 30th. Once we're closer to that date, we'll see if there is a Beta or something we can make publicly available. Don't hold your breath.

I'm still very very excited for this project. I would love nothing more than to have it play like we want it to. Getting it on XBox Live Arcade, or Greenhouse, or something would be nice, making money with it would be even nicer, but just for the experience and practice it is definitely worth the effort. I'm hoping that I can sink some time into it this weekend, but assignment has to take priority.

But I should get to work here, I'll be keeping you updated.

Summer Plans

So I have been trying to decide what to do with my holidays this year. I've put some aside for the Penny Arcade Expo, as I always go, and it's a great time. This year I may be taking resumes too. But last year I took two full weeks off, and spent 1/2 a month on that coast (and loved it). This year, I don't think I'll be spending near that much time, which gives me a few holiday days to use up elsewhere.

As that was sitting in my mind for a couple weeks, I was contacted by a friend in FFXI, the MMO I play. There is a crew of folks, all of whom I know in game, who all live (somewhat) on the East Coast. They get together every summer for a BBQ to hang out and have fun. I was invited this year. They haven't locked a date in yet, but with some rough estimates I determined that it would be a decently cheap flight ($400 round trip? nice) and I would have no hotel or anything to worry about, as I can crash at friend's places. I think it would be a lot of fun, and a good chance to meet these people for real. So I'm pretty excited for it.

That sort of event always brings up debates. Some people, like my sisters, and parents, think it's crazy that I would have friends that I consider really good friends, that I have never met face to face. They thought it was very weird last time I had some online friends share a hotel room with me for PAX (which was 3 years ago now? And Ruben still owes me money for!). I think many people in our society think along the same lines. Sure, I have never met these people face to face, or even seen pictures of some of them, and constantly forget their real names (I don't even know how many of them know I'm a Cody), but friendship isn't based off that. I DEFINITELY talk to these online friends more than my Parents, and my sisters (likely combined). I know what they do for a living, I know of some of their interests. I know about the good and the bad things that happen in their life. I trust them with things like my account numbers for my game characters, which gives them access to years of effort on my part, and virtual goods worth thousands of dollars. That's more than I trust some of my local friends with.

I just find it an interesting generational divide. Making solid connections over the internet is just a foreign concept to many people. To those of us who have done it though, it just seems natural.

Allergy Season!

Its not here yet. We've been getting quite a bit of snow lately. But I have started my pre-season treatments. They have created an interesting dilemma. They put me to sleep. Something about injecting with pollens makes me sleep. Maybe I just need to time this better. They sure knock me out. Worth it though. I can't imagine doing through a spring without my shots. It's bad enough with my shots. My allergies are definitely one of my biggest concerns about moving to the coast. In more temperate climates, I suspect I will have allergic reactions much more frequently. I'll be constantly on meds. I think it'll be worth it though, for the nicer weather.

Due to demand, I'll look into posting a version of my assignment here for people to try out. It's definitely not perfect. I should have started working on it earlier than I did. I think over the summer, or maybe after Project Instant Ramen (the code name for Monoclesoft's current project) is done, I'll come back to it, and improve it. I'd love to get it more so to a quality product I am willing to use to supplement my resume for job apps to the industry. Although with the economy the way it is, the Games industry seems to be laying people off left and right, so that may hinder my chances there. You never know until you try though.

So I'm in the process of correcting my sleep schedule still. I really need to just buckle down, and re-adapt the the changes I want to make. I'm been getting to work between 7:30 and 9 ish, which takes a lot of the pressure off in the morning, which has turned into me sleeping in more regularly. I really need to be very rigid with my schedule for a bit to correct this. Hopefully as weather warms up, I can go outsied more, which will help provide more tasks I can work on. I'll keep you updated with how that all pans out.

Holy assignment Batman

So I'm taking one class this term. It's a Computer Game Development course. I'm really enjoying it. It's a very informative. But it is a very heavy class. I just recently finished the first assignment, which was create a version of SpyHunter. It was a touch harder than I expected. As a result, I ended up not getting much sleep (even by my standards) the couple of days before the assignment was due. This was the first time I'd really cut my sleep down further. It was rough. I don't recommend it. I will definitely start the next assignment within a day or two of it being assigned. That said, I think I'll get a decent mark on it. I hit 19 of the 20 main requirements, which I think was the most anyone in the class did. I paid dearly in my sleeping though.

Due to lack of sleep, I slept a lot the day following (like 6 hours at night). It has damaged my schedule pretty good. So I am going to have to work at it this weekend to get everything back in order. I think I'll take this chance to move back up to 3 naps a day, instead of the two I've fallen into. It'll help that the weather is starting to warm up again, so I can start napping in my car if I'm trapped somewhere. I think I'm going to try moving my core. I'm thinking of changing it to 1-4am, nap around 10am, 3pm, 7:30, or 8pm. This means I'll have to find some new good tasks for early AM, as I won't be going into work at 5am, so I have an extra hour to kill. Maybe I'll actually try to get in the habit of a morning workout or Yoga session.

That's my goal for this weekend, and next week. I don't have classes next week, and it is a long weekend, so hopefully it'll work out well as a transition time.

Dreams

Been awhile since I've posted about many of my dreams, and lately they have been very messed up. If you don't enjoy hearing about my oddities, feel free to skip this one.

So a couple nights ago. The dream involved me grocery shopping with my Dad. For some reason, I had to help restock a cooler, because I complained about there not being any bacon. So I got in the cooler and helped this little midget restock the cooler, which ended up taking hours. The store closed while I was restocking the cooler. So when I got out of the cooler, it was all dark. But there was still a ton of people there, just all employees of the grocery store. It was like they all lived there. I got them to let me out, and my Dad was gone. So I started walking home. This was where I realized the grocery store was by itself, miles away from the city. I walked for a bit down the highway, and my Dad eventually picked me up (not sure how he found me). After he picked me up, we drove off the highway and went off roading. And that was the end of the dream.
OH! I should mention the great products that were the main point of the grocery store trip. Apparently aside from the bacon that wasn't there, the main thing I wanted from the grocery store was Ramen (ichiban noodles). But the flavours I was looking for were Fruit Punch Ramen, and Castle Crashers flavoured Ramen. I have no idea what a video game flavour of ramen would taste like. The Fruit Punch Ramen also came with like gooey gel things you were supposed to add that were supposed to simulate soggy fruit rinds.
So yeah. That one was pretty weird.

My other weird dream lately was shorter. Much shorter. It involved my whole family moving into some large castle. It was this huge mansion, but was laid out on the inside much like a high school would have been. We were just moving in, so we were doing some large scale renovations to make it more like a house. This involved converting a lot of the space into bedrooms. Not that weird yet? So the space I end up getting as my room was originally a Men's washroom. BAM! Weird! So I the rest of the dream was about the changes I was making to this Men's room to make it a livable bedroom, and people's reactions to me living in a bathroom. Let's just say non of the changes I made involved moving anything connected to plumbing. So I ended up with this decent bedroom that just happened to have toilets and urinal's somewhat all over the place. The main area the bed was contained shower heads. No idea why I was in the bathroom.
As I remember, we all got our own wings too, so I had a bunch of other rooms in my wing. Not sure if using the bathroom as the bedroom was an order, or my idea. It was definitely the weirdest / creepiest bedroom I had ever been in though. Although there was a bit of convenience in not having to leave bed to have a shower.

And those are my creepy dream updates. Hopefully you found them enjoyable / haven't decided I am a lunatic yet.

I have Returned!

So due to various complaints, I figure it's about time to write something here.

First of all, my blog is seeing less activity. If you didn't notice, then you need help. One of the reasons for this is I'm on twitter. I can use twitter from my phone, so I update it MUCH more regularly. Then I find when I get to sit down to write on this, I've already talked about a fair bit of it. I'll find something to talk about though.

So December was hectic. I only had one final (which went well. I ended up with a 90% in the class) but I had a fair bit of work I needed to accomplish as well. For the most part I'm caught up now. Started my new class (Video Game development) which is awesome. At work I'm shifting into testing mode, so I'm writing lots of test apps, and just using the stuff I made last month. Things are starting to settle down.

I had a good Christmas holiday. The whole family thing was a bit weird. My oldest niece was at her father's house all day, and the next oldest (only one old enough to know what was happening) is very resistant to change. She was definitely NOT excited to open presents or anything. So we ended up drinking, Hot Tubbing, and playing Boom Blox on the Wii pretty much all day. My mom was so excited she could beat me at a video game. My parents caught on to Boom Blox quickly, and I''m not very good, especially when I'm drinking.

New Year's Eve was a lot of fun. We ended up having people over. It was good times. Got a loaner projector, as mine was in for repairs (sigh). Played some Rock Band, lots of drinking, and general just hanging out. Had a pretty decent turnout. We even got to count the leap second. We went with counting zero. Then there was a fair bit of drunk dialing a friend in Vancouver. We were calling from the future. It was quite humourous, but I imagine you a) had to be there, and b) needed to know the guy. So I'll save stories about it for others to tell. There might be a video floating around the internets somewhere...

After New Year's (New Year's Day, in fact) I took off to Jasper with 2 friends. Got 3 days of skiing in. Had a ton of fun. Spent maybe a touch more cash than I should have. It was totally worth it though. I had a blast. I realized how much I actually love the mountains though. Now that I have a sibling living closer to them, I might have to start making more trips. Probably not this winter, as I have some debt to clear off now, but next year!

So that's essentially the update for my December, and first 1/2 of January. Eventful, Fun, and great. I'll make another post in a week's time or so to talk about how that month has hurt my sleep program (which I'm slowly getting back on track for) and maybe leak some details on my latest (video game related) project.