dave_b93

Sorry, this is something only Warcraft people would care about, but we got the last boss in one of the hardest instances in the game down for the first time on Wednesday night.

http://www.wowmeteronline.com/combat/log/996254

If you actually care which one I am, I'm the one in the back left behind the 'Perjur' nameplate. ( no, my character's name is the only one not showing in the pictures. It's Nishan if you're looking at the combat report.)

drinking friday night at PAX

I had to clean out one of the spare rooms here today . Both spare rooms are already very sparsely populated, but I had started to overflow some of my stuff into what will be the baby's room, and the stuff had to go.

Old snowboard boots, volleyball kneepads, and some cycling gear were easy to just move farther into storage; or send to the thrift shop. The hardest part is pruning down novels. Why is it so hard for me to get rid of books? I had a 3 shelf bookshelf full of books that I was not allowed to just move to another room.

I'm sad to say, that today I'm no longer the owner of any Dragonlance novels. Also no more Star Wars novels. The housewarming present from the MADD house is no longer around anymore either, so no more reading aloud from Victorian Erotic Tales and seeing who cracks up first. Piers Anthony did not make the cut. The Death Gate cycle and all the Timothy Zahn did make the cut. I'm not sure why I held onto Weis&Hickman's Death Gate Cycle, It just seemed like something I might read again.

The hardest books for me to get rid of were James Blish's Cities in Flight and R Meluch's War Birds http://www.amazon.ca/War-Birds-R-Meluch/dp/0451161122 They weren't great literature, but they were fun reads, and they were Doug and my first ... serious Sci FI novels. The Amtrack Wars is another series that went which wasn't too bad. I'm not that sorry to lose Neil Stephenson's Zodiac. ( Cryptonomacon made it though )

It's easy to keep the Asimov, and the Gaiman, and the Pratchett. I just wish I had room for more books.

To those of you who are currently following me. Whoah, long time no see. To those who aren't, this is hopefully a way to catch up.

What have I done in the last 3 years?

Work

When I last posted, I was working for Blackboard, still on the UBC campus. I had just gotten back from PAX 2006. In August 2007, Blackboard announced that they were offering relocation to Washington DC to about ninety percent of the people in Vancouver, the other 10 percent were being let go. A third of the relocate people could choose to stay in Vancouver and keep their jobs if they wanted.

I had the option of moving to Washington DC, or quitting. After some serious thinking, I tentatively choose DC while applying to various local companies. The day of the deadline I was still waiting to hear back from a company. It came back no. I was going to DC. 1 week later Next Level Games interviewed me, and offered me a job. I stayed in Vancouver but lost out on the severance package. Oh well.

At Next Level I was working on an undisclosed game, the predecessor to what became Punch Out. I hadn't worked in games before, and I hadn't worked in C in forever so things were very new and exciting. I didn't realize that the game didn't have a solid direction, and probably wasn't going to make it. When they canceled the project, I was let go. They had 1 project with a lot of people ramping off, and I was the new guy. I had a really good time there, and so getting let go hurt.

I picked myself up, and got going on interviews. There were quite a few good ones, in the end it came down to Rockstar, Relic, and EA. It was a tough choice, but I'm pretty glad I chose Relic. I've been here for the past 2 years. I've worked on Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, Company of Heroes Online, and Dawn of War II. I really like the people here, and am really happy with what I'm working on.

Personal
I proposed to Nicola sometime in January or February 2008. We were married Nicola Oct 5th, 2008.

Our first child is due Dec 7th, 2009 - no we don't know the gender, yes we do have names picked. yes we know it's not twins.

Snowboarding has been decreasing in frequency the past few years. I still enjoy it, but Nicola hasn't been able to wear contacts, so it's not been as much fun for her. I hope to get in 10 days this year, but with the child coming, we'll see.

I sold my car this spring. I'll miss it, but I wasn't using a car. If I need one I can borrow Nicola's

Been playing a lot of World of Warcraft.

I stopped playing ultimate on a regular basis. I miss it, I don't miss organizing people for that every week.

Cool vacations of note
- China for work, march 2008. Even though we worked way too much the trip was awesome. I probably won't get sent to Korea for CoHO but I probably wouldn't complain if I did.
We've been going to Portland for a weekend in the late fall the past few years for a WoW guild meetup. That has been a lot of fun. Looking forward to going again this year.
- Mexico for Mike and Shelly's wedding.
- Had an awesome time at Shannon and Jordan's wedding this summer in the Okanagan.
- PAX every year. It's getting easier to wrangle people, there were 11 of us over 2 rooms ( or 14 of us over 4 rooms if you really want to count. ) It has been awesome every time.

Biggest thing that jumped out and got me to pay attention to it at PAX this year?
Borderlands looks awesome. I'm probably going PC, depending on who of my friends I can convince.

Other things i saw
- Starcraft 2 and left for dead 2, but those are probably self evident. The wow expansion looked typical. Wow is starting to lose it's luster

i don't have time for a big post but i've got some pictures from PAX http://dbeleznay.dyndns.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=PAX06

i might update more later.

I had an awesome time. I spent probably too much time in various tournaments, but all in all it was a fairly relaxing PAX for me. The final competition of the Omegathon was a little bit lame, they were given tetris to play (woot!) and told to do 30 lines as fast as they could. Neither of them were playing that well, they were going for tetrises, not for speed.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4261701022851065123&q

okay, that's in german, but you get the point.

Multi input touch screen demo

so uh yeah...

My old cellphone jumped off the bedside table the night before we left New York. I didn't notice or hear about it till the morning when I went to get my stuff.. It no longer stays turned on. The screen kind of lights up but nothing shows up, and it turns itself off after about 15 seconds.

I'll try repairing it once I get a hold of the proper screwdriver ( a weird 5 pointed star shape), but in the meantime, this seemed like a good enough opportunity to switch to a new cellphone.

Meet the Nokia 6670. I'm fairly happy with it so far, but I'm still in the process of figuring out what it can and can't do. Here's the breakdown so far ( in +/- notation )

- it's bigger than the old phone ( but not by much )
+ it synchs directly with outlook via bluetooth or usb cable.
+ it has an address book that's actually useful and actually keeps items all under the same person, instead of storing them seperately but duplicating the persons name

neither - better camera, can take 10 minute movies....

there's probably more, but I've got to go.


The biggest benefit I'm going to get out of this is the address book and the synching. Unfortunately because the majority of my contacts were stored on the old phone instead of the SIM card, I've had to resort to a year old backup. sometime soon I'm going to have to verify everyone's info with them.

Between late nights and relatively early mornings I haven't had much of a chance to update this. It also didn't help that we moved out of the building with the public terminals in the library :)

I'll try to get in more details of the trip, but will probably end up abbreviating the days so that i can get a chance to catch up. If you want more detailed happenings from a different perspective check out Rick's blog here. He's been staying up later keeping his up to date like a good boy.

where was i? saturday night huh? well I think i'm going to have to experiment with a livejournal cut here cos this might get long..

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Yeah they're not great but we're going to a hockey game !

So apparently I haven't been updating enough during my trip. I'll see what I can do to fix that. but I don't want to be sending too many pictures from my phone as that will get expensive. Also it's kinda annoying to be typing on the phone keyboard when I can be touristing instead.

So, short summary of the trip so far. Get up at 7:30 ish Saturday morning in Vancouver, get to the airport by 9:00 am saturday, fly for a number of hours in a pretty cool airplane. ( I think I like Cathay Pacific. There was a tv in the seat, and you could choose which movie you wanted to watch. ) Arrive at JFK airport in New York around 8 pm. get stuck in customs untill after 9:15 pm. Then start taking New York's transit system.

The airtrain from JFK to the subway was about 10 minutes of waiting followed by a fairly uneventful ride. after the airtrain we were invited to participate in the fun which is the Metro Pass system. but first we had to pay for that airtrain ride we just took.

After navigating the menu's Rick ended up with at $20 ride card, and Nicola and I ended up with $24 unlimited rides for the week. We'll see who wins out in the end.

The ride on the A train was interesting to say the least. We encountered a preacher of sorts, telling everyone on the train how the blacks should rise up against the white man, etc... etc... we were a little bit uncomfortable as we were the only white people on our particular car.

It took about an hour to get to the 42nd Street stop. We were only served lunch on the plane, and were starving, so decided to have some food and get our bearings. we knew that we had to walk along 42nd st to get to Grand Central station, but we weren't quite sure which direction we were supposed to walk along it. The blocks are short so we would know quickly if we'd screwed up.

anyway, we're moving out now. I'll cover more of this later.

We're on the circle line tour, which came highly recommended by andy. I wasn't thinking about taking pictures with the phone camera, which is why the picture here is worse than usual.

This is where andy lives. We spent the first night here. It's a pretty cool place. We got in late so i didn't get as much sleep as i wanted but i can sleep later.

At the howard beach station jfk airport

Nicola (also checking to see if this still works )

http://www.drunkmenworkhere.org/170 I found this off Boing Boing. It's a self referential test. I'm not sure of any of the answers yet, but figured it might be something others would enjoy as well. I'll post what I know so far under a lj-cut but it probably won't help you much.

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A few things going on of interest.

I updated my cousins website AFA Fireworks about a week ago to make it look a little bit better. It's now a lot easier for me to change the layout and top or sidebars. This means it will be a little more technical for my cousin, but way easier for me. I can live with that for now. In related news the website seems to have gotten him a few shows. Apparently both Alberta and Saskatchewan turn 100 on September 1st. One of them ( I can't remember which one) went out and booked all the fireworks companies in both Alberta and Saskatchewan so the other one is scrambling around looking for people. They ended up coming across my cousins company on the web somehow. Apparently they offered him more shows than he could handle, he took a few shows out of the deal, and one or two for one of his friends as well. I'm not actually sure if that's because of the website but it might be from the sites that are linking to his / advertising his business, so that's kinda cool.

Second thing is Ultimate. I'm captaining the team this year as Scott is going to Europe for a while. It's a bit stressful because we keep getting and losing girls, but I think/hope that it's settling down for now. We're good for the first part of the summer at least. Our second practice is tonight, which reminds me that I should probably send out one more email confirming that yes there is a practice, so please show up if you said you would. It's like herding cats, and it gives me more appreciation of what Scott was doing as captain. Oh and we're in Div 5. I'd kinda hoped for Div 6 as we'd lost half our females to other things and were forced to replace them with new players, but I'm not too worried. Things will even out after the first trimester if they aren't even already.

Finally, I found this link off Slashdot, and it is hilarious. Someone has made Darth Vader's Blog. I haven't read all of it yet, but the parts I've read were funny. EDIT: Spoiler warning! the previous link actually has some vieled references to events that happen in Episode III.

This entry is probably not going to be much more than a shameless plug. Though I'll try to make it a little bit less so by explaining some of the background as well. Probably about a year ago, my cousin contacted me about setting up a website for his Vancouver Island Fireworks Company.

He didn't know HTML, and didn't really know what he wanted, and knows that I work with HTML a little bit for a living, and so figured I'd be good to help. I figured what the heck, and sure it'll probably be a good learning experience.

We worked through a few designs, and I've learned more about Cascading Style Sheets, and a little bit of PHP ( kind of unrelated, but I thought it might make the site more maintainable, however the cost to run a site which supports PHP isn't really worth it. Around November of last year we were probably ready to actually have a bit of a page up somewhere, So he bought the domain islandfireworks.ca. When he did this, he never gave me information to upload stuff to the site. After some back and forth and a few months of nothing happening, he got a hit.

Apparently someone had looked up Vancouver Island Fireworks Company or something and found his domain somehow. ( Note, the website didn't exist then, only the domain was bought, I actually have no idea how he managed to get found on the web.) And so he was energized to actually get some web hosting. When the company that he was thinking of buying hosting from wanted to charge him over $100 a year he was a little bit shocked, so I told him about Tera-Byte. Tera-byte is the place where I'd get my stuff hosted if I wasn't getting it for free. They've got good prices and I haven't had any problems yet, Their accounts seem okay so far, though I was kind of hoping for some more email forwards ( you get 3 pop email accounts with the package that Don got though)

In February he bought hosting through them, but didn't have the information needed to switch the nameservers for islandfireworks.ca to the ones at Tera-Byte. After contacting his registrar and going through a whole bunch of emails, yesterday we finally got his username and password for the registrar system and I was able to set it up to point to the actual site. Yay! After one more day of waiting for the nameservers to pick up the change, we finally have a public spot to view the website. Now without further ado I present to you the website for AFA Fireworks

Please note, the site is seriously under construction at the moment. I think now that the site is up he'll probably have more incentive to give me some content for it. Also, the use of tables is slightly bad (I know), and probably shouldn't be used as an example of good HTML. I'm going to play with the stylesheets a bit more and see if I can figure out how to get it all so the pages are almost all content only, and everything is done in the stylesheet. Oh and the scrolling text only appears on IE.

One more time, the site is AFA Fireworks. If you have any suggestions on colours or layout, please feel free to pipe up. Right now I'm just trying to get the search engines to see it.

Dave