dave_b93

First Yogg-Saron Kill

2009-09-18T05:02:35Z

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.)

I'm smiling oddly here

2009-09-15T23:57:22Z

drinking friday night at PAX

Pruning

2009-09-14T05:11:02Z

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.

Where did the time go?

2009-09-11T20:29:36Z

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

pax was awesome

2006-08-29T16:37:06Z

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.

i now work for blackboard

2006-03-01T00:43:48Z

i now work for blackboard, originally uploaded by dave_b93.

more wow.

2006-02-16T01:07:47Z

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

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

cool.

2006-02-13T22:32:25Z

Multi input touch screen demo

congratulations Kat

2005-11-26T06:49:47Z

congratulations Kat, originally uploaded by dave_b93.

new toy

2005-11-16T02:07:54Z

new toy, originally uploaded by dave_b93.

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.

The trip so far - part II or Nov 5th - ( hopefully) nov 10th

2005-11-11T03:10:32Z

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..

Saturdaywe found our way to Grand Central without too much difficulties. We were headed the right direction on our first try, and our only obstacles were the other pedestrians ( I couldn't believe how many of them there were on the streets at that hour) and the act of having to haul our bags around. There was a tiny bit of confusion about which ticket / train stop we should be buying for, but it was quickly remedied by a phone call to andy. We got in to the North White Plains station at what seemed like a late time. i think it was 11:30 or midnight, but honestly don't remember at this point.

After a brief tour of the house, and an email check we were off to bed with an early start for the first day.

Sunday Morning - Andy dropped us off at the North White Plains station around 9:15 or so. We ended up on the local train which means it stopped at every stop. Our itinerary for the day was to do the circle line tour and maybe see a bit of times square. We were also aware that the New york Marathon was going on that day, so we didn't really want to be running into too many runners.

We walked west from Grand Central, along 42nd to the Hudson Pier. On the way we stopped at a Deli and picked up lunch before getting on the boat. (According to Andy, the food on the actual tour boat would be expensive.)

I recommend the circle line tour. It was a 3 hour tour which took us around the whole Island as well as taking us out to see the Statue of Liberty ( but not actually out to the island she's on). the Guide was good at his job, being informative as well as funny. I took tonnes of pictures, but I'm not sure how well they'll turn out.

The tour took us till either 2:00 or 3:00. by the time we were done and had walked to Times square it was probably around 3:30. ( honestly I should be looking at my photo's to see )

We walked along Times square, stopping at the Hershey's store, and then headed east along something like 46th st. We stopped to get a look at Rockerfeller center, then headed north on 5th avenue where we saw st Patricks Cathedral. We were walking through Saks when Andy called to let us know that he was done his hike. We headed south again to get to Grand Central and then headed home to Andy's. We hadn't quite figured out the local vs express trains yet, and so ended up taking a local again. it adds about half an hour to the trip.

When we got back it was dinner time, and we stopped at a local BBQ place. they're pulled pork was pretty good.

I think it was probably about 11:00 or so when we got into bed on sunday night. we planned a little bit later start for Monday, as we had to actually check in and pay for our lodging.

k.... going to point form for now so that I can actually catch up.

Monday. Paid for lodging, explored the grounds at andy's place a bit. took the train in kinda late. tried to go to the UN, horrible line ( really short, but really, really slow. ) also really rude security guards. lunch at another deli. ( roast beef sandwhich, huge) Went to the empire state building. cool. line was about 90 minutes or so. spent quite some time up at the top. took even more pictures.

Walked to Madison Square Gardens as we were going to a Hockey game that night. Rick bought a Jersey. Nicola and rick were tired so we headed in to Penn station to rest for a bit. got 2 pretzels and a lemonade and the 3rd pretzel was free :). Met Andy around 6:20 or so and went in and watched the game. The rangers weren't passing or shooting much the first few periods, so it wasn't very surprising when they lost. had a foot long hotdog with chili and cheeze on it. yummy.

Went to a bar after the game. Pretty good beer. apparently was where andy met kathleen. cool. got home really late, like 1 or 2. slept in till 9 on tuesday.

Tuesday. We were joined by Andy and Kathleen, we walked around Central Park, it was fun, but it turned out to be a really long walk. I didn't take too many pictures as I was concerned about running out of room. while I've brought a memory stick the computers here don't have admin rights, and the one that does is a windows 2000 machine and I don't have the proper drivers or something so the pictures are coming off as TIFF's.

walked around central park. had lunch at a mexican bistro. bistro means expensive yet small :( went for bon bon's for desert :) then we went to the museum of Natural History. that was really cool, but they'd blocked off some of the exhibits I wanted to see. that closed around 5:45. we took the subway up to the seinfeld diner. the subway was CRAZY packed. seinfeld diner was cool, but lots of food. almost too much.
said goodbye to kathleen, then caught a bus to the harlem station for the train. walked through harlem at night. not that scary with 4 or us :)

Wednesday. slept in a bit, probably could've stayed more of the day at Andy's. ended up going in to town. Walked around times square some more, down broadway looking for Max's on the recommendation of Nicola's Mom. we made it all the way down to the Columbus Circle without finding it ( basically the sw corner of central park) We went into the Time Warner center? ( not sure exactly, but it was a pretty big mall with REALLY expensive stores. ) we were hungry so didn't explore too much. We ended up going to a place on 57th avenue called the Brooklyn diner. Very good food. kinda pricey, but worth it. I had a pretty big bacon and chedder burger which came with onion rings and fries, and I ordered a shake. I was pretty full, but we'd decided that we were going to try to have some new york cheesecake on the trip and that seemed like a good time, so I didn't finish my fries, and left a bit of room. the 3 of us split the cheesecake and it was really really good. There was a chocolate sauce which was basically pure melted chocolate...

rolled out of the restaurant. decided that we wanted to go on a bus tour ( actually we'd decided that earlier. ) but first we were going to go pick up the tickets for the show. ( oh yeah,we were going to the producers wednesday night :) ) bought bus tickets, but we'd missed the bus by like 5 minutes so had to wait an hour. went and explored the huge toys'r'us in times square. huge. ferris wheel inside, giant barbie house. Lego models of the empire state building and chrysler building. no lego trains.
walked back to the bus stop. ended up with a private tour of new york, just the 3 of us , very cool driver. got to experience new york traffic jams. we were a little bit worried about making it to the play on time, but it was fine.

the producers was good as a show, but some of the individual actors weren't as good as they could've been. the leads felt like they were trying to play Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane rather than trying to play the parts, which kind of spoiled their performances a bit, but after a bit the show picked up and it got much better. definitely worth seeing, but probably not as good as it could've been.

Thursday. slept in really late. got into town late, went and saw the intrepid. really neat aircraft carier. didn't do much else except have lunch and dinner downtown. had a good new england clam chowder. came back fairly early. and now am writing blog and have been for the past 45 minutes.

Tomorrow? Nicola and I are getting up early to go try to check out Soho, the WTC site, and the business district as well as battery park and do some shopping. If things work out I might end up seeing Spamalot tomorrow night, but I've been researching tickets and i don't think it's going to work out the way I'd like. Andy's band is playing at the CBGB late tomorrow night, so Nicola and I are on our own in the evening. if nothing else maybe we can check out a movie or something :)

11-07-05_1749.jpg

2005-11-07T22:52:25Z

11-07-05_1749.jpg, originally uploaded by dave_b93.

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

Day 1 recap part 1

2005-11-07T14:56:47Z

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.

11-06-05_1244.jpg

2005-11-06T19:12:12Z

11-06-05_1244.jpg, originally uploaded by dave_b93.

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.

Not bad for $10 per night

2005-11-06T15:21:25Z

Not bad for $10 per night, originally uploaded by dave_b93.

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.

11-05-05_2146.jpg

2005-11-06T02:50:33Z

11-05-05_2146.jpg, originally uploaded by dave_b93.

At the howard beach station jfk airport

11-05-05_1044.jpg

2005-11-05T18:48:40Z

11-05-05_1044.jpg, originally uploaded by dave_b93.

Nicola (also checking to see if this still works )

odd little puzzle

2005-05-10T00:15:21Z

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.

#1 cannot be A (because of #1) or B ( because of #2)

#6 and #17 are either B and D or D and B
#10 is A, this makes #16 D
#13 cannot be A or C
#20 is E

Coolness

2005-04-28T20:56:37Z

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.

Tricking the web crawlers

2005-03-31T00:41:21Z

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

Calvin and Hobbes Snowmen in real life

2005-01-25T21:05:53Z

Found this linked off Boing Boing

Calvin and Hobbes Snowmen in real life

Some of these are pretty good.

while i'm at it, here's a link to a fake VW ad that someone posted:

Fake VW ad it's funny, but wrong.

Christmas in mexico

2004-12-03T03:44:51Z

Monday's tour of Puerto Vallarta was a lot of fun i highly recommend it. Advantage was a 20 percent discount at a silver store we could trust. Nic wasn't feeling well that night so we attempted to go to sleep early. This was not to be as there was another band playing outside our room fortunately they finished around 10 pm. Tuesday was a late wake-up followed by lazing around the pool, some volley ball and boogie boarding. Nic was still tired but another early night helped. Wednesday was almost a repeat of tuesday except we went on a kayak tour and saw some dolphins and ended up staying out a bit later with some people we met from saskatoon. Thursday was fairly quiet. Lots of volleyball and a trip into town. Nothing of interest there today perhaps some restaurants to check out later. Tonight was a mexican theme night with one of the better buffet meals we've had. The desserts were good tonight as well. Tommorrw expected to be mostly relaxing, perhaps will go to the steak restaurant

Beaches and pools

2004-11-29T14:49:22Z

This morning was spent getting oriented and walking along the beach. The afternoon was spent mostly hanging out at the pool then swimming in the ocean. Dinner tonight is at the mexican seafood restaurant. Tommorrw is a tour of puerto vallarta

Beaches and pools

2004-11-29T14:49:19Z

11-27-04_1429.jpg

2004-11-27T22:32:49Z

Peurto vallarta