VARIOUS THINGS

After Thursday, I found myself with nothing too pressing to do. When you're in school, that feeling should worry you. A student, especially a grad student, should always have something pressing to do.

Yes, I do a have a proposal due on Tuesday, but for some reason I'm not too worried about it. I should be, since I have no idea what I'm going to propose. It's a proposal for a short project I'll be doing for a class. It'll get done somehow and on time, and if it's crap, then it's crap, because I know I'll have tried my best on it.

I also have to make an hour long (or thereabouts) presentation in about two weeks. This isn't even for marks or a class! Here at SJC, we have a Resident Speaker Series. It gives the residents a chance to speak, lecture style, about some topic. It doesn't have to do with your research, it can be anything you have knowledge of. The talks are generally attended by other residents. The impression I get is that these talks have sparse attendance. To be honest, some people choose really dense subjects, which they genuinely may be passionate about, but leave others wondering if there's an episode of Family Matters on TV. Others give light-hearted talks, while they aren't rooted in academia, are much more appreciated.

Anyways, a moron like me doesn't know a whole lot of anything, so I can only give a fluff talk. I've decided to entitle my talk, "Video Game Testing : A Dream Job... Or Is It?". I realized a long time ago, the job of a video game tester is pretty unique. Whenever I told people what I did, invariably their eyes light up, and they start asking questions. From this, I gathered most people have inaccurate perceptions of what goes on during testing. My hope is that my talk will shed some light on what testers do and what goes on during the testing phase.

My goal is also to keep people entertained. If my talk about entertainment software, doesn't entertain people, then I will have failed horribly. I'm planning on having some hands-on demonstrations of certain testing activities. I'll pick a volunteer out of the crowd and get them to participate. I won't give away what I have in mind, except to say it'll be fun. I'm also going to have a PS2 setup with my lecture. While I'll try to keep the focus on the general activity of testing, I'm going to get specific with a particular game. I've decided to use NHL 2002 for most of my specific examples. It makes sense since I believe I did a good job testing that particular game. Near the end, I'm going to show the audience something really neat with NHL 2002. Again, I won't say anything more.

I'm kinda looking forward to writing this presentation, except for two things. I've never done a presentation on Powerpoint before. I don't know how to make the slides and I know nothing about those fancy transitions and fade-ins. I'm hoping the learning curve will be quite shallow. The other thing is that I don't have a laptop to put my presentation on. I will have to rely on the kindness of my fellow residents to let me borrow their laptop. I must remind any SJC resident with a laptop that I occasionally bake cookies and cakes, and a trade just might be possible.

Wow, it's getting late. I need to go over some PHP files. I will talk to you guys later. Oh, one more thing, that was a hell of a save.

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LAZY THURSDAY

After working all evening on Wednesday to finish an assignment, I really had nothing planned for Thursday. Of course, I stayed up late, heading to bed around 2am. I woke up around 8:45am and headed off to 9:30am class.

The prof was a bit frazzled when he arrived in the classroom. He announced that this was going to be a short class.

"My wife and I having been moving for the last two days, so I basically didn't get any sleep last night. I'm pretty out of it."

Well, he seemed pretty with it to me. For a computer science prof, I've noticed he knows a lot about mechanical engineering concepts. His knowledge of finite element analysis goes way beyond mine, though I didn't take FEM in undergrad. He also seems to know as much as I do about fracture mechanics. Today, he gave the class some background on how metals get stronger as you deform them. He went into grain boundaries and dislocations in the crystalline structure. I was impressed. I had to remind myself this guy's Ph.D is in computer science.

He stopped about a half hour early, which was fine by me, since, as usual, we got into some heavy duty mathematics. It was about 10:30am at this point, and I didn't have another class until 5pm. You'd think I could have probably got a lot of work done, and you'd be right, except I didn't.

I grabbed some breakfast from the Barn and then headed home. I'm reading this book called Physics For Game Developers out of my own interest. Today, I went on the book's web site and looked at the errata sheet. Holy crap are there a lot of errors in this book. It took me nearly an hour to go through each one and correct the copy of book I have. I hope the library appreciates what I did to their book.

After that it was a nap. I had intended it to be for only an hour or less, but I didn't set my alarm. Total nap duration? 12:30pm to nearly 3pm. Oh well. I forced myself to get up and sat in front of my computer to learn some PHP. It's a scripting language I need to learn for my software engineering project course. I took it really slow. I wish I had gotten through more of it today.

Before long it was time to get ready for my 5pm class. It was a good class. I handed in my assignment and got the last one back. The prof warned us that the marks weren't really good this time, but when I got mine back, I had no complaints at all.

After class, I had some dinner and the rest of the evening was kind of a blur after that. So, here I am. I try not write these what I had for lunch type of posts anymore, but sometimes that's all that happens to you in day.

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MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH

I am sorry that sometimes, people miss one of my new posts by exactly one minute. Doh! Always reload a minute later just to be sure!

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EXHAUSTED

Boy, am I tired right now. I had a twelve hour day. I was up at 8:30am and my day didn't finish until 8:30pm.

I had to invigilate a quiz as part of my TA duties tonight. I was stuck in a stuffy, hot, and crowded classroom from 6:30pm to 8:30pm.

I don't have to be up until 10am tomorrow. The logical thing to do would be to go to bed now, wake up early and then do some work. I don't work very well in the morning though, so tired as I am, I'll probably try to get some stuff done before 2:30am, which I'll probably shoot for as my bedtime.

It's interesting what can drive a person to ignore fatigue, to clear your mind, and to sharpen your focus. Caffeine is one thing. It's a dangerous game though, since too much of that stuff will leave just as ineffective. Anger is another thing. I found this out in undergrad. If you just find one thing to be really angry about, you can channel that anger towards getting some work done. I tend not to use this very often as you really don't want to live your life this way. If I may borrow some terms from an ancient order of peacekeepers, anger, fear, and agression are paths towards a darker side of living. It's the easiest and most seductive way to get your ass in gear, but it's done for all the wrong reasons.

The best way to movitate yourself is sheer determination. You simply rely on your will to get things done, no matter what stands in your way. People have finished assignments in one night, written an essay in five hours, formulated presentations in an afternoon, and carried their best friends up a volcanic mountain on their shoulders.

Having said this though, I'll prolly watch some stuff on IFILM until I get too tired to do anything else.

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AN OPPORTUNITY LOST

Over one year ago, Ryan Allan, a former co-worker of mine, embarked on an ambitious journey to launch a web site to end all web sites. Spurned on by the fizzling successes of this site, ryannordman.com, and garrettknights.com, Ryan thought he could make his mark with www.flyingboxstudios.com. No one knew what he was going to do, but most people assumed it had to do with his series of Flying Box games that he designed.

Once he secured a domain, he threw up a "Coming Soon" page and there that page rested, complete with an annoying spelling mistake. Months went by without any word from Ryan. One day, he corrected the spelling mistake. Then over Christmas, he changed the page once more, promising that the site was "nearly complete".

No launch ever came though and the beginning of February rolled around. Time for his domain to be renewed. It was not renewed. In a matter of weeks, the domain will be let back into the public for anyone to claim once again.

Sure, it was $20 US down the drain, but the greater loss was the loss of what could have been. If one can take a lesson from this it's if you ever buy a domain, do something with it.

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