To balance off the development geek, here's some anime and gaming geekery.

This song definitely makes me and Jilly think of Happenstance. I'm linking to the full version rather than just the portion the use for the ending because its more evident that way.

So I've been rushing through the next release of my current project so that I can go to ICC next week. And to Arlington (for work) the week after that. And I need to help orient a new developer starting Monday over in India. Its going to be a crazy two weeks.

( What comes next is very, very nerdy. )

Whew. I know very few people probably cared about that, but really I wanted to get it into print somewhere.

It has, actually, been quite a long month. I started it out by developing the flu - I spent pretty much a week curled up in bed and on the couch. And its been lingering since then, though it has by now devolved into some sinus symptoms. Nothing too much to worry about. In the course of the flu, though, I learned that I am, apparently, allergic to amoxycillin. This realization coming when I took the antibiotics for a few days and developed a pretty bad rash. Like I said - not so great.

Being sick for most of the month has led to other things. I wanted to get back to Aikido this month, but that pretty much entirely failed. I'm hoping to go back in October, instead. I am really feeling the need to get some exercise, to be honest - I'm larger than I've ever been before, and I'm starting to really feel the health effects of such.

The house is doing pretty good. I replaced my broken thermostat about a week ago - the new one seems to be working just fine.

Work goes well. We're doing a release of Steam, as we get set for the final push to get the business team to actually use this application. Which will make their lives infinitely easier, but it will admittedly take a bit of time to convince them that it will. At the same time we're starting planning for our next large project - a build-out of an integrated reporting platform. We've hired a developer in India who will, apparently be reporting to me. So I'll be working on that challenge at the same time as I'm trying to figure out the architecture for this new product.

The Camarilla is the Camarilla. We played some this month - made it to the Boston game. Really excited about what DiPesa is planning to do with the Boston mage game. Also interested to see what happens with the local venue. Changeling is interesting, as always. I haven't done a lot of character writing in quite a long time, but we'll see what happens. ICC is coming up - we've got everything all set to go.

I've run two sessions of my Star Wars game, with the third being this Wednesday. It has, so far, been a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to running it. The characters are seeming to click very well, and I've had fun running their attempts to get away from the Hutt crime lord who screwed them and their attempts to get hired by his primary rival (Karrde) instead. This week will involve them getting their ship squared away and starting their first job.

I finished the entirety of the Night's Dawn trilogy. It was, in the end, pretty good sci-fi. I thought the last book lost its focus a little bit and had plot threads that seemed to just peter out until the big reveal and the resolution of the book. But over-all, it was a good trilogy. I'm working on Lieutenant Leary Commanding. Its military sci-fi, of a similar bent to the Harrington novels. In the end, it really is Patrick O'Brian in space - even the science of the universe works out to ensure that there are analogies. This sort of science fiction is, generally, a fun read. They don't, generally, present some sort of sweeping, futuristic view of where humanity is going. Humanity is, in fact, generally much the same. Some have them with a slightly more developed social and political structure (the Harrington novels, arguably), others have them with a less developed social and political structure (the Leary novels). Science is, of course, more advanced - but its always carefully presented to ensure that there are plenty of points of reference. The point of them, though, is not really to present a vision of the future. Its to present people in this future environment and how they react to events which, in the end, are caused by many of the same reasons that events are caused by today.

I also finished the first season of Bleach. I've purchased the second one to start viewing it. In-line with this, I've started reading the manga. I really like Bleach - its so far been a very interesting series and I'm definitely enjoying watching it in order rather than randomly catching Adult Swim episodes.

Comics-wise, Blackest Night is awesome. They're starting to get some big reveals out of the way, and I'm looking forward to the change of pace that's promised for the next few issues in the mini-series and the next Green Lantern. I've enjoyed the three tie-in series so far. Not entirely sure about the next three, though. I'll probably pick up Flash, but I'm not sure I care enough about JSA or Wonder Woman to follow them.

This weekend will probably be a weekend of rest - we did a lot of running around in September, including two trips out to Boston (congratulations Chris!). We'll use this weekend to unwind and relax.

Not a whole lot more to write at this point. I'll keep trying to do regular updates, but it will be dependent on time.

Gah. Having read forsaken-ooc for the past half-week, I'm reminded that the Camarilla OOC lists are just about completely useless. Every discussion turns into a veritable fight and its pretty clear that any amount of discussion held on the list will change absolutely nothing.

Time to reduce my bandwidth usage.

Not actually a lot to write about this week. I'm in the middle of reading The Neutronium Alchemist, which has been a really enjoyable read so far. Its a thousand page book, though, so that's simply not going to happen overnight.

Wednesday night I had the character creation session for my new Star Wars game. I'm going to be playing with the Saga edition rules - I picked up the rulebook on a lark a few months ago. It turns out, the book is really good. In terms of production values, one of the best. They're using a non-standard size, but the book is full color inside and all the illustrations are nice. Every book in the line, so far in fact, has had similar production values.

The rules set is not bad either. The biggest problem with Wizard's first edition of Star Wars was that it, quite simply, felt entirely too much like D&D in space. Proceeding editions have slowly worked on fixing that issue with Saga, I believe, being the pinnacle. The number of classes has been reduced pretty drastically - there are now only five classes - Jedi, Noble, Scoundrel, Scout, and Soldier. Instead of this cutting down the amount of flexibility that you have with a character, however, they have actually managed to increase this. They do this via talents - trees of abilities that characters get access to gradually as they gain level. Talents turn out to be one of the primary ways they add new things into the system - every sourcebook has new talents for at least some of the classes. Two nobles can, therefore, look very, very different.

Skills have been drastically changed as well. There are fewer of them, I believe. There is also no concept of skill ranks - you do not get skill points each level. You are either trained in a skill (in which case you get a +5) or you aren't (in which case you don't get a bonus, and might not be able to make a check at all). You get an initial set of trained skills at character creation - additional trained skills come from taking a feat.

The combat system has been tuned a little - characters add 1/2 their level to damage pulls, for instance. Vitality and HP have again been combined, but a new condition track has been added to represent situations that HP doesn't model very well. Heroes (as Star Wars calls characters) are much more resilient - all characters can basically regenerate half their HP once a day, for instance. Heroes also get access to destiny points, which can drastically change a situation. Starship combat, as before, seems to work pretty much like character combat, with a few added wrinkles. They added a dogfighting system, for instance, that is really the equivalent of character grapples. A supplement (Starships of the Galaxy. Amazon link not included because it is literally impossible to find a copy of this book. I tried.) includes a system that gives PCs access to maneuvers that give them an edge in combat. It also provides the concept of linking your PC's destiny with their ship (ala Han Solo) and a ship modification system.

Jedi have, also, been revamped pretty extensively. Jedi do get talents which are based on the Force. They also have a Use the Force skill which gives them some abilities. The vast majority of their abilities, though, are going to come through Force Powers - these are the traditional abilities of the Jedi. The caveat being that a character can use a power once per encounter. I haven't checked to see if you can pick up a power twice.

All in all, I'm really happy with this game. The caveat being that I haven't actually run a game with the system yet - I'm eager to see how well it goes.

In addition to reading lots of Star Wars, new comics were also released this week.

( Spoilers Within )

Thursdays have been kind of turning into my geeky media posts. I think I'll keep going with that.

Having already bought Auron, I ordered the corresponding Yuna figure from E-bay last week. It arrived today. I'm still pretty amazed at the detail put into these figures - both Auron and Yuna's costume are pretty much perfect. The detail on Yuna's skirt and Auron's costume are amazing - complete down to the presumed effect of wind. Jilly helped me set them up on my bookcase and they look really great. I might order the Tidus figure next, but I think next month I will be picking up Saint Walker.

Finished The Reality Dysfunction over the past week. This is about of thousand pages of space opera. I'm always a fan of books with sweeping, long-ranging plotlines that effect lots of characters. I've seen it done badly, though - generally when characters are added and then simply forgotten. Peter Hamilton doesn't make that mistake. Every single character introduced in the book has fairly significant play, and has a definite role to play in the plot. This comes with the exception of a single character, but its made very clear that she's going to be playing a huge role in the next book. That said, I shouldn't be saying this more than once in a year - you wouldn't think a plot involving the returning dead and a space opera would mix very well, but it totally does. I've got The Neutronium Alchemist and am reading it now. It is, again, a thousand pages.

And, of course, there were comics released this week.

( Spoileriffic! )

The week is almost at an end, which is a nice thing. There's a pretty busy weekend planned at this point. Syracuse Requiem on Friday night. Saturday we're doing lunch and a movie and then playing Changeling. Sunday I'm getting together with some old college friends. At some point I'd like to lay down some more weed killer on parts of my lawn I think it didn't take on.

Sat down Wednesday night and watched the Gundam Seed Destiny Final Plus episode that they put out. This is the expanded version of the final episode of Gundam Seed Destiny - 45 minutes as compared to 20 minutes. It, actually, helped a lot. The biggest problem with the ending of Gundam Seed Destiny is that they had to wrap it up too fast. The final battle took place entirely in the last episode - they didn't have time for the kind of character moments or tension building that they needed for an episode like this and, as a result, the entire thing had a feeling of just being an explosion, a couple lines of dialog, and then some explosions - really short service was paid to resolving Shinn's storyline and Rey Za Barrel's change of sides was very, very sudden. The new episode managed to solve a lot of these issues - the episode felt dramatic rather than simply being a 20 minute Gundam slug-fest. They even managed to have time to wrap-up the series in a way the original just didn't do - they followed it through to the political after-effects and to a short meeting between Shinn and Kira at the memorial in Orb. All in all, this was definitely worth it.

Also picked up a bunch of comics this week - this was actually a pretty heavy week, due too their being three different Blackest Night tie-ins, two "Batman" books, Titans, Adventure Comics and Action Comics (now with 100% more Codename: Patriot action).

( Thoughts on Comics - INCREDIBLY Spoilery )

Whew. Next week should be shorter, since there are less books coming out.

For those interested, I've just posted a new entry to my development blog. Using ASP.NET AJAX and Web Services to Show Progress on Long Tasks, part 1 - Breaking the Task Up

So since I usually end up just duplicating content, I thought I would save all this journal's readers a lengthy read on jQuery and just point interested readers to my new blog entry - http://netbard.blogspot.com/2009/07/jquery.html

This summer is, definitely, strange. There are days of pure sun and blue skies, but then they get drowned out by rain storm after rain storm that hits the city. I don't think we've gotten into the eighties very much so far - but then again we haven't put out the air conditioners, so perhaps that is for the best.

Work continues apace. We have released version 1.0 of our survey builder and player to be QA'd. We haven't released it to the (semi)-adoring public(co-workers) yet. But this application has been put through its paces before, so I expect a slow trickle of bugs that need to get fixed. The idea is that we'll have teams shadowing their survey projects in the system for the first month or so and then turn on the flood-gates. This is, really, pretty exciting - this is an application suite which I pitched the initial idea for in front of the executives back when we were still Genesee Survey Services. It is a major milestone both in this company and, possibly, in my career.

So naturally, I go into work each day and continue working on the features needed for version 1.1. Life works like that, I've found - any milestones that are crossed simply lead to another road to walk down. Which is pretty good - I'd hate to be completely done, what would be the fun in that.

My birthday is coming up in the next couple of weeks. So is jilliko 's. And the Ren Faire starts this weekend - I believe we're planning on bringing a fairly large contingent (4-5 people) out there on Saturday. We'll stay all day, then go home and collapse on the comfy, comfy couches.

--
And just because I feel like it and have been watching too much Gundam Seed Destiny, a QOTD: 

"Life Goes On, passionately.
As long as I am alive,
Even if I were to lose sight of my real self
Life Goes On, I want to protect it."

-- Life Goes On, Mica Arisaka

The lesson learned from the previous entry is, by the way, to not use Microsoft Word 2007 to attempt to write and publish blog posts to livejournal. The publishing interface doesn't work, for some reason, and copying the entry from Word to Semagic once I installed the client made for some very messy HTML.

One of my favorite scenes from any anime. Massively spoilery regarding Gundam Seed.
( Spoilers behind the cut... )

So I've been working with jQuery for the past few weeks - this is an open-source javascript library that was included with the Telerik controls we purchased. It is also, I believe, included with Visual Studio, or will be in a future release. Let me tell you, it makes things a lot easier. One example - moving table rows up or down in the table. This is actually quite difficult to do in Firefox (IE provides a non-standard method to do it for you) - the only way to do it that I've found is to clone the affected table row, remove the old one from the table and add the new one. I hate cloning objects. I'm not going to include the code on how to do this, because I didn't write it. But here's a link - http://www.w3hobbyist.com/web-designing/moving-table-rows-up-and-down-with-javascript/

Once I figured out that this was going to be hard to do, I thought I would try to do it in jQuery. I hit the documentation site for jQuery (http://docs.jquery.com/) and found the answer really quickly. In the examples below, pretend that tableRow is the row of the table that needs to be moved.

Moving an item down in the table:Moving an item up in the table:That is,actually, pretty amazing.

I keep loosing this link, so you're all being subjected to it.

Good weekend - beautiful weather on Saturday and alright weather on Sunday. A fair amount of gaming, in fact - played Rochester's new Mage game on Saturday night and played a soft-RP Changeling session on Sunday evening. Cooked BBQ chicken which turned out really well and placed some of our lawn furniture out into the back lawn. I'm fairly happy with how the weekend turned out.

Today was less great. It was a very gray day, and I finished the stuff I wanted to get done very quickly. Called the doctor and had to re-schedule an appointment, which will be annoying. But I did leave a half hour early and get time with Jilly before she had to run out to rehearsal.

And now I shall enjoy my very comfortable couch while WWE Raw plays and I start to install Visual Studio 2008 onto my home laptop. And realize that despite the difficulties of the day, things are still wonderful and will always be wonderful - even when they are hard.

It is really, really wet out there. For a period of time, it was raining hard enough that the water was dripping through the closed flu of the fireplace. It has stopped raining that hard now, at least, but its really wet out. I have a feeling that this front is going to lead us to some pretty hot temperatures, as well, I have a feeling we'll be wanting the air conditioners sooner rather than later.

Today was good, though. Jilly had a doctor's appointment in the morning and then it was off to work. I finished up the last task needed for our release. And then spent a few hours tuning our daily build and our automated test build. There's a development blog entry formulating in my head about how awesome the combination of powershell and ms build are. We'll see if they came out.

This was a very productive day. I spent last night working on a regional plotkit which I sent out to be reviewed. I'm going to release it at the end of the week so that VSTs have plenty of time to work with it. The Network shall live!

Today was similarly great. Craig and I reviewed what was left to me for this monthly release, and both of us commented that it was a fairly big chunk of code. So, of course, I whipped out all but one last case before I left for the day. And the last case should be easily buildable tomorrow or Friday. Which is awesome. I'll need to look at the next release after that, though, because its huuuuuge. Probably we'll push some cases to the release two weeks after.