Yes, you read that correctly! Kickball! Some friends from work started up a kickball team in the local “Underdog” Seattle coed kickball league! Who knew that a game we hated in 4th grade (at least those of us who weren’t very athletic in 4th grade!) would be so fun now! And boy do the little kids at the park seem confused when they see adults kicking that playground ball! To keep up with our team, keep an eye on the schedule page

A status page for us to see what everyone is up to from one place.

Because my XBOX 360 is autographed by Steve Balmer! So there!

I won this autographed XBOX360 at a charity auction for Clyde Hill Elementary school in Bellevue, WA. It is the pro version, with an extra wireless controller and the media remote, and PGR3 and Kameo. HD Gaming here I come!

Reviews of the 360, Project Gotham Racing 3, Kameo, and the new Ghost Recon game after the jump.

With Xbox Live, you can get yourself a snazzy little “gamercard” for your website/whatnot by inserting a little html. XFire has the same kindof thing with their “miniprofiles”, but i like the look of the live version better, so i did a little hackery.

XBox Live version

My Xfire version

Specifics after the jump! bonus points if you know what “famous person” HiroProtagonist is. :p

I previously posted a review of my Springfield 1911, and after using my Marvel Precision Unit 1 1911 .22 LR conversion kit for a while, here are my notes on that. This is a continuation of a previous article, about my Springfield Armory black stainless 1911.

This is one of the most popular pages on the whole site! For more information, you can also see the update to this review, one year later, and another update, the two year review!

Our paper mache Bobblehead halloween costumes were the best halloween costumes EVER! About 40 hours of work, several weeks worth of newspapers, 2 giant balloons, 20 little bottles of paint, 5 lbs of flour and some hot glue make a pretty good costume! More details and pics inside!

before

after

Review of my new 1911, a Springfield Armory PX9154L, or if you like long names, “Tactical Combat Black Stainless Steel Custom Loaded 1911-A1”.

The fourth and final class of the UW Extension Game Development certificate program is done! More later!

Asheron’s Call is a MMORPG by Turbine Games. Originally released in 1999 and published by microsoft, in 2003, the franchise was bought entirely back by Turbine. A 3-rd party utility application, Decal, was created by players with some programming savvy, which allowed other programming end users to create plug-ins that integrate with the AC client. This allowed for the automation of tedious in game tasks, tracking of statistics, drawing of extra things on the screen, and any other number of things which Turbine would not, or could not add themselves. (for a list of the large number of plug-ins, see sites like Decal Dev or AC Heaven)

I have written 3 plug-ins for Asheron’s Call using decal; one which tracks monsters you kill and “trophy” items you recieve, and submits it to a website (Trophy Hunter), another which acts as a shopping cart when interacting with players who are running special “Trade Bot” plug-ins to act as vendors (Bargain Hunter), and one which tracks Player vs Player kills (PK Hunter). This article covers some design and implementation details that third plug-in, PKHunter.

Just finished up the third class of the Game Development certificate program offered by the University of Washington Extension system.

The adv graphics class was, like the first class, taught by Bretton Wade, who works in the XBox group at Microsoft. I don’t know exactly what his title is, but he’s neck deep in the graphics part of the X360, so he’s in the know. (If you google him, you’ll find all kinds of papers and stuff. He’s the BSP tree FAQ maintainer too.)

Other details, as well as my final presentation with screenshots and all that is available after the jump.

Since the STEAM friends stuff hasn’t been working lately, my friends and i are trying out this cross game browser (didn’t gamespy used to do this? are they just a website now?) that we can use to find eachother when playing counterstrike…

Here’s my profile thing (click it to see more info about what i’ve been playing):

To get more info, go to xfire.com for downloads and all that. So if you want to play along, now you know how to find me!

My Mac Plus case mod is complete! Its the most powerful Mac Plus ever in existance! (Athlon64!)

4/24/05: updated with pics

Just finished up the second ‘mester of the Game Development certificate program offered by the University of Washington Extension system.

The AI class, taught by Steve Rabin of the AI Game Programming Wisdom series of books, was pretty awesome! We added debug graphics, a real time profiler, a state machine system, flocking, A* pathfinding, coordinated behavior, terrain analysis, and gameplay to our game engines created for the first class. More details about the content after the jump.

I just finished the first ‘mester of Game Development certificate program offered by the University of Washington Extension system. System? Whatever. Anyway, the first quarter is over and i learned more than I can type here! If you want to see how stupid my stuff ended up, there’s a link after the jump. Now that the quarter is over maybe i’ll have more time to update this silly site. But probably not!

I’m back into playing AC (Asheron’s Call) again, so i need to go back through and update all of the plug-ins i’ve written! Since Trophy Hunter and PK Hunter are all working fine, but Bargain Hunter wasn’t working completely, so i had to update it first! BargainHunter 2.0.1.0 does all kinds of new things! Colors for imbues, more filtering options, keyword filtering, it works better than ever!

Went to mount st. helens this weekend. Took a buncha pics. Too bad it was cloudy (the norm!), so there were no “spectacular” pics. There were quite a few good ones with sun rays, though. Here’s a panorama, though. this is at 8%, its 8 pics wide. The full image is 10444x1471!

When i get some more time i’ll post up some more, though.

I recently purchased a naviPod remote for my iPod, because I use my iPod every day at work. Because of the layout of my office, there isn’t a convenient place to put the ipod and control it. I used the Apple supplied corded remote for a while, but then when I took my iPod somewhere else, I had to untangle even more cords. I love having a remote, but I do have some issues with the design of the remote…

Modding a mac classic case to hold this web server. I already have the LCD monitor in it, now i just needs to squeeze the rest in. Pics up soon, hopefully.

The passport 8500 has a remote mount kit that has a power light, a warning light, and a mute button. My mod is to use a different set of lights for both power and warning, have them inside of a button that fits in the cigarette lighter spot. There is also a switch to turn of the detector completely. This is all still a work in progress and isn’t fully “implemented” yet. :) Follow the link for details of my scheme.

I updated the neon page today after i did some rewiring and got some better pictures of what they look like for real.

I also took some pictures of the new hardwire setup for the radar detector, but i’m to tired to put those up right now.