ChezWorld

Are you kidding me..?

Programming section is up!

http://www.chezworld.com/programming/

It’s been a while hasn’t it? The last time I posted something I was unemployed. But now I am employed at Lockheed Martin as a full time simulation developer. If you’ve never heard of Lockheed Martin, it’s the world’s largest defense contractor and they make military-ish type things. It’s a decent job: the people are nice and hours are very flexible (half day fridays are awesome). As for the work, I haven’t gotten into anything too deep yet but it’s the first time I’ve been part of a development team greater than two people in size so I’m excited about that.

I would be lying if I said that my job was the only thing distracting me these days. I have a wonderful girlfriend, Sally, who I’ve been seeing for a few months now (6 months in Feb.) I usually don’t like to talk about girls until I know exactly what’s up, but I know what’s up with her and I’m really happy. The only hard part is the semi-long distance. She lives in long island while I’m still in south jersey so that’s pretty lame. I’ve been learning NJ Transit pretty well though.

On the gaming front I’ve been playing the same two games for the past 2 months: Left 4 Dead 2 and Guild Wars and I can’t get enough of them. L4D2 needs no explanation, but I feel like Guild Wars is the most under appreciated game in the history of PC games amongst everyone I know. There’s just so much to do in the game both PvE and PvP wise. And competitively it takes a lot of skill to play. I really like that the expansions are horizontal (meaning that the new content is spread amongst all areas of gameplay) rather than vertical (meaning the new content is solely focused on adding to the end game which obsoletes old content like WoW does). I am really looking forward to Guild Wars 2 but there has been no release day announcement so it’s going to be a while. I’ve pretty much stopped playing dance games all together but the community is still amazing and I will try to be a part of it as long as I can.

Other random thoughts that I don’t feel like putting into paragraph form:

-The Old Republic Q1 2011 YES
-Raquetball is cool
-Rock climbing is very cool
-I will never look at the Jersey Shore the same way
-Time to make a music game engine
-Time to make GAMES
-I really want to play poker
-The Battlestar Galactica game is amazing and I need people to play with me
-I need to do more physical activity
-PAX EAST!!!!

I placed 2nd in an ITG Sightread Tournament and the final song was absolutely ridiculous.

Awesome song though!

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/07/ea-puts-sexual-bounty-on-the-heads-of-its-own-booth-babes.ars

One of my favorite PC franchises is coming back to life. Here’s a teaser trailer:

http://pc.ign.com/dor/objects/18954/mech-warrior-project/videos/mechwarrior_trl_phoenix_70709.html

http://www.hcn.zaq.ne.jp/cabic508/rsf/mq.swf

Music section is up. Go have a look (or a listen!)

A nice little summary of video-game featured South Park episodes with clips:

http://tv.ign.com/articles/100/1000492p1.html

A very interesting article on how the underdogs can win if they think unconventionally:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

So it’s finally over. I am graduating from RIT tomorrow (w/ honors!) and it’ll be the end of a very interesting 5 year period. So what am I doing afterward?

I’ll be in good old South Jersey for the summer doing a lot of things actually:

1. Working on my Programming/Game Dev portfolio – So much stuff to learn. My first project will most likely making an online poker game, just to gain some experience with networking. Possibly also learning iPhone stuff.

2. Working on some websites – I want to make a tournament section for GrooveStats, finish ChezWorld v3, and start my top secret project GETTYBUNGA. Even I don’t know what it is yet.

3. Traveling – tentative visits include San Diego, Las Vegas, Lake George, insert random Anime con/game tournament here

4. Working remotely part-time for the web company I did my Co-ops with. I’m so looking forward to working in pajama pants.

5. RELAXING – Probably will be doing this more than anything.

And after summer? No idea, but I’m not worried. We’ll see how things pan out.

In other news I finally sold and transferred GrooveStats to the new owners. It was more hassle than I thought it would be but they were nice enough to keep access to the server so I could implement the tournament section.

“‘Noob’ could well be the millionth word in the English language – a milestone set to be reached within the coming weeks.

Paul Payack, chief analyst at the Global Language Monitor, claims that the “average persons vocabulary is fewer than 14,000 words out of these million that are available. A person who is linguistically gifted would only use 70,000 words.

every 25,000 times eh? Time to start spamming ChezMix.

From Kotaku:

“A World of Warcraft subscriber has accidentally been given a powerful in-game item normally reserved for internal testing. And what’d he do with it? Why, he used it.

Who to believe, who to believe?”

I would’ve done the same thing. =)

The LAN party I went to on campus was pretty good. Played some TF2 and L4D and I somehow won the Unreal Tournament III tourney. Funny thing is, I had only played it once for 20 minutes after I installed it and never played it again until the LAN.

I just bought a 750GB External hard drive for only $60. =)

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=1304721

Metallica came out yesterday and I’m loving every second of it. It is so insanely hard for both Drums and Guitar. Dave (Mr. Kingoflight) quite appropriately labeled it the ITG of band games.

Here’s me sightreading the Expert+ chart for Blood and Thunder. (Expert+ is a new difficulty mode for drums which feature heavy double bass note patterns).

Some other vids I took last night:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaeeB-TpLbQ -- Foo Fighters -- Stacked Actors -- Expert Sightread FC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK3YPAQGM6o - Metallica -- One Expert FC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWDf8RmUOJ4 -- System of a Down -- Toxicity -- 5 Star

Dinosaur Rave