Stuff and Things

Well, actually it’s been over a year. Not much of note has been going on, but I thought I’d write about the most blogworthy events of the last year or so. Besides said events, I’ve been coding various things, working at my job, and reactivating my Guide Dogs for the Blind application.

May: I purchased an iMac

My good old Dell Dimension had served me well, but at last, it had begun to slow down and fail. Last year, the video card needed to be replaced because it was making the system unstable, and this year the CMOS battery died, which somehow coincided with a decrease in responsiveness. Every few minutes or so, the system would completely lock up for 5 seconds or so, then return to normal. I had considered getting a nice Asus desktop with Windows 7, but somewhere along the way, the idea of purchasing a Mac came along. Eventually, I decided on a 21.5 inch iMac, with an Intel Core 2 Duo at 3.06ghz, 4GB RAM and a 1TB hard drive. So far, the experience has been wonderful. I’m sad to say I haven’t been able to entirely switch away from Windows, as there are some apps that don’t have Mac equivalents that I use, but I am trying. I have only had one bad experience with the Mac so far. In October, I started getting kernel panics when the Mac came out of sleep, and an inability to reach the login screen. Eventually, I brought it in to be examined, and the hard drive failed two tests, and was eventually replaced.

July: The ACB conference and convention

This year, I decided to go to the 49th anual conference and convention of the American Council of the Blind. I was still paying off my iMac and Nokia N86 I had bought, so the money situation was very tight, but I still managed to make room for convention costs. In total, the whole trip was roughly $1200.00. That includes administration fees, event fees, plane tickets and hotel costs. That was only the second time I had flown by myself, the first time being when I flew from Minneapolis to Amsterdam, and then on to Germany for a month-long internship in 2007. I had managed to find a roommate, so the hotel costs were split. I don’t think I could have gone if I hadn’t been able to find someone to share the room with. I went to the Grand Canyon tour, which was really fun. That included going to a really awesome reservation where we had lunch and did some shopping, going to the park building to take a look at the different plants in the environment, heading to a nice restaurant for dinner, going to the edge of the canyon, and finally going to a general store for some more shopping before returning to the hotel. We left at about 06:30 AM and returned at around 01:00 AM the next day, if I recall correctly. I also signed up for all of the BITS events. BITS stands for Blind Information Technology Specialists. I met a lot of nice people who share my interests, and heard a wonderful presentation on Apple computers and portable devices. I was also able to take a look at the new iPhone 4. It was amazing! I was a bit nervous holding it… The whole thing seemed like nothing more than two rectangular pieces of glass and a metal chassis. Shattering one of those would be very easy. OF course I went down to the exhibit hall, and saw a lot of really cool stuff, but the only thing I ended up buying was acane tip for my then tipless cane, which had lost its tip in an accident with a couple of elevator doors. That tip is probably still at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Haha.

September: I bought an iPod Touch

After I bought my iMac, I was finding myself more and more interested in other Apple devices. I once joked to my mom that after the iMac, I had been become sick with Apple fever. Heh. On the same day that Steve was due to announce the latest generation of his popular iDevices, My mom and I went to the state Fair. After a really fun day, we went to a Weird Al Yancovic concert. After we got home, I stayed up all night listening to the announcement on Apple’s website, and then reading news articles about the announcement. Somehow, I managed to make it through the next day, when I went to work, without falling asleep at my desk. I was thinking about preordering right away, but I thought it might be better to get my iPod from the local Apple store at the Mall of America, but when I was told that there wouldn’t be any cases available at the same time, I decided to preorder after all. That was September 8th. I received my iPod Touch 64GB on September 13th. Getting Voiceover set up was extremely easy. I really didn’t start messing with apps until mid October, after my Mac’s hard drive had been replaced. As of this writing, I have 21 apps on my iPod, all neatly sorted into folders. I’m really enjoying my iPod Touch, and I did consider the iPhone as my next phone before I bought my Nokia N86 in April, but later discovered that AT&T’s plans were too highly priced and offered too little in the way of features.

October: Birthday.

Well, actually this was pretty uneventful compared to the other notable events of the year. My mom, my sister and I went to the Olive Garden for my birthday dinner, and afterward, I was allowed to pick out a new bathrobe to replace the one I had accidentally left in the hotel in Phoenix at the ACB convention.

November: Thanksgiving and cell phone dilemma

Thanksgiving was very fun, actually. My uncle and his kids and my grandfather all came over for thanksgiving. We had the usual thanksgiving dishes, which were excellent. We played a few of my CDs in the background, and after the meal we had some wonderful pie and icecream that my uncle provided. We played a game called Say What, which is a game where you are provided with a famous phrase. Each of the five balls on the game are assigned one or more words of the phrase, and the phrase is scrambled, so you have to rearrange the balls to reconstruct the correct phrase. Lately, I’ve been having a problem. My new phone has poor reception, and it’s really been annoying me. I get almost no bars at all in my room, and even when my phone has a lot of bars, it will randomly lose the signal, requiring me to either restart the phone, or set the phone to offline mode, then reactivate the general profile to reacquire the signal. As a result, I have been wondering whether I would be better off selling my Symbian phones and applications and switching to a different phone, probably using a different phone OS. Like I said, I’ve considered the iPhone, but AT&T’s plans are too expensive for what they offer, so the only choice is to get a phone with the Android OS. After all considerations, I’ve decided that within the next few months, I’m probably going to replace my Nokia N86 with a T-Mobile G2. I’m going to sell my N86, TALKS and my copy of K-NFB Reader Mobile.

Besides the above events, I’ve been doing some random coding, I’ve gotten back into Twitter, and I’m trying to get my own apartment and get back into Guide Dogs for the Blind. Among my other coding projects, I’ve been experimenting with BGT (Blastbay Game Toolkit), an audiogame engine developed by a good friend of mine, Philip Bennefall. I’ve developed one sample game so far, called 23 Bricks, and I’m working on developing a highly object-oriented sidescroller. Both have their own Subversion repositories, but only the former’s is publically viewable. The svn repository for 23 Bricks can be located at http://svn.jasonsw.com/23bricks. It contains code not available from the sample game download at the Blastbay site, and experimental code for multiplayer support, though I haven’t finished that.

I understand the arguments that other people have submitted about BGT not being a propper programming language, but unless you plan on creating games with advanced features like 3d sound, I see no reason to use a standard programming language for audiogames, and personally, I would rather spend more time working on the game than worrying about buffer overflows and null-referenced pointers and such.

Well, that’s about it for now. I can’t say for sure that I’ll blog any time soon, but I’ll try and do it a little sooner than a year from now.

Filed under:
coding, GDB, general, jobs, projects by Jason SW