Year: 2010

Yep, that’s my boy…

Today we spent most of the day ripping up our house. We moved everything out of the downstairs– shuffling furniture and pictures and all of the little things that build up over time into the basement, the garage, and the upstairs. Then we proceeded to rip the carpet out of the office.

Underneath? The like-new hardwood floor that we covered up when we moved into the house eight years ago. We’ve decided not only to de-carpet the office so it’s hardwood again, but extend the hardwood into the family room. That meant we had to rip out the carpet there too.

We’ll have new hardwood installed there, and then the entire downstairs will be re-sanded and re-finished. At the end of next week we’ll have a beautiful downstairs smelling faintly of polyurethane, and can move all of the furniture back in place.

Of course this means we can’t actually live in the house for two days next week, since the poly is so pungent and we won’t be able to do anything on the main floor (and thus can’t access the other floors). So it’ll be an interesting week…

This evening we trucked down to Louisville to visit my friend Bill at work. He’s at NetDevil, the company who’s writing the upcoming MMO game Lego Universe. It’s a pretty cool game, wherein players get to design their own minifigure characters, build castles and fortresses and cars and boats and whatever, and race around doing stuff. Although I don’t know a lot of details about the game itself, it was really cool to see how Bill and the other two hundred employees of NetDevil work together to design all of the in-game Lego creations and interactions.

Although I was interested in the programming and the creative side of actually writing a computer game, there was no doubt the kids were interested in the rows upon rows of Lego bricks along one wall of the huge facility. There were literally millions of bricks there. They’re used by the game creators to experiment with models for different portions of the game– after being built and approved, they’re converted to digital models and inserted into the game itself. All of the employees have their own Lego creations scattered on their desks.

We talked with Joel, one of three Builders (not Master Builders, he was careful to point out). His job, quite literally, is to build Lego all day. Sometimes he’s asked to create certain things which will be used in the game– for example, a car or a house. But other times he can sit around making up whatever he wants. His desk and several tables around it were scattered with amazing Lego creations: dinosaurs, spaceships, a model of the Death Star trench (complete with flying X-wings and a Y-wing in the process of exploding), even a full-size broadsword. Everything, and I mean everything, was done with Lego. There aren’t other props inserted into his creations, and he stressed that true Builders never ever use glue to keep things together.

I spotted a model of the Millennium Falcon. It’s the largest, most expensive Lego set currently available for sale. There are actually two of them: a smallish model that retails for around $100, and this behemoth that’s upward of $500. It was enormous: fully three feet long with all kinds of amazing detail.

The highlight of the tour was the end, when Bill took us over by the bins of bricks and invited everyone to build their own minifigure to take home. They had hundreds (maybe thousands?) of sliding drawers full of carefully-sorted pieces. You could choose from probably a hundred different faces, then select from about forty sets of legs and another fifty or sixty chest parts. The most fun was accessorizing: there were hundreds of headpieces, weapons, tools, and just goofy add-on things. I think we spent half an hour picking pieces and laughing about our characters.

Woo hoo! Here’s what we ended up with.

I made King Arthur (note the Holy Grail) and a pirate complete with a parrot, treasure map, and buccaneer sword.

Zack chose a hilarious assortment of stuff and ended up with Boba Fett in swim flippers, Buzz Lightyear with a robotic grappling-hook hand, and some kind of weird robot.

Kyra made some girls. She had a cat (shown here) and a rat (lost somewhere in the van on the way home). There’s even a little book that opens. Who knew?

Alex put together some knights, one of whom packs a machine pistol and the other holds a lightsaber and has a speargun for an arm. But hey, that’s what Lego is all about.

At first Laralee didn’t really get into the spirit of it, because she couldn’t think of what to make. I gave her a few ideas, and she ended up making two characters from her favorite book series, The Hunger Games. This is Peeta and Katniss.

All in all it was an awesome time. Every kid (well, every boy anyway) dreams of designing video games and playing with Lego for a “grown up job”. And Bill gets to do it!

Vonage does a pretty good job transcribing our voicemail messages and sending them via email. It never gets Laralee’s name quite right (lately it’s been showing up as “Dr. Marley”) but overall it’s impressive.

Today we had an automated message from the school, and after the English version they always have a Spanish translation. Vonage tried its best but failed in a hilarious way.

!Impresionante!

On Friday evening we biked over to the Longmont Main Street Festival because it sounded fun. It was a beautiful summer evening, and four blocks of Main Street was filled with booths, shows, performers, and thousands of people.

There was a photographer offering to take pictures. She had some goofy items in a costume box, so I grabbed a sombrero. Unfortunately it didn’t fit, so I handed it to Zack and grabbed a nice red feather boa instead. The picture was… umm…

Just as we were finishing, Jack Sparrow sauntered up. And I mean “sauntered”… this guy had an amazing costume, and even walked like the famous Disney pirate. He posed for a few pictures as well (he had nothing to do with the photography studio). He even had a spyglass!

Tonight when I was poking around their web site to see my pictures, I saw Captain Jack’s as well:

Although I’m not about to pay the $15 for a digital proof of my picture, I wonder if ol’ Jack is going to get some of his.

When I was 18 I bought my very first computer: an Apple IIgs, which was the top-of-the-line Apple model at the time (1990). It set me back a little over $2,000 but was fabulous during my first year of college. It had amazing graphics and sound (hence the “gs” in the name) and was way ahead of the competition– notably IBM clones running Microsoft’s MS-DOS. The Macintosh, which had been first released a few years earlier, didn’t have the processing power or color screen of the IIgs. So all in all it was a great piece of hardware.

I was waxing nostalgic a bit this evening, so I surfed over to eBay to see if people still sell those twenty-year-old computers. To my surprise and delight, there’s apparently a thriving market for the IIgs! Not only can I buy a full system– for $150 or so– but people sell games and software on ancient 3.5″ floppy disks as well. I’m almost tempted to buy one, just to remember those heady days of the start of the PC revolution. Almost.

Stepping even further back in time, I remember the old Apple IIe we had at home. I suspect mom and dad bought that puppy around 1984 or so, when computers at home were rare (we were the only family who had one for a long time). Ahh, the crazy cool games we played back then: Apple Panic and Night Mission Pinball and Black Magic.

I even taught myself how to program on the Apple IIe. First I learned BASIC, then stepped into assembly (yes, I figured out how to program 6502 Assembly on my own), and managed to write all kinds of software ranging from text-based adventure games (Zork was king then) to low-level disk drive routines that increased the data density of the 5.25″ disks we used back then.

Wow, I’m a geek.

Funny, though, how twenty-five years later I’m still programming, and in fact making a decent living at it. You never know what silly childhood hobbies will endure into adulthood…

Today I finally had a chance to throw our copier out the window.

It’s a great copier, but it broke about two and a half years ago and despite my best efforts, it was simply irreparable. So we bought a new copier for Laralee’s office, and the broken one has literally been sitting on the floor beside it for all that time. I kept meaning to chuck it out our second-story bedroom window onto the driveway, but the time never seemed right.

With the impending hardwood floor upgrade to our entire downstairs, we’re in the process of moving everything out of the office (including the mammoth six-hundred-pound desk La uses). It just doesn’t make sense to move a broken copier and then move it back in when the hardwood is installed. So the time had come.

Everyone gathered on the driveway while I maneuvered the copier into the open window. Alex took pictures on repeat mode while I tossed it, but unfortunately they ended up completely blurred out because he forgot to focus. The copier actually didn’t sustain much damage on the first toss, so we went for a second throw with Laralee taking the pictures. Unfortunately you can’t see the magnificent end-over-end spin I put on the copier, although it hits with a nice solid bounce.

Toner blew up everywhere and plastic parts managed to scatter across the entire driveway. Awesome.

Today I received an email from some sales guy in Poland who must’ve looked on the Zing web site to get our contact information so he could write to us about a potential business relationship.

His company does 3D modeling. Although I think 3D modeling is pretty cool, and did some fun stuff many moons ago with realtime space simulation software, I have a hard time picturing how it’s going to apply to the web development work we do at Zing.

Nonetheless, I went to his company’s web site– more out of a morbid sense of curiosity than anything else– and was treated to an project portfolio that included an amazing 3D hamster!

Now that’s something that every web site could use!

Or, umm, not.

It’s been almost a year since I updated my photos online. They’ve been sitting on my hard drive here at home but it takes some time to upload them, label everything, and so forth. With nothing really stupendous to do tonight, I decided to sit down and spend a few hours updating everything.

So now the photos are up-to-date; click the camera icon on left to see them. Hopefully it won’t be a year before I do it again…

This morning as I look at my email inbox I see that some enterprising spammer has decided to capitalize on interest in celebrities. I have a bunch of messages about various people who have died. Each message has a few lines about a plane crash, and an attachment you’re supposed to open to read more which, of course, contains a virus.

Oh, and of course the all-important “You need matching size for those hooters”.

I hate spammers.