If you're the creative type, and we all are to some degree, then you should probably watch this video.

Not too much to post about I suppose. Its quicker and easier to update Facebook so the routine stuff has been updated there. Currently, I'm in crunch mode working 10 hour days and half days on Sat. Violet's due any week now (hopefully Griffin will wait until at least next week). The limited free time I have is spent watching TV for the most part. I recently finished Ghostbusters the video game (360). I'm working on Call of Juarez 2, but its slow going. I didn't realize it was a FPS, otherwise I would have got it for the PC instead of the Xbox 360.

Probably the best thing about living in Euege, OR is that we have friends here. Friends that help babysit, invite us to parties, and generally significantly increase our social lives. Yesterday we went to the Brown's house for a 4th of July BBQ. We were surrounded by kids, and yet we were able to interact with adults most of the time. As the sun began to finally set, people were watering down their roofs. I've never heard of this before. Since fireworks are legal (and to some degree encouaged) here, this practice helps discourage the falling firework embers from landing on a patch of roof moss and starting a fire. It was a good time overall. This is a pic of Drake playing with the T-ball. He thought it was awesome.

We brought chips, sodas, and I made my favorite dessert, Three-Layer Dessert (My mom's recipe.. I don't know where she got it from). It's SUPER easy to make, and doesn't take very long at all (so long as you're not being distracted by the TV in the background as I was). It was a huge success, which is great. I also made a smaller 1-person version in a sundae dish that didn't contain any chocolate in it since one of the guests was allergic. I'm not sure why its called 3-layer dessert though. There's technically more than 3 layers (From bottom to top):

• Crust. Usually walnut based and made from scratch. I'm lazy so I bought 2 pre-made Honey Graham Cracker pie crusts. But after baking them for 5 mins to make them crispier, I decided to dump the extra crumbs on top into the sink. Half the crust came off! Ooops. Since I stayed up until about 2 am making these, I went to the local WinCo market and ended up buying an Oreo based crust)
• A blend of Cream Cheese (just one 8 oz package) + powdered sugar (1 cup) + Cool Whip (1.5 cups). I bought an electric hand mixer which made this SOOO quick and easy! And no lumps for a change!
• Chocolate Pudding (1 lrg pkg)
• Vanilla Pudding (1 lrg pkg)
• Cool Whip
• Grated Hershey Bar (refrigerate the bar to make it easier to grate)

Today was Father's Day.
Normally I would post some kinda epic poem or write some kinda creative story. But as a father, I'm too tired and unmotivated for such things these days. So instead of some clever prose, here's a basic outline of my special day.

• Slept in until 11:30am. Drake woke up at 6:30am (arg), but Violet took care of him for a change (WOOT!) so I didn't have to get up. Normally I'd be the one getting up early. I needed it to. I've been sleep deprived for the last 2 weeks. He stayed up until about 9am and then napped until a bit past noon.
  
• Had breakfast at 130pm at IHOP. I had a bacon, cheese, and sausage omelet. Basically everything that's bad for my cholesterol. Mmmm, I need to have checked again now that my prescription ran out a few weeks ago and I haven't seen my new Oregon based doc yet. I certainly can't say I enjoyed my breakfast meal since I don't really remember eating it. I was pretty much handling Drake the entire time.
• Went to the Gateway Mall in Springfield so Drake could play in the playground. I really like it because I can just sit there and watch him run around and have a lot of fun (and tire himself out). It was kinda crowded but that didn't matter much.
• Since Drake didn't get up until about 12:30-ish, he was go go go all afternoon. By the time we got back from the mall though he was tuckered out again and napped from 5:30p-8pm when we woke him up so we coudl have dinner. During his nap I paid bills and played some more Ghostbusters.
• We had dinner at Carl's Jr, one of my fav locations but Violet doesn't care for it. We had just had Sizzler the previous evening, which is why I chose Carl's.
• We got home around 9-ish, a bit past his bedtime but because his sleep schedule was running late him and I watched an episode of The Backyardigans before he went to bed.
• Earlier in the week we all went to Brushfire and Drake helped mommy paint me a mug.
  

So a fairly busy day that went by pretty quick. I had hoped to spend time with the family outside, like at a park or Letterboxing, but it rained later in the afternoon so we didn't.

At Brushfire



Drakey and I watching Backyardigans just before his nap.

Check out my friend's most excellent lunch bag art. It's all the rage.
He now has an online store too!

Totally Awesome.

Check out the new Tony Hawk game on Gametrailers TV. Seriously.
Then check out the main Tony Hawk Ride site.

From the creator of Mathematica...
Compute Anything
Check out the intro video. It's spiffy!

Thank an Engineer

Here it is, past midnight on Sat, April 18th. The move began about a month ago, and yet I haven't had time to blog about it. I'm going to have to break it into pieces simply to post it all since I don't have time or energy to make one big long blog. As I type this I'm on hold for the insurance company because I've been needing to do that for over a week now. I also needed to go to bed an hour ago in order to get enough sleep for if Drake wakes up. But I'm gonna post something darn it, so here goes...

I think I'll just outline the event for now, and provide more details as I can.

Wed, Feb 4th, 2009, I was laid off from Mythic Entertainment (an EA company). After some intensive job searching, exactly 1 month later on March 4th, I received an offer from Buzz Monkey. I accepted the offer on March 6, 2009. Then things got really busy.

First order of business was finding a place to live. Fortunately, while I was there interviewing, I decided to explore around and look for places to live. I found a few promising ones, but not much, and I didn't have too much time. I was lucky to have a friend drive me around though. So I had a vague idea of what to look for, and I had a list of homes via the internet that I wanted to drive by. But the real question was how to best coordinate the move. Having a very limited relocation budget, and time, I planned the move like this (in 10 EASY steps!!)

1. Drive Violet's Xterra from Manassas, Virgina to Eugene, Oregon.
2. Find a place to live.
3. Fly back to Manassas, VA.
4. Pack and load.
5. Fly Violet and Drake to Nebraska so she could visit family, and so Drake wouldn't have to endure 1,500 miles in a car seat.
6. Drive my car (with a loaded trailer) with Sebastian, our 2nd dog, to Nebraska.
7. Pick up Drake and Violet in NE and all of us then drive to Oregon.
8. Wait a day or two for the movers to arrive around Wed April 1.
   
9. Unpack.
10. Start work on Monday, April 6th, 2009.

That's it in a nutshell. I'll go into more detail on various steps later. Things mostly went as planned, but it was easily the worst move I've ever done.

P.S. I was on hold for the insurance company for about 20+mins, so I hung up. I'll have to deal with that another time. And soon.

Its very difficult to pack and watch Drake at the same time. That's all I'll say on that matter.
I got 2 ABF trailers. I get the whole 28' in one and 14' in the other one. These are pretty much rig trailers. I'm charged by linear foot, not by weight, which is nice. A friend used them and recommend them. Much cheaper than professional movers and I just can't move myself this time. So this seemed the best solution. They delivered the trailers today and man are they big. They are also fairly high off the ground. I'm not sure I can load the pool table. Maybe if I had 6-8 fairly strong people helping me, but I don't. Maybe I can rig some kinda pulley system. Maybe I can ask my neighbors. Maybe I can post an ad on craigslist. Not sure how this is gonna work, but I get 3 business days (and the weekend) to figure it out.

My mom and I drove Violet's car across the country from Virginia to Oregon. It was a lot cheaper than the 1k-1.2k a mover wanted. It took us about 2.5 days. It was nearly 3k miles.

I don't have a lot of time to look, but with the use of hotpads.com, craigslist, and the local paper, along with several of the property management website's, I've had a few dozen listings. Of those, I drove by about a dozen of them, and of those, I did a walk through of about 6 of them. Tomorrow I'll start filling out applications as I wait for Violet to see the choices and provide feedback. Bottom line is for the house we need (3+bedroom, 1.5+ bath, fenced backpack, pets allowed, <= 1300), we won't be saving a lot of money compared to our current $1,300 rent, which sucks because I'll be taking a 20k-ish salary cut. This is due to many factors, the main one being that Eugene, OR has a much lower "cost of living" than Fairfax, VA. Supposedly. Most house that meet our spec are 1,000 - 1,300. I saw some pretty great houses too but they were well over 1,300, unfortunately.

The last few days we've driven over 200 miles and consumed 3/4 tank of gas. Now that house looking is done, its time to fill out some apps and discuss options with Violet.

I'm very happy that Carl's Jr. is here, and for lunch Friday I had their yummy Sante Fe chicken Sandwich. Its awesome.

I'm extremely grateful to our friends T & H for housing me and for pet sitting Gwen and our two cats for a few weeks. I'm also grateful to my step-dad's brother and his wife for housing my mom and helping with the search. I cannot express how helpful their help has been.

Mom and I fly back Tuesday. Then I'll have a few days to pack before ABF arrives with a trailer. I load it and then they haul it and then I unload. Much cheaper than an actual professional mover. I'm gonna need help loading though, but I haven't had a chance to resolve that issue yet
:(

Last night I finished Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (Xbox 360). I enjoyed the game overall. Some of it was over the top, even for Star Wars (I used the Force to bring down a Star Destroyer, and I defeated/killed Darth Vader). I enjoyed the premise of being Darth Vader's secret apprentice and the twisting plots throughout the game. Most of the levels were well designed and quite varied in locations. I thought that the secondary objectives were confusing to complete though. The control scheme was good and using the varied force powers was fairly natural, though I didn't really do a lot of complicated combos. The save points were a weak spot since I couldn't seem to save the game anywhere I wanted.. I always restarted at the beginning of a save checkpoint. I liked the leveling up and the variety of force powers and combat techniques available, though admittedly I didn't take advantage of many of them. There were lots of lightsaber upgrades I didn't acquire, and changing the color crystal or the power crystal didn't seem to do much.

Overall the game was fun and perhaps a bit too short. I reccommend it.

I just realized I failed to post anything for my Bday on Feb 16. Ah well. I was busy job hunting anyway. I think we went out to dinner, but only because I had a coupon. Special thanks to my mom for getting me the book: Order of the Stick: War and XPs.

My programmer personality type is:

DLTC
You're a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a Low level.
You're from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don't mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.

You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it's parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.

You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.

I was laid off from Mythic Entertainment (an EA Studio) Wed, along with a bunch of other people (the rumor says 60-130... to be honest, I don't know how many. They kept us seperated into small groups and issued appointments to come back another day to collect our personal belongings).

I don't know why I was chosen. I can't explain it. I worked very hard, did a lot of great work, had a great review, and I was in a tug of war between 2 team leads who wanted me for my talent and skills. Heck, they had 5 or 6 people working on the Guild Window when I used to (before I was reassigned) do the whole thing myself! Why they picked me to be laid off and not some of the other people I really don't know. One would think that a company would keep the better people and lose the not so great people, but that didn't seem to be the case here. A lot of great people were let go. The leads didn't even know who was being laid off. Wouldn't you consult your team leads as to the performance of their employees so that you could wisely chose who stayed and who got the boot? Wouldn't it be better to layoff the one, probably younger, dude with no ties, no family, and had a better chance to move on than the person with family, a house, and had determined to plant his roots there? (Of course not.. that would be prejudice, and illegal) Wouldn't it be better to lay off the people who spent 3 or 4 months working on a single feature that ended up late and bug ridden? Wouldn't it be better to layoff the people who didn't contribute as much to the game or got a poor review? Wouldn't it be better to layoff the people who didn't earn a bonus as a result of their hard work and dedication? Wouldn't it be better to layoff the people who didn't impress the top brass, including EA execs, with a feature so revolutionary that they asked it to be removed for the E3 demo so its competitors wouldn't copy it? Wouldn't it be better to layoff the people who didn't actually do much actual work on the game itself and instead were simply PR fluff? Wouldn't it be better to layoff the people that were responsible for the major systems that caused the game to be redesigned over and over and over and over again (and that many users still complain about)? Wouldn't it be better to layoff yourself for the poor mis-management that contributed towards the lackluster subscriptions to begin with?

I understand financial woes. Believe me. A reduction in force isn't good. I understand that hard sacrifices need to be made. But it confuses me when such sacrifices are seemingly random dice rolls and I was laid off for no other apparent reason than because some upper exec who didn't even know about my importance to the team failed my saving throw.

While I like Blogspot a lot, Facebook seems to be easier to post quick notes, and they're more likely to get read by more people. I'm spending more time updating my facebook status and playing Dragon Wars + Vampire Wars. I downloaded the SDK for facebook apps, but I havent had time to mess around with it yet. Violet hasn't been feeling too well lately, so I've had to take care of Drake a bit more than usual.. plus I have a looming deadline for a really cool feature that I've been working on (even from home). I'll still ramble here, but I'll be less inclined to blog about small, daily, or trivial stuff.

Saturday the family spent the afternoon driving around and looking at houses again. We're getting a good feeling for where we want to live and what kinds of houses fit our budget. We found some pretty good choices. A lot of the homes we've been seeing are in the process of being foreclosed on, so the price is really cheap but its owned by the bank and the owner. Usually it gets put up on auction to the highest bidder. If the house doesn't meet a minimum amount, the bank doesn't sell it. All in all, its a long and painful process... and there's no guarantee you'll get the house in the end. We're trying to stay away from such deals, but it's difficult... there are some great houses in foreclosure right now. I feel sorry for all the owners who got suckered into buying a house they couldn't afford. Often they will try to sell the house before the foreclosure is complete. That's called a short sale. But again, the sale also requires approval of the bank/lender.
I'm very close to finishing Mass Effect. Just like in Fallout 3, I decided to stop doing all the side quests and just go through the main story line. Although I enjoyed all the side quests I did, there's just too much game for what time I have. I've had a lot of problems with the game lately. The sound has been dropping out, hissing, and/or crackling. Several times the game just crashes. Last night I could hear the music going but the screen went blank, as if there was suddenly no video signal.