“You’ll never walk alone,” indeed! The first day I wore my new Liverpool T-shirt the guy in front of me at Publix was from Liverpool.

• Coding Horror: The Programmer’s Bill of Rights
  “It’s unbelievable to me that a company would pay a developer $60-$100k in salary, yet cripple him or her with terrible working conditions and crusty hand-me-down hardware.”

I put up a few photos of FIEA and a whole bunch of photos of my trip to Key West. More to come.

This one is my favorite.

Microsoft picked up a twelve month exclusivity deal on the two leading soccer games on the market. They will be headed only to the Xbox 360. I’m glad I already own a 360.

Bee-Tee-Double-Ewe: The workstations at FIEA are AMAZING. My monitor space is 3800×1200 pixels.

The first two days of classes are over. I love the FIEA program so far. Yesterday I had Programming in the morning and Rapid Prototype Development (A.K.A. Digital Media Development) in the afternoon.

I didn’t get a good sense of what the programming class is going to be like yet because we had a test yesterday to assess the level each of us is at coming in to the program. The test was not as hard as I was expecting, though I am a little rusty on my C and C++. Tomorrow we are again foregoing the normal lecture. Instead we will be meeting with the professor one-on-one to discuss our background, our test results, and what we want to get out of the program.

DMD sounds like it may be my most taxing and most fun class. The schedule moves in two-week rounds developing a new game in each round. All of the work for DMD will be in Flash. The first couple weeks are spent learning Flash 8; then we start making games. There are two solo projects and four group projects. With such a short timeline for each game it’s going to be hectic. One thing I like about this class is that everyone will be getting a chance to try out all the roles: production, programming, and art.

My one class on Tuesdays and Thursdays is Design for Media. It is intended as an introduction to the production and business aspects of the industry, though not in as much detail as the dedicated producers are getting. I am not crazy about learning all about scheduling and budgets, but I understand why it’s necessary and I look forward to having that knowledge–hopefully it will make me a better game developer. It sounds like, in this class, we will be developing one game idea over the course of the whole semester, but not developing the game, just exploring the production process.

The only class I haven’t had yet is my Improvisational Theatre class, which meets on Wednesdays. I have done some improv in the past. The class could be really fun.

I finally got my camera cord in the mail that I had left up in Virginia, so I should be able to post some pictures of my house and of FIEA pretty soon.

• The Secret to Great Caesar Salad
  This is basically the same recipe my dad uses. It does make a great salad.

Since the English Premier League kicks off tomorrow, I’ll offer my predictions.

1. Liverpool
2. Chelsea
3. Manchester United
4. Tottenham
5. Arsenal
6. Newcastle
7. Blackburn
8. Wigan
9. West Ham
10. Bolton
11. Manchester City
12. Everton
13. Fulham
14. Reading
15. Charlton
16. Portsmouth
17. Aston Villa
18. Middlesbrough
19. Watford
20. Sheffield United

To be honest, I don’t expect Liverpool to win. No one does. Everyone thinks Chelsea’s going to become the first second club to win the EPL three times in a row. (Edit: I think Man U did this in the 90s.)

Also, my predictions for the 7-17 spots could be way off, I know the least about those teams.

We had a going away party in Virginia Beach. Not everyone I wanted to be there was able to make it. Still, it was fun.

The couple of days immediately following the party were hectically spent trying to pack all my earthly possessions into a ten foot Uhaul. The drive was last Tuesday, the eighth. I left at 9:30AM in my car. I was to be the vanguard for the Uhaul which left exactly twelve hours later with my brother at the controls.

The drive was long, but not as long as I originally anticipated. I had to make a detour through Gainesville to pick up my house key; but even with the more circuitous route it only took me thirteen hours to get to my new house. It took my brother twelve going the direct route in the truck.

My house is in a neighborhood in northern Orlando called College Park. I am near the Dubsdread golf club. It’s a great location–only three miles from FIEA. When I arrived I discovered that my housemates had not fully unpacked and the house was full of flea poison. I was exhausted from the drive, so I nestled up in a pile of boxes and slept.

The next couple of days (wed. – fri.) were spent cleaning and fumigating the house and then unpacking the truck, which had arrived on Wednesday morning. On Friday I was back on the road again, still headed south.

I dropped Andy (my brother) off at the airport on Friday morning and promptly made a wrong turn trying to get on the turnpike. The turnpike runs from Ocala, through Orlando, down to Miami. It took me about three point five hours to get to Miami. I arrived just in time to meet up with G and her friends, trade my car for one of theirs, and head south again. This time I was headed to Key West.

Key West was amazing. G’s friends provided beautiful accommodations for us and took us out on their boat. We had beautiful weather to enjoy boating and coral reef snorkeling. Now I want a boat. The town was lovely as well, if perhaps a tad too warm. We went to the Hemingway house and saw the cats with many toes and did other touristy things you should do while you’re in Key West. I took lots of photos of places and people. It was good to get to know G’s friends a little better.

On Sunday afternoon we headed back to Miami to get back to our normal lives. I stayed in south Florida until Tuesday, when I made the drive back to Orlando.

My first impressions of Orlando are not exactly positive. It’s sort of like a white-trash Vegas. I’m from Virginia Beach and Orlando looks like a city the size of all of Hampton Roads that consists entirely of the ugliest, most garish, most commercial parts of Virginia Beach Boulevard mashed up with the strip. I suspect I’ll find some nice enough areas after I’m here for a while.

My house seems nice. I’ll post about it later. I’m living with two art students in the same program as me. It seems like we have a lot in common and will get along well. We were all three a little apprehensive about starting at FIEA because the program’s still young and unproven. I can’t speak for my housemates, but my own fears were assuaged by our orientation on Wednesday.

There are about forty students in my cohort group at FIEA. The divide is like this: approximately one third (14, I think) are programmers like me, approximately one third (13?) are producers, ten are artists, and three (including one of my housemates) are “technical artists,” which basically means they are going to try to balance the art workload with the programming workload. It should be interesting to see if they are successful; especially because the technical director of the program made it sound like the programming track is going to be extremely taxing. The students come from a wider background than I might have expected. For one thing, there are a lot more out of state students than I thought there would be. The gender balance is pretty unbalanced, to say the least. There are two women in our incoming class. I thought there would be at least four, in keeping with the industry average of ten percent.

I thought it was interesting that some of the students haven’t even worked out their financial aid information or signed their registration agreements, despite the fact that classes start next week. All the students are required to be there at 9:00AM Monday morning for the rest of the orientation process: badges, laptops, parking passes, etc. Our laptops look pretty sick. They are high-end Dell workstation models. I am pretty excited about having a nice semi-portable computer.

My first class is at 10:30AM on Monday. It’s a programming class. On the first day the professor is giving us a three hour test which “most people will fail” to assess what material we already understand and what material he should cover in the class. I’m not too worried about it, though it’s been a couple years since I wrote anything in C or C++.

I will post about my other classes next week after I’ve had each of them at least once.

• Ironing the Flag
  The USofA has now been at war with Iraq longer than we were at war with Germany in World War Two.
  (tags: iraq America WWII war)