Photos of my house that I took while moving in a couple months ago. We have a great backyard.

• Indeed | one search. all jobs.
  Interesting salary search. I wonder if it’s accurate.

• Cruel 2 B Kind - a game of benevolent assasination
  Hooray games!
• Come Out and Play Festival
  Play in the streets of NYC.
• The Anarchy of Paidia
  An essay describing the alternative to ludic (rules-oriented) play. Paidia is freeform and improvisational. It’s rare to see adults engaging in paidia.
• French and German remakes of the BBC’s Office.
  There have been four different versions of The Office (French, German, American, and British). The differences between them speak volumes about the nationalities of their creators.

Okay, I have a project due a week from Monday. I have to build a Flash game. I am totally at a loss for ideas. So I am turning to you guys for inspiration. What would you like to see in a Flash game? Is there a particularly good game mechanic that you would like to see used? A particular theme? Feel free to suggest anything.

The idea I ultimately choose must meet the following criteria:

• Time Limit: I won’t be able to work on it this weekend, which means I have about seven days to do the project to completion with art, programming, sound effects, etc. It should not be “large.” That is, it should not require creating multiple levels or enormous amounts of animations.
• Programmer Art: I am a programmer, not an artist. I can do basic drawing and animation in Flash, but I’m not very advanced.
• PG-13: If it got a movie rating it would have to be PG-13 or younger.

Additionally, the game should meet the following criteria, but it is not, strictly speaking, necessary:

• Innovation: It should have something to it that is new or innovative for a Flash game.
• Programming Challenge: The game should somewhat challenge my programming skills, so it should be more advanced than Pong, but it doesn’t have to be a full RPG engine or anything like that.
• Style: These projects are graded as much for aesthetics as for technical skill, so it should have a coherent visual and auditory style.

Again, feel free to pitch any idea. I’m really just looking for some inspiration.

I just missed the most amazing photo opportunity. I was driving home from school and I passed a gas station that just reopened after being renovated. Their sign said, “Gas is back and better than ever!” A stretch Hummer was filling up at pump one.

Posted some photos of the wedding in Colorado this past weekend.

I’m sitting in the Denver airport right now, using my FIEA laptop. My oldest brother got married yesterday. He and his wife are perfect for each other. I’m sure they will have a long and happy marriage.

I’ve attended so many weddings in the past six months, but I guess I’m just getting to be that age where everyone starts thinking about those kinds of things. It’s still weird to me to think about someone who’s only twenty-three or twenty-four getting married. I guess I just always assumed that getting married and starting a family were things you did after age thirty, when you were settled down and had money.

It was good to get to see the whole extended Forget family. I also got to meet my half-brothers’ maternal family. I sort of knew them when I was really young, but not very well. A lot of them live in Florida, so maybe I will visit them now that I know them.

My mom officiated the wedding ceremony. In Colorado the only requirement for marrying someone is that you have to know them for at least three years. The ceremony was in the City Park in Denver, which overlooks the skyline and the mountains. The view was lovely.

Everyone thought it was going to rain (it had been raining for days, an oddity in Denver at this time of year), but it cleared up at the last minute and it was clear and sunny for the ceremony. We really lucked out.

I have a project due tomorrow. (Technically it was due on Friday.) I’m having a hard time motivating myself to finish it. I should have plenty of time on the Atlanta-bound leg of my flight. It’s going to be sad leaving my whole family behind to go back to Orlando. On the other hand, school is really getting into high gear and it’s really exciting. I can’t wait to get into the really tough course work.

I’ve probably rambled enough and I should stop procrastinating so I’ll have time to play Dead Rising when I get back home.

Joel Spolsky wrote a few books about software development that are pretty good. He also writes a blog. This morning I was read an essay he wrote: A Field Guide to Developers. It identifies all the reasons I didn’t like my last job.

I think lightning just struck the building. We didn’t lose power, but the internet was gone briefly. It was pretty loud. There’s an alarm going off somewhere.

FIEA’s going really well. I’m still getting settled in and establishing a routine. I have already learned a ton, mostly about Perl and Flash. Next week we are starting assembly for the 68000 processor in my programming class and I will be trying my hand at some basic animation in Flash. In the production class yesterday we practiced analyzing a game (Fable) the way a developer would. I think we’ll be doing that a lot in that class.

Over the long weekend I went down to Miami to visit G. I had a really good time, but even with the extra day on Monday the weekend just wasn’t long enough.

It seems like I just got back to school yesterday (I did.) and I’m already heading out-of-town again tomorrow. I’ll be in Denver from tomorrow (Thursday) night through Sunday night for my oldest brother’s wedding. Pretty exciting.

• Programming Quotations
  A set of sometimes accurate and usually humorous qotations on the art of computer programming.