Blade Edge

Computer software | Video production | My life in general

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Vacation is over

September 1st, 2008 · Personal

Well it was a pretty cool summer. I didn’t get to do as many things as I had hoped to do, like there were no bike road trips, no trips up to PA to Sash’s farm, and I didn’t go kite flying all that much either, at least my family and I were able to enjoy a well deserved vacation camping with a tent from Survival Cooking for a whole week. My biggest regret is more of a monetary one – I should have filed for unemployment. I didn’t even think about it – my coaching hours at the gym fall off to nil between July and August, and while that gives me more time to myself to work on personal things and GDNet, it doesn’t really help the finanances. While I’m still employed like a few hours a week, the drop in hours is significant enough to grant me at least partial unemployment pay. Well, note for next year.

Tomorrow kicks off classes at the gym, so I’ll be back to coaching “full-time” with 2-3 classes a day during the week, and a two-hour open workout on Sundays.

Tonight I also brought over entires from the GDNet journal for the months of Feb – June 2005.

Man, can’t beleive it’s already September – where’s the year going?? I suppose I’ll kick back and relax some more before the craziness begins anew tomorrow.

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Swingin on the Flying Trapeze

August 30th, 2008 · Personal

My friend Sasha had to go into the city (NYC) today to check out a Mini Cooper he was looking to buy, which was owned by a friend of a friend, both of whom are trapeze artists that work at a gym in west/central Manhattan just a few blocks from Penn Station. Of course, Sash and Dizzle, who was driving, were late catching our intended train… which was a double-decker train. I have not yet ridden one of the new snazzy-lookin NJ Transit double-deckers, and was very disappointed to miss this one. Very. Dizzle owes me a damn ride on a damn double-decker. Dammit.

Anywhoo, we get to the city and walk over to the gym, which is a lot smaller than I imagined – I thought they’d be in some large empty wharehouse, not a pre-fab structure barely large and long enough to handle all the trapeze apparatus. But it suited the purpose well and our friend Dallas (friend of the friend with the Mini) showed up after Sasha took his test ride and let us swing on the trapeze. Sash and I both took turns on the bar – mind you this is a real trapeze. You’re standing 30ft up on a teeny platform hooked into a spotting belt and when you swing off you’re swinging in an arc of a good 50ft – it’s awesome. They have the large trampoline netting underneath for when you release and do tricks – I just let go and fell to my back (one time kinda my head, hahah). Getting used to the swing took me three seperate tries, because I’m used to a gymnastics high bar in which you can bend to generate lift and swing. A trapeze bar does not bend. So I had to learn to let it do some of the swinging for me before I arched and kicked through the bottom. Unfortunately I didn’t think to get any video – they have a TiVo setup with a camera that lets you rewind the video feed and watch yourself, but that was it. I’ll have Dallas use his own video camera next time.

So after playing around a bit we walked through Manhattan all the way down to Chinatown, stopping and checking out shops along the way. We got a little turned around when we hit the SOHO district, but luckily there was an Apple store I was able to plug into to get wifi on my iTouch and pinpoint our location using the map, which led us to Canal Street and Chinatown, where we stopped to grab some good Chinese grub from Hsin Wong’s. Got the leftovers in the fridge. Then we hoofed it partway back uptown before giving up and catching the subway. In all, according to my rough plot on Google Earth, we walked about 6-7 miles. My legs are killing me. Well not true – just my left one for some reason. But still.

Oh but the fun does not end there. Coming home on the train we get held up two stations away from our stop because there is a “car on the tracks” according to the conductor’s announcement. So, I’m thinking another train is held up in front of us. 15 minutes later they come back on saying “automobile”, and my picture of things changes entirely. My friends are confused but I remember hearing stories of the drunk and elderly making turns onto tracks thinking they’re roads and getting stuck on the rails. 30 minutes later cops come walking through the train, and we postulate that there is no car on the track ahead – they’re just coming up with a story to hold the train while they search for a suspect. 45 minutes later (and after moving up one station) we finally get the full story – some drunk dumbass decided to take a ride on the tracks, got hung up on the switch (where the trains change tracks) and was leaking gasoline, which made cleanup quite the hassle. About an hour total and we were finally back underway, passing the offending car in the process. Oh, and the cops were called in because apparently one of the passengers had become unruly and was threatening the conductor for the delay.

So I finally made it home, but it was still a very fulfilling day. Hopefully Sash will be able to nail that Mini Cooper, which was in nice condition, and hopefully we’ll be able to get back to the trapeze gym soon so I can get some video of me swingin. Now tho I’m gunna lay in bed and rest and read my new Star Wars book.

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Location, location

August 29th, 2008 · Production, Stuntwork

Crap. (and maybe another crap)

So the first crap comes from the 7-Eleven where I want to shoot the opening of my short fight film. I was there last year to shoot some footage with a friend and the guy behind the counter was totally cool with it. Because of troubles with my bike shortly thereafter, we were unable to complete the scene. Coming back to it this year, I wanted to try some different camera angles and move the camera around a bit more (original footage had it locked to a tripod). So my stunt partner, Dizzle, and I went back to the 7-Eleven location to film a few quick shots, at around 8pm. We get there and start filming at the guy behind the counter gives us strange looks. So I walk in (like last time) and tell him we’re just doing a small film. He freaks out and calls his boss as we continue outside. He then comes out and tells us we have to stop. So I tell him to call his boss back and ask him why were we allowed to film last year and not now? Apparently the store owner never even knew about last year. So I told him I’d come in the next day (today) and we’d talk. So I show up and he’s not around, and I can’t wait around. I leave the clerk (same guy as last night) my cell number and ask him to give it to the owner. I still haven’t gotten a call back.

Bah. While I understand the store owner’s concern – for all he knows we’re filming a spoof on 7-Eleven that could damage his business – I wish it hadn’t come to this. I’m going to try again sometime next week to stop in and see if he’s there. If I catch him and he demands I get a permit to film on his property well, screw that. I’m not bothering with that crap for a no-budget film. I like the location but I can make changes to the opening scene so it doesn’t have to be filmed at a location other than my god damn house.

And the second (maybe) crap is that my friend, who works at the gym I’m planning to use to set the actual fighting, may be no longer working there before I can finish the choreography and the entire movie. If that’s the case, at least I’m sure I can get in the first scene of fighting, which by itself is pretty badass.

Speaking of that scene, Dizzle and I got a chance to really work through it at the gym location this afternoon, and I started taking a kick to the face and spinning over a low wall – with a small mat on the other side of course. We mde several more minor tweaks to the fight, nothing major – just where to take certain hits and how to tavel as we fight so that we end up in tha proper spots to sell everything properly and leave room for the camera to capture it. The desk lady there said it all looked really good and real – which means it’s even going to look more awesome on camera.

I got the month of January ’05 ported over from the GDNet journal too. Wheee.

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2004 now available

August 27th, 2008 · Personal

So I spent about 5 hours tonight getting the year of 2004 transposed from my journal over at GDNet here to this blog. It wasn’t all that arduous a process – I just had a lot of posts to move. Looking back, I updated a lot more often than I do now – the entire month of October and the majority of November and December. I started the journal at the end of September, so I really only had 4 months worth of entries to deal with, not a whole year’s worth. Plus, it’s easy to set the date of the entry back. When I moved journal entries from an old project forum to my Blade Edge forum (now lost *sniff*) I had to go into the the forums DB files and change the numerical date, which was a number of seconds from when the PC that hosted the forum was started (or something gay like that). So for example, 123984326 would equal Jan 20th, 2002. If I wanted to edit a post date to be the next day, I would have to add 86400 seconds (24 hours) to that number. Oyez, don’t get me started on calculating exact posting times.

Also, I had an excuse to read through my entries from 2004, which was nice – lotsa good memories, especially from the Batman show. As you can see from clicking on the link, I’ve also been very meticulous in the tagging of my entries, so that I can also point you towards all the development work I did in 04 on my Katana engine. Good stuff eh? Not to mention coming across gems like this post that I had completely forgotten about. Awesome, LOL. They never caught me, it was great 😉

Finally, I was also able to fix some dead links to media files in several posts by finding them on my hard drive and re-uploading them to the server now that I have gigs more space to kill.

I’m going to try and transpose one month a night from here on out, depending on how many posts I made in that month. I might be able to get 2-3 months in per day. Once I’m done with that, I can call this blog feature complete and finally turn my attention back to Joomla and getting my production site up and running. Right now tho I wanna play some Guitar Hero, read and then sleep.

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The rest of Me

August 26th, 2008 · Personal

Well, I’ve completed the About section completely, from head to toe. If there’s anything you didn’t know about me, you can probably find out by reading all the stuff I wrote down. Obviously I haven’t told you all everything. Where the bodies are buried I’m afraid you won’t get out of me that easily.

Anyways, it’s good to have this done, because it’s been nagging me for quite some time now. Next up – I have to transfer all my relevant GDNet journal entries over here, which means about 85% of them. I wish I could also bring over my posts from my original developer journal that was hosted by my BES forums, but the forums went belly-up on me without warning earlier this year – I guess IPB finally noticed (after like 4 years) that I had set up a 10$/mo account with them and they had never charged me after the initial setup fee. Well, on the bright side at least they didn’t send me a bill. Of course, legal action does take time so I might be getting a notice any day now… *crosses fingers*

I’ll the the entry transfers to another day though. I think I’ve done enough blog work for tonight.

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A little history on me

August 25th, 2008 · Personal

Okay so “a little” is a bit of an understatement 😛 Head on over to the About page to check out my biography detailing my involvement with the computer game industry. Lengthy? Yea yea go on and say that I like to talk about myself. Really I just want as comprehensive an account for myself more than anything else. I had to do a lot of research to remember half of the stuff I wrote down – fortunately I save pretty much every peice of correspondence (IM, email, PM, etc) I’ve ever received so tracing back my steps into the past wasn’t too much of an effort. Still, since it is pretty damn long I’ve broken it up into sections you can navigate straight to from the main page and links at the bottom of each section pointing to the previous or following sections as well as back to the main index. I also linked to as many references as I could and created custom header images to showcase aspects of each section (love the custom header ability).

Too bad I stayed up way late to finish this, but I’m glad it’s done. Stuntwork bio coming up next.

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Back to the track

August 23rd, 2008 · Personal

It was another evening at the track yesterday, same crew as last time. The weather was really good, no stupid torrential downpours, nice clear skies and the temperature was falling fast. We got to the track almost 30 minutes later than last time, and the weather being as nice as it was I expected it to be crowded, but it was even emptier than two weeks ago when we finally pulled into the staging lanes. Getting through tech inspection was, again, the longest process. I don’t understand why they can’t split the line into street stock cars and tuners, because once I get up to the guy I just hand him my form and license, he writes my number and lane assignment on my car, and off I go in less than 5 minutes. Before that though I’m sitting in line playing games on my iTouch for like 20 minutes. Next time I might as well bring a friggen book.

Anywhoo, we only had to sit in the staging lanes for a few minutes before they started pulling cars onto the track. I came back this time with a different strategy than before, after having a conversation with some other gearheads over at GDNet I set my shift light to blink at 5800 RPMs so that I would shift and drop the revs down into my power range, since my engine’s torque hits maximum at 4800 RPM. I unfortunately could not couple this with a “chirp start” as recommended in the aformentioned discussion as I never took time to practice. In hindsight I probably should have because, once again, my start times spelt my doom.

Run 1

Temp: 76 degrees F
R/T: 1.036
60′: 2.341
330: 6.331
1/8: 9.550
MPH: 76.41
1000: 12.330
1/4: 14.657
MPH: 97.27

Yowch! The last time I crossed the line going 97mph I managed to pull down a 1/4 time of 14.4 for crying out loud. Next run I tried to start with my RPMs up higher and ended up spinning out completely through first gear. Rather than let up the throttle, I just waited until my shift point came and then continued to roll out in second. I still managed to beat my Mazda 6 buddies times, but it was my worst run ever so far

Run 2

Temp: 74 degrees F
R/T: 1.215
60′: 2.645
330: 6.969
1/8: 10.302
MPH: 75.97
1000: 13.140
1/4: 15.493
MPH: 95.58

So that was pretty disappointing. During the downtime before the next run, I took a few pictures of the cars racing down the track and met with some of the other car owners in the staging lanes. There were two other Z’s there as well as 2-3 G35s. The other two were both better than mine, one being an 06 and the other was an 08. The 06 was twin-turboed with an intake, exhaust and drag wheels. The 08 was an enthusiast trim, so it had an intake and exhaust as well. Both being later model years than mine meant they had more horsepower. The 06’s I think run around 300 while the latest 08’s I think are up to 308 or maybe even 312. Too lazy to check. Anyways the 06 guy (I don’t bother asking for names, cause I know I won’t remember anyhow) had a brother who owns a tuner shop not to far from me, so I got his card. Then the 08 guy I saw had spray-painted his stock rims black with Duplicolor paint – and they looked nice. My friend Andrew (there with his Mazda 6) had just earlier recommended that I spray paint my wheels instead of coughing up mucho dinero for new rims. Seeing how nice my calipers came out, I’m seriously considering it!

Soon enough it was time to hop back in our cars for the third run.

Run 3

Temp: 73 degrees F
R/T: 1.101
60′: 2.356
330: 6.315
1/8: 9.536
MPH: 77.88
1000: 12.308
1/4: 14.617
MPH: 97.35

Well, I had gotten my time back down from my last run, but still it was almost a full tenth of a second slower than my first ever drag run two weeks ago. What the fork? Luckily we were allowed a fourth run because it was only 7:41 and it still wasn’t as crowded as two weeks ago. That, and there weren’t any accidents on the track either that required cleanup crews and resurfacing and all that crap. So things were moving pretty smoothly and we were back on the track for our last run in an hour.

Run 4

Temp: 71 degrees F
R/T: .729
60′: 2.391
330: 6.364
1/8: 9.579
MPH: 77.40
1000: 12.354
1/4: 14.646
MPH: 97.77

Too bad that last run didn’t do anything for me, being a few hundredths of a second slower than my third run, which turned out to be my best for the night.

So what happened? How’d I pull down a best time of 14.3 two weeks ago and ended up consistently racing three-tenths slower the next time? I checked my weight off the track and I was within comparable heftness to the last time (quarter tank of gas, no spare tire, cleaned-out car, etc – 3,284lbs) so that wasn’t the case. I didn’t check my tire pressure, this time or the last time but even still that alone can’t count for three-tenths of a time difference.

I think I just came back with too much knowledge. Last time I didn’t really know how to drag, but I knew instinctively how to make my car go fast (I do it all the time, after all :P) so I just drove as fast as I could. This time I tried to be a bit more technical – watching my starting RPMs, shifting at the proper time instead of just smacking the redline… my theory is that I thought too much. So, I certainly don’t want to toss proper technique out the window and just wing it everytime which means I have to either hit the track more often and practice timing my shifts and my starts so they become more intuitive to me ($$$$$) or find an empty parking lot with enough room to at least use my iTouch and Dynolicious to work on my 60′ times. I’m thinking the latter ’cause I’m cheap 😛

However I’ll definitely be hitting up the track again – the season doesn’t end I think until October or November, depending on the weather, so plenty of time to get back. 3-4 timed runs for $24? Can’t beat that I’ll betcha.

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New Controversial Game? The C Word

August 14th, 2008 · Gaming

Warning! NSFW!

Warning! NSFW!

Okay, now that I have your attention – I got home earlier tonight to an IM left for me by my buddy Edmund McMillen (Gish, Tri-achnid) about the new game he worked on with Florian Himsl (his partner on Tri-achnid). Let’s just say this is one of those games that is sure to cause its own share of controversy amongst the gaming community. I like games that push the barriers of what people find to be acceptable, so I’m all about this latest creation.

The game’s already popped up on TIGSource, of course – no mention yet on Kotaku or elsewhere. I’m curious to see how the reaction spreads over the coming days/weeks. The game itself, in my opinion, is not offensive – however people who find such material offending will be the ones to lead the outcry against it. I don’t know if that made sense to any of you, but I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t see the game as being suggestive in any way – it’s just a rather uhm… interesting twist on the shooter genre.

The C Word [newgrounds.com]

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First fight scene – angles worked out

August 13th, 2008 · Production

Tonight Dizzle and I, with the help of our friend Dallas as a stand-in, worked through the choreography on camera as we would shoot it for the final movie. Before this, every time we did the choreography before a camera it was for posterity, now we were doing it as if we were filming for real. It sucked that my camera is an old crappy Hi8 (not even digital) without a 16×9 lens, so it was tough to frame things properly as the final film will be letterboxed. Still, we were able to at least get a general idea of how things will look from various camera angles.

It only took us about 30-40 minutes of filming to get all the shots that we wanted. As planned, we only have two cuts in the entire ~1.5 minute scene, and the rest are camera moves, where the camera pans around or follows us, sometimes both, as we go through the fight. I’m glad it’s all turning out like I imagined it – so far I haven’t hit any serious walls along the path to making this film, and I haven’t had to change too much along the way to make it work on film and be conventional. I’m not looking to do anything radical film-wise, story-wise or even fight-wise. At the same time though it won’t be boring 🙂

Anyways this is really the next to last step in filming this scene. Now we have to do a walk-through with the actual cameraman to clean up the shots and make sure everything looks well on the actual film format we’ll be shooting in. Once that’s all locked in we can go through and do several takes at full speed and wham bam thank you ma’am we’ll have our first scene in the can. After I edit it together maybe I’ll post it up as a “sneak peek” for the rest of the film, because although it’s technically the fourth scene in the movie, it’s when the action really kicks off.

We’ll see. Hopefully this scene will be wrapped by the end of the week.

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Stargazing the Perseid Meteor Shower

August 12th, 2008 · Personal

A bit of history…

I used to be quite the backyard astronomer when I was a kid. When I was around 8 or 9 I would use my dad’s binoculars to scope out the sky, not caring that after a few minutes my head felt like it was going to fall off my neck from looking straight up into the sky. I collected books on stargazing and astronomy both from stores and the local library. I learned about stars and nebulae and galaxies, quasars and pulsars and black holes… the constellations and where they resided in the sky. Messier objects. I crammed tons of astrological knowledge into my head because the greatness of space brought much wonderment to my young imaginative mind.

Not long after I got my first refracting telescope, and that’s when the fun really began as I was able to study objects in much greater detail – from the Andromeda Galaxy to the Seven Sisters – and of course the Moon. Although I had always wanted a reflecting telescope as well, as they gather much more light (they are the short, wide ones while refracting telescopes are commonly long and narrow) they also were more expensive. My second telescope, also a refracting model, was actually one my father got and had azimuth controls that let me better “steer” the scope around the heavens and adjust for the movement of the stars and Moon.

Although I’m only just over 25 miles South from New York City, luckily about 18 miles of that distance is open water. 8 miles to the East over rural suburbs lies the Atlantic Ocean. South and West for a good 30-40 miles is nothing but small towns and farmland. So the skies over my head are generally dark enough to see the soft smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy out of the corner of your naked eye – if you know where to look. For my area of the US, it’s about the best viewing conditions you can ask for.

I don’t recall what meteor shower I saw first, although I have a good feeling that it was a Leonid shower, seeing that I’m a Leo and they’re usually pretty damn good. Several years ago in the late 90’s was supposed to be another memorable storm, and I sat outside and watched as the meteors streaked across the sky in pretty decent numbers, though I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere near the kind of storm darker places were. Still, watching the dust from comets streak across the night sky or sometimes burn slow and bright, leaving behind brief after-images of their trail – I was hooked. I watched several more storms over the years, including more Leonids, some Perseids and a Taurid.

The Perseids Today

There has been a gap of several years, about 4-5, since I’ve taken the time to check out another meteor shower, and I just happend to be checking my news feeds tonight when I stumbled upon the fact that the Perseids were due to peak at just that hour (2am) as the Moon set. We had been under some nasty stormy weather the past few days but when I poked my head outside my window and looked up, I was pleased to see relatively clear skies, with only some high cirrus that were barely visible. Encouraged, I checked for the location of Perseus thanks to Stellarium (wonderful stargazing app!) and seeing that it was rising to the East and would be initially occluded for some time behind trees and another house, clambered out one of my bedroom windows and onto the roof over my garage, which pointed directly East. I brought a folding chair with me and sat it astride the upside-down V of the roof, then sat down and leaned my head back.

Although I said it was fairly dark in my area, I knew better than to expect to see a normal stream of about 1 Perseid every 1-2 minutes as was predicted. In the total hour and a half I was out there, I only saw about 25 Perseids, which equates to around 1 every 3-5 minutes. That’s fairly reasonable. While I think I saw about a dozen more, they were so faint and quick it may have just been my eyes and mind playing tricks on me. However the benefit is that I see the biggest and the brightest as they streak through the atmosphere. The first one I spotted actually broke up and created two seperate streakes like -* -* along the same trajectory.

I forgot how much fun it is to just sit under the night sky and gaze up and the stars. In-between streaks of meteors I was casting my eyes about, picking out stars and constellations elsewhere in the sky, working hard to dredge up knowledge I hadn’t put to practical use in several years. I’ll have to take some time to see when the next big shower is supposed to be – this one was just its usual average faire. But it was still fun. If you haven’t been out to see a meteor shower yet I’d suggest doing it at least once – you too may end up drawn to the heavens

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