June 2002

+ Sunday - June 30, 2002

Tomorrow I leave for a week long vacation to Wisconsin. Going to visit the folks, hang out in Door County and up at the cabin, and then going to my friend Janet's wedding next weekend. Annette is tagging along for the ride, which should be fun. I've been looking forward to this vacation quite a bit, and I need to enjoy it. When I get back it's going to be nonstop work to find a job and do all the things I need to do to get one. Like they say, finding a full time job is a full time job.

+ Saturday - June 29, 2002

I redid the CSS on the site. It should now look the same on both Mac and PC as well as be more readable on both as well. I think I caught most of the formatting bugs, but there may still need to be a few tweaks, especially since I can't really test this on a PC (it should work fine though).

Got my new issue of EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly) in the mail yesterday. I have issue #2 of EGM and have read issue #1 (the current issue is #157) and obviously a lot has changed since then. The mag started out really good, then somewhere around issue #20 it fell apart. It's gotten better since it was picked up by Ziff Davis, but I do wonder why every game magazine has to pander to the 16 year old market. Perhaps it's teenagers who buy the most mags, but having pages devoted to "booth babes" of E3, the talk of how cool blood and gore is, and that great potty humor just doesn't make for great reading. They also have the audacity to somehow call all of this writing "mature". Mature for 16 year olds who don't know what mature means perhaps.

I know it will never happen but I would like to see a game mag written for people who are really into gaming, not side show antics. Next Generation magazine was exactly this when it first came out, but again, around issue #20 it all fell apart. I guess it all has to do with the economics of making a print mag. You need to pander to the lowest common denominator to make any money. Funny, same goes for online game sites. Thankfully,
Steve Kent is still around, the only glimmer of hope in an otherwise cesspool of gaming journalism.

I decided that in anticipation for the new Metroid game coming out in November I better reaquaint myself with the old Metroid games. So I pulled out my trusty NES and my old copy of Metroid and quickly realized that I had misplaced the NES plug. Thank god for emulation, as I've intead been playing it on my Mac all morning. Not quite as comfortable as sitting in the living room, but it will do for now.

+ Thursday - June 27, 2002

Few new game notes:

Looks like good ol' M$ has made the creators of MAME for X-Box take down the program. The source is still available, but without an X-Box Dev Kit (which you'll never get), it's pretty much worthless. I guess little Billy Gates was afraid Pac-Man was going to steal profits away from X-Box games (I'm only half kidding when I say that, which is sorta sad really).

The Economist however, paints a rather bright picture of the current video game industry, saying it's expanding like crazy. It's a good article, and the pretty graphs really drive the point home that the game industry is at its best point ever.

The only problem is they screwed up in a few areas. One is that they consider both Gamecube and X-Box "128-bit" systems, when they're really 32-bit (for those that care, bits mean nothing anymore). They also say successful games can bring in $300 million, which, while true, is really only true for a few games. To make that much on a game, a publisher has to sell over 10 million copies. Very few games have done this. I also find thier prospects of game sales optimistic. This winter is *the* season for games this generation. I doubt there will be more games sold per-capita after this winter until the next generation comes out.

Well, my time off from the job market so far has been off and on. I have an unbelievable amount of time on my hands now, which is great because I get to do all the things I've been meaning to as of late. Yesterday I installed an air conditioner, worked on my computer desk, and today i did laundry, and made a mix CD for my trip to Wiconsin. It's great.

At the same time, the worst thing is not knowing what I'm going to be doing, and where I'm going to be doing it in the future. The uncertainty is hard to deal with at times, but I'm trying to take it in stride. One thing at a time, day by day.

+ Tuesday - June 25, 2002

I got laid off from work today. Amazingly, I'm doing pretty well. Perhaps it's just because I really wanted a vacation and a break from work for a while, but I'm really trying to look at this as a new chapter in my life instead of the closing of an old one.

With that said, I really feel for Jen and Eric, the owners of B-Swing. They're good people, and I know this is the last thing they wanted to do, but at the end of the day, it's still a company, and in times like these when it's tight, tough decisions have to be made. I can accept and respect that.

I guess the one thing that is hard is knowing the kind of talent and product B-Swing produces. It's above and beyond everything being done in the Twin Cities by far. Sometimes I even wonder if the people there even realize how good they are compared to everyone else. In a way, it'd probably be good if they didn't, since they strive to push themselves to be better, instead of doing "just enough" to be good. It's going to be hard (if not impossible) to replace that.

Anyway, I'm now looking for work. I plan on taking the summer off to do a lot of things I've been putting off, but I am open to freelance opportunities if anyone out there would like to hire a web designer with 4+ years experience. I should have more info and a portfolio up at a later date, but in the meantime you can just drop me a line if you're interested.

+ Monday - June 24, 2002

Eboy has a new book coming out. These guys are some of my favorite designers of all time. Perhaps it's the fact that their style reminds me of video game art, or the fact that this stuff is damn hard to do well, neverthless, outside of 16-bit game artists, there isn't much better.

+ Saturday - June 22, 2002

Today I picked up the legs to the computer desk I'm building. They actually cost twice as much as the wood top I got, but I suppose that's understandable when the top is just an unfished door. Hopefully I can finish the work desk before I go on vacation for the 4th. It will be great once it's done, since I'll have over 6 1/2 feet of desk space to put all my computers on, and enough room left over to use as a building area for various parts of my arcade cabinet.

Since I was out shopping anyway, I decided to head over to the Apple Store at the Mall of America. Jason was trying to convince me last night to go mobile from here on out and get an iBook like he had.

After testing everything out, the Powerbook was tempting, especially the one hooked up to an external monitor. Of course this was right next to the 23" wide screen, high definition, flat panel display, hooked up to a dual 1ghz G4 (which ran some new stuff I've been working on for Assembler amazingly fast). This of course blew my mind when I saw it (tho so did the price tag). I figure I have some time before I make my next purchase, so I'm not going to jump the gun. I just wish the G5's would come out already.

+ Friday - June 21, 2002

Jason was in town tonight, and as such he, myself, Ben, Scotty, Jesse, Brian, Jack and Mark made our way out to Machu Picchu for dinner. While we may be a bunch of geeks, I always have some of the best times hanging out with the guys because we always have so much to talk about and it just usually ends up being a lot of fun. And even though we didn't talk a lot about the web (surprising, I know) I can tell these guys are the reason I had so much fun at Imaginet when I worked there. Sometimes it's not always what you do for a living, but who you work with that matters. Hopefully these kinds of nights will become the norm rather than the exception.

+ Thursday - June 20, 2002

After a good 2 1/2 years I decided to give SETI@Home another whirl. I had gotten an email from them today and while usually I would delete it without even thinking, something told me to read it. After reading it I just thought to myself, "why haven't I been doing this all along?". It's such a simple way to help out, especially for something I love as much as astronomy. Perhaps helping out with simple things in other areas of my life wouldn't be such a bad idea either.

Speaking of asronomy, aparently we just missed getting hit by an asteroid. What's more interesting is they didn't find out until 3 days later. Some good that does us.

+ Tuesday - June 18, 2002

Finally got all the archived posts into MT. These posts date back to August 1998, when the vitaflo.com domain went live (the vitaflo site is actually quite older than that). There's many skipped months between different versions of the site and different directions I went, but now they're all archived in one place.

I had originally thought about adding posts from my sites that predated vitaflo, since I have dated online posts that go back to 1995, but I figured that since they were never a part of the vitaflo name, they don't belong on this site.

With that said it's pretty interesting reading all the old posts as I put them in one by one into MT. My posting style changed quite a bit through the years, from very journal-ish and more personal, to only about design and design links, etc. I'd like to hopefully strike a nice balance between the two in the future.

+ Sunday - June 16, 2002

Made a few changes to the layout. The main difference being the Info section how includes everything about the site, meaning a FAQ, the XML and RSS feeds, as well as ways to contact me.

I also added info on my arcade cabinet, ROM colelction, and game console collection to the Misc section. This is basically the same info I had before I moved everything into Moveable Type.

I'm also going to be adding in previous posts from past versions of vitaflo into the MT database. So if things seem kinda flakey for a while or the archives don't seem to flo together real well (no pun intended) that's why.

+ Saturday - June 15, 2002

I think this fall will be the biggest year ever for me as far as gaming is concerned (well, since I stopped reviewing games for Gannett news in the early 90's anyway). The cool thing is, all the games I want are on the Gamecube, which is the only next-gen system I have currently anyway (PS2 and XBox just don't really have any games I want, especially XBox). Here's the big list of time killers I'm looking forward to:

Mario Sunshine
Super Monkey Ball 2
NFL 2k3
Animal Crossing
Metroid Prime
Zelda

Of course I'm also looking forward to Metroid Fusion and the rumored Phantasy Star Collection (games 1, 2, and 3) for the GBA. What can I say, I'm a sucker for Shigeru Miyamoto and cutie-cutie Japanese games.

Fall should also be the time I start putting in a lot more effort into my arcade cabinet. I should should have my arcade, roms, and system collection pages up on the site soon (I hope).

+ Thursday - June 13, 2002

After walking out on the company for the second time in the last four months, Stone Cold Steve Austin is no longer a member of WWE. This is pretty big news, as Austin was WWE's biggest draw. It's even bigger news that WWE just let him go.

Aparently on this weekends WWE Confidential Jim Ross and Vince McMahon are supposed to have some rather harsh things to say about Stone Cold. I'll for sure be watching, and hoping it's not all a work.

So last night I get a bill from my old apartment complex for damages to my old apartment. Our deposit was $300, and aparently my roommate and I had more damages than that. I was sorta nervous opening the envelope because I knew we had really nasty stains on the carpet that probably needed replacing, however when I finally looked at the bill, I just started laughing. The bill was for 67 cents.

I laughed even harder when I looked at the nice big 34 cent stamp they put on the front of the envelope and the fact that they had two people sign the bill, photo copy it, file it, etc. So, much to my delight, I wrote them a check for 67 cents and put a memo on it that said, "Nice Bill Jackass".

+ Wednesday - June 12, 2002

Hot on the tails of MacMAME 0.60 comes 0.60a, which should fix a lot of bugs. I haven't tried it out yet, but this is good news, and I'm pretty excited.

Speaking of version numbers ending in "a", Mozilla 1.1A (for Alpha) was released as well, and adds a lot of new features and 1700 bug fixes.

+ Monday - June 10, 2002

MacMAME 0.60 is out. It fixes a lot of the things that were wrong with 0.59, though there's still a few bugs to be ironed out. I'm hoping this isn't the last release on OS9, as I'd like a more stable version for my arcade cabinet.

Also, it looks as if Link will be in Soul Calibur 2 for the Gamecube. This I really like, and makes the Nintendo/Sega/Namco Triforce arcade partnership look very interesting for the future.

+ Sunday - June 9, 2002

Saw the Lewis vs Tyson fight last night. I will say it was pretty much a disappointment. Everyone was just waiting for Tyson to land that one big punch to end the fight, but it never happened. As the fight went on it was easy to see Tyson was losing it. I knew that if he didn't win in the first 3 rounds, it was all over, and it pretty much was. With that said, Tyson took a lot of abuse, so you really can't doubt his toughness.

In a lot of ways this fight reminded me of The Rock vs Hulk Hogan at this past Wrestlemania. While it's probably an unfair comparison since wrestling is a work, it had a similar theme in that a previously unstoppable force from the past has come back to challenge the current hot fighter. The old-timer gets lots of cheers, everyone wants to see him win, but as the fight goes on it's obvious he isn't what he used to be. Well that and they both get paid a shitload to come back from the dead and fight.

+ Saturday - June 8, 2002

Well, I decided to change things up a little here. As I was building the current look of this site I really liked the overall design and idea, I just wanted a better way to do some of the things I wanted. Most of that meant just putting up random bits of information, which is why I decided to make the front page a list of various thoughts (or a "blog" as some people like to call it, though I'm not too keen on that term).

At first I was going to just write my own admin system in Perl, and while it would have taken a bit of work, I didn't think it was going to be anything too horrid. Then I came across an admin system for personal sites called Moveable Type. It seemed to basically be what I wanted, and it was already done for me. After about an hour installing it and setting it up on my server it was all good to go. So far, from my tests, it's been oustanding, I'd highly reccommend it to anyone who does personal web publishing.

Anyway, as you can tell, I've changed the directory structure around a bit, and a few items are missing. I just haven't had time to incoporate some of the old stuff into this new environment. So things like the progress of my arcade cabinet (which will become its own mini-journal inside this site) will be put back up at a later date. I just wanted to get the ball rolling.

If you see bugs or notice anything strange, please let me know. There's bound to be a few issues that will come up.