I got a webcam the other day - the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000! Now I can more-proudly consider myself a citizen of the digital age and join things that everyday technology-enabled people are a part of, like Skype!

I've been having a bit of fun with the webcam actually - taking photos, testing the face-tracking capability (I can happily report that Logitech webcams are not racist) and making a video or 2 - and I guess like most people out there, I'm really enjoying having this new piece of technology in my life.

"What are you doing, Dave?"

Much like when I got myself a new cellphone, particularly one with a camera that, unlike my last phone, takes pictures at sizes measured in megapixels, I think I might enjoy the video capabilities that are now at my disposal.

When I got my new cellphone, I picked it because of: a) the flip-top design, and b) having a camera that doesn't suck. I had the latter in my purchasing decision because I wanted to take photos that I could upload and use on my blog. Lo and behold, I've been using many of my own photos in my blog instead of trawling the internet for something that resembles the image I'm trying to portray. I've even used the cellphone camera to take pictures of inane things, like Windows XP error messages on supermarket monitors, or billboards I come across in my walks around the city.

So far I've only called my family on Skype with the webcam enabled. They don't have a webcam themselves, so while I couldn't see them, they were able to report that the video and sound feed of me weren't too bad, even when Skype was reporting to them that their internet connection was "slow".

I've started adding a few others who I know have Skype, but there's one overseas friend in particular with whom I can't wait to tell them that I'm not such a useless IT guy anymore :)

Maybe next I can start uploading to YouTube... lol, let's not get carried away here.

(queue obligatory Christmas blog post)

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY!

I planned to write more, but the days have been packed with lots of Christmas and New Year's stuff that kept distracting me from my blog. I should have a bunch of new material, especially now that I've got a phone that takes decent pics that I can transfer to my computer without having to pay cellphone data usage to e-mail it to myself at a resolution so low that it doesn't get measured in megapixels...

I've had a very good year, and I hope the same can be said of y'all. I'll share more of my Christmas and my 2009 once the holiday season has calmed-down some.

Merry Christmas from the cuddly toys living under my family's tree (pic taken with my new phone!)

The Beatles: Rock Band came out earlier this week, which should mean that in the lead-up to the release date I'd be very excited (I was) and that after bringing it home and giving it a go I'd be enjoying the game thoroughly (I'm not).

"I'm not" I say? Does the game suck? Well, I don't know yet.

On the morning of the release of The Beatles: Rock Band (a work day, unfortunately), I got the usual message from the mail room that a package had arrived for me to pick up. Ooooo, exciting! I was thinking, because I knew exactly what waiting for me.

The remainder of the work day was not ordinary, but rather uneventful: picked-up the package, went to lunch w/ dad (although I didn't have to pay for his meal this time), browsed the CD store with him to check out the release of the digitally remastered Beatles albums, worked until all enthusiasm was drained from me, read the local rag on the train ride home, ate dinner, watched CSI: New York on TV...

...and THEN, it was time to play The Beatles: Rock Band with the family.

We were all pretty excited. For me, because it's a new toy; for my brother, probably the same reason; for my parents, because they finally get to play to songs that they grew up with (a change to having to play Boston in Rock Band 2 over and over again - don't get me wrong, I looove Boston, but repetition does remove the mirror sheen on even the nicest things).

So we plugged-in/turned-on all the controllers, loaded-up the disc, and... wait, what's up with my controller? The Xbox guide button on my fake plastic guitar just kept flashing; couldn't register as a controller with the Xbox. Oh F***!!!

I kept the expletive thoughts to my inner voice, conceded my position as 'lead guitar' and let the family play on without me. I went back to my room and sulked by browsing the internet for the guitar tablature to emotion-infused meaningful songs I know so I could learn to play them then and there on my real guitar :(

NOT my favourite peripheral right now...

I've had this problem before (this is actually the 3rd fake plastic guitar I've gone through: the first one having a broken strum bar and the second one having this same flashing light issue) and the guitar is still under warranty, but it means having to send the damn thing back and waiting anywhere from a week to a month for a replacement... again (stupid courier costs associated with returning items when buying from an internet vendor).

Not that I'd want to: I'd rather head for the nearest store, buy a new WIRELESS guitar, and pray the thing doesn't get a bung strum bar. And if it does, at least I'll have the option of going down to the store and venting my frustrations out on the nearest store employee who will likely be some unsuspecting teenager who has absolutely nothing to do with the failings and design faults of my fake plastic guitar.

*sigh*

As you can imagine, I'm not very happy right now. Here I am, blogging about another situation that is out of my control. So, this lunch time, I'm gonna go fill my stomach with tasty fast-food, knowing full well that what I'm putting into me isn't very good for my body and that my patronage is lining the pockets of already-rich corporate billionaires overseas.

At least I still have control over that.

I've left today's blog a bit too late to write something approaching the average number of paragraphs I've had for every other entry thus far of Blog Every Day April, but I was held-up for good reason. That reason: Rock Band 2.

w00t

So I'm gonna leave it at: I just got Rock Band 2, and OMG it's awesome :D (proper blog coming post tomorrow)

One thing I foolishly thought that I'd have more of when I moved into my own place, was time. Oh how wrong I was.

When I was younger, I had this habit of finding waaay too many hobbies and messing around with waaay too many different things. Maybe it's just the thing to do during those teenage years; experimenting to find out who the heck you are and who the heck you want to be. Only a handful of hobbies from that era have survived - drawing and playing the piano (whereas digital art, writing, playing the guitar, and computer programming could be considered post-high-school pursuits) - and yet I haven't yet found the time to improve on a single one.
OK, so it doesn't help that when I moved-in, I went and bought an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, and since then Devil May Cry 4 and I've borrowed Gears of War from a workmate. Now I'm contemplating Guitar Hero 3, although the smarter part of me is telling me to curb the spending.

Despite the new distraction/s, I've found that most of my time is getting lost to cooking. Yes, cooking.

Slightly motivated by a story I heard of a family friend who moved back home because they missed the real homemade stuff their mother made, I've been stocking my fridge and cabinets with raw ingredients and making genuine attempts to recreate the meals that I grew-up with and then some. The good thing is I've found I'm not a total failure when it comes to cooking, and have even had a friend who lives nearby over several times to eat the leftovers. The bad thing however is that there are always leftovers because I'm not yet used to cooking for just myself, and so always end-up with this elaborate meal for a family of 4.

Food aside, there is one hobby I've managed to progress, but only because I've hit a bit of a lull at work: the RSS feed for the Writing section is now done (unlike the other feeds, I couldn't fit entire stories into the feed because they all rely on special formatting which you can only get by visiting the page), hurrah.

I wasn't really going to write anything about this, but then I got an e-mail from someone wondering if my RSS feed was broken because I hadn't reported on it. So what happened to me? I moved into my own place in the city, and celebrated my birthday with friends (in that order too).

Over the past couple of months I'd been looking at places to live in the city as pretty much everything going-on with me right now is there: work, friends, your mum, etc. I used to live out in the suburbs and rely on the trains to take me between these places. I remember when my train buddy (a friend of mine who by sheer coincidence ended-up taking most of the same trains I did for all of our years at university) started talking about how much she hated the trains. After having taken the train for more years than I have fingers, she just got fed-up with them. I didn't understand her then, and soon afterwards she and her husband-to-be moved to Australia.

Earlier this year, I think I finally understood where she was coming from.

Somewhere between the beginning of this year and the date of this post, I got tired of having my life revolve around the public transport system's schedule. Running after trains, waiting at the station, leaving parties early just so I could catch the last train home... small frustrations that just started adding-up. I thought it was about time to do something about it, and so here I am, recently-relocated into an apartment in the city, when I had my birthday.

So my birthday isn't usually something I post about, but it has been a long time since I actually celebrated one of mine with friends. This year's one was a simple affair; dinner at my favourite Italian tratorria (a place I had been going to for every one of my birthdays since turning 21), talking about matters close to our hearts: AIDS monkeys, ginger kids, your mum, etc. I got presents too!

The most notable would have to be the flying alarm clock. And yes, it works as well as the web page suggests: the clock does have a loud shrieking alarm, it does have a propeller that flies off to some dark corner of your room, and it does require you to retrieve the propeller and return it to the clock otherwise THE DAMN THING DOESN'T SHUT UP!

I haven't been late to work ever since.
I've also been a lot grumpier than normal.
Go figure.

And on the back of the last post, I have extended the RSS capabilities to the artwork page as well. Not only that, but I've incorporated Media RSS into so that it can be used with flashy apps like the Firefox plugin CoolIris.

With CoolIris, you can now browse my gallery in sweet 3D:

Pretty eh?

And now, for the writing section.

Just when I thought I was getting too old for presents, I bought a new scanner and suddenly it feels like Christmas has come early! :D OK, so technically it's not a present as I bought and chose it myself, for myself, but the result is the same: I have a new scanner!

If you must know the exact model, it's a Canon CanoScan LiDE 600F. It's a huge step up from the old one, which was also a Canon, but was a relic from the pre-Internet era: a parallel port scanner. Actually, I'd probably still be using that old scanner if it wasn't for the fact that I no longer have access to a computer with a parallel port, and that it doesn't play well with a USB-to-parallel adapter.

So what made me buy it? Well, I've been drawing again in an effort to re-train myself for a big drawing project I'm aiming to do, and I had just finished a sketch that I was relatively proud of. My first thoughts were along the lines of "Ooo, gotta scan and store this one", which after some more thinking soon became "Crap, I can't use the scanner anymore".

Always amazing what necessity makes us do :)

So I went on a bit of a scanning spree and scanned several drawings new and old.

Not my best work, but... new scanner!

As a belated Christmas present, my brother got me Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, Game Of The Year Edition, which includes both the original game (The Longest Journey) and the more recent sequel Dreamfall, as well as the soundtrack to Dreamfall.

I've never owned a point-and-click adventure game before, so this was rather new for me. That's probably one of the reasons it's so fun; the original game may be technically outdated (1999, 640x480 screen res), but most of the themes and the story still hold-up pretty well: saving the world, meeting a magical race, killing the evil witch, all clichés that I've never had the time to completely appreciate, until now.

I'm now onto Dreamfall, and the more modern game is a welcome sequel and step-up from it's predecessor. However, I can't seem to get passed how stiff the character models are during some of the talking scenes. I mean, for an Xbox 360 and PC game released in 2006, I was kinda hoping for more natural movements. Didn't all those developers get that right after the Half-Life 2 / Doom 3 era?

Oh well, just a small blemish in an otherwise enjoyable adventure thus far.

First of all, shouts to my friends who notched-up this milestone in my website stats:

And they've told me that my site works just fine in the PS3 browser :)

Anyway, apologies for the lack of updates, but I've been kinda busy lately. I recently got a new computer, and have spent the better part of a fortnight getting it up to speed. It isn't helped by the fact that I've now got a dual-boot setup, with Windows XP and openSUSE 10.2 (a form of Linux for those who don't know), so I've been getting 2 operating systems back up to speed. The main reason for adding a bit of Linux to my setup, is so that I can develop Red Horizon for Linux-based OS's as well.

I've also spent a bit of time making my Windows XP look a lot like Vista. Things I've read and heard have turned me away from Microsoft's latest Windows offering, so I'll hold-off moving to Vista for a while (that, and many of my development tools don't work in Vista either). But after having been stuck with the blue XP look for so long, I thought it was about time to revitalize what my eyes have been accustomed to. Here's a screenshot showing-off the new look. If I were to select an appropriate simile: it's like adding speed-flames to your operating system.

It was a bit easier to pull-off a whole new look in openSUSE, just by using Beryl, which gives me an OpenGL-accelerated desktop, and a whole lot of cool animations to make my windows fade, beam-up, burn-up, alter transparency, etc. One of the more stand-out features of Beryl is the ability to represent multiple desktops as 4 sides of a rotatable 3D cube. Functional? Time will tell. Hella cool? Oh yes.