Sundays with blogs

It's zombie season soon!


I couldn't resist going to their information session to take a look, after Nick Bugliarelli (yay new friend!) got all pumped up talking to me about HvZ.


Basically, it's the closest to street warfare with humans using Nerf guns and zombies playing tag. Simply speaking, if zombies tag, you will die and join the zombies, but you as human can take out zombies with a simple Nerf gun firing Nerf darts; when they hit it'll be counted as they died, and they can only respawn after five minutes.


I think I'd probably enjoy running down Willows Road being hunkered down by zombies ^^


In other news, ProjectFUN screwed with me by messing the Jukebox bit of my project. So I'm going to have to redo Pong from scratch, bummer.


-__-|||


Aaaaaand we all spent about 8+ hours playing Dragon Nest over Saturday. Which is a pretty huge bummer, considering we all saw how Jun Wei leveled faster than any one of us and, by now, should have hit Level 30. Level cap is 32, release was Wednesday, and he's already 30. Yea.


Too fast. Cannot take his awesome.


>_<+

どうゆ意味これ? (What is the meaning of this?)

*Any names used in this post is pure coincidence. No offence to the chai dians and chee dans! - @ Jun Wei

So yesterday I did something really silly in Edison, wanting to get my grouping early.

I held a sign up in Edison that says:

Looking for a GAM100 Project Partner? Talk to me!

Desperado-do-do-WHUUUT?

The reason for this is really simple. They have many weeks to complete GAM100, but we're leaving two weeks before the end of the semester. That means whoever partners with us needs to be on his own (or at least without overseas support for two~three days).

It's a little hard now because everyone's still trying to find their footing in this, so actually I can fully understand if people are still not in the mood to get into making games yet (as in, their students, not ours, we should be ever-ready I guess? Just guessing).

Luckily, that sign hanging got me a single name - Austin Kruckmeyer. ^o^

I find that DigiPen actually does this: through ProjectFUN, they teach you how you can rapidly prototype games without actually going to very deep levels of coding (although deepest I've seen so far is if/else conditional C++ coding), whereas in DET we're made to go through C++ codes FIRST before going onto making actual games out of it.

So is it our cue to maybe use an entry-level game prototyping software, something like Game Maker? Because the general sentiment now is that those in DET(G) VERY QUICKLY sees how programming is dull/bunch of maths stuff being thrown about/yada (yet while they do understand the hard of C++, they don't know FIRST how to make games fun as a base).

I find that a little disheartening, seeing people wading in a sea of lost codes. >_>;

Our course is, comparatively speaking, a pressure-cooker course for those who really know what they want, I find, because I know for SURE I wanted to program games all the way (unless something in life throws me a spanner/Jun Wei(???)/lemon) and many of the better programmers in our course (that is, better than ME programmers) are self-motivated to succeed in one way or the other through making games, but neither us nor the rest of the course sees first-hand how to make it fun first.

Principle of Game Design doesn't really count ^____^;;;;;; (sorry Mr Wee!)

[but PoGD IS fun, yes it is! But it's Year 2... a little late >.<]

Anyway,  I got to know three other guys from our classes through table tennis (since someone *ahem ahem* is too focused on his Alienware to care about a poor, poor friend, hmph).

Garrett, Steven, Blake.

[remind me to sneak a picture of them three all at once]

Yea. I'll try to remember their names by their hair and body shape, but it's going to be a little hard. I see Asians all the time back in Singapore, so of course it gets harder trying to identify Americans! >.<

The Departed (Jun Wei) and Infernally Electrical Business!

Ah yes, I've completely forgotten about that dinner picture from two posts ago so I'll do that later.

But first!

I've thought about it again, so today I posted on GAM100 about finding for a new partner. o_o; hope it works out yet again, but it's a risk!

Jun Wei is on tenterhooks today; after ditching him at home habitually now because of my sudden love for going to school early, I'd expect him to chase after my tail or at least get to school on time; today he's nearly late for lessons, and he was huffing his way to class.

On top of that he's kept checking his low-bat phone (how it got low is a mystery) for the delivery schedule (receiving a few smashes to the face from my ping-pong ball in the process, lol!), because his new laptop is coming and he cannot wait at all.

Well, at least it saves me a few hours on my audiospace away from "cheedan", "chai dian" and "is that true"... >_>

As if to help him settle back at apartment to wait for the laptop, Professor Schafer reported in sick on Moodle, so we have no more lessons after MAT140 (yay).

But while he skips back to the Ridge happily, I am determined to practice more on the circuits I'm so confused about, so I'm checking in at Archimedes for more practice.

I can't be defeated by a breadboard and so many wires! -_-+

Edit: And so I managed to get some gates working here and there ^^;;;

You'll notice a few familiars like the crocodile clip, resistors and LEDs. The one you probably don't know would be the fuse (black crocodile clip connecting it), a switch (blue thing) and relays (in white).

A relay is like a switch changer, pass electricity through the relay on the electromagnetic side  (far left edge) and the switch would change. In the first picture, it's a NOR (i.e. A=0,B=0,result=1) gate because it works such that if either switch is turned on, the circuit would break and the light won't turn on because the actual electrical connection (rightmost bottom, coil of red wire), which originally connected to the yellow line, now connects to nothing.


The next two pictures are the OR gate (notice where the yellow line is now on the first relay? And the bottom black line?) and the NAND gate (notice how the circuit will break if BOTH switches are turned on? Remember that NAND is such that only A=1,B=1 will produce result=0)


I know the OR gate is unnecessarily complicatedm but I needed to have a base in making the gates work. The pictures were uploaded in reverse manner. >.<


The AND gate is too stupidly simple to show. Put two wires together, disconnect either and you don't get jack. TADA. LOL.


The one gate I don't really get is XOR, because XOR is such that it MUST be either A or B but not both.

Trippy Days

So yesterday, after making that post with the flowers and the alternate route, I drank a can of Budweiser.


Oh, do you still call this a can by the way? It looks really long to me. The can says one pint and 8 fl. oz, whatever that means o_o;

Lesson learnt: Never drink beer unless you know enough of what you're getting yourself into.

I can be considered a teetotaler because I drink booze like, what, no more than five times a year? That can send me drunk, which was what I expected, but for the first time ever I found myself vomiting empty two hours after downing booze. The last time I boozed I just slept through to the next morning, so needless to say this is an unexpectedly unpleasant surprise.

The girls dropped by our apartment to cook again, which was nice, but just hours ago this wouldn't have been possible. The whole of Samammish just blacked out; thankfully when it happened it was around noon, so nothing adverse happened.


So I remembered someone in school had a zombie film to make at 2pm, and we (i.e. me and Faiz) were about to leave when one of the guys suggested Munchkins (specifically, the Vampires and Werewolves variant I bought at Barnes & Noble during the trip to Downtown Seattle). So we played it, and we left home... at 2pm.


By the time we got to Gibran, expecting a little crowd, we saw what was instead... a single person inside the classroom.


The closest parallel? Imagine it's a Sunday, and Rudi's inside spouting one-liners like "is that true?!" So yea.


Since that was the case, we left (after Faiz collected his newsprint for the DMDG guys) and we split ways at 90th; he said he needed to grab more stuff from QFC.


Dinner was fantastic - once again, rice and soup reminded me of home. The only thing that didn't quite match was tofu and beef (normally, it would be tofu and something else), but everything else was just good.


Yet despite all the good today, I'm increasingly feeling this strange, digging-at-me sense of unease.


Hopefully it's just me.


P.S.: Just a little update. Lauren Gold emailed me to inform me that she has found the original person she had wanted to partner, so I am out of a partner. Luckily, Kate had told me that it would be worth a shot to ask Mr Doug Schilling about a third wild-card on team, considering our status as sort-of-like-journeymen-students.

How to Get Lost without being Lost

I don't consider myself the most adventurous person around, but I've always told myself to maximise what I see, especially if I have control over going to places.


So today, I started by exploring an alternate route from the Redmond Way QFC back to Sammamish Ridge Apartments.


Oh wait, I went too fast, I'll start by mentioning what I did first.


(the tldr cat tells you that this could be a boring rant)

I went to Redmond Town Center alone to get a new pair of long pants (doesn't really matter if it's jeans or otherwise), as well as some new undies (well, what? It's normal!)


To be honest, I risked it because I never, ever got my own clothing, except for a few tees and whatnot. I am lazy and not confident back in Singapore, so coming to the US devoid of this kind of clothing support, I was determined to learn how to.


But that's all I'll say here because I'm sure this will bore you, so moving on...

(end boring rant)

So I deviated from the normal path. Here's how it roughly looks like.

The green path is the normal path we normally take to walk back from Redmond Way QFC to our apartment. The red path is the route I took.

From first glance alone you probably can tell it's a long way around.

But look what I found!

Pretty flowers! Yes, I am a guy who does stop to look at flowers.

These ones are just too pretty to pass up.

One of those information signs. It's interesting to note that here in America, they take everything green seriously.

That reminds me about how they deal with the trash back at DigiPen.

They have four receptacles in the cafeteria - two for general trash and two for recyclables.

A plaque for the mayor who made Sammamish possible. Yay! \o/

It occurred to me fairly quickly why this shrub is called Hens and Chicks. They're roughly the same shape, but of two distinct sizes. LOL.

To end off - the route is as long as it looked. I took three times the time (that is, close to half an hour) to get back to the apartment.

OTL...

Thank goodness for long baths.

Rice is Nice!

Finally, some rice.

[insert dinner picture here when I feel like it 24 hours later?]

Well yea, we just had a rice-based dinner with cooked food that vaguely resembles the quintessential Singaporean meal - one rice pot, 2 meat dish, one veggie.

With a strange hiccup or two - veggie not really cooked to done, and fish fillet actually having bones within (!!!)

Even so, for some reason, for the whole day I felt a strange attack of don't-belong-ism.

I mean, well, we all know we are not Americans, not by a long shot, but I get this strange feeling I'm probably the only one trying, and even so, I'm actually trying too hard to fit in.

I probably should keep trying though, despite how flat-out futile it seems to be.

Why?

Because if I do not make any attempt to Americanize my accent (which of course isn't anywhere close) my raw Singaporean accent will definitely make anyone give me that ?_? look, as Kate just showed me when I accidentally pulled it off on her yesterday.

This pretty much sums it up.

I don't foresee doing anything on Saturday, but for Sunday I am thinking seriously about that zombie film thing someone's trying to film.

Seems like a good chance to network in a casual environment, which I prefer over sterile school shop-talk >_>

Getting stood up in the US of A

So, following yesterday's failure to get Lauren's response, I wrote arbitrarily that I'll be waiting for her in Edison (the computer lab area) if she's still keen on the grouping.

I've been waiting here for the past hour and I don't get anybody asking me, "hey are you Joel? I'm Lauren."

I'm tempted to make this face...

 

Then I remember that we already had a picture in Edison like this:

Joy.

On the other hand, it's ArenaNet Day, and Faiz and the other artists are there. Faiz in particular, I think, because it's the company that developed Guild Wars 2 and he's going fanboy all over it XD

"I must recognise the faces in this video," says Faiz as he watches this Manifesto Trailer on Guild Wars 2 this morning.

Almost like cramming for exams, but the question is all about matching faces to name i think? lol

 

Sometimes the students and staff here gets really funky with what they do.

 

Case in point - A technical staff with curly hair walked around with a shirt that, on his back, said this:

"Got a question?

Ask me!!"

 

I'll be sure to wear a shirt like that next time... in another capacity altogether. XD