Catching up

It's been awhile since I posted anything, so I thought I'd post a brief update on life, liberty, and the pursuit of unlocking all the race tracks in Mario Kart Wii.

• On February 5th, a tornado struck my hometown, doing a considerable amount of damage. Fortunately, there were no fatalities, but the damage was extensive in places. My parents were far enough away to avoid any damage to their house (phew), but many were not as lucky. My mom took some pictures of the damage, which I have posted here in my photo album.
• On February 20-22, I attended the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It was a great trip, other than getting sick while I was there. I learned a lot of interesting things, saw a lot of cool stuff, and got to catch up with some old friends I used to work with in the game industry.
• Around March 5th I was invited to join a new social networking site on ning.com. It's run by the Lintonian and is open to anyone who lives, lived, or just likes Linton. You can find it at http://lintonian.ning.com/. Its been a great way for me to get in touch with people I went to school with and follow what's going on back home.
• March 8th brought us Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii, the perennial Nintendo fighter where everyone picks their favorite Nintendo characters and uses them to beat up their friends favorite Nintendo characters.
• April 1st brought the predictable round of April Fools Jokes. One of my favorites was YouTube rickrolls the Internet.
• On April 8th, I finally broke down and purchased a Roomba for my townhouse. I got a Roomba 560, one of the most recent model of Roombas. Its been doing a fine job of keeping my floors clean.
• April 27th brought us Mario Kart Wii, the perennial Nintendo racer where everyone picks their favorite Nintendo characters and uses them to outrace up their friends favorite Nintendo characters. (Er, didn't I write this already?)

So that pretty much brings us up to date. Oh, and all of the 50cc and 100cc tracks have been unlocked in Mario Kart Wii, and the 150cc tracks' days are numbered!

Music Genome Project

A couple of friends at work have been talking about the Music Genome Project at Pandora.com. It is an interactive web radio-like system with a unique approach to classifying music. It classifies music based on a variety of factors and then groups them based on their similarities. Users then can create a "station" based on a single musician, group, or song, and the system will provide them with a steady stream of music similar to their style.

It's not new, apparently it started back in 2000, but this is the first I've really heard of it. So last night I tried it out, and I have to say I'm pretty impressed with it so far. To get started, you just go to Pandora.com You enter the name of a band or musician or song which you like, and then it builds a playlist of songs similar in style to what you entered. You can tell it whether you liked or didn't like the song, as well as a few other options. The interface is very slick. I entered "Nobuo Uematsu", the composer for the Final Fantasy video game series, and it has provided me with a stream of mostly instrumental songs that are similar to the ones in Final Fantasy (in addition to a few FF remix songs). So far I have only voted down one song that it has given me based on that.

Its free to use, ad-supported. You are prompted to sign up with the service after five or six songs, a fairly painless process which quickly got me back to listening to music. It saves the stations you create, so the next time I log in I'm back listening to the last station I selected. There is an option to pay a membership fee to remove the ads. I'm considering subscribing even though the ads are extremely non-intrusive, just to support the service. Its definitely worth checking out.

New Projects page and DuSTED

I've added a new Projects page to host any personal projects that I release publicly. It currently only has one entry, DuSTED, which is a simple tile editor I wrote for the DS. Click on the 'projects' link above to check it out.

The Long Family Christmas Letter

The year 2007 has been a busy and fulfilling one for the Longs. Keith is in his eighth year of serving the Lord as pastor of the Furnace Christian Church in Bloomfield and his first year as treasurer of the Central Greene County Ministerial Association. This is Linda's forty-second year of teaching business classes at Linton-Stockton High School.

A few days after Christmas last year Keith, Linda, and Michael had the opportunity of getting a different view of Greene County when riding on an Indiana Rail Road engine across the 2,295-foot long viaduct. The view was breath-taking from the 157-foot high historic structure across Richland Creek Valley. The ride was definitely a dream-come true for us!

In June we visited our daughter Denise, Jonathan, and Divot (their miniature Schnauzer) in Fishers before and after traveling to Madison, WI to see our son Michael. While in Madison, we toured Monona Terrace designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and visited the Farmer's Market held around the state capitol building. Our big purchase was Wisconsin cheese curds--and yes, they do squeak when you eat them!

On April 20 the building known as The Roundhouse which houses the offices of HumanHead Studios where Michael is employed was extensively damaged by a fire. The company relocated in temporary offices until major repairs were completed by late September. Fortunately, they were able to recover most of the files for their video game in development.

After returning home from our travels Keith made an emergency trip to the Indiana Heart Hospital where he had two stents placed in his heart. In August he returned for a second procedure--both were highly successful and for that we are very thankful.

In the November/December issue of the Today's Creative HomeArts magazine, the Peter Rabbit mittens that Linda had knitted and entered in the charity contest received Honorable Mention and were pictured in the magazine. Linda's happiness over her good fortune about the mittens was punctured by the horns of a goat that she hit with her car while driving to school one morning last fall. She discovered what they do at the insurance office when you tell them you hit a goat--they laugh uncontrollably!

The "Dueling Lights" Contest took an unusual turn this year. When the cold weather arrived, we did not have our outside lights up. Our neighbor volunteered to help us put them up! We are highly suspicious of his motives--was he trying to discover our secret technique of stringing our six strands of LED lights? However, the neighbors might have a slight edge on the contest this year as they added a reindeer lit with white lights--at least it wasn't a goat!

Child's Play 2007

Penny Arcade's annual Child's Play Charity kicked off its seasonal drive at the beginning of this month. For those of you not familiar with it, Child's Play is a charity started in 2003 by some gamers to fight the media's negative stereotype of gamers by motivating the gaming community to become involved in a worthwhile cause that's related to our favorite pastime. This year it has partnered with 45 childrens hospitals around the world to donate toys, games, books, and cash for the kids being treated at these hospitals.

I think this is a very meaningful way to help relieve some of the suffering of children who are stuck in the hospital this holiday season. If you're a gamer, or just would like to brighten someone's holiday, I highly recommend you check it out.

Welcome to Facebook. You will be assimilated.

The title of this post means two things. One, I've been watching way too much of the Star Trek: Borg fan collective lately. Two, I'm now a member of Facebook.

I've resisted joining social networks like Facebook and MySpace because my first impression of MySpace was very lackluster. It seemed like 90's era GeoCities web pages had returned, even uglier and less usable than before. Facebook is very popular around Madison (being a college town), but my first encounter with it suggested that I provide it with my Yahoo e-mail account username and password so it could search through all my contacts.

Yikes.

So for almost three years since coming to Madison I've refrained from joining either service. Now, within the course of a week I found myself on both, due to two unrelated incidents. I had to join MySpace to read a friend's blog (I can't see why he couldn't have just written his own blog software from scratch like I did...), and I had to join Facebook to some of the pictures taken by others from my Life Group's Halloween pumpkin carving. Oh well.

MySpace has not improved much, so I probably won't be doing much there, but I've found Facebook fairly interesting. So far I've managed not only to connect with people I know through Access, but a few other random friends, even one person from college who I lost touch with after graduation. And it didn't require me to enter sensitive e-mail information (though it still gives me the option to do so if I want), so no more hideous security objections to joining it either.

So now I'm on MySpace, Facebook, and I run a blog. I've even experimented with microblogging on Twitter. Looks like I'm going to be dragged into the 21st century after all. Maybe resistance really is futile.

Helping out M.O.M.

Last night, several members of my lifegroup volunteered at Middleton Outreach Ministry's food pantry. A few of us had done this before, but it was a new experience for me.

The donated items in the pantry are organized somewhat like a store, complete with shopping carts for collecting items for families. Each volunteer (or in our case, pairs of volunteers since we had so many) is given a list of requests for a family or individual, and guidelines on how many of each type of item they are allowed based on the number of people in the family. As one of my friends described it, you basically "go shopping" for them.

After gathering up everything for your family, you sign off on them and then use the directions provided to deliver them to the family in question. Although I've heard some interesting stories about some deliveries, mine went smoothly. I didn't even make any wrong turns while driving there, which is amazing considering I did so twice when going to the food pantry in the first place!

All in all it was a good experience. Things went very quickly thanks to all the volunteers who showed. The amount of food and clothing that the pantry holds is pretty amazing. It was great to see that people are giving so much to those in need in the local community.

Peter Rabbit Mittens

My mom won an Honorable Mention award from the Creative Home Arts Club for a pair of hand-knitted Peter Rabbit mittens she entered into their Hats, Mittens & Scarves Contest.

A picture of her entry, along with all the other winners, can be found here. It is about a third of the way down the page, under "Peter Rabbit Running Mittens".

Real Pumpkin Carving

My lifegroup decided to carve pumpkins for Halloween, so I got to do the real thing for the first time in years. I helped carved the spooky castle jack o' lantern, which turned out surprisingly well despite my 'assistance' (thankfully someone had enough foresight to bring patterns!). All of them ended up looking great, and we had a lot of fun making them. Pictures from the pumpkin carving, as well as the end result, can be found here.

Virtual Pumpkin Carving

A friend sent me this link to a nifty Pumpkin carving simulator. Perfect for those who don't want to deal with the mess after they've carved their pumpkin!