When you work as a business professional representing a company; even as a programmer who doesn’t get much face time, you become accustomed to certain things. Things like wearing a suit, going to business social events and drinking wine while talking to other professionals become the norm. The trouble with this environment can be that people become so careful of what they can and can’t talk about. If you say too much you can leak sensitive company information, or if you say too little you can be run over by the more prominent figures in the community and fade into the background. People begin to worry about helping their friends and colleagues for fear of violating agreements with their own workplaces.
Recently I decided to step outside this world and combine some of my lesser used hobbies to join a different crowd of people. What I discovered was quite a surprise.
Well, for once one of my dumb domain purchases can go to use! Since it was cheap I decided to purchase the domain ‘slly.me’ recently. I had a laugh at all the possibilities for short addresses that could be made with it, like ‘oh.slly.me’ or ‘silly.slly.me’ — lots of opportunities for comedy gold.
Out of curiosity I signed up for bit.ly Pro to see how it worked, after a few days wait they approved my account and now I have slly.me set up to create custom short URLs on my TweetDeck and I’m itching to test out their API to see what kind of ridiculous things I can come up with.
I will be presenting an introduction on designing your own video games using the Unreal Engine at the OKDG meetup in October, which doesn’t have a set date yet.
Some topics I will cover:
- The history of the Unreal Engine
- The potential of the Unreal Engine, examples of what can be built
- Importing your own 3D models into the UDK
- Importing your own custom textures and creating materials with them
- Creating a level from scratch
- Placing your models and animating them
- Lighting your level
- Recommended reading and resources to learn more
If anyone has anything in particular they’d like to see presented, please let me know!
I had a blast being an exhibitor at the F5 Expo in Vancouver recently. Although by the end of it my feet were numb from standing all day. Got to meet some fantastic people, and spread the word about what I do at work! Just found out about this video today, which briefly has me in the background flailing my arms and talking to people.
Be sure to check it out!
My only wishes for the next F5 Expo is that they start having panels and workshops on more advanced talks. Everything felt pretty basic, I don’t need to know how to set up a wordpress blog or how to check my email on a Blackberry.
So it was the first ACK! (Anime & Cosplay Kelowna) screening at my house last night. Since I’m fairly new to the club I wanted to help out and offer to host some events, especially now that Bandeau – the primary host of many past events – is moving away soon. So 9 people were schedule to show up, and one ended up canceling. We all crammed together into my living room with piles of chips, home made snacks and pop to enjoy this spectacle:
Blassreiter, wow.. words cannot describe how cheesy and poorly edited this was. The opening scene cut right into the action with some low budget CG mixed with traditional 2D animation. There were naked dead chicks turning into 3D animated “demoniacs” that merged with motorcycles, cars, bombs, and we had hoped for a helicopter merge – but didn’t see it within the 2 episodes we permitted ourselves to watch. Ridiculous.
So we quickly ejected the DVD and proceeded to watch random clips of Samurai Pizza Cats and whatever else we could entertain ourselves with in my collection until we finally arrived at Firefly, and managed to watch the pilot. I know it was an Anime club screening, but Firefly was worlds better than Blassreiter and was a breath of fresh air.
The night finished off with the unofficial raffle of the Blassreiter DVD to Gord, who makes a habit of collecting the bad screened animes.
Jordy from work decided to make a video overviewing some of the new revisions to our video player. I’ll leave the sales talk out, but I just felt like showing it because the video player is my baby -- it’s what I spend the majority of my time working on while I’m at the office.
So I was sitting around with a cold on a Friday and thought it was a good idea to start blogging about things again. I attempted to blog years ago at my other site www.seratonik.com but failed at keeping it up to date – I was never happy with the name, nobody really knows what it means and it doesn’t accurately represent me in my current state. So what better domain/blog name than my own full name? Now I can be a narcissist in plain sight, and don’t simply have to leave it to Twitter.
