Chiara Meets Santa

Chiara woke up so Sabrina and I feed her. Both of the girls went back to sleep leaving the insomniac awake with nothing to do. So I figured I'd edit together some video I've been meaning to do since Christmas.

The back story of the video is Santa Bob comes every year to my sisters birthday party which doubles as our family Christmas party. Makes sense as my sister was born on Christmas eve. Santa Bob started coming to the house when my sister was 1 so this was his 23rd year coming to our house for Christmas - so he's watched us grow up, start dating, get married, and now start to have children. We never told him Sabrina was expecting so he was a little surprised to say the least as you will see in the video.

I hope you enjoy it.

Merry Christmas everyone! I know January is almost over but his video puts me back in the mood for Christmas.

Chiara - Waking Up

This is our little one in the morning. Just a little taste of what we get to see every morning. :)

A little early...

I'm watching the first Christmas movie of this year... a little early but I blame the TV scheduling peoples. Surprisingly, "Fred Claus" is a pretty excellent holiday movie. :)

Little Wonders

Yet another video for you. I wanted to create a video compilation of all the great little moments captured in our 8mm conversion. I quickly found it a very difficulty task to fit all the clips into the duration of the song. I first got the idea from the listening to the song, and all my inspiration flowed from there. I tried adding another music track but I found two songs to be distracting and overall competing themes. So I cut the clips to a single track.

Blogspot does horrible things to the quality so if you have access to Facebook please view the video there. If not, this is acceptable until I burn all the produced video's onto DVD.

I hope you enjoy the latest video. Please let me know what you think. :)

After getting my first MacBook, I finally had time to discover all the software that comes preloaded one of which being a video editing suite iMovie. I'll be posting some old 8mm family video's that I've cut-up and added a base music track to all in iMovie.

The video's posted on my Facebook profile are of better quality something that Google does in the video process step (I'm assuming to save server space/bandwidth) is reducing the image quality. I'll if I can tweak it... but I doubt they have exposed those settings to the general public. Enjoy.

Roberto Parolin's Blog

Storms a brewin'

Rock Band Feature: Harmonix's Top Tips For Drummers | Game | Life from Wired.com

If drumming in Rock Band is kicking your butt... the game developers have put together this HowTO article to get you past the most common pitfalls.

Rock Band Feature: Harmonix's Top Tips For Drummers | Game | Life from Wired.com

Happy New Year to all. :)

This is an interesting comic... I guess as the gamer population ages this is going to be alot more common place. Maybe gamers will have to start stories with "When I was your age..." hahaha....

Portal as a business model...

Kotaku has a very interesting article... With the success of Portal being analyzed what does this say in to our industry? Should this model be the litmus test for all innovated products deemed too risky by, to use a Half Life convention, our benefactors?

Its an interesting thought... I don't obviously don't have any answers so I will merely pose more questions. Is it a way to test the reduce the risk game production? Or is it simply that game publishing executives don't have the stomach for this business anymore? I'm guessing the game executives of today don't have an the experience of beating OR are unwilling to "bet the farm" on some crazy kids game design project? Which is understandable... but this business was built on the "crazy kids game design project" and moving away from that ultimately lead to gamers who remember the good ol' days to blow the dust off their old gaming machines... the whole retro gaming industry I believe it a spin off of the lack of innovation and unwillingness to take risks in the gaming industry.

Wow... that was long winded... if your still reading Thanks for endulging me. See the orginal Kotaku link below.

http://kotaku.com/336504/gearbox-want-to-copy-portal

Another classic from Penny Arcade

Pictures from my work Christmas Party.

Mr. Plow...

During our 1 day of snow fall I managed to snap a picture of a snow plow. Don't ask why I felt compled to post this picture. Maybe I just needed something to do... or maybe I need to justify going out and walking in the bitter cold for nothing but a stupid picture... ah well another question that life will not answer.

Whistler Day Trip

If you take the time to adventure up to Whistler for the day during the summer this is your reward. Sometimes I forget we have all this in our backyard.

Nothing like a Whistler sunset. :)

So it ends...

Well its finally done. I've moved into my new place... and I'm done with all this mess.

I'll post pictures as soon as I get my computer up to normal running condition.

Stay tuned... :D

The magical day came...

Well, after another 'error' Aragon has moved the inspection date from Feb 16th, to Feb 21st. Well that day has come... but we called the city of burnaby and they have no record of any applications for inspections from Aragon. So, there is a error on some end ... I will call aragon again tomorrow to see what is going on... they had better no be lieing yet again to me.

To clarify, I called there offices this morning and asked if the inspection was going ahead and their people said "YES". So the saga continues... and continues...

I'm really getting sick of all this crap.

Never purchase anything from these "people."

Finally... some progress

We decided to drive past our townhouse / construction site after today. Wouldn't you know it... they actually appear to be 98% complete. The construction 'blue fence' was taken down, my front yard had a nice picket fence around the perimeter. It actually looks like a ready to be moved in home. It looks like the construction people finally got the lead out and did their jobs!

So hopefully the inspections will go fine, and I can then move in. At least a little progress has put me in a very good mood today... :D

Waiting & WoW...

As I'm still waiting on my house to be completed. I've been playing alot of WoW recently. As of tonights quests on the foggy area known as the 'Wetlands' my paladin is now level 20. And yes, I'm quite proud of myself. Hopefully, I can power level my way to level 40 so I can finally, finally, FINALLY get a create mount so I don't have to walk/run everywhere.

Level 60-70, can't remember which, is when you get fly mounts. Yes, that will be very sweet.

Oh well,...

10 second house update:
Aragon sucks, I'm waiting for my house to be completed. They still no idea when it will be ready. Fantasic company eh? Yes, I thought so too.

Tank Wars

I've decided to being development of a very VERY simple game just get some momentum on my home projects. So, my selected project is a tank game. Its not really a game, its more of an AI testbed. Tanks are going to have a set of behaviours that will be switched on during runtime.

Ultimately, these tanks will just sit within the small world and try to destroy each other. I've got one behaviour about 50% completed. The 'hostile' behaviour does the following:
- scans for tanks in the surrounding area
- attempts to move closer to it (if out of range)
- attempts to shot the closest tank (if within range)

There are other behaviours that I'm thinking of implementing that are taken directly from the 'steering behaviours' model such as "evade", "arrive", "queue", etc.

I hope to have something that can be fun, and maybe user customizable through some very simple scripting language or possibly xml. But that is a consideration for later on...

I'll post some source code, and or some screenshots (when I start the rendering modules of the code) when I've gotten them a happy place.

Stay tuned...