Too lazy to come up with a more descriptive title for this post. :p

Anyway I figured it's about time I made a post to show people I'm still alive. I am still working in edmonton and will be heading back home at the end of june. Finnally!

I just submitted my Fart Sniffer tutorial to gamedev.net so I will see if they accept it or not.

I also purchased my first camcorder! The Sony HDR-HC3. It's a pretty cool camera. I researched camcorders for about 3 weeks and had all but decided NOT to spend $2000 CDN on a comcorder, even though all the reviews I read gave it good scores. I was not willing to spend all that much. That was until I walked into best buy and saw the demo that was on display and saw the clarity the camear was capable of. Even sweeter, I waited for about a week before decideding to purchase it, and as it turns out the price droped to $1799 CDN. And on top of that I found a cheaper price at www.thecamerastore.com for $1599 CDN. That was enough incentive for me to spend the few hundred dollars more for the HC3. Bestbuy will match and beat any advertised price so all I had to do was show them that I had found the HC3 selling for $200 cheaper and bing! $200 dollar savings! Whoot! Unfortunatly I spend over $300 in accessories like a 2gig memory stick pro duo, tripod, extra minidv tapes, camera bag , additional battery etc, so in the end I still ended up spending over $2000 CDN.

The only thing that kinda bugs me is that I will not be able to see just how good the camera really is for some time, as I do not have a 1080 high definition tv to view my recordings on. :( So very sad.

But at least I now have a digitial camera for taking pictures and video of the treks I go on up the mountians and such. As well as the possibility of a video blog! In HD! Hmmm maybe not, but we'll see.

I am also hoping to make an extra $2000 CDN or so before heading home so I can renew my msdn pro subscription just in time for windows vista to ship. Although I have to admit I am weary of doing so, because the last time droped $2000 CDN on a msdn subscription I never even used a tenth of the software I recieved. Seems a wee bit of a waste.

I should also mention that I am still hard at work on my xGSuite projects(s) and have got a basic working game engine running with integrated menus, console, etc. It's just a matter of figuring out weather or not the libraries I have created are benifiting the development of the game engine or hindering it. Hopefully not hindering it because that would mean back to the drawing board for me.

VB.NET Express now free, forever! Link to gamedev article

Wuhoo thats such an awesome feeling knowing you did something right the first time.

I have something special for you! Wait for it! ... Wait for it! Warp3DVB!

I have finished converting the C# graphics library Warp3D over to vb.net 2005! By finished I mean %95 done. I kinda cheated a little and got lazy doing the conversion so I am sure some people are going to find some gotchas in the code. My biggest concern is the way I converted the type conversions over to vb.net. Some of the type conversions were not written the same way they were in C#.

But I do plan on writing an extensive tester app that will run both my converted Warp3DVB and the original C# Warp3D library through it paces, and have the ability to directly compare the two. In the mean time hope you have fun using the library.

For those of you who don't know Warp3D is a powerful %100 .NET Graphics library! I would also like to thank Alan Simes http://alansimes.blogdns.net/ for creating/converting the Warp3D library to C#. If I am not mistaken I believe Alan converted the Warp3D graphics library from a java based graphics library. You can download the Warp3D library from alan's web site here. I would also like to thank Kamal Patel (http://www.KamalPatel.net) for his great C# to VB.NET converter utility which I used to assist me in the conversion. Although the C# to VB.NET converter is far from perfect it was still a great help.