I have not been posting any update as of late. I have not been doing much of anything really, mostly slacking off.

First it started last week when I hiked from my house up the thornhill mountian trail to the first lake on top of the mountian. It took five hours of walking to reach the summit overlooking the lake, and another three and a half hours to walk back home. Needless to say my legs were a little sore for the next few days after that.

The the the other day I purchased Half-Life 2 using steam. It was an simple experience, and I have to say using steam to purchase games online is a mixed blessing. For one the purchasing of a game using steam may be easy but having to wait for 2 days before you can play the friggin game is BS. And Yes I have broadband! The download for HL2 is over 3 gigabytes! And that does not include downloading Counter-Strike Source, HL2 Death match, or the Source SDK!

Then there are the "Time" concerns. Time as in will I still be able to play HL2 15 years from now? Or will valve simply decide to stop supporting it. Additionally, what happends if Valve the company goes belly up, what happends to all us gamers then! Will we still be able to play HL2?

I considered taking the $60 CAD I spent on HL2 and getting World of Warcraft but I dispise blizzard for taking the monthly subscription aproach. it's cheap, meaningless, and BS. And is just another way to suck more money out of the consumer for the same game.

I have also been planning a new game engine called Zider. The name Zider is a mix of words and meanings. It combines Side scrolling game "Side", but rendering the scene in 3D "Z depth". Hence the name Zider. It will be my 10 to the 24th power attempt at starting and finishing a usable game engine. But this time I'm taking it slow. Really slow. Now that I have a better understanding of game engine design and in game consoles, as well as my DXTools graphics library I almost have all the tools and pieces I will need to make the Zider game engine a reality. Zider is actually a old idea I have had for a while now but have yet to get around to coding it. Just one of those things I guess.

Oh yah, can't for get about this. Guess who can juggle? You got it! Yours trully! ha HA! Awesome. The other day for no reason at all >cough< Wating for HL2 to download >cough< I picked up 3 tennis balls that were lying around and started learning how to juggle them. I can't believe it only took between 6 and 8 hours before I was juggling 3 balls! I have already started to get real fancy and doing tricks like in the middle of juggling I throw up one ball then as it's comming down throw the other two balls up at the same time, catching the first ball and continuing to juggle. I can also juggle 2 balls in one hand!

It was actually a fluke that I started to juggle, I was out in the back yard and after hours of not being able to grasp the concept of juggling just out of the blue I got lucky and managed to juggle 3 balls about 5 times before fouling it up. But that's all it took to open my eyes and wrapping my mind around how to juggle. From then on I've been juggling up a storm.

Strangley enough now that I am comfortable juggling, my mind can be off wondering on something else while I'm juggling. many times I feel as though I am juggling unconsiously and I'm not in control. It's a strange sensation being able to keep track of three balls both catching them and throwing them at the same time, and doing it in rapid succesion.

If the Video does not play below then just click this link to download the file.

I have been playing around with Media Wiki, and I have to say it was quite easy to install andget up and running. I tried using Flex Wiki but had too hard of a time getting it working properly after installing it.

As opposed to an average non-programming windows user I tend to reinstall windows at least once or twice a year. Especially with all the crap I download, you can never be sure if some of the stuff truly uninstalls itself completely. But anyway I was reinstalling XP Pro an hour ago and for the first time it actually did something different.

Oddly enough though I tried to click the "Microsoft Activation Assistance Web Site" link but my internet was too slow and caused a timeout that crashed the Microsoft server, causing it to return an asp.net application error page telling me the request timed out. Not very graceful error handling by the microsoft web devs.

So instead of trying again to activate windows I simply clicked cancel and proceeded to install SP2 as well as download additional windows updates. And when I went to activate it again just a moment ago, poof, no more nag screen. Something about SP2 or one of the other windows updates must have nullified the windows activation mechanism, because windows is now activated and ready to go.

This post is for those of you who in the off chance read this post and reinstall windows and it tells you have exceeded your install/activation limit, to simply try and install SP2 and all windows updates before trying to activate. The activations exceeded nag screen just might disappear like mine did!

Go check out google earth it's free!

Since Google acquired Keyhole satellite imaging company they have been doing awesome things with it. First it was google maps and now this! Sweet. Now I can totally plan out a hiking trip or plot a kayaking trip down the river and not have to "guess" how long a trip will take or what provisions I will need.

In case you havent heard GameDev.net is holding a programming contest over at GameDev.net - Contests - Four Elements IV

I have been aware that the forums have not been working and was not sure why it suddenly stopped working. Then I woke up this morning and realized, I changed my password at my brinkster web hosting account. lol Duh! The password that phpbb was trying to use to connect to the database was the old password. Any way all is right again and no fourm data was lost. If this ever happends again and you are trying to visit the fourms just send me an email at createdbyx@createdbyx.com and let me know that the fourms are down. I am able to respond more quicker this way.

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A winning game has been chosen at the 2005 VB Game programming contest. TAttack took the top spot and won a copy of VB.NET 2003 standard!

I would just like to say thanks to all who participated, and I hope to hold another contest some time in the future...

On June 13 I made a blog entry titled "Hint: noslO nosaJ "Nutty Soup"

This post if any of you might have figured out, refers to Jason Olson's blog regarding 2D game game development using managed DX.

Well instead of leaving you hanging and scratching you heads. I'll just tell you. I have taken the C# code from the Console and Command classes and converted them to VB.NET. I have also added some functionality, as well as stripped some out.

The console code Jason has on his blog was too tightly coupled with the game that he was making so in order to simplify and make the console code more easily portable and reusable I removed the rendering code so that the console now calls a delegate that the programmer specifies rather then the console rendering itself.

But anyway, I will be posting the code as well as a example of the console code in action, fairly soon. I am planning on making a video demo that will take you thru understanding how the console works and what changes I made to it etc. As well as demonstrate the power that having a console in your game can be.

I was checking my old email addresses over at yahoo and realized that I was looking at a ebay banner advertisement (yahoo email displays advertisement banners when checking your email.)

Is this a bad marketing idea or what! Yahoo has there own auctions site at Yahoo Auctions which I believe they promote on TV, but there displaying ebay advertisements on there site?

LOL >Snaps fingers at yahoo< Comon yahoo snap out of it!

I personally only use Yahoo Auctions for buying and selling my online auction stuff. I was registered at eBay but have had nothing bad to say about it ever since, I tried to put an item up for sale on it. Oh, you want a add a picture .25 cents, want to do this .25 cents more, bastards, to hell with you ebay. Yahoo auctions are completly free! Yah you heard right, Free!

I even went so far as to have them close my account and request they purge all traces of me from there filthy databases, and any backup databases as well. lol. As you can see I am a little peeved at eBay. If me and eBay were standing on a high bridge and no one was looking I'd push push them over the side and wave good buy. Money lovin greedy bastards, stab you in the back if they had the chance. Did I mention Yahoo Auctions are completly free to use!

Rant Over.

Now that I am using two computers (laptop and desktop) I find myself needing to sync file between both computers. So I was using VBExpress beta2 to create a fily sync utility for my self when I stumbled across this little tidbit under the Widbey documentation.
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Most Efficient Data Types
For variables that never contain fractions, the integral data types are more efficient than the nonintegral types. In Visual Basic, Integer and UInteger are the most efficient numeric types.

For fractional numbers, Double is the most efficient data type, because the processors on current platforms perform floating-point operations in double precision. However, operations with Double are not as fast as with the integral types such as Integer.

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This is interesting to me because I am a directx programmer and as any managed directx programmer knows is that all the data types and classes etc in the managed directx sdk use the Single data type, not the Double data type!!! Mabe someone should contact Tom miller about this??

Efficient Use of Data Types