I have never been a fan of reality TV and this just seems to be another attempt to garner ratings. The drama in the show seems so artificial I want to claw my own eyes out. The crabiness of Hawass added just that much
More hate for the show.

What I would enjoy is more archaeology and less fluff. It seems after a wee bit of searching many others agree. Sadly thus type of TV seems to be more and more common. Does anyone else long for the times when channels like TLC, Discovery, and History actually showed worthwhile content?

Should be a good trip!!

June 30th here we come!

I wake up
Beside you, in mom’s car
I try to get you out,
You’re strapped to the backseat
I am too.

The car is rolling down to water.
Why are we
Strapped to our seats,
Trapped,
What did we do?
I cleaned my room just as she asked me to.

Filling up, dirty water,
My chin’s up, going under.
You’re still asleep, baby brother.
I’ll wake you up when this is over.

The car is rolling down to water.
Why are we
Strapped to our seats,
Trapped,
What did we do?
I brushed my teeth just as she asked me to.

This is it, baby brother,
One more breath togther
We’re almost underwater
Where is mom?
I miss her.

The car has rolled into the water.
Why are we dying in this way,
What did we do?
I was nice to him,
Her boyfriend, this is stupid
When people come to search the lake
We’ll be found in our pajamas
They will see
A big mistake is all that this must be

Her reaction was fairly positive, but she did ask “where do you find this crazy stuff?” In reply I chuckled and said “the Internet, silly.” Overall a good experience, even if it did keep us up too late.

Anyway, if you’ve never heard of Dr Horible, I recommend checking it out: http://www.drhorrible.com.

Well, let’s see what’s happened in oh… the last six months:

• I had surgery in November to fix some problems with my bottom (I am not getting into details )
• HighJump Software layed off > 50% of its staff in the delivery division on my birthday (not me though).
• My boss told me he was quitting the very same day (which is also HIS birthday).
• Christmas came and went… I got lots of new video games (and a new awesome toy!)
  • Dragon Age : Origins (Spectacular!!!)
  • Uncharted 2 ( Another spectacular game )
  • Assassins Creed 2 ( Good, but easier than the original IMHO)
  • Heavy Rain (Very Good)
    • This actually came a few weeks ago, but I’m too lazy to create another game section.
  • Dinovo Mini + PS3 Adaptor for Harmony Remote
    • Sooooo awesome… everything works with my remote, and I have a full wireless KB for the ps3 now.
• January was a flurry of job interviews as I looked to flee a sinking ship (aka HighJump Waterloo )
• February I landed a new job at Moxy Media, starting March 1st
• February was also a flurry of school work as I completed my degree on the 25th & 26th with my final two exams.
• March I started the new job. What a change from working on windows mobile devices to doing work for an advertising agency!
• I also got my grades for school… Passed with flying colours. Just waiting on the degree in the mail now.
• My little brother, Aaron, announced to the family he’s getting married in July… Of this year! Insanity is soon to commence.
• Since school is finished, I’ve started writing software on my own time again. I’m starting to feel the love once more!
• I remade the whole http://zenwerx.com website with a new wordpress look in mid-April.

I think that’s about it… It’s been fairly busy. Lots of stuff going on, and lot’s more to come.

The year was 2002; I was in college at the time. I was beginning my second co-op work term during the winter semester. I also had a girlfriend, of almost a year – the longest ever at the time.  (SIDE NOTE:, this is the same GF whom I lied to about smoking.  Not my best years, I must admit.)  Sadly it was not to last as someone else,  ‘something‘ else rather, came into my life shortly after. As you can guess from above, this was a MMO game.

I had beta tested a few years before for a game called Asheron’s Call being created by one Turbine Software. At the time I was not very interested. The beta came and went and I paid no heed to it. I was more into first person shooters and real time strategies at the time. I also had a real Dungeons and Dragons group to get my true geek on with, why bother online?

Flash back to the co-op work term. I was working for the same company I did the first term for, but the load was pretty light this time. I was working from my apartment and corresponding through email and telephone. To make a long story short, I was bored:  I had nothing to do and I had no desire to find anything else to do.

My playstation and my old video games were getting a little tiresome.  I decided to try one of those new MMO games I was hearing about on the Internet. My first attempt was at EverQuest, but it just did not seem right to me. I packed it up and traded it in (yes, you could still do this at the time).  I remembered playing the beta for AC, and looked it up. I could not find it in stores but managed to have a copy shipped to me. It was the begginning of the end for my social life.

I am sure that many people who will actually read this post know what these games are like, but I will explain it anyway. The game was like being on drugs. I was glued to the screen for 18 + hours a day. Yes, 18 hours of every day I was spending on this game. Always trying to make my character better, trying to compete against everyone else. I had to be the best! If that meant I needed a widget or a do-dad which could only be found by killing a super-rare monster a hundred times, I would do it. I could not stop myself.

I soon stopped calling my girlfriend. I could not talk to her and play at the same time. When she called me I would ignore the calls whenever possible and make up excuses later. When we did talk I tried to keep it short, any time that I was not spending on the game was time other people had to get ahead of me! When I went to see her, all I could think about was the game. It was the first thing I thought of when I woke up! Not of the woman whom I had told I loved…

Yes, this is exactly how I behaved back then. And as you can guess I was to lose her soon afterwards. There were other reasons, of course — and I will not enumerate them all here — but this is the one I look back upon and feel ashamed of. I let a video game control my life, and I lost something special because of it.

After she left me I went a little crazy.  I was stuck between a rock and a hard place – give up the game, or give up the girl. I told myself I really loved her, but I did not give up the game : I wanted both.  In the end I said some nasty things, none of which I can recall. I do, however, remember the reaction which they got me.  I was an immature 22 year old, but I say that with 8 years of retrospective. I would never have admitted it at the time.

All of that said and done, I quit the game forever 6 months later. I got a real job, since my money had run out. I could not devote the time I needed to it any more. When I quit, I had absolutely nothing to show for it except a still broken heart.

With that said, I am finished my story for today. And if you ask me to play an MMO, you will know the reason why I turn you down without even a second though.

I have my first summer off in roughly five years. As many who know me are privileged to hear, almost constantly, I have been taking university courses part time. It has been a constant move from one set of courses to another, but the end is definitely in sight. I cannot wait to be done, but I also ponder the thought of “what will I do?” after I am finished. This question does make me think, but then again I will most likely do what I am doing now during the summer : fill my time with hobbies. I am just not sure if that will be satisfying enough. Two months of fishing, video games, and other things is great, but what comes next? That will be a question for 2010 though… September marks the beginning of the end, my last two courses.

Some history is in order for the rest of this post. I completed college in August of 2003, but was never satisfied with the education I received from Conestoga. I always felt that I was being taught the basics over and over again, only with a different language every semester.  By basics I mean syntax of language, and not the FUNDAMENTALS that I believe that any decent software developer should know. Nobody taught us about data structures – Hash Tables, B-Trees, Lists. We never learned about how an operating system really worked. We were taught about Windows – How to operate it. We were taught VB, Cobol, and C – How to program in them.

Taking university courses in Computer Science has really opened my eyes. I have seen the guts of an OS and how it works with hardware. I know how my databases work behind the scenes, and can make better informed decisions on their design. I know how my computer network is designed and really understand how it works. I have dabbled with the semantic web and can make my documents part of it. I will be learning about Artificial Intelligence and Distributed computing next.

I also brushed up on my mathematics, something which was severely lacking in Conestoga. We learned “Business Math” and “Statistics”, but this is not nearly enough. I have the power of Calculus and Discrete Mathematics under my belt. I even tortured myself with a class on ODEs (Ordinary Differential Equations). This is the sort of learning that I longed for when I was in my early twenties!

Unfortunately, looking back a decade or more, my late teens made the trip to university impossible. I had a choice between friends, school, or a compromise between the two. During my first three years of high school I chose school and participated with friends to a lesser degree. After grade eleven, I tried to get into the social scene much more and my studies fell to the wayside. I even went for a sixth year of high school to attempt to bring up some grades and join the university crows a year later, but to no avail.

In one way, I do not have much to show for the bad choice I made above.  The friends I keep company with to this day are those whom I spent time with before I made the choice to let school slack. In other ways, I do not think I could have done anything differently. I have a beautiful wife, whom I would never have met if I changed the way I lived my life, and a life I would not give up for anything. It is hard to imagine how my life would have turned out if I had changed even a single thing in the past.

It is funny, I did not know how this post was going to turn out when I started it. I am quite satisfied with the results, even though there is much more racing. The mind is a beautiful thing, and I must exercise mine more to keep it in shape.

That’s it for now I guess. Will try to update again soon!

*sigh*

WordPress is definitely nice, but probably waaaaay more full of features than I really need. Oh well, it looks and feels very nice. I’ve added another last.fm plugin for wordpress, and this one actually downloads album images rather than just song names!

I also tried to upgrade my gallery from gallerypy to gallery2. I’ve tried this upgrade in the past, and it didn’t go so well. I should have stuck with my gut feelings, but I was interested to see how a wp->g2 plugin would work. While it worked reasonably well, I still can’t get past gallery2′s stupidness. I really hate that I can’t just point it at a folder of pictures, which are already on my site here, and have it parse them. I don’t have the time or willpower to sort thousands of pictures into albums… when the folder heirarchy I already have does that just perfectly as it is!

Anyway, I just hacked the template for gallerpy so it would look like the blog. It’s exactly the same thing I did with bblog a couple years ago! C’est la vie… take the easy route I guess!