Technomicon Banner Graphic
So I’ve been playing with Photoshop a little bit today, and lo and behold what do I make but this handy-dandy little banner above. It’s not terrible for a first time, and I did use a few kickass brush packages that I found on the ‘net for technical-type brushes (credit to ~ak-productions and ~z-design for those, find both on deviantart.com).
I’m such a Photoshop newb.
I have many things that I need to do in the next 24 hours. Unfortunately, unlike Jack Bauer, none of them are interesting on the “international incident” level, but each one will hopefully get me a little further along than where I am. As it stands right now, I need to tweak my resume slightly to make myself more attractive for a certain position (and this is coming from the people who’re hiring to fill it; no idea how to take that). I also need to get some samples together for another potential gig. Finally, I need to give up a $14,000 bank cheque (yeah, I spell it like the English) as part of our P&S agreement.
If I had a fancy “9:49pm” graphic where the seconds ticked down with that cool “beep boop” noise, I’d insert that here. I don’t, so you’ll have to imagine your own.
And also, I’m incredibly happy that the only Faerie deck to make into the PT Hollywood top 8 was sent packing. 25% of the field. One guy in the top 8. Best deck in the format? Eh, not so much anymore. I’m debating whether I should take down that silly little page I have listing what I do and don’t have. Maybe focus my efforts on B/G elves instead (for all those FNM’s I never play in).
In completely unrelated news, I might be addicted to Vitamin Water. Vanessa and became Costco members over the weekend, and I had to indulge with a 20-pack. Great stuff, seriously. I’m not one for water normally, because I think it tastes like nothing, so this is nice way to convince myself to drink something better for me than soda.
Tomorrow marks the first day in two months that I will be resuming the job I was hired to do. This is not to say that I have not been working for the last 8 weeks, because I have been (save for this past week when I did take a vacation to my sofa). During that time I spent 6 weeks as an escalation engineer, including a full week on-call during which I experienced 27 hours of broken database synchronization between Toronto and Germany. It was awesome, but not really.
The swing week was something that I’d been looking forward to since the start of the year, as it was a week devoted to personal development. I’ve been working on a GUI wrapper for one of our products most convoluted command-line tools (some functions take up to 20 parameters – TWENTY!) since January of 2007, and it has languished in “development hell” for the better part of 16 months. I now have a (mostly) working version, and hope that when I return to work tomorrow that my testers will have actually done something with it.
If anyone who might be interested in my programming skills happens to be reading this (HA!), then you should know that I had my own project manager, have setup my own defect/enhancement database, and even invested in a source control server (Subversion for the win!).
But yeah, tomorrow is back to the world of customer support, and I’m not looking forward to it, mostly because the past few weeks, having had the chance to do something different, were much more fun than the usual day. At any rate, I digress.
I changed up the layout of ye olde bloggings today, and swapped out the Necronomicon joke for something from one of my most favorite hobbies in the world, Magic: The Gathering. The phrase at the top, “Wield you heart and the world will tremble,” came from the flavor text of a card that I own exactly zero copies of, but that doesn’t stop the sentence from being awesome. Seriously, I might get it tattooed on myself in the near future along with the blue and black mana symbols.
…
How the hell did I ever swindle a girl into marrying me?
I could probably go into a multi-page diatribe about our first foray into the real estate market as first-time potential home buyers, but that’s a story for another time. Right now I have some emails to write.
Victory for me.
Today I woke up, fresh off of last night’s surge of creativity, wishing that my new machine would get here all the quicker, but knowing that I would have to wait until Tuesday’s estimated delivery date. So, after having overslept an amount that has become unprecedented since living with my wife (today saw me wake up at 12:45pm), we went out and grabbed something to eat. As she dropped me off at the house before heading out to pick up her dad, I was surprised to open the door and find a special treat.
My new PC has arrived.
The original StarCraft is one of the best games I have ever played in my life. Having been a fan of Warcraft since the early-mid 90’s, ever since I first played Tides of Darkness, I had always thought of StarCraft as the next step in evolution, as the pinnacle of the genre up to that point. I joke from time to time that it’s the game that ended my college career, and while that’s not true in the least, I sure did play it a hell of a ton.
When I first read on the World of Warcraft launcher that StarCraft 2 was in the works, I damn near soiled myself with glee. For a while, SC2 was one of those “rumors you wished would come true”, kind of like Duke Nukem Forever (sorry 3D Realms, but seriously, get your shit together). Now it’s actually in the works. If you’d like to take a look at how it’s shaping up, may I direct you to this clip, which is located at wegame.com:
http://www.wegame.com/watch/Starcraft_II_Terran_Demo_part_1/
(The user who posted these, Starfeeder, has a few other clips up that show some more of the content)
If you haven’t heard about WeGame, think of it as the Youtube of recorded games. I’d only heard of it myself a few days ago, and from what I’ve seen so far it’s pretty cool. So far I’ve watched some folks show off their Half-Life 2 mods, seen some pretty ridiculous Counterstrike kills, and have watched a hysterically funny World of Warcraft machinima called “Inventing Swear Words” about a tauren who marries an undead. Genius.
On a completely unrelated note, I ordered myself a new desktop last weekend, and it should be delivered by Tuesday. I’m really looking forward to having a more powerful desktop, splitting my display across two monitors, and all the fun little dev tools that I’ll be installing. That also means that I believe the game project will be picking back up. Victory for me.
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