Since I never seem to write in here anymore I might as well put up a year in review since so much has happened in 2008.

January - Was still at Sapient and just got pulled into doing the godawful Doral site. That was an eye opener because it made me realize I really really didn’t want to be in the advertising industry. I still have some friends there, and they do some good work, but it’s not for me.

February - Most of February was a blur because I was trying to finish up things at Sapient and I believe around this time I started to realize more and more that I needed to find a new job because I was miserable at Sapient. Jamie was still working at the Shelter and doing decent there.

March - Had another birthday and I seem to remember right around that time is when I started to get a 1st, then 2nd interview with the Zeta people in Vancouver. By the end of the month I had an offer on the table and put in my resignation on the day of my birthday at Sapient. That was a fun birthday mostly because of the prospect of starting a new job, and also because the party Jamie threw was awesome. Though in true ‘good’ party fashion I remember everything up until a certain point, but damned if it wasn’t good before that point.

April - In the beginning of the month I started to get into the groove of working from home, which turns out I liked, or at least liked then. I think somewhere in the middle of the month Jamie lost her job and was put in limbo because the Zeta job was only supposed to last a few months before we moved up to Vancouver.

May - Jamie and I took a trip up to Vancouver to visit my coworkers and also look around the area in the hopes we could find a decent place to live in eventually. It’s also where Jamie had a little rough time our first day over there. Otherwise the trip was awesome, and we even got to meet up with an old friend of mine in Seattle and his then gf/now fiancee. At the end of the month we went to Jamaica for Jamie’s little sister’s wedding in Jamaica and man was that awesome.

June - This month was somewhat of a bummer simply because not a lot happened. I worked, Jamie started working part-time at the gay paper [I think it was around this time] and that was about it. I think also around this time I might’ve started to realize that working from home was fun, but it also wasn’t conducive to me being productive.

July - This was a huge month. But only right at the end because it’s when I proposed to Jamie finally after a long time of knowing she was the one, but not having the right moment + ring to do it. Thankfully by this time I had both things set and popped the question while we were up in Pittsburgh for my family reunion. The rest of the month however, went by with not a whole helluva lot of fanfare.

August - I just remember that now is when we started to try to go crazy finding dates and venues to have the wedding in, even though we had both promised ourselves we wouldn’t go crazy right off the bat.

September - By now the 3-month trial period at Zeta had long since lapsed and I was starting to figure they weren’t in that much of a hurry to get my work permit and move me up there. However Jamie and I did the necessary paperwork to try to start the whole process of getting a work permit. Turns out that it wasn’t nearly as easy as we thought and we’d find that out. We heard back from the Canadian Embassy about my work permit and were informed that we needed a lot more information. Most of which could be provided by Zeta but we weren’t sure how to proceed. While we were trying to figure out what to do an old work buddy informed me of the fact that they were looking for some help up at EA in Orlando. I didn’t think I would actually get the job but figured I’d be stupid to not try for it at least. Jamie’s birthday was at the end of the month but instead of being able to really celebrate it here, we could only go out for a few hours because we had to catch an early flight up to Pittsburgh to look at potential venues that weekend. Thankfully by the end of the weekend we found an awesome venue, picked out a date and were a helluva lot happier and less stressed out than before.

October - By the first week in October I had gotten an official offer from EA and while it was a bit of a paycut from Zeta I knew I had to take it because making videogames has always been something I would jokingly put in the ‘If you could do any job, what would it be?’ list. I put in the 2-weeks at Zeta and started a whirlwind process of finding a new place to live and eventually starting work there by the 20th of the month.

November - Was spent mostly getting used to living in Orlando and everything that came with it. Work wasn’t too crazy but that was because I was still trying to get a real understand of just what I was doing there. Right before Thanksgiving I got a call from my mother about my dad going into the ER, turns out he had gotten two subdural hematoma’s and needed to have surgery to relieve the swelling in his brain. It was a bit touch and go in the beginning, but thankfully by the time the month was over he was better, but still not back to 100%. Thanksgiving was a low-key affair that Jamie and I spent at our new place in Orlando just hanging out because frankly after hearing what happened with my dad I wasn’t in much celebrating mood.

December - Jamie’s dad visited the first week of the month and that was nice. It was also one of the few times in my life I’ve seen two men over the age of 40 smack-talking with some 10 year old kids at a Go-Kart track. Work got better and better as I started to find my groove. Our final trip of the year was the trip to Pittsburgh and Ohio to visit the family for Christmas. This year was a bit different because I wanted to spend a few extra days with my dad since work was completely closed for the annual Christmas break period. In the end it was a good thing because Christmas Eve my grandma had to go to the ER because she could barely hold herself up. Seemingly like dad she took a turn for the worse, before seemingly doing a 180 and making a surprising recovery. As of this moment I believe she’s still in the hospital, so I keep hoping she’ll make more of a recover but she’s 96 so who knows.

This was a year filled with two new jobs, a new hole in my dad’s head, a new ring on Jamie’s finger, and a new town to live in. If that doesn’t make for a crazy year I don’t know what does, and 2009 looks like it’ll be even bigger and better!

This past weekend was an eventful one. Jamie and I drove up to Orlando early on Friday in the hopes of visiting a few apartments we had already done an inital look at online. Most of them were near the EA studio, and one or two were a bit farther away but looked really nice. We figured we’d look at them all day Friday and decide on one by Saturday, Sunday at the latest.

All of that went out the window when we saw our initial complex, while they didn’t have the 3/2 layout open for viewing [the previous tenants had literally just left the day before and there were workmen cleaning/touching up the place] she did show us to a 2/2. We did a walk through and then went back into the leasing office to talk about specifics of if/when a 3/2 would open up.

I was due to start work on the 27th and ideally wanted to move into our apartment during the week of the 20th so that come the 27th we’d be completely settled into the apartment. Some of that went out the window when the women in the leasing office told us that there was one 3/2 opening on the 19th of the month and it was within our price range. This seems good, however the downside to this was that we had to take the keys from her on the 19th, which means we’d be moving this weekend which was a bit sooner than expected.

We figured we’d look it over until we went to the complex literally next door since a friend of mine who lives in Orlando had recommended it to me saying that a lot of his friends lived there and really liked it. Well we looked at a few of their 3/2’s and really, they weren’t that good. Sure they had some nicer amenities but the actual units themselves weren’t near as nice as the ones we initially looked at.

After realizing that we quickly went back to the initial complex and told them that we’d take the 3/2 that was opening on the 19th. So now we’re in get-shit-packed mode and trying to pack as much as we can now since Jamie is busy working most of the week. We’ve managed to get a lot done today and I figure as the week goes along I’ll pack up more and more of the electronics stuff since right now that’s most of what’s left unpacked.

If anyone has extra boxes and packing materials, feel free to send ‘em my way!

I always love how I never seem to write in here about any day-to-day type things and instead simply summarize things that have happened recently.

Well this is another one of those, except this one has even bigger and better news than usual. In the past two months a few major things have happened.

• I proposed to Jamie in July
• We’ve since figured out a date and venue
• I just recently [as of yesterday] accepted a new job to work in Orlando for EA Sports on the Tiger Woods series of games

As you can figure from those almost all of them are big huge momentous things. Most notably the marriage thing. I’ve known for a while that Jamie was the one for me, and knew I wanted to propose to her in a neat and special way. That way was during my family reunion in Pittsburgh and thankfully she said yes.

From then we started to look at venues in the Pittsburgh area since it’s really important for my Grandma and Aunt’s to be at the wedding and they’re on the older side so they can’t travel too far. About a week ago now we took a mini-trip up to Pittsburgh to try to find one after narrowing it down between a few online. Imagine our surprise when after going up there we end up picking a venue that we had initially written off because their website was so terrible. So let this be a lesson to people with businesses out there, make sure your website isn’t terrible so you put your best foot forward for people!

We had just gotten that settled when I was informed last week that after going through a few rounds of interviews at Electronic Arts in Orlando that they did indeed want to bring me on board the Tiger Woods team as a UI developer/designer. So it seemed as if last week everything was turning up aces because I couldn’t believe, and still almost can’t, that I get to actually help make videogames. Sure it’ll be hard, and the hours can be long at times, but it’s something I’ve always said I wanted to do and never really thought I could.

Hell it was only 5 years ago I was waiting tables endlessly and somehow I went from that, to making videogames. Pure. Fucking. Insanity.

So now we’re in the process of getting a move up to Orlando sorted out and are heading up there this weekend to stay with a friend of ours and look at potential apartments. It sure as hell is exciting times over here.

I recently got to purchase a Mac Mini for work because it’s about 1000% easier to do rails work in OSX than it is in Windows. I’m sure someone has a guide to prove me wrong, but I tried for a few days when I first started working at my new job to get around having to work on anything but windows.

Sadly I couldn’t, so I turned to some of the many OSX on PC part ISO’s that are floating around on the internet. I thought I had them working well as most everything seemed to work except for some sleep issues. Another issue was that the HD I installed OSX on was only a meager 20gb and after installing the OS and some programs I was fast running out of room.

I decided to reinstall OSX on a bigger drive and that’s where things went sour. So much so that after almost a week of re-installing OSX over and over again I went and bought a Mac Mini at the local Apple store.

All was well and good when I got it home and hooked it up to my 2nd monitor. A coworker had already pointed out that using a Mini with Synergy and a PC was something I should look into.

I did and was surprised that the PC installer was a lot better functioning than the OSX one. I would’ve thought the program was really geared towards OSX/Unix people and not Windows.

Nonetheless I seemed to get things setup ok and I was happy, except for the fact I couldn’t get it to start when I logged into OSX.

I followed the guide here and yet nothing worked. I could see things would error out at boot-up but still it wouldn’t connect to my server on the PC.

I noticed that for some reason I could connect to my machine by using

$ synergyc -f 192.168.1.1

Which would keep the program running in the foreground and supposedly once you were done testing you could remove the -f flag to run in the background. [You too can use synergyc after putting the file in your /usr/bin/ folder]

Except mine would never stay connected.

In the end I used Lingon to make a custom startup event. All I did was create a custom agent by clicking on the + symbol.

For your name I just used

com.scud.SynergyLogon

For #2 and the “What” section just follow the directions and put in

synergy -f 

And then in section #3 check the “Run it when it is loaded by the system (at startup or login), that way it’ll start when you log in, and thankfully even if you close down your Synergy server on the other machine it’ll reconnect as soon as it’s back up and running.

Hope this reaches people searching on google because I know I had a helluva time trying to get the server setup.

I’m pretty sure everyone else who is a videogamer is writing about how good GTA4 is today. And I have to agree, after having put in a lot of time into it today it’s one of the better games I’ve played in a long long time.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s the best game I’ve ever played, because there are parts that are annoying as piss. But overall it’s an amazing game, most amazing to me are some fo the little things that they put in but didn’t have to. The biggest one is the GSM interferance noise you get while driving your car and getting a call on your cell. Just like in real life right before the call comes through you get a weird buzzing noise in your speakers and then the phone rings. The first time I heard it I thought my own phone was ringing and instantly looked around to find it.

It’s small, not really necessary in any way, yet makes the game all that more awesome because of it’s inclusion. There’s a lot more things like that so if you like videogames at all you owe it to yourself to at least rent it and play the game that everyone is going to be talking about for months.

And multiplayer is fucking hilarious. Often times in completely unintended fashion, but hilarious nonetheless.

Well this time it’s updated to the very latest Wordpress version. So if you upgraded your blog to WP 2.5, and really you should’ve already, then head over to the Girls-Suck Theme page and download v5.3 of the theme. It’ll give you the new gravatar style comment images, tag-cloud on the sidebar and some other fixes I found.

As usual if you find something wrong with it, or find that it’s awesome, say so here. Especially if something’s broken because I checked it on my install here, but mine isn’t necessarily the same as yours. So if you see anything odd at all, let me know, otherwise I’ll never be able to fix it.

It’s April Fool’s and looks like the WP devs decided to be smart and release 2.5 a few days before now. Otherwise I’m pretty sure people would’ve thought it was a joke since it was delayed.

The upgrade went pretty smoothly here, and my slightly modified Girls-Suck theme seems to be doing ok, I’ll give the ’stock’ version a go sometime tomorrow evening and fix up any bugs that may have cropped up, but the fact that this one works without any modifications is a good sign.

If you’re a user who currently has Girls-Suck installed and has a problem, comment here and I’ll keep it as a list as I go through and make fixes.

I feel it’s my duty to inform people about the happenings of peacocks. Why?

Because not everyone can come into their workplace and see a whole flock of peacocks outside their office. Can you?

Didn’t think so, but I can. And let me tell you they’re not the brightest of animals. They seem to love walking up the out-ramp of a 2nd story parking garage instead of going towards a lake for a drink. I feel sort of sorry for the one peacock who was smart enough to not go up the ramp. I bet he wondered where his buddies ran way to.

Peacocks also make some of the weirdest sounding calls you can imagine. Try to picture a child’s cry slightly distorted and it’s a bit closer to how they sound.

That all aside they are fucking pretty.

And I’m going to miss them when I stop working here at Sapient. Yeah I did just sneak that into this post about me getting a new job. I put in my two weeks yesterday and in 2 weeks I’ll be starting for a small start-up based out of Vancouver. No that doesn’t mean I’m going to be staying down here forever. It simply means if all goes well then in a few months Jamie and I will head up there and see if what everyone says about Vancouver is true.

Today is the first day during this trip where we’re not traveling.

Ok maybe Sunday was but that didn’t really count as it was our first full day in London and we took the opportunity to sleep to a sane hour and then try to figure out just what we were going to do for the rest of the week.

Monday however was a day full of travel and fun. We were going to initially take a train to Wales to visit a friend of mine and see the Welsh country-side since neither of us had been. We would’ve done that had we not tried to price the train and seen that it comes out to about £106 per person, or the equilivent of $212 per person per leg, so for us to travel on the train it would’ve been nearly $800.

I nearly shit my pants because I wasn’t expecting it at all. A friend had told me about the trains in the first place, and they were cheap then. I didn’t realize they were akin to airline tickets you had to book months in advance otherwise the price skyrocketed. After asking around again someone put us onto buses, or coaches here, and we gave them a try. At £62 for both of us it was a helluva lot cheaper.

So we went to Victoria station trying to find where the buses were, but again our trip of near misses and inability to read signage continued and we back-tracked into the train station because we thought we had missed where the bus station was. Turns out we hadn’t gone far enough this time.

Then after attempting to buy tickets we were told we had missed the 11:30 and had to wait an hour. We figured since we’ve got an hour I’m going to grab something to eat because I was starving and starting to become a dick, and also attempt to get my phone figured out.

Turns out I shouldn’t have even bothered with trying to get my unlock code from my US carrier as it didn’t do shit. Instead I should’ve taken it to the dodgy mobile shop near Victoria station paid them 10 quid to unlock it and all would’ve been done.

So in the end I didn’t waste much money as I used a Vodafone sim-card since I had already bought some top-up minutes earlier.

Having that settled meant I could actually call my friend in Wales and tell her what was going on. She understood our problem but mentioned because of the coach ride there wouldn’t be much daylight to see some sights. We understood but not like there was much we could do.

After doing the 3 hour coach ride to Wales we arrived and were immediately greeted by my friend Llinos, who I also found out I had been saying her name wrong entirely. But that’s because I had only heard it said by English people who also got it all wrong. We put our bags in our shit hotel and proceeded to be led all around the Welsh country. We got to see Penarth a pretty town on the water-front, got taken around Cardiff to see both where the Millennium Stadium was, and some of the other newer buildings there. And then went to where Llinos’ home and home-pub were at. It was great fun to sit there, have some good fish and chips and then drink a few pints while watching shit football.

We were brought back to our hotel and again slept like nobodies business because we were exhausted from traveling again and then cramming more sight-seeing into a day. When we woke up however we went shopping in and around downtown Cardiff which I have to say was great. Jamie found some good rugby shops, I got some Christmas shopping done and I managed to pick up the new Arsenal kit I needed for yesterday’s game. Then right before we had to catch our return bus we went up in the Cardiff Winter Wonderland ferris wheel which was fucking massive. I mean this thing was huge but we decided we were going to go in it, even if it was slightly drizzling and overcast.

We paid our £10 total for us and got to be the only people on it, course it probably helped that it was only 12pm and raining out. But we went probably at least 6 stories up and we were both scared shitless from the height. I’m ok in a building and usually have been ok with heights in rides, but this was bad because I happened to look out at the ground and that’s what kept fucking me up.

Jamie proceeded to take a lot of pictures, which will be uploaded soon and I’ll link to them. And then started to try to stand up and move around in our little cabin. I might have laughed at her when we were getting into it and she kept saying she was scared but I definitely said “Oh no you don’t” as she started to get up because I didn’t want the thing to rock.

Yes, yes I am a giant sissy.

After we got off it was right back to the bus station to catch our bus back to London. Oh wait, except that I had left our return tickets in my Arsenal magazine which I had left on the train when we got to Wales. Great now we were going to have to re-buy the damned things. Except Jamie reminded the ticket agent we had purchased them with a credit-card and he simply looked up our information and then wrote a number down on a piece of paper which we used to get 2 boarding passes.

It worked out in the end, but proved that apparently the only thing I’m good at doing when I come to the UK is drinking in pubs, and watching football matches.

Anyway we were able to catch the coach ok and got back to London around 5:15. Which was good as we were due to meet up with a gentleman who was friends with Jamie’s dad for dinner at 7pm. Now an hour and 45 minutes should be good enough to get to our flat, change and make it over but really it wasn’t. We had to get there with the mob of people during rush-hour, then iron our clothes and change because we were still wearing mostly dirty things from Wales and then travel back from where we had just come.

In the end we met him at 7:30 and all was well. We had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant called BANK, and then went out for a pint or two at the pub ’round the corner. All in all it was a great evening and some fun conversations but i have to say I’m looking forward to today and the fact we don’t have to be anywhere at any time, and we can simply go shopping when we want and for however long we want.

Sometimes I think I only update when something major’s happened. Or I take a trip to London.

In this case it’s because I’m taking a trip to London, only this time I’m a] not going alone and b] not going for only 3 days. Jamie and I are headed to London for an entire week to see an Arsenal game, tour Wales, get wasted in foreign lands, and also see some of her father’s work associates.

Needless to say I’m so fucking excited it’s scary. Mostly because it’ll be my first trip to the new stadium and I think it’ll be good to show Jamie just why I’m so fucking passionate about a team that’s so far away from me.

Because I actually have a non-shit job we rented a flat in London for the week and I may actually be able to update mid-week without having to pay through the nose for some shit Orange Internet cafe.

Now it just needs to be 8pm so we can already be in NY and getting on the plane bound for London.

Though Jamie just reminded me that she’d rather it be 8am so we’re already in London, which as usual is correct.