Bryan’s Web (.net)

After a perfect normal season ranked #1 the whole way - and then two months off - OSU lost to Florida. Florida played really well - their play calling was amazing. We lost Ginn 15 seconds into the game - after one amazing touchdown return - and we just didn’t play like the team we were way back in November when we beat Michigan. Or even back in September when we beat Texas. If we had played the game back on November 25th, it would have been a true showcase of our skill level. But the game was now, not then. Our defense wasn’t up to snuff the first quarter and let Florida walk all over them (though I still say that second Florida TD should’ve been recalled… both knees were down way before the ball broke the plane). The defense came back from half time and played like they should’ve in the first half, but by that time Florida had too much of a lead and our offense just couldn’t fire back. Troy Smith didn’t play like I know he can, (and unfortunately Tressel didn’t coach like I know he can, either) but I place most of our offense’s problems on the inability of our offensive line to hold the pressure off of Smith. There wasn’t one play the entire game when he wasn’t scrambling for air. And the loss of Ginn meant that their defense was able to cover any potential recievers. Bottom line: Our team deserved better, but it’s their own fault for becoming complacent, or whatever happened. And Florida played one hell of a game, too.

Oh well. It’s just a game. I know I said the Longhorns could have it again next year, Dad, but… that doesn’t count anymore :-). Though, without Smith we’re going to have to train a new quarterback while Michigan gets to keep Henne. So, that just means it’ll be an uphill battle. Yeah, it means we won’t become complacent like we did this year. Like steel, the loss of the Bowl game and our star QB will galvanize us into a better team.

I hope.

I’ve got a lot to talk about (like Moving to Orlando), but unfortunately I spent all of my time tonight writing this cool new photo thing, so this will be a quick update about that, and I’ll update more hopefully tomorrow.  Anyway, as you might guess from the little icon that I put next to the “Pictures” text on the sidebar, my pictures are now powered by Google Picasa.  Yes, my old thing was cool because it stored the images directly in the database, but my host’s mySQL server and their www server aren’t connected very fast, so I’ve been dealing with INCREDIBLY long load times for over a year now.  No doubt you’d notice, as the page would pause for a long time just to load the images on the side.  Well, say goodbye to all of that, because I’ve completely rewritten the pictures thing so they now load off of Google’s servers.  And, I think they have enough bandwidth ;-).  Also- I stopped putting up new images because it took forever to upload them as well.  No longer.  I don’t even have to go to my website to upload new pictures- I can do it right from Picasa, which will automatically resize them, organize them, and upload them en masse.  On any machine, I might add.  So, what makes this miracle of modern technology possible?  RSS.  Basically, I take the RSS feed so thoughtfully provided for my web album and parse it using a slightly modified version of lastRSS.  Then, I’ve got everything I need in PHP, and it’s simply a matter of outputting the right URIs to the browser.  Plus, using Google’s web interface to browse and view the photos should provide an overall better end-user experience than the one that I threw together over a year ago in one night.  So, enjoy!

PS… All of the photos you’ll see up there for a while are going to be old ones… I broke my camera in Hilton Head on the way down to Orlando when the backpack it was in got wet when the tide came up.  Now the only way to get it to focus on something is the manual way- walking towards or away from the object you want to photograph.  So, take note of the fact that digital cameras do not like playing in the sand and salt water nearly as much as I do.

First read this, which is a news article that says that the Penny-Arcade guys think that $600 is too much to pay for a console. Basically, a bunch of guys were putting down PA in the comments, and I felt like I had to come to their rescue. The following is a response to that, which I tried to put as a comment but the site wouldn’t work for some reason. Oh, and yeah I know I mixed star wars and star trek in the title of this blog post, but it just fit the situation too well not to use it.

Penny-Arcade sees itself as part of the community. They don’t see themselves as above it. If you guys had been following the site since 1999 like I have, you would know that. Do they have money? Sure, they’re lucky enough to do a job they like and live off of it. However, there was a point when they both had day jobs, and made a few comics for the hell of it. In other words, they don’t flaunt their money, and they act like you or I. Okay, point to the fact that you or I couldn’t throw something like PAX. But show me how they’re throwing pax is good for anybody but the fans. Certainly, someone who has never heard of penny-arcade isn’t going to go. Also, point to the fact that you or I couldn’t put together something like Child’s Play or that donation in Jack Thompson’s stead. But now you’re faulting them for helping sick kids, and that’s just not right. Like the comic or not, don’t hate them because other people like them. That’s just rediculous.

So when they say that it’s Bu11$h!t that Sony is charging $600 for a console, it’s because they feel that it’s rediculous for Grandmothers to buy their grandsons a $600 piece of equipment for their birthdays.

Sony didn’t have to charge $600 for their console, they could’ve made it competitive- but they put too many eggs in the basket of untested technology, and the price of manufacture (and the length of development time) was much higher than they expected. The only games that will have a chance of looking better than the 360 on the PS3 are the ones that aren’t cross-platform… games developed for the PS3 only. Add to that the difficulty of programming efficiently for a chip like cell, and I bet you’re going to get comparable image quality on the vast majority of games.

So really it comes down to the number of quality games available for both systems. Now, consider the installed user base that the 360 has since it has taken so long for it to come out, and consider how much the $600 price point is a turn off for many people (especially high-school and younger), and you see that when developers have a choice of which console to develop for, they’ll see that many more people have 360s than have PS3s. So if they don’t do a cross-platform game, it makes better business sense for them to make the game for the 360, since it appeals to a greater number of potential buyers.

Hey, I know I haven’t updated in a while (what else is new?), but I’ve been busy being bored at work, and looking for jobs, and hanging out with Roshan and Marc when I’m not doing that.  Anyway, I’m sitting in the Orlando airport and waiting around since my flight doesn’t leave for another two and a half hours.  Apparently, they don’t have free wireless in this part of the airport, so I’ll have to write this in notepad and post it when I get back.

Our time at the cottage was a lot of fun.  Surprisingly, we never put the boats in the water this year, because the fishing the last few years has been terrible and we decided it wasn’t worth the effort for a simple tour around the lake.  Jeff and I rode our bikes to Michigan (the upper peninsula is only about 7-8 miles away) several times, though I popped a tire a mile from home the first time (it wasn’t inflated to the right pressure) and had to walk the rest of the way.  After replacing the tire and inflating it correctly, it was fine the rest of the week.  Also, I ran at least 2 miles every day.  The first day it was sprinkling and that made it much easier- the other days were hot and humid, reaching 85 or so (really warm for up there) and making running hard.  But after running each day I changed and went swimming in the lake, which was great relief from the heat.  After that it was usually dinner, cards, ice cream, and watching the stars, and then to bed.  Thursday night we saw the northern lights (Aurora Borealis).  We hoped to see them again friday night, but our plans were interrupted by 2 large storms that moved through.  One in the afternoon that cut our swimming short, and one in the middle of the night that knocked out power.  Between the two storms it was relatively calm, and Jeff suggested we go bikeriding.  This was at about 11:00 at night, and it was cloudy and thus starless, and the moon was only a sliver of a waxing crescent and had set by this point.  In any case, there was no light coming from the sky.  Plus, we were in the middle of the woods with absolutely no streetlights, and absolutely many bears.  So, I thought maybe it wasn’t the right time for a bikeride.  We ended up reading until one, then I wrote in the book for an hour up there, then I couldn’t sleep for a while, then the second storm came and woke me up and knocked out power, so it was a standard final night for me.  Unfortunately, the power was still out the next morning, so we had to pack and clean in the dark.  Plus, we couldn’t run the vacuum cleaner- I hope their not too made.  But we managed not to make a complete mess this time.

Now, you may be wondering why I’m in Orlando right now.  After all, I was planning on meeting my Dad in West Virginia today, and being in the Orlando airport is certainly different.  Well, I just got done with a job interview at EA- Electronic Arts.  Specifically, the studio that handles NCAA and Madden.  The contacted me after finding my resume (probably on Monster) and after a phone interview they offered to fly me down.  So, I flew down yesterday morning, hung out in a hotel for the rest of the day (for free), then had my interview today.  First they gave me a little tour, and then they had me take a little 5-question test to make sure that I wasn’t lying about what I said I knew, and then I met with the team that I would be working with.  They seemed like nice guys, friendly, and they asked me a bunch of questions (I asked them a bunch of questions, too) and then we went out to lunch.  The restaurant was called “Thai Cuisine” and upon hearing that I asked “Really?  What do the serve there?” and either noone heard me or they just ignored me.  Despite my attempt at humor I think they still liked me.  After that, I talked with the HR person for a while, and then I was waiting for a car to pick me up from the airport when she came back out and wanted to talk to me some more.  She said that she talked to the manager that I had lunch with and that I scored perfect on the test, so she was going to make me an offer in the next few days.  The first thing that came to my mind was “Phew!”.  The test was fairly easy, except for one question which was worded poorly.  Basically, it asked me to write a function in Actionscript to check and see if a point was inside a rectangle.  It then said that the top left corner was this, the bottom left corner was this, etc.  This is a trivial problem if the rectangle is axis-aligned, but if the rectangle is rotated at all then it’s much harder.  I wrote the easy solution, since that’s what I figured that they wanted (based on the difficulty level of the other questions), but I gave my ideas for how to do it the other way just in case.  But, I guess I answered right because they seemed to like it.  Also, it seemed like a really nice place to work (free cereal all the time!), so we’ll see how that turns out.

Oh, one more thing while I’ve got you here.  I think that the Republicans need to choose a real left-leaning republican as their candidate to replace Bush in 2008.  Really, if they did, they could take it.  Get someone that is still a republican- believes in God-just not rediculously and against science-believes Nuclear Power can be safe with enough regulation but that we need to explore other options, believes that guns are okay as long as they’re kept safe from kids, capitol punishment for serious offenders, and believes in smaller government (note, these aren’t necessarily my views).  Also, one that isn’t too keen on the war and one that’s cool with gays marrying, abortion under certain circumstances, etc.  Really, one like Alan Alda’s Arnie Vinick on the West Wing.  I’m not saying I agree with those, and perhaps I’m not describing any republican that’s out there, but if the republicans could find someone like that and get behind him I think they’d win.  You’d get most or all of the votes that were on the edge in the last few elections, you’d get the people that think only republicans can handle military operations, and the you simply have to tell the people that are crazy religious to deal with it.  Those people aren’t going to vote democrat, and the worst that could happen is that some of them won’t show up to vote, which wouldn’t be all that bad since you’d take a big chunk of the votes that normally go to the democrats.  Anyway, that’s what they should do according to me, and so if they don’t then screw them I hope they lose.  If they do, you heard it here first ;-).

Alright, well, this post is long enough, and I’m going to fly home, maybe go to another interview tomorrow morning (if they’ve e-mailed back), and then drive down to west virginia for yet another family vacation this year.  It’s a good thing I don’t have a real job yet, otherwise I’d never be able to take this many vacations!

PS… On the way home, we flew into some nasty weather approaching Columbus.  It really hit me as a good illustration of the classic concept of “Heaven” and “Hell”.  I wish I could’ve taken a picture of it, but my camera was in the overhead compartment, and they don’t like you taking pictures on airplanes anymore since 9/11- Especially this week I doubt they would’ve let me.  Anyway, we were still at altitude, just beginning our descent.  Above us, the sky was clear and blue, with just a little white haze that made it look really angelic.  The sun was setting, and over to the west around the sun there were these towering thunderheads flashing with lightning every few seconds.  The sun, however, was shining partly though the clouds- but only in one oval-shaped area- making it look like a giant pit that was glowing red.  Beneath us, what little we could see of the ground was already completely in shadow and dark, with the orange sodium-vapor street lights giving it the look of cooling lava with glowing orange/red cracks.  As we descended into the clouds, the blue sky all but dissapeared as it got darker and darker, and the flashing of the lightning and the plane’s anticollision strobes showed raindrops pelting the aircraft.  When the landing flood lights came on, they reflected off the nearby clouds, and the shadows of the wings made it look as if we were being chased by a demon plane.  Anyway, it was really cool- I’d never seen lightning from the air that close before.