I’ve done everything the Bible says - even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!

Happy new year everyone, unless you don't believe in new year, in which case insert politicly correct good wishes for getting round the sun once more, with no offence intended to you or your friends and loved ones.

2011 was certainly a year, thats for sure. In my final semester of University I helped create a pretty awesome multiplayer flash game, I learned Object-C and created an iPhone app for my final year project and I graduated from the course with first class honours (go me!). I also got a little full-time job with some folk who sell fermented vegetable drinks online and was tricked into doing terrible things to my facial hair. 

It wasn't all sunshine and victory laps though. It rained a lot for one and the final few months of University were some of the most stressful of my life. It didn't help that at the same time as trying to complete my final year project and maintain a part-time job, I had the consecutive loss of both Tabby and Hamish, two long-term members of the family. They say a dog is for life, but you forget that it's their life, not yours. His death hit everyone hard, but my mum most of all, who became physically ill for over a week and caught an eye infection that could have made her blind (fortunately she fully recovered). On a more up beat note we also got a couple new members of the family in ones of the most unexpected ways (my older sister nearly tripped over a stray cat giving birth on her doorstep). 

The last month has also been "an experience". Working for an online e-commerce company means everything is about Christmas, and this one was the busiest yet. On one day in December the website took more orders than the entirety of 2008, so to help support the team and fix any issues that arose we had to move from our nice warm office to a very cold warehouse. Christmas was a success though, mostly because it didn't snow and we made order processing much more efficient, so yay us and all that. Next year our systems will be so efficient the whisky will be picked and packed by little robots and I can spend the last two weeks of December in Malaga instead of High Brooms, aka the coldest place in Britain.

Christmas wasn't all cold warehouses though, as for a person who doesn't drink very much, I did a lot of drinking. This included a surprise party in London for an old college and uni friend and consecutive days of going to work and hitting the pubs in the evening, which I'm positive did wonders for my programming. It was great to see a lot of people again and we defeantly need to do it more often.

I also learned in 2011 that I am terrible at ice skating. So there is that.

What are you, nuts?

I've been using this profile picture about the place for a month or so with no real explanation for why I have an appallingly fake beard and an incredibly ugly hat. As it turns out, I wasn't trying to get arrested for looking like a child molester, it was for a Movember photo shoot.

Movember is one of those charity things, where you do something effortless and stupid and people give you money to make themselves feel better about their life. This particular one is for men's balls, so as a man who has a reproductive system and the offending gland, I must profess some self-interest in supporting this one over starving Africans. To offset this selfish behaviour I did donate to other charities during the year, so I feel pretty good about this.

So Movember is where you grow a mustachio in November (M-ovember. Get it? I thought it was clever to). In support of this charity my day job has released a charity bottling every year, and this years one (in partnership with Glenfarclas) features a photo of all the men in the company looking incredibly stupid.

I actually thought it came out quite well. As the company gets behind this charity every year I thought I would attempt to participate (after avoiding it two years running), by growing some facial hair. I'm going to bend the rules though by not just growing a mustachio, but a full beard, as young people with mustachios simply look like pedophiles. I'm sorry, its just a fact. It's on the Internet, so it must be true. I've never truly attempted the whole facial hair thing (beyond laziness which always stops at the point that it gets itchy), so I'm interested to see how this turns out.

If this post has convinced you to donate to saving my balls, and you like whisky, you can buy a bottle here starting November 1st. If you want to save my balls, and don't like whisky, you can donate directly over here.

In other news, I've started hosting a new blog by my friend and co-worker Michael. He writes funny stuff, so I urge you to go read him, as I'm not funny at all.

Disclaimer: In case it wasn't clear, I don't have prostate cancer (yet), so think of this as saving my future balls. Not my present ones. Those are just fine.

Those are brave men. Let's go kill them.

As someone who likes to spend the majority of his free time in front of a television consuming television and playing video games, I've had a surprisingly active couple weekends. Last week was the epic warehouse move of doom at work, in which we had to pack all the whisky in the known universe into vans and relocate them to a larger facility. This resulted in me and many other vigilant "volunteers" spending most of Friday and all of Saturday carrying a metric shit tone (an officially recognised weight) of whisky of vans and onto shelves.

It wasn't all bad though, there were some laughs to be had as the professionality of the operation fell the more tired we became. Below is one of my favourite images from when myself and Mike (pictured) had to move a packing table across the building. It would have required four people to carry it, so we came up with a more creative solution that I could move single handed.

Having recovered from that fake weekend, yesterday was West Hill Karate's twelve hour sponsored bag session to raise money for St. Michael's Hospice. It's not as bad as it sounds, I didn't actually have to hit a bag for twelve hours. Instead there was a single punching bag that had to be hit for the twelve hour period, with people taking fifteen minute shifts. I showed up for the last three and a half hours of the event, hit the bag for thirty minutes and held it for forty five minutes. It was a lot of fun, although I did make quite a mess of my hands. Its not like my career depends on them or anything fortunately.

Of course all this frolicking in the wilderness hasn't stopped me doing some loafing. The folk at work got me into watching Breaking Bad recently. I'm two episodes into season two and absolutely blown away by how incredible it is. So far every episode has been greater than the last and from what I've been told it just gets better and better. It's shocking how methodical, drawn out and realistic the show is and I'm pretty surprised someone hasn't tried to cancel it yet. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't heard of it.

The last TV series I really got into was Game of Thrones. After the season finished I really wanted to check out the book series it's based on as I'm a fairly impatient guy, but gave up on both the ebook and the audiobook. I dumped the ebook due to fear of eye strain (I look at screens for most of the day and didn't want to add additional reading) and quit the audiobook pretty quickly because the person reading it is simply god awful. For my birthday I got the physical books which seems to have stuck, as I'm almost half way through the first tome. It certainly feels good in this modern day to read a good old fasion book. Whoda'thunk it huh?

Finally in video games, I've been on an old school Zelda kick in anticipation of the new game. I completed the original NES Zelda for the first time about a month ago and I'm a couple dungeons away from the ending of Ocarina of Time, which I've also never completed. I'm a terrible Zelda fan I guess, but I'm trying to correct that. On the more modern side of things I've been playing Gears of War 3, which is a fantastic co-op experience. I played the entire campaign with three other University / Karate chums and it was a blast. The game is a pretty evolutionary upgrade from Gears 2, but simply playing that game with four people is such a fun experience. We also completed an epic fifty waves of horde together and yesterday did all twelve waves of beast mode on insane. It's great stuff indeed.

Fuck you! And your eyebrows!

So I've been at home sick all day. That's been just great.

In other news, today (it's nearly 2am as I write this) is my birthday. I'm 23, whatever that means. Birthdays are an interesting thing once all those important early "mile stones" have passed and you have enough money to buy all the things you would normally await birthdays so eagerly for. Sure I will get gifts, but nothing I couldn't have paid for myself. A lot of people seem to get depressed over this fact, but honestly I find it kinda cool. Gifts are such a material thing. What birthdays should truly be about is appreciating that you've been on this world another year and celebrating that fact with the friends and family that care about you. Its also a great time to consider where you are in life and where it is heading. Getting older is certainly a good way to appreciate that everyones time is limited and none of it should be wasted. 

As mentioned in an earlier post, we adopted kittens! Polly and Alice are great, but Sybil (our older cat) isn't very fond of them yet. There have been a lot of standoffs where she runs into them and stands her ground, hissing and growling. The little buggers don't get put of though, as the moment she turns and walks away they immediately follow her. I'm sure they will be a happy family eventually or there will be a violent battle for cat supremacy. Lets hope for the former.

At work we launched a couple neat features that I worked on. The first is a simply awesome dedicated page to our new Christmas Bitters, featuring corny JavaScript snow, looping Christmas music and a "live" webcam feed. In combination with that page you should also read this hilarious blog post, in which Mike truly outdid himself. The second feature I contributed to is a page where folk can create their own whisky. I encourage you to click the "make me a case" button to see my favourite addition to the page.

I also got my own PC! It's an Intel i5 machine with a honking 12GB of RAM and a AM Radeon HD 6700 graphics card with dual 22 inch Samsung monitors. Unfortunately some genius thought it would be a good idea to RAID 0 two 60GB SSD's to give me 120GB of space and absolutely no redundancy. I already lost one SSD, so thats been great. Except for fearing the machine isn't going to work every time it boots though, its been wonderful. Its certainly the fastest Windows PC I've ever used. And look at how professional my monitor stands are! No expense was spared.

It also occurred to me that I forgot to plug the episode of Downloadable Content I was on that was posted over a month ago where we talked about the Supreme Court ruling, which is a nice follow up to this post. You can subscribe to the show in iTunes or download the episode directly over this way.

You'll have to forgive him. He's from Barcelona.

As predicted in my previous post a full work week resulted in my failure of the Tales of Symphonia Challenge. I managed just over 25 hours in eight days, getting to Gaoracchia Forest, before I had a full week of work in which I wasn't able to keep up my original pace. I then only had the weekend to play the game before two more days of work and the graduation deadline. Alas, no £40 for me, although it did achieve Dave's goal of getting me to play the damn game. I haven't gone back to it yet, but I certainly plan to at a more leisurely pace now that I've invested time into it. I would certainly recommend trying to get hold of a copy if you have an itch for a good JRPG.

Speaking of graduation, I'm now a graduate! The event was held at the Brighton Dome and while entirely too long, with chairs that absolutely sucked and much more clapping than I could really deal with, it was mostly enjoyable. Some of the students even made mockery of the whole formal procedure, which was taken in good humour and brought some life to the event. Overall it was mostly just a good excuse to see some folks from Uni and go out for drinks and food afterwards.

I wasn't particularly a fan of the getup they made you wear, especially when the robe people told me I had a large and awkward sized head. Some photos of said outfit can be seen over yonder.

So with graduation behind me I'm now officially a real boy and this week I started my first week of full time employment. To be honest I've not really accepted this yet, as working for the same company I've been at for two years makes it feel like nothing has changed, but at some point it will certainly hit me that this is it, and I'm not going back to education in October.

Speaking of work, this week we released a pretty major revision to the site with an entirely new navigation structure. The old nav was structured entirely around whisky, which made it almost impossible to find the many other drinks the company has expanded into. Hopefully this new nav will do a much better job.

In animal news, we're adopting two kittens! My older sister practically tripped over a stray cat giving birth to a litter of five outside her house, so we took them to the RSPCA Cattery my younger sister volunteers at, and rather inevitably we've ended up adopting two of them. My younger sister has already named them Alice and Polly (the latter following the Fawlty Towers theme our remaining cat Sybil started), and we should be taking them home in a couple weeks.

I also appeared on another episode of the Downloadable Content podcast which went up a couple weeks ago. In this one we discuss the advent of downloadable add-on content in console games and whether they are good for gamers or designed simply to drive up prices. As before, you can subscribe to the show in iTunes or download the episode directly over this way.

Hi, folks. I hope I didn't crash-land on anybody.

So this Friday everyone at the office went out for lunch (we ate delicious pizza) to welcome the new employees we have, including new placement students (remember when I was one of those?). The following picture, taken as we returned from lunch, demonstrates the continued professionalism of the operation as much of the office walked down the street eating ice creams.

I approve of everything about this image.

 

Today I received the fabled results letter from University that would declare whether I had succeeded in becoming a real boy or if I had just wasted four years of my life. The good news is I passed! The more shocking news is I got a 1st, which this wikipedia article will tell you is the highest level of degree I could have got. How I managed that, I have no idea. Here are my actual results my module:

- Placement Learning: A-
- Individual Project: A
- Advanced Internet Application Development: A
- Internet Gaming Design and Development: A
- Data Management: C-
- Managing the E-Enterprise: A-

As this picture shows, I got a honours degree in internet computing with sandwich (means I took a placement year). I sure hope its delicious!

 

I was also reminded today that I have a long running bet (for about a year now) that I can't complete Tales of Symphonia before I graduate. If I achieve this goal I will win back a delightful £40 that I lost in a previous bet. Something about not being able to complete games or something. Fortunately I have a whole eighteen days left before graduation, unfortunately I'm informed the game is over seventy hours long, so I better get my finger out.

I will keep this blog updated with how I progress in the Symphonia Challenge (TM). So far I'm about three hours into it and the game seems pretty cool. Wish me luck!

 

At some point in their lives 1 out of 6 children will be abducted by the Dutch.

Instead of doing the sensible thing and actually revise for my exams, I've been working on my little side project the last couple days. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the imaginatively named "my e-penis.com" is a database for tracking game collections and progression. As it stands a user can register for an account, login, search for games and provide basic information about the status of each game, such as ownership (whether you have the game, had the game or want the game), completion progress (if you completed it, gave up on it or if the game is uncompletable in the case of an MMO or puzzle game), completion date and how many hours have been played.

Technology wise, I'm using a combination of PHP and jQuery on the front end and a MySQL database on the back end. I've had very little practical experience with jQuery despite being aware of it for a while now, so the whole thing has been a learning experience. Its also been quite a while since I last designed a site from scratch, so I've had to come up with a fresh design that feels more modern than the last site I built. And yes, I'm making a green website. You have a problem with that?

The internet doesn't have enough green if you ask me.

The site uses Giant Bomb's API (which was a nice crash course in JSON) to provide the game database. Back in the FWXD days one of the major issues with the site was trying to get users to enter game information into the database. Using an external wiki that is always growing and correcting itself is certainly the better solution, especially as the site is really only designed for myself. I would love for others to get some use out of it, however I don't really intend for it to gain traction. If I did, I would have chosen a more politically correct name...

The site is currently in alpha, but if you want to play with it and give me feedback, you can check it out here.

In other news, on Thursday I was offered full time employment at my day job. This July will mark two years with the company. I joined them for my placement year and stayed on part time (currently only a day a week) during my final year of University. This offer marks the first time I will be "employed for reals", and includes the obvious benefit of a pay rise, as well as the promise of 20% time to work on personal side projects that can benefit the company. 

I had done a lot of thinking leading up to this week as to what I wanted to do once I graduated. Should I do a masters degree? Look at what other job opportunities are available? Or maybe live up to my threat and go back to college and do an art degree? After the last year it didn't take me long to decide that I had had enough of the education system, and frankly I don't know how well I would fit in with a more "professional" company. 

Despite the fact they claim to be getting more "proper" (with a real office and everything), you gotta love the idea that your company is making its millions on porn star rum.

So I accepted. If nothing else, I feel more comfortable graduating with a secure job, which will allow me to more casually monitor other opportunities than if I had graduated unemployed. Not that I expect to be leaving them any time soon. They tried and failed to find a replacement for me, so I must be doing something right.

I wont be joining them full time until after graduation at the end of July, so I have some time before then.

On another topic entirely, SEO is a funny thing. I use quotes from TV shows and video games for the title of all my posts. This has resulted in my blog ranking highly in a Google search for "Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's going to burn your house down", which is just wonderful. I found this out when looking at the referrals this site has been getting. Some of the more interesting (and non-SEO abusing) referrals have been for searches such as "nsurl asynchronous download image progress", "uisearchdisplaycontroller coredata" and "iphone development sqlite or core data". I don't claim to be an expert in any of these subjects, but I'm thinking of writing a few posts on how I did a few things in my project to help people searching for these subjects. There was a lot of work involved in understanding some of this stuff, so maybe I can give developers taking on the insane task of learning object-c in the future a hand.

Here come the test results: You are a horrible person. That’s what it says. Horrible person. We weren’t even testing for that.

Poster Day for the project seemed to go well, especially when you bribe your examiners with whisky samples. A few guys from a local company also attended the session and seemed fairly impressed with my work. They offered me the chance to attend an interview day they were holding, which could have led to a job, however I decided not to submit my CV because apparently they build all their websites in perl…

Quite why you would do that, I'm not exactly sure. They said it gets them "deep down" into the hardware, increasing performance, but I don't really believe them. It appears to me that their first developer knew perl and everyone else was forced to continue using it. The same argument could be made for writing everything in machine code, which I have little desire to do either.

In my last post I showed an early version of the flash game we had to build as a group. The game is now finished, however because its a two player game requiring a server, I can't put it online like I did my first one. Instead I have produced this overly dramatic video demonstrating it.

We worked as a team to create the game. My major contributions to the project were the tank controls, timers and turn switching, the start and end sequences and conceptual designs. Other team members produced the assets (graphics and sound, which are far superior to my previous effort), collision detection, random rock layout and the server side work. We had planned to have other weapon types, but ran out of time. I'm really happy with how it came out though, and its surprisingly fun to play.

With that handed in I have officially completed all the coursework for my degree. All that is left is a couple hand written exams next month. Exciting stuff!

In the meantime I've been getting back into the swing of completing video games. I completed Portal 2 twice (with and without commentary) just after my project. The game is without question a must play, and if you didn't play the original you should play both of them immediately. The writing and humour is some of the best video games has to offer, and the puzzles are perfectly play tested. Valve added so many new unique twists to the original concept that I often sound myself banging my head against a puzzle I couldn't solve, and then remembering that I had a portal gun…

I also went back and completed Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Back at the start of the year I played and completed the first two games back to back after getting a PS3 at Christmas, however I stopped playing Brotherhood only a few hours into it after getting some fatigue. While improved, Brotherhood is very much a second act of AC2, so its perhaps not wise to play them consecutively. I did really enjoy the entire game though (I don't think the mechanics of scaling rooftops and assassinating will ever get old), and the ending is as unpredictable as the first two. If your new to the series as I was, and want to catch up, I recommend reading the wikipedia article and watching some YouTube videos for the first game, before skipping it and playing the sequel. While you need to know the story to play AC2, the gameplay in AC1 is incredibly repetitive and frustrating and one of those rare occasions where the sequel is 100% better.

With Brotherhood out the way I'm now enjoying L.A. Noire, Rockstar's mix of Grand Theft Auto and Phoenix Wright. So far I'm enjoying it immensely.