Project 365 — Album

And we’re back! The site is live again, now with 100% wind-powered Fatcow hosting. New hosting, new theme (I think it’s a lot cleaner, don’t you? If you’re reading this through your feed reader, you should come check it out), new plans — it’s going to be a fun year.

Goal the first: I’m going to be doing Project365 with Lauren — an image a day for a whole year. No promises regarding quality I will likely post all the pictures to my new Picasa account, and cross-post them between here and tumblr.

2nd Goal: Read 50 books. I first started keeping track of my books this year, and made it almost to 40, so 50 shouldn’t be a huge stretch. I had a drought in spring and early summer due to some massive life upheaval (new job halfway across the country can do that to a guy).

Goal #3: Compete at least once a month in a coding/algorithm competition, whether it’s TopCoder, Code Jam, or whatever else I might find. Even if I don’t officially participate, follow along and do the problems anyway.

Fourth Goal: Join and regularly contribute to an open-source software project. The hard part: finding one I really want to improve.

Five: Ensure that some of those books I read (and some of the feeds in my feed reader) will enrich my understanding of Catholicism and of Christianity as a whole.

And finally, 6: Play my guitar a lot more often. Lauren got me one of these for Christmas, so that should make it much easier and more fun. If I get any good, I’ll record myself and post it up here, too!

I never know how to wrap up this sort of post.

Just switched up my hosting and I’m still getting things back in order. Bear with me for a bit

Morning all. After a complete lack of response on Twitter and Facebook, I figured I’d post this here. I have quite a few Google Wave invites available to anybody who wants them. Drop me a comment here letting me know you want one, and be sure your email address is valid. First 15 get invites!

I wanted to spread the laughs. Here is a list of all the webcomics (and online versions of print comics) that I read on a regular basis. Note that I’m treating “anything that is drawn and humorous” as a comic, so GraphJam and Indexed make the cut, too. Some of these are finished and no longer updating, but you can still read their archives. Finally, some of these are pretty offensive sometimes – you’ve been warned.

I’ve also created a Google Reader bundle for these feeds – subscribe here.

Abstruse Goose
AmazingSuperPowers
Basic Instructions
Bug Bash
Code Comics
Ctrl+Alt+Del
Cyanide & Happiness
Daisy Owl
Darths & Droids
Dilbert
FoxTrot
garfield minus garfield
Geist Panik
GraphJam
HijiNKS Ensue
Indexed
Least I Could Do
Left-Handed Toons
LoLBoTs
Maths for Laughs
Order of the Stick
Penny Arcade
pictures for sad children
Questionable Content
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
The Zombie Hunters
theWAREHOUSE
Three Panel Soul
Tiny Ghosts
Us the Robots
User Friendly
XKCD

Enjoy.

By my troth, thou sayest true; for since the little with that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have makes a great show.

SILVIUS: O Corin, that thou knew’st how I do love her!
CORIN: I partly guess; for I have lov’d ere now.
SILVIUS: No, Corin, being old, thou canst not guess, Though in thy youth thou wast as true a lover As ever sigh’d upon a midnight pillow.

By my troth, and in good earnest, and so God mend me, and by all pretty oaths that are not dangerous, if you break one jot of your promise, or come one minute behind your hour, I will think you the most pathetical break-promise, and the most hollow lover, and the most unworthy of her you call Rosalind, that may be chosen out of the gross band of the unfaithful. Therefore beware my censure, and keep your promise.

– As You Like It, William Shakespeare

Here’s the writeup of the PCs’ backstory for the Shadowrun campaign I started tonight. It was surprisingly fun to write.

Dramatis Personae
Baldvin: Fomori troll street samurai, unhealthily happy in combat
Kino: Neotonous female sniper, very focused on her work and not dying
Karolyn: Steampunk-loving psionic mage, Dryad face
Adrea: Wheelchair-bound girl hacker/rigger who is unexpectedly social

The place is Seattle. The year is 2071 – early spring. Our heroes are Kino, Karolyn, Adrea, and Baldvin. Three girls (of one sort or another) and one seriously large troll.

They all know each other, and have for more than a decade. They grew up together, in the same orphanage in Renton. Your normal orphanage upbringing; they don’t remember any children over the age of seven being brought in. Every so often, a child would be placed with an adoptive family: usually high-ranking corp administrators or crime syndicate leaders (is there really much difference anymore?). Or at least, that’s what it looked like from the outside.

In reality, the orphanage was a front for a secret black ops agency run by the Shiawise megacorp. All of the children were heavily indroctrinated to think of Shiawise (and their handlers) as beloved family members. Then they were given stealth and combat training, along with more specialized skills, and, in some cases, ‘ware. Those children that were “placed” with new families? They made excellent spies with deep cover in competitors’ organizations. So our heroes have spent the last eleven or twelve years of their lives stealing, delivering, spying, and in some cases, assassinating.

That all ended about six months ago. Several Shiawise administrators were meeting with the orphanage’s handlers, and Kino was roaming the halls looking for something interesting to do. Out-of-office bigwigs always forget about Kino. She looks twelve, and she an act it, too. After hearing enough words like “liquidation” and “cut our losses” and “sweep it under the rug”, she raced back to the dormitory. After much arguing, she convinced Adrea to turn her not-insignificant hacking skills toward their “family”. That’s when Adrea discovered the trail of emails saying that the orphanage cover was about to be blown, and it was time to shut it down and destroy all the “equipment”.

Spurred on by this knowledge, the team staged a daring escape while out on a run, during which Baldvin mangled no less than five Shiawise security officers. Unfortunately, Adrea was grievously injured during the battle, and has been wheelchair-bound ever since.

Since then, they’ve been ‘running for money, not for love. They make a living and have found a home in Snohomish among the factory farms. So far, they’ve avoided reacquisition by Shiawise…

I don’t want to write a great novel or extensive political thesis – well, ok, I do, but that’s not the focus. I want to sit down and just write, and end up with something worth reading. How do I do that? How do I come upon inspiration for a topic, first. I’m a programmer – a technical person first and foremost; I don’t just sit down and let the creativity flow. On the other hand, here I am in Barnes & Noble, standing in the aisle and writing. Maybe I can do it after all?

So why not start with this? This is the first time I’ve actually just sat down to write. My chronic problem is a desire to be a writer, but a complete lack of anything to write about. As I grow in so many other ways, in my political and religious understanding, in my fiction and nonfiction reading habits, even in my relationships with others, my desire to write grows and grows, with no outlet at all.

I have my stereotypical twitter account where my small nuggets of wisdom, wit, or banality go. I have my blog, where I can expound on anything I’m legitimately knowledgeable about, which usually means software.

So, here we have it. The awakening of a new being. I resolve not to care if anything I write is worth reading – the writing of it is value enough for me. If I end up with something useful or edifying or entertaining along the way, so be it.

Hello, world.

The preceding was written on my cellphone while wandering Barnes & Noble this evening. I’ve corrected spelling and capitalization errors, but haven’t done any other cleaning up. I won’t guarantee that it leads to a change in my writing habits here, but as I said, that’s not the most important thing.

Wooo I qualified for Google’s Code Jam 2009! I won’t be able to participate in Round 1A (going to a high school football game with my wife – go Ship!), but I have high hopes for 1B and 1C. I’ll be using Groovy again – I had hoped to learn Haskell in time to use that, but I haven’t had time to learn as much as I’d like of functional programming. I will probably do the same thing I did last year, and post the code I turn in as well as a refactor once I’ve had a day or two to mull things over.