Author: Tony

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Refocusing

Life has been very wild lately. They say time flies when you’re having fun, I say time really flies when you’re working your butt off. Actually, that’s not exactly what I say, but this is a family website.

Work is just crazy this time of year. The problem with being the boss is I can’t just point the finger at someone else any more. If something is broken, it’s up to me to get it done. Hopefully I haven’t screwed up too much.

Now that the students are back in school, things should calm down at work. We’re not there yet, but I’m hoping we’ll get caught up sometime next week.

The school district bought me a new laptop a few weeks ago. Yes, it’s a MacBook Pro. It’s amazing what a faster computer does for my productivity. I can’t say enough good things about it.

I should have a little more spare time since I’m not teaching a class this year. At the end of school last year I had 9 students signed up. I didn’t like teaching in the afternoon, so I asked to have my class moved to before lunch.

Out of the 9 signed up last year, only 4 could be in the class 3rd period and 1 of those took it last year. I just couldn’t justify giving up over an hour a day for 3 students. Hopefully I won’t regret this later.

I’m going to try to start updating my other blogs regularly. Everything has basically taken a two month break. If you’re into paying off your debt or programming games, check them out.

I’ll also upload some more recent pictures of Matthew soon. I don’t carry pictures in my wallet, instead I just point people to this site. Unfortunately all of the pictures here are months old now.

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My New Favorite Word

I have a new favorite word — speach.

I actually typed it that way a few minutes ago and I had to read it several times before I noticed anything was wrong. Of course it looks ridiculous now, but at the time it looked correct.

So if I’ve ever typed a message to you and used the word speach, just assume that I meant giving a speech while eating a peach.

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Another New Blog

You may have noticed another new link on the right side of the page — Death By Plastic.

Death By Plastic is my new weblog about getting out of debt, specifically credit card debt. It will also cover other personal finance topics like reducing expenses, finding alternate sources of income, and saving for the future.

There’s not much content there yet, but it’s growing steadily. I just finished up a three-part series on eliminating debt with my 1, 2, 3 plan. I think it’s pretty good. Hopefully other people will like it, too.

I’ve got more than 10 other posts in various states of completion — everything from book reviews to investment tips. I’m going to try to update the site at least three times a week.

I feel like I’m finally starting to make money for myself instead of just working to pay the bills. It’s a really good feeling, and I want to share that feeling with everyone I can.

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Technology Director

Here’s one reason why I haven’t been posting very much on this site lately:

Back in March my boss announced his retirement. A month or so later, his job was posted on our employment opportunities page.

I turned in my resume for the job around the first of May along with a few other people from outside the district. I interviewed for the position last Monday.

This morning, the school board held a special meeting to discuss several personnel items. During the meeting I was officially employed as Technology Director.

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Leia’s Prom Pictures

I finally got around to uploading the pictures I took of Leia in her prom dress over a week ago.

Leia's Prom Pictures

Click the picture above to see all five pictures. I would’ve taken more, but she was running late and didn’t really want to stand still.

Check back tomorrow to find out why it took me so long to get these uploaded…

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MacBook

Apple announced their new laptop yesterday – the MacBook. Now it comes in black or white. So you can make sure your laptop matches your iPod.

The Intel Core Duo processor means it’s around 4 times faster than the computer I’m using right now. It has a glossy widescreen and a new low-profile keyboard that looks really nice to me.

I’ll have to get my hands on one at the Apple store to see if I really like it. In the mean time if anybody knows a way for me to a quick (legal) $1000, I’m all ears.

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New Kitchen

We spent all day yesterday working in the kitchen. We pulled off all the cabinet doors, sanded them down, primed everything, painted everything (twice), and finally put all of the doors back on with new hardware.

We didn’t take any before pictures, but here are some after pictures.

New Kitchen Matthew on counter

Matthew seems to like it.

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New Blog

There’s one less link at the top of this page. That’s because I finally got around to setting up another site for all of my game programming tutorials. So now you can come here to read about Paige, Matthew, and me and not have to learn all about programming computer games.

But, if you are coming here to learn how to write game, by all means check out Game Dev Geek. I moved all of my programming tutorials about Lua, SDL, and managing game states to that site. Over the next few weeks I’ll be updating all of them to work with Visual C++ 2005 on Windows as well as Xcode on Mac OS X and of course good old make on Linux.

I’ll also be updating the blog at Game Dev Geek on a regular basis with interesting news about game programming, and I have a bunch of ideas for new tutorials. I’m going to wrap up my series on Lua with a complete example. I’m also going to expand my list of SDL tutorials so you’ll have everything you need to make complete games.

The new site will also have tutorials on OpenGL as well as writing games with Java. I teach a high school Java class everyday, so I already have some pretty good material on the subject. My main focus on the new site is going to be cross platform game development. So if you into that kind of thing, check it out.

Speaking of my class, someone at lunch today told me that we only have 14 school days left. I didn’t realize we were that close. So in about three weeks my life will get a lot less complicated…

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Where’s the Beef?

Back on March 28 I decided to stop eating beef. That decision was mostly brought on by this quote:

If you’re worried about getting cancer, do yourself a favor: steer clear of red meat and rich foods, and avoid cigarettes.

Robert A. Weinberg, MIT Center for Cancer Research

I remembered reading 30 Days to Success by Steve Pavlina and decided to try going without beef for 30 days and see how it went.

I did slip a few times – on April 6 I went to a meeting with free pizza. I grabbed a few slices (1 hamburger and 1 pepperoni) and ate them before I even thought about it. I’ve had pepperoni pizza one more time since then. I’ve also had two muffaletta sandwiches (I miss Central Grocery…) in the last few weeks, but I’m not really sure if they had beef on them or not.

Anyway, it’s been over 30 days now and I can honestly say I haven’t noticed much of a difference. When I cut out Dr Pepper and sweet tea from my diet I noticed an immediate change – I lost about 10 pounds in 2 weeks.

Back then I replaced all that sugar water with just water. In this case, I’ve replaced all of the beef with chicken, pork, and seafood. I’ve also eaten several diffent kinds of meat substitutes (Garden Burgers, etc.), but we were eating these before.

I plan on sticking with this new diet as long as I can (forever?). I’m also going to try to replace more of what I used to eat with fruits and vegetables. I don’t think I’ll ever become a full vegetarian, but eating more vegetables couldn’t hurt.

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Another World

Way back in the dark ages, sometime around 1991, I played a lot of video games. By “a lot” I mean pretty much all of them, day and night, all the time. Yes my grades suffered.

Anyway, one game that I have fond memories of was called Out of this World. It had amazing vector graphics. The animation was smooth and the backgrounds were dark and mysterious.

Unfortunately, those fond memories can sometimes be a little deceptive. In reality, it looked something like this:

Out of this World 1991

Not too bad, but still a little ugly by today’s standards.

Another thing about this game – it’s hard. Many people probably never made it past the first screen. You will die many times while playing this game and it will test your patience. Basically anything that touches you kills you. Even the slugs have fangs.

On April 14, out of the blue, the developer of this game decided to rerelease it with updated graphics. Now it looks more like this:

Another World 2006

Much less blocky, but still true to the original. It’s still hard to play, but it’s now much easier on the eyes.

They also switched back to the original name – Another World. They called it Out of this World in 1991 so it wouldn’t be confused with the soap opera Another World.

If you’d like to try it for yourself, you can download the demo from the Another World web site. If you like it, you can buy the full version for 7 euros (about $8.50). It was the best 7 euros I’ve ever spent.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to kick some slugs…