Advanced Theory

For those out there with a Wii: feel free to send me a message.  My Wii Number is 0930 7646 5795 4713.

And I currently have the following games on DS WiFi:

After standing in long, retarded lines I got a Wii and it is Amazing!  I got a second controller, nunchuck, Wario Ware and Zelda.  But I gotta say, I am not happy with Target and it was Best Buy, out of all stores, that actually had the coveted console.

So last week I had heard through the Internet rumor mill (mostly Digg and Wii Seeker) that Target was holding Wiis until January 21st so they could re-release them.  I had been watching Target in particular because after trying and failing to get a Wii before Christmas, my family bought me a Wiis worth of gift certificates there.  After checking the ads for any sign of the Wii I saw that Target didn't have Wiis advertised, but they had the controllers, so if nothing else I could pick up a controller.

I went to my local Target to start standing in line about 7:30 in the morning -- a half hour before the store opened.  Since there wasn't an advertisement in the paper I wasn't going to stand in line for more than an hour and I figured most people would either be giving up or wouldn't know Target was holding at all.  Not to mention I had good reason to believe this since I rode by the store around 2am on my way home.  So I get in line, about four people are ahead of me and nobody's really talking.  Things seemed tense, especially since employees kept going into the store and totally ignoring the campers.  Over the next half hour the line grew to about fifteen or twenty people until the doors were unlocked.  Yeah -- no tickets were handed out, nobody even had the decency to come out and uh, maybe mention what their inventory of these coveted items actually were.

So everyone begins this deliberate run-walk to the back of the store where electronics is and several people simultaneously ask if they have any Wiis in stock.  And they did!  I was so excited that after missing one by a couple spots before Christmas for foolishly standing in line a mere four hours before the store opened, I was finally going to get my chance.  Well, not really.  Because right then the guy pulls out ONE Wii to which the girl that was in the front of the line pays for and that was it.  SHIT.  Well that's it.  The crowd/line of frustrated and now angry people dissipates and I get a chance to ask if they have any controllers in stock.  NOPE.  Of course not.  After having a solid number for all their before Christmas Sunday releases, it's like Target just didn't care.  After all, they had my money on their gift card.  So why should they bother carrying anything.  The least they could've done is bothered to tell us that we should go elsewhere.  Jerks.

So on a whim I drove over to the local Best Buy and see what the word was in the line.  And to my amazement, they had more than forty in stock!  All I had to do was stand in line until they opened at ten.  So a little less than an hour before the store opens they begin handing out vouchers to everyone in line.  I think almost everyone that was there before the store opened actually got a Wii.

It was the first time I've ever stood in line for hours before a store opened.  And it was the weirdest experience quickly walking into a store in groups of five (they had a bouncer controlling who got into the store).  Seeing a table of controllers while my mind clicked from trying to find a Wii, to realizing they had controllers, to snatching one up while still trying to figure out that the Wiis were at the register.  As much as I hate Best Buy because they made me drive two hours across town to get a replacement for my scratched supposedly new-in-box copy of GTA for the PC after refusing to accept a return for an item the didn't have in stock... I gotta admit this made me happy.  Good job BB.

Alright, I started playing Halo 2 again... and I'm addicted again.  But I'm having a bitch of a time getting everything linked up to my gamertag.

OMG I got an Amazon wish list. I decided this year that I'm going to just tell people what's cool so those that aren't in the know can still get me awesome gifts.  You're so welcome! :D

I' ve been tempted to start playing a little Magic again.  So I've updated the "Image Tiler" with a few tweaks to make it easier to make proxies of my more valuable cards.  I gotta admit, it works pretty well for testing the new cards too.  Just point it to an image and give it a quantity and you can proxy out an entire game, even create your own game.  Just make sure you have fair use rights before using the tool and enjoy.

While I've thought about it many times, I've decided to actually start blogging again -- this time about my adventures in coding.  I've been pretty lucky with my career so far as I've been able to jump on a lot of interesting projects that I've had a lot of latitude.  Currently I have two major projects that I'm developing. 

I work as a senior developer for a startup company named 1360 Studios.  I'm currently in charge of data consistancy and algorithims, so basically I'm running the show for everything non-GUI.  It's quite challenging, especially since we're coding the whole thing in Java and optimization is extremely important on the backend to make sure things work as quickly as our competition.  Luckily there are a lot of good resources on the web regarding Java code, as long as you can pick out the crap for the good stuff.  Speaking of which, I learned a valuable lesson recently that just because an article appears on IBM's developer works doesn't mean it should be trusted.  Specifically I found an article regarding the Collation class that only half-implemented the Boyer-Moore algorithm for text searching!  I couldn't figure out why the hell I was getting infinite loops in my text searching until I realized that one jump table wasn't the complete implementation!

My personal project is a DirectX game, that... well... I don't want to actually reveal what it does until it becomes more developed.  Currently I'm in the exploration phase of the project, meaning I've determined basic requirements for the game and now I'm implementing them component by component in a generalized form.  I already have a graphics framework that I created to work with 9.0c but those wiley Microsoft programmers have changed the API again (slightly) to keep me on my toes.  And so right now I'm changing that, stabilizing communication between the windows thread and game thread, and working on adding an event manager model.  I'm not quite sure if I want to make the event manager use functors or enums at this point.  Especially since it's a casual game and speed shouldn't be an issue.

Well there's a little of my background and current projects.  I plan on complaining a great deal about both ;) and hopefully provide some information and tutorials about what works or didn't work for me.