And boop! I'm in Malibu. Will be here 'till Saturday night when I fly to Berkeley for two friends' wedding in Tilden, then back to Pittsburgh on Monday.

Biggest shock of the day was walking outside of the LAX terminal to find that the outside was warmer than the inside.

I kinda miss California.

Especially as I sit here in a beautiful office at 12 after midnight, 20 feet from the pounding California surf.

Contented sigh... Now to bead my dad at cribbage (and put a little more time into my game list which is actually larger than 300 entries now!) and then to sleep.

Be well!

Sitting at gate 2, terminal one, Southwest Airlines. Thanks to ample construction along Pacific Coast Highway, a 40 minute airport sortie took nearly two hours and skidding through security and up to the gate at 7:07 for a 7:10 departure is exactly 30 seconds too late.

NEVER plan on taking the last flight out.

Luckily, though it was the last flight to San Jose, and the first morning flight would get me there too late for the wedding, there's another flight in 40 minutes to Oakland. The LAST flight out.

So now instead of a nice evening with Ammy and Rick, I'm off to a night of retro-eighties dancing at New Wave City with Karen and Crystal, unless good sense gets the better of me and I work on my game design assignment instead.

Cest la vie, in the purest form.

I hope your weekend is happy without being quite so eventful.

Oh yeah; yay Cal, and go Raiders. Okay, done now.

I love that there's a major city in Pennsylvania called State College. It makes me want to name a place 'town.'

"Where do you live?"

"I live in 'Town'."

"Ahh. I'm thinking of moving to 'The City'."

"Do you know Batmanuel?"

Another in a long series of displays of why I get so little sleep, here's my latest class assignment, this time from my Interface and Interaction Design course.

The assignment: Take a widget (defined as a single interactive element, like a lightswitch, a pull-top can, or what have you), and redesign it, demonstrating the affordances and benefits of your new design.

Since the professor said the assignment would be graded as much on final production value as for the design of the widget itself, I went a little photoshop crazy.

If you're truly interested, I have a lot more specification detail than made it into the poster, but the poster still gives a good idea.

I chose car exterior door locks.

With a wind-chill temp of -7.

Oh yeah, and that's Farenheit. That's -16/-22C.

Brr. Arg!

Looks like it's that time of year again: Nikolai's posted the finalists for the 2003 Bloggie Awards.

I completely missed the whole nominations process, living in my own little world, but apparently a bunch of you didn't miss it, as Fury got nominated for 'Best Programming of a Weblog Site,' alongside Textism, ScriptyGoddess, Metafilter, and Kuro5hin.

I remember when this happened last year I felt compelled to quickly introduce new functionality, to prove (to myself more than anyone else) that Fury was worthy of competing with MF and K5.

So of course this year's no different. I've got some functions I've been working on for a few weeks and I'm about ready to incorporate them anyhow, and the unexpected Bloggies is just a convenient motivator.

Okay, enough of that. Go vote!

So it's week two and the semester's already at full tilt. I pulled my first all-nighter of the semester Sunday night, and have been packed with work all week, and all the week to come.

It feels SO GOOD.

I learned a new word yesterday: eustress. I haven't found it in an online dictionary yet, but I'm going to check out the Oxford. Eustress is an opposite of 'distress.' In effect, eustress is 'good stress.' To me it feels like 'frenzy' but then I'm a sicko who likes frenzy. Anyhow, that's what I've been swimming in, and I like it.

Every single one of my classes is awesome. My teachers are fantastic, in contrast to a mix of brilliance and disappointment last semester. I'll write up my course listing in the next couple days, and will dive into detail on each of my classes later on, with syllibi and possibly even photos and video.

Right now, I just finished a simple maze program, representing my first foray into visual basic. It's a simple maze game for my Programming Usable Interfaces class. We were told to code something, anything, in Visual Basic. Don't even try to map the maze; it randomizes each time you turn. It's nothing special, but it's great to have the freedom of sitting down in a computer lab for a few hours, letting my imagination being my guide. Oh, and I wouldn't have called it 'impress.exe' except that was the sole constraint of the assignment.

For a (very, very slightly) more down-to-Earth example of what I've been doing the last few days, our first project in Game Design was to create a new game based off of hopscotch. The assignment was in three parts:

1. Brainstorm at least 50 ideas for hopscotch.
2. Pick three or more ideas, and write a paragraph or two exploring them.
3. Pick one, create a rule set, playtest it, document your findings, iterate the ruleset, playtest again, and document your findings.

I love this place. Wait'll you hear about our project for this week. I'll write that as soon as I finish my reading for tonight's classes.

I'll need your help. Get ready for some great nostalgia.

Well, all games anyhow.

That's this week's Game Design assignment: Make a list of all the games you've played. Then go through and determine, as best you're able, what year you first played each (and how old you were). Then come up with a sentence or two describing what was notable about that game to you.

That's right. Every single one. From the past 25 years.

The exercise is intended to provide us with a toolbox of ideas. Looking through the list of games we have experience with should prove useful when trying to deal with design problems or coming up with new game designs. In this I have no doubt it will succeed.

When Prof. Schell handed out the assignment I was a little panicked. He's looking for at least 150 games on our list, due Monday. Specifically, he also wants at least five games for every year since age 5. 150 games? It sounnded like an awful lot.

Then I started thinking...

...and writing...

...and thinking and writing.

Quickly I realized that 150 is a cakewalk. A really low number.

Christ I've played a lot of games. Board games, video games, card games, sports, made-up games...

I'm still scared of this assignment, but I'm not scared of 150. It's clear that by Monday I could easily have a list of 400 or more, and the only part that scares me is knowing that for weeks after I turn in the assignment I'll keep thinking of games from my past that didn't make it on to the list.

Truly this will be a living document.

As such, I'm putting it up here during its fetal stages. Each of these games reminds me of several more, but since I have to start somewhere:

Cat's Cradle, Jumprope, Doubledutch, Chinese hopscotch, dodgeball, "operator" math games, hopscotch, fitaly jumpboard hopscotch, bouncy-ball (Ali), D'n'D, HitchHikers Memory game (Josh), M.A.S.H. (fortune-telling), Hitchhikers Guide (Infocom), Enchantment (Infocom), Tee-ball, Baseball, Basketball, Stunt-kite flying, Boggle, Bridge, Sorry, Handball, Tetherball, Tag, Freeze Tag, Keep away, Chasing, Unsnapping bras (AP Calculus (Thank's Jeff!)), Apache, Airborne, Gato, Dark Castle, Crtstal Quest, Crystal Castles, Crystal Crazy, Glider Pro, World Builder, Minotaur (World Builder), Spacequest (World Builder), 3 in three, Fools Errand, Cosmic Ozmo, Orbiter, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Falcon, Rummykub, Rummy, Cribbage, Wizardry, Knights of Diamonds, Ultima IV, Final Fantasy VII, Galaxian, Galaga, Defender, Stargate, Space Invaders, Robotron, Daleks, Snood, Tempest, Solarian, Pipedream, Lode Runner, Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros., Super Mario World, Super Aqua Blooper, Dig-dug, Centipede, Millipede, Tapper, Track and Field (video game), Frogger, Zork, Bejeweled, Dopewars, Tetris, Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmix, Quake, Doom, Quake II, Quake III, Half-life, Myth, Myth II, Myst, Riven, Dark Forces, "I know you are, but what am I?", Air Hockey, Pong, Ping Pong, Foosball, Volleyball, Charades, Movie Game (Karen), Movie Game (Ammy and Rick), Croquet, Marco Polo, Scavenger Hunts, Geocaching, Easter Egg Hunt, Phase 10, Gimmie the Brain, Lord of the Fries, Deadwood, Bitin' Off Heads, Kill Dr. Lucky, Clue, Masterpiece, Life, Hungry-hungry Hippos, Malibu Gran Prix, Kings in the Corner, Blackjack, Keno, Poker, Spades, Hearts, Roulette, Craps, Slots, Minesweeper, Hangman, Jeopardy, Battleship, Chess, Checkers, Othello, Tennis, Racquetball, Wallyball, Speed Cribbage (Dad), Scrabble, Speed Scrabble (x-mas 2002), Nurtz, Speed, Spit, Pictionary, Cranium, Kickball, Relay Race, Obstacle Courses, Footraces, Touch Football, Tossing Football (Karen), Aerobee (Dad and Karen), Frisbee Golf, Ultimate Frisbee, *Drama games, *SCA games, *Faire games, *Card games, *Fezziwigs games, Chrononauts, Fluxx, Nanofictionary, Icetowers, Zendo, Liars Dice, Tiajuana, Yahtzee, *Dart games, Matchbox car racing, Firetruck playtime, Grapes-in-mouth, RC car racing, Guillotine, *other computer games, *console games, **odyssey 300, **colecovision, Red Baron (snoopy), **Intellivision, **gameboy games, **single-game handhelds, **current (gamecube/playstation/etc), **GBA, VirtualBoy Tennis, **pinball games, Parchesi, Poor Pussy, General Post, Blind Man's Bluff, Telephone, Picnic on Mars, Alphabet in the Round, Bondage, "Honey if you love me, why won't you smile?", Horseshoes, Wheel of Fortune, Name That Tune, BlindDateBlog, SurvivorBlog, Tic-Tac-Toe, Nine Mans Morris.

*The one with aserisks are genres that I've only barely dipped in to, lest I forget old favorites like Venture for the ColecoVision or Super Monkey Ball for the Gamecube. With those last two I have exactly 201, and if the recall of games follows the same decay curve as most large recall tasks, I'd estimate I have another 300-600 games left in me. Time will probably be the limiting factor for Monday.

So did I forget anything obvious? Err, obvious to you, that is. I mean, I probably didn't play all the games you did, but I bet your thoughts will trigger more of my own memories.

This should be one of the funner and more nostalgic discussions...

Thank you Zhaneel and Ammy for your help. Ammy, sadly I accidentally deleted our IM convo. You don't happen to have it, do you?

Oh, a few more I shouldn't forget: Milles Bornes, Uno, Lord of the Rings Board Game, Chez Geek, Magic: The Gathering (just twice, but still), Diplomacy, Risk, Illuminati, Shinobi, SimCity, The Sims, Sim Tower, Battlezone, Robotron, Dragons Lair, Billiards, Bowling, Tron, Tron Discs, Street Fighter, Gran Turismo 2, Need for Speed II, Need For Speed III: Hot Pursuit, Virtua Fighter, Sands of Egypt (CoCo), Guess My Number (Mickey), Merlin (handheld), Red Rover, Trivial Pursuit, Kinesis, Speed Sliding Puzzle, Snake, A-Maze-Ing (Mac 128K), Pyramid Solitaire, Clock Solitaire, Klondike, Dark Castle, Diablo, War, Bullshit, CivNet, 10 women (Mr. Bad), Warcraft, Warcraft II, Warcraft III, Starcraft, Pole Position, Lunar Lander, Maelstrom, Gother Than Thou, Aquarius. Okay! I'm stopping now! I could keep going on and on but I have to sleep now. This paragraph adds another 51 games to the total.

So I was passed (ooh, poor choice of words, as you'll see in retrospect) this article from the UK Guardian. It was published back in March 02, but is still definitely worth passing along.

No war, no politics, no internet security or freedoms. This article is all about your inner self; not the spiritual self, but the stomach, intestines, and colon, and about a remarkable place in Thailand that will help you perform a complete gastronomic overhaul, a 50,000 mile tune-up, if you will.

Not for the squeamish, but I found the article fascinating. I can't wait to read some of the comments from this one.

After my bitching about the cold to Rachel today at lunch, she forwarded me this:

Subject: That just ain't right....

Ok y'all: What is up with THIS!?

Right now, at the Larsen Ice Shelf in Antartica it's 33 F
Right now, at the Esperanza Base in Antartica it's 38 F
Right now, at Ago-1 in Antartica it's 47 F

.....and right now, at Pittsburgh PA it's 16 F. IT IS WARMER IN FREAKINGANTARTICA THAN HERE.

Okay, okay, granted it's Summer down there, but it's darn cold here, as weather.com can attest:

Brrr... Wind chill....

Thanks for the parka and gloves, Mom!