Category Archives: Activities

Life lately

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Life has gotten another update, bringing it up to today. Yay life.

I also got inspired to start working on the RPG Get! CCG again. I got the website up after about an hour of playing around with CSS and figuring how to hack stylesheets so IE does what I want it to (stupid non-standards compliant IE7). No cards yet though… still finishing up the base set.

Didn’t go to Capture the Flag with Stuff in the park today, and I’m very glad I didn’t go. Instead had a nice quiet day by myself (making tasty chicken and rice and beans for lunch, and working on RPG Get!) and then had some social activity at Sharon/Charles/Matt’s housewarming party. CtFwS would have been too much crazyness.

This is basically a dump of photos from the past few weeks:
Played with the zoom on my 18-200mm lens.

Went to the SCS picnic.

Went to Dim Sum with coworkers.

Went to Trisha’s to watch movies. Saw Smart People (finally) and decided it was a horrible movie. Dueled with Alfred with my new (very slow to reload) camera.

Had Sharon, Charles, Justin, and Mark over for games.




Went to Sharon/Charles/Matt’s housewarming, where there was Space Munchkin and N64 and Wii and lots of tasty food and wine.

Life

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Dinner today was a salad with mushrooms, grilled garlic-herb salmon, and some jalapeno cheese bread. It was fairly good.
I’m also currently working on a new incarnation of PPA TCG/Student Wars called People Wars:

Really though, I’ve lately been feeling like I’ve lost all my passion for things in my life.

I used to enjoy designing webpages. The last website I designed was my photos2 layout, and that was over a year ago.

I used to enjoy writing code in my free time. The last bit of code I wrote “for fun” was the backend for life.alanv.org, and that was mainly because I wanted a way to share photos (so more out of necessity than desire to code). I have a bunch of project ideas in my head that want to be turned into applications, but for which I can’t find the desire to work on.

I used to enjoy creating card games. Even as I work on People Wars, I keep feeling like it’s not something I really want to be doing. The past 3 or 4 TCGs I’ve started work on have stalled in various non-playable states. The older TCGs I used to like working on haven’t been updated in years (PSO TCG?).

I used to enjoy photography. Lately though, every time I pull out my camera, I feel more and more like I’m compensating for my utter lack of social skills. I rarely look through the photos I take anymore. I don’t really sort or tag the photos I take anymore. When I take photos, it no longer brings me the joy it used to. (Even the recent fourth of July and related photos were sorted mainly out of a sense of obligation rather than a desire to do so, and they still haven’t been tagged.)
I guess the purchase of the point-and-shoot was an attempt to get me interested again, but part of me is doubting that it will work… in particular after yesterday’s picnic where I kept finding myself wishing I had left my camera at home and was forcing myself to interact on a less superficial level.

I used to enjoy spending time around people. More and more, however, it feels like I’m incredibly out of place. There are times when, no matter what is happening, I can’t get myself interested. When there are people over I increasingly spend more and more time alone in my room clicking through the same 4 webpages or listening to the same dozen songs over and over. I simultaneously feel like I want more social interaction and social interaction would only serve to make me miserable and feel even more left out.

I used to be passionate about work and look forward to heading in to work every day. Lately though, it’s become more “same old, same old,” and I get up and get dressed and head to my desk every day out of necessity. Part of this may be the bad couple weeks I’ve been having WRT work, but I feel that it’s likely part of the larger issue where I’m losing interest in everything.

I guess I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong with me, other than I wish I had something I actually enjoyed doing instead of having a bunch of things I do to pass the time. Hopefully this is nothing more than a small rut and I’ll find my interests again. Maybe it’s time to go out and seek new interests. I want to enjoy, rather than simply live, life again. I just can’t seem to find activities that allow me to do that in the same way that I once did.

I should thank Greg, Tim, Ian, Mars, and Dan though. Sometimes I feel like you guys are the only thing keeping me sane, and when we play games or just talk, everything feels like it used to and I find myself being interested in things again.

Meh.

(I suppose this should include a small disclaimer that there’s still one thing I’m passionate about. You know who you are, and I hope that never changes.)

Photos

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Photos 2 got another 4 galleries today of random things that have been happening over the past month or so. I haven’t yet had a chance to go through Thailand/Europe photos, but those will be posted at some point as well.

Random (not in photos2):













Chocolate tasting:




Urban hiking:




Twister chess:







Fourth of July:









Please forgive the framing issues. Almost all of these were taken with the camera upside-down to counteract the shutter issues it’s having and, for some reason, it’s harder to frame things correctly that way. I still need to buy a new camera at some point…

Bleh MSN and Breadcake!

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Your little bit of stupidness today comes courtesy of MSN Messenger.
When you add someone to your blocked list, you are apparently also adding them to your contact list. What this means is that, if you block sufficient numbers of people, you can’t add people anymore.
This by itself wouldn’t be too terrible… except you actually can’t delete people from your blocked list. This basically means that, once you block someone, that space on your “contact list” is filled forever. (At least, it is if you are using any normal MSN client to connect, since you can unblock and such, but can’t actually delete entries through the UI.)
Bleh.
Fortunately, I found this tool that will do it for you… but since MSN imposes additional limits on things, you can only remove 40 blocked SNs at once and have to keep resubmitting the page to clean everything out.

Today’s adventure in baking is breadcake.
I had a ton of bread crusts from making finger sandwiches this morning. I decided to try a culinary experiment with them, and it actually turned out really good. Em says it reminds her of cinnamon bread mixed with french toast, which makes sense because it shares most of those ingredients.

Crusts from 1/2 loaf of bread
4 eggs
1/4 cup milk
Cinnamon and sugar to taste

Beat eggs and mix in milk, cinnamon, and sugar. Rip bread crusts into tiny pieces and gradually mix in until crusts are thoroughly coated. Place mixture into small baking container and bake at 375 degrees for 35 minutes. Let cool and slice. Serve with honey.


Also, as promised, here are two of the new Student Wars v2 cards with the redesigned templates: Tim’s FA character card and the new Attachment card type (this particular one attaches to GPA cards).

Today was also the Bay to Breakers parade, which was quite interesting. I have a ton of photos from it, which will eventually be posted to photos 2.

Freebies!

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I’ve been following consumerist lately, and have gotten quite a few free coupons. Today, I got a free 8×10 print at Walgreens, free 2-piece grilled chicken meal at KFC, and a free Kashi frozen meal at Safeway. Safeway also has a few good deals this week, including $1.77 milano cookies and $1 blackberries. Yay for cheap-or-free food-or-things. :D

Work has been exciting lately. I’ve been working on reskinning the login page for the past few days… it’s made me realize how behind I am on new webdesign paradigms. Apparently, everything nowadays is done with CSS and the HTML itself is very minimal (sometimes to the extent that the page without CSS looks like a plain text file–unformatted black text on a white background). This is all fine and good except it often involves hardcoding pixel values in the CSS. Unlike tables, which will grow to fit larger text, CSS-styled divs will do strange (and often undesirable) things. This led to a few hacks that I ended up doing to get stuff looking right after localization. Meh. I really need to do webdesign again.

Life has been good. I’ve been working a bit on a redesign of Student Wars v2 to make the cards cleaner (AKA less text). Eventually, I’m going to release the game freely (instead of behind a password) so more people can play. Whee.