New Year’s Resolutions

Stop flying.

Ended up paying $1500 to visit home for christmas. I guess all that extra money is to pay them to cancel my flight a few hours before I was supposed to leave, put me in coach when I bought a business class ticket and then lose our luggage. Thanks American Airlines! (?)

New language of the year: Objective-C.

With the iPhone SDK coming out soon, I’ll probably want to play around with building some apps for it, so I think it’s time to dive into mac development. I wonder if my knowledge of Visual Studio is going to taint my progress. Along that vein, I also want to make an iPhone-friendly version of my diet plugin. I haven’t made any web apps using the iUI library, but have been meaning to.

Get my apartment awesome by the summer.

I still have stuff in boxes and the place doesn’t feel finished yet.

Lose my christmas weight.

Weighed in this morning at almost 7 pounds over my target. How can I say no to fudge at christmas?? (Plus gumbo, etouffee, jambalaya, fried alligator, shrimp poboys, oh shi- [food coma]) Well that was easy, just get food poisoning! I also caved in and bought a gym membership, but since Yahoo! reimburses me for it I break even which is pretty good.

down with stick figures

if you’ve ever been my roommate before, chances are you saw me on one of my “drawing kicks”. i’d buy some pencils and a sketch pad at the LSU bookstore, doodle for a few days, and then eventually put them away and forget the whole thing. the usual reason for stopping was that i sucked at drawing.

so guess what: i’ve got the itch again. but this time it’s different. maybe it’s b/c i have more time to think about it, or maybe it’s b/c i’m older, but i think i figured out why i go on these art tangents. i’m a maker. i have this natural need to create. it’s one of the reasons i became a programmer, so that i could literally make something out of nothing. but while programming is definitely creative, it doesn’t really tweak the same nerve-endings as something like art and music do. and i know that if i actually get good at drawing it will make me better at my job, and break me out of my focused, analytical, logical rut.

so instead of just buying some supplies (well, i did that too) i went to a bookstore on my way home from work and bought The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. (aside: being able to just hop off your bike and walk it around the store rocks!) from what i can tell so far (i’m on chapter 4), this book is to drawing like Good Eats is to food. rather than just show you the steps and the results, it gets down into the science. the author spends alot of time talking how the brain works and the real physiological reasons why some people can’t draw what they see. (mainly due to the left brain dominating over the right brain)

so hopefully whenever i get through this thing i suck a little less, and maybe i’ll post a few pictures. i had to draw a “before” self-portrait, but i’ll wait to share that one until i have an “after”. :]

my first nfl game

i’ve never been to an nfl game before. and yesterday i realized that the saints were playing the 49ers this weekend! so off to craigslist i went. found 2 tickets for $150 (geez, $7 student tickets seem so far away…) but they were in an awesome spot right next to a bunch of saints fans who needed no reason to start singing ‘who dat’. the game was awesome, mainly b/c we whipped them up and down the field. a few of those scores were on our side of the field, so i got to see them up close and personal.

i brought my camera and had a really good time taking pictures (of the cheerleaders). unfortunately, it made me realize that while my 18-135 lens is great for general use, i really should get something with more zoom if i want to make a habit of taking sports photos. but honestly, i just put my camera on ’sport’ mode and pressed the button. i let it do all the rest! here are some of the ones i really like.

so i bought an xbox 360

i’ve been holding out from buying a new console since i was perfectly content with my ps2. (and by content i mean i had a way to play guitar hero). even when i got a little antsy, i could go buy a game like GTA: san andreas, since i hadn’t played that yet either. but after i really couldn’t do any more with GH2, (like i’m gonna be able to beat jordan…) and then my PC died so my hopes of getting back into FPS gaming stalled, i decided to bite the bullet and buy a new console.

what i really wanted was a Wii, but since they are still impossible to find (and all i really wanted was wii sports which would get old after awhile) i decided on the 360. the ps3 wasn’t even on the list since it costs too much just isn’t worth it. now i am worried about getting the “red ring of death” but since i won’t have to pay to get it fixed, and since i’m just buying it now, the newer hardware is out which hopefully helps out a bit. i made sure to get the HDMI version also.

so now i have this new toy, and all the time in the world to play with it. there’s the obvious omg buy halo 3 but other than when we used to have those halo parties on pecan tree, i didn’t really play that game. and now that i’d have to rely on playing online to get some multiplayer action, it just wouldn’t be the same. :[ so i decided to buy skate. and holy crap, this game is awesome. part of it is just getting used to playing games in HD, since i’ve never done it before. but after i got used to the awesome graphics, i realized that this game is way better than the Tony Hawk games from PS1/PS2. and if you know me, you know how much i played those games.

one of the cool things about this game is how you can upload video to their site directly from the game. check out me getting hit by a car.

do any of ya’ll back home have a 360? add me as a friend, my name is ‘afexTW’.

looking for top-down map of LSU

so here is some background. every 3 months, yahoo has a “hack day” where instead of working you spend 24 hours on a hack. a hack can be a new product idea, a new feature for an existing product, whatever. afterwards you showcase your hack (you have 90 seconds) and a panel votes on the best. well one of the hacks from last hack day just went live in yahoo maps, but i need some help finding something. (i didn’t make this, b/c if i did, i would be pimping it 10x harder :P)

http://maps.yahoo.com/mapmixer

mapmixer lets you take a 3rd party map (such as… a map of the LSU campus? :]) and overlay it on top of the global map. but in order to do this, the map needs to be a 2D, top-down view otherwise it doesn’t make much sense. all the campus maps of LSU i can find either have an angled view, or are too ugly to use. ideally it would have all the buildings labeled, since that is kinda the point. this is the best i could find, but the building names are un-readable :[

if you find one, you can post here or if you want, just post it yourself to mapmixer.

here’s an example: (don’t forget to play with the opacity)

if you can’t see anything, stop reading this from facebook and come to my site! :P