Let me explain.

In the past month, a lot has been going on. I was fired from my job at Brave New Media, and I got a job as a software engineer at The Nerdery in Bloomington, MN. I just finished my first week as a Nerdery Nerd, and it’s even more amazing than I ever thought it would be. I won’t go into detail on the Brave New Media situation—people close to me know what happened, and anyone who is curious should feel free to ask. It wasn’t exactly amicable and I don’t want to go spouting things on my blog until I can be completely objective about it. (Even then, I might not “spout” anything about the matter. We’ll see.)

Anyway, the new job is so fantastic, awesome and wonderful that it warrants a whole other post that I’m sure I’ll write this weekend. I just wanted to give a quick hello and explain my recent lack of blog-posty goodness.

Every time I walked down the street of a new neighborhood, I had recollections like:

I remember jumping off of that building as the Hulk.

I remember beating up a SWAT officer on that roof.

I remember jumping through that plate-glass window.

I remember dodging obstacles from on top of the subway train.

Of course, most of the games I would think of were not actually set in New York. They were set in fake New Yorks, or fake Chicagos, or fake San Franciscos. One game in particular resonated more than any other, though, for two reasons: One, it was actually set in New York City, and two, it was the game that started my life as a gamer. Can you guess? It was Deus Ex.

I have nothing but the fondest of memories for that amazing game. It was my first time playing a first-person shooter, it was my first time playing an RPG, it was my first time pretending to be asleep so my parents would go to bed and I could get up and play until 4:00 AM. It is undoubtedly the game that made me a gamer.

On my first trip to New York last year, I actually got to see Liberty Island and Battery Park. Walking through them was like taking a trip through time to when I was a teenager, gaming on my first computer. Not my family’s first computer, but my first computer. It was in my room, it had my stuff on it, and no one else used it. I named her Doris.

But I digress.

Strolling through Battery Park last year, I remembered what my Cherry Coke tasted like and how the glow of the CRT monitor felt on my face in the dark bedroom. I could practically see Denton in front of me, walking around with his GEP gun (or crossbow, depending on which playthrough it was). I pictured the guards walking on their pre-programmed paths, and I remembered where the great hiding spots were. It was really an amazing feeling, and one I will never forget.

This year was similar, but because the games I’ve played since were not actually set in New York, the memories weren’t always as vivid. Still, scenes from Mirror’s Edge were playing back in front of me, even though the buildings in that city were all a stark, perfect white. I was looking for red pipes to run towards… but then I realized I was walking around with Damian and Neal, we were on our way to lunch, and I wasn’t an Asian free-runner.

Am I too much of a gamer? I don’t think so. Others might disagree, but I always remind them that I don’t live in a basement OR drink Mountain Dew.

Some of you might have seen my posts about PAX appear and then vanish. Well, PAX was another Brave New Media trip, and my blog posts needed to come down until after the blog posts for the client were live. It was my mistake. However, those blog posts are live now on BlueberryMuffinTops.com, so I can post mine again. I will be back-dating them to match up with the actual days they cover. Days 2 and 3 aren’t written yet, so those will (hopefully) be coming sometime this weekend.

I won’t be having much downtime while I’m here, because like PAX, this trip is filled with lots of really fun work. In the time I do have, I’m going to do—you guessed it—daily blog posts! As with past trips, I’ll be posting in parallel on the Brave New Media blog.

That’s it for now. Look for my Day 0 blog post tomorrow morning!

Hi folks.  Alison has asked me to write a post and explain her absence.  I shall do my best.

December was a busy month for us, professionally and personally.  As a result, she has been unable to blog, or give users of SimpleMap the support she feels they deserve.  To top that all off, she is currently in bed with a nasty head cold (who says I never get her anything fun?).  At any rate, she will be back on the grid 1/4/10, and doing her best to get caught up.

Have a safe and happy new year!

The Barretts.

I was then greeted by a folder icon with a question mark on it.

Somehow, my computer had lost the ability to find its own hard drive. My husband and I worked on my computer the rest of the evening—about seven hours that night—and several hours the following day before we could get it to see the drive at all. We still couldn’t boot from it, of course, but at least we could wipe it and reinstall the OS.

We finally succeeded, after three tries. The install kept freezing at 2% or so.

I had a two-day-old backup, so I still have most of my data. Time Machine is a godsend, but I turn it off when I play WoW because it brings my frame rate down to around one frame per seven seconds. That’s quite a problem when you’re healing nine other players while fighting Onyxia. I basically lost a weekend’s worth of work, which sucks, but isn’t horrible.

Running a surface scan revealed that after zeroing out my drive, I still inexplicably had corrupt blocks on the drive. My hard drive is probably going to physically fail for good sometime in the near future.

Until I can afford (in money AND time) to get a new drive for my computer, I might have to lose another day or two here and there, relying on hourly Time Machine backups to save my butt. Development on SimpleMap and all of my other projects has pretty much come to a halt for the next week at least.

Trust me—I don’t like this any more than you SimpleMap users out there do. I’ll do what I can to get 1.2 out of beta soon.

—

I was going to change the way Categories work a little. Right now the category name is actually what’s inserted into the database record for a location. In the categories table, each category has an ID number, and I was going to link to that from the locations database instead. That way, when you change the name of a category, it will be changed across all the locations in that category. I could also let the user reassign those locations to a different category automatically.

This would make matching the category in a search a little more painful to code. It also still limits each location to one category.

My mission with SimpleMap is to keep it really simple… like I’ve said in a blog post or two, I won’t be adding any major features for a while after I release 1.2, because I want to make this plugin as streamlined as possible before it gets any bigger.

Would adding a Tags field, like you mentioned in your email, be a little too busy? I like that it would allow another search dimension, and that it would be unrestrained as to what you type in it (multiple tags, huge phrases, numbers, wouldn’t matter). My only concern is making things too complicated.

Then again, WordPress uses both categories and tags for posts, and people using this plugin already use WordPress. So I think I’ve answered my own question.

It was a bummer of a day. I’m really sorry that I released 1.1 with these huge bugs in it, and I paid for it by getting some pretty negative ratings on the WordPress plugin site. For those of you still using SimpleMap, thank you so much for sticking with me. I really do want to deliver the best tool I can—especially one that isn’t broken. I greatly appreciate all of the support and patience I’ve gotten from you guys.

As always, if you find any errors or bugs with SimpleMap, please email me or post a comment on the SimpleMap page. I can only fix bugs if I know they’re there!

About a week ago I got an email from Big Nerd Ranch telling me how best to prepare for the trip. I’m reading Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephen Kochan. Let me tell you something about Objective-C: The syntax is very dissimilar to every other programming language I know. So far that has been the biggest barrier in working through this book. For example, when you need to call a function on an instance of a class in Actionscript or Java, you do this:

myObject.method(arguments);

In Objective-C:

[myObject method: arguments];

It’s not impossible to understand, just hard to get used to. Defining a class is also somewhat different: instead of just one class definition enclosed by curly braces, it’s this:

[cpp]@interface ClassName: Parent Class
{
// instance variables go here
}
// instance & class methods (declaration only) go here
@end

@implementation ClassName
// method definitions go here
@end[/cpp]

I’ll be posting one more time before I leave for the Big Nerd Ranch on Friday, and hopefully after I’ve gotten through a few more chapters in the Objective-C book. Once I arrive in Georgia, I will be posting at the end of every day with any interesting highlights (code-related or otherwise).