Last Thursday, I had the first session of my last Master’s class at VT (the Northern Virginia campus). After a severe bout of misguidance via my various school advisors, I’ve been forced to take this one last class after being told I was done for good after finishing a course in Artificial Intelligence over a year ago. If that came out confusing, it’s probably because the whole graduate school situation has been fucked up for many, many months now. As it stands, I just need to defend my thesis (which is complete, but untouched for 6 months now) and get a passing grade in this summer class to finally get my MS and move the hell on.

Without getting into too many trivial details, this class is an absolute joke. The professor who teaches it is a hardcore academic and is of the mindset that all programmers eventually ‘graduate’ from coding and enter the ranks of middle management at some point in their careers. I don’t know about him, but the day I stop coding or designing is the day I start looking for a new job. At any rate, the worst part of the class is that it starts in the early evening and doesn’t get out until 10pm. So, I’m basically forced to work late, scarf down reheated left-overs at work for dinner, drive out to Falls Church, attend class, drive home to Leesburg, and then pretty much go to bed before heading out to work the next morning. Goddamn drag and a half. To top it off, last Thursday I called Krystle on the way home only to find out she had an accident while I was in class. Thankfully, she wasn’t hurt at all, but she hit a deer coming home on a back-road in the dead of night. I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later, living way out in the boonies like we do – but it’s still a pain in the ass (and a several hundred dollar deductible) to sort through.

The weekend ended up being pretty nice, though. We slammed through all of our errands / chores on Saturday so that we could pretty much just chill out the entire weekend. Chilling out, in this context, involved watching a metric ton of the French Open and playing a bunch of games. The highlight of the tournament has definitely been the match today where the Swede, Robin Soderling, absolutely manhandled Nadal to beat him in four sets. This is the absolutely first time that Nadal has ever lost a match in the French Open and I’m insanely happy that Soderling was the man to finally do it. He’s been one of my favourite players since last Wimbledon when he pissed Rafa off by mocking him and pretending to pick his ass like OCD Nadal always does before a serve. Serves him right – fantastic match.

I mentioned that Krystle and I played a bunch of games, but that’s a straight-up lie. In reality, we’ve just been playing the hell out of one game – Sacred 2 for the 360. Generally, the only games that she’ll even consider cooping with me are the isometric, hack-and-slash RPGs which, pretty suprisingly, are in severe short supply on the 360. After scoping this out on-line, it looked right up her alley and so I ended up buying it Friday evening. Needless to say, we’re both addicted to the damn game, and we’ve racked up about 15 hours just from this weekend alone. While it can be buggy as hell and it’s interface is pretty clumsy, there’s something intangibly awesome about the game in general. For one thing, we’ve been running around completing quests and leveling up and, after all this time, we’re still in the first chapter. There’s still 85% of the game we have yet to uncover – it’s insanely massive, to put it mildly. So, it looks like we’ll have a distraction for quite a while to come.

Speaking of massive, this post has turned gargantuan. Serves me right for taking so long to update, I suppose. The tech blog at Pansopht is still in the works, I’m just tweaking the design before I turn it live. In addition, I’m working on a few other projects which should yield some interesting things in the next few weeks. As for the near future, I think Krystle and I are going to see Up tomorrow after work. I’m a huge fan of Pixar’s body of work, so I’m really jazzed about seeing it. If we do end up seeing it tomorrow, I’ll be sure to write a review and post it by the middle of the week for those who are interested.

Well, that’s all I’ve got. Night.

Speaking of which, I have several things planned for the near future. I’ve written a pretty basic article involving PHP daemons for my first technology post. As I was going to publish it, I stepped back a moment and rethought things a bit. I’ve decided to keep this blog separate from my posts concerning programming and technology, in general. For one thing, the vast majority of my friends are, decidedly, non-technical and reading posts involving PHP would probably spawn a mass suicide, culling them all, inevitably leaving me friendless. To avoid this, I’m going to create a new technology-related blog on my sandbox domain (pansopht.com). I’ll make sure all posts there get fed into my Lifestream here. That should be ready by the end of Memorial Day or so.

I’m also currently writing up a review for the fantastic Halo Wars game and plan to write another for the upcoming Terminator: Salvation movie (which I plan to see tomorrow). Expect both of those in the near future.

As always, feedback is greatly appreciated. If you have an idea or want to drop me a line, feel free to DM me on Twitter or leave a comment here.

After being lazy mofos for a couple hours after that, we packed up a metric ton of presents into the Civ and drove out to the in-law’s house for Jaime’s birthday / Evan’s birthday / late Mother’s Day shin-dig. As usual, Krystle’s parents prepared some excellent food to consume: hot-off-the-grill hamburgers, hard-boiled egg filled potato salad, New England hot dogs, and about fifty desserts. Again, as usual, I ate way too much and have been regretting it since. Everyone seemed to like their gifts, however we got Sherry the Professor Layton & the Curious Village DS game and proceeded to ‘test’ it for her for about two hours. Good times.

Pretty much the best part of yesterday was when I hooked up my 360 to the big TV in our bedroom and we played Scene It: Box Office Smash for many hours. We played a bunch of random people on-line and always managed to squeak out a victory. Goddamn, I love movie trivia. As the night wore on, I showed Krystle that I was a handful of achievements away from a full 1250 gs on that game and she got really into helping me try and nail down the last ones. Yep, I think I definitely married the right woman.

Today will be like pretty much every other Sunday. We’re going to walk Connor in a few and then head out to meet the usual gang for some bowling. Might join a league this summer, but I’m still not convinced I’m good enough. When we get back, I’m going to update the review template for this site and add a rating to all my reviews, so people can just skim the gist of a review instead of slogging through the whole thing if they don’t want to. I’m also nailing down a few ideas for some technical posts – thinking of writing a Wordpress plug-in and then dissecting its inception, design, and implementation in a series of posts. Haha, EXCITING.

Long story short, everything should work properly now.

In other news, I’m writing a review for the latest Star Trek movie, which should be out by tomorrow, at the latest. Cheers!

The rest of the day was much more relaxing. After doing some obligatory chores, we drove out to Alexandria to eat at a restaurant called Rustico to celebrate a friend’s birthday party. Although it was kind of a bitch to find the place, I ordered a smooth oatmeal stout and thoroughly enjoyed some fancy-pants macaroni & cheese dish they served up. Kind of pricey, but the food was definitely top-notch.

The following day, we got up early and drove out to Ashburn for a spur-of-the-moment sonogram we had registered on the previous Friday. We’re still a full month out from our official, level-two sonogram (where we potentially find out the gender), so we said fuck it and dropped a little money on a sono that’s specifically geared towards determining the gender. They ushered us into a room that housed a patient bed in one corner and a veritable movie theater in the other. The sono output is streamed to monitors embedded in the walls every few feet in addition to a giant projector in the ceiling which throws the picture onto an entire wall in the corner. Pretty swank. At any rate, the doctor spent all of five minutes looking at the picture until the baby finally flashed some wang. That’s right, it’s official – we’re having a boy! I really can’t explain the emotions I was feeling when I saw that picture, but I was was damn proud that I was going to have a son. At any rate, it was a perfect Mother’s Day present for all mothers / grandmothers involved and was definitely worth the coin we dropped on it.

The campus was pretty quiet on Saturday as we walked through the greens and pathways that linked the numerous dormitories over by the West End food-court. There was that all-too-familiar background tension in the air that reeked of finals being a little over a week away and closing fast. It was oddly surreal to stand in front of the festering hole that is Pritchard Hall, stare up at my first room away from home on the seventh floor, and notice that the student living there now has the exact same model of fan jammed into his window that I had when I lived there in the fall of 2001. I wonder if that floor still reeks of pot, Natty light, and clogged showers like it used to. I do NOT miss having to wear flip flops to take a shower, I’ll tell you that right now.

Every step through that campus brought back a ream of memories. Eating cheesesteaks every day for lunch at Owens for an entire damn semester, going to my first frat party at Theta Xi and drinking my first beer there (Pabst Blue Ribbon, natch), waking up one morning in September of my freshman year and watching as planes flew into the World Trade Center on my battered 13″ television, just reams of shit. I remember all of this, and then I think it’s pretty strange that my experiences are completely divorced from Krystle’s. We have similar memories of the same places: seeing movies at the Lyric and the cheapo student union, eating at the same restaurants, even taking some of the same classes – but we never knew eachother until we met on-line years later in Northern Virginia. Although, I’m around 99% sure that her sister, Jaime, used to serve me Subway sandwiches one summer when I was taking classes and working at 4Help to pay the bills. Now THAT shit is funny!

Anyways, it was a great trip. We drove down Friday morning and promptly lunched at Macado’s. The Big Daddy sandwich was, unsurprisingly, money in a bun. That night we met up with some friends (among them, my best Twitter buddy, Katie [@kathleenfoucart], and her new-ish husband – the venerable JoeGTN1) at The Cellar for some spaghetti with GIGANTIC meatballs, a few pitchers of beer, and some great conversation. After sleeping it off, we walked around campus for most of Saturday and got some great shots in the overcast sky. As the afternoon waned, we played a few rounds of pool in Squire’s, where Krystle was impressed to find out that I used to be a member of both the Pool Shark League AND the Dance Dance Revolution Ladder. That night, we grabbed Mexico and drove an ass-long way out to the Home Place for dinner. We waited about an hour to get in, but the home-cooked Southern fare more than made up for it. Goddamn delicious.

And that was about it. We checked out this morning, grabbed some coffee at Mill Mountain, drove up, got our pooch out of the doggy clink, and Krystle’s now sleeping it off. I miss the Burg, but I think we’re planning on going back in the Fall, if Krystle’s not too round by then. All I know is, it doesn’t matter where we live in 18 years, my girl/boy is going to be a damn Hokie, even if it costs 30 gigabucks a year in tuition.

Left 4 Dead

If you haven’t heard, Valve has announced that they are giving away a free 24-hour trial of Left 4 Dead tomorrow (2009/05/01) on Steam. This trial also comes with the brand-spanking new Survivor Pack DLC that was recently released.

Left 4 Dead is one of my favourite cooperative games on any system and I’d highly recommend giving it a spin if you haven’t tried it yet and you are a fan of: zombies, humans,  humans shooting zombies, or zombies eating humans. While light on story, each campaign in the game attempts to emulate a horror movie cliche involving a zombie apocalypse and a rag-tag band of survivors who try to make it to safety using anything and everything at their disposal. For example, one campaign starts you off on the roof of an apartment building and forces you to traverse through the abandoned city subway system as you try to make it to the local TV broadcast station to try and signal for help. Another one has you blasting your way through a Friday the 13th-esque campground as you attempt to reach a quay where a boat is waiting to ferry everyone in your party to some unknown safe haven.

However, what it lacks in narrative, it more than makes up for in fundamental gameplay and outright fun. Valve has proved time and again that they are masters at crafting new experiences from played-out genres. In the late 1990’s, they breathed new life into the first-person shooter genre with the first game in their venerable Half Life series and now they’re breaking the mould once again by presenting a truly cooperative shooter fused with horror elements.

In Left 4 Dead, communication within your team is paramount to your success within each level. As the difficulty ratchets up, so do the sheer numbers of undead that you’ll have to take down. Additionally, special ‘boss’-like monsters will appear more frequently, each with a special set of abilities that will rip your team apart if you’re not careful. The boomer, for example, will explode if you let him get too close and will cover everyone nearby in a goopy substance that acts like zombie candy – causing every upright undead in a mile radius to home in on you as fast as they can. And god help you if you are beckoned by the keening wail of the Witch and accidentally manage to wake her up.

Long story short, I would definitely recommend Left 4 Dead and Friday’s free trial is an excellent opportunity to check it out.

So, here we are again. It’s 2009 and I’m ready to write.

If you don’t know me, then welcome! My name is Gavin – a programmer, currently in my mid-20’s, who lives in the blighted nether regions of Northern Virginia. I have a beautiful wife named Krystle, a chunky Black Labrador Retriever named Connor, and three cats who prefer to remain anonymous. Regarding my true passions in life, I absolutely love playing video games, reading books, designing complex systems, and writing all kinds of code. And that’s about me in a nut-shell.

Well, I suppose that’s all for now. I have many (hopefully interesting) ideas for programming posts in the near future. However, if you aren’t technologically-inclined, I suppose you’ll have to make do with… me.

I guess it helps that I am AWESOME.