The Big Show

One of the most important influences in my life was Nathan Hillrich. For years, Nathan was one of my closest friends. Much of who I am today can be attributed to my time with Nathan and what he taught me.

Big Show (Nathan was 6’ 8” at least and a huge guy. With the long hair, he looked very similar to the wrestler The Big Show which earned Nathan the name) was an unusual guy. Unbelievably outgoing, Show was friends with most everyone and very few people disliked him. Oddly enough, Show chose to hang out with the “Loser Patrol” as we were known. He was fiercely loyal and would stand up for any of us in any situation.

Show was a fun guy to hang out with. He always had a joke to tell and was just a goofball all the time. He had a strange home life, living with just his brother and his dad who happened to be pretty much stoned all the time and grew pot on occasion. It wasn't really a bad thing, just something to take note of. His dad tended to be a pack rat, so Show always seemed to have the most random toys. At one point, he rebuilt an old adult tricycle, complete with a comfy padded seat, and used it as his main form of transportation.

I honestly can’t remember how Nathan and I became such good friends. I suppose mutual friends brought us together and we just became really close.

Nathan taught me a lot about life, although I imagine much of it was unintentional. When I met Show, I was a gangly fifteen year old kid without many friends and very low self-confidence (although that’s a story for another time). Show always had a good word to say about me and always boosted me up. Hell, my first foray into dating was largely because of him.

As Nathan and I became closer, we started hanging out much more often. We had a million inside jokes and even a goofy little handshake. We would spend a lot of time after school just chatting about nothing, life, and everything.

Reading what I’ve written so far, I realize how little I’ve been able to express about Nathan. Nathan showed me how to interact with people. He taught me how to make friends. He showed me how to project self-confidence in such a way that people notice and admire you. Without him, I never would have come out of my shell and I’d still be a shy, self-conscious loser with no self esteem. In short, Nathan made me into a whole person and the man I am today.

Writing this, I find myself on the edge of tears thinking of how truly terrible my life was at that point in my life and thankful that I met Nathan.

I love Nathan and I always will.

Moo

As I've grown older, I've come to have a fairly well defined style. I know what I like and I know what looks good on me. It's always changing and improving, but it always looks good.

It wasn't always that way.

When I was in grade 12, that would be about 5 years ago now, I was really just starting to define a style for myself. It was a very experimental period in my life as far as fashion is concerned. My style changed frequently as I decided what I liked, what looked good, and what other people thought.

One fateful day, I stepped into Randy River and made a bad, bad decision. I saw a... "unique" shirt and I decided to buy it. The next day, I wore it to school and received less than stellar reviews.

The shirt in question was a cow print. Not only was it a cow print, but it was slightly meshed and therefore a bit see-through. Oh yeah, I looked pretty sweet.

Long story short, I don't think I even wore the shirt all day and I returned it that afternoon. Not my proudest fashion moment, to say the least.

It's good to be awesome.

One fucking word...

This morning was the midterm for my coding class and it didn't go nearly as well as it should have.

The written test was fine, although I know there are a couple questions that I got wrong, one of which because the teacher never actually taught us what it was.

Then came the practical. Man, oh man, what a train wreck that became.

The assignment itself was really easy for a midterm and should have taken me about 30 minutes to complete and then maybe another 30 if I felt like adding some polish.

(Feel free to skip the next block of text if you're not a programmer.)
We had to create 2 classes, one called Vector3D and one called cube, and implement a couple of functions into them. After that, we just needed to make a simple driver program that would demonstrate all of the functions.

Basically, super easy. The problem is that inside of one of my classes I had declared a function as inline not realizing that I couldn't actually use inline there. What made it worse is that everything compiled. Now cut to about 10 minutes later when I attempt to use the function in my main code. Fucking token errors all over the place.

For those not in the know, token errors are some of the worst because they don't tell you anything. Usually when you get an error, Visual Studio will tell you what's wrong and where the problem is. A token error spits out a bunch of garbage telling you it's brokexored but doesn't really tell you why or where.

Long story short (too late, I know), I spent more than 2 hours trying to figure out what was wrong and took out the single word that was destroying my sanity.

Thankfully, I was able to get everything working and handed in about 10 minutes before we ran out of time. I totally dodged a bullet there.

My Awesome Frogger Game

Here is the spectacular Frogger game that I made for my midterm. I've touched it up a bit and prettied up the graphics. However, as you can see below, "pretty" is a relative term. Download it here.



It's good to be awesome.

A Man Ahead of His Time

Greg and I had a house party on Saturday night. It was a really great party. We played a few thrilling games of foosball, ground some axes in Guitar Hero, and I got totally hammered.

The best part of the night by far came just before the end. Everyone but Tom and Mike had gone home and Mike, Greg, and I were sitting in the living room playing Wario Ware. After about 10 minutes or so, it dawns on us that Tom is missing. I decide to go look for him to make sure he's alright.

I peek into Greg's room. No Tom.

I check my room. No Tom.

I notice the bathroom light is on so I knock. No answer.

I crack the door and there's Tom on the toilet, making a delivery, and, I shit you not, sleeping with his head on his knees. So I say, "Hey Tom, you alright?" and he looks up at me through squinted eyes and I just lose it. I totally break down laughing and wander back out to the living room to tell the story.

I think Greg and I laughed for an hour straight. I wish I had taken a picture.

A couple days later, I was talking to my buddy Chris who was also at the party, but had left before the excitement. I told him the story and I think he summed it up best when he said, "My god, the man's a genius. To think, all this time I've been wasting time when I could have been doing both at the same time. The man is a visionary."

I salute you Tom.

Frogging Awesome

I'm just coming down from a natural high I got after doing my midterm in Math class.

The midterm assignment was to take a bit of GDI framework and create a working Frogger style game out of it. A few moving boxes to represent cars, some circles to be the flies at the end, and a keyboard controlled circle to act as the frog.

I owned, nay, I pwned that test.

It took me just under 2 hours to completely code the Frogger game to the requirements provided in the outline. The next person to finish completed their's at around the 3 hour mark.

And my awesomeness doesn't stop there, oh no. I went on to add in levels with ramping difficulty, correct Frogger-like movement, and a character that actually looked like a frog rather than a circle.

God damn, I rule.

And on top of all this, I know that it's because I did an awesome job and not just because everyone else did a poor job. There are classmates of mine that I have great respect for, Heath in particular, that took much longer than me to get finished.

It's good to be awesome.

Review - Sam & Max Episode 2: Situation Comedy

I just finished up Episode 2 and it was awesome. A huge improvement over the first. The pacing was great, the puzzles melded together nicely, and I was even laughing out loud at a few of the jokes.

If you've read my review of the Episode 1, I don't have much to add. It's the same engine and actors and I'm still equally impressed with the graphics and sound design of the game.

As for this episode, Telltale's plan is becoming much more clear. There are recurring characters and themes, inside jokes, and familiar locations. It's like they read my mind and created the type of episodic content I wanted. The best part is they have an awesome release schedule. They're releasing a game at least once a month.

I would just like to say again how much I enjoyed this episode. Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that the way this episode is put together and flows is nothing short of amazing.

At around 2-3 hours long, it runs about the same as episode 1, so I imagine this is what can be expected from the future episodes. However, when the episode flows this well, the length of the game really doesn't matter. It was a complete game experience and I really enjoyed myself. That's all that matters.

If you were wary about getting into the series, this should settle it for you. Go grab a copy right now.

Crazy Fro

I was talking with a buddy of mine last night and I was reminded of a bit of an embarrassing story.

Roughly a year and a half ago, I was riding my bike to and from the Skytrain to get to work. One day on the way home, I arrived at the station and there was someone on my bike. I was pretty far away, but they had this huge fro and were hopping around like a crazy person on my bike. It was during the middle of the day, so I figured I'd just get one of the Skytrain cops to deal with it.

"Hey, you see that person on the bike there?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that's my bike. Think you can do something about it?"

The cop looked at me like I was on crack.

"Why don't you just go ask them to get off?"

"Oh, yeah, OK."

So as I walk over to my bike, I realize why the cop was looking at me so strangely.

The crazy person on my bike that I was bothering a cop about was a 6 year old girl.

Yeah, I'm awesome.