It's been a while since I last posted, but it doesn't feel like it.. The weeks have been flying by recently, perhaps i'm getting old.. :/

The main consumer of my time outside work recently has been GTA: San Andreas, which was released for the PC (Windows - bah) on the 10th. Having preordered my copy from Play last month, I received my copy on the 9th. The basic gameplay is similar to GTA3, and Vice City. You run around, pick up guns, steal cars, run people over, crash, burn, and basically cause havoc. Rockstar have added much more detail than in the previous incarnations of the game. The game world is HUGE compared to Vice City, and those annoying area transition screens are gone. You can also choose how your character will look - if you eat lots of junk food you get fat, if you go to the gym and do lots of weights you build up muscles. You can choose your clothes and haircut too. If anyone enjoyed GTA3 or Vice City, and hasn't bought San Andreas yet, i'd recommend that you waste no more time.

Things have been going well at work, and despite having to force myself out of bad in the mornings, MS Word being the most horrific piece of software conceived, and a certain e-Commerce site being the bane of my existence, I'm enjoying the variety in the projects i'm working on. So far I've played with managed DirectX (C#/MS SQL Server), converted Word documents to PDF using wvWare and LaTeX (C), debugged and repaired chunks of LiteCommerce (PHP/MySQL), started work on a tool to help with a large web localisation project (Java/MySQL), and started work on a Content Management System that will run several sites that we will be building soon (PHP/MySQL/Smarty). An aspect that I especially like is that within the bounds of practicality, I get to choose what I use to implement stuff. It's also quite satisfying to be paid for doing something that I enjoy.

Following on from idea of getting old, Cat and I are looking to rent a flat together. If anyone knows of flats going in the West End (Glasgow) around August/September time, let me know.

I'm off to play some more San Andreas before bed. Mmm GTA.

I was sent a link to NeoSwiff the other day. It's a C# to Flash compiler, and although it would obviously be better if it was Java, it's still pretty cool. At the moment it's a public beta - so get it while it's still available! I may or may not post up some experiments - it depends if I manage to do anything worthy of sharing.. :)

Perhaps this will make Flash more accessible to non design types like me. It's also notable that they support Mac, Linux and Windows..

Mind you, none of this will matter if Adobe decide to destroy Flash. Time will tell.. :)

I've just finished my fifth cup of coffee today, and it's almost time to get back to coding..

The past few weeks have been nondescript, nothing really happened, but it wasn't really dull either. Work-wise, things are going well. I've got my own project to work on (mine! all mine!), which I'm aiming to have finished and polished up for the end of the week. I started hacking around with it a few weeks ago, but other distractions meant that I'm only just back into it again this week. The hard bit is already done, which involved some hacking with Managed DirectX to get decent 2D graphics performance. I'm currently building a GUI that has to be an exact clone of a Macromedia Director movie. I'm not even going to consider DirectX for this one, GDI is good enough. When I've got it working - which should really be by the end of the day - I'll start refactoring the hacked together mess that passes for my display application, and tie the two together. When that's all done, we'll deploy my app in place of the current Director application. This is the slightly scary bit, as the current system (up until Sunday afternoon) had a one month uptime, where there were no support callouts. While in theory my app should be more robust, such things can never be taken for granted.

Things have been even less interesting outside work - staying in to watch films, going home early on Friday night, getting to bed at a reasonable time to be up for work in the morning. Yawn.

I ordered some new toys at the end of last month, which are still to arrive. This is to be a much needed upgrade to my desktop at home, which is starting to strain when I'm playing games. Doom 3 just isn't playable at the moment, and Half Life 2 gets a bit choppy if there's anything too spectacular happening. I decided to go 64 bit, as the Athlon 64 has been around for a while now, and is actually affordable now. I'll be getting an Athlon 64 3500+, 1GB of DDR400 RAM, an MSI K8T Neo2 Pro motherboard, and a 120GB Maxtor HD for good measure. I went for socket 939, rather than 754 - which means I'll be able to upgrade to a dual core Athlon 64 if and when they appear. Not that the cost of a new motherboard is going to come close to the price that dual core chips will be going for when they appear. Also worth mentioning is that I chose a motherboard with an AGP slot, rather than PCI-Express. Going the PCI-Express route would mean that I had to buy a new graphics card at the same time, and really, AGP 8x is fast enough for me for the forseeable future.

Anyway, back to work..

Woo. This'll be my first post since my birthday. Nothing's really been happening, except for the party on Friday 28th. Much Jack was consumed, and all concerned appeared to have a good time.

I'm settling into work, getting my hands dirty with some managed DirectX using C#. There's plenty to do, and I can always go off and do some PHP, C, C++, or Java for a while if I get pissed off with DirectX. Life is good, and I get to choose what I code in. I also have a really geeky desk - two 20" Sony TFT monitors, a cool Sony VAIO desktop, and an evil genius style black chair. I may post pictures at some point..

I have also aquired a new toy - an O2 XDA, which is basically just a PDA with some phone bits added in. It's a bit of a silly size to use as a phone, and definately too fragile to go anywhere near the pub, so I'm just using it for games right now. I've found a fun bubble game, and I've installed SCUMMVM.

Mmm toys.

It's a bit depressing that I'm sitting up at quarter past 11 at night, and thinking that I should go to bed soon. Dear me.