Mosquitoes ate my update video

Man, don't you hate it when small, buzzing insects devour files off of your hard drive? It's the worst. It's also something that definitely happens all the time, and our modern society is powerless to stop them. Remember when your favorite thing was cancelled or delayed for no apparent reason? Mosquitoes. Yup. Definitely 100% not telling any sort of fib or white lie right now, and frankly I'm a little wounded that you'd suggest that I might ever not tell the truth in a vain attempt to cover up my own shortcomings.

So, because a swarm of mosquitoes ate the update video for this week that I definitely made and didn't put off for too long, I'm making a little life post instead. You can expect me to have it finally finished remade in time for next Sunday's post.

Let's talk about my weekend

I had a really busy weekend, which is why I was unable to complete my video powerless to stop the horde of ravenous arthropods from devouring my video files.

On Saturday, I went on a hike in the Laurentides with a group from the office. For those who don't know, the Laurentides is a region of Quebec that's packed full of beautiful lakes and mountains. Just imagine every photo of the Canadian wilderness that you've ever seen.

This pretty lake is the perfect environment for breeding the harbingers of your hard drive's doom

The hike was 5 1/2 km, and circled a small lake. It was a good length, long enough to be enjoyable without overstaying its welcome. The weather was warm and sunny, but not so hot as to be uncomfortable. In many ways the conditions for this hike were ideal. They also happened to be ideal for the terrifying force of mosquitoes that hounded us and our video files, especially the latter. For every person, I'd say there were 10-20 mosquitoes buzzing around them. They didn't manage to ruin the experience though, and I'd definitely do it all over again. Oh, and uh....some of them, err, hid inside my backpack? Yeah, sure, we'll go with that. Then they emerged to feast upon my defenseless PC or something. It was awful.

Artist's rendition of the event

Unlike most activities that I engage in, I brought my camera with me and took a few photos. Several shots came out quite nicely, so I might do this more often:

(Click any image to view at full size)

On Sunday, my family came in for a visit. They brought my bike over, so once I buy a new helmet I should be able to travel much farther in the city! After that, we went out for pizza and ice cream, then took a little stroll around Parc La Fontaine. I'm not fond of spending lots of time with family, but I really enjoyed this little outing quite a bit! They seemed pretty happy too, so it was a good day all in all. Oh, and they were...yeah, they were totally devastated at the carnage caused by those darn mosquitoes. Yup!

So that was my eventful weekend! As you can see, I was quite busy and didn't find time to make this month's update video set up adequate anti-mosquito defenses. Anyhow, this week is mostly still May so I'm still keeping to the schedule to some degree. Expect the monthly dfgame update next Sunday at the regular time.

EDIT: According to Blogger, this is post #256, so if we were counting with one byte I'd have to stop here. Thankfully, that's no longer the case!

A post-graduation reflection

Last May, I got my Bachelor's Degree at Champlain College. Now that May has come again, I thought I'd give a quick recap on my first year out of school.

Getting a job

I started hunting for jobs on and off several months before graduation. Unlike many of my peers, I was in the interesting position of not wanting any sort of game development job at all. For years, I'd read stories about the horrors of game development and how it churns through the annual supply of bright-eyed college grads. So, I applied to software development gigs and got ignored a whole lot!
 
I suppose it's natural. Game Programming doesn't sound like the most reliable major to pick, even with the work I've done on my own. Ultimately, I got my current job through a mix luck and networking: My friend Vince (lead programmer on The Last Light) recommended me to a recruiter from Ubisoft Montreal during the end-of-year showcase of our game, and that led to an offer. (Seriously, networking is really good and you should do it) I wanted to stay close to my home in Vermont, so I decided to take the offer rather than keep looking.

Canada!

With the offer accepted and some necessary summer prep work complete, I found myself on the other side of the border just in time for Fall. Due to a scheduling mishap, I ended up arriving a month and a half before my start date, giving me plenty of time to settle in and explore the city. In order to best take advantage of this, I spent the majority of the time sitting in my room with a tiny specter of legal and financial uncertainty drifting lazily over my head.

Now that the weather is warm and I no longer fear for my checking account, I've been spending more time going out and looking around. Overall, I'm super happy to be here! Being half-French, I'm enjoying the mix of languages especially, even if I now have an irrational fear of peanuts.

Yup definitely not made of spiders no siree

...Moving briskly on, Montreal is a really nice spot to live. I've got a nice inexpensive apartment on the Plateau, and some streets are lined with enough trees to almost give the feeling of being in the woods! As someone who grew up in a reasonably small town village, the neighborhood makes me feel at home while still providing all of the bustle and convenience of a city close by. (And of course, there are some standard socialist benefits like free healthcare and unified public transportation systems)

Work life

Unfortunately, I won't be discussing too many details of my work. I'm not 100% sure what is/isn't covered under my NDA, so for now I'm playing it safe and speaking in very general terms. If I get that cleared up I might discuss some juicy details in a future post. So far, Ubisoft has been an incredibly pleasant surprise. Being a big publisher, I was expecting them to screw me over at every opportunity, but I have absolutely no complaints about them.

I've only truly been "on the job" for a scant few months (I was in a long-term training up until mid-January), but I feel like I'm trusted and relied upon regardless. I usually get handed a bunch of requests and long-term goals, and then I'm left to my own devices until they're finished. Not only have I not done any overtime, the senior devs that I work under have made a point of reminding me to take it easy on the hours and stay fresh. Some of this can be chalked up to the fact that the production I'm on is still at a very early stage, but even so I was expecting much more pressure.

Another fear that I had was about whether or not I'd be allowed to continue my personal work unrestricted. Ubisoft requires you to send in a 'request' for side-projects, but:

1. The restrictions that come attached are mostly just obvious things that most sane people wouldn't do in the first place
2. The responses get back to you in a reasonably timely manner
3. I have pushed no fewer than 19 personal projects through the official channels, and to this date not one of them has been refused.

Point is, they're pretty nice about these sorts of things. It would be even better if they didn't ask for requests at all, but at least the process is simple and painless.

The work itself has been really fulfilling and exciting for me. I've been doing tools work since it's the closest I can get to normal software development, and it's been a lot of fun! It makes me a little disappointed that Champlain doesn't cover tools programming in their curriculum at all, given how crucial good tools are to large-scale production teams. I'm mostly working in C# and WPF, but my experience with Vala and GTK are still coming in handy regardless. Indeed, it feels like both my personal and professional work are fueling each others growth.

To sum it up, I've managed to land a fun and not-too-stressful job in a city where I feel at home right out of college. I can't help but feel lucky where I am right now, and I hope my current streak of good luck lasts quite some time to come!

Getting Organized - 4 - Gripes and progress

Another week has passed, and here I am, still using Taskwiki. I promise that this is the last time I bring it up for a while, but I wanted to discuss some of the good and bad that I've encountered before moving on to some actual code.

This week, I haven't made too many additions to the wiki itself. My main addition was a project list, and the start of a dfgame wiki. The way the dfgame wiki is laid out, I have a task filter front-and-center. Rather than adding things to the list directly, it simply gathers all of my tasks for the project into one place. Inside the pages for each module, I can simply jot down relevant tasks, and they'll appear on the front page as a combined list.

I've also started using vimwiki (no taskwiki yet) at work! It has given me more time to get accustomed to the bindings and nuances of the plugin, so I'm pretty happy about that.

The Good

• As it turns out, a number of annoying Taskwiki keybindings have normal Vimwiki equivalents that are much nicer! Of note is Control-Space, which creates/toggles a checkbox. Since Taskwiki runs off of checkboxes, you can use it to create new tasks or mark existing tasks as completed.
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The Bad

• Turning my first good point around: Why does Taskwiki bother making and teaching custom keybindings for Vimwiki features? They're much less convenient and harder to use in general.
• Taskwiki doesn't seem to have any convenient ways of inputting projects and tags for your tasks. You can do it as part of a filter, but otherwise you need to edit the task after creating it.
• I decided to give task dependencies in Taskwiki a shot, but there's one big problem that I realized: Because of my date filters, dependencies with different due dates can simply not show up sometimes. As a result, dependencies are pretty much useless outside of project pages.

Time to code!

Now that I've played around with Taskwiki long enough to make it a part of my workflow and see the uses (and flaws) of the tool, it's time to fill in the holes. I've come up with a few tasks:

1. I don't want to open my wiki every morning. Instead, I'd like to have that happen automatically. Thankfully, this is super-easy to do.
2. I need a timer. It's easy for me to take a five minute break, then wake up after several hours of doing something else. I could look for a timer program, but timers are pretty simple and I'd like something that fits with everything else.
3. I need a simple way to create tasks while I'm at work. This is probably going to be a tricky one to pull off, but I have some ideas.

Now, because this post is secretly a horrifying bait-and-switch, I'm not actually going to write any code yet. Instead, I'll be teaching you the secret art of baking a delectable 12" thin-crust pizza from scratch on a weekday.


You'll need the following ingredients:

• 1 1/4 cups of flour
• 1/2 cup of lukewarm water
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp instant yeast
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1/4 cup tomato sauce
• Enough mozzarella, possibly more
• A few pinches of thyme and oregano
• 1 small clove of garlic (optional, but recommended)
• 1 tbsp dry minced garlic (optional, but recommended)
• Toppings of your choice (optional, but recommended)

A few notes

Before we begin, I want to give a quick shoutout to King Arthur Flour. They have a ton of great ingredients and recipes, and the dough for this pizza is adapted from one of their Ciabatta recipes.

Note - Picking mozzarella

Here are a few mozzarella-buying tips.
I personally recommend avoiding blocks of "pizza mozzarella" like the plague (specifically the shiny, slightly rubbery kinds). The taste, texture, appearance and melt, are typically awful, and your end result will suffer. I would also try to avoid fresh mozzarella that's suspended in liquid, unless you plan to slice it. This sort of mozzarella is too soft to grate nicely, so I recommend looking for (relatively) fresh mozzarella that has been wrapped up instead. If you can't find anything like that, you may want to consider pre-grated mozzarella. The quality there will vary, but some brands are surprisingly good.

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on cheeses, this advice is based entirely on personal experience.

The night before...

1. The night before you plan on baking, mix together 1/2 cup of flour, 1/3 cup of lukewarm water, and some yeast. The precise amount of yeast isn't too important, just keep it between a pinch and 1/4 tsp.
2. Cover the bowl and put it somewhere warm overnight.

Note - In a hurry?

If you don't want to prepare this recipe the night before (or you forget), you can do this step in the morning and do the next step in the evening.

The next morning...

1. In a medium/large mixing bowl, combine the the mixture that you prepared with 1/6 cup of lukewarm water, 1/2 tsp salt, and about 1/4 tsp instant yeast. Add the olive oil and dry minced garlic, and stir the mixture together until it's combined.
2. Add 3/4 cup of flour and continue until the mixture starts to turn into a solid mass. At this point, you'll want to keep adding small amounts of flour and mix/knead with your hands until you have a ball of slightly sticky dough.
3. Rub a little bit of olive oil into a clean bowl or rising bucket and add the dough, then cover it and stick it into the fridge. (If you're doing this step in the afternoon, skip the fridge and go directly to the next step)

That evening...

1. After about 8 hours in the fridge, take out the dough container and let it continue to rise for an hour. If you just prepared the dough, let it rise for 3 hours instead. While you wait, prepare your toppings.
2. After this final rise, sprinkle flour onto a clean work surface and roll out your dough into a rough circle. Don't overdo it, try to keep the circle around 10". sprinkle flour onto your pan/baking sheet, and carefully transfer the dough to it. Using your hands, spread the dough out to the desired size, pressing your fingers to leave a slight lip at the edge.
3. Set the oven to 500F (or however high your oven goes), and immediately place your dough inside. Let it bake for a few minutes until it just barely begins to brown, then remove the dough and place it on the stove. This step will cook the dough ever-so-slightly, making for a crispier crust. If the center of the dough has begun to puff up, carefully press it back down (be careful here, you don't want to get burned).
4. Quickly add the sauce, garlic, cheese, herbs, and toppings in that order, and put the finished pizza back in the oven to bake. There's no universal bake time for pizza, because ovens vary in temperature. Instead, I recommend watching for the cheese to melt and brown to know when the pizza is finished.
5. Pull out your pizza, place it on a rack to cool, and enjoy! The number of steps may seem off-putting, but I assure you that this recipe can be done without too much effort. Good luck!

Announcement: A newer, better schedule

With a new month comes a new and shiny schedule! Up until now, I've been mostly winging it with regards to posting here. My goal was one post a week, but I had no other rules to go by. It was a lawless wasteland, here on this blog!

Pictured: A lawless wasteland of blogging

It's time to end all of that. The sheriff's back in town and he's getting organized! Apologies about that not showing up until last Thursday, by the way. It was scheduled for the Sunday before but Blogger decided not to post it for some reason???
Being just a tad more serious for a moment, now that I'm capable of reminding myself about long-term tasks I'm going to try my hand at a proper schedule again.

The schedule

New posts will appear on Sundays at 9:00 PM (EST).

The last post of every month will be a large update post about my current focus. Between now and August, that's dfgame. That post will come with higher production values than my normal posts, featuring images, videos, audio, or something else entirely.

Besides the big update, I will also make two smaller posts every month. These can be about anything I want, but will likely resemble the type of content that I've posted in the past.

On one week each month, I won't post anything. This break can be taken on any week besides the last, and it'll hopefully keep me from having to apologize about delays or throw together something uninspired at the last minute.

Announcement posts (such as this one) will not count towards the monthly post count.

Summary

Expect one fancy post at the end of each month, and two little posts in-between. Assuming they're on time, posts can be expected to arrive on Sunday evenings.

I might also try to make my posts funnier. I like to think that I'm a pretty amusing fellow in real life, but dear lord are my blog posts boring. Hopefully, that's about to change.

Expect the puns. Fear the puns. Become one with the puns.