This week started off so well – Dace came over, we had pizza and played games. I had some golf practice with Grandad on Monday, then a lesson on Wednesday and our usual coffee. I picked up Mum’s new computer that I had ordered, since the old one is… well, old. I got work done, to the point where it was time to start the actual code-monkeying for the software house. I got accounts done, I got laundry done, I watched a bunch of good shows with good company and had good chats with people online. Then, my computer decided to have a spaz.

Now, I had already booked her into the shop to get a few minor things looked at (one of the speakers is bung, some annoying dead pixels, etc), but apparently this was the wrong thing to do, because as soon as she sensed that it was time for the shop, she went mental. Literally. My graphics display started doing all kinds of crazy shit which basically rendered her unusable when it happened. It seemed to be on-and-off though, so I figured I’d pick her up today after they’d had a look at her, found out what parts they needed to order (last time it took about three weeks… sigh) and then at least I’d be able to semi-use her while I waited for parts. The call came in today that the power board (which they had replaced only… 8 months ago?) was bung. So, in I go to pick her up and hope for at least some temperamental use. When I get her home, she won’t even boot up. Luckily I’d had enough time while she was temperamental to make sure all the important stuff was backed up, but this pretty much screws me in terms of work. My machine is so custom that it’s a royal pain to set up, and I really don’t like un-setting up a machine, as that takes even longer. So, right when I was set to dive into a bunch of work, I’m fucked.

At the very least this has given me an opportunity to set up Mum’s new computer physically, then install a bunch of software on it and set it up for her use. Later on once I’ve made sure it’s running properly with everything she needs on it, I’ll pick up the old machine and transfer over all the data. I even put Total Annihilation on it and Dace and I had a few LAN games. Still a fabulous game after all this time – I am constantly amazed by how little memory this game takes up for what it is. For those of you that are interested, Dace always canes me at this game. Always. I would not recommend taking him on. I instead choose to join him and kick some AI virtual ass.

Silver lining of the black technological cloud continues somewhat, as I got to spend some time with Ian helping him develop his SoundReason website shop, which he’ll be using to sell packs and tracks of original music that he has composed (and is still composing). It’s not live yet, so I can’t link you to it, but I’ll be sure to as soon as I know it’s up and running.

It’s weird having to go back to using webmail after using Thunderbird for so long. I also got the results back for my dormitory selection in Japan, but it’s an Excel sheet and I haven’t installed Office on Mum’s machine yet, so I’ll find out soon enough, I guess. ^^

Today I feel really, really shit. My laptop is bung and this cuts out a huge portion of my regular activities, including my work. I was right on the verge of doing a bunch of really productive things, particularly for the end of the month and that means that my projected progress has just been shot. This adds to my feeling crap. I miss Anastasia a lot as well and am just generally feeling horrible like I want to curl up into a ball. I’m trying to see the silver lining as much as I can, and I know it’ll pass and things will get better… it’s just kinda crap right now.

The week started off a little weirdly. After a reasonably good sleep and not feeling too groggy, I had a really weird dream about my friend Jen. The details (much like almost all of my dreams) have already faded into nothingness, but it was odd enough that I took note of it.

This week I pre-enrolled in a basic Japanese course at Polytech, got my textbook and had my first class yesterday. I was hoping to have a bit of a refresher on the material that I had covered back in 2005 when I did JAPA101 at Canterbury. It turned out that the course I had selected was even more basic than I thought it was going to be – it doesn’t even cover any kana (Japanese writing) at all. Still, it will regulate me practicing at least some Japanese before I go to Japan, which has to be a good thing, right?

I spent some more time this week in at the software place I mentioned, continuing to set up my computer with the tools and codebase and trying to get everything running. It’s a bit of a struggle just having everything set up right when it comes to software. Kind of makes me wish I could just have the machine set up for me when I go to jobs like this, so I can focus on the actual coding rather than the mucking about getting things set up – it just seems like a colossal waste of time. Anyway, I got some other work done as well, including sorting out some hosting stuff which was a bit more interesting and let me play around a bit with the hosting management tool for my US server.

This week I also went into the bank to sort out my accounts (I was hoping I could go back to having a student account when I went to Japan… apparently not). I did a few bouts of shopping, had my golf lesson and coffee session with my Grandparents on Wednesday and then nine holes today, met up with a bunch of people for catching up and talking, had pizza night, watched some shows… I also did a lot more online stuff than usual, which was a little peculiar because I do that a lot. I wrote a whole lot of emails and talked to a lot more people online this week – I guess it was just one of those weeks. I got to talk to Anastasia and Lea after they had been to their masked ball, which was pretty cool. I talked to my friend Alison up in Hamilton midway through the week, we’re still trying to sort out whether or not she’ll be able to come down to Christchurch or I’ll be able to fly up to the Tron. On Friday I also went and had a drink with Belinda, who works for one of my Dad’s companies and I have been liaising with over some of the work I’ve been doing. Mostly I ended up talking about myself, my background and that kind of thing, which was odd because it’s not something that I usually do. Still, was good to get out and talk with her for a bit, get to know her a bit better. Yesterday I also got to go into the Arts Centre and see Hera playing live again, which was lovely. I also got to grab some food from the stalls at the Arts Centre, which I haven’t done in ages and was also pretty awesome. ^^ Today of course I also had family tea around at Mum’s, and got to talk to her and Dace for quite a while.

I spent some more time with Ian on Friday and yesterday doing game stuff, that was pretty cool. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with him since he lives so close, just getting towards the end of the day and having someone to grab some souvlaki, or pizza, or whatever, sit down and talk some crap, or watch some TV. I’ve introduced him to John Doe and The Pretender (which is essentially John Doe’s predecessor) and it’s been fun going back and watching them again. More so the Pretender I guess, since I watched John Doe again semi-recently. It really does make me think about how much the idea of “you can be anything if you want to” influenced me growing up. I still think that way – if I want to be something, I can. It’s just a matter of finding the right path and putting in the time to do it.

This week is also the week of travelling friends – yesterday I went and picked up Rach from the airport from her stint up in Auckland doing some work. I’ve been talking with her on and off online while she’s been up there and it sounds like it’s been an interesting trip. The other friend of mine I got to see this week was Robbie, who I haven’t seen in far too long. The last time I was properly living in New Zealand I was seeing him every week, catching up over coffee and just generally talking about life, the universe and everything. We went out and had dinner at Little Saigon, then went over to Hoyts and saw Michael Clayton (which, incidentally, was nothing like what I was told and was very good). Afterwards we went back to Dad’s and just talked for ages and I was reminded that Robbie is possibly one of the most emotionally significant friends that I have made, and his insight, perspective and general awesomeness are all things that I treasure about our relationship. I miss him when I am overseas, and since he’s something of a ‘man about world’ himself, I don’t know how often we’re going to coincide in the coming years, which makes me sad. However, I know we’ll find a way to see each other every now and then, to reconnect and catch up on all of each other’s news.

This week I took Dad and Liss out to the airport and they left NZ again, back to the UK for the both of them via Thailand for one of Dad’s best friends’ wedding. Before they left I did get to spend some time with both of them, talking about various things and generally having some fun. We took some pictures as well, but the ones that would have been good on my camera turned out kind of blurry, which is a shame. It looks like Dad won’t be back in NZ again before I leave for Japan, so I guess I’m house-sitting until I leave. It has worked out pretty well being able to live here again, but I am a bit sad that I haven’t been able to share it with Dad a bit more.

This week I’ve done a bit more work setting up my machine for some more work that I’m looking to take on. Assuming everything goes well, I should be able to complete it before I leave for Japan, so it should be OK. I got dicked around a bit at the initial meeting, they made me wait for about an hour… I don’t think I’m ever going to let that happen again. Anyway, things are progressing on that front and I got a bit of other work done this week, so it’s been fairly productive. I went to a Canterbury Software Cluster meeting this week on leasing software that was pretty interesting. It certainly gave me a bit of an added perspective on some other options that there are when it comes to getting a software solution into the hands of the customer. I also got to sit in on a meeting with Dad and one of his developers, which I found to be pretty interesting (being the huge geek that I am).

I got another golf lesson this week and what is looking to become a routine coffee, chat and Borders visit. We were going to go out to Clearwater and watch some of the golf that’s been going on there, but the day we were going to go out there the sky decided to open up and pour (also cancelling an outdoor concert of Hera‘s that I was going to go to), so I ended up just watching some US golf on television with them. This week’s “Sunday family tea” was actually held around at Grandma and Grandad’s place, since Dace was absent it was them, me and Mum, which was nice.

Speaking of family, I also saw Mum earlier this week when I went around to her place to chill and have some fish and chips and watch Brokeback Mountain, which I hadn’t yet seen. Now I have and I have to say, I thought it was pretty damn good. I think it’s interesting that the film managed to get such critical acclaim, despite the fact that there is still a hell of a lot of homophobic sentiment in the wider population and in the media. I think that this film is a great illustration of a good love story that just happens to have a homosexual relationship… it doesn’t matter that it is what it is, that’s just how it is. Anyway, I’m glad I finally managed to see it.

More family this week: I also caught up with my cousin Dylan and talked him through a few things for getting himself a new laptop, as he’s going to need one when he heads over to the US later this year. I like Dylan, he’s a great guy. It always cracks me up when I remind certain people that he’s my cousin – Dylan went to St. Andrew’s as well (he’s got to be loving their family-gets-in policy) and so there are a whole lot of people that we know in common. We look nothing alike, have different names and interests so it’s no real surprise that no one can pick it, but I do find it funny when people remember (or are reminded) that we’re cousins.

Keeping with the family theme, I also managed to spend some time with Dace this week. He came over and we talked some crap and played computer games together, which was really fun and nostalgic in a good way. Dace and I used to spend hours and hours together – playing backyard cricket, mucking about with Lego and playing computer games together to name a few things we used to do. It was really cool to spend some time doing that with him again and hopefully we’ll do it again and I’ll see a bit more of him before I leave again.

I also spent some more time around at Ian’s for a couple of sessions learning some more about XNA and going through some more tutorial material. I think this is definitely the right decision to get started on this. I hope that I’ll be able to continue working with this, even when I’m in Japan.

I also did the usual pizza and media thing, this time I spent some more time with Daniel which was pretty cool. We watched a bunch of anime and I introduced him to Eureka as well – Media Pimp strikes again! I really do love Eureka, it’s an awesome show and I can’t wait for the next season to come out. Although I’ll probably have to find an alternative means of viewing it, since I’m pretty sure they’re not streaming it to Japan yet. Flipside I suppose is that I should be able to watch anime on television as it comes out. ^^

Not a lot happened that was out of the ordinary this week, which was nice. I did some work, saw my friends a bunch, had lots of pizza and souvlaki, watched various TV shows and anime… actually on that note, I introduced Dad and Elissa to Fallen and the first episode of The Dresden Files. The week started off with a Martini Monday with Dad where I showed him Journeyman, then later in the week I showed Ruby a bunch of different anime as well so I guess this week I did a bit of television pimping. ^^

This week I upgraded Dad’s internet plan to a higher bandwidth cap, as I’ve been ripping through Dad’s bandwidth quite a lot since I’ve been here. After being away for a couple of years in places where there are no bandwidth limits, it’s weird being back in NZ where all of the internet plans are governed within quite low bandwidth limits before incurring overage charges. I wonder if NZ will follow suit and remove the caps on their plans at any point? I hope so.

In the middle of this week I went out with my grandparents and got a golf lesson from Grandad, and then we went for coffee and a bit of a browse through Borders. I think it’s pretty cool that I can spend some time with them while I’m in NZ and I can also get back into my golf a bit, which I’ve been wanting to do for a while but haven’t really found an opportunity to do so.

One very frustrating thing that happened this week was that I tried to set up a Subversion repository (or SVN) on my US webserver for holding the game code and assets for the stuff that Ian and I have been working on. I spent quite a bit of time on this and got it semi-working but not quite how I wanted it to, then eventually gave up and tried to revert to the semi-working version… only to have it not work at all again. Argh! I think this is why I don’t really do server management… it’s still quite over my head with a lot of how it works and how to get it to play nice and work. I’d enlist Michael to help me fix it, but I’m pretty sure he’s got more than enough on his plate with his regular work, and he hasn’t really been as social this time (this visit to NZ, I mean). Anyway, it was all in the pursuit of tools and process for my game development so certainly not a waste of time, just very frustrating.

Anyway, all in all it was a good week which felt very much in the groove of regular New Zealand life for me. Hurrah!

This week saw a few issues and some changes in what I’m going to be doing. Unfortunately the week was slightly technologically marred by some network issues around at my Dad’s place and my computer being a little on the fritz. However, a visit from an engineer for the network and a bunch of clean-up tools for my computer and things seem to be running back on track pretty smoothly.

Something fairly significant happened this week – I decided to start making games. I’ve been talking about it for a while as the direction that I wanted to head in, but I hadn’t really started pushing myself in a practical, technical sense to learn the tools and actually make something. Part of me recognises that making decent games is always going to be a collaborative effort and unless I wanted to make crap, I was going to need help and hadn’t really found the right people for it. I didn’t want to find games that I could mod just for the sake of it, I wanted to find games I liked and then learn to mod them. However, I haven’t been playing games as much as I used to (sadly), so I just needed to dive in. Nik, Ian and I have been toying with the idea of setting up a company together for a little while, but we haven’t really nutted out any of the specifics of what games we’re making and how we’re going to do it, given that for the majority of the time we’re all in different countries. Anyway, all this lead up to Ian and I getting together this week and committing to spending time together each week working towards developing games. We spent a few hours just talking about the kinds of possibilities for things that we could do and eventually nutted out a pretty good rough plan. We’ll put together some more concrete notes and design documents later, but in the mean time we’ve got something to work on. I’m going to be a little on the back foot because I’m going to have to learn the technology and the frameworks first, whereas Ian will just be jumping right in to making the game assets. I found some online tutorials and got everything installed on my computer, so I’m going to have a go at learning how to use Microsoft’s XNA Framework, then develop a small game with it in conjunction to Ian. In a lot of ways it’s really just a technical test to see whether or not we work well together, so really it’s not much more than a version 0.5, although we had plenty of ideas to flesh it out to a larger game if it works well. I don’t think we’ll actually get to have something complete before I have to leave for Japan, but as I said it’s more to see if we work well… hopefully we’ll be able to finish something off by working remotely after I’m gone. Not that I’m expecting an overwhelming response, but I’m completely open to different kinds of ideas for making games… I’m more about making them than having all kinds of ideas for the actual games. So, if you’ve got an idea, feel free to send it along, or post as a comment and hopefully I can try and work out a more coherent design with you. I also need a company name… I figure making a Games division of LeithCorp might be a bit naff, so a new name would be cool. Again, send any ideas my way, or post them in the comments.

This week also had a bunch of the usual stuff – meeting up with friends to have coffee and watch movies, that kind of thing (as a side note, I managed to hook up my laptop to Dad’s big-ass speakers, which makes for much better sound!), dinner with my grandparents and spending some time talking and hanging out with my Dad. I did some work as well, although it was limited a bit by the technical difficulties. I also had a bit of fun caddying around Shirley golf course for Dad and Grandad this afternoon, which was good fun and got me out and about for a while – given that I seem to spend 90% of my time in front of a computer, it’s nice to be able to do that.