I should hardly have to mention anymore my glorious walk for free vacation time. The graph has been sitting there up at the top of my blog page slowly counting up to the grand total of 750,000. And today, one week before deadline, I have hit that total. This little exercise has added quite a bit to my life, from friendly competition with co-workers to some much needed think time. Now, to celebrate this achievement, I give you some more photos of my journeys.

I live a fairly open online presence. This whole Facebook debacle has nary phased me as the whole point I post things on there is for selfless promotion and narcissistic reasons. I want people to read those things. But, there are a couple things I hand out to only an elite few people: my phone number and the privilege of Skyping me. This latter one is especially fun for me.

Sometimes during conversations, something interesting will be said that sets me off on a journey to Photoshop to concoct a visual representation of said mutterings. The fruits of these labors are interesting indeed and I present them here for your enjoyment.

I am in the realizing that it's been nearly a month since I last blogged anything, granted this comes on the heels of an unusually active period for me. But, hey. Nothing terribly exciting has happened, so there it is.

I decided that last week would be a pretty good week to blow a whole bunch of my paid vacation time... after all, the best day of the year happened to fall in that week (hint: my birthday). It was nice to just forget about the world around me and piddle around quietly the way I used to back in the days when I was without work. I churned out no less than three distinct (but wholly unfinished) projects.

The first of these is a UX re-imagining for my ongoing project, the Music Page. Now that I am a far better JavaScript guru than I was when this was originally written, I've decided to take a completely different approach in terms of user presentation (though, the underlying functionality is pretty much the same).

Another thing I did was start in on learning some more HTML5 canvas stuffs, as it provides a pretty sweet opportunity for gaming purposes. I started messing around with coding a simple drawing framework and, at the behest of my osu! fanatical brother, began attempting a clone of sorts for that. Ultimately, I made some good progress and the canvas object is certainly a powerful tool, but there are some simple things that it simply can't do that keeps Flash at the advantage (I'm looking at you, per blit alpha).

Other than these few programming things and a goodly amount of time with my nose in books, it was a slothful week to be sure. But, then again, that's the whole point of "vacation."

Tune in this weekend as I head to yet another anime con.

There was one week a month or so ago when I churned out a crap ton of art. Then I stopped. Not sure why, but here are some of the fruits of that (and other) endeavors.

There you have it. Enjoy!

Punny titles aside, I have made more than one allusion to my walking sessions. Currently my graph is telling me that I had a pretty crappy week last week, but that's not what we're here to discuss.

The Pathfinder Parkway has been my preferred walking path of choice for the weekends as it removes me from all the loud roads and reminds me of the lengthy walks I took to the bank in Winter Park via the Cady Way Trail. The Pathfinder runs right along the Caney River, Bartlesville's local body of poisoned water, but it does provide that "nature" feel. But, I could throw words at you all day and not get the point across, so queue up the photo gallery!

Okay, so it has it's downsides. Arguably the most annoying part is the dozen or so oil pumps, but it's amazing the crap I've spotted along this trail. I will, perhaps, update again with more pictures later as these just barely scratch the surface.

I was on another one of my afternoon walks, shooting to get in my 10,000 steps for the day, when I ran into yet another billboard that struck me an odd way. As can be seen above, it depicts Mr. Monopoly jumping out of Hell, presumably after having used his "Get Out of Hell Free" card. Their illegal use of the Hasbro icon notwithstanding, this brings up some interesting notions.

The sign insinuates that you've already BEEN to Hell (you can't get out of something you're not in). This means that you are some sort of terrible person, probably a child molester or some one who talks at the theater. This notion of leaving Hell kind of makes "eternal punishment" seem a little less eternal. But, let's play by their rules and assume for a bit that Hell is indeed an escapable place so we can extrapolate further.

Anybody who is mildly familiar with Monopoly knows that when you land in jail there are three ways of getting out: get our of jail free card, roll doubles, or pay $50. Applying these rules to our great Hell-break scheme - as these seem to be the rules we're playing by - there are now other ways with which to escape eternal damnation. If you've got some extra cash, just be sure to be buried with some tenners or, if you're not, play it like a game of chance, bring some dice and pray to God that you get doubles (remember, you get three throws). Suddenly, your chances of escaping Hell are looking pretty sweet.

Now that we have traversed the psychology cleverly hidden in this image, we can finally extract it's true message: Hell is for poor people.

As I'd briefly touched upon in an earlier post, my place of employ is currently having a little fitness competition: can you walk 10,000 steps a day for 75 days? If you reach the grand and glorious total of 750,000, you are awarded two free days of vacation. Everybody was provided with company branded pedometers to keep track of our steppings and left to our devices.

Now, I'm never one to turn down an opportunity to make money for nothing, so I'm doing my best to make a firm effort and accomplish this goal. If you take a look at the blog main page, you'll see that there is a graph with my current progress on this mission (assuming you're using an HTML5 compliant browser). As you may well notice, I'm a few thousand steps shy of my quota for this week (shame on myself).

Now, that's the boring part. The cool part (and the reason I'm posting) is the really the graph itself. Back in December I switched the site codebase over to HTML5. Now, this was mostly a change in semantics, using new tags such as <article> and <section>. I'd not done anything special with CSS3 or some of the newer, funner tags such as <video> or <audio>. One major thing I'd really not looked too much into was the new <canvas> tag, with the ability to draw images in the browser on the fly.

That all said, I needed some place to test this exciting new functionality, and making the graph was just the place. To update update said graph, all I do is modify a JSON data file with my step information, and HTML5/JS takes care of the rest. Of course, this leaves people using IE in the dust, but this site was never designed for them anyways.

So, there you have it. A fitness contest spurned my thirst for learning. Now, if IE9 could speed along and summarily obliterate the install base of all previous versions before it, life would be a joy of canvasy win!

So, I'm walking around the downtown area, an activity I've undertaken in an attempt to accumulate 10,000 steps/day for a work thing.

Anyways, I'm walking around enjoying the scenery and weather when I spot a giant billboard. On it is a man and his three young children. I was slightly touched by this nice picturesque scene... until I read the accompanying text:

Our daddy will sell your home... GUARANTEED!

In just a few words, this man went from upstanding role model of the American family to a parental pimp, whoring out his children to make a quick buck. Does anybody else find this kind of advertising appalling?

I see a commercial for a local used car reseller and his prepubescent daughter is going on about how her daddy will get you the best deal in town. Is this supposed to make people go "awwww" and rush out to buy a car, or are they marketing to pedophiles?

I don't know. I just don't know.

I don't make it a secret that I have thoroughly enjoyed the Ace Attorney. series. There's so much to enjoy about them; the crazy cast of characters, the edge of your seat stories and the twists they take out of seemingly nowhere. Be it Mr. Wright himself or his vest wearing successor, Apollo Justice, there's no doubt that these are incredibly addictive, quality games. However, there was one character that we as fans had always wanted to play as, but were only given the opportunity briefly; the egotistic, pompous and slightly emo Miles Edgeworth. Well, Capcom heard the cries of the fans and bestowed upon us Miles Edgeworth: Ace Attorney Investigations.

...it might go a little something like this.

As some of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed, I recently crafted a small bit for inclusion in the write in portion of Anime News Network's Hey, Answerman! column. Unfortunately, I was snubbed there and didn't have my writings brought to a larger than usual mass, but as I was planning on ranting about that topic on my blog anyways, I shall put it here regardless. (Damn you, Answerman!!!)

The question put forth was thus:

How open are you about your anime love with friends, family, and colleagues? Do you wear anime cloting, or read manga on your break? Be honest, damn it!

His incorrect spelling of "dammit" notwithstanding, here was my response:

When it comes to sharing my feelings of the various Japanese related media that I ingest on a day-to-day basis, I'm really very open. After all, why is it that just because a person likes media from a different country, they should be ashamed? For that matter, why are they persecuted? People who really enjoy sports or cars or anything "normal" don't have to face this problem, but they're doing the exact same thing we "otaku" do; follow, enjoy and obsess over their particular subject of interest. I suppose it's the "die hards" that taint the perception of the anime crowd, but aren't we all annoyed by that one person who won't shut up about his obsession (whatever it may be)? But, now I'm delving into another topic all together.

I enjoy my anime, my manga, and Japanese culture in general and I'm not afraid to share that enjoyment with those I'm with. But, at the same time, I try to keep in mind that they may not enjoy the subject as much as I do and adjust my level of enthusiasm accordingly.

One thing I did not mention, but was actually a driving force for me writing something in the first place, is a nerd's treatment of another type of nerd. To rant about somebody else's fanboyish obsessions while you yourself are guilty of the same crime, though it may be in a different field, should be punishable by damnation. Granted, I myself am guilty of this, but there it is.

/rant

So, after my epic battles with Premiere and then three times uploading to YouTube, I've finally finished the video that completes my series of reviews. If you can excuse the rather poor writing and me tripping up over my words, you may find enjoyment in it. Either way, it's been fun writing these reviews and I look forward to the good stuff to come in 2010!

Due to many codec and such type issues, progress on the third and final installment has not progressed as quickly or smoothly as I hoped, so I'll give you a quick sneak peak at what's coming down the turnpike.