Before I delve into the juicy, gory details I will warn anybody who's unfortunate enough to be on dial-up: there's going to be pictures. Lots of them. Be patient.

I guess I'll start with the beginning. I was born around 10ish on June 8th, 1986. Life was pretty good until they cut my umbilical cord. You see I... Okay, too far back.

Last Monday, Sept. 17th, was a crazy, hectic day because I really hadn't packed much up to that point. About the only things I had packed were my books and DVDs. That left this:

(be sure to follow the link. I've got region thingies set up on the flickr page)

As you can see it was quite a hellish nightmare. But, I got everything packed and by that evening it looked more like this:

Evening came and morning followed the first day.

The next day, Tuesday, began the first leg of our near thirteen hundred mile trip. After I said goodbye to my family we started off. Then we promptly returned because I'd forgotten some things (that's not to say I got everything I'd forgotten, though). That day we drove about seven hundred some odd miles, well over half the trip, passing through five states (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama). We stayed in a little town past Birmingham called Oxford. Evening came and morning followed the second day.

There's really not a whole lot to say about the second day of driving. We passed through Atlanta (uneventfully I might add) and drove from there on down to Florida. One thing I will say about Atlanta, though, is that there's an assload of cars on the road. Twelve lanes and all of them packed. Once in Winter Park it took about an hour and a half to find our lodging for the night. Luckily we did find it and it was an easy drive to the apartments. We ate at Boston Market that night. It was pretty good (though the service was... weird). I'll forgo the Genesis reference this time.

So, it was finally the big day (or at least one of them). We made our way over to the apartments and got there without any trouble. However, we did circle the whole complex nearly three times before we found the leasing office which was tucked away discreetly behind some trees. It was there that I met up with my roommate and signed my life away to the dark cabal that controls everything. However, we did get a sweet apartment in return:

As you can see in that last picture we have a sweet TV setup (or I do. It's all my stuff). The gibberish on the screen is our (at the time) messed up cable. Dragging everything up and in wasn't to big of a deal and really didn't take too long. Getting setup, that was another story all together. My room isn't completely unpacked yet though it's functioning at one hundred percent capacity.

That evening we went and bought some furniture.

The next day we didn't do much aside from pull in some of the more minor items we needed. I spent a good chunk of the day working on the mess that was my room. I think I did anyways... By this time it was Saturday and I had to see my Dad off as he prepared to redrive the roads we had just been on. We (my roommate and I) didn't do much over the weekend. Bought some stuff, played some games, watched some TV, drew some pictures. Just kept low. Then came yesterday (Monday).

We were both getting kind of tired of not having much to do so we packed up and went to the beach. Daytona Beach, that is. Up to that point the closest I had ever been to the beach was watching LOST so it was something completely new for me. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

We tossed a Nerf football around, we rode some waves, we walked up the beach (probably a mile or more not including the trip back). Being the off season there weren't too many people there and at that most of them were seniors. With the exception of the little kids we were the youngest people there. While it was fun and all there was a price to be paid. I had purchased some sunscreen before we'd gotten there, but was unable to get my back. My roommate, who I will refer to as E, didn't put any on at all. So by the time we got home he was completely red and my back felt like it was on fire. That evening we laid low and watched all the new offerings on NBC and headlines on Jay.

Tonight we're going to be going to a little meeting thing at the school and tomorrow is registration and the getting of our Mac Book Pros. It'll be sweet to be sure. I'll be back a full update including pics. Until then, stay cool.

It is currently September 16th, 5:30AM CDT. Temperature is in the mid-sixties with some cloud cover. I'm sitting here asking myself what the hell am I doing up at five in the morning? There's a myriad of ways I could answer that question but the one that seems to fit the bill the most is anxiety... and heartburn (one too many sausage calizones) . Today marks only two days left until I set out on my cross-country trip to begin my new life.

I've only been waiting for this moment for twenty-one years but when the time is actually upon you it feels different. Everybody and everything I've ever known will all be left behind; thirteen hundred miles behind. I've known this for some time but it didn't really hit me until it was brought up that I'll never live in this house again. Never again will I call it my home. From here on out I'll be fending for myself. Alone.

Another thing on my mind is the actual trip itself. The longest car trip I've ever taken is up to Morrison, Missouri a six hour trip that was generally broken down into two days on familiar roads. This trip to Florida, however, is more than three times the length over the same amount of time on roads completely unfamiliar. Luckily there's Google Maps to help with that, but twenty hours is still a long time to be cooped up in a car.

Tomorrow I'm going finish packing all my stuff, taking apart all my furniture, and trying to mentally prepare myself for the day after when I have to say goodbye to my family. How do you say goodbye to those that you've been around all your life? To the siblings that you grew up with and are your best pals? I'm really bad at goodbyes and I can tell you now that Tuesday morning is going to suck.

Today marks the beginning of the new bowling season. Even though I'll only be able to bowl twice I'm still excited. I've been bowling twice in the last couple of weeks and did really well, all games over average and two over two hundred. I could even have some beers if I wanted. T'will be an awesome time to be sure.

Today also marks the two week mark until I leave for Florida. I'm not sure if I've said it before, but I'm currently bored out of my skull. I got most of my packing done last week so that's done. I really don't have much to pack, really. What packing is left to do is of the stuff I use regularly... wait. I have said this before :-/. Granted, I haven't packed the kitchen stuffs yet so there is something left to do. I also need to get my haircut at some point.

That isn't to say I've been completely idle. I did do that little YPN thingy. I've been playing some games that I never finished *ahem* Thousand Year Door *ahem*. I was going to make another short movie, but lack of wardrobe kind of puts a damper on that. You'd think it'd be a simple matter finding a white wig, but no. Not in Bartlesville.

Whilst I was out on one of these wig finding missions I ran across something at a local craft store. It was a cheap glue gun (packaged and distributed in my good state of Oklahoma). It looks fairly standard to the casual observer but reading the fine print reveals, well see for yourself:

Needless to say I'm sending it in to Jay and hopefully it'll make headlines some night. If it does I'll be sure to have a YouTube clip up here the next day.

I've said it before and I will say it again: Titles are not my strong point. Especially when I know I'm just going to ramble about random stuff.

Today marks the three week mark until move out day. Excited? Yes. Packed? Partially. I started packing last week and have pretty much gotten to the point where's there's nothing left to pack save what I'm currently using (Xbox, computer, TV, that stuff). I suppose I could pack up my pots and pans and malarky, but eh...

I did wind up trading Pokemon (and a myriad of other games) in and picked up a copy of Puzzle League. It's good, but it definitely is NOT Tetris Attack. Ranked matches... well there really aren't ranked matches. The closest thing is the "Birthday Mode" which ranks you against people with the same birthday. I'm number one... and the only person on the list. Not many people play PPL online. Another thing that cheeses me off is the difficulty level; it's too easy. There's really slow, slow and about what would equate to normal in TA. Nothing in between. The music sucks too. It's just standard ambient/techno type music like you'd find in Lumines or any recent (non-DS) Tetris game. The music from Tetris Attack was awesome. Every single piece. I've got the Blargg music on my iPod for heaven's sake! That's how awesome it is. But otherwise, it is Tetris Attack and I can play online but they've screwed up the best puzzle game of all time.

I took a little Lord of the Rings quiz thingy on Facebook (which is definitely better than MySpace) and I'm a true LOTR fan. The questions were rediculously easy like "What race is Legolas?" Some information I suppose probably can't be gleaned from the movies. But at that even a casual reader of the books could get all the questions right. Either that or I'm a bigger nerd that I thought. Meh.

Well, like a said, general ramblings of random stuff.

Well, after a hellish last week we are all moved into our new house (when I say "all moved in" that means we live here, that doesn't necessarily mean we're all unpacked :-P). It's wonderful. Our room is almost double the size of what we had and the backyard is superb (we've been out at least twice everyday since we moved last Wednesday). Of course, there's been a few problems but all have now been worked out.

Last night I e-mail Phil Vischer, creator of the popular kids show VeggieTales, inquiring about how he rigged the veggies. To my surprise, waiting in my inbox this afternoon was a personal reply:

Hey Matt,

When we produced the shows in Softimage, it was all lattice deformation. Each eye was in a lattice, and then the entire character was in a lattice. We just animated lattices. The mouths were simple texture maps created by a separate animation and applied in rendering, and then reapplied slightly blurred as a bump map. Very simple stuff. (All developed in 1991 when I built Larry for the first time.)

Virtually nothing changed until we moved to Maya in 2000. By then I was no longer animating, so I'm not sure what they changed. Now everything is done in Canada, and I'm clueless.

Hope that helps.

Phil

Talk about cool :-D. With that knowledge I can now finish my models for MeatStories (R) ;-).

Also this afternoon I became the webmaster for a bunch of monks. Tomorrow I'm going to call their "outside guy" to get a list of everything I need to do. I poked around their server a bit and it looks like I'm going to have to do some ASP[.NET] work (which I'd actually been tinkering with shortly before we moved), so that'll be fun (and bring back some memories).

Well, that's enough for tonight. Now that my computer is setup again (with internet) I'll be making my usual every other day entry.

It was certainly an exciting weekend for those of us paying attention to TGS (Tokyo Game Show). The new Nintendo Revolution controller was finally unveiled. At first I was kind of skeptical, I mean the thing is a freakin' remote:

Part of me kind of died because I've grown up holding a controller in two hands using super quick thumb reflexes to get myself around. However, the more I thought about the possibilities of the tilt sensors, the more I began to like it. One thing that I would love to see is a Star Wars lightsaber game. I was still kind of leery, but then I heard that there's a conventional controller that you can plug the remote into. Besides, I'll be able to play Tetris Attack, so I have to buy one whether I like the controller or note. Needless to say I really can't wait to get my hands on one of these and see how it works.

On the house front: A good 75-80% of the house is packed now. Mainly just the big things (furniture, appliances, computers, etc.) are left. Sometime tomorrow we'll be getting a dumpster and emptying the garage and packing the U-Haul. It's going to be a long, tiring week but it'll be well worth it.

As an interesting closer I post some things I've unearthed (either through packing or cleaning up my computer):

19 years later

And finally: Jack and Jill (flash)

We went through our grand tour of the house today (second for me) and I was able to snap some pictures. So, here they are:

I seem to be missing pictures of the master bedroom as well as Steve and Joe's room, but that's the gist of it.

Most of our stuff (and when I say our I'm usually refferring to Jeff, Chris and myself since we are roomies) is all packed and ready to go.

Well, we're getting down to the wire on this but it looks like we're gonna make it! Part of me is kind of sad that we're going to leave this house (I mean, I've lived here 18 out of 19 years of my life), but it'll be nice to move on.

Our realtor called today and apparently we should've been packing a week ago because now we're left with exactly one week to pack! So, I've been going through my stuff today (nuked a few CDs :-D) and getting ready.

Yesterday was the first night of bowling and a good night of bowling it was. The first two games were sort of ehhhh, but the last game was my best yet. I'll let the image speak for itself (haven't tested this Tetra feature, so it's overdue ;-)):

Yeah, 207! My dad was only 18 ahead of me at 225 (I beat him the first game :-D). If this had been last year I would've gotten my 100 pins over average watch. Pooh :-P.

Well, with the moving and all, it may be a while until I can put anything up. I'll try to squeak out a little blurb before I have to pack my computer. Cheers :-)

It seems like the biggest problem to us getting out of our house is no problem. The people who are buying our house have basically set everything in stone and so now our house and the house we're getting will all have "Sold" signs. So now the packing begins (our room'll be a nightmare :-P) and in probably about two weeks we'll be in our house :-D. btw, here's some info on our new house.

A couple days ago I picked up my free version of Linspire and I decided to try to move over to Linux full time for a month. I got it installed and it was certainly nice looking. I went through some trouble figuring out how to use apt packages but I started to get the hang of things. And then the trouble set in. PHP was giving me problems with MySQL, depending on what program I tried I couldn't get the sound working/synced on DVDs (or avis) and Lsongs, while nice, obviously was running on a low priority because it would cut out frequently. And things went down from there. So, I'm back on a fresh install of Win2K3 and it's nice to be home.

Got an interesting piece of mail the other day about a college down in Florida called FullSail that specializes in film [pre/post]-production. It's quite interesting because next to game programming the realm of film is my other big area of fascination. So whether I'm going to DigiPen or this place is kind of a toss up. I guess I'll worry about that when I get there. Right now I have to keep studying for ye olde GED and get a job (so I can buy my laptop ;-)).

Well, that's enough for today. Stay tuned.

Well, we've had an offer, the papers are signed and with any luck the moving will commence soon. So for those of you out there who pray please add in an extra word to the man upstairs that all this goes through :-).

Bowling league starts again in a couple weeks (13th) which I am looking forward to. Dad and I had been on a Monday league over the summer, but it was with "commoners" (i.e. people who come and bowl every now and again) and the atmosphere was.... common :-P. Now we'll be in a USBCC sanctioned league again with all our bowling buddies from last year :-D.

I will be updating in as much as I can. Stay tuned. Now back to our regularly scheduled program...

It's been a few days since I last posted anything. I'm sure you're all thinking because we're moving. Well, sadly, that guy who was so interested seems more interested in renting, not buying (stinks :-P).

But, anyways. Today I began studying for the GED. It's not quite as simple as I thought, but I basically finish high school in one run as opposed to another two or so years.

Things on Desert Planet (the online game I mentioned earlier) is coming along quite nicely. I'm in charge if designing and implementing the interface (putting to use those Ajax skills I picked up recently). You can check out what there is of the game here.

I spent most of yesterday keeping track of hurricane Katrina. I'm not really surprised that New Orleans is a total wasteland. Let's face it: They built the thing on the coast below sea level. They were asking for it (not to mention Mardi Gras :-P). Soddam and Gamorah all over again. However, I did donate some money to the relief fund because I'm sure those people are going through heck and every little bit can help. If you're interested in helping check out the American Red Cross.

Got a call this morning from our realtor. The showing last night went incredibly well, apparently. So well, in fact, that the guy is going to be getting his financing in order within the next day or so. So that means I will be movingprog!!

In other news, Steve's Four Swords Adventures copy should be coming in the mail today. It'll be nice to have something to play again.

Well, that's all I can think of for now. I will keep you all posted :-)

Some interesting things happened today (we had burgers for supper, that in itself makes it interesting ;-)).

Firstly, my Empire game is coming along nicely. I spent most of the afternoon and part of this evening getting the random map generation working. That was a blast :-D. Tomorrow I will actually start building the engine framework. This is the part where I generally choke, but I feel pretty motivated :-). I've never really done anything to this degree (and this clean) in C++.

Secondly, I got to evict a wasp nest hanging up in one of the windows. It was kind of cool (and scary). Luckily, we've got some nasty spray that kills on contact. A couple of spritzes upwards and it started raining wasps. One tried to retaliate, but then it died ;-).

Thirdly, somebody is coming to see the house tomorrow morning (day 6 on the market, about day 4 for actually having the sign up). So that means more cleaning and evacuation and since school starts locally tomorrow we're going to be the odd ones out. Figures :-P. But, all in all, I don't really mind. The more people who look at the house the greater our odds of selling the thing.

It kind of bums me out that Twilight Princess isn't coming out until next year, but that gives me more time to come up with money ;-). Actually, I seem to have found a direction for me to go. Sometime this year I'll take the GED and then just spend from then until fall of next year, when I'll go to a local college to get ready for DigiPen, on a job and saving money. It's the clearest direction on where to take life I've had in a long time.

Well, that was kind of long winded for a change :-P. Before I leave, however, I'd like to give a shout out to Slazer for reading my blog. You're a cool dude, Slazer ;-). See ya!

The parents have signed the papers for our new house and to get our current one slapped on the market. Today, day one of house-on-the-market-dom, an investor came by to look at the place. As I write this we have no idea what his thoughts are, but the fact that it's only been a day is promising.

In programming land I downloaded every pattern from ACC and am having fun fiddling with that data. First I converted it all into pattern data (a string 1024 bytes long using hex numbers for image data) and yesterday a wrote a little compression algorithm. It's similar to BMPs RLE compression and just about halved the size of the file. I'm not sure what I'll do with the stuff now. I may lump it all into a database and build a viewer around it (it would be nice if the guy who ran ACC liked it and hired me to write the ASP version).

Well, we're going to be eating lunch so that's all I'll write for today. Heck, maybe the next entry will be written from our new house (would be nice). Cheers :-)