The Radar: Back On It
This post will be a break from the normal over here. That is to say, it will be substantially different from my normally-scheduled entries in that it will exist. I have left these internet affairs go too long untended - my Facebook account held over 13,500 friend requests when I logged in, which a dilligent and underappreciated Greasemonkey script is currently ignoring. That is all I shall say about the vast temporal rift between this date and the one on the previous post.
I'm going to list my news in chronological order. This should hopefully keep particular news posts from being offended by being mentioned too early or too late, or other such nonsense. Some of you may already know most of these things, but there are others who do not and this post is mainly for their benefit. So without further ado, here is a brief Timeline of Notable Events since the last entry up to the beginning of this year.
2007
Now that we are suitably caught up to the current year I can begin laying the heavy information down on you. This isn't to marginalize the events of the last few years but I have been making a great deal of progress recently, respectively.
On April 24 in the Year of Our Lord, 2009, we purchased and subsequently moved into our first house. The market has been great for buying and a little research on this home and similar dwellings in the neighborhood show a very respectable difference between what we paid and the amount the house was bought for only a few years ago. In the event the market rebounds we stand to make quite a bit on our investment. In the time since we moved in we have done a lot of furnishing, mostly from yard sales and Craigs List. We can afford to buy new furniture and decorations of course, but I don't see much point when there are living room sets available for a few hundred Earth dollars on Craigs list, new and in their unopened original plastic wrapping, that would have cost eight or ten times that amount in a store. Also there is a certain infectious treasure hunt mentality that strikes me when I am perusing the belongings of ohers that makes things exciting in addition to economical. I have a pleasant collection of Victorian-era gadgets and other old-world style decorations (model ships, celestial armillary, model Da Vinci flying machine, various clocks, weapons, maps and much more) decorating my office amid my more modern comforts of my high-end gaming computer, large-screen TV with game consoles and the like. We are currently redoing the basement in the hopes that we will be able to continue to rent it out for more than we were asking previously.
September 2 saw the first of my graduate courses at Hood College. I am currently enrolled in two courses: Principles of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence: Expert Systems. I have the same professor for both, a man whose appearance could best be described as a clone of Colonel Sanders. He is a knowledgeable and entertaining man who spends his free time breaking bones at rock concerts or on his sports motorcycle. On the first day of class he was walking on a collapsible metal cane because he completely totaled a brand-new bike on the race track. This man is clearly fantastic and I shall endeavor to learn his ways.
On November 6 of this year I will be getting married to Kathryn Michele Bruins in Cumberland, Maryland. I plan to book Western Maryland Station as well as the depot in Frostburg in addition to chartering the restored train that travels between those two locations. The train itself is a restored 1916 Baldwin 2-8-0 steam engine, and the cars are restored Pullman-style coaches and dining cars, among others. Some details have yet to be settled but on the big day things should generally work like this: There will be a brief ceremony at the station, which is itself a fantastic-looking building. Then we will all board the train (again, chartered for our sole use and composed of cars I will specifically choose) for the hour-long journey to Frostburg, following this general route. On the ride there we will probably serve hors d'oeuvres and cocktails. At the Frostburg depot we are planning a served buffet. When dinner is over it should be getting dark and so on the train ride back (during which we would like to serve dessert and coffee) we should have a good view of the lights of Cumberland. Our tourism guide mentioned that there are something like a hundred different churches in Cumberland, and at night all of the steeples are lit.
There are of course any number of details that I have left out of the previous paragraph, partially because they are subject to change and partially because I'm not entirely involved in the minutiae of the event. I'm sure there will be more to tell closer to the date.
On the hobby front I have two main programming projects in my free time. The first one is currently on hold, and is a new iteration of the airship game you might have seen me mention several posts down and some years ago. Using the lessons I learned there I took up a more powerful language and a better understanding of the architecture to really give it a go. I set this aside when I bought the house because of a general lack of time and energy, but you can compare these screenshots to the previous ones as a testament to how much time I have put into it: Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2 Screenshot 3. What you can't see there is that I have implemented "random" terrain generation so that every time I load this up the landscape is completely different. I use a very interesting system to ensure that the terrain is generated from scratch while still looking like real landscape.
My other project is a family website, using a lot of the knowledge I have gained from my employment. I am planning to have multiple applications including a shared events calendar, an "address book" where one could look up contact information and bios for other family members, a virtual recipe book, chat and whatever else crosses my path. There will be a News/Updates page that will automatically display whenever someone makes significant updates in any of these sections, similar to Facebook. I have the calendar pretty much done aside from some superficial work, and the address book works correctly. The one thing I do not have yet is hosting, so I do not have a live link to display yet. Still, this is coming.
There, we should be more or less up to date.
I'm going to list my news in chronological order. This should hopefully keep particular news posts from being offended by being mentioned too early or too late, or other such nonsense. Some of you may already know most of these things, but there are others who do not and this post is mainly for their benefit. So without further ado, here is a brief Timeline of Notable Events since the last entry up to the beginning of this year.
2007
- July 4 - I proposed to Ryn during the fireworks. I had very good taste when choosing the ring. We have been engaged for over two years now.
- May - I graduated from University of Maryland, Baltimore County and obtained my Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science.
- May - Upon graduation, Ryn and I moved into an apartment together. The apartment looked great on first inspection. Six months later we had a gnat problem so bad management we were released from our lease with no penalties.
- June - Roughly a week after my graduation I began working for Experient Inc. in Frederick, Maryland. We make registration, housing and lead retrieval software for trade shows and conventions. When you sign up online for an anime convention and book a hotel, those websites are the sorts of things we make, in addition to some data mining onsite. The pay was fantastic just out of college and the commute is roughly 8 minutes.
Now that we are suitably caught up to the current year I can begin laying the heavy information down on you. This isn't to marginalize the events of the last few years but I have been making a great deal of progress recently, respectively.
On April 24 in the Year of Our Lord, 2009, we purchased and subsequently moved into our first house. The market has been great for buying and a little research on this home and similar dwellings in the neighborhood show a very respectable difference between what we paid and the amount the house was bought for only a few years ago. In the event the market rebounds we stand to make quite a bit on our investment. In the time since we moved in we have done a lot of furnishing, mostly from yard sales and Craigs List. We can afford to buy new furniture and decorations of course, but I don't see much point when there are living room sets available for a few hundred Earth dollars on Craigs list, new and in their unopened original plastic wrapping, that would have cost eight or ten times that amount in a store. Also there is a certain infectious treasure hunt mentality that strikes me when I am perusing the belongings of ohers that makes things exciting in addition to economical. I have a pleasant collection of Victorian-era gadgets and other old-world style decorations (model ships, celestial armillary, model Da Vinci flying machine, various clocks, weapons, maps and much more) decorating my office amid my more modern comforts of my high-end gaming computer, large-screen TV with game consoles and the like. We are currently redoing the basement in the hopes that we will be able to continue to rent it out for more than we were asking previously.
September 2 saw the first of my graduate courses at Hood College. I am currently enrolled in two courses: Principles of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence: Expert Systems. I have the same professor for both, a man whose appearance could best be described as a clone of Colonel Sanders. He is a knowledgeable and entertaining man who spends his free time breaking bones at rock concerts or on his sports motorcycle. On the first day of class he was walking on a collapsible metal cane because he completely totaled a brand-new bike on the race track. This man is clearly fantastic and I shall endeavor to learn his ways.
On November 6 of this year I will be getting married to Kathryn Michele Bruins in Cumberland, Maryland. I plan to book Western Maryland Station as well as the depot in Frostburg in addition to chartering the restored train that travels between those two locations. The train itself is a restored 1916 Baldwin 2-8-0 steam engine, and the cars are restored Pullman-style coaches and dining cars, among others. Some details have yet to be settled but on the big day things should generally work like this: There will be a brief ceremony at the station, which is itself a fantastic-looking building. Then we will all board the train (again, chartered for our sole use and composed of cars I will specifically choose) for the hour-long journey to Frostburg, following this general route. On the ride there we will probably serve hors d'oeuvres and cocktails. At the Frostburg depot we are planning a served buffet. When dinner is over it should be getting dark and so on the train ride back (during which we would like to serve dessert and coffee) we should have a good view of the lights of Cumberland. Our tourism guide mentioned that there are something like a hundred different churches in Cumberland, and at night all of the steeples are lit.
There are of course any number of details that I have left out of the previous paragraph, partially because they are subject to change and partially because I'm not entirely involved in the minutiae of the event. I'm sure there will be more to tell closer to the date.
On the hobby front I have two main programming projects in my free time. The first one is currently on hold, and is a new iteration of the airship game you might have seen me mention several posts down and some years ago. Using the lessons I learned there I took up a more powerful language and a better understanding of the architecture to really give it a go. I set this aside when I bought the house because of a general lack of time and energy, but you can compare these screenshots to the previous ones as a testament to how much time I have put into it: Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2 Screenshot 3. What you can't see there is that I have implemented "random" terrain generation so that every time I load this up the landscape is completely different. I use a very interesting system to ensure that the terrain is generated from scratch while still looking like real landscape.
My other project is a family website, using a lot of the knowledge I have gained from my employment. I am planning to have multiple applications including a shared events calendar, an "address book" where one could look up contact information and bios for other family members, a virtual recipe book, chat and whatever else crosses my path. There will be a News/Updates page that will automatically display whenever someone makes significant updates in any of these sections, similar to Facebook. I have the calendar pretty much done aside from some superficial work, and the address book works correctly. The one thing I do not have yet is hosting, so I do not have a live link to display yet. Still, this is coming.
There, we should be more or less up to date.