Looking back on the 6 topics covered I can't really say that any of them will fail to keep me occupied over the next few months. Each of them provides plenty of fuel for the blog. I think that being a self-aware blogger kind of hurts the genuine nature of a personal blog. This certainly is no where near becoming one of those professional blogs which are very self aware. I believe I have attempted to balance between the two types for too long. In the end I think the point is that the blog will focus more on my personal ramblings and stop attempting to achieve cohesion which I always fail at reaching.

Web Development has moved from being a simple hobby of mine into my profession. At work, I am a professional ColdFusion developer. At home I still play, albeit, not as much as I once did. I believe in many ways I have plateaued with ColdFusion. At least as far as my job is concerned I have definitely plateaued. There is no up, no growth from here. As a result I find myself looking in other directions. After attending a Microsoft Firestarter event on November 8th I have decided to pursue .NET as my next programming platform. Yesterday I purchased a book of ASP.NET with C# and am hoping to put together at least a “Hello World” site today. If all goes well I will slowly begin to move all of my sites over to ASP.NET. At the center of my personal projects is a new web game. The game takes a lot from Sundog and Freelancer but brings it to the web. Basically, the idea is to have a fully fledged space trading game online. Hopefully, I will be able to implement some more exciting elements of the game like combat with something like Silverlight. I think I will avoid Flash for this since I can program a Silverlight application in C# instead of having to learn ActionScript. Somewhere tied up in my game is my tired old Blog/Wiki/Forum project that never seems to get off the ground. Perhaps .NET will make that a slightly less horrible project to take on. At this point however my game itself is going to take precedence. I have started thinking about breaking it up into several smaller parts so it will be easier to handle. later, -junc

Brataccas is one of those games that you either loved or hated. A few people have written me and while seeming like a fan have complained about the impossible controls. Others have written me and shared the common experience of picking up that mouse and becoming Kyne once again. Brataccas had an open world with a straight forward goal. It was perfect in nearly every aspect. Over the years I have built up a website and pursued the extraction of all of the graphics from the game. Unfortunately, I always fall short of achieving this goal. Several times people have written me with a great deal of interest in the game and claimed that they had the skill to disassemble the game and extract the graphics. Even with my offering people money to take on the task it always ends the same way. That energized and interested person always asks, why not just screenshot it. Anyone that knows Brataccas would know that this is a silly suggestion. There are too many characters and not enough hours in the day. With that said however, I have realized that it is very unlikely that I will ever find someone to hire that can actually handle the disassembly project. So, I have landed upon the screenshot solution. My goal, over the next few years, is to attempt to collect enough screenshots to reassemble the game. At first I will most likely assemble a walk through version in AGS. I think the AGS engine is more than capable of handling the sword fights and AI. With my improved programming skills over the years I don’t even feel that the real challenge is creating the game. The real challenge is ripping those sprites. Once I have created a 1:1 copy of the game in AGS I will start to assemble a sequel to the game. Of all the games ever created, I truly believe that Brataccas deserves a fan sequel. The biggest part of that project, once again, is getting the graphics. Of course, once I have done so I will share them with the rest of the world. Hopefully, many others will beat me to the first Brataccas fan game. later, -junc

Most of my focus over the past few months has been on Novel Writing. Unfortunately, that has received much less activity than I would like it to. While my goals have been to move further ahead with Keptosh, things have kind of fallen flat most of the time. I managed to finish an outline and start the storyboard. The storyboard is where I am currently hung up. I have attempted a few different strategies for moving the novel along but most of them just end up wasting time. My inability to focus on one project at a time is a major weakness. I always feel that I have so much to do. So while I put the focus on the Novel I get distracted with the other projects and generally end up getting no where with any of it. My hope is to combat this writer's block by setting some public deadlines here in my blog. Obligations to reach certain milestones within the process which I will feel guilty about if I fail to reach them. I recently attempted this strategy with a co-worker. Telling him about a goal I had set myself in October. While I missed the overall goal I did get a large amount of work accomplished during that time. So it is obviously a decent motivational tool to share deadlines with others. At least, so long as they aren’t depending on that deadline. Writing a novel has not been an easy goal to achieve. I feel that there is a difference between a writer and a novelist. I think a lot of people have what it takes to be a great writer, but not a novelist. For me, I fear that it is the opposite. I am by no means a great, or even good, writer, but I feel that I have a decent shot at putting out an adequate novel. I attribute this to the Hero’s Journey model and many others like it. Basically, the key is to learn the elements of good story telling, not necessarily story writing. In the end you can plug certain things into the story to make it take a shape. From there, flesh out enough scenes that cover those core mythological struggles. Once you are down to the scenes, trying to understand how rhythm plays a part in both single scenes and strings of scenes is key. The result of using the toolset is the construction of a novel. I see it more as a step by step assembly process. With that view of novel writing it certainly boosts my confidence and helps me believe that I can finish my Keptosh novel. later, -junc

It has now been well over a year since I composed any music. I recently sold some music equipment and have plans to turn back towards the computer since I now own a laptop. The Korg nanoSeries is of great interest to me. I think they will serve as an excellent portable performance setup. To help with my push back into music I would like to revisit the piano. In a few weeks I intend on purchasing a digital piano. My hope is begin composing completely on the piano and then pursuing MusicXML as a means to render composed works in a format ready for live performance via the laptop with midi controllers. The point of MusicXML is to create an open platform for my music. With the idea being that the music notation would be shared in a digital format with instructions for how to perform the piece. With the samples being the “unique” factor. The hope would then be to build up a community which performs works by other community members. I feel that MusicXML can be extended to handle the specific exception which electronic music brings to composed music which MIDI and simple notation cannot handle. Very similar to the way that special notations have had to be invented to handle Scratch Notation by Turntablists. Of course MusicXML can easily be converted to MIDI and notation allowing potential performers to ignore recommendations by the original composer and interpret the piece as they wish. This is all currently in the concept stage and not much has been done regarding the application of it. I’m honestly not even positive that MusicXML can handle what I want, which may require me to make some sort of derivative form of MusicXML along with a web driven converter. later, -junc

I have had a considerable amount of difficulty keeping this blog alive over the years. Most of my posts have been sporadic throughout the past year or so. I had one burst of video game news posts around the launch of the current generation of video game consoles, but other than that, things have remained rather silent. While I attempt to evaluate the direction I would like to take my blog I am also attempting to evaluate my life as a whole. Since starting my job I have been attempting to find out where I want to set my focus. My intention is to have a series of posts relating to my current interests. As a conclusion to the series I will evaluate these things and see how they will contribute to the blog and find their place within my life. Check back tomorrow for the first post in the series.

I finally managed to purchase a laptop last week. After months of waiting to be paid for the Opper Project I picked one up at Best Buy on the 9th. Since then, I have been installing software. I always forget how freakishly horrible it is to move to a new system. Most of it is my fault since I still don't have an external hard drive. This would reduce the time it took by hours. A vast majority of my time is spent waiting for backup DVDs to copy over to the hard drive. I just won't think about the damage that I'm sure all of those DVDs did to my new DVD drive. The laptop itself is beautiful. Just typing this is heavenly. I went with a 15.4 inch monitor instead of a 17 inch with number pad like I had originally intended. This is mostly due to the fact that the 17 inch weighs too much and won't fit in my backpack. I just took the Vista voice recognition software for a test drive. That technology has come a long way since Dragon Naturally Speaking. It is still slightly clunky getting around windows with it. It feels very Star Trek talking to the computer though. later, -junc