On Sunday, Sep 5, I finally went and bought Doom 3. Lucky for me, it was on sale at Fry's for $37.99.

At this point, I am up to the Enpro Plant level. The newest demons I have encounted are the flying heads. The first encounter with one of those was pretty cool. I have to say, Doom 3 is pretty fun, but my 2 year old computer lags a little bit playing it.

I have a Dual Athlon 1900, 512M RAM, and a GeForce4 Ti 4400 video card. I get 18 fps in demo1.

While playing, some parts are a lot slower than others. It seems like the opening scene of a level when you get out of the elevator are the slowest. In some places even look back at the elevator slows it down to a few frames per second. Also, being attacked by a few demons makes it go pretty slow.

When playing online, everything is fine until any action occurs, then it slows down and makes it hard to kill people.

I have dual monitors, so a couple times while I played, I put the task manager on the other screen and checked out the CPU and memory usage stats. While playing, it constantly uses about half of each CPU, and 150-300M of RAM. In the menu screen it uses about 80M RAM.

I would like to upgrade my video card to a GeForce 6600 when they come out, but I will have to wait for the AGP version.

The game gets it's scary atmosphere mostly by being dark, and you have to use your flashlight a lot. But you would think that in 2145, you could have a gun-light or some night vision. But then the game wouldn't be nearly as creepy.

Doom 3 has many Kiosks you can interact with. Some of these perform nessesary tasks in the game, such as opening doors or sealing a gas leak. Others run informational videos about Union Aerospace Corporation. And then there's Super Turkey Puncher 3. It's an arcade game I've run into a couple times in the game. You can walk up to it and play the game, which consists of punching a turkey until it explodes and a new turkey drops into the screen. The punching hand uses the same graphics from the original Doom. Neato.

I would like to see some mini games that use the Doom 3 engine to render. Maybe someone will come up with a mod that does that. More to come later...

On Thursday, I went to Shiloh's house for the first time in quite a while. He told me he learned some HTML stuff, which I have been trying to get him into for a while. He had posted links to a bunch of images he took from Asheron's Call 2. More about that later...

I told Shiloh about a program I use called Zend Studio. I said it is used to write PHP. He asked if it was like HTML-Kit, a program we have been using to work on our web sites. "Yeah, kinda like that", I replied, "but it has a debugger". "You can run your scripts in slow motion so you can see your page being created line by line".

I downloaded and installed Zend Studio 3.5.1 on his computer. I explained what HTML tags are, and how you start and end a PHP section. I decided the first thing we would write would be a simple while loop that printed a list of numbers, from 1 to 10. Next I introduced the break tag so the numbers would each be on their own line. After each step we would save the script and view the output in a web browser.

Next we put the numbers in a table, I explained how to use the table, tr, and td tags. I decided to show him show simple it would be to make it print a multiplaction table. We added another while loop, with a second iterator variable. It wouldn't work as expected though.

I guess I am a for loop kind of guy, as I had never used a while loop in PHP before. I've used while loops in C, Java, and probably Perl and Pascal, but never PHP. I guess they don't nest the same way as those languages. After a few minutes of feeling like an idiot, I resorted to using a for loop, and explained to Shiloh how for loops have 3 parts.

With the 2 for loops in place, the multiplication table worked as expected. I tried making a 1000 by 1000 table, which took a while to calculate a million numbers, and even longer drawing the page. Internet Explorer took up over 250 megs of RAM and then crashed. I said something like "see how such a tiny about of code can create a huge set of data?".

After that, I showed Shiloh how hex color codes work, and made each cell in the table a different color.

You can see our wonderful program at:
Mulitply.php

Brandon

Next I would like to show Shiloh how to generate an image using PHP. I have a couple of ideas in mind that would look cool.

Shiloh loves playing Asheron's Call 2. He has uploaded a bunch of pictures from things he has collected in the game to his web server. Then he posted a message in a popular message board with links to the images. I looked at the stats for his site, and quite a few people have viewed his images. So I think instead of linking directly to the images, he could link to a gallery script that displays the image, along with stats associated with that image, and links to other images. A comments section for each image would be good also.

I was feeling slightly under the weather yesterday, so I tried going to bed around 9:30 pm. I usually go to bed at some random time between midnight and 6 am, depending on what I am working on. It is hard to tell for sure, but I'm pretty sure it usually takes me over an hour to fall asleep. I remember awakening around midnight, then at 2 am I was still awake.

Usually after 3 or 4 hours of lying there trying to sleep, I will give up and go get on the computer and experience the everlasting joys of the Internet. During these hours of attempted sleep, I will think of all kinds of programs I should write, along with the various other things going on in my life. As I get out of bed and head for the computer, I make a plan to work on some specific program. By the time the computer is booted up, I am usually off on a tangent, distracted by the never-ending stream of news coming in off the net.

So here I am, tired but still fully conscious, writing an entry in my long neglected blog. If Dani wakes up and sees me on the computer, she's gonna tell me I'm insane. I don't think she can relate to insomnia very well. The other night I used the timer on my watch to find how long it takes for her to tall asleep. About a minute and 4 seconds into my investigation, all signs of a her consiousness vanished, and I was left with the silence of my own thoughts for God knows how long.

I look at the clock, sigh, and close my eyes. Perhaps a few thousand thoughts later, I open my eyes, and see a few hours have passed. Should I try, try, again, or is it time to hit up the warm glow of my dual computer displays?

So here I am, once again, in my digital domain.

I woke up around 7:30 from a really weird dream I was having. Most of my dreams switch from location to location, but this one was as if I could mentally teleport at will. The main scene was a big room, roughly shaped like one of those sloped lecture halls. Objects would pop up in the room everywhere, but it was easy to navigate.

I don't remember the order of things that happened very well. As in a lot of my dreams, my electronic drumset was there. My brother was playing it. At some point my brother was playing my drumset.

I found a tiny wooden pipe somewhere in the room. Some guy put a tiny amount of an unknown drug in it and gave it to me. I smoked it. After that my brother was on his cell phone calling my dad to tell him I was on drugs.

I teleported to a distorted version of my mom's house. She was flipping out because I was high. I don't remember much that happened there. I think I teleported to some magical world and then came back to tell my mom how great it was, but she wasn't having any of it.

I forgot everything else except for a part where some guys stole most of my drumset. This happens a lot in my dreams for some reason.

A tiny spider just lowered itself on its silk line, right in front of my face. At first I thought I was seeing a big spider over on the wall but in fact I was seeing a tiny spider up close. Weird huh? I stuck out my finger and attached the silk to my finger and guided it back towards the desk. I wish I had a microscope so I could look at it more closely and take pictures.

I need to make a program so that I can upload several pictures with each message. That way I could Illustrate my spider story better.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ednieuw/Spiders/Info/spindraad.htm
http://www.sciences.demon.co.uk/whistmic.htm

Someone hacked my Yahoo account and locked me out of it. :( That is a major inconvienence since I use Yahoo messenger to chat with a lot of people, and have over 100 contacts in my list. I also store photos and email in there. It is also a lot more difficult to read my message archive, I would have to use a home-made archive reader program, and I don't feel like doing Windows development at the momemt.

On SNL they just had an episode where this guy invented a weed smoking robot. It was one of the cooler episodes, I'd say. It was saying funny stuff as it was smoking a joint. The guy said he built it while trying to turn his dad's lawnmower into a bong.

I'll try to post some images of it later if someone gets some video captures posted on the net.

Dani got me a monkey pen. I have yet to write anything with it.

Today Dani woke me up at 2 pm after picking flowers with Vickee. We went to the 99 cent store and to costco. At the 99 cent store we got a bunch of nifty items such as compact flourescent light bulbs for only 99 cents each. They were subsidized by SDG&E. I also found an audio cable I can use to attach my guitar effects processor (Boss GT-6) to my computer. We got around 60 things, but the aforementioned things are the most worthwhile to me.

Notice that the picture of my watch has nothing to do with this message but I am too lazy to plug-in my laptop and upload my digital camera pics via that. It is complicated, but basically it sucks we are still using AOL, and don't have a high speed LAN going on. There is no LAN to speak of. :(

Oh yeah, my watch has some awesome features I'd like to talk about. It is a CASIO atomic solar, which means it charges with light, and also updates the time via radio waves which are broadcasted from a facility with an atomic clock. It has a battery meter and an indicator for signal strength, along with other things. Go to Casio G-Shock to check it out.

Dani bought me a South Park shirt :) I will post some pictures of it. Target also caries a Towelie shirt with a stoned Towelie saying "I have no idea what's going on". They were out of stock though :(

Here is a close-up of Token (T), Towelie, and Cartman.