Author: Sam Steele

This author has written 1653 articles

Update

K, so I haven’t posted in this thing for like a million years.

I got invited to join Orkut, google’s social network thing. I wont spam all of you with emails, so if you actually want to be invited, let me know and I’ll click the magic buttons on the website.. lol.

Also, my financial refund check came, so I can finally pay Capital One, T-Mobile, EZ-Pass, and everyone else I owe money to! yay! And I can pay rent, which is also good.

Finally, my job training for NJIT’s helpdesk started yesterday. We spent about 3 hours learning about the history of the department, the layout of NJIT’s organizational chart (ugh, bad memories of MGMT-390), and the names and positions of some important people that we’ll be quizzed on on Wednesday. I’m still not really feeling the whole phone support thing, I’m much better at doing on-site stuff, but at least it’ll look good on a resume, and I can get some more $$!

My, that’s a small house!

Ok, I’m finally happy enough with my little demo to show everyone! I’ve been adding some new effects to the DCBlap engine to eventually use it for my IT360 (Intro to computer graphics) project.

Here’s a run-down of the new features:

  • Dynamic, colored lighting
  • Parallax sky texture
  • sin-wave animation effect on water
  • Scrolling textures

If you wanna play with the demo, you can grab the Dreamcast version here or the Windows version here. The windows version will run under WINE for linux users, which is another improvement over DCBlap.

The demo uses the standard first-person shooter controls for the respective platform.

Windows:
Mouse looks around, up and down walk forward and backward, left and right turn, A and D strafe left and right. You can hit ESC to exit.

Dreamcast:
Analog stick looks around, Y moves forward, A moves backward, X strafes left, and B strafes right. You can press Start to exit.

Suburbia fun

Jay and I had some fun terrorizing Scott’s development, and the neighboring development while waiting for scott to come back.

Sigh

Interesting how one of the best days I’ve had in a while can be ruined by just a few minutes…

First, I finally made it to the class I’ve been oversleeping for for the first time this semester! And guess what? Today was the first class, anyway! Apparently I didn’t miss anything after all!

Next, my psyc. class was cancelled! We got to fill out a survey and earned 1 r-point, and then we went home.

Next, I went to PathMark to use the CoinStar machine, I got $35 from my change jar and used that to buy a lot of food for my roommates, since they’ve been buying while I was broke. I didn’t make it to the bank before they closed, but I can do that tomorrow. I did fill my gas tank for the first time in months, it felt great to say “Fill it regular, please!” and actually have money in my wallet to pay for it!

Then I got home and started thinking this day was too good. So I login to NJIT’s financial aid system to see when the refund check is coming and…. I no longer qualify for aid because I dropped a course and am now considered “part time”. I now owe NJIT $2700ish.

This starts to sink in, and I start writing an email to the financial aid office to see if there’s anything I can do, and I get a call from my mom. Apparently EZ-Pass sent her a bill instead of me, because my car is still registered in her name. For those of you who don’t know, I haven’t been able to pay ez-pass for a month or so, and didn’t have enough for tolls to get to scott’s and back, so I went through the ez-pass lane anyway. “Call Service Center” the display says, I figured whatever, I’ll call them in a few days when I get more money.

So now my mom knows, and she starts complaining about how we have to make my car registered to me, I need to pay ez-pass, “no more surprises”, blah blah blah.

I’m officially broke, $4000 in debt, and unemployed, since my on-campus job would have been Federal Work Study, which I no longer qualify for.

But at least I have a full tank of gas.

It’s so true..


Are you Addicted to the Internet?

67%

Hardcore Junkie (61% – 80%)
While you do get a bit of sleep every night and sometimes leave the house, you spend as much time as you can online. You usually have a browser, chat clients, server consoles, and your email on auto check open at all times. Phone? What’s that? You plan your social events by contacting your friends online. Just be careful you don’t get a repetitive wrist injury…



The Are you Addicted to the Internet? Quiz at Quiz Me!


Typey Typey!

Ok, so I finally got around to making an on-screen keyboard for DreamZZT so that the percentage of the Dreamcast audience not cool enough to own a real keyboard or PS/2 adapter wont feel left out. Now that people can finally enter stuff, I can finish up the save dialog (OMG YOU CAN ENTER A FILENAME NOW!!!), and finish up the online scoring.

Also, the modem support in KallistiOS is coming along nicely, so hopefully soon dialup users will be able to access the online content too. Also, the code I wrote to read the network configuration from Dreamcast flash rom has been comitted to KallistiOS! After years of just being a “user” of KOS, I’ve finally been able to contribute back 🙂

Untitled

Well, I’m finally almost happy with my desktop.

I curved the top corners of my menu panel, and added a 3 pixel drop shadow to the bottom to add more contrast between the wallpaper and the panel. Here’s a zoomed in version, for those of you without magnifying glasses:

I also made my own icon for the gnome-bluetooth bluetooth:// URI:

I’m still looking for something to replace the home icon, the one from the Snow-Apple icon theme looks kinda silly.

Finally, I got a nice blue GTK+ theme that isn’t so much of an aqua-clone that you wanna puke called Glossy P from art.gnome.org. Maybe I’ll make an orange version of it for Jay, but I kinda like the blue, so I’ll keep it for now. Lastly, my window border theme is a modified version of my most favorite theme ever: Crux. Someone finally updated it so it shows the application’s icon in the title bar instead of an empty box!

Here’s a screenshot of the whole thing together (click to enlarge):

Kinda like OSX, but without that stupid dock, and I get to keep the window list at the top, and a taskbar at the bottom 🙂

Crop circles

Well, SamTown suffered yet another UFO attack, and this time they left crop circles in my farm!

Isn’t that cute?