Brent Stace’s Weblog

Excluding the queen-size bed purchase earlier this year, over the weekend we’ve made another substantial purchase. We bought furniture for our over-1-year-barren living room. We bought a sofa, love seat, coffee table (with internal storage), and 2 end tables, and we should be getting them mid-late Oct. 2008. It was very hard furniture shopping, esp. with Jenn and the size of the room. This is probably why it took over a year to find the “right” furniture. So, we should have furniture people can enjoy come the Thanksgiving feast we’re having at our place this year. I’m debating if I should post a photo of the furniture once it’s in our house…or maybe I’ll just tell you that you have to come over to see it .

Well, the fiscal year is coming to a close at the USPTO. Officially it ends the beginning of Sept. Once I get all my due cases in, I’ll be a couple counts short of making 130%. I can get 5 counts in if the cloaked-in-mystery review team for my GS-13 promotion could review my cases prior to the fiscal year ending. Strange that a case I did in early July still isn’t reviewed, but a case done in late Aug. has been reviewed. So far only 1 of 5 have been reviewed, and 4 have been officially submitted. I’ve come to realize something at the end of this FY. And that is 130% isn’t worth it anymore. For future FY’s I’ll just do 110%. I’m not going to bust my butt (that hard) anymore. It gets more difficult to maintain a 130 as you go up in ranks at the PTO since more work is required of you as you go up. I’ll be able to scrape by this year…may have to take some time off to do it, but It’ll happen. Therefore, after my promotion (hopefully end of Oct.), maintaining that 130 will be more difficult that it has ever been. So, my logical response, at this point in my life, is to tone it down a bit (to 110).
What is sad is that even though I’ll probably be taking time off to make 130%, I’ll probably be working from home (voluntary OT) to hopefully get through some amendments so that I can have a real vacation in Jan. 2009 (passport pending) - probably more about this future vacation later.

The Unoh program is fully functional, as reported earlier, but adding advanced AI’s to it is taking a significantly long time to do. The logic is very complex. Actually I’ve kinda hit a…writers/programmers block regarding it. As such, I’m thinking that I may release version 1.0 as it was before I started hacking it up with AI code. When that happens, let the laughter begin (mostly at the poor interface). But, at least for me, it’ll be proof of concept. Hopefully when the FY ends and I switch gears/goals to a 110% at work (see above), I’ll have more time to devote to Unoh.

Recently, at work, I’ve gotten a lot of work stacked up for me to do. Don’t get me wrong, I should be able to make another 130% quarter, but it looks like my beginning July is going to be busy. Jenn and I were/are planning on doing some kind of vacation in that first week of July since July 4th is on a Friday this year, but in order to do something I’ll have to do a good amount of working ahead. This means that more time will be devoted to working for USTPO more than working on my program Unoh. For my people who have been receiving the usual weekly Unoh builds, new builds, at least until I catch up at work, won’t be weekly. They will be sporadic. I am, however, comfortable with where I’ve gotten Unoh so far. It’s functional, and stable (as far as I know). There’s only a small list of major things I’d still like to add in (two things are 1) better AI’s and 2) GUI). Everything else seems minor. The next thing I wanna do is the AI’s, so I’m going to need to carve out a huge chunk of time when I start that.

However, changing subject and on the plus side of things, I’ve started getting into a semi-regular workout routine. It feels good again. I’ve had my lifting bench here at home since we moved in, but I haven’t gotten it to an area where I can actually use it until a couple weeks ago. Once I set it up, I started hitting the weights again and, boy, was I sore for a while.

Hopefully, at least for my physical self, doing more USPTO work for this time before July won’t cut into for workouts. Its too bad there’s only 24 hours in a day and that I need to eat and sleep, otherwise I could easily fill that time with something else…like 1) USPTO cases 2) Unoh, 3) working out or 4) Halo.

I finally got around to watching the iPhone SDK roadmap event today. MacRumors.com pointed out something interesting after I watched the event. The iPhone very well could establish itself as a portable gaming system. It’s hardware is superior to most portable gaming systems, it has the accelerometer (sp?) like what is popular in Wii’s, but its just lacking software at this point. It’d be great to have this…but I got thinking about what else apple could do. Why stop at the iPhone for games…they should be in Macs too. And hey - they already built a controller…the iPhone. Think about it….it’s got bluetooth, most macs have blue tooth, so there’s the interface. The mac has crazy huge screens and much more hardware/processing than the iPhone. It be cool if the iPhone could be transformed into a controller for Mac games…until you get a phone call in the middle of using it as a controller. But hey, I wonder if Apple put any thought into this.