Brent Stace’s Weblog

Just to let everyone know: my PSU email acct. stopped working today. I sent out an email a while ago advising people that this would happen someday, and you should have the other email address to use.

What a day/week it’s been.
Work
I found out today that 50% of new examiners make production and are retained at work. Normally this wouldn’t concern me, and I would think I could make the cut off and be retained. What makes me scared that I may be cut is the fact that as soon as I got used to my first supervisor I get a NEW supervisor to report to. So, now I must get used to him, and it’s taking a while and I’m sure it will be reflected in my production. Meanwhile, other people are in easier areas of the USPTO, or have been reporting to the same person and are doing ok. I just have that little voice in the back of my head saying that I’m slow, and I may not be retained because I don’t think that the change in supervisors will be considered for my reviewal later on. If only I could put in overtime to catch up…but no, they don’t allow new examiners to do more work than what they’re supposed to. I need this job to live, I sure hope I don’t get cut…but we’ll find out for sure in a couple months.
Life
Jenn was here last week. It was good to have her near me. Although….I didn’t play as much D2X as I normally would if she wasn’t here. Speaking of D2X…I’m going to have to voluntarily cut back on my D2X playing to revive my programming projects I’ve been putting off. Unoh I’ve been putting off too long. I originally stopped development for several reasons 1) I was moving and I wanted to wait until I was settled down, 2) I started an easier (or seemingly easier) project Decider and 3) OpenGL is still odd to program with. Well, I decided in the last couple days that I need to start programming Unoh again and to forget OpenGL for the first release. That’s right, It will be all TEXT card game I could probably swing colored text though v. 1.0’s aren’t supposed to be good anyhow, and with this big project I’m going to need to segment development goals better than I am now. With that being said I hope not many people laugh at it when it is initially released, and I hope I’m not embarrassed of my work. Time to hop on my bed with wireless, open up my new Xcode, and hope my coding hasn’t gotten rusty. Oh, but don’t worry people, I still plan to get OpenGL in the project for the interface, (with the help of Bobby Andersen and Apple’s newer sample code they kindly distributed) but I just don’t think I can make it pretty for the first release, I need all the guts of the project done first…then I’ll put a candy shell on it.
Undergroundware will not die!

Well, I got Mac OS X 10.4, Tiger, on the Friday that just passed, April 29th, 2005, and like many upgrades these days I like it. I don’t think I’ll use the spotlight/search feature much, or at all simply because I’m an organized person, but I think I’ll get full rounded use out of the other features. One feature I’ve been loving a lot so far is all the improvements done to iChat…it is a HIGHLY respectable AIM client now, instead of a dinky one. All the previous versions I wasn’t a great fan of…I only stuck with iChat before because it made great use of the addressbook, and mail. But now, it’s got that and more of the standard features from the normal AIM clients. Features, like user profiles, an option if you want iChat to log off when the user logs off, built in show currently playing iTune song when available, easy switching between AIM screennames, and it shows if you’re IMing to someone on a mobile device. So yes, out of all the features in Tiger, I think all the new iChat features are the major ones I was begging for. Don’t get me wrong though, I will be probably encoding my movies into the new H.264 or whatever format to save space using the new quicktime, I’ve used dashboard, I’ve liked the upgrades to safari, and I know I’ll use the new Xcode sometime too, but iChat is by far the most used, wanted, unsung upgrade in Tiger.
–update– I hate the buggy as hell new quicktime, and to encode things in the new H.264 format takes about….18X play time. Yikes! So I’m using the 3ivx codec still.