Hiro Antagonist

50mm, 1/20th @ f/2
Photo taken last weekend after dinner in Dallas - 5 internet points if you can figure out where

So I graduated last weekend. It feels a bit weird. I've been in college for about eight years now - five years at my first university doing CS and pure math then sculpture, working for a dotcom for a year, then transferring to another university for 3 years and getting a degree in video game development.

I've worked full time before, so that's not weird. What is weird is the feeling that I don't have to eventually start taking classes ever again. That I actually did finish college. I'm very good at the academic side of things, just not very good at sticking to one thing and finishing it.

I'm going to shoot for a job doing level design, hopefully I'll find a good one, as there are quite a few big video game development companies around here, and even more in Austin. If not Texas, there's always California. I like Texas, but I wouldn't be against moving, especially if it's a good company.

It's actually a fairly good time to be a video game development-type person fresh out of college - the industry is laying off a fair amount of senior dev people, but they're hiring far more fresh out of college types on average than they have been the last five years or so. People seek entertainment in a depression, apparently.

It would certainly be nice not to have to be hobbled by living on only a single income - money is always tight, and I miss when both of us worked for the dotcom and we had boatloads of it for that one short year. Lesson learned though, don't put all your eggs in one basket and don't work for dotcoms. And a college degree is actually pretty mandatory for getting a decent job. There's almost a glass ceiling if you don't have one.

Anyway, enough rambling. We'll see what the future brings. Hopefully not Skynet heh.

Anyone on my friends list experienced with gigabit networks, mainly getting them to transfer at 100 Mbit/s + speeds? Maybe even at the usually attained 400 or 500 Mbit/s?

I've got a gigabit switch, and a server (Windows Server 2003) and my personal computer (Vista) that both have shiny new gigabit network cards hooked up to it. Windows file transfers were sucking (130 Mbit/s bleh), so I set up FTP services on the server, but it seems to max out at 97 Mbit/s :(

The ethernet card on the server is a Linksys EG 1032 card I got about two months back. The one on my computer is a Realtek RTL8169 (on the mobo). The switch is a Netgear GS 105.

Sustained throughput should be a quite a bit faster, but I'm not sure why it isn't off the top of my head. It's taking two minutes to transfer a 1.4 gig file, for example.

Both the server and my computer are moving the data off of SATA drives, so there shouldn't be a bottleneck there.

Any thoughts?


EDIT: Looks like I forgot to enable jumbo frames on each card. Whoops. Getting 45 MB/s / 360 Mbit/s, which is much happier.

Over the last few years, I've been steadily pursuing the art of photography. I've gotten a lot better at it too, and aside from doing a small amount of commercial work myself, I've been working part time as an apprentice to a fashion photographer.

However, the more I explore the commercial side of photography, the more I feel deadened. There's lots of money and work if you're interested in beauty photography (think ads for Clinique skin care and the like), and there's a small and extremely competitive niche if you want to get into high fashion photography (think Versace and the like).

There's certainly no small amount of skill involved in this, and experience has shown I've got the skills as a photographer to hack it in this particular arena. Maybe even get to the top one percent, if I work at it. But what's there?

Just photographing more pretty people in clothes or demonstrating products.


I don't want to knock it. I know there's a good number of extremely skilled photographers who love it. But... After the initial rush of 'ooo, photographing models!' wore off... There wasn't much to keep me going. No one is in it for the money, because for all but the top one percent, the money isn't competitive if you're at all good at *anything* else.

I still love taking pictures of architecture, and there is some money in that, but I've gotten to the point where I either pursue it as a career or abandon it as a career.


I don't care enough about doing it on the behalf of clients to make a career out of it, I fear. I've gotten my feet wet in the commercial world of photography, and far from being the most awesome thing ever, I've found myself bored to death. The fact that it barely pays anything really doesn't help either.

Heck, I made more as a mid-level network tech than the average professional photographer.

I don't know...

Eh, fuck it.

Making video games is more interesting, and there's more room to make a fortune. I enjoy the heck out of level design, but I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say my ultimate ambition would be to run a successful game development company that puts out fun, engaging games that make all of the developers financially better off for it.

I can't say I have any particular illusion about the odds of succeeding - the failure rate of video game companies is pretty horrific. Roughly speaking, one out of every three fail. Out of the 33% that don't fail, only 11% of those manage to make another game before going bankrupt.

So hey, most likely doomed to failure, but at least it has the potential to pay better than photography! Where on the other hand, even if you make it big as a photographer, you're still not making much of anything comparatively :(

I don't have any desire to give up photography, but to be honest, if you don't make a career out of it, you can only go so far. My next best hope is doing something with it after I retire. Who knows...

And if I fail at game development, there's other things I can do that pay well, but fuck me are they ever boring. But hey, I like the things that having a decent salary affords you, and if worst comes to worst, I'll take a boring decent paying job and a good home and family life over exciting but low paying work any day.

But who knows, maybe I'll get lucky and be able to make a living at doing what I love.

In a response to kittytreats previous comment, I'll try to write three posts about topics I normally do my best to avoid - work, computers, and stuff I own. Today I'll cover work.

At the moment, I don't work. I'm a university student and have been for most of the last eight years or so. I took a break in the middle ('05 to '06) to work for a dotcom. It was one of the most exhilarating and most depressing jobs I've ever had.

To start off, I've had a large and extremely varied number of jobs. Out of high school, I worked for the US Postal Service over the summer. It was, and has been, the worst job of my life to date. The work is hard manual labor, and that was the highlight of the job. The co-workers were unbearable, aside from the tiny minority that made the decision 'go into work today or put a gun to my head?' come out in a fashion where I'm writing to you now. The more work you did, the more you were given. The less work you did, the better your chances were of getting promoted. The work environment was a soul-crushing factory floor style place, with sodium vapor lighting that always hummed from ballasts going bad. Imagine going to work in a prison, where the only release is death, and more or less have it. However, they paid accordingly, and that's why I was there.

Over the next few summers and winters, I worked at a university research center near my folks home (not at the university I attended down in Texas) as a computer repair tech. One of the better jobs in my life, with the best boss I've had to date. He was a former social worker, but was one of those unfortunate types who really do care and got burnt out. Computers don't go off their meds and try to stab you that often, apparently, so they were the next best thing. I'd never had a boss who actually cared about you before, and I haven't since. The job wasn't that great, but the co-workers made it a place I fondly remember. Most of the work at that lab consisted of contract work for the military, and while the specifics are classified (and completely boring), the generalities are pretty cool. The coolest building was the one that did all the classified work. It was carved out of a former mental insane asylum for children, and if you didn't know what was inside, you'd never guess. In fact, the visitors entrance was just some very boring and nondescript offices. Once you were escorted in past the inner door (which could have been an unmarked janitorial closet for all it looked like), there were lots of funny stairways and closed off labs, but hey, everyone has computers that need fixing, so I saw more labs than just about any scientist there (normally you only see what you're working on in your lab, because you have no business in the other labs). The most awesome lab was the one that did penetration testing - basically, 40 foot long cannons with a bore big enough to fit your head in on some of them. They shot projectiles at various things to see how well they did - airplane cockpits, tank armor, the like. When they fired, a red strobe would flash and a second later the whole building would shake. After the first time, you learned to plug your ears as soon as you saw that red strobe heh.

The dotcom where I worked after my first stint in college ('00 to '05) deserves little mention, except that it was almost exactly like a dotcom in the late 90's - lots of money, people who sucked at running a company, and the belief that throwing money at a problem was the best way to fix it. I learned a lot there, and most of it was filed under 'things to avoid in the future'. If you don't understand how the company stays in business, and the people running it can't offer an intelligible explanation, don't work there. If the turnover is high and no one will say why, don't work there. If benefits aren't offered and you're being paid a lot, it might not be a good idea to work there. If management constantly makes stupid mistakes that are killing the company, don't work there. If you and your co-workers are excellent at what you do, but you're forced to fix problems that shouldn't have happened to begin with, don't work there. If every day is a 'crisis situation', don't work there.

Hell of a way to learn such things...

Over this most recent summer, I interned for a company that did financial transaction processing and found out that people often don't read resumes. If you hire someone who's strength is hardware, networks, and troubleshooting, you shouldn't hire them as a software programmer. While I can program, I'm slow at it because it's the subjective equivalent of tying my shoes five hundred times in a row - insanely, inanely, completely skull-numbingly boring. The coworkers were very nice people, and that's all that made the job worth going into every day. However, I decided not to stay on and they were amazingly gracious and kind about it all. Exceptional people, insanely boring work.

That's the highlights of the various jobs I've held. There's a few others, but they're fairly run of the mill things that don't make for entertaining reading whatsoever.

I want one of these. Mostly because I see things like this and this and go 'wow, that's how vehicles should be! 700 horsepower and able to go 135 mph / 217 kph over rough terrain!' Bwuahahaha!

Blame hexapod and jeramey for this lol.

Rules:

* take a picture of yourself right now.
* don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair... just take a picture.
* post that picture with NO editing.
* post these instructions with your picture.




And yes, I have hair again. I suppose we'll see if I keep it or shave it all off again...

Hmmm... If I keep it, I'm definitely going to need to update my user icon lol.

This is just boring personal stuff of little to no interest to anyone aside from myself, so I'll be polite and use the LJ cut.
( Read more... )

I read quite a bit. At times, as much as a full length book a day (300-500 pages, hardcover). I usually get my books from the public library, for if I purchased them outright, I'd be unable to afford my habit.

Quite often, I'll have to go through the library shelves trying to figure out which books I *haven't* read before. The problem is that I recognize most by their covers, and failing that, reading a few paragraphs tends to jog my memory. It'd be easier though if I had some idea of what I'd read, as I forget titles and authors like nobody's business.

I've noticed that most books now have a ISBN barcode on their back cover, and I've thought about setting up a scanner of some sort, much like the library uses to check out books, though hopefully far less expensive.

Getting a scanner might not be much of a problem - I'm sure some of you recall the ill-fated Cutecat, which left many people with inexpensive scanners they had no use for.

The software, on the other hand... What could I use that would read barcodes and add them to a personal database or upload them to a website like librarything.com?

Do any of you out there have recommendations for such a thing?

Talking to my younger brother who recently graduated this spring and trying to help him through the directionless and overwhelmed feelings that often accompany the loss of direction made me contemplate the same things.

Namely, what do I do with my life? I graduate this coming spring, and after eight years of college, I'll finally be free to do whatever I want really. Having worked at a fair number of extremely varied jobs, I know what I'm good at and what I don't like to do.

My first priority is to get a job that A.) pays the bills and B.) involves something I don't mind doing, or maybe even enjoy.

1. Level designer for video game developer. (low job security, low pay, great fun)
2. Technical writer. (pays the bills but may be boring)
3. Photographer (doesn't really pay the bills though)


The need to have a job / career really imposes upon what you want to do with your life. Being independently wealthy saves you a lot of trouble and really opens up what you can do with your life. If I was only independently wealthy heh.

What your life ends up being depends a lot on the direction you give it when you're at the age / point in life that I'm at right now. So the overall course of my entire life will most likely be shaped by my choices in the next 24 months.

No pressure, no pressure...

Haven't written much of anything in the last few weeks. I haven't written anything remotely creative / not about my personal life in even longer a span of time.

Haven't had much interest in shooting models, trying to see if doing architectural photography would make me any more inclined to take pictures.

If I didn't know better, I'd almost think I was depressed.


Lately, I've just been playing COD 4, while Assassin's Creed and TF2 languish in the dust.

Classes start in a week, three this semester, two next semester, and after that I'll actually have a degree after eight years of fucking around in college. I've learned a lot of things, but I'm not sure it was worth 8 years of my time. To be honest though, about 1/4 of that time was spent failing classes very creatively when bipolar disorder reared its nasty head.

I feel like I haven't done much with my life to date. Short of carving my name into the moon with a giant laser, I might always feel like that. If I ever have a conversation with someone, and the question 'what have you done to set yourself apart from everyone else in this world?' were to come up, I wouldn't have much of an answer. That disappoints me.

Perhaps it's simply the biological understanding of impending mortality that fuels this urge, the notion deep down in your cells that you won't be here much longer and so you should do something to be remembered by.

One of the jobs I've thought about doing was technical writing, though it was always fourth or fifth on the list.

Then I happened to talk to a technical writer at QuakeCon and I found out that the average salary for a technical writer here in Texas is $70,000 a year. Ok then! Screw being a programmer!

In northern California, the median salary for a technical writer was $95,000 a year in 2006. Median! In other words, half the technical writers out there are making *more* than $95,000 a year! For being a writer!

Screw writing novels for a living! Writing user manuals appears to be a much more viable line of work!

Writing manuals isn't the most fun job, but truth be told, I do like taking highly technical matters and breaking them down into everyday english that the average, normal human being can read and understand. That's why I used to write a lot of tutorials.

Given the pay, I'm thinking that this is probably something I should look into and see if I could hack it.

Currently at QuakeCon. OMG. This much fun should be illegal.

I'm starting to have second thoughts about this whole photography thing. I'm good, darn good, good enough to make my way to the top most likely. But I just don't see much of a future in photography where I can sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor. I don't see being retired at 40.

And as much as I love photography, I love the idea of not having to work for a living more. In fact, I think that every career I've ever been good at has always played second fiddle to 'just being able to do what ever the hell I want day in and day out before I'm 50'.

I've known people from every walk of life, and no matter how much money you have, most people worry about it. Even if they've got a few billion in the bank. But the difference between the people who have a few billion to sit on, even just a few million, is the fact that if they really wanted to, they could just cash out and retire. Most of us don't have that luxury.

I've seen people that work all their lives, dawn till dusk, slaving away at a job. Some of them love their work, others hate it, most are just indifferent.

Maybe it doesn't have to be that way.

Maybe it should be work harder, smarter and better than everyone else, and not have to deal with it for as long.

There's not much potential for that if you're a photographer. If you start your own video game studio, maybe. As much fun as it is to shoot models, it's not fun enough. Neither is making video games, actually, but that can serve as the means to an end.

So I stopped by the Dallas CrossFit place this morning to see what it was like.

Did a few exercises.

1. Medicine ball. Imagine a large soft leather ball, 20 lbs. Bounce it off a wall, throwing it about 12 feet up, catching it, doing a squat with it, repeating as many times as you can for a minute. Very exhausting.

2. Sumo lift. Much like a dead lift (squat, grab 75 lb bar, lift), but with a wider stance and a narrower grip to make it a lot more work. Repeat as many times as you can in one minute. Very, very exhausting.

3. Box jump - jump up on a 3ft box, stand all the way up, jump down, repeat. Not too bad, but I could barely breathe at this point, so I was just stepping up and down. Still pretty darn exhausting.

4. Shoulder press. Grab 75 lb. bar off of a stand that's at chest height, push into the air all the way up, let fall, squat a bit, bounce it back up. Repeat as many times as you can in a minute. I think I managed 3 by this point, almost ready to fall over.

5. Rowing machine. You get to sit down, but it's still quite a workout. Repeat as many strokes as you can in one minute. Barely seeing straight at this point.

Round two, I made it all the way up to the box jump again before I started stumbling and about fell over, which was fighting with the urge to puke (too much work in too short a time).

That was the point where I had to sit down. Muscles just wouldn't work, and wobbling and wanting to puke seemed like indicators that it was a good time to take a rest and be smart.

Everyone else did three rounds of this, with a one minute rest between each round. It was fairly insane. Had I exercised at all in the last eight years, I just may have made it through 3 rounds. As it is, one and a half isn't too bad. They were all very supportive, which was good, because I would have stopped two thirds of the way through the first round if they hadn't been.

Anyway, I'm going to go back next week to see if I can keep up with it or not. Wish me luck, because I might have bitten off more than I can chew.

Sadly the home network has gotten a bit long in the tooth. Well, actually it was fairly long in the tooth when I slapped it together with the technical equivalent of spit and baling wire. An old PIII Hewlett-Packard crap box that was (and still is) literally rusting. A generic router from Fry's. Random patch cables. A laser printer that was new when grunge was just getting fashionable.

It works, but by Crom is it ever slow. Transferring 6 gigs of data from the network server to my computer takes... Oh, fifteen to twenty minutes.

Sigh.

Current plan is to convert everything to gigabit compatible hardware and work up from there. The hardware leftover from my most recent upgrade should make a decent substitute for the current server. The AMD Sempron 3100+ isn't that fast by current standards, but it's a lot faster than a PIII. And it has SATA connectors. And USB 2.0 even!

So, current hardware acquisitions as planned:
Gigabit switch.
PCI-E Gigabit cards
500 gig SATA hard drive

Finally getting around to rebuilding my computer.

Current hardware: AMD Sempreon 3100+ (don't ask), 1 gig of ram.
New hardware: Intel Quad Core Q6600, 2 gigs of ram.

Hopefully this will be a bit better.

Tonight I was going to see a movie with a friend, his sister and the wife.

However, my friend got off of work and said he was too tired. I was massively disappointed, because I had been wanting to see it for months, and had been looking forward to it all damn day. He could make it the next day, but you know what? It would still suck not seeing it tonight.

I felt upset because I'm always there for everyone else. If I say I can make it, I do. I always fucking show up for everyone else, whether I'm tired, feeling crappy, or it's a pain in the ass to make it there.

The wife said 'hey, just because he can't make it doesn't mean you should have to forgo seeing it tonight'. And you know what? She was right. Seeing the movie is as much about me being happy as it is my friend being happy. So if he can't make it, that doesn't mean I have to have a let-down for an evening because of it.

Somehow, I just didn't see this myself. A lot of times I think I get caught up in the whole 'making everything perfect for others' syndrome. Jeez, I could be someone's mother.

Feeling a lot better now and heading out to see the movie with the wife.

You know what? After having a few periods in my life where I was dead broke and could only afford to eat ramen for months on end, I decided that I never wanted to go through that again.

That blew.

While money may not buy you everything, it sure does help take care of problems. It's like the universal lubricant for all the friction in life. It's also one of the most effective modifiers for freedom out there - the more money you have, the more freedom you get.

While I'm good at a fair number of things, there really aren't too many I have a burning desire to make a career out of. Thankfully, that leaves 'things I do have a burning desire to make a living at' and that's 'making a lot of money'.

There's a lot of ways to do it. All of them tend to have a few things in common, the first one is not being a complete idiot when it comes to business. Surprisingly, this is a hard one to master for most of humanity. I think that perhaps business isn't inimical to human nature.

Anyway, talk is cheap.

Either I'll fail terribly, or succeed wildly, or just do ok. In any case, at least I'll have given it a go.

So the ignition on my current car (an elderly but very solid '94 Toyota Corolla) had been finicky for the last month or so, and turning the key didn't always mean the engine would turn over right away. You'd have to fiddle with it and coax it a bit.

This became dramatically worse last night.

Dim headlights when trying to start, engine starting by some miracle, etc. Given the symptoms, it was most likely the starter, based on my wife's excellent knowledge of cars (yet another reason I'm glad I married her heh). I wondered if it wasn't the battery or the alternator, but she was right on the mark. Taking it to the mechanic this morning revealed that the starter was shot. A new one is $200. Ouch.

Being that only one of us has a serious job (being an intern sadly doesn't pay like a serious job does) and the other is in college means that it's a tight budget we're on. The world was made for people with two incomes.

The starter is affordable, but that's $300 (add $100 for labor) that could have gone towards rebuilding my computer, which is in serious need of being upgraded (when using Photoshop to edit photos becomes a pain because the computer is slow, it's srsly upgrade time). That's $300 that could have gone towards camera gear I need at this point (a new tripod, the current one is falling apart). There's a lot of things $300 could go towards.


Cars can be expensive after a certain age. People say "Ah, you can buy a used car for $2,500 - why even bother buying a new one?" What they don't realize is that for that price, you're getting a much older car that will require far more maintenance, and the total cost of ownership over time will be far more than what a newer car would be.

In other words, there's a point of diminishing returns. Cars over the tender age of five start to have expensive problems as they slowly break down. Buying used only makes sense if you're getting something under five years old. New off the lot may not make sense due to the massive depreciation that happens immediately after, but neither does 'buying a used car more than five years old'.

It used to be that I knew nothing about cars, but I could quite literally diagnose, fix and rebuild a computer blindfolded with one arm tied behind my back. The reason I got so good with computers is that I fixed a lot of broken ones. I'm not quite to that point with cars, but at least now I can do all the basic maintenance up to putting in a new alternator. Which is entirely due to the fact that I've had to fix my own car on a semi-regular basis.

Doing so has definitely opened my eyes to the hidden costs of car ownership, hopefully enough to inform my next car purchase with a bit more wisdom than I had previously.

EDIT:
Walk back to apartment from mechanic after dropping off car: 1 hour
Biking back to the mechanic to pick up car: 20 minutes.
Driving car back to apartment: 8 minutes.

I'm glad I walked in the morning before it got in the mid 90's. I needed the exercise, but the bike ride back down at 3:30 was like bicycling through a steam oven. Phew!

I've noticed lately that almost every other entry has been about photography. I've got it on the brain and in my veins, but yeah... I know the rest of you might not be quite as interested heh.

Anyway, if it's boring you senseless, chime in.