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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Ben's LiveJournal:

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    Monday, July 4th, 2005
    6:23 pm
    This is accually pretty good.
    You entered: 8/25/1980


    You were born on a Monday
    under the astrological sign Virgo.
    Your Life path number is 6.


    6
    The Life Path 6 indicates that very prominent in your nature is a strong sense of responsibility. You are idealistic and must feel useful to be happy. The main contribution you make is that of advice, service and ever present support. This is the Life Path related to leadership by example and assumption of responsibility, thus, it is your obligation to pick up the burden and always be ready to help. The Life Path 6 is one who is compelled to function with strength and compassion, a sympathetic and kind person, generous with personal and material resources. Wisdom, balance, and understanding are the cornerstones of this Life Path. Your extraordinary wisdom and the ability to understand the problems of others is apt to commence from an early age allowing you to easily span the generation gap and assume an important role in life early on. While the 6 may assume huge responsibilities in the community, the life revolves around the immediate home and family, for this is the most domestic of numbers. Most with Life Path 6 are the positive types who willingly carry far more than their fair share of the load and are always there when needed. You are very human and realistic about life, and you feel that the most important thing in your life is the home, family and friends.

    The number 6 Life Path actually produces few negative examples, but there are some pitfalls peculiar to the path. Avoid a tendency to become overwhelmed by responsibilities and a slave to others. Also, avoid being too critical (of yourself or of others). The misuse of this Life Path produces tendencies towards exaggeration, over-expansiveness, and self-righteousness. Imposing one's views in an interfering or meddling way must be an issue of concern. The natural burdens of this number are heavy, and on rare occasions, responsibility is abdicated by persons with this Life Path 6. This rejection of responsibility will make you feel very guilty and uneasy, and it will have very damaging effects upon your relationships with others.


    The Julian calendar date of your birth is 2444476.5.
    The golden number for 1980 is 5.
    The epact number for 1980 is 13.
    The year 1980 was a leap year.

    As of 7/4/2005 8:19:57 PM CDT

    You are 24 years old.
    You are 299 months old.
    You are 1,297 weeks old.
    You are 9,079 days old.
    You are 217,916 hours old.
    You are 13,074,979 minutes old.
    You are 784,498,797 seconds old.

    There are 52 days till your next birthday

    on which your cake will have 25 candles on it.
    Those 25 candles produce 25 BTU's,
    or 6,300 calories of heat (that's only 6.3000 food Calories!) .
    You can boil 2.86 US ounces of water with that many candles.  

    Your birthstone is Peridot
    The Mystical properties of Peridot
    Peridot is used to help dreams become a reality.


    Some lists consider these stones to be your birthstone. (Birthstone lists come from Jewlers, Tibet, Ayurvedic Indian medicine, and other sources)
    Sardonyx, Diamond, Jade


    Your birth tree is
    Pine Tree, the Particularity

    Loves agreeable company, very robust, knows how to make life comfortable, very active, natural, good companion, but seldom friendly, falls easily in love but its passion burns out quickly, gives up easily, many disappointments till it finds its ideal, trustworthy, practical.



    There are 174 days till Christmas 2005!

    The moon's phase on the day you were born was full.




    Saw this on Nick LJ and thought his was pretty accurate so I tried mine. It's amazing how with the correct words we all can be Pigeon-Holed.

    Your Turn To Try.
    Wednesday, June 15th, 2005
    11:54 pm
    Beat "Kingdom Hearts". Now onto ".hack//Infection Part 1".


    ohhh, you want more details?? Not now, maybe later.
    Sunday, June 12th, 2005
    4:12 pm
    Good Weekend
    Call me crazy but this weekend feels like a "good weekend". What I mean by that is I feel like I've been productive, I say that because it feels like I havn't wasted it away by sleeping though it, I say that because I havn't slept though most of the weekend. The biggest problem with this weekend so far: I havn't played any Video Games. I'm hopeing to rectify that later tonight. Acctually I havn't played any games in about a week. The main one I'm playing (Kingdom Hearts) I just put down last weekend and have felt like I should be doing other things then playing games. Like usual though I end up not doing anything.

    Karen and I are looking for a new place to live. The lease on this place is up and there is another "threat" of forclosure so K&I are just done dealing with this good-for-nothing landlord guy. Unfortually the best place we found is farther from work so I may have to fight traffic everyday and waste more gas. We are still looking though. We both dont' want to move too close to where I work; it's just not what we want even though it would help us save money. I guess my reasons are, I may not be working for this company for as long as we are living in that place. I guess if that is true then the opposite is true (If we find someplace farther, for the time I am working at this company it wont be were we should be). Those last sentances may be confusing but they did help me think things though.

    As for work, things are going well. After my two games at once projects I was put on a game someone else was working on but they needed help. Then the other person is no longer at the company. They did ask me before they canned him if I think I would be able to see the game through to the end and I said I think I could. They also gave me a raise (6.5k raise in 9 months time, not too shabby if you ask me). I don't believe it's because the other guy got canned but it could be that with the money they are no longer giving to him they could give me more (as they would've wanted to just couldn't). At least that is what I'm telling myself. I know that they love me at work and really don't want to lose me. This is proven by: We may be working on something new in the comming months (obviously I can't say much if anything about it since I did sign a NDA) and it has been said multiple times by the owner of the company and his wife that I would be the first programmer on the new project. I am VERY excited about this new project and hope we will get the green light. When I first heard of this new project being a possibility I serisously thought hell froze over. So because of these events I am happy enough with work that I don't think I will be looking for new work just yet.


    oh screw the spell checking, you all know I'm a bead speller.

    Current Mood: complacent
    Current Music: DragaConcert:81
    Wednesday, May 11th, 2005
    11:13 pm
    A couple of quickies
    First of all, for those of you who do not know I will be visiting Mich. I will be there as of Friday morning. I will be on the west side of the state untill tuesday though. So that leaves a few good days. K&I will be staying with my grandmother for half the time so I'm thinking Friday will be a good day for Munchkin at Dragon's Mead. This way K&I are not waking her up by comming home late. But nothing is in stone so plans may change.

    Second, I had some code for the projects I'm working on, on my laptop and I wanted to get a line count. I knew it would be decently high (for these projects and only me working on them) so I was curious. The code I have on laptop is a few weeks old too. But to end the suspense, one project is 14000+ lines and the other is 12000+ lines. Yes both have 3 (three) zeros in the number. And this was all written since the begginning-ish of Feb. Another thing to keep in mind is that I forked the second project from the first many moons ago so a "decent" amount was just copy-paste-rename. In these files I have nice large block comments so that could possibly cut the lines in half. If only I knew how many hours I've been working on these then I could get a "lines per hour" count.

    Anyways, I have much to do before I can leave tomorrow so I should get at it.
    Sunday, March 20th, 2005
    2:16 pm
    So it's been awhile
    Yeah I konw it's been a while. That is why I want to write something in here. I'm not sure what to write, alot of stuff has happend since the last post but most is boring mundain stuff (the rest is work related that I can't talk about :).

    Anyways, I'm just updateing the server with some PHP stuff which is forcing me to update some other components (like glibc). So while I download it I'm writing.

    Oh now that I think about it, It's offical: I have vacation time in May for comming back to MI. I do not have the plane tickets yet, but it will most likely be around May 13 - May 20 (give or take a day or two on each end). Obviously some of that time will be spent in Battle Creek with Karen's family and I'm betting I will have to bring some work with me, but DO plan on playing some Munchkin with me. I need to introduce more people to the game.

    As for games, I have finially beat Disgaea. But there is soooo much more to do in that game I'm guessing I could spend forever playing it. I put in just under 100 hours to beat it and I konw of few guys from work who have put over 400 hours into that game. One of their roommates has put in around 700 hours. I would say that is pretty impressive for a $50 game. I do want to unlock and open up all that Disgaea has to offer, but I think I'm going to move onto a new game first. I found Final Fantasy VII for like $8 and I figured that was a good enough price to make me buy it, so I'm thinking that will be the next game I play. Yes, I have not played it yet. I konw it's one of the most loved games in history, but I was always happier with how Dragon Warrior played.

    Work is going okay. I accutally have a project with deadlines now. The deadlines are way too short, like always. And best of all I'm working on 2 games at once now. This is because we don't have enough skilled programmers to handle the load right now and I made the mistake of making my first game generic enought that it can be easily ported into a new game. So this means I get to work twice has hard, luckily I'm getting some compensation for this extra work. One of the new guys hired in for this influx of work is asking me, on average, 13 questions a day. Most of these questions are stupid programming questions any freshman in college should know. For example, he ask a question on how to make a C style string in C. He then announced that he has never worked with strings in C before. For you non-programmer people out there, that's like saying: "I know how to eat a steak but I've never used a knife before." So the end result is I feal like I'm making half of his project for him.

    So this is a rather long post and I know people don't like reading long posts so I'll end it here.
    Tuesday, December 7th, 2004
    10:28 pm
    Work
    So I've learned at work that its not a good idea to do your best. Yes you heard me correctly. The story goes like this:

    So I was given my next project a few weeks ago and started working on it. I worked hard so that I wouldn't be the bottle neck. I worked diligently to get this game to where it needed to be and I did it. I was very proud of getting my game to the same level as a co-workers who was working on his game for over a month longer then I was. This was a few weeks ago. Now I have far less bugs then him. I have 98% of my features in and he is still trying to get his going. He also have a separate part of the overall game that needs work. Now, he wants to go home for x-mas the the boss told him, "if you get all the bugs out of your game then you can go" (he was previously denied this vacation time because of our deadlines). What I want to know is, when new bugs come up after he has left who will be taking care of them?

    That's not even the icing on the cake. Because my game is better off then his, I was pull onto a different part of the game to get it working. This other part is a complete re-design to be completed in under 2 weeks.

    So basically I have been told "You did such a good job on your game, which you programed 90+% by yourself, that instead of letting you polish the 'ell out of it (and work "normal" hours like you planned for), we are going to pull you onto something which you are going to have to crunch hard to pull of something pass-able so we can meet our contract." Gotta love management.

    Current Mood: being crushed by life
    Sunday, December 5th, 2004
    9:36 pm
    Moving The Sequal
    Yes we may be moving, again. Not our choice, mind you, but because we are getting kicked out. Ahh, now I have your attention. To clarify, our place is getting foreclosed. Thus we need to move. Now this foreclosure isn't 100% for sure but if it's not resolved before the 16th it is 100%. It's scheduled to be sold on December, 27 ... Merry Christmas, now get out :)

    We've started looking at other places today and we are looking at this in a positive light. This gives us a chance to find a place we wouldn't mind being for multiple years until we have the money to make a down payment on a house.
    Friday, November 26th, 2004
    7:32 pm
    Long weekend update
    So it's been a while since I've updated. Yeah I know. My excuse: Work. I've been working some really really long hours. Yeah I know hours are always the same length but sometimes they dont' seem that way.

    It's a good thing that things are starting to slow down. I know Karen has been not too happy with the situation. She is doing awesome with dealing with it and knowing that it wont last forever. She also realizes that it's part of this industry. So I'm happy about that. There is a guy at work that has a wife that doesn't understand this and it puts a lot of un-needed pressure on him. She always calls him at like 5:30 to make sure he leaves work exactly at 6pm. This happends EVERYDAY! The worst part is, he works roughly 40-50 hours when the rest of us work 40-60 hours and then have to make up his work. Yeah it's shitty. But it wont last forever, he's quitting. I'm not saying this is a good thing but it is the best thing for him.

    Anyways, I have a long weekend right now. I had Thanksgiving off and because I worked on Labor Day they gave me today off as a paid holiday. So I have a 4 day weekend. What am I doing with this new found time? Playing games of course. I picked up Metriod Prime 2 the day it came out and haven't had as much time as I have wanted to play it so I'm hoping to beat the game this weekend. I was thinking of picking up World Of Warcraft to take up the rest of the time this weekend but I don't think I'll have too much time left. Someday soon I may pick up WoW anyways.

    Now you may be asking why I'm not playing MP2 right now, well that is because Karen has to work early tomarrow morning (6am) and she will be sleeping soon so I want to give her as much time with the TV she wants while awake. I know I will be playing most of the night so this is a small sacrafice :)
    Monday, August 30th, 2004
    8:28 am
    PAX and work
    So I went to PAX this past weekend. It was pretty cool. I would have enjoyed it much better if I had a friend (like Nick or Josh) to take with me. There were also too many people there. I do know they got more people then they were expecting (last number of attendies I heard: around 2700). So things did seem overcrowded; thus it was much harder to fully test out the games I wanted to. The pannels they had were sweet. Professionals from the gaming industry talking about different topic, and these professionals were acctually from big name places (Nintendo, Microsoft, Raven, etc...) and they knew what they were talking about! So that was definatly the best part. I played a new game a lot while there. It's called "Munchkin" [or here]. I played the original and the 'Star' offshoot (the 'Star' one more) and I was quite impressed by it. It was a simple fun game that you can pick up in matter of minuets. I've seen this game in the store previously but didn't want to pick it up on a whim, now (when I have $$$ to) I know I can pick it up with out worry (and so can you). The guy that owned the 'Star' offshoot likes the 'Star' one better because the kinds of cards and the humourous words on said cards but I think I like the orginal better because I think the balance is better (though I do have to admit I like the way the two different types of cards are colored in the 'Star' one... once you play it you will understand).

    So that was my weekend.

    Now today is my first day of work. Yes you may notice I'm writing this right now at 8:40 AM so you may think I'm slacking off at work but I'm not at work yet. I don't start untill 10am. Which means I wont be getting home till after 7pm (later if there are more tasks that need to be done). Which means you may not be able to talk with me on the phone most of the time. So not much else to say since I'm expecting to be doing mostly paperwork today :\


    Postscript: At PAX, Gas Powered Games was there showing off Dungeon Siege II and DAMN! it looks nice. I didn't get a chance to play it partly because I knew I wouldn't be able to expore much in 5-10 minuets. But from what I did see it could turn out to be a very good game (the options I saw for your characters look good).
    Post-Postscript: Another upcomming game I saw was "Guild Wars" from ArenaNet and it looks good. It definatly looks like they did their research and thoughly thought out the game but I have a feeling "World of Warcraft" will blow it out of the water.

    Current Mood: relaxed
    Current Music: DragaConcert :89
    Friday, August 27th, 2004
    2:52 pm
    I got a Job
    if you didn't read the Subject line:

    I GOT A JOB!


    Starting monday I will be working for: Handheld Games. As the name implies they make handheld games. I can't say much about what I will be doing so I'll end it here.
    Monday, August 23rd, 2004
    5:42 pm
    Job Interview
    Well all, I know I havn't told most of you this but I had an interview today. It was with "Handheld Games". Yes it's a game programmig position. As far as I can tell it went very well. More info will be in following updates. (Needless to say I can't say too much since I signed a NDA (Non-Discloser Agreement)).
    Wednesday, August 11th, 2004
    5:13 pm
    Sing it with me

    Foad's Foad's, nobody likes a foad.
    Foad's Foad's, I'd rather get SPAM.


    Okay so I'm not a composer, but I did get another foad today. Couple this with the pressure I'm getting to land a job and well I can'd do sh@t -- I can't even rhyme.
    Friday, August 6th, 2004
    8:52 am
    Erg
    Of course, when I need dragacon up and working so that potential employers can see what (little) I have on the server my IP changes. This is the only time this has happened to me (other then moving) since dragacon went live. It did seem like people were visiting the site, though most of it could have been me. There are some pages that I know I didn't visit though. So I guess that is a good sign :)

    UPDATE: Yeeeeaaaa! Dragacon's back up. (that was fast :)
    Monday, August 2nd, 2004
    3:37 pm
    dragonsapp.dragacon.com revamp
    Hey all, I did a slight revamp of my space on dragacon. You can see it here: dragonsapp.dragacon.com

    any and all comments/seggestions are welcomed.
    Tuesday, July 27th, 2004
    4:23 pm
    this fscking sucks
    Friday, July 23rd, 2004
    3:40 pm
    this sucks
    Wednesday, July 21st, 2004
    10:26 am
    You people are going to love this...
    So there's this association called IGDA (International Game Developer's Assocciation) and they have a MI chapter that I went to a few times (their meetings were too far apart for my tastes) and I found out about them from DigiPen. I found out, just as I was leaving DigiPen, that the seattle chapter meets in one of the classrooms at digipen. So since I'm back out there I contacted them and their next meeting it tomarrow. So I'm like "Yeaaah, I get to visit DP again." :) ... then the bomb hit ... this time around the meeting is to be held at Microsoft. And I'm going damn it! The meetings wont always be at MS so I'm happy about that.

    Let the flames begin :)

    Current Mood: Something not sure what though
    Tuesday, July 13th, 2004
    9:29 am
    So back when I worked at the Theater up at MTU, the ligthing teacher told me that there are some lighting designers out there that clain to be able to tell the difference between two colors that are 1 step apart from each other. (For you geeks out there, that's like saying they can tell the difference between #000000 and #000001) When she was in college she had a prof that said this same thing. To test this she was changing the lights' values as the designer was telling her to and he told her to change a group of lights by like 5 (or more) and she fiddled with the buttons and then put everythign back exactly where they were and said "Okay, how's this?" The guy loved it.

    Right now I just got a 'bug report' from my boss guy and he says (in general terms) "This feature you had in last weeks code, it doesn't work in this new compile you gave me." I say "That feature has not been implimented." Which is true since I didn't even know about it. His reply "OH! hahaha, I thought it was in because it worked quite well before"

    This is the second time he's done this to me.

    Update (7/17/04): He did it again. So that's at least 3 times now.
    Sunday, July 11th, 2004
    1:12 pm
    Yeaaaahhhh we got a new Refridgerator. Well we got it yesterday. We found out that the refridgerator that was in this place wasn't cold (enough)... milk would spoil faster, ice cream was soup, frozen juice concentrate wasn't forzen, etc.. Once we told the landlord type people about this we got a new one quite quickly. So all is good now.
    The one we got is quite nice, though it doesn't have the LCD TV in the door like I was hopeing.

    It's finially starting to look like we are making some head-way into un-packing. Our biggest stumbleing block is not knowing where to place things in the living room to gain the max room and best flow. It's kinda at the right size so that you can't do much with it and it's almost perfectly rectangular. The only wall that is at an angle has the fireplace in it so we can't use that to our advantage. Once we get things set up I will be taking a virutal walk-though pictorial so you can see what I mean. Though I still need to finish making my virtual tour maker prog, but you will get to see the pic :)
    Friday, July 9th, 2004
    3:42 pm
    How to make a dragonsapp
    Ingredients:

    1 part friendliness

    3 parts humour

    3 parts instinct
    Method:
    Add to a cocktail shaker and mix vigorously. Add a little cocktail umbrella and a dash of curiosity


    Username:


    Personality cocktail
    From Go-Quiz.com


    Have to say Thank You to Ken for this one.
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