According to a local radio station, summer has officially left us. Boo hoo! How was it for you?
A lot has happened around me now that I think about it. I became an uncle for the second time. My brother and his wife had a beautiful baby boy in May. He’s a big, healthy boy and doing well. I didn’t really get a chance to see them much over the summer though.
I spent the summer working for my dad in his gardening business. It was good fun, we got great weather and the outdoor life was a welcome change from the computer. We tore down a huge greenhouse on my last day which was especially memorable.
Despite promising myself since back in April when Habboi and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named got me a couple of games, I still haven’t treated myself to a PS3 yet. It’s mainly a lack of money really, although I do feel guilt-ridden if I spend any sizeable sum of money on myself. I have a list of games as long as my arm (or at least as long as three Apple Sticky Notes 
) that I want to get so when my bank balance catches up with my intentions i’ll be off shopping. It’s a good thing I’ve waited though, considering Sony released two new versions of the PS3 in less than a month (The 120Gb slim and 250Gb slim respectively).
A strange thing happened over the summer. Dad lost his wedding ring!=S Cue much pulling of hair and searching the house high and low, but we couldn’t find it. I even had a dream about finding it under a bush. Then one morning he remembered he’d been cutting my neighbour’s hedge two days previous and, while he was up on the shed getting the difficult bits, he’d heard something metallic fall down into the hedge.
So on the off chance that it was his ring, we went round and, with him at the bottom pulling out all the excess dirt and leaves, and me on top of the shed shining a torch down the side looking for anything shiny, we started looking for the ring. We weren’t having much luck though as it had rained the night before so all the leaves were shiny!
After a bit, I went down to the bottom and we both started methodically pulling out all the crap from under the hedge (this was a really wide privet hedge so it was a full arm’s stretch). We couldn’t find it and dad said we’d call it quits (after all, it could have been in one of a hundred gardens across the city if he’d lost it while at work!).
He went to put the ladders back and I told myself I would keep looking until he came back. It didn’t help that the neighbour had a rusty old fence in the hedge so there were some bits we just couldn’t reach. At one particular bit I noticed a clump of leaves we’d missed and I stretched my arm in and around the fence post to feel what was behind it. I should mention at this point that I regularly have mental little conversations with myself and this time was no exception.
I was thinking about the Lord of The Rings where Déagol finds the One Ring in the river and he opens his palm to reveal it. I pictured myself doing this and then presenting it to my dad. While all this craziness was hurtling round my head my hand closed on none other than his wedding ring! I had to do a double take to make sure I wasn’t imagining it and then told my dad the good news. He’s going to have it made smaller since it’s very loose since he lost some weight. Pretty lucky really, but to think if i’d gone with my dad to put the ladders back, we’d never have found that ring. Bizarre eh?
I’ve started back at uni now. This semester i’m working on my dissertation (more on that in a future post), as well as a group game project and a third module which was life writing but i’ve switched to 3d graphics. The life writing class was genuinely interesting and saying it’s autobiographical writing doesn’t just mean writing about what i’ve done. It’s a very reflective module and the lecture last friday raised some interesting issues on the portrayal of the self.
That said, since I discovered Unity was being taught* in the graphics module, I was really keen to do that. The workload for life writing was simply too much for me to attempt both modules so I had to choose. I was also at a disadvantage since it’s completely unrelated to my degree and all the other students are doing writing degrees. Anyway, I emailed the course leader this morning and she agreed that this is the right decision for me at this point in time.
I said taught* above because our tutors have openly said they’re learning Unity too. That’s understandable given that the 2.5 release only came out this year with Windows support, but combine that with the written part of the module (we have to research our own articles then tell them what we know about it) and it seems pointless to even turn up. I can see the point, but surely it wouldn’t hurt to have the lectures before the hand in??
Anyway, Unity is pretty cool, there’s a lot of stuff in the tutorial videos that they haven’t even mentioned in class. I picked up a book on it that just came out this month: Unity Game Development Essentials by Will Goldstone. It looks good but i’ll give a more comprehensive review once I’ve gotten my teeth into it.
I’m tinkering with WordPress again. I recently discovered the Theme Test Drive Widget for WordPress by Vladimir Prelovac: it’s a handy little plugin that allows you to work on a theme live while showing another theme to the public. I already use MAMP on my Mac to host an offline version of the blog, but it’s nice being able to do it all from my main WP installation.
Oh and if you want to work on the same theme, just make a duplicate of the theme’s folder inside wp-content/themes. As well as renaming the new folder, I recommend you edit your style.css file with a helpful description so that the two themes show up differently in WordPress. Then you just select the theme you want to work on in the Theme Test Drive settings panel.
Image showing duplicate themes in the theme management panel
Well, my break time is over, I better do some work.
