Thats not to say that nothing much has been happening in my life, quite the contrary, just that i’ve not been able to motivate myself to talk about it all that much.

To start with i was made redundant at the beginning of the year which kicked off a whole load of changes in my life, most of which are good, surprisingly.

Having no job and very few jobs out there, i made the decision that now was the time to go to Uni (can’t say ‘back’ as I’ve never been there full time) and get a Bachelors Degree in Software Engineering. Always been interested in programming and had considered it as a career from day 1 along with architecture.

Thankfully a friend of mine is an Architect and he needed someone to do some drawing work a few days a week, so that was ideal to keep me ticking over and can hopefully keep it up while at Uni.

As a result of all this i even decided to move back in with the folks for a year while i study (closer to uni and cheaper), which should prove interesting.

Well that’s a bout it for me really, getting back into doing more exercise now I’ve got more time on my hands and catching up with old school friends which is really nice.

Oh and for those that are interested, we will be producing our final release of Spaceship! in the coming weeks, so watch this space.

Share/Bookmark

For those who don’t know, Spaceship! is a collaboratively designed text adventure by the Guardian’s gamesblog community.

I’ve been involved with this project for a couple of months now, ever since Aleks did her spiel at BarCampBrighton3, it’s been challenging and informative (another programming language in the bank) but most importantly….great fun.

It’s very much at an alpha stage though, so still a few weeks to iron out all of the lumps and bumps, which is why it’s being announced at this point….WE NEED TESTERS….so if you fancy having a peak at what we’ve done, you can find it here. Probably best to just click “play” and play it online (java runtime needed) or if you want you can download the game file and run in an interpreter on your machine (links to terps also on page).

Type “transcript on” to start with and “transcript off” at the end, then save the transcript as ‘spaceship tester [your name] [the date]‘ and send to wikicoders +at+ googlemail.com so we can see where you got stuck etc. Any other feedback also appreciated, either post at our google group or comment here.

There is also a competition to design the art work for the game, so if you have an artistic bent, we’d like to open the floor to you to create our Cover Art.
Submit your pieces to the gamesblog’s Flickr Group, and the submission which the team chooses will win a lovely prize.

Think that about wraps it up, have a look, play to your hearts content and let us/me know what you think.

Share/Bookmark

Decided to use up what was left of my leave days by doing something interesting rather than just sitting around home like i usually do, so i booked a few days camping at a couple of different site in Scotland along the Great Glen at Fort Augustus and Fort William.

To make the most of my time off i opted for traveling up on the Caledonian Sleeper train rather than flying or driving, still think this was the best option even though i was wiped by the time the train got back to Crawley at 9am ready for me to start work that day :S.

Really glad i went and can’t believe i hadn’t done it earlier because its just such an incredible place to go and see, will certainly be going back again.

Weather was a bit hit and miss, which was the more noticeable because i was walking everywhere and staying in a 2 man tent , but to be honest even when it was raining it was beautiful and fun because it’s Scotland i expected rain and in the words of William Wallace in Braveheart “Oh, it’s good Scottish weather, madam. The rain is falling straight down. Well, slightly to the side like.”

And it’s true, when its coming straight down it’s fine, it’s when the wind gets up and it comes at you from the side that it starts to get nasty.

Well i took loads of photo’s as usual that can bee seen here, none of Nessie but Loch Ness was fantastic none the less.

Share/Bookmark

But as usually i needn’t have worried, having bumped into two guys at different times on the way down who were also going, i started to relax and get into the flow early on (offering to help on front desk helped too).

Was surprised how many people didn’t turn up (badges left on the front desk) but there was still a lot of people up in the common room for the intro talk.

We went round the room introducing ourselves with keywords with others being much less serious than my “programming, construction and environment”.

Then the mad dash to the schedule board started, with everyone putting up what and when for their talks, I opted for an early start on the Sunday so i could get a feel for things beforehand (although this changed to almost last thing on the Sunday so i could go to another talk, but I’ll mention that later).

Well i won’t bore you with all the details but i went to many a session on  topics, including:
Flickr API, Content without restriction.

Oh and i met Aleks Krotoski from the guardian, who does the TechWeekly podcast and gamesblog-textadventure which I’m getting involved with.

To sum it up (because i can’t think of anything else to say), I had a blast and will definitely be going to the next one.

Share/Bookmark

But the fact that its a student union isn’t the point, come Saturday I’ll be heading down to University of Sussex Student Union in Falmer to attend the third occurrence of BarCampBrighton, also a first time for me.

Been spending the last few weeks deliberating on what to talk about (everyone has to do a 30min talk on something) and finally put pen to paper so to speak for a few slides on “Building Information Modelling & Revit API”, although still got a couple of topics gnawing at the back of my mind, like “Global Carrying Capacity” and “Landfill Mining”.

To say I’m nervous about the whole thing might be a bit of an understatement, but definitely looking forward to it at the same time, should be loads of interesting stuff to learn and people to meet.

About time i got a bit more social and active with my interests.

Share/Bookmark

My photo’s from the holiday can be found here (apologies for the quantity).

Weather turned out quite well i thought although i’m sure many will disagree, got a bit windy and had a few showers but stayed relatively warm, plus the first few days were real corkers with lots of sun (lots of sunburn all round, except me).

Highlight was definitely seeing dolphins off Trebarwith Strand while having a lovely meal and ice cold Magners in the sun.

The last day turned out pretty good too which is funny because everyone else struck their tents and left in the morning while i waited till the evening, working out if i was going to Bristol on the Saturday, which it turns out i wasn’t . So spent most of the day walking up Stonebarrow Hill next to the camp site then sitting on the cliff reading a book (Judas Unchained if anyones interested) which was really nice (can see the view at the end of my photo album).

Well thats enough waffle about my holiday of which i’m sure you really have no interest in, but what the hell i was bored at lunch and needed something to blog about .

Share/Bookmark

Well for the non geeks amongst us “DnD” stands for Dungeons and Dragons, this being the fourth edition hence the “4″.

DnD is a fantasy role-playing game originally invented by Gary Gygax in 1974 and is currently published by Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro) but this isn’t an information page so go check wikipedia for more info.

Reason for the title is that myself and a few friends (you know who you are) have started up an adventure campaign using the latest DnD rule set.

Think its going really well so far under the leadership of an exceptional DM (Dungeon Master), everyone seems to be enjoying it, especially now we’re starting to get our heads round the mechanics as the rules really do feel like they were designed with a computer game in mind (they probably were) .

Been meeting every couple of weeks of an evening to progress a little, which fits in nicely around everything else.

Share/Bookmark

Was a tough decision as I’ve lots of good memories and joyous times spent socializing and raiding with some good people on there, but i came to the realization that i had been spending too much of my time playing it online and after a few weeks of consciously not logging on i realized that i missed the people more than the game so the time had come to quit.

New expansion coming out towards the end of the year so I may yet change my mind and re-activate my account to give it another try, but thats at a point in the future, so we shall see.

For now I won’t have the pressure of making sure i’m online to raid and hopefully I’ll start to make better use of my time. Actually i already am, otherwise i wouldn’t have gotten around to setting up this blog and making progress on both my website and another site.
( barrymars.co.uk & wfrpbyemail)

Share/Bookmark

Don’t know how often i’ll post yet, kind of depends if anything interesting enough happens for me to post.

Share/Bookmark