I stood in the Harry Potter line.  Well, not quite.  My friend and I went over to Borders at Santana Row just before 9:00PM last night to check out the action for the newest Harry Potter novel.  We were surprised to see no lines other than the short line to confirm reservation for the book and get a wristband for the midnight madness.  The first floor had the normal amount of traffic that you would expect for a Friday night, with people crowding around the magazine racks and teenagers sitting on the floor in the magna department.  Masking tape on the floor outlined the line to cash register, starting at the romance paperbacks, running around the aisles of horror, science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, and the last mile was loaded with Harry Potter merchandise and candy.

The upstairs seem normal enough as we made our counter-clockwise prowl of the floor.  The children department had way too many young schoolgirls to be hanging out for that time of night.  When we got into the nook and crannies of the computer department where young couples hide out to make out, did we find witches, wizards and more schoolgirls. There was a line outside when we left.  I was glad to be out of there before someone mistaken me for Rubeus Hagrid because of my long beard.  The last thing I needed was a bunch of schoolgirls chasing me down the street.

We drove briefly by the Barnes & Noble on Steven Creek Boulevard to check out the Harry Potter line over there.  No line but one heck of a Harry Potter party for the kids inside the children department.  The last time we drove by this location was when Bill Clinton was signing his memoirs in June 2004.  As it happened, traffic was a mess with the Secret Service vehicles and the Clinton limo trying to get out of the parking lot that night; Bill and Hillary stepped out to wave to everyone for five minutes before the traffic jam was cleared up.  We were three cars away from the former first couple.  The closest I ever got to another president was a quarter-mile from George H.W. Bush in San Francisco when my Dad and I drove home from our construction jobs in the city just hours before the Loma Prieta earthquake.

I never got caught up in the Harry Potter craze enough to read the books.  I saw the movies, including Order of The Phoenix last week, that I thought they were all entertaining even if I didn't understand some of the details.  I been reading too many other books series in recent years, including Stephen King's The Dark Tower (seven books), Jim Butcher's Dresden Files (eight books), Kim Harrison's Hollows (four books), E.E. Knight's Vampire Earth (four books), Karen Traviss's Wess'har Wars (five books), and various re-readings of fantasy classics from David Eddings (16 books) and Terry Brooks (six books).  A rare joy to find a book that isn't part of a series these days.  Now that the last Harry Potter book is out, I'll wait until the paperback set of all seven books come out for Christmas (hint, hint) before I start reading that series.

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After attending school on a part-time basis for the last five years, I finally got my associate degree in computer programming.  Well, almost.  I missed the filing deadline for the graduation petition by one day.  I won't officially be graduating until the end of the summer session, and my diploma won't arrive in the mail until late August.

I'm finished with my second tour through college.  (I got my first associate degree in General Education back in 1994, and got kicked out the university a year later.)  I'm still planning to take Ceramics II class next semester but that's more for my own personal development.  As I told my instructor, Dan McElroy, whom I had for most of my programming classes, I'm glad that it's over.  The road was long and hard with computer programming no longer the hot field that it once was five years ago.

Now that's school is over, I'm getting back into writing again.  I wrote 13 short stories during the six-week winter break, sending them off to the literary magazines to find a home somewhere.  Five are still circulating while eight came back over the last few months with rejection slips.  I spent the past weekend editing the stories where necessary—which I'm happy say wasn't much—before sending them back out for another round of rejection slips.

I'm thankful that I got a Brother HL-5250DN network printer to replace my old Samsung ML-4500 Windows printer when I got serious about being a writer.  The faster print speed (30PPM versus 6PPM) and Mac-compatibility made a huge difference in printing out the cover letters and manuscripts.  I'm still working on a backlog of writing stuff: editing a 100-page rough draft of a novella, developing story ideas that's been sitting on the back burners, and revising a new story that I wrote up yesterday.  I'm still planning to write a novel this summer if I can find a worthwhile story idea.

Another idea I'm thinking about doing is a weekly webcomic, mostly to learn Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop like I learned web programming through my website.  My drawing skills are getting better for each of the acrylic painting that I been doing in a watercolor tablet.  I usually do about one or two paintings per week (except this week where I done six so far to unwind from the semester).  After being in the video game industry for six years, a re-telling some of my experiences might be more suitable as a webcomic rather than prose.   If I have enough material to do a 12-week run, I'll go live with the webcomic.

A common misconception that people have outside of the video game industry is that testing video games is fun and easy by sitting on a sofa all.  Not true.  It can be hard work when you're working 80 hours a week for days on end, living off of vending machine food, and wondering why the video game gods and/or your supervisor haven't struck you dead yet.

Then there are the Dilbert-inspired moments, like when an air conditioning crew pumped coolant through a worn garden hose in the crawl space above the IT director's office that exploded green slime on his brand new 19"-inch CRT monitor (which cost $1,200 USD at the time).  Moments like that are priceless when told in the right medium.

[Note: The webcomic never took off because my drawing skills really did suck.  Besides, too many webcomics are about the video game scene, making it difficult to successfully break out and/or be profitable with another wannabe webcomic.  I started writing a novel based on my misadventures at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company/two owners/multiple identity crises) a year later.  The names of the guilty and not so innocent have been changed to protect the stupid.]

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Entering the home stretch for this semester as I graduate with an associate degree in Computer Programming from San Jose City College in less than two weeks.  Ceramics I is pretty much finished as I need to glaze my four pieces—a self-portrait bust, a large water jar, a square bowl, and a Egyptian figurine—this week to be ready for the potluck and critique next week.  A Directed Study (CIS 098) course is being substituted for Object Oriented Programming (CIS 059) that's not being offered this semester or next was completed in less than ten hours.  (The record for completing an entire course in the fewest hours possible was a online HTML class that took me six hours to complete all the assignments on the last day of school.)  Data Structures (CIS 055) is proving to be problematic; I want to do something else than figuring out how to link data nodes this way and that.  I might wait until the very last day to finish all the assignments for that class.

I'm still planning to take Ceramics II for fun next semester.  But this is the last semester  I can qualify for academic pricing on certain software packages.  I got Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium and Photoshop Lightroom for $600 USD (retail is ~$1,800 USD), and I got Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional on order for $99 USD (retail is ~$800 USD).  These are heavy duty programs if you're going to have a career as a web developer and programmer.  I'm currently using Dreamweaver to prototype a complete redesign of this site over the summer, and Lightroom to organize my photo collection.  As for all the other programs in CS3, I'm waiting for the how-to books to be published this summer as this software package is so new that there's nothing on the web about using the new features.

[Note: The website redesign was abandoned in January 2008 with the switch to Joomla! CMS.  When I finish converting the legacy content, I will try my hand at creating a custom template to finish the redesign.]

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The last several weeks—or maybe the last month—of midterm madness is finally over.  My sleeping pattern is returning to normal.  The extra weight from eating food at odd hours of the night is burning off.  My head doesn't feel like an exploding zombie headshot in Planet Terror.  What brought me back to normalcy was reading "One L" by Scott Turow, his semi-autobiographical story of being a first year law student at Harvard Law School that's a lot more insaner than my accumulated ten years of college (1990-1994 / 2002-2007).  My graduation petition has been accepted by the school, and, if I successfully pass my programming classes, I can pick up my diploma in late August.

My programming instructor returned a 3.5" floppy disk that I submitted to him in my first programming class in Spring 2002.  Now that's spooky.  None of my computers today have a floppy drive installed.  I still have a few floppy drive units in storage after I rebuilt my computers a while back, and a USB floppy drive for those rare occasions when I do need to access a floppy.  Five years ago we used to turn in our source code and executable files on floppies.  These days it's just print outs and/or emailing the source code.  For a directed study project, I turned in the completed project with source code, executable, data, and documentation files on a CD.  I heard some schools require assignments to be turned in on a USB memory stick.

The Data Structures (CIS 055) class is getting hard.  I've always relied on the instructor's lesson and reading the source code to understand the material without having to read the textbook itself.  The assigned textbook for this class dribbles out the source code in bits and pieces, and then buries the completed source code in overwritten comments that make a bad science fiction novel enjoyable.  My superficial understanding of the C++ language doesn't help either.  Looks like I'm going to have to work for a grade in this class instead of cruising through my final semester.

On a related note, I got my midterm worksheet back in Ceramics I (Arts 46A) with an "A" and a comment from the instructor that I have excellent focus and control of my work.  That's being put to the test with the larger-than-life self-portrait bust that will probably weigh 30 pounds in clay when I get done.  It's the biggest piece in class as I have the biggest head.  This week I'll be carving in the details, getting back a glazed statuette and the other statuette will be ready for glazing.  Project four is stacking three or four separate pieces into one object.  My design will be based on a tall Japanese water vase that I saw in a ceramics book.  The bottom bowl, sprout and collar will be done on the kick wheel, coil building will be used for the middle to combine the other pieces, and using nylon rope to impress a spiral design on the outside.  After working in the studio for six hours straight, I just come home on Saturday afternoons to collapse in bed since I'm so exhausted from all that focus and control.

I been playing Age of Mythology lately, an old game that's been sitting on my hard drive since the game was released.  My interest in the single-player campaign died on the very first mission that laid out the story elements back then, and it happened again when I replayed it.  I never did played the single-player campaign mode in the previous games in the series, Age of Empires and Age of Kings.  I was more interested in the single-player random maps where you need to get your economy and military up and running in 15 minutes flat if you want to avoid losing the game after the first 20 minutes.  This game is tiding me over until I can finished some additional hardware upgrades for my game machine before I can get Supreme Commander in June when I'm safely done with school.

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