Well, I wiped the sweat from my brow this morning. Let out a big *WHEW*!!!!!!!!!!

We shot a FIEA commercial a couple weeks ago. It was a day long affair, and I hid out all day with my door closed in hopes of being accidentally avoided by the casting director. At about 3pm, he found me talking to Brian, who had come in to chat and left my door open. So I went and shot some scenes of me teaching to a group of fake students. Well, they were real students, they just weren’t students in a class I was teaching, since they were from all the disciplines, not just programming.

In any event, since then I’ve been sweating it big time that my a$$ would end up on channel 27 during South Park, 5 nights a week for 3 months, starting tomorrow. It debuts on the Gator game tomorrow, which means my Dad might see it without having to trudge his way through an episode of South Park, which would be a good thing. Our marketing and communication gurus have been working with the tv station to get a commercial ready from all the footage they shot that day. In this morning’s 9AM staff meeting, Todd and Rogier showed the finished product. The fact that I wasn’t in there was a home run in my book, but what made that home run a grand slam was the fact that Brian was not only in there, but he was shown doing a gorilla animation for a group of students holding a small mannequin in his hand. Since Brian is hungry for the media spotlight, everyone came out of the meeting a winner. The commercial itself turned out great, and not at all cheesy like the other video game school ads. I mean, naturally, I would say that, but I was pretty worried about how it would compare to those, and I think it comes off much more professionally than those. If you see it, let me know what you think. Maybe if you’re lucky I can get you non-locals a link to it.

I start back at EA part time today doing some work for their Superman project, in case you were concerned that my weekends were a little bit “too” open. I have a lot of friends over there, so it will be good to see them more than once in a blue moon now.

I’ve been playing a lot of 360 lately, and had a great chase in Need for Speed last night end in me getting arrested and paying a steep fine for my recklessness. I tell ya, I was really a hooligan though, so I got what I deserved. It wasn’t enough that I was going 160mph in a 40mph zone, but apparently they’d had enough after I disabled 38 of the city’s finest cop cars. I almost got away once but got cocky and continued racing around the city instead of hiding out when I was out of sight - trust me when I say I will NEVER make that mistake again.

So I got a 360 - no big deal right? Wrong. I’ve been wanting one since they came out, so my dream became a reality yesterday.

My buddy Scott Nagy had given me a link to a list on BestBuy.com that showed which stores in an area you specify by zip code had 360s in stock. Simple, you just type in your zip code and look and see if any stores are black, not gray. Well, all stores are always gray. Always. I checked diligently every morning since he gave it to me a few weeks back. All gray. All the time.

Then Wednesday night I got home and checked it, and it showed Florida Mall and Oviedo were black, meaning they had them. I immediately called both stores, and both confirmed that they had gotten a shipment that day, and had sold out of them in minutes. OK. No big deal, missed it by a few hours, no biggie, but a good sign that the link idea maybe could work. Fast forward 12 hours.

Wake up Thursday morning, check the list. Nothing. OK - well, actually a good sign that they had already reset the gray status of those other 2 stores, so it’s somewhat realtime. So I prepare my Perl Script for class, do a little research, and start talking to Dave about him maybe coming down for Spring Training. He goes into no-respond to IMs mode, and I’m left in a conversation by myself, so I get bored. I think - ok, I’ve got 90 minutes to class, why don’t I go fix myself some lunch and get rolling. Before I do, I check the list. ALTAMONTE SPRINGS HAS THEM.

OK, no biggie, let me call. “No, we haven’t had any for a while.” OK, check. Call Angus - tell him to high tail it to Altamonte. He’s checking out an S2000 with his girlfriend, so he’s unavailable, but he says if he gets a chance he’ll head over there and get me one if they have one - I dismiss that, knowing how much he likes spending time with Cindy. I forego lunch and leap in the shower, convinced they’ll be heading to the floor soon. I’m in the car in a flash, hoping against hope that I could get one. Getting off on 436, Angus calls my cell phone, and I’m thinking he’s going to tell me he couldn’t make it over there. Instead, he’s in the store, and they won’t let him buy two, and he doesn’t know what to do.

NO PROBLEM TOM I’M 2 MINUTES AWAY PUT IT IN YOUR CART AND SHOP!

So that’s the end of the story, I got one, it totally rules, and all that. I hooked up all my MP3s and pics from my server, and now slide shows will rule. Downloading cheap fun games kicks ass. Call of Duty looks incredible. PGR is a riot. All the things you’ve heard are true.

Now back to my Hexic achievements.

Planning out my Spring Training trip, so if anyone wants to come down and join me, let me know now. Here’s what I’m looking at:

I might just bail altogether with a baseball trip and do something else, but hey it’s fun to plan it out anyway. Once I get my hotel on priceline or buy any game tickets, then you’ll know I’m actually serious.

Olivia doesn’t have a blog, but she’s taking mine over just this once…

I had a great Christmas. From Santa Claus, I got a desk and a TV. My Dad got me a Nintendo DS and 3 very good games. We got a lot of board games and I got some clothes. Mostly I got notepads and toys that I like very much. On my DS I’ve played one of my favorite games Nintendogs. My dog won in two competitions. I don’t know what else to put.

I’m sure you followed our pre-holiday vacation and busy Christmas on Tina’s site, so I don’t need to tell you that we had a great time and everyting went as scheduled. I took lots of photos and movies on the trip, but nothing tells the story of our trip better than this short movie clip from the Georgia Aquarium. If you have a high speed connection, enjoy.

Hit the Biltmore last night for dinner and a candle light tour of the house. If any of you heard about the ice storms in Carolina and all the power outages late last week - it was real bad. Between Spartanburg and Asheville looked as bad as any hurricane damage I’ve seen in Florida - there were half trees everywhere. I’ve never seen a non-wind event do so much damage.

The Biltmore is pretty incredible - this is our first time here, but probably not our last. It’s the largest house in the US, and it’s got a little bit of everything. It would use the Hearst Palace in California as a servant house. Food at Deerpark was buffet style and very good, and I liked just about everything. It was definitely upscale, and while probably not worth $33, it was pretty good nonetheless. I’m confident our dinner at the Dillard House tonight will put a beating on it, but then again, that’s my favorite restaurant, so it better.

So today was the wedding. My radiant cousin Lindsay asked me to be the official “photographer” at the wedding, and I told her I would do it. It was fun, but it was also a lot of work. I got a new 1GB memory card and a new flash for the occasion, both of which came in very handy. I took a grand total of about 920 pictures between the rehearsal dinner, the wedding and the reception. Everyone seemed to have a great time at all events, and everything went off basically without a hitch. I only deleted a few pictures inadvertantly, and they were only “non-essential” ones, although they were some pretty candid shots. Oh well.

Hooray for car trips! 8 hours later, we’re in South Carolina. Totally uneventful trip, the best kind of all.

It’s been a bit since I’ve been cold. It was about 43° when we got out of the car - oh my god is that cold. You northerners are a tough breed I tell ya.

We had our FIEA christmas party tonight, and fun was had by all. The 20 or so of us went to Buca di Beppo, and got a smattering of menu items - definitely the best way to do Buca. Got to try lots of different things, and even got some dessert. Way to go, Ben!

I normally bite off more than I can chew when it comes to Christmas presents, and this year was no exception. Let’s just say I’ve been up all night working on them. Hopefully the lucky people receiving these items will appreciate them at least as much as I enjoyed the process of creating them…

Looking really forward to our trip on Friday - it’s been a few months since we’ve seen the rest of the family, time to get back in touch. It’s hard to believe that only a few years ago, we went many, many years without seeing any of this side of the family…now we take it for granted that we see them every few months like clockwork. Hard to imagine returning to not seeing them ever again.

I gave a presentation this morning in Tommy’s 1st period Journalism class, in addition to the students in 2nd period Journalism as well. The school paper was published today, so it was a pretty good day for it. It went much better than my first experience at Lake Mary High, last year for “Career Night", which felt more like “Make Fun of Speaker Night". I’ll be returning for 4th period for AP Computer Science, which should be interesting…

I told my boy Todd about my Dwight Howard sighting, and he said “Oh my God was he frickin’ huge?” (yes he said frickin’). Short answer: Yes.

My tire was low today, which I realized as I was out the door to join my buddy Jason at the RDV. We like to hookup on Mondays and Wednesdays for a little PSP gaming, wireless style. We’ve been enjoying Hot Shots Golf immensely. I was all set to spring my new outfit on him today, but a trip to Discount Tire Center put an end to that.

It was 45° here last night. Why did I move here again??? I thought it never got cold????

While out last night at the Cheesecake Factory at Mall of Millenia, I saw Dwight Howard, which was pretty awesome. Dude is huge, and was dressed up in a pinstripe suit. That’s a great restaurant, he’s got good taste.

The first semester of FIEA went out with a bang, and we will be doing a “blob” game with this cohort. We will start working on it with them in January, when the new cohort joins us as well. It will be very strange to have 30 students at the facility. The most satisfying thing so far at FIEA has been that I’ve been there from the very beginning, and I’ve seen it go from a glimmer in someone’s eye to an actual school, executing on a curriculum that I had a lot to do with planning. Very Cool.

We’re heading up to South Carolina for Lindsay’s wedding on Friday, and following that we’ll be having some fun in the Southeast part of the US. What I’m most looking forward to is seeing all the Christmas stuff. We’ll see the Biltmore Estate, the Dillard House, the Georgia Aquarium and Callaway Gardens.

I’m going to be learning Java over the break. Wish me luck.

Tina told me I needed to catch up last night on Lost, so I did. So anybody who wants to chat about it (which seemed like just about everyone up until last night), I’m now ready to talk. If you don’t watch Lost, I recommend getting the DVDs once this season is over and catching up. It’s neat!

I’ve been over on main campus two times this week already. We talked to a computer graphics class last night about the game industry, FIEA, and some high level 360 stuff. They seemed to enjoy it, and the professor was especially excited to hear what we had to say. I’m heading to USF on the 21st, and to FIT on the 18th - no rest for us academics. We’ve got our spring class pretty well set, so we’re moving onto the Fall class - it’s so much easier now than it was when I first started. Back then, we weren’t a Master’s Degree, and we had a $50,000 price tag. Now we’re an accredited Master’s Degree and we cost $30,000. Bonus!

I’m planning on picking up a 360 at Walmart the night they come out - I think they don’t do pre-orders and will get some in. Does anyone know if there’s like any official time that you can line up or anything, or how that works? I’m planning on sending Tina up there, and I’m hoping she doesn’t have to like sleep there a few nights or anything just to get me a game system. That would hardly be fair, so I’m going to try whatever I can do to save her from that. Please - someone - send me some alternate ideas!

Hard to believe it’s been a month since I’ve written in my blog. I’m getting to be as bad as Chris and Lindsay, so we can’t have that now, can we? And if you two were waiting for me to write to finally update yours, here’s your chance.

Part of my lack of updates, I must admit, is that I don’t have much to write about, and what little info I do have Tina always beats me to. We had a great birthday party for my Mom, but she beat me to it. We had a great FIEA party for all my co-workers, but she beat me to that too. My fantasy football team are the hardluck kids, she even beat me to that. Oh wait, nevermind, she didn’t write about them.

I’m serious, my team can’t get a break. It’s a good team, but I keep losing. Barely. It sucks to watch me to lose to inferior teams week in and week out. To give you an idea, I’m 2-5. Dave is 6-2. His average score per game is 128 points. Mine is 132.3 points. You starting to get my drift? It’s bad enough to make me question why I play fantasy sports. However, my basketball team should kick ass this year. As long as Jermaine O’neal and Dwayne Wade stay healthy, that is.

We finally got our drink machine figured out. I got into contact with the local Island Oasis representitive after they stopped selling the drink mixes in the liquor stores. Previously, I had avoided contacting these people because I had seen a couple people on the web mention that I wasn’t supposed to have the drink machine and that if the company found out, they could come get it. Well, I had paid $800 for it on ebay, so I wasn’t really anxious to have them come rescue it, needless to say.

When I could no longer buy the mixes at the store, I tried a couple sources. I had emailed Island Oasis just to ask where I could buy the mix, not mentioning what type of machine I owned or anything. They got back to me with the name of a guy, with whom I made contact via email. I asked their prices, and he got back to me right away with info, which I took as a good sign, even though it could’ve been a bad sign just as easily. My Mom gave me a phone number of a restaurant in Deland which had the machine and had offered to buy me some drinks, but they didn’t answer when I called. I finally decided that enough was enough, and we would just buy it from the guy and let him come over and see the machine, the house, comfiscate whatever he was going to comfiscate, and live happily ever after.

We ordered a case each of mango, margarita and pina colada, since a case was the minimum purchase order of any one flavor. He came over and dropped it off, and then asked if he could see the machine. Tina took him back and gave him the grand tour, and he turned the machine on to have a listen. He noted that the ball bearings sounded like they were going, but that other than that, it appeared to be in good shape. Tina noticed a hose in the back of his car, and asked if we could have that, since ours didn’t come with a hose. He obliged. He also dropped off a bunch of other flavors for us to try, including lemonade, hurricane, wild berry and peach. What a guy!

We used the machine for the FIEA party saturday, to the tune of about 30 drinks, and everyone seemed to enjoy them. I made Tina her new favorite Pina colada based drink, the “Stormalong", which she had while lounging along Stormalong Bay at the Beach Club Resort on our Disney trip. It’s a mix of Pina Colada, Amaretto, Bailey’s and Kahlua, and she said I made it perfectly. I have to admit it did smell good, and when I made it for three other people at the party, it was received with rave reviews each time.

Work has finally let up at EA, and I’m just doing my thing at FIEA now. We’re just getting into C now, and XBOX, so the assignments should be getting more interesting. Not that I don’t enjoy assembly and Perl, it’s just you can do so much more interesting stuff in C that it makes the assignments more fun to come up with. And watch for Madden360, the game we finally finished, to hit store shelves with the XBOX360 on November 22 or thereabouts. It’s a great looking game, easily the best looking game I’ve ever worked on, but then again, I’m biased.

I went to the UCF game tonight, and had a great time with my boss Ben. We got to sit in the President’s box, and it was pretty incredible. Great food, great people, great game. And we won for the first time in a LOOOONG time, 23-13. We had the longest active losing streak in major college football, so this was a big win indeed.

Got to go to Simon’s play last night, he did a great job and I was very proud of him. After the play, there were many people in the audience shouting his name and professing their love to him, which was a little weird. Clearly, he has quite the following at the school. It got to the point where I didn’t want him to appear anymore since it would cause a disruption each time. He agreed after that it was “brutal". Sometimes it’s just scary how much he takes after me.

I headed up to Gainesville yesterday to talk to Computer Science students that might want to get into the game industry or come to FIEA. I had a lot of fun, and the more I go there, the more I like Gainesville. This was the first time I’d been there while school was in session and the atmosphere was just great. Nothing like the University of Utah - that’s for sure.

Between the road trip and the teaching, I wasn’t able to put in any time at EA this week, so I’m here for two long days this weekend. I’ve got some stuff I need to get done, so hopefully I can accomplish that in the next two days.

I saw the new Nintendo controller today - give them points for at least trying something new and risky to push the state of the industry. I’m not convinced that the thing is going to be great for sports games, but I can certainly see where the obvious examples of it’s use would be made more fun. The pluggable model also seems smart, and I could see them making different things to plug into the clicker to make for fun interactive entertainment options for years to come. Ben mentioned that he’s got an inside track on a couple revolution devkits for FIEA….so sign me up. He’s also got some DS kits coming. Um. Awesome? Man I love learning new systems, especially (I’m thinking) well documented, stable ones I don’t have to make a launch title for.

I was proud of Tommy having 6 pictures on the back of his High School newspaper of the football game. I take partial credit for letting him use my camera, as well as passing on at least a portion of my photography know-how. Here’s hoping he got more than just a partial dose….only time will tell…

The first time I heard that college was using instant replay, I thought it was going to slow the game down too much. Well, 2 weeks in - yep I was right. When the coaches don’t have to challenge, they over-review. And I’ve seen a couple instances now of refs looking at each other not making a call because they don’t want to be wrong, so they just make a call and then put the headphones on. That’s lame. The NFL rules cause the coach to only challenge plays that matter, and it makes it so that there’s a limit to the madness. Although lately, I’ve been hearing that the challenge itself is an overrated part of the NFL anyway and doesn’t really add much to the overall experience. I don’t know.

Well, I was sure glad to have Tina back from her big Holland trip. I’m glad she got to go and all, but with the kid’s activity schedule, FIEA starting up and my EA part time gig, it was very difficult indeed on the homefront. She had a great time and by now, and that’s the only thing that matters. I just hope she doesn’t take any more trips anytime soon.

I managed to teach my first week at FIEA without absolutely hating it and wishing I had never left EA. Actually, I like all 4 of my programming students, and look forward to the next 12 months. I’m finding that the constant curriculum development is taking a long time, and the other little things like relationship building, student recruiting, future curriculum planning and project planning leave very little time for anything else. The good news is that I’m enjoying my job now more than ever, and I’m learning so much game stuff that I never had time to in industry that it’s very fulfilling. I’m learning a ton about a program called Maya, which is used by most everyone in the industry, and has always been sort of black magic to me ever since Dave insisted on being the Maya guy way back on wrestling.

I love having Brian here - FIEA just wouldn’t be the same without my old friend to hang out with. I only wish Jason would be willing to go to lunch with me once in a while, then I’d be truly having my cake and eating it too. I got a fridge and a lamp for my office, so it’s starting to slowly take shape. I’d like to get some artwork in there, and maybe a TV and some game systems, and then it’ll be good to go.

Every morning in my UCF mailbox, I get a mail with the with the subject line “Good Morning UCF!". While I think that’s weird, one of those emails led to me looking at something called the DMAC (Downtown Media Arts Center, basically an artsy-fartsy movie house). When I went to their site, I noticed they had a movie playing this weekend chronicling a band I’d never heard of called The Minutemen, but the description of the band and the movie made me realize that Tommy would probably enjoy it. When I then remembered that one of our new FIEA students Rich Grula runs the DMAC, I thought I should give it a shot. So I emailed Rich to find out how early I should get there, and he actually comp’d me 2 tickets. What a guy!

The theater was in a part of town that is in one of those strange renovation steps where some things are really cool and nice and other things around it still smell like pee. Luckily, the DMAC itself was in really good shape. It had a small screening room upstairs for the movies, which seemeed like it would hold 50-75 people. It was reasonably comfortable, and the movie played on an LCD projector from the roof. It was nice enough, and had a good sound system - Tommy enjoyed the content as expected. I worked extra late Friday night and extra early on this fine morning to afford the time to take off yesterday afternoon, and it was worth it - we had fun.

Joey and Mark came over and took the kids to Wekiva, and we hooked up after the movie for a little fine dining at our favorite Italian restaurant Vivona’s. A place, so good, so close, and triple miles on my Amex - how is that possible? Tommy missed the visit because he was at John’s birthday party, but I’m sure he had fun with his friends.

Speaking of projectors - I got a projector setup in my living room this week. When the room is dark, that thing looks great. It’ll be interesting to see what Tina thinks of it. I’d like to get an HDTV tuner box and start watching some Monday Night Football in HD, although I hate watching live TV (or more precisely, live commercials). As long as HD-Tivos are too much money, an over-air HD tuner is pretty much my only option. We’ll see.

FIEA classes starts tomorrow. I’m teaching a programming class from 3:05-4:30 on Mondays and Wednesdays, and while I’m looking forward to it, I still have a lot of work to do. As we develop and execute on the curriculum, it will definitely get easier teaching these classes to new crops of students each Spring and Fall. Brian and I are teaching a class over on campus Tuesday nights from 6-9 as well, so that should be fun. I’d like to race Brian over to campus, me on the 408, and him on 50, since he doesn’t have a toll box and refuses to pay for tolls. I think if he leaves at 3:30, I could probably have leave at 4:30, have dinner at the Union, and still beat him to class.

My wonderful wife comes home tomorrow, none too soon. She didn’t seem to happy with the condition of the house last time, which was pretty much perfect when she got home. It’s the kind of thing, I guess, where if it’s perfect, it’s like yeah, of course, it’s like I left it, big deal, but if it’s not perfect, then we all lose. It’s not perfect this time. Not even close. 3 weeks in Utah was my breaking point - another 10-day vacation has left the house in a condition that will require some maintenance upon her return. Here’s hoping she harkens back to all the good times in Holland she had as she gets the house back into ship-shape. Yeah right.

I would say the whole - hey, here’s a great idea, I’ll go to work at the school during the day, and then at night and on the weekends, I’ll work at Tiburon - is a pretty bad idea. I don’t want to overreact, because I don’t know how much of this is just because I’ve really had 3 fulltime jobs this week, and the school stuff has been very busy since we open Monday. I would say it safe to assume that if next week’s not better, I’ll need to adjust my schedule accordingly.