I often do a "Year in Review", but this year I thought I'd change it up a bit. Last year, in addition to reviewing what happened the previous year, I added some goals for 2015. This year, instead of just reviewing what happened last year and adding the goals, I figured I would also add in a kind of "report card", where I grade myself on how I did towards those goals from the previous year.

I'll be honest. These goals stayed with me all year long. When I thought about what I want to do, I compared that to my goals. Having goals I actually thought about has made me learn a bit more about myself than I knew before.

So, without further ado, here's the 2015 report card!

Music

2015 Goal: Complete and release full versions of "All In My Head" and "Paper"

There's no beating around the bush here, neither of these goals happened. In fact, I was musically silent for the first half of the year. I did, however, come out with three different pieces of music, but none of them were original works.

In 2015, I started a podcast with Dr. Zing and Morfod called the Self-Destruct Sequence Podcast, which is a podcast all about Descent. Dr. Zing kind of dropped off the face of the Internet a few months ago, but Morfod and I picked it back up late last year, and have been having fun with the episodes this year. I mention this in the music section because when we were putting the first episode together, we wanted to have some Descenty music, and I delivered in a big way.

Our title music, Self Destruct Sequence, is a remake of the level 1 music, while our outro, Mars Processing Sequence, is a remake of the level 8 music. Both had electronic elements, and two guitar tracks each that I performed myself. This is the first time I've actually been happy with guitar tracks that I've created, especially the lead guitar parts. Hopefully I can take my experience from this and translate that into better guitar tracks in my music in the future.

The third piece was something I couldn't get out of my head, a piano cover of the song "The Wight to Remain" by Danny Baranowsky, which is best known as the music to Zone 4 Level 3 in the game Crypt of the NecroDancer. This has always been a beautiful track to me, and could be the launching point of a piano-only soundtrack to the game, if I get so inspired to complete some day. I even put the song's score up on flat.io if you so desire to try to play it yourself.

So while I kept the dust off of my music, I didn't do what I set out to do. At all. I tried to work on "Paper" once, but couldn't get any inspiration for the one part I still don't have a working idea for. Maybe that will change in 2016, but unfortunately, this gets poor marks this year.

2015 Grade: D

2016 Goal: Complete and release full versions of "All In My Head" and "Paper". For real this time.

Coding

2015 Goal: Finish the updated roncli.com site

Well, you're looking at it, baby. I'm still quite proud of this accomplishment, and it really took a load off my shoulders last year when I completed it. It's even gotten a few updates since that fixed some bugs and added (and, sadly, removed) some features.

So with the main 2015 goal accomplished, what else have I done in 2015? A quick glance at my GitHub profile shows I've contributed to Descent's DXX-Retro source port (this was the mouse fix), and started a series of Descent 3 tools written in node.js, including the rebirth of Descent DSN. However, in recent months, coding's not exactly been a priority to me.

The main project I have going right now is getting Six Gaming's official website off the ground. It is going to be started pretty much directly from roncli.com with a Six Gaming theme. At first it's just going to be a static page with links pointing to most of our presence on social media. Later, it will include episode-specific links for the Six Gaming Podcast, and the final version will be a full fledged social site where people can come to find other people with whom to play games they enjoy.

So 2015 was good, and 2016 has a clear goal. Looks good to me!

2015 Grade: A

2016 Goal: Finish the Six Gaming site

Gaming

2015 Goal: Grow Six Gaming into a bigger and more general gaming community

So at the beginning of 2015, I had this great idea to make Six Gaming a big community, not just for World of Warcraft, but for all the games we play. Over the years, we found that many of the gamers in Six Minutes To Release enjoyed other games as well, so it made sense to want to cater to that while keeping the close-knit community we've created from the core members of the guild over the previous 7 years.

Two major events accelerated this goal to fruition. First, Showsan got the jump on me. When he returned from his service in the military, he came in and lit a fire under everyone. He basically rebooted the Six Gaming Podcast, gave it a new format and new life. Since then, we've added a ton of cohosts that bring their own unique perspective on the games that we are playing. The Podcast has stayed fresh and has been enjoyable because of it, and we recently completed our 100th episode, which we call... Episode 48. Don't ask.

Second, Warlords of Draenor happened. What a bad expansion! I would rehash what I've already written, but suffice to say that not much has changed, and on top of it we're looking at another 6-8 months until Legion, which will make a 12-14 month content drought, similar to the one at the end of Mists of Pandaria, and exactly what the devs previously said they didn't want to do. Add in their stance on flying, and I honestly couldn't tell you if I trust Blizzard to get WoW right anymore. Legion is their last chance to get it right for me, and until then I am probably going to be doing some different things.

Like Descent. Descent: Underground made it known that Descent still exists for a lot of people, and despite the issues they are having (a topic for a future blog post), I am genuinely excited for a release of a new Descent game, even if it's not by the same people who gave us the first three. Naturally, a new Descent game has raised interest in the original games, and Descent 1, 2, and 3 have all seen an uptick in activity.

Case in point is the Descent Champions Ladder. It went from 1,408 games played in the fall 2013 season, down to 938 games in spring 2014, and down further to only 504 games in fall 2014. At the end of that season, Descent: Underground was announced, and the spring 2015 season saw a massive ressurgance with 2,218 games played. The late 2015 season, which was only 3 months, had 1,416 games played, and not even 3 weeks into early 2016 we have 510 games played.

Playing Descent again has been awesome, and has inspired me to learn a new control scheme. I used to be all keyboard, and now I do mouse and keyboard. I play at the high bronze/low silver level on the DCL currently, but I feel I have a lot to learn about the game both mechanically and philosophically.

I've also been involved with the Crypt of the NecroDancer community, racing most recently in CoNDUIT 7, and will be playing again on CoNDUIT 8 on the 29th. I'm not that great, which is why I'm in the "junior" league, but it's still a whole lot of fun getting some competition in. I still need to complete story mode and an all characters run to unlock Coda (I have no false impressions that I will BEAT Coda, mind you), so there's still plenty of room for improvement. I'm mainly known for having the Bard Deathless world record at 112 wins, and have performed fairly well at deathless mode with a few other characters as well.

I've also done a ton of streaming on Twitch. While I've stopped playing League of Legends, I still stream things such as my DCL games, Crypt of the NecroDancer runs, and even some Sublevel Zero speedruns. Basically, if I play it, it ends up on Twitch at some point.

Gaming has become a central part of what I do. I play a wide variety of games, involve myself in the Six Gaming, Descent, and Crypt of the NecroDancer communities, do two weekly podcasts involving games, and stream many times a week. I don't see this slowing down in the near future, so the only thing to do in 2016 is embrace it.

I have plans to start a regular Descent-themed competition show on Twitch, and am most interested in growing my stream large enough to get partnered. I don't think partnering will happen this year, but I at least want to get started. I've played with some ideas for growing my YouTube channel as well, but nothing's really stuck, but I'll keep trying.

2015 Grade: A+

2016 Goal: Substantially increase my streaming presence on Twitch

Life

2015 Goal: Get back to the Bay Area at least once

I think I nailed this one, at least in text. However, my experience thus far has been... less than ideal.

So instead of taking a trip to the Bay Area, I actually MOVED out here. In October, I packed my things, drove West a few days, and settled into the Belmont area. Central to everything, I've done... nearly nothing since I've gotten here. Sure, I've ventured to Pier 39 in the city, finally ate some Iguanas down in San Jose, and have occasionally taken in some of the area's scenic routes, I've yet to really do something... defining when it comes to the Bay Area. Seriously, I've seen more of the Bay Area the last time Kathy and I came out here in February 2013.

This is compounded by the fact that many of the people I knew and hung out with here are gone. One of the reasons I gave for moving out here was to be close to people I knew and give myself opportunities to "get out" every so often. I have done that a grand total of zero times since I got here.

There have been several reasons why I haven't really capitalized on my new living situation. The first is that I work remotely, yet am wanting to work locally. My job in Houston allowed me to work remotely when I told them I was moving and giving what I thought was going to be my two weeks. While the remote working part of the job has been going okay, I know through my experience with Sift that this isn't something I want to do forever. I have been really slow on advancing this agenda, however.

Second is that I've found myself in somewhat of a funk recently. I can't really put my finger on why, just that I find that I don't have the energy to do a whole lot since just before Christmas. My focus has been poor in coding-related projects, and I don't really feel that I've "settled in" very well. I don't at all regret making this move, in fact I think it's the best thing I've done for myself in a long time. However, I need to really break out of whatever it is that's causing me to, for lack of a better description, lose time doing nothing.

So, yeah, I made it out here, but... what next? Well, the first thing is going to be transitioning to a local job. Even before then, though, I need to find a way to get more active again. I have a plan, it's just acting on it - or more accurately getting over what's preventing me from acting on it - is proving challenging.

I hate these lethargic, stagnant days. I've had them before and have gotten past them, and have no doubt I will again. But the time until that happens can be downright depressing some days.

Oh, and there's this house thing. Yeah, we want a house. Soon.

2015 Grade: C

2016 Goal: Get more active, find local employment, and begin planning moving into a house

Overall

I've had an up and down year for sure. I recognize that my strongest point currently is with gaming, and recently that has been the outlet I go to in order to unwind and have a good time. I also find enjoyment in coding, but need to find a way to motivate myself to finish projects like I did with roncli.com. While my music still remains on the back burner, I am doing my best to keep sharp and avoid going flat... okay, I'll stop with the music puns! I recognize that I need to make some changes in order to improve my quality of life in my new surroundings, and am hoping that I can get those taken care of quickly.

2015 Overall Grade: B

Labels: Coding, Crypt of the NecroDancer, Descent, Descent Champions Ladder, Descent: Underground, Gaming, Life, Music, roncli.com, Self-Destruct Sequence Podcast, Six Gaming, Six Gaming Podcast, Twitch, Year in Review

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Year In Review: 2014
Posted: 3:37:00 AM 0 comments

In many ways, 2014 was a big year for me. There were a lot of big changes made right at the beginning of the year, with some exciting plans starting to form up.

Where to begin?

Music

I will always remember the end of 2013 as being a kind of inspirational epiphany for me. In the span of 4 short months I wrote 4 songs complete beginning to end, managed to record 2 of them as stripped down versions, and penned the final lyrics of a few more that had been floating around.

The only major song that has come out of 2014 is a dance-ish piece I call "Bullseye", which is designed to be more about the music than about the lyrics. Even the lyrics that are sung focus more on the melody, making strong use of some of my unique vocal inflections. There is only a single verse and chorus, but the usage of such are designed to give the song added texture, not added meaning.

The main problem here is that a grand total of zero songs were released in 2014. After having such a strong finish to 2013, I expected things to carry over into the new year. Looking back, much of the music that came out of 2013 was due to having a lot of extra time on my hands while in San Francisco. I was able to put notes to Reason because I had little else to do, and with commute times being upwards of an hour some days, it was not uncommon for me to do some writing in my head, and then later pen it down into lyrics or Reason. I haven't had nearly the luxury this year since I've not been in San Francisco at all, and opportunities to write have been few and far in between. I've got this awesome guitar I want to play around with, and just haven't had the inspiration to do anything with it.

I've always toyed with the idea of setting aside just one night and dedicate myself to nothing but my music, but right now I take care of Six Minutes To Release five nights a week, spend Fridays with Kathy, and do the Six Gaming Podcast on Saturdays. Music has been playing second fiddle to pretty much everything else these days. I don't like it, but I know that I will never lose the drive for my music. It will come back some day.

Coding

After leaving Sift in February, I took a month off and then joined HCC Insurance Holdings as a .NET programmer. So far, I've been doing a lot of VB.Net in WinForms, but this last month has seen me start to work on an ASP.NET project again. It's in C# with a Bootstrap framework, and communicates with a lot of different moving parts within the company, so it'll be an exciting project to start 2015 with.

Personally, well, I'm always full of coding projects. My big project this past year has been the remake of roncli.com. This project is designed to stretch my understanding of the node.js stack, as I'm taking advantage of projects such as Bootstrap, Rendr, and Express, and have been working with APIs from Twitter, Google Blogger, and Tumblr, with many more in the works.

roncli.com as a domain turns 15 years old this February. The current design is its second, but is one that it has had for most of its lifespan. I've grown to absolutely HATE it. I've tried a number of times to remake it but nothing ever stuck... until now. Currently, I'm nearly done with integrating the blog into the site. It is going to be a pretty big hub of all things roncli, so I don't expect it to be complete any time soon, but I have made steady progress on it since May with no signs of slowing down. The fact that I'm learning the innards of these node.js projects is arguably more valuable than the site itself.

Gaming

2014 brought about a gaming renaissance of sorts. Sure, I'm still playing World of Warcraft, but I've expanded my horizons into games such as Diablo III, League of Legends, and countless other indie games that have been slowly filling up my Steam library. I've not exactly shaken off the "hardcore casual mobile gamer" title, either, as I still am very much into gaming on my iPhone.

What brought this on was the fact that while I was with Sift, I really did not have any time to myself. Gaming became a luxury to me, something that I couldn't spend a lot of time on. Once I left Sift and realized that evenings do exist, I had a lot of free time. I began streaming to Twitch regularly, and this past July took the reins of the Six Gaming Podcast while cohost Jacob "Showsan" Showalter is deployed in the military.

Between all this and the increase in popularity of streamers and professional gamers, gaming itself has taken on a new meaning for me, and is something I feel I could take advantage of given the right environment. After I am done with roncli.com, I want to build something gamer-centric around the whole "Six Gaming" concept we've got going on, so I don't expect much to change when it comes to my gaming, at least in the early part of this next year.

Life

This year I celebrated my 5 year anniversary of marriage to my lovely wife, Kathy. The fact that I've survived this long without her trying to cash in on the life insurance policy speaks volumes. And the fact that she has supported me through so many things, both good and bad, really makes me blessed.

Leaving Sift was a hard decision. I felt I held on a lot longer than I should have. In some ways, I did. Perhaps I could have made a more positive impact by leaving sooner. Or maybe I didn't hold on long enough, as it seems as though some of the things that caused me to leave have passed. Whatever, hindsight is 20/20, and I'm not going to dwell on the could-haves. I did what I did.

And what I did was start a new job. It's quite a switch going from the rushed startup environment to the slow-paced, meticulously-planned environment of a publicly traded company. At the same time, however, many of the habits I learned while at the startup I've been able to apply to the new job, and the transition couldn't have gone better.

But there is still that bit of emptiness, that missing sense of adventure.

I only managed to take 3 trips this year. The first was our 5 year anniversary trip on a cruise around southeast Alaska in June. Then came BlizzCon in Anaheim in November. Finally, I just returned from Christmas break in Buffalo, where the temperature averaged a balmy 45 degrees, much warmer than usual.

I'm hoping to get back to the Bay Area soon. I made a lot of connections out there, some friendly, some professional, and some both! I am still very much fascinated with how differently things work out there. It was very exciting to be a part of the culture, and I look forward to my next visit out there, whenever that may be.

A Look Ahead

It's hard to predict what's going to happen in the next year, but I'm going to state my goals here. No, they're not New Year's resolutions, but rather things I want to get done and say that I've accomplished.

Complete and release full versions of "All In My Head" and "Paper"
Finish the updated roncli.com site
Grow Six Gaming into a bigger and more general gaming community
Get back to the Bay Area at least once

Some strong goals. Now, to work on fulfilling them!

Labels: Alaska, BlizzCon, Buffalo, Bullseye, Coding, Diablo III, Gaming, HCC, iPhone, League of Legends, Life, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, Steam, World of Warcraft, Year in Review

Friday, December 15, 2006

Year in Review
Posted: 2:51:00 PM 0 comments

What a hectic end to 2006, where to start.

Work. Metro seemed like a decent place to work. The environment was laid back, the pace was healthy but not too quick. The people were great to work with. It had its problems, though. I never got a salary review, but didn't feel like I needed it, as the money I was making there supported me and then some. It came crashing down in late July, however, when my boss either got laid off, one among 100, to cut costs. We were now managed by a guy out of New York City, a long ways away from Houston. Consultants were hired for a project, sending off warning alarms. Why spend more money when you just cut back? Perhaps the lay offs were done to allow this, I don't know, but it looked silly. Then I started hearing some rumors about the future of the department and the office I worked in, all of which were bleak. Given what I knew within the company and taking the rumors with a grain of salt, I still got the impression that it was going to be a good idea to bail, and that's exactly what I did.

Shortly after Thanksgiving, I started a new job with US Interactive, a local company that does defensive driving websites. So far, it's not been bad, I'm just going through the usual bits of getting up to speed. They do C#.Net here, which actually is pretty nice. I'm liking working with it so far, but I have much to learn about how they do things here, and that is a challenge I feel I will enjoy in the coming months.

Outside projects. I had started a project with my friend Saurin a while ago. Originally, I was going to be the main developer and all-around technology person, something the HP I've mentioned in earlier posts is being used for. Things quickly went south when it was decided that PHP would be the better path, a language I previously have known nothing about. I didn't put up much of a fight for ASP.Net, as I wanted to keep an open mind when it came to server performance and what not. Another developer was brought on board, and it made sense for him to be the lead. After a couple of weeks of studying and writing PHP, I quickly realized that this project had become something I had no real interest in anymore. Saurin wants this project to move fast, and I can't deliver on that. Now, he's a great friend and all, and he's probably more than willing to wait for me to learn PHP, but quite frankly he's shooting himself in the foot by not getting himself a seasonsed PHP developer that can write more than one page a week. Earlier this week, I decided it was in my best interest to discontinue this project.

Another project I've been working on outside has to do with website building, and I'm not really interested in that either. It was another project that started as something big and turned out to be a lot less than what it was. I plan on removing myself from that project today.

It seems like with the new job and two less big projects to deal with, 2007 promises to be the year of the fresh start.

I have been contemplating for a long time to return to doing a weekly Internet radio program, similar to the TiS Weekly News, which ran as a test beta for two weeks before I decided it wasn't worth it. My format would basically be commentary on the digital music scene, spiced with a bunch of tracks from around the digital music community. Well, I think I'm finally going to start doing this, with the first show airing Monday, January 8th, 6 AM GMT (1 AM U.S. East Coast). The idea is for it to run an hour to two hours, depending on how much music I have to play and how much I have to talk about, including possible interviews and Internet callers. The show would of course be podcasted and archived for future listening. I don't have a name for it yet, but I'm going to be taking care of all the technological concerns this weekend before I head to Buffalo for Christmas and New Year's.

As for my personal projects, I've pretty much lost interest in a lot of them. It happened during the 4th of July weekend when I reformatted my computer and had days of trouble afterwards. After that, my frustration with things grew, and I realized I didn't have the patience to deal with making things work, so I passed on the projects for a while.

One project that hasn't died completely is OSMusic.Net. You may not see anything new there, but I am working on a basic graphical interface that will replace the clunky-looking boxes that I've grown to hate. No idea when I'm going to finish this project, as it's going to take quite some time to morph all of the tables, but it should look pretty cool.

I've been doing a lot of gaming lately, mostly for relaxation. I got hooked on to Aveyond through Kathy's Shockwave subscription. Aveyond is an RPG reminiscent of the old Nintendo RPGs, like Dragon Warrior. Then Kathy got me into Westward, an RTS based in the old west. It's hilarious. Both highly recommended.

My latest obsession, though... yeah, yeah, I know it's cliche, but I've finally broken down and started playing World of Warcraft. It was actually something I have tried under the advice of my new co-workers, most of which play, but it's something I've been considering trying for a long time. Kathy was none-too-pleased, largely due to some of the negative stereotypes found around the 'Net. She didn't get Leeroy, either. However, I have found the game to be quite different from what I was expecting, something I'll save for another post.

One thing I did accomplish this year was to finally get out of debt. Ever since the end of 2000, I've been in debt, and it's taken 6 long years to finally get out. I almost have the feeling that I can do just about anything now, and even have been thinking about finally getting some real music gear to do some real recording with. I probably won't be doing that until at least the second half of 2007, though.

2006 was crazy, especially in the second half of the year when I probably overwhelmed myself with responsibility, but I've been able to take a step back and recover. Kathy noted in the days up to my leaving Metro that I was a different person, nervous and unhappy. I knew this, and the night after my last day I was back to my normal self. I knew I would be, stressful things like this never last for long unless you let them, and I have a habit of eliminating unnecessary stress. You can't go through life worried and unhappy, you have to do what it takes to make sure that you don't stress yourself out for long periods of time.

Right now I am in a pretty comfortable position, and I think that 2007 is going to be a year of new things. I turn 30 in June, and a lot of thoughts about where to take my life from here have crossed my mind... we'll see how much I get to do in the coming 12 months.

Labels: Aveyond, Gaming, Life, OSMusic.Net, Projects, Westward, World of Warcraft, Year in Review