Operation: Portland

All the pieces are falling into place. In a few months, I will be able to kick back with a cigar and proudly announce “I Love It When A Plan Comes Together!”

Yes, in just three weeks, I will be back in Portland, kicking ass and taking names (and living with my parents). Annie will be in Tacoma with her family, where she has a summer job babysitting, and is having minor surgery on her ear. Hopefully by the time her job starts in September, I will have found a cool job and a good place to live. So Operation: Portland is proceeding according to plan.

And the KillingMachines front is slowly but surely advancing. Every time I tell Steve what the next feature we need on KMorg is, he tells me there’s no way that will work with the existing code, and proceeds to make it work anyway. He’s like my own personal Scotty (from Star Trek). I’m working on the design features, and I’m hoping things will keep getting better every day in little ways until we’re running the BEST WEBSITE EVER.

And if that wasn’t enough, Studio Fojar might pick up again! Steve is very interested in finishing up a project, and when I get back to Portland I’m going to get back into it, and in addition, Urn is probably going to join our ranks! He’s interested in doing artwork and level design, which is exactly what we need!

Hooray for Fojar!

Villagers Need Flowers

Sorry for such a long delay in posting, but I just bought a copy of Black and White, so I’ve been playing pretty much non-stop. I felt guilty for not posting much, so here’s several various tidbits.

  • I would like to repeat, once again, my undying love for annna from Things I Hate. This article has only strengthened my feelings.
  • I sat down at my friend Urn’s work computer and found this note taped to the monitor: “Urn- Some woman called and said something- could have been about you, or someone else, or something like that. Call her back. I think her number was 1-900-something, but I can’t remember. -Colin”
  • Netscape sucks. I feel bad saying this, since up until a year ago, I was a strong supporter of the “Netscape is better than Microsoft” mentality… Until Netscape proved me wrong. IE is faster and more stable (on my system) than Netscape 4.7, and WAY more stable than Netscape 6, which is awful. This is old news, though. What’s new to me is that I recently discovered that Outlook Express is better than Netscape’s mail client! I put it on Annie’s computer in desperation to find something that would crash her computer less than Netscape Mail. Outlook not only loads faster and crashes less, it was WAY easier to set up. The configuration just make more sense.
  • In Black and White, the villagers express their needs to you by raising little flags around the village store. These flags have little icons on them to tell you what they mean. Little pictures of grain mean they need food, the little heart means they need to breed, and the little tree means they need wood. So I was walking around campus in a bit of a daze, and I saw this banner they have hanging from all the light posts, which just has an image of a flower on it. My first reaction: VILLAGERS NEED FLOWERS.
  • A few years ago a coworker of mine from Egghead set up a website called the Psychic Dog Network. In a freakish coincidence, Jill just gave me a link to the amazingly similar, but wholly separate Psychic Puppy Network.
  • Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus!
  • Oh, and also, Annie and I may be moving back to Portland in mid-June instead of late July. More on that as we get details firmed up.

Rusty Killing Machines

As some of you will no doubt have noticed, WWW.killingmachines.org is now a redirect to RUSTY.killingmachines.org. Please change any links or bookmarks to reflect this change. There are a few reasons for the new address. One is that Rusty.KillingMachines sounds really cool. Another is that I’m going to be making some design changes to this weblog very soon. But the major reason is an experiment I will be starting soon.

I’m going to start a ‘zine, which will be hosted on www.killingmachines.org. At the moment, this project is still largely undefined, and is sort of a general interest pop culture webzine. I’m hoping to release it monthly, and I will be performing as editor. I’m currently looking for talent to write for it. If you are interested, send me a sample piece of writing to [email deleted]. Be aware that I will be expecting a new article every month. That being said, it’s wide open. You can write about whatever you like, from humor to news to reviews.

Edit 10/26/2005: Killingmachines is offline, but after www moved to rusty, it moved to rusted, and then ended up here. So you’re already in the right place.

Moving Back to Portland

We might be moving back to Portland this summer, instead of next summer, as we had originally planned. The situation here is a lot rougher than either of us had thought it would be. The job market is terrible. Annie’s still unemployed, and my boss has cut my hours back so much that we’re barely able to cover bills. After my money from the Myst3 job runs out, we won’t be able to cover them unless Annie finds a source of income. So that’s one reason. In addition, Annie is “not excited” about school next year. She says that it might make sense to move back to Portland, because then she could do Americorps for another year, and then finish up school down there, at PSU. And on top of all that, we can’t deny that one of the reason is that nearly all of our friends are moving this summer. Urn and Kat will be leaving, and so will Eric and Jill. Becky and Jessi will still be here, but we barely see them anyway.

We talked about it for a long time last night, and it’s sounding better each time we talk. The only problem is that unless the money situation improves a lot, and quickly, enabling us to get some money saved, when we move back, we won’t actually have enough money to move into an apartment right away. We’ll probably have to move into my parent’s house for a little bit while we both find jobs and get enough money cached to pay first month’s rent, plus security and cleaning deposit.

We still need to check a few things out, like if moving early breaks our lease, or if we can just take off in the summer, and whether Annie can get another job in Americorps. Still, the job market in Portland is so much better than here, that even if we both had to take crummy mall jobs or something, we’d be okay. Plus, Portland means that I could try to get a graphic design job, or even get involved in web design!

It’s all still up in the air, and basically it’s Annie’s decision, but we’re checking out our options.

In addition to all that, I finally realized that my cousin Deni married the lead singer of the Ataris, a band that I like. When my family told me that Deni had married a rock star, I kinda rolled my eyes, and even when I met him, I didn’t place the name of the band. But Annie and I were on the radio and played two songs by his band that I know, and love! So suddenly it all fell into place! Cool!

Jester called me and told me he has no idea why my second check from the Myst3 job hasn’t gotten to me, and that he also has no idea why the themes aren’t up on the site yet. Apparently both should have been done quite a while ago. As soon as I know what’s up, I’ll post about it.

Moved to Ellensburg

Well, we’re just about finished moving in here. On Sunday, the woman in the office gave us a whole load of crap about how she couldn’t let us have the apartment because our cosigner (my dad) has perfect credit, but not enough of it. Three hours later, after a phone call from my parents, and running a credit check on my mom also, she finally says that she’ll let us have the place. We’ve been unpacking since then. Cable works. Internet works (on Annie’s computer, mine’s fuxored). The phone works. On the whole, I think we’re coming out winners.

I’m going to be a DJ. The college radio station KCWU is looking for volunteer DJs. This would never have happened to me in Portland. All the radio stations are highly competitive, and I think the college radio station is limited to communication majors. So this is totally rad. Because it’s a college station, I can play whatever I want as long as I follow a few simple rules like not playing any “red-sticker” tracks (swearing) and that I play 6 rotation songs per hour. So given that I play a few songs that are on the station’s current playlist, I can play anything I want in between! KICK-ASS!!!

Now I just need to find a paying job.