Harry

My nephew Harry was born yesterday, to my sister Miriam and her husband Lawrence. All reports point to a healthy mother and child, which is a tremendous relief. The nephew was born in Saudi Arabia, has an Irish mother, an English father, an Irish uncle living in the US, Irish grandparents (at least on his mother's side of the family), and an Irish aunt and uncle living in Ireland. I'm sure he'll have quite the multi-cultural upbringing.

So: I'm now Uncle Ewan, and my parents are now Granny and Grandad Oughton.

Good times.

In other news, it's Thanksgiving here, which means I get to have a 4-day weekend. God bless America. We're having some of Samantha's friends over for dinner and drinks, I'm really liking having my own place.

My draw shoulder has finally loosened up, so I'm going back to archery training soon. I've been reading Inside the Archer back and forth, coupled with what Jeep has been showing me I think I have the beginnings of a stable shot. Taking it nice and slow.

Work continues apace; writing some interesting stuff. Can't even begin to elaborate on it.

I bought an extended battery for my ADP1 off Dealextreme; for $12 (yes, twelve US Dollars) I've doubled the battery capacity of my phone, and it'll now do three days between charges, at the expense of considerably increased thickness.

Speaking of the adp1, I finally got a public alpha of TargetScheme out the door. Feedback so far has been positive; I'm working on adding in some needed features and stabilising it before putting it up on the Android Market.

Time goes by, tables turn

I need to blog more. I used to blog at regular intervals, but life has been busier, and frankly, I just can't bring myself to use Twitter.

I've been playing Borderlands. The depth and range of weaponry in the game keeps me playing. The storyline is pretty decent too. I'm usually quite averse to RPGs, but the first person shooter aspect in Borderlands makes it a lot more appealing. I'm glad to see they've patched the matchmaking tech in the game, it was a bit.. rough to begin with.

I bought a box of Coors Light in Costco at the weekend. It's actually not too bad, but I'm going back to Stella next time I'm beer buying.

Samantha reliably informs me it's 44 days until we arrive in Dublin for Christmas. Samantha will be in Ireland for the first time (in addition to meeting my family / friends etc.), so that should prove interesting.

Modern Warfare 2 is almost upon us. I will of course play it through out of professional interest. It's using Steam for distribution; first time in a long time the most secure SKU for any game has been the PC - usually it's the first to appear on various torrent trackers.

I've finally given up on the Heretic technique, and have joined the ranks of BEST shooters here in California. My friend Jeep coaches the USC archery team, and he recently completed his level 3 course with the man himself, Ki Sik Lee. He gave me some insight into the BEST method I had been unable to glean from the books. I dutifully gave it a go, and was able to get into much better line than previously. Still feels a little unnatural, but so far the results are promising.

Tomorrow (Thursday) marks the two year anniversary of my start at Treyarch. Time flies. I've shipped two games in that time, consulted for 6 weeks on a third, and generally made a reasonable niche for myself. I can't blog about what my job currently entails, but it should prove to be quite the challenge.

Catchup, again

Been busy.

Work continues apace.

Samantha starts in UCLA today, this pleases me.

Going home next month for a week, looking forward to it.

Had the busiest Sunday ever yesterday - started off packing up 6 months worth of recycling and driving it out to the dump with my landlord; then drove out to pick up a Yamaha Virago 1000 he managed to spot for free on Craigslist. Got the bike loaded onto the trailer, drove it home. Did some gardening - cut the grass, dug up all the weeds, fertilized the beds. Help landlord take bike apart slightly.

Really need to get on with TargetScheme development - all the hard bits are done, just need to hook up dumping the scores out to SD card, and some menu contexts and it's ready for a public alpha. I've been using my ADP1 as my primary phone, and I've been very happy with it. The only issue I've encountered so far is Google Latitude sometimes stops updating my location, from googling this appears to be a known issue.

I've had some good progress in archery - it occurred to me whilst reading ArcheryTalk that I was rotating my bowshoulder toward the string instead of rotating my scapula / shoulderblade toward the string. I changed this, and my bowarm became a lot more stable, and I was able to shoot more. Time will tell if this is viable long-term, as setting it up doesn't quite feel natural.

Still haven't pulled the trigger on any new archery gear - going to wait and see for a while, no hurry.

There is a pawnshop around the corner from where I live - I'd never been in a pawnshop, so I wandered in over the weekend. Turns out they have quite the selection of XBox and PS2 games - got myself Spiderman II for 10CAD.

My sister Miriam texted me the other day to inform me I am to have a nephew soon enough. Wee.

My WRT54GL died quite suddenly - flashing power light and capacitor whine, it's well and truly dead. Shipped it back to Linksys today.

Catch up

It occurs to me that I haven't updated the blog since I moved to Vancouver. Have found a really great house to live in, just off Commercial Drive.Really great landlord, and really friendly housemates. Sharing a house has really worked out, as living in an apartment didn't seem like a good idea when I'm here on my own.

I've joined an archery meetup group - it's proving to be a lot of fun, as I can just shoot a wooden bow, relax and concentrate on my form. I've ordered some low poundage KAP limbs from a local archery supplier so I can really go to town on my form with the X-Factor. I've been thinking about a complete gear change - right now it's a toss-up between the Bernardini Luxor and the W&W TF Apecs. Very different bows, and I'll have to think about it carefully. The torque compensator in the Apecs is very interesting, and from what I've seen Frangilli has switched back from the Bernardini to the Apecs, and I've moved away from heavy risers since I gave up the 2001 VBS. More research needed. Either way, I'll be pairing the riser with W&W Apecs Prime Limbs and some form of stiff single rod stabilization, like the Soma CEX2 or Fiberbow S3 or something similar.

I dropped Samantha off at the airport earlier today, she came up to visit for a week. I miss her. It was really good to see her. She's very good to me.

Work has been busy; they've given me my own office, which has been kind of odd, and a little bit lonely sometimes, but such is life. I walk the 1.8km to and from work every day, and it's doing me good. I have a bike getting fixed up in the local bike shop, which will be useful for getting around.

iPhone toolchain continued

After attending a python talk at SCALE7x, I did some googling, and it turns out there is a port of pyobjc for the iPhone - whilst useful, I wanted to get into some proper 2D graphics coding, especially with the excellent Cocos2d framework. My last attempt at building a toolchain on my Debian Lenny box ended in failure. However, I came accross iphonedevonlinux which gives you a neat little bash script that abstracts out all the pain of building the iPhone toolchain on Linux. Worked pretty well, I've just compiled my first HelloWorld to the iPhone and (after calling ldid to "sign" the binary) it worked perfectly. Only requirements are an apple developer login (free) and the iphone sdk from apple (downloadable from apple). The script does the rest, including grabbing the latest firmware if you give it your apple dev id and pass. Only non-obvious but was when it died immediately trying to build the toolchain with a misplaced @ error - turns out I had to install gcc objc support - once I did that it compiled straight off. Good times.

The move to Vancouver is becoming a bit more real - I have an appointment at the embassy next week. I've been doing my research, and I should have an archery club within reach. Once I'm settled up there, I intend to get some low-poundage limbs and spend the long lonely evenings working on my form; my current Samick Extremes are just too heavy to do any kind of meaningful form adjustment.

Shot cycle

I went shooting for the first time in over a month today, as my back is feeling pretty serviceable, and I missed it. Shot pretty well; it occurred to me my shot cycle was far too long (on the order of 10+ seconds); I was starting out with the bow arm too high, and I was losing the rhythm of the shot getting the sight into the middle of the target. I concentrated starting with the bowarm lower and concentrating on the expansion, and it appears to work - groups tightened, and my shot timing became more consistent.