Just sayin'

In composing this post it started as, and was meant to be, about divining my career path for the relatively near future.  As I got further in, however, I found that it was becoming less about my potential careers and more about what I have learned and experienced with iD Tech Camps.  So, I cut out the career stuff to save for later, and we'll get right in to iD.

Through iDTech I have found a love of teaching and being involved in child development though, notably, in a short term setting (I honestly just can't see myself standing in front of a classroom of the same 30 kids for 180 days).  I love the culture of camp, the silly games we get to play, that moment when your students finally start getting what you've been teaching them and begin to understand the possibilities suddenly available to them.  But I think what really appeals to me is that sense you get that you're making a potentially positive contribution to who that kid's going to be one day.  Because camp isn't just classes and curricula-it's this great big social experience, perhaps even more so at iD.

All of iD's camps are held at Universities across the country; it's one of their big selling points.  The kids sleep in university dorms.  We wake up early in the morning and stroll over to the closest dining hall and eat university food.  We greet the day campers, lessons are had.  The instructors are teaching, but sometimes so are the students.  A kid will forget how to perform a function and his neighbor will lean over and say, "Oh, listen, you just do this, this, and this," followed by the obligatory, "Oh, that's right.  Thanks!"

We all eat lunch together, socialize together, and go out to play capture the flag, or have giant rock-paper-scissors tournaments.  And before the day campers go home for the day, we have an entire period where people can say thanks or good job to other students for being awesome.  We play games, we hang out, we watch awesome old 80s movies (I'm still floored by the fact that 20 kids can sit around completely and quietly immersed in WarGames).

It's amazing.  And I get to witness moments like the following.

Every week, the preteens have an Armagetron tournament (essentially the light bikes from Tron; the game is free and awesome).  I had this kid, no older than 12 but definitely intelligent, clever as a fox and really good at this game.  Half way through he was clear in the lead and it was obvious no one could beat him if he was even vaguely trying (myself included).  In this situation, most kids would be hamming it up, boasting, etc.  This kid, though, he reigned himself in, started giving absolutely non-condescending advice to the other children, and actively and heartily cheered his friends when they won a round.

Sometimes, especially with the older teens, there come moments where you just sit down and have a perfectly serious conversation.  I've talked to kids about what they want to do for careers, where they're thinking of going to college, how they feel about the climate in the mobile phone services market.  Sometimes the conversation is about how they wish they'd known about iD years ago because they're 17 and they won't get to come back as a camper and how they'd like to work for iD one day.  And in those situations I get the pleasure of encouraging them to come work at iD, and I get to tell them that camp is still awesome as an instructor.

I'll wrap this up lest it get long winded, but I think I've made my point.  Camp is just this amazing experience, and I'd like to keep it in my life as long as possible.

Dewey Decimal in the home

I know I just said I'd be talking about neat iPad apps I've found, but I realized that I'd discovered a regular old computer application a few days ago that I think is well worth sharing.

The discovery came amidst my spring cleaning when I wondered whether there was a convenient way to electronically keep track of all of my books.  In my mind's eye, I wanted what most public libraries have: a system that allows you to search for books, provides their location, and where you could note that the book was "out" or that you'd lent it to a friend, etc.  Preferably, my hypothetical home library system would be accessible to, at least, everyone else in the house.

Assuming that I would not find such a useful program for free, I queried my programmer friend (hi, Danny) about the difficulty of building such a thing myself given that I'm not awful with computers and have some very basic understanding of programming theory.  I figured that what I wanted was essentially just a searchable database that could be accessed through an online interface.

After talking to him for awhile about it, I determined that I might eventually be capable of such a thing, but that it would take a significant amount of time.  As such, and not really expecting to find what I wanted, I did a quick Google search to see if I could find something close.

And I was ever so pleasantly surprised to find Book Hunter.

Book Hunter has everything I was looking for and more and it's free to boot!  Here are a few things I rather like about it:

-The interface is simple and easy to navigate.
-Adding books to your electronic library is a cinch.  You can, of course, enter all of the book's information manually but it also has the option of looking them up for you.  You can enter the title and perhaps an author name and it'll search Amazon.com for the book and fill in the rest of its information.  OR you can press a little button, it will activate your webcam (if you have one attached) and prompt you to hold the book's ISBN bard code up to the camera.  The program will recognize and read the barcode automatically and look the book up.  I think this is very cool and it definitely streamlines the process of logging all of your books.
-When you add a book, you can specify whether it belongs to a collection, its location (e.g., upstairs hall-second bookcase- third shelf), whether you've loaned it to someone, who you loaned it to three months ago, whether you've read it yet or not, etc.
-It's not just for books.  You can use it to keep track of all of your DVDs, magazines, CDs, comic books, etc.

The form for adding a new book.

So, overall, I think this is pretty neat.  My longterm goal for Book Hunter is to register my family's entire book collection (no small feat; we have so many books...) which will likely be a significant time commitment, but ultimately worth it, I think.  Too often I know we have a book that I want to read and I eventually give up because I simply can't find it.  With some luck, Book Hunter will bring a bit more needed organization to my possessions and life.

On a fun, related note, let's say you wanted to go old school with your home library. Well, ThinkGeek offers a really neat kit for running your library the classic way :) 

"I don't work for money, I work for you."

Yesterday morning I, and a few of my good friends, Commenced from Rhode Island College.  This is all very good and wonderful but one of the more interesting, as the commencement ceremony most certainly was not, points of the day was receiving of my graduation/birthday gift.  It was an iPad 2.

Now, I should preface by saying that I and my family are a little weird about our mechanical and/or electronic paraphernalia (this includes cars, as well as phones and computers and such) in that we tend to give them names and treat them as if they have sorts of personalities.  I've had friends and significant others who find this practice somewhat odd, but I'm pretty sure that most people are passively guilty of this activity (tell me you've never sworn at your computer as if there was any chance that it could understand you).

So we name our computers, etc, and more often than not those names have some sort of meaning attached.  So when I opened up consideration for the iPad's name to my family, the name Jane was offered up almost immediately and just as immediately accepted.  'Why' requires some explanation.

My family and I are fans of a novel called Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, and all that follow it in the series.  In the book's reality, computers are pretty much all flat, touch screen tablets and table faces and are called "desks".  So when I first heard about what the iPad was, I thought to myself that here was the frontrunner of desk technology.

Within the Ender series there is a character named Jane who I cannot describe further without spoiling the story.  Just know that the name is appropriate.

Jane has proved to be an auspicious gift given what I will be doing for the majority of the summer (teaching Game Design for the iPhone and iPad as is further detailed in a previous post).

So for the past couple of hours Jane and I have been getting to know one another and I've downloaded a bunch of potentially useful (and free) apps to play with.  I may periodically mention them here if I find some really neat ones.

One of the things that has me most smitten with the iPad as a useful device is how absolutely natural it is to type on one.  This entire post, for example, was composed in the simple notepad app that comes standard with the machine from my living room couch, from the middle seat of the car as we drove to and from seeing the new Thor movie, and from the movie theater itself.

So.  New toy, new tool, new prospects, new things to learn, and yet another platform on which I can test my budding ePublishing skills.  There is surely more to follow :)

Also, if you were wondering where the title came from, it' a quote from First Meetings.

To Do (2)

So, I was reviewing the To Do list I made two months ago and I've made pretty poor progress on it.  I got comfortable with about half of morse code before midterms distracted me from that and I only really managed to master one new origami pattern (a lily) but made significant progress on two others (the crane and the lotus flower).  As for all of the reading, I haven't had time.

So all of that will stay tentatively on the list with a few additions as follows:

5. Spring cleaning 

I'm already knee deep in this.  There's been a fair amount of dusting, vacuuming, and moving furniture, but major de-cluttering an reorganization are looming in my future.  I have difficulty with letting items with any nostalgic value go.  I'm working on this.

6. Learning my curriculum for camp

My assigned courses this year include Video Game Creation, Adventures in Game Design, and the RPG Design/Graphic Arts hybrid course, all of which use Multimedia Fusion Developer 2 (though the last incorporates Photoshop as well).  After teaching Fusion for three years, I'm pretty comfortable with it.  I really only need a little refresher before the season begins.

My difficulty comes with the new course I'm teaching this year, which is Game Design for the iPhone and iPad.  My Regional Manager keeps telling me that enrollment is high for this course and, having now just checked the Course Availability tab on iD's UCI location, it looks like he's been adding weeks where the course is available.  It's looking more and more like this will be the only course I'm teaching this summer, and to full classes as well.  @_@

Anyway, the course uses a program called Game Salad which, like Fusion, is an interface that allows non-programmers to build games.  I've been running myself through most of their basic tutorials and have found the interface to be somewhat less user friendly than Fusion.  On the flip side, it also feels like you ultimately have more control over the physics of the game.  So, on the whole, while I think you could probably turn out some pretty neat material in one week of camp with Game Salad, I'm not necessarily looking forward to teaching it to the more difficult 10 year olds that I will invariably be in charge of. 

Game Salad is a free program, by the way, and comes loaded with a variety of tutorials in case any of you are the type to try and play around with that sort of thing :)

7. Graduate

Yeah, that's happening soon :)  I'm walkin' the walk this Saturday.

Dressing up ramen

As a (soon to no longer be) college student, I have of course developed a taste for the quintessential cheap college food, Ramen.  Specifically, I'm rather partial to Shin Ramyun which is a very spicy ramen.  Like, seriously spicy.  I like spicy foods and I won't even use the entire spice packet for this stuff.

The responsible adult in me, however, recognizes that ramen just isn't a nutritious or complete meal at all.  As a result, I often find myself looking for ways to dress it up and make it more interesting.

My most successful concoction so far went something like this.  I added about three fourths of the spice package to the noodles, poured in boiling water to cover the noodles as per the instructions on the bowl, and placed a small plate over the bowl to keep in the steam and help cook the noodles.

I then threw some cut up green beans and sausage chunks in a small skillet with a tiny bit of olive oil, sprinkled the remaining contents of the spice packet on top, and cooked thoroughly.

Once the noodles had been stewing for about five minutes, I removed the cover and poured about a third of the spiced water over the beans and sausage and let it reduce.  I drained the rest of the water at the sink.  Once the liquid in the skillet had mostly reduced, I threw the noodles in the skillet as well and tossed all of it together for about twenty seconds.

And serve.

Came out pretty tasty.  I imagine this would be pretty good with chicken, too, instead of sausage.

Lisa's Wedding

My mother is a great fan of throwing parties.  So, when she heard that one of my best friends from high school was getting married and that I was co-Maid of Honor, she insisted on hosting and throwing the bridal shower.  It was decided that the shower would be a traditional English tea.

This has mainly been a trial for me, as my mother has spent the last month or so talking about what jams we should get for the favors, how many tea pots we'll need to employ at any one time, scone recipes, tasting of a number of small, very froofy sounding sandwich recipes (though, notably, the asparagus and prosciutto one was very tasty), etc., etc.  And there's still almost an entire month before the shower.

Besides driving me mad with discussions about tweaking the fairy cake recipe, my mother has also asked me to design the invitations and then carry that design over to the menus and name tags, etc.  I have actually finished the invitations.

Personal information has of course been removed for the purpose of sharing.

In searching for examples of tea invitations, I found that most of them were just a bit too cute with their pastel pinks and cartoon tea pots.  As a result, I decided to go with a more traditional, classy look while utilizing Lisa's basic wedding palette.  We've printed them and nestled them in their envelopes to await sending and I think they look rather nice.

It gets better

A good friend of mine posted this video.  I think the message is wonderful and the idea and execution are amazing.  Please watch.

It Gets Better

Shoreline update

I forgot to mention it at the time, but the finished hard copies of Shoreline came in a couple of weeks ago.  They look so nice.

I am exceedingly pleased with them.  We've gotten tons of compliments on the look, the reading party was crowded and a success, we sold a whole bunch of copies, AND I got an A in the class :)

I've also succeeded in properly formatting all of the text portions of Shoreline for .epub and have the issue (minus art) on my iPod currently by way of the Kindle app.  There are still a few kinks I have to work out like adding the art in an aesthetically pleasing way and getting italics to work in-text, but I'm getting there.

Not your average camp experience

During the summers I work at a technology camp.  The company, called iDTech Camps, runs camps in over 50 prestigious universities across the country including Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Brown, etc.  We teach a variety of things from programming, game design, video editing, web development, robotics, etc. to kids aged seven to seventeen.

For the past three years I've been at the Brown University location teaching Video Game Creation and Adventures in Game Design (with Multimedia Fusion Developer 2), Graphic Arts (Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop mainly) and a hybrid course that combines the two. This year I'll be Lead Instructor at their UC Irvine location.

I could go on forever, and perhaps I will at some point, about how much I love working for iD.  It's hand's down the best job I've ever had.

But I specifically wanted to share one of my little side projects for camp.  I thought it would be fun to incorporate a Hogwartian house system into the iD camp culture but instead of Hufflepuff and Slytherin, there'd be video game mascots for each house.

In the planning, I wanted each mascot to represent a different game company.  I also tried to avoid non-creatures, machines, and player characters.  I've nailed down my definite choices for the first three houses and I think I know what I want for the fourth (even though it's a player character).  They are as follows:

Creature - Games - Company
Chocobo - Final Fantasy - Square Enix
Epona - Zelda - Nintendo
Zergling - Starcraft - Blizzard
Amaterasu - Okami - Capcom

I even went as far as making crests for each house.

I'm fairly pleased with how these have turned out.  I started with the chocobo and tried a technique of illustration with Adobe Illustrator that I had never tried before.

It starts with a scanned in sketch.

Then the entire area of the image is traced with the pen tool.

Then the individual color areas are traced.

Until each area is defined.  With your white to-be-colored areas overlaid on top of your black shape, the line art is formed.

Assign each area a base color.

Add shadows and highlights and dress it up a bit.

And voila!

It things like this that I seem to do purely for amusement.