Oh wait, the demise part hasn’t happened yet… right?

For those of you who don’t know me (why the @(*$*@ are you reading my blog?), you might not know that I’ve grown a strong distaste for social networking as of late. I deleted my Facebook page a long time ago. I absolutely refused to ever get a MySpace page. I don’t follow anyone on twitter, nor do I tweet.

I judge a person’s worth on a scale that’s a direct inverse of the number of Facebook friends they have. Seriously, the only people I’ve ever met that have ridiculous amounts of social networking “friends” are always the ones that are completely clueless as to how much people hate them.

I don’t want to learn something about you through a Facebook update. Nor do I want people learning stuff about me through someone else’s “at a glance” updates page. No I didn’t read your blog, and no I’m not going to. If you’d like to talk to me, go old school: write me an email, or a letter, or pick up the telegraph machine and dial my number. Or, go new school and VOIP / webcam me. I’ll be doing the same.

Of course, the hypocrisy of writing this in blog form is not lost on me. I guess I just felt like I owed it to myself and the rest of the internet to make this post.

Communication technology is supposed to bring us closer together. Despite what certain controlling bodies may want, it’s meant to enable us, the commoners, to have a voice. It’s meant to redistribute the true power that comes along with knowledge to the people.

Social networking doesn’t bring us closer together, it keeps us from really communicating. It’s the new opiate for the masses. Because mind-numbing passive entertainment is no longer enough. We need to be watching television and checking status updates on our smart phones simultaneously.

Does anyone out there really feel more connected or enabled now?

Yeah? Let me guess, you have 600 Facebook friends don’t you?

I’m not saying that I think these new communication technologies we’ve built are worthless. I think using twitter to help fight fires is both innovative, and completely stupid — but hey, if it works, why not? Looking to make new business or research connections? Yeah that makes sense. Obsessively pouring the details of your mundane bullshit life into a server on the internet so your equally as boring and mundane friends, and their friends, can know about the minutia of your life? Lame.

It’s truly odd to me. I spent my youth practically growing up inside a computer. I had a computer life, and a real life… not because I didn’t want the worlds to collide, but because they couldn’t. No one else I knew was jacked in. And I loved it… I loved spending hours hanging out with “friends” on IRC, and causing mischief. It was an exciting time of discovery… I remember the first MP3 player (the 16-bit reference player from the Fraunhofer Society), the first JPEGs, dear god the first animated GIFs. It was a playground filled with cool people, doing interesting things.

Now it’s a bunch of douchey idiots using the technology that we once used to exchange information and “subvert the global suppression!” (AKA HACK THE PLANET!) (we were young okay), to talk about what they did last night, and what cute things their cats do. Let’s not forget the old jaded people who do nothing but rant (ahem).

Don’t get me wrong, I still love the internet. It’s grown into something I never would have imagined. It really is what I had hoped it would become, more so. It really can connect us all — hell I frequently use it to talk to a close friend who lives in Ireland. Pen and paper has nothing on Skype! It really does keep power in the hands of the people. Sort of. If you want to know the truth you can actually find it. Of course, the surface is still nothing but brainwashing and media hype. We can’t win them all I guess.

Anyway, as I was saying… it’s truly a weird thing for me. To think about turning off my internet presence. It’s something I’ve been doing for over half my life. I’m not a researcher, but I still consider myself a computer scientist at heart. Part of me just feels weird about what seems like going backward. I feel a bit like a religious zealot or some other crazy person… like I should be shunned or locked up or something.

But, nevertheless, here I am. Going Dark.

I encourage everyone to do the same: disconnect from social media, and connect to people… real people.

Do something real… go outside. Talk to someone. Pick up the phone. Hug someone. Make love to your spouse. Go to a bar. Walk the dog. Pet your cat. Do anything… anything but waste your time on Facebook. Hell, even watch TV… at least with TV there’s no pretending that you’re not alone.

Good-bye no one. Hello life.

p.s. Look for my new project: goingdark.org, coming soon! A site where people who don’t like social networking can go to meet other people who don’t like social networking. .

Although that’s big news for me, it’s not actually the point of this post. As it happened, I ended up having a bit of time off between when I left my old job and when I start the new job. It wasn’t enough time to go anywhere, so I thought I’d park myself on the couch (or in my chair) and play through a game from start to finish in a few epic marathon sessions. It’s not something I’ve been able to do in… a decade or two?

So, my first task was to find a game I actually wanted to play. This was no small feat in and of itself. Honestly, most games these days are regurgitated garbage, and amount to little more than Doom clones, or a clone of some other high popular game from a time when people were actually creative.

As an aside, I should say, this is partly why I like the casual game scene so much these days, especially on the iPhone. People are doing a lot of inventive things in that space, but the problem is very few of the casual titles have the gameplay depth (or length) that you find from a AAA release. I wanted something much heftier… plus staring at an iPhone screen for more than a few hours bugs my eyes out.

So, I tried everything I could think of. I looked at all the current new releases, I resubscribed to Eve Online, I picked up the Humble Indie Bundle, I looked through countless old game lists. I kind of wanted to pick up a new MMO, but honestly, as much as I love the idea of an MMO, I simply have yet to find one with the depth of gameplay of any of its non-MMO counterparts. Yes Eve Online is ridiculously deep and complex, but when it comes down to it, it’s still largely a grindfest, where you’re repeating the same tasks over and over again to accomplish some menial feat. Regardless of how complex the game rules are, the act of playing the game is really no different than any other MMO: go kill X of Y, travel from A to B to A, rinse, repeat.

Oddly enough, I’m actually a fan of loot whoring games, and grindfests that are the Diablo and rogue-like type games, so I often wonder what makes me enjoy those games but not MMOs. There’s a subtle distinction but in rogue-likes, the grind is not the purpose, nor a requirement. You’re simply exploring and the beasties you encounter are obstacles, the loot is a secondary (but important) reward. The push to keep going, for me, comes from discovering new and unique environments, and from some overarching goal such as killing a massively evil monster and saving the world.

After contemplating this stuff for a while, I decided it was time to go back to some old-school dungeon crawling, and ended up picking up a copy of Torchlight. It’s a shameless Diablo clone, but it is a fresh take on the genre. I won’t go into a review of it, since plenty of others have done that already, but I will say that it’s a great game. It’s got a unique graphical style, great level design, well thought out skill progression, is extremely mod-friendly, and addresses all of my complaints that I had with the Diablo series (mainly convenience issues).

Again though, this isn’t exactly the point of my post. After finding a game I wanted to play, I decided to see if I could get it work under Linux using Wine. The game has been given a “platinum” rating on Wine’s app database, which means it supposedly runs nearly perfectly. However, this simply isn’t the case. The game crashes on startup, and only works if it’s run in safe mode with a lot of the graphical niceties (like fragment shaders) turned off. Ultimate I ended up having to reboot into Windows to play it — a huge inconvenience .

So, to come full circle: I suppose the point of my post was related to my new job after all. The state of gaming on alternate platforms like Linux and Macintosh is definitely improving, but it’s simply not where it could and should be. I am really excited to be working for a company that’s working toward being a part of the solution.

It’s also a nice bit of closure on the years spent head deep in fluid simulation stuff. I really enjoyed doing it, and I’m glad I decided to do a Master’s at Dalhousie, but I’m also happy that soon it’ll be done and over with. It’s an awesome way to end that period of research, and although I don’t know exactly how yet, I’m sure it’ll spark the beginning of something new too.

As excited as I am to present my research to others I must admit that I’m also looking forward to checking out Amsterdam and the Netherlands (and maybe even a surrounding country or two if there’s time). I’ve never been to anywhere in Europe before, so I’m planning to make the most out of my free time while I’m there! I don’t know how well connected Amsterdam is yet, but hopefully if there’s WiFi abound I should be able to update on the go!

For more information on my thesis, and a video of the application in action, check out the project page.

They x-ray’ed me twice, did three malaria screens on different samples of my blood, ultrasounded my liver, spleen, and for some reason the underside of my freakin’ spine. Seriously, when pregnant women get ultrasounds of their babies done, does it feel like the doctor is trying to forge the ultrasound wand into the sub-atomic particles inside the molecules on the back of your skin?

Anyway… so yeah, after all that, a bunch more blood tests (at least 10 vials worth), 3 urine samples, plus the fainting episode, and a trip to the hospital in an ambulance, they were able to give me the diagnosis that I am perfectly healthy!

I’m actually pretty stoked about it. Plus who knew that your liver and spleen were so cute. Well at least mine are. My internal organs are so much cuter than everyone else’s, and it’s not just because they’re mine! They were way cuter than any of those blotchy fetus ultrasound photos I’ve seen.

So my liver and spleen didn’t have hands or arms or legs, or a head. Nor did they look remotely different from each other in any way. They were smooth, and oblong, and completely uniform in colour. That’s what I’m talking about.

Alright I have no idea what I’m talking about.

The whole experience was a bit mad, but I’m thankful it’s over, and I suppose in a way I’m glad it all happened the way it did. Next time I feel weak from 4 nights of fevers though, I’m staying in bed!

As for the fainting… maybe I just think about things too much or something but it was not a fun experience. I felt powerless, like, I knew it was going to happen and there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe that’s not true but at the time that’s how it felt.

Plus, waking up on the floor, seeing your wife’s terrified face… never fun.

Thanks to everyone who wished me a speedy recovery!

I’ll update again tomorrow after I’ve had my spleen ultrasounded!

The first four months of the new job were spent working full time and finishing my thesis at night and on weekends. Every spare moment was devoted to writing, proof reading, or preparing for the defense — nights, weekends, even on the commute to and from work, so I didn’t have much time for the website, or anything else for that matter.

After finally making it through that I was feeling a bit fried, and I also had a growing backlog of things I needed to catch up on, so the last month has been spent on the backlog and pretty much reveling in the awesomeness of free time . I’ve been getting a good number of hours with the new Fallout, been doing some reading, I even got out on my bike a couple times — I’m finally starting to feel a bit decompressed.

Which, I’m hoping, should leave time for something I’ve really missed: writing (of the non-thesis kind). I’ve been planning a few things for the website for a couple of months now, but I just haven’t had the time to make it happen.

Until now!

If all goes well there should be a fairly regular stream of posts coming.