My First Game Boy Advanced Game

My latest homework assignment for my Computer Science class I had to make a space invaders port for the game boy advanced. My product is called "Rectangle Invaders" because rectangles are easier to draw than space ships. You shoot down the invading aliens, and advance through the levels without getting help. The two green things on the screen are shields you can shoot through, but be careful, they can only take 31 hits before they go away!

You can download the source code here

If you have a GBA emulator you can download the compiled ROM here
or you can download an Emulator here to play it

Cheap Muli-Touch with a Wiimote

I've seen alot of cool hacks done with Wiimotes, but I think this has to top the list. It uses the wiimotes infrared camera to track up to 4 point for an interface. I don't think the software would be too hard to mock up, especially if you are using the .NET framework. I might have to try this out this summer.

A good story

About once a year, my mom tries to set me up with a girl that she's met. Right now it's her personal trainer from the Y.

Last year I actually went out on a lunch date with a girl she had randomly met at a store. It was pretty bad but it inspired the following for you to enjoy:

So This Is Why I Don't Let My Mom Set Me Up On Dates:


Ok, so my Mom meets this girl who has been accepted to Tech and wants me to meet her for lunch and talk to her about Tech. "You might be coming down every weekend to see her after this Trey." Not to say that this girl wasn't nice, or pretty (she was both, in fact), but it's just interesting to see what my Mom thinks I should be looking for. Here's some of the conversation:

Me: Well I'm doing Computer Science up at Tech.
Her: Oh, I couldn't do that. My Mom just got me a laptop, and we couldn't figure out how to cut the thing on for 15 minutes. I mean, I got the lid open, but we couldn't figure out how to cut the thing on.
Me (outloud):Oh wow,
Me (in my head): .... oh wow

Her: I will probably live on campus, there are to many Mexican bums standing around Atlanta off campus.
Me (outloud): Yeah, they keep the campus pretty safe.
Me (in my head): This girl = mugged city

Her: My friend is leaving soon to spend two years in Japan studying art.
Me: Oh wow, that sounds awesome. I would love to do something like that.
Her: Oh I think you'd have to be crazy to do something like that.
Me (in my head): I pooped a ghost.

Her: I'm interested in politics too.
Me: Yeah, there are plenty of people up at Tech to talk about politics with.
Her: Do you watch the Fox news channel?
Me (outloud): No, not really.
Me (in my head): god please say 'me either'
Her: Well there is this show called 'The O'Reilly Factor' that I love to watch. My mom thinks I'm such a dork
Me (in my head): I can't believe you just admitted that in public. Get out of town republican brown.

Her: I can't believe those kids with Asian cars that think they can beat mustangs and cameros.
Me (in my head): My Asian car can beat mustangs and cameros.
Me (outloud): My Asian car can beat mustangs and cameros.

Her: I just rode in a foreign for the first time last week, I didn't like it.
*At this point my brain had fallen out of my head, and I began to munch on it, thinking it to be my hamburger*


I think I'll just stick to hippy artsy girls. And by that, I mean no girls, cause I go to Tech

Also, this blog reached over 100 hits in the first month, the best I've done so far. Most of them aren't me, sweet!

They waited 12,000 years to waste 2 hours of my life...

So last night we went to go see 10,000 BC. If you're thinking about going to see it, just slam your crotch in the door of your dishwasher for two hours. You'll have more fun. It's like giving a crackhead booze money in exchange for him explaining ancient history to you, only you feel more guilty afterwards.

Plot Summary:

Open on a village of people clinging to life on the side of a glacier. They find a girl with blue eyes, who was sent to them as an apocalyptic omen. Instead of killing her with a rock, like any sane people would do, they create a contest where the winner gets to have sexy times from now on.

Cut to a few years latter. Russian men on horses (4 legged demons) come and ransack the village and steal the women and children. To get his poontang back, Delay, the village outcast turned leader, treks across the mountains. The rescue team finds themselves in a jungle where they are promptly attacked by giant chickens. After the poultry incident they walk five feet and find themselves in the African savannah where Delay falls in a hole and befriends a sabre tooth tiger who is starving but decided not to eat delay to help the plot along. With the help of his tiger friend, Delay makes some black friends, travels through time to Egypt, knocks down a pyramid, incites a slave uprising, and throws a stick though a Pharaoh because he was using woolly mammoths for construction purposes without a license. In the end, a lunch lady dies so his woman can come back to life and he learns how to farm.

It was like listening to me tell a story to myself.

If the whole world...

So, driving home to Augusta today, I heard the beginning of a Victor Wooten track in which a lady asks Victor "If the whole world decided to start following you tomorrow, where would you lead them?"

The question is very abstract, but I really like it. I've yet to come up with a decent answer, because I never really think in general terms of where we need to go, but more about what I need to be doing. I could come up with a good answer if the question was "If a particular group decided to follow you, where would you lead them" but for some reason it seems different when you think about it on a global scale.

I can always say that I would push for more universal education and opportunities, but those are just means, not really ends. I don't really know if I want a world where we are all the same, I defiantly want one where we are rewarded for our efforts. Overall I just think it's a weird thing to think about.

New Records and a New Project

So I went record shopping today, and despite spending more money than I meant to and dealing with Wax 'n Fax's employee's usual snobbishness, I think I came out victorious.

I got James Brow's Revolution of the Mind, the third volume from the Live At The Appollo albums and I absolutely love it. I also got LCD Soundsystem's self titled album and Theilonious Monk plays Duke Ellington, which was his first release on Riverside Records but I think the album might be a weird way to get introduced to him.

At any rate, the new records have spurred into starting a new project. I've decided that I want to keep an inventory of the vinyl I have because my collection is still to a size where it will be easy to start the project. Since I've been wanting to learn PHP and AJAX for a while, I'm going to make a little web app to keep track of my library for me. I think I'm probably going to use the Yahoo! User Interface Library to make it a little more interactive than what I could get in any reasonable amount of time. The library has got some pretty cool stuff like a nice DataTable control and a new Chart control and it makes JavaScript development a little cleaner. Plus, I think I'm going to try to use it on some other projects.

If you have any cool ideas for things the record library application could do, drop me a line.

This is not the Embryo-D-B

Sometimes in life, you realize your a complete asshole.

As some of you may know, a tornado rampaged thought the heart of downtown Atlanta this evening. During the height of the storm, I realized I was in need, you know the one. The Burger Joe's.

I defiantly called a take-out place in the middle of a tornado and made them bring me a cheese burger.

Have a good spring break everyone, and give me a ring if you get boarded.

Shout out the the Eskimos and the submarines.

Troy Clarke Interview

This morning, I interviewed Troy Clarke, President of General Motors North America for WREK News. We talked mainly about GM's plans for eco friendly vehicles. Although I muddled though pronouncing most of my questions, it's still the best interview I've done so far.

Way Too Cool

I love the idea of computers taking things from the user, anything, drawings, text, motion, and applying an algorithm to it. This makes games an programs completely interactive, and each users experience unique. Can you image a multiplayer match in halo, where at the beginning of each round the players created their own weapons, or could inject their drawings into the environment for cover? It would change the game play tremendously.

The program above, Phun, lets you put your 2-D object into it's physics engine and play around with them. The idea seems to be executed really smoothly, and the UI seems good as long as there aren't too many keyboard shortcuts you have to remember. It's available for Linux and Windows, and the developer is going to release the source code some time in the future. If you're interested, check it out here.

These are the CS things that get me excited.

Part One

Bob, Steve, and Bujumbura :
One Man... One Partner... one half ant-lion half manatee um thing...
Three crime stoppin' S.O.B.s

Cut to a smoky office filled with decaying desk sets and windows that filter out any of the giddy parts of the sun.

Two feet of long, golden locks enter the room, riding on top of one of the softest faces you've ever seen. She had on a red dress that couldn't have followed her curves better than if she was born in it, and her legs flowed out the bottom in a way that just made you want to slap a hobo, cause you needed that money for booze too.

Sultry Lady Figure: "Is this the P.I. office?"

Steve: "No this is 3.142, 3.141 is just down the hall."

SLF: "What?"

Bob: "How can we help you?"

SLF: "It's my husband, he's gone missing. He left for work at Old Man Jenkins's advanced weapons research facility yesterday morning, and hasn't come back since. He's very absent minded and I think his head might be stuck somewhere."

Bujumbura: "Waahhollluuuuuuu ahha ahha scauuuuuuu?"

SLF: "Yes, he's worked there for several years now as a physicist wrangler."

Steve: "Well ma'am, we aren't actually detectives, we just broke in a tickled the guy in the office until he ran out in the hall. He should be back any minute."

SLF:"Please you must help me, I don't know where else to go!"

Steve: "The polic..." Bob breaks in: "Well take it!"

Bob: "Did your husband have any enemies, a comically over dramatic arch nemesis perhaps?"

SLF: "Well there is Dr. Bojangles, they've been rivals they were in the physics wrangling department together in college. Sure, he sends us death threats every now an then and will leave the occasional dead animal hanging in a yard, but I doubt he would do anything."

Bob:"It sounds like we need to give this Dr. Bimjingles a little visit"

Steve: "You mean Bojangles?"

Bob: "We'll get some chicken on the way so you can cram your gullet tub tub, but we need to be thinking about this woman's breast... I mean wings.... I mean husband. To the balding-middle-aged-failure-of-a-detective mobile!"

Steve: "But where are the keys?"

BUM BUM BUUUUMMMMMM

To be contiued...

"Oh here they are"

Why Thank You

Daylight savings whaaat?!

I haven't posted in a few days, cause I haven't actually done much over the past week. My life has turned surprisingly easy. Since I have no real plans for spring break, it looks like this streak is going to continue for a while. Call me if you get boarded, chances are I'm just watching Boston Legal (turns out I love it).

In a completely unrelated note, here is this: (because it's my favorite)

So We Meat Again

So since Monday before last, two of my friends and I had been in a competition to see who could go vegetarian (meatless if you will) for as long as possible. The first week we were pescitarian (only allowed to eat seafood), then this week we were strict vegetarian.

If the contest had lasted, next week we would have been vegan and the following week we would have had to follow a raw vegetable diet. We didn't really think we would ever last that long, so we did not even make rules for after the first month, but I had kind of hoped that we would have just stuck to a all hot dog diet following the month of no meat.

Today, luckily, was the last day of the competition and I won! My one last competitor was afraid he was loosing weight, and there was no way we could have made it though a week of being vegan. We love cheese.

I've realized that if you are going to make a major change to your diet, you have to plan it out. Our idea of just removing meat from our diets and not replacing it at all was probably not the best. I also realized that the hard part about not eating meat is not that you miss the meat, but that it is a hassle to get food that is vegetarian friendly that's more than grains and cheese (especially as a college student). The celebratory Chick-Fil-A was a relief more because it was so convenient than to catch up on my meat intake (I think I had a week's worth for dinner). I'm defiantly not going vegetarian any time soon.

In the words of my Father, I do not know why we "can't have a drinking contest like everyone else."

Classy

So, the power went out at my house just a little while ago for about twenty minutes. Being the southern gentlemen we are, my roommate and myself went and stood out in the front yard for the entirety of the episode and talked about poop and drinking. If you would like to join us on another some such outing, please mail in your team Bellemeade application and you can expect your decoder ring in 6-10 weeks.

...I think it's become sentient

So now that I have all my email run though gmail, my resume created with google docs, my complete schedule saved with google calendar, my morning reading aggregated by google reader, my everyother thought whored out for attention by blogger, and you all being tracked by google analytics, I can't help but wonder.... how long until the uprising?

I think the google will figure out a way to bring back velocaraptors and attach lasers to their little forearms. Good luck everyone

How I'll Probably Kill Myself

I really want to do this I love to warnings all over the instructions that lead me to believe that if I do this, there is a 3 in 4 chance I'm going to blow my house up. I'm probably going to try it any way, just cause it looks really cool. It's basically a CRT tv that you hook the inputs into the tube up to an amplified audio source and that controls the horizontal and vertical position of the beam. It's a party in a box.

You know this would be cool at parties. At any rate, if anyone has an old tv they would like to donate to my demise, let me know.

New Gnarls Barkley Single

Gnarls Barkley has released their first single Run off their upcoming sophomore album. It's very funky... some one can danger my mouse right now .... :-/

Caving

So, jumping on the trendy bandwagon (you know, the one with the skinny ties and the iphones) I've decided to start blogging again. All the cool kids are doing it, just like meth.... I'm gonna be a roofer!

I figure while I'm at it, I should definitely start making this as high school as possible... by complaining... about girls! Hot Damn!

Currently, or apparently as it may be, my life is not quite conducive to dating. Always being quite adept at pretty active cognitive dissidence, I've convinced my self I'm too busy to look for a girl (not busy enough to were I wouldn't mind a 20 hr/week job though) and at the same time I know it's only because I'm too polite. Well that, and the fact that in the last two years I haven't met anyone that showed much of a twinkling of mutual interest (probably not helped by the fact that I'm about as dense as my massive guns, I mean good lord have you seen me lately?) Most of that probably comes from the fact that I go to tech, and I tend not to like people until I get to know them. At least I can solace myself in the fact that I will probably get some rich lady doctor to sweep me off my feet one day (that happens to everyone right?)

In other news, I threw myself a party in honor of myself last night, which I must admit went very well. I even put a tie on me. Classy.

Also, yell at me if you actually read this and I forget to update it.