Big Changes to Close Out 2014

As usual when I start a new blog, I made a couple posts and promptly forgot about, but I'll keep trying. There's been some pretty big changes for me in the past few months. The biggest change that sort of holds all the other changes is that I've moved from the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio to Murfreesboro, Tennessee not far from Nashville.

It started out as dipping my toes in the Nashville job market by being really picky and only applying for one job in the Nashville area. I found a job listed on Indeed for a Linux Systems Engineer position that looked like it offered everything I was looking for in a job and I applied by firing off the generic resume attached to my Indeed account.

I didn't really expect a whole lot from it. The real plan was to start an intensive job search in early 2015. But a couple calls with the recruiter turned into phone interviews, and then a face to face, and before I knew it, I was hired on at Franklin American Mortgage Company. After a decade working within the DoD, the last two years being in HPC, it's been a big change of pace, but I'm liking being back out in the real world. With the DoD always being a few years behind the rest of IT world, I've been working to get caught back up to 2014. So far so good.

Of course changing jobs was the easy part. Much more difficult was moving the wife and kids down here and then disposing of the old house without going totally broke in the process. We actually moved pretty quickly on buying a house and had one a little over a month from starting my new job. It's a lot bigger a nicer than our old house, and checks off a lot of boxes on my wife's "dream house" checklist, so that smoothed over her concerns about moving. Getting rid of the old house was the bigger issue, but we actually got pretty lucky and was only on the market for about two months before selling, which isn't bad for the Dayton area.

All in all, its been a pretty crazy end to 2014 that's just starting to calm down. If anything, I think I'm in a great position to start out 2015.

Not Getting Too Comfortable

While I like my job and don't have any reason to leave it anytime soon, there is a bit of a problem. I'm just a bit too comfortable where I'm at. I get to play with a lot of neat things(despite the issues faced, vSMP is really a cool bit of technology), but they're in a rather narrow subset(HPC and supporting technology in my case). Of course it's not a problem unique to me, lots of people comfortable in their little narrow subsets of technology they use at work. I've not touched a Windows server in years and barely know PowerShell. I'm just now hearing about docker. I've even been missing out on things like Chef and Puppet because I don't use them at work(and now I'm kicking myself because maybe they could have).

Luckily this realization comes not long after I've returned to having a real desktop computer. So I'm putting that spare CPU and RAM capacity(though I could really use about twice as much RAM) to good use with VMs(and even docker in some cases) to get myself acquainted with the latest shiny things in computing. Luckily I'm a student with Dreamspark Premium access, so I've even got Windows Server 2012 up and running. I'll be done "learning" Java for school within the next few weeks and once that's done it'll probably be PowerShell. Already messing with docker and getting acquainted with it. In addition to Windows 2012, I've also got CentOS 7 and Solaris 11 up and running(okay, not actually running right now, but all I have to do is issue the start command). So I've got a lot of catching up to do over the next few months and just have to make sure I don't let myself get so rusty on everything non-Linux next time.

Making Games

I keep saying I'd like to try to make video games, but since you have to walk before you can run, I always get bored and stop when trying to make some sort of simple games as a stepping stone to the games I actually want to make. I think I've found a way to motivate me to make the simple game I usually don't care about and make a pretty cool gift for my daughter.

My plan is to make a Mario-like 2D platformer that features her as the star. I'm using Godot as the engine and that seems to be working out pretty well. It seems powerful and scriptable enough to let me do what I need to do while at the same time still doing enough of the heavy lifting so I can spend most of my time on the art, sound, and level design. I haven't quite decided what direction I'm going with those yet. While it will be a fully 2D game(instead of 3D characters moving across the screen in a 2D fashion like some of the newer Mario games), I don't know if I want to go with or retro 8/16-bit retro look that's popular on even new platformers these days, or just go with a nice, yet simple modern style. At least I've got a couple of weeks before the art work becomes a more pressing issue while I get to know the engine a little better.

I'll be posting updates and perhaps even milestone builds of the game here for anyone that wants to follow along.

Kuiper-1

I've recently been writing again. I tried jumping in with a couple novel length projects I've been working on for years, but I seem to be a bit rusty for that. So I've been writing small snippets here and there as exercises and yesterday I wrote a short story. The exercise I game myself self was to create a new character and write about and ordinary day. The setting is on a colony/space station in the Kuiper belt, but it's just and ordinary, so there's no big heroic deeds or anything like that. While the story itself may be small in scope, I think I like the character I've created and might be writing more about him. But anyway, it's also the first piece of my fictional writing that I'm going to make available publicly. So here it is. The Google Drive formatting isn't great, so I'll try to put it up as an epub or something later.

EDIT: Here is a more readable PDF.