As mentioned in my previous post, we’ve just gotten back from the UK where my sister Corine got married to Rob. It was a wonderful party at which we enjoyed ourselves very much. I pondered long and hard on what to get them, thinking about doing something on the guitar, but I didn’t think it was the right kind of party for that. I thought about doing a speech, but I knew there were already going to be a few very good ones and didn’t want to bore them with mine, although I do regret for passing on the chance to say something to a special person who made all the difference for me in getting through some rough days at school when we were young. Instead I chose to draw/paint something. They say a picture says more than a thousand words, but then again ‘they’ haven’t heard the great speeches so I’ll never trust that statement again ;). Anywayz, this is my way of saying ‘guyz we love you very much and wish you all the best together!’.

And the sketch which I created first:

Sooo it has been kind of silent around here lately. It’s annoying really. Although I normally keep these kind of post to myself, I thought I’d make an exception. Silence may give you the wrong impression that nothing is going on here, while the truth is quite the opposite. So what’s causing it?
Well first of all, I’ve been working on the same project for the past few years, and it’s gonna stay in AS2. Although the project is great, I feel AS2 is .. well .. so last year (for a few years already). On the other hand except for performance reasons I’m not jumping up and down to move to AS3. We’ve come up with a lot of ‘fixes’ for problems in AS2, which are now mostly standard features people are praising in AS3, such as solid error handling, reflection, logging, dictionaries etc and in addition nothing beats MTASC as a compiler:). Besides that I’m still not too sure about migrating the project to AS3, although I myself feel I might need to move on or miss the last rowing AS3 boat entirely.

So what is going on on that front is that AS2 development continues, while I’m turning to AS3 as well, for example by developing new stuff with Gaia (Steven Sacks’ framework), doing some tutorial work, and I’ll probably do the next NeuroFlasher game in AS3. Migrating the current project is kinda hard because of the 30 or so people involved and the 1000+ fla’s that have to be migrated as well (although AS2 to AS3 communication might help us out there, the garbage collection problems in the current FP9 player will not).

One of the other causes of radio silence is… truth be told.. family & social life. Yep I know if you are a workaholic this will sound sad :). Roan just turned 1, Leon is almost 5 and we share many a happy hour which couldn’t be further from the concept of silence than it is already. Besides that I enjoy playing AD&D, AT43, and a lot of other computerbased games such as starcraft, diablo, warcraft, with a bunch of friends where I live and online… and yes once you start …. Although this only happens about one night in a week, if one night is all you got to do something extra, it diminishes the output by about well yes a 100%! But of course that is entirely my own fault.

So what else is there? Ah yes, exercise woohoo. I set myself a goal to gain (yes you are reading it correctly) some kilograms, and up to now it’s working quite well, although the muscle/fat gain ratio could be improved :). In addition I’m working on a tattoo for Jeremy from New Jersey for his son Aidan, like I have one for mine. Up to now it’s going nicely, although there is still a certain amount of work left to be done. I’ll post some pictures of it. Which brings me to my most recent painting, a work I did for my sister Corine’s wedding in the UK, from which we just got home. An awesome party with a very nice family, but I won’t go into details here (but I’ll post the painting and some pictures). Last but not least, the beta version of NeuroPuzzles 1.3 is close to completion, and I’m very excited about it’s release (and yes I’ll post some pictures and more info about that too!).
So here I am, on Sunday morning, with a few hours of holiday to spare, before I’m getting back to work to tomorrow, full of plans for improving the frequency of my blogposts with the images & words promised above!