John Ratcliff's Weblog

This morning I clicked on my friend Rob Wallace's website and downloaded his latest track from the new CD he is working on called Serenity Now II. It's a really nice track called 'Simple Pleasures' and it starts out like a conventional environmental audio piece and then expands from there. Very lovely, and very relaxing, which is the point. I then started clicking on other parts of Rob's site and got to his game music web page . Of course, this just reminded me of all of the time Rob and I spent working together on music for products during the 90's. They were good times and we created a lot of great art. Rob even had a few sample tracks on his site from Granduer. Granduer was a strange product that was supposed to be an interactive multimedia art gallery. We actually got funded to produce the product, but when it was complete the publisher didn't know what to do with it. I contacted three brilliant artists from the Sedona, Arizona region and created an art...

Wow, this comment system rocks. I love having my website interactive. Thanks all for participating. News on my car today is the plugs are fouled and the plug wires were corroded. Highly likely that was the source of the problem. They are on order and that should fix everything.....that is everthing except the messed up suspension, trashed tranny and..... Hey, if I can just putter around the neighborhood this fall with the top down I'm completely happy. The Cardinals are catching break. Our rookie pitcher Danny Haren is coming on strong. He got to hit...in the *first* inning!! We batted all of the way around the first inning and, sadly, Bo Hart recorded 2 of the 3 outs in the first inning of the game! The pitcher hit a double, several other players hit doubles, and their wobbling starting pitcher for the Expos threw several walks and a hit by pitch in the mix. We ended up with 7 runs in the first inning. Danny Haren left the game around the 8th inning with a shutout....

Well, I kind of got my comment system to work. I had a really nice dialouge with Dave and Lynn about music theft and parents being aware of what kind of materials their kids have access to on the computer. Now my comment system is manually linked to just one set of comments. Great.... I am getting pretty psyched about my vacation starting this Friday. We are frantically trying to get everything ready for the long trip. Still having problems with my Alfa Romeo. If I had known two years ago I would have been putting this much money into the car I would have gotten rid of it and bought something new. Now I feel like I have too big an investment in it to write it off. I just recently put a new exhaust system on it, front to back, and had to have a new transmission mount installed. The suspension is shot, I have a wheel bearing going bad and all of the springs need to be replaced. The transmission is a mess, the synchro's won't mesh without grinding. In the last couple of...

I'm annoyed that this comment system won't work. I tried using the same one that Johnny seems to be using successfully, but mine just refuses to function properly. Anyone know of another comment system that is more reliable? Bruce, regarding movies, you are correct. I think this is going to start becoming a major shift in the next couple of years. For only $149 I got an 8ft by 8ft ceiling mounted projection screen for my home. It literally fills the entire room. A screen that size works out to about 11foot diagonal. Combine that with a nice surround sound system and DLP projector, and you have an in-home theater that is arguably superior to the conventional theater going experience. I only go to a few movies a year now, typically just a handful of major action releases like "The Lord of the Rings". Other than that I can wait the relatively short period of time till they come out on DVD and watch them in my *own* movie theater. Now, a brief comment on a topic ...

Vacation Day #15 : Friday, July 5 : We were not ready to give up the vacation yet. Even after partying all day on Friday we figured there was room left for a party on Saturday too. We decided to throw a pool party for all of our friends on this very hot day. In fact, it was so hot that the water in the swimming pool was over 90 degrees. It hardly felt cool to get into the pool at all. Terry and I tried an experiment and dumped 20 bags of ice into the pool. An entire bag of ice would melt, literally, within 30 seconds. After all of that it, maybe, dropped the temperature one degree. It was a great pool party. We played a lot of very competitive table tennis and the kids played both in and out of the house. In the evening I showed "Fight Club" on the big screen to a large group of teenagers. It was a great day of fun. Here are a few pictures I snapped from that day. Matt seems to have a day of it as Lisa looks on. Patty hates to have her picture taken, which is why I posted it ...

As promised I'm going to try to finish up this vacation series. This last post is mostly just a photo-album of our friends at a BBQ on the Fourth of July. Vacation Day #14 : Friday, July 4 : On July 4th our plan was simply this. Our friends Rob and Lisa have a house right on the lake. Each year they throw a BBQ that is equally mixed with boating throughout the day. In the evening we always watch the fireworks show put on by by the city. The fireworks show is always by the dam and goes off directly over the lake. It is truly magical watching the fireworks reflect off of the water. It's not a very big budget affair, in fact it is produced almost entirely based on donations from the community, but it makes up for it based on location. This single night has more boats on the water than any other day of the year. It seems virtually everyone who owns a boat in Lake St. Louis takes it out on that night. There must have been 500 boats on the Lake and it was a sight to behold. I didn...

If anyone who reads this blog knows Dave Dean, ask him if he will email me any photographs he managed to successfully take at Meltdown last week. Thanks! Update: Dave Dean got a hold of me and he is going to send me some pics once he gets a doo-dad attachment for his camera-phone gizmo. Those are all technical terms of course. On another topic, does anyone know of a better comment system this this piece of crap Enetation one I'm using now? This thing hardly ever works. ">Comment

Last week I went to Seattle for the Microsoft Meltdown conference. This remains one of the most valuable technical conferences in the game industry. I'm sure I'm under NDA and probably shouldn't discuss whatever I did manage to learn. However, I will say this. Neither Microsoft nor the hardware manufacturers seem to understand the real needs of game developers. This conference, like past ones, was marked by presenters giving 'advice' to game developers about the kind of things they 'shouldn't do' to take advantage of their hardware. Of course, the things they say we 'shouldn't do' are the exact things that virtually all games have to do. Go figure? My suggestion, surprise, surprise, is that they start making hardware and API's that solve the actual problems presented by actual game engines. You know, little things like rendering massive numbers of instanced geometry with varying shader properties. Of course, these are the things they tell...

I just got back from my trip to Seattle for the Microsoft Meltdown conference. It was an extremely useful conference and yesterday I spent the day with my good friend John Miles. I've got some photographs of the event but not nearly enough. I will be posting them soon. When I got home I messed with my Pocket PC, I'm pretty happy with it so far. And, once again, my theory that blogger searches the content on my site and inserts targeted advertisments seems to be holding true. Today the ad on my site was for boating supplies and, obviously, I talk a lot about boating on this site. I'll update the blog with photographs from my Seattle trip and finishing up the vacation series. ">Comment

Vacation Day #12 : Wednesday, July 2 : The vacation series continues... Our plan on this day was to 'make our own float trip'. Alex and I were going to take the inflatible boat with trolling motor and put it in to the Cuivre River , taking it upstream until the battery died on our trolling motor. Then we were going to just float back down river to our car. However, by this time Alex was getting pretty exhausted from his activities of the last couple of days, so we decided to put this adventure on hold. I am still looking forward to doing this, even though there are some mild risks. Namely, we could sink. Nevertheless, I still want to try it on my next vacation segment. Alex and I did try out the boat in the Lake and it worked great. In fact a bunch of kids tried it out, driving all around the cove, and had a blast. Some of the parents even gave their young children rides in it like it was a little amusement park attraction or something. In the end Alex just relaxed during the d...

Vacation Day #11 : Tuesday, July 1 : The vacation series continues. I'm trying to get through this vacation series before my next vacation starts. On Tuesday I took Alex to Six Flags. Alex got a free ticket to Six Flags for reading six hours over a number of months. What Alex finds silly is that he probably read 150 hours during that period of time. He is only 10 years old but he reads at a high school or early college level. He finished reading the new Harry Potter book in a few days and is now reading " Watership Down " which I didn't read till I was in college. I took Alex to Six Flags in the morning and we did the water park. In the afternoon I took Alex on rides he likes and he played various games. One amusing moment was when Alex waited in line to throw three baseballs to try to break plates. In front of him was a teenager who swaggered up full of bravado trying to show off in front of his friend and the two girls that were with them. He started discussing what...

Vacation Day #10 : Monday, June 30 : The vacation series continues. On this Monday I began my week of quality time with my youngest son Alex. The plan this day was to drive down to Elephant Rocks State Park to go rock climbing, something both Alex and I really enjoy. Elephant Rocks is the perfect place to go rock climbing in Missouri. Alex and I drove down in the Alfa Romeo with the top down and stumbled across a number of interesting points of interest. We took many photographs along the way, so this post is going to contain a lot of visuals to document the trip. We took Lake St. Louis Blvd. to Highway N, Highway N to Hopewell Road, Hopewell Road to Highway D, Highway D to Highway T, Highway T to Highway TT, Highway TT to Highway 47, Highway 47 to Highway 21 which takes you right to Elephant Rock State Park. Wooohhh. Now that's a little trip, about 110 miles from my door. At 73 miles along the way I saw something remarkable from the road. I was just passing through the town of Cad...