John Ratcliff's Weblog

Just a small update today. My job is going well. I finally am feeling comfortable in the position and feel like I am contributing towards the cause. I just laid out enough tasks to keep me busy till June. We are brining on a GUI programmer who will be writing a Windows front-end for all of the tools and engine work I will be doing. We are going to try using C-sharp in the .NET framework, because I have heard that this is the best way to produce highly sophisticated Windows user interfaces in a very rapid fashion. So far, I remain extremely unimpressed by .NET. It may be great for Windows GUI developers, but if you are an old school low-level programmer it's nothing but a monsterrous beast that gets in the way. I was using Visual Studio 6 before, but under .NET my entire machine goes down to a crawl. I only have a 2.8ghz P4 with 2 gigabytes of ram; so why should I expect the compiler to run? I really want to be able to do some work from home, so today I broke down and b...

I don't have a whole lot to say. I'm just bumping my previous post. I'm now finished with my third week at my new job, and I'm beginning to make some progress and feel like I am contributing a bit more. Next week the company is having me fly out to a business meeting, which will be fun. I enjoy business travel. My friends who travel constantly have a different view but, for me, it's always nice to take a break from programming a computer all day. Today I stopped by and visited my friends at Simutronics. I kind of let them know what my new job is all about; and one very exciting thing is that I will actually be able to provide some technology to their product as part of my new job. It's really cool working for a company that is primarily acting as a technology provider for the games industry. I am not a direct competitor with anybody, yet, at the same time, I get to help contribute to many products and meet lots of people. Some of the specific technol...

Well I just completed my first week of work at my new job. It was a good week and I have a lot of positive things to say about it. The commute was not as bad as a I thought it would be, but it was worse in other ways too. Yes, it takes me an hour each way, and yes I get bunched up in traffic. However, the actual driving part just didn't bother me as much as I thought it would. I have yet to get blocked by an accident, though I'm sure it will happen soon enough. I'm not looking forard to it, but what can you do? The hard part has been simply the time. I am working from about 8:30am till 7:00pm. These are hardly insane hours, and no more than I worked at the Sony office in non-crunch times. However, when you tack and extra hour on each side of that for the commute, it's not very pretty. I get up at 6:30am, leave at 7:15am, and get home at 8:00pm. So I only have a few waking hours at home in the evening each day. Oh well, I can't complain too much, that...

Well, I managed to go through the holidays without making any blog entries. I guess I just wasn't in a writing mood. I gained five pounds over the last few weeks, so I will have to start Atkins induction all over again starting Monday. I had most of these last two weeks off of work. I'm a little disappointed with myself, because I really didn't do much of anything with that time. I did see "The Return of the King" three times, so I suppose it wasn't a total waste. I had intended to do a bunch of work during the break, but once the break got here, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. As my dear friend Gandalf would say, "It was the deep breath before the plunge." Tomorrow is my first day at my new job. I'm very excited, and very nervous about it too. To be honest, I don't exactly know what it is I'll be doing. I don't know if I will have an office or not, or just how terribly awful the commute will be. We did have...