John Ratcliff's Weblog

Ok, tonight I’m going to download what I can, from my brain to my blog, in one large data dump. It won’t be pretty, but at least I will have posted something. My memory is so porous that if I don’t post shortly after an event has occurred I really don’t remember it with any clarity. The memory of my past week has already faded in my mind and I will doubtfully be able to do much more than recite some basic bullet point items. I have a few photographs, none of them really all that representative of everything that happened, but they will at least anchor portions of the story. Last week my company sent me to GDC at the last moment. They flew me out on Monday so I could attend a Microsoft DirectX developers day event on Tuesday. My flight was relatively uneventful. The small pewter sculpture I brought in my baggage for my friend John Oberschelp was successfully investigated by the transportation and safety administration and determined to be safe to consume a small quantity of weak tea fro...

Well, not that I post that often anyway, but this will be my last post for over a week. I am leaving for the Game Developer's Conference tomorrow. I'm supposed to attend some DirectX talks on Tuesday, then have tons of meetings on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday I am going to San Francisco to visit with my friend John Obershelp. We will do the whole San Fransisco thing on Friday and Saturday and I fly back on Sunday. Last night I had my movie showing for SNSR. It went very well. I had about 12 people in attendence, including David Whately and Ashley Ellis. Some SNSR people made it, and the film was very well received. I had a slight projector problem on the first reel, where the film was stuttering a bit. However, I switched projectors for the last two reels and it ran fine. That's about all the news that's fit to print. I'll try to take some photographs on my trip to California so I can update my blog when I return.

Just a reminder that on Saturday evening I will be having my showing of "Empire of the Sun" for the Saturday Night Screening Room. With the exception of the President of SNSR, Phil Steinberg, no one has sent an RSVP. So, if you are planning on coming, please let me know. Today Terry painted the marquee and framed the rest of my movie posters so the theatre is set!

I had some internet friends from out the country show up in town on Friday. So, on less than 24hours notice , I decided to throw them a party. Pulling together a party in such a short time proved to be a real challenge. If it was not for my good friend Melissa Meyer it wouldn't have been such a success. I used AOL instant messenger to contact Melissa at about midnight on Friday night and asked her for help. She, in turn, coaxed a bunch of our mutual friends to change their plans and show up for the party on very little notice. I also invited a couple of our neighbors as well as people from work at my new job. Terry and I spent the day getting things ready and were just in time to have a large spread of food and drinks when guests began to arrive around 6pm. It was a huge success with at least twenty people who managed to make it. The theme of the evening was a game night. We set up a number of game tables and there were always one or two games going on at any given time. I also sh...

So, I keep trying to get my friends signed up for Orkut. And they resist. And, why shoudln't they? The damned thing likes like spam, smells like spam, and reeks of trouble. If someone's invite manages to get past your spam filter and you click on the link, it asks you more questions than a four year old without his ADD medicine. Yet, still, I try to invite people to join? Why is it? Is it really all that cool? Well, it's not. The site itself is actually kind of lame. I mean it's slick, and professional, and fast. That's nice. But it's thin. Very, very, thin. Like too little butter spread over too much toast. It offers very little in fact. So what compells me to continue to mess with Orkut? I think, in many respects, for the same reason I keep up with my blog. Maintaining connectiosn with friends I care about spread across vast distances. The 'fun' I get out of Orkut is when one of my friends gets one of their friends to sign up w...

Well, I've learned a little bit more about this Orkut thing since I last posted. It's kind of interesting. Apparently Google is a rather progressive company and they allow all of their employees to spend 20% of their time working on personal projects. One of their engineers, named Orkut, wrote a piece of 'social networking' software on his own time. Google went ahead and put it out there for the heck of it. It's in 'beta' now, and will eventually likely be either advertising based or have a premium service. Either model seems reasonable to me. I've been using blogger for almost a year and half now and have never paid a penny for this fantastic service. We all use Google constantly and don't pay for that either. Apparently, before Orkut, there was a product called "Friendster" which I was lucky enough to have never heard of. Apparently Friendster has a lot of critics. Orkut is supposedly much better, it's certainly quite...