avalonstar:distortion

Today Jen and I had the chance to visit the Sony Metreon in San Francisco for a Square-Enix event that was announced a few weeks ago, celebrating 20 years since the release of the first Final Fantasy for the NES. It turned out to be more of an event to get your money than an event to celebrate the legacy of Final Fantasy, but as blind fans, we had to at least see what the “crystal hooha” was all about. Below is a retelling of today’s story. (I would have had this up earlier, but my battery died ...

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A lot has been going on with respect to Revyver lately. A lot of rearranging, a little designing here and there, an event or two, and quite a bit of programming.

In fact, (I guess you can call this a pseudo-official announcement), I released my first application under the Revyver brand which goes by the name of Wii SportsStar. If you’ve been following me on Twitter or got a shot of my Flickr stream lately, I’ve been slowly pushing the buzz train with the project, mainly because there are a few features that need to be implemented ...

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I rearranged my desk tonight—and actually—it’s not something I do rarely.

Whenever I find myself cleaning, I start to rearrange things. I seem to do that to relieve stress. The cleaning, not the rearranging. If say, Django’s kicking my ass, I’ll go ahead and do the dishes and wipe down the counter, maybe even vacuum to get the nerves down. It’s relieving in an odd way. Well, I have a hard time not thinking about things, especially if said thing is troubling me. Things like, the rent being due, but not having any ...

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The subject of relevance has been floating in my mind for the past few weeks, off and on. Why? I’m not too sure, other than to attribute the thoughts to the overall reasoning for wanting to wipe this slate clean in the first place. As everybody who blogs knows, the blog is based on a descending chronological structure. New posts come in, old posts go down and fall into the back of the blog’s memory. Archives allow you to access the past, to do anything from compare the difference in writing styles to find that article on ...

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Work is love made visible. And if you can’t work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy.

~ Kahlil Gibran

It’s funny sometimes. I look back at my education, and I wonder if spending four years in college studying entrepreneurship was the right thing to do. Do I regret it? Nah. But I would certainly say at this stage that I’m not a normal entrepreneur, if you’d call me that ...

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It’s almost nauseating how many frameworks and blogging engines onecan choose today. Everything from Ruby on Rails, to SimpleLog and Mephisto, to CakePHP, Expression Engine, the growing Habari Project and even good ‘ol WordPress. All of these contenders (and the loads of others that I haven’t mentioned) have their appealing values, I had reasons, albeit small in most cases against using them. Note that I’ll be intentionally making general assumptions—each tool has their rightful place in different projects, just not in this “exploratory” one.

It wasn’t until I exchanged a few emails with Jeff ...

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As one of the last to sound-off on this awesome conference, I’ll try not to bore you with some of the details. What I am going to do is commit grand theft entry on my friend DKR and take a look at the conference from (hopefully) a different set of lenses.

For this conference goer, the trip to Austin and back spanned 17 days and over 2,500 driven miles. Even though I’d probably never drive halfway across the country ever again, what I found and experienced in Austin has once again changed my outlook for the ...

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In the next few days, as I find myself back in the environment I call home, I’ll be able to fill you in on my experiences at this year’s SXSWi. (Although, I’m sure all of you have already had your fill of SXSW related posts.) But let’s talk bowling for a little bit, shall we? To make a potentially long story short—this year’s event was more than Jen and I could ever hoped for. In case you want the long version, keep reading.

As with all things that require planning, the real test ...

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At the moment I’m in the middle of the first phase of my road trip to Austin; spending some time with my sister who’s on spring break (yes, I know February just ended) and my parents. So I’ve had a chance to take a breather and prepare for the 1,300 mile trip ahead of me. It’s surprising just how unproductive one can be when sitting on a comfortable couch. Since my mind will be occupied with enough serious subjects by the time I get there, I wanted to just sit back, relax and write ...

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Wednesday the 21st marked my fourth year with Jenni. Four years of being together, a little over than three living together—we’re practically married except for the church and the cake parts. So, to celebrate we took a trip to Uno’s Chicago Grill in Antioch (which happens to be the only Uno’s in the Bay Area because the other two were closed down due to the owner not paying his taxes for 15 years). I first took her to dinner there when she visited me in April of 2003, so it seemed appropriate. That and we ...

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I’m excited and honored to announce to all of you the start of something that I’ve personally been extremely anxious to do in recent memory. Ever since last year’s SXSW, there were a lot of ideas being thrown around and a feeling of empowerment. Unfortunately, ideas born that way usually stay as ideas. I’m happy to say this is not the case.

So along with Steve Smith, Jonathan Snook and Dan Rubin, I present Sidebar Creative.

Many of you know how excited I get when it comes to the beginnings of journeys and such. God ...

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