Keeyai.com

I only managed to get one post up in May? How is that possible? Silly lazy blogger.

I’ve been jumping around between tons of projects lately, which might be why I haven’t had anything big enough to fully blog about, sending my little updates to twitter instead. Not an excuse, just an observation.

I haven’t finished anything in a long time, and that is starting to grate on me. I have the same to-do list of major projects I had six months ago (including writing a to-do list program!). Instead of completing projects it seems I just add new ones onto the list. That trend ends now though, because the projects I am currently working on are all very important as they might actually bring in some income. Hobby coding, back of the line!

I’m splitting my time pretty evenly between my mortgage software (which is requiring lots of additional features lately) and cooking up the tech for a little MLM startup two of my friends dreamed up. I was extremely reluctant to have anything to do with an MLM (pyramid scheme), but they are doing it in a very legit way that looks like it will actually be pretty cool. If you jump on that particular bandwagon, know you’ll be using my software and website.

Next up in the queue is the plasma donation business I’ve been trying to start. This one is a doozy, but I’m making progress — I signed the incorporation papers earlier this week, so all that is left is a bunch of research and putting together a pro forma. Then of course getting funding, cutting through the miles and miles of red tape, and actually getting off the ground. If any of you readers happen to have boatloads of investment capital laying around, you let me know, okay?

Other projects that have made their way up the list are my five open source projects: Tail, Flame, WPMC, CGL, and Chronolapse. Each of these have features or bug fixes requested from users but I haven’t touched any of them in far far too long. Sigh.

Also, if my artist buddy (you know who you are) ever gets un-busy, I’ll be working on Ithilis again someday in the future. You old school Ithilis-ites won’t even recognize it - the new code is very ‘Web 2.0′ with slick n’ snazzy ajax and even, gasp, graphics! I was inspired by ‘Nile Online’ and think it would be a major improvement over the old design. Don’t get your hopes up though, this one won’t even see the light of day for a while.

Other notable mentions:
- dive in movie review
- to do list website (dooeet)
- life achievements
- redo interwebs and putting online, 3 years later
- maybe make an actual video game?

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to do 15,000 situps? Of course you haven’t, that would be crazy.

I so very badly wanted to leave the post at just that… Oh well.

Anyway, as per my usual, I’m wondering what effect 15,000 situps will have on my body and have decided to try it out at 1,000 a day, every other day, for 30 days. For variety (and to give myself even the slightest chance of finishing) I’ll be mixing up legit situps with other ab exercises, including but not limited to: V-ups, oblique sit ups, leg lifts, crunches, those weird leg climby things, and a small amount of micro crunches. I’m not trying to do them non stop or anything like that - just 1,000 in a day with a rest day in between.

Will it be hard? Will it be easy? Is it enough to have noticeable results? I have no idea, but I wouldn’t mind getting my abs back so let’s find out.

Well, somehow I decided to start pyweek 8 today, even though half of the time is already gone. Previously I was working as part of a team, coding some backend stuff for the pyedpypers group which was going well. Today, however, was a weird day, and we had some team drama. We flip flopped across a whole slew of decisions, with moral falling through the floor. We scrapped our old idea and started on a new one, but now part of the team is going back to the original. It is a little bit hectic.

Anyhoo, I really liked one of the new game ideas and am going to pursue it solo (it looks like each of our team members is doing a solo entry now). I already don’t have a ton of available time and it is way outside my comfort zone, so this should be a very interesting 3 days. I’m going to spend a bit more time tonight hacking stuff together then evaluate my situation tomorrow. I have to go to work this week and I have a couple important meetings, so for now it is all up in the air.

Keep an eye out for progress, if there is any.

Updates!

I got back from Las Vegas last night and had an absolute blast. I’m trying my best to get back down there and waste some more money. I love everything about Vegas; I annoyed the hell out of my friends blathering about the beautiful mix of flashy gaudy bling and the seedy sex-driven underbelly. It doesn’t even try to hide it, which just makes it that much better.

We hit a lot of casinos, a strip club, and couple key restaurants, but my favorite thing about it was just sitting down at an empty table and playing blackjack with my buddy. We lost all our cash, but we had a hell of a time and a couple free drinks, so it still ended up being a great night. If only we could have gone home with that bachelorette party…

Anyway, as soon as I have enough money to move there, I’m going to. 24 hour buffalo wild wings, steak joints, gambling, and strip clubs make it my kind of town.

On to work! Today is 4/20, a classic day of debauchery, and to celebrate we stopped working at 4:20 pm and played beer pong (beirut) on the lower floor. One of the bosses (my mother!) came down mid-game, but just got out some patron silver instead of getting upset. It is a great place to work.

So, buzzing a bit from the beer (I only won a single game… wth), my roommate picked me up and we went disc golfing, where I threw my first hole in one ever. It wasn’t pretty — I threw a decent hammer that smashed into the ground a couple feet from the basket and bounced up and in. Dirty, but an Ace nonetheless. This led to a record round for me, shooting even at that course for the first time.

I rounded out the day with a stop at blockbuster where we picked up an average looking action movie and watched it in the hot tub, as usual. I just finished writing my first review for the site, but you’ll have to wait until the site is up and running to actually see it.

All in all a fantastic day.

For those of you who follow my twitter or facebook accounts, this is mostly old news. But to the rest of you…

A new project is on the horizon! Lately, I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time watching movies from the hot tub. Quick synopsis: I recently bought a hot tub and put it on the other side of our large kitchen window. On the inside we’ve put the TV and rigged up a speaker that we can easily take outside. Recently I added this canopy/gazebo thing which let us watch during a heavy rainstorm yesterday and a surprise snowstorm today. Throw in some beer and the towel rack and it makes an incredible movie watching experience. Next paycheck I’ll be adding a 50″ plasma TV and some permanent outdoor speakers to make it truly ridiculous.

Now, for a couple years I’ve been wanting to create a casual movie review site that addressed some of the issues I have with most of the other review sites out there. My main problems with the other sites is that they are usually either an amalgamation of community reviews with no rhyme or reason, or they are the opinion of a single critic (or worse, the site is a collection of reviews by a few reviewers, but each item is reviewed by a single person). In my opinion, this is not an accurate or effective way to gauge the quality of anything.

So, to address this, I’ve been wanting to make a site where a few regular reviewers post intelligent reviews for each movie. Viewing a movie’s page shows you what each reviewer thinks about it, with both a blurb and some numerical rating systems. Naturally, each reviewer will have differing opinions, which is what makes this work; the value comes from the users’ ability to identify with a certain reviewer’s point of view, either wholly or on a category by category basis. As you read reviews, the site will track whose opinions your own views line up with, and can recommend movies to you based on that. It’s like having a friend who knows your tastes suggest movies to you because they know what kind of things you like.

I want to take this deeper than just an overall score and drill all the way down to a category level. For example: One thing I value more than most other people is that a story ‘plays by its own rules’. This is different than a story’s plausibility in our reality. Let me explain in detail. Part of every story told is the setting — in its broadest form it is the universe in which a story takes place. Every universe has a set of rules; for example, star wars is set in a universe powered by ‘the force’ where things like swords made of light are possible. I’m 100% fine with this. Where I start to get upset is when the characters do things (or don’t do things) that don’t fit the universe in which they live. Why oh why has no jedi just turned off his lightsaber in the middle of a fight, swung past the other jedi’s block, and turned it back on somewhere inside his opponent’s chest? Remember X-Men 3, when Magneto carries the golden gate bridge to alcatraz to land his army? I’m fine with magneto being able to do that; what frosts my balls is that he takes an army of mutants and sacrifices them on the marines there, instead of SMASHING THE ENTIRE ISLAND OVER AND OVER WITH THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE. They didn’t need anything there; all they wanted was to kill the kid inside. He just wouldn’t do it the way it happened in the movie - they simply put it there to make a fight scene happen. I see this as very sloppy and lazy writing. So, if you feel the same way I do about this kind of thing, the site can learn that maybe you identify with a reviewer X’s general movie ratings, but agree with my reviews specifically when it comes to continuity/plausibility (there is probably a great word for this that I don’t know).

That brings us back to the new project — I’ve been thinking about such a review site for a while, and I’m starting to watch tons of movies with a semi-regular crew of hot tub goers (hottubbers?). I’m already sharing my opinion of each flick with anyone within earshot, so I figure I might as well put it to good use and rope as friends in as I can. So I bought up diveinmoviereview.com and away we go.

I’ll be building the site one of these days, but for now I need two things: suggestions on what things are important in a movie review, and regular/semi-regular reviewers excited to watch a bunch of movies. It isn’t even critical that you watch them from the actual hot tub, but c’mon, if you have the opportunity, why wouldn’t you?