State of the Union

When I visited home last week, my dad (of all people) scoffed “Your page isn’t about anything but cars these days, is it?” Touché! There hasn’t really been a lot of content lately that didn’t revolve around Infineon Raceway, which is usually cheap content. You may have noticed some recent signs of life, but it’s been a while since I updated regularly. So I think a quick “state of the union” post might be a good idea. What’s up with me and the webpage?

The short answer is that life has been busy in the last few months. I don’t work for Factor 5 anymore, and I am taking some time to figure out what I want to do with my professional career for the next few years. That status puts me in a weird state; on the one hand, I have tons of time to do whatever I want to do, including blog posts. On the other hand, I’m busy figuring out Life, the Universe and Everything, which doesn’t leave much time for the webpage, at all.

But I want to get back into blogging soon. I’ve been thinking about a whole bunch of stuff, much of which would make for good web content. I’m a game designer at heart, and I want to make that topic the focus of this blog again. Hopefully, I’ll arrive at at least one actual posts per week on that subject, on top of a the recurring themes that were running earlier this year. Speaking of which, what’s up with…

• Beyond Belief 2008? Don’t remind me. The short answer is that the level is pretty much done, but hasn’t progressed much from the state that it was in for my beta test back in March. It still needs difficulty settings, a bunch of tweaks based on the testers’ feedback, and a complete VIS pass. Which takes roughly three days on a quad core pentium, a computer I don’t have access to right now. With everything else going on, I don’t see this being released anytime soon. But I do plan on releasing it! This level is getting comfortably close to “cannot finish something” territory, and I have never let that happen… In the meantime, I’ll send the beta version to anybody who would like to play. Just drop me a note!
• The monthly hike series? My knee happened. It’s been broken since I was 15, with recurring periods of bustedness in between. And almost 4 months ago, one of those periods started when I twisted the knee out of its socket while sleeping during the night. I pretty much wasn’t able to walk for 3+ months, let alone hike. So there haven’t been any hike posts. I did my first short hike after all this time just today, though, and as soon as I get back in shape enough Victoria and I will try to pick up the series.
• The Silent Reviews? Well, the page doesn’t look very attractive when it’s the only content appearing for several weeks, for one. And honestly, I was just running out of stuff to “review”. I’ll probably go back to the monthly snapshot posts instead.

I think that’s about it for now. Thanks for visiting, or still having me in your RSS reader! I’ll try to be more interesting again soon. Before I do that, I have at least one more racing post to get out my system, though

Spam Attack

Well, well. I leave the page alone for a while (I’d post about the reasons for my post lethargy, but I don’t feel like it ), and as punishment I get attacked by the evil spam gods. 76 spam in one go? With Askimet and various trackback and math checks installed that’s highly unusual. I guess I should feel a tiny bit honored and hang on t… nah, screw it. *Delete All*

Testing The New Server

Testing server migration. Back to regular business soon!

Server Move

My page is undergoing some internal changes to the server, but we will resume regular service soon

Blog Fu

My blog fu is weak these days, as Gunnar would say. There’s actually several topics that I want to write about, like Gears of War 2 (which I finished a couple of weeks ago), Resistance 2 and The Reader. I started working on BBelief2008 again and, with a couple of month’s perspective, realized what a monster that level is. I just haven’t found the time and energy to post. Part of the reason is that I changed my work routine. I’m not taking my laptop to the office anymore and strictly use my work computer for…well, work stuff. So there’s no time to scribble down things during a lunch break, for example. It makes for a more concentrated and efficient work experience without distractions, but often results in me not wanting to touch another computer when I get home in the evening. I usually opt for doing something with Victoria (or turning on the PS3 or 360) instead. It certainly demonstrates how little I really need the internet during the day. Checking CNN.com or your personal email once is informative. 20 times per day not so.

I figure I’ll get back to regular posting soon, just need to shake off the lethargy. In the meantime, I’d like to give a few shoutouts:

• To Victoria, who just gained another year of wisdom and beauty.
• To Grant and Virginia, who decided to get married.
• To Gaurav and Summer, who did get married last years and who are now expecting a baby.
• To Kerstin and Olli, who had a baby
• To my brother Guido and his fiancee Sarah, who (almost) set their wedding date for this summer.

Gonna be a busy year! I guess I should get ready… And post about it when things come to pass.

Feed Hiccup

The WordPress 2.7 upgrade introduced some RSS hiccups, causing http://www.worch.com/feed to not reliably forward to my Feedburner page anymore. Hopefully, those problems should now be resolved. If you’re already subscribed to the page, please take a second to check if that subscription actually does point to http://feeds.feedburner.com/worch. If not, please let me know in the comments. Thanks!

WordPress 2.7 Update

After a short grace period (you never know what new versions do to your plugins!) I have updated the page to WordPress v2.7. Everything seems to be fine, but please let me know if you find any weird behavior or missing stuff!

Page Navigation Improvements

A few weeks ago, I invested some time into making the breadcrumbs on top of every page a useful navigation tool to browse my page. That made matters much better – but when looking at image attachments, the trail was missing a link back to the parent post. Which made it a pain to go back to the actual post, and made it impossible for Google image searchers to refer to the post at all. Not anymore, though! I coded up something that includes the parent post in the breadcrumb trail:

Of course you’ll need to be in an image gallery to see this small, but important change (at least to me ). I don’t have any good new images to upload right now, so I copied over a cool post from the last webpage instead: “It’s Alive!”, the animatronics exhibition that Victoria and I visited a couple of years ago. Head over and see what Gizmo, Harry (without the Hendersons) and the American Werewolf in London look like without makeup on!

Page Gallery Improvements

Whoop! I’ve made some major improvements to the gallery posts on my page. WordPress v2.5 introduced an image gallery that is functional, but a lot of basic functionality is still missing. Once you click on an image, for example, you have no easy way of going back to the parent post. You can hit the Back button on your browser, but what happens if a search engine brought a visitor straight to an image page (as is happening quite often for my Samantha Sarcinella image, for example)? When you’re on that image page there’s also no way to go to the parent post and see the rest of the gallery.

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Page Navigation Improvements

I spent the last couple of hours making the breadcrumbs on top of most pages more useful. They’d always been there, but as a navigation tool there were pretty confusing, to be honest. Missing parents (the main blog page was never included!), confusing hierarchies (breadcrumbs for a download post didn’t lead to the Downloads page!) etc.
I’d never really dug into the plugin and wasn’t sure how much work this would be. Turns out that most changes were relatively easy because the plugin already supports them. I had to make some code modifications for others, though.

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