Back In The USA

Rhaluka finally made it back to the USA from her long 5 month stay in Romania, thank you Homeland Security. Government immigration paperwork is such a nightmare. Anyway, she's back and settling in again after almost half a year away. We decided to start leveling some Draenai toons on Dragonmaw (WoW, of course!) and we're in the mid-teens now.

What else has been going on? A ton, especially at work. We're over 60 people now and working away on our MMORPG. It's a lot of fun but also an insanely interconnected web of dependencies and just a huge project size, the biggest I've done thus far. We're still in stealth mode for quite a while yet so I can't say more yet but we're all very excited by our progress!

My iPhone continues to be the paragon of electronic goodness. It just rules, completely. I love watching TV shows and movies on it, taking photos, listening to music, getting email, sending SMSs, etc, etc. It's AWESOME! Rhaluka loves hers as well.

I'm slowly working on Quinn Fox's official site as well. I gotta get his music up there.

Other interesting things going on: a Daikatana recreation in the Half-Life 2 Source engine; I might be the star of a reality show (these things never work out though :); I'll be in China for a week in November; Dangerous Dave on cell might be published soon.

R.I.P. John J. Anderson

One of my favorite writers and game authors from the 80's was John J. Anderson. I first got acquainted with John from his excellent game Sea Dragon (published by Scott Adam's company Adventure International) and then Eliminator.

I used to read his columns in Creative Computing magazine and he was a very bright guy, crossing over between the Apple II and Atari 800 with ease. He was one of the few authors back in the day to write code for both platforms because it required quite a bit of knowledge to do both well. Not only did you have to be completely fluent with 6502 assembler but you also had to know the entire memory map of the system and all the important switches and places in RAM and ROM. John was a master of 8-bit systems alongside Jim Nitchals and David Lubar.

John Anderson died on October 17, 1989, seventeen years ago. R.I.P. John.