They were surprised that I last this long before coming in for a checkup. According to them, this is a very painful condition to be in. From my point of view, I only wanted to find out if there is a way for me to stop getting distracted by the inconvenient feeling that began 5 days ago.

Shingles is the resurfacing of chicken pox what lies dormant in a person’s nervous system. The method of storage is unknown and the method of reactivation is unknown. Apparently, something triggers the nervous system to start making the very virus that causes the pain. Yes, the liquid that oozes out of the sores are actual varicella virus and contagious, but unless you touch it with a part of your skin that has open wounds, you won’t catch it. Or if you somehow rub your open wound all over my pants.

It’s painful all right since the virus uses the nerves to travel to the surface of the skin and creates sores at the numerous nerve ending clusters. To those of you who never had it. It’s like getting stabbed randomly and repeatedly by the tip of a knife.

Supposedly, at around 50, when your immune system gets weakened, it has the most chance of surfacing. Otherwise on a healthy person like me who’ve never experience the fever that precedes the viral outbreak, the only unofficial explanation is by some nervous shock induced by psychological stress.

Consider that I have been working full time to come home and either day trade or write my game till well into the night,  while, at the same time, dancing salsa about 3 hours/week. I would say that psychological stress is the most probable cause. I am just angry that I can’t put my body on overdrive as much as I wanted to.  Not if I want another episode of shingles for a month and risk having phantom knives stabbing me for the rest of my life. Seems like I have to slow down, meaning no more programming at the doctor’s waiting room in pain while the babies around cried their crescendos.

For the right prices, I would risk it, but at the moment, nothing is worth that much yet. It is my life’s philosophy to step into my coffin with a body that’s completely ruined, but I also understand that I can only ruin the body parts once. Choose wisely.

• BUY microsoft stock. Project Natal is going to kick everyone's arses. Advice from a gamer with 25 years gaming experience. #
• Once I decided to do something. Shit started happening that made me hesitate. Should I charge ahead? Or settle for the comforts promised? #
• Been laughing non stop for the past 2 hours after discovering bash.org #
• News corp blocking google. It's going to be one of those FAIL stories we reminisce in the future. #
• Really Miss Z. But the most surprising of all of this is that I can't imaging you playing farmville. #
• Uhhh… Why is facebook blocking links? #
• Funny, my skin is allergic to the pickle juice, but I can eat it without needing an anaphylactic shot. #
• New blog post: Zania dev journal day 13 http://bit.ly/3p5mJ8 #
• Can't wait. So excited. And tired and burnt out. The roughness is contagious. #
• I like how China is getting more important. Evident by Obama's Chinese visit. I just hope it'll translate to our cultural image one day. #
• My AMD is up 22% in a day. Been waiting for this Intel settlement for a year. Orgasm. #
• @LivelyIvy Congrats. Showing my support for fellow indie developer. #
• Yes, mind blowing. But I am glad I got it right. #
• Heh, COD:MW2 sells 8.8 million copies on day 1. If you haven't bought ATVI stocks. Now is a good time. #
• New blog post: Investors and the economy http://bit.ly/nIUMl #
• Heh, so basically Modern Warfare 2 has the whole thanksgiving shopping week to itself. WIN. #
• You heard it from me first. Electronic Arts (ERTS) is headed towards bankruptcy. No insider information. Just pure Fundamental Analysis. #
• I should start charging people to help them call up some Chinese shop and schedule an appointment for them for repairs. #
• Playing with illustrator. Working on graphics and animations. #

Life and trade optimization

Yeah, I know, I didn’t update last week. It’s not because I lost big or anything. I just got too busy and didn’t get to trade much. Trading, unlike what I used to think, requires more research than a full time job. I decided that I shouldn’t make a trade, unless I’ve done enough research for a particular stock. As can be seen from my last statement update,  10% of my profits got eaten away by commissions to my broker. The solution that I applied is simply to trade less and ride the swing for a longer period of time.

On top of that, because I day trade now, the concept of money and time is even more distorted than it used to. I am basically losing and gaining thousands of dollars daily, while living a very frugal life where I barter for anything that cost more than $50. I started to realize that most of the cost cutting that I’ve been doing isn’t really worth my time. The enjoyment of life is slowly creeping to the #1 spot in my life’s goal. Which is why I took that Metallica trip and had to basically abandoned trading for 3 days because of the aftermath.

Performance analysis

Starting balance: $5149.48

Closing balance: $6368.08

Trade carrying over to next week: $4814.5 (75.60%)

Derivative risk: $21,000(329.79%)

Increase from opening balance: $1218.60  (23.66%)

Cost of capital: $241.4  (19.80%)

Earnings excluding one time lucky shot: $0

Successful bets: Lost track

Failed bets:  Lost track

Carryover bets: Lost track

Strategy

I tried a strange straddle technique by buying one put option on the FAS and another one on the FAZ. Figuring that since these two both decay, it is best to buy the put options. Also, because they are way cheaper than the calls. I am still waiting for it to play out, if the financials experience a big rally or big drop, I’ll profit greatly.

Reflections

I slipped and missed out on a few earnings release that should’ve reaped some great benefits for me. At the same time, I am abandoning the straddle strategies that I’ve been using for earnings release. Upon some initial estimations, I realized that for a straddle to earn anything, the underlying stock needs to have a wild swing of at least 10%. A great feat if you’ve seen enough of the market. At most, it’s a 5% swing for stocks that are large cap and even when it’s a small cap, the volatility is usually already discounted into the options price. You lose either way.

On another note, writing options is making my books look terrible. The risk of having everything exercised will require me to pony up $21000. Which is an astronomical number compared to the actual underlying cash. This is part of the reason why we have a financial crisis at the moment. The problem is not that I’ll lose big, but rather, when people exercise the options, I need to have that amount of cash on hand. Which, means liquidating a lot of assets just to have cash on hand, exacerbating the problem.

After much thought, I’ve decided to stop writing options because the risk/reward is not worth the small amount of income it generates. So far, for small transactions, the best risk/reward is still in the direct buying of a call or a put option.

In my opinion and this is my opinion only from observation. Critics love big failures. The down fall of the the free world brought about a flock of critics who spend their time writing articles to point out the faults of every firm that’s out there. I personally believe that it is the action of a coward. People who criticizes and bath in the glory of their prescience on how bad things are because of those “in the wrong”. Those who, instead of acting to save, acted to destroy. Through what they thought as innoncent words.

Yes, in writing this, I am also attacking, but I am only attacking because we have recovered. To tell you the truth, the only people who can survive what we survived are those who has everything that they have in hard earned cash, but even that is debatable due to inflation. Perhaps gold is a better bet, but then you also have to spend money to rent a vault somewhere.

Critics love pointing out a fact and use it to prove a weakness and how badly managed something is without looking at the details of the circumstances. As if the only actor on stage is the one that they are criticizing without bringing into focus the other players in the market.

Why were all firms being destroyed? Because they don’t have cash. Why can’t they raise cash? Because it shows weakness. Why is that a bad thing? Because once they do, shorters circle over the sky and short you to bankruptcy. I was fully invested during the crash and I went into it with my eyes wide open. The people that are the most despicable and added no value to rescue the system are the media.

Which I have a lot to say about in my next opinion piece.

It’s been a while since I last updated on the progress. Well, things has been hectic. You should probably head to the flash file itself to see. Make sure you click on the stage that opens up so that it’ll start capturing your keyboard events.

Use arrows or wasd to maneuver and space to shoot.

Bug fixes

I fully fixed the physics of bullets so that angular rotation of player ship as well as the ship’s momentum affects the bullet’s trajectory. On top of that, I fixed some trigonometry errors in my formula to calculate where the nuzzle of the ship is. While a long ship is rotating, the angular force on the bullet is greater as the nuzzles are farther away from the center of the body.

Additions

It’s beginning to take too much time to single step through the code to debug physics or some new mechanism. So I added an administrative debug interface as an overlay. It explains why the HUD is so messy right now. The released version will have it cleaned up, but I don’t have time to design the release HUD at this stage.

The major milestone reached in this build lies in the implementation of player save files as well as a working inventory system. These are done through remote loading of xml file. And yes, I had to code a xml parser for that. Eventually migrate to PHP calls to mysql databases. Again, too ambitious at this stage.

Architecture

I spent many an hour with my head in my palm chasing after chains of thoughts in the dark. Figuring out how to connect the code’s architecture through Aggregator and Singleton class. The class structure for aggregator is very alien from what I’ve learned up till this point in life. So it was equivalent of a mind fuck in exploring how to do it. All this because I want to be able to scale this up if I want to in the future. It is both a satisfying and frustrating experience because I just want to get a product out first and here I am stuck working on something that end users won’t see at all, nor appreciate.

Art

I drew a few ship designs on paper and realized the vector art through adobe illustrator. If you have seen the demo before, you’ll notice that the player ship’s style has changed dramatically. I still had some problem porting the separate parts to Flash, but the basis of the work flow has been established. The rest is just details which will be left till before the first release. As mentioned before, I will be using pure black for foreground objects in order to improve performance. Something that is very important in flash because of how cpu intensive it is.

I find it amazing that people refers to traders and investors as if they are a group of people who deserves what they get from the risk they agreed on taking. Not knowing how interconnected everyone is to the behavior of stock market. “Yes, let’s wipe out the investors of certain big name company. We should let those too big to fail firms fail and wipe out the shareholders.”

Are you fucking thinking at all?

If there is one thing you need to know about investors is that 100% of the population is invested. You just don’t know that. In some Asian countries, where people are more emotional and the regulations are more lax (especially where I was born), you see 120% population investment. Yes that’s right, through fake heads and borrowed money.

But back to the case in point. How? I’ve never touched a bank before. Sure perhaps I am exaggerating a bit, there are those special case hippies who’ve managed to stay out of the society’s structure, but even they are impacted more or less by the investment community.

The everyday guy

An average Joe is invested in the market thorugh the pension fund that they contribute to with their paycheck. The pension funds of nowadays no longer engages in the safe and secure investment routine that guarantees a small and secure interest income. Instead, they are tagged as sophiscated institutional investors who “should know better”.  After all, they are managed by executives who are paid 10s of millions of dollars each ear to screw up. The prime example being Canada’s pension plan losing $30 Billion this year. That’s about 1/4th of their capital. Mostly from investing in risky assets because they are sophisticated.

The reason for their engagement in risk is simple. The outlay of their fund will be bigger than the inflow of capital by 2018 for most western societies and the fund should be empty at around 2048 based on current projections. This is the result of the baby boomer retirement which reduces the ratio of working poplation per retired population. Thus, less people contributing than withdrawing.

The well off

Most of you belong in this category, you got left over money, you invested in mutual funds. You got burned. While the market picked up from the crash, your mutual fund is still 50% underwater. Those fund managers cares only about the fees they get from you, they don’t really look out for your wealth. Why would they if their money is not invested in the said fund and if they can charge 2% for managing it, basically shifting the portfolio around about 4 times a year.

The rest

I guess I don’t have to convince you since you are already in the market investing.

So big names are famous and pension/mutual funds loves having them in their portfolio. It shows prestige and good judgment. Most sane funds have the big names because that’s what YOU, the average chump, wants to invest in. Guess what happens when you call your government to wipe out the big names in a bout of  righteousness? YOU take a loss. You just won’t know it until 3 months later when your statements gets updated. Or a year later when the government does a review of the pension funds.

Karma is a bitch.

• Stay hungry stay foolish. Oh how I've forgotten this principle over the years. #
• OMG LOL. Bill gates said: Improving your odds doesn't guarantee success. #
• Listening to Steve Job's speech to get some courage. #
• Too much happening. Body can't keep up. #
• Really hate days like this, where everything is waiting for FOMC's 2:15PM news. #
• @natashaduchene so jealous you get to go to russia. You'll have to teach the ropes on low budget travelling one day. #
• Ottawa, road trop, metsllica, junk food=going to drop like a stone in my bed. #
• At Metallica concert. #
• Timbits, Coffee, sitting in front of my computer coding. Reminds me of university. #

I am always intrigued at the audacity of some of the ladies in my class when they tell me that I am leading them wrong and that I need to do it in a certain different way. I mean HOW COULD THEY? Don’t they know that it’s their fault? Of course, that thought only flashes by for an instant before being overtaken by bemusement. This must be what an elephant feels when a cat is trying to attack its foot.

The idea leads me to an interesting conclusion which I didn’t see before. Maybe there isn’t a “universal lead”. For years, I’ve chased after the holy grail of the men’s role in dancing and that is to be able to lead everyone while believing that if only I can perfect my lead, if only I can perfect it to what a perfect lead is, then I can do it. Herein lies my mistake, in which I believed the existence of an ideal.

So perhaps I need to adjust my lead and find what the perfect lead is for each lady, in the process becoming many different perfect lead myself. But if this is the truth, then there must be a perfect follower for the natural tendencies in which I normally lead.

Finally got my backdrop/movie screen setup correctly after adding some modification to my wall. Now I just have to figure out a way to iron the muslin backdrop vertically. Next up is the sound system and I think I am done in terms of adding things to my condo.

Because I have plenty of time to think while working on the basics and my awareness of our bodies intensifies to compensate for the dance partner’s inexperience, I started to notice all these awesome things that I am doing which I wasn’t aware of before.

The most amazing feat of my subconscious is the awareness of people, where they are and what move they are about to do. A consequence of dancing waltz where floorcraft is essential in order to avoid people while keeping the whole routine going smoothly. Avoiding obstacles in your path as if your routine were planned with the obstacles in mind.

I believe that several years of dancing, looking all around and bumping into people in crowded dance floors managed to burn this ability into a subconscious routine that I don’t have to think about. Leaving my mind free to take care of other tasks. I don’t know how else to explain this to non dancers, let’s just say that if I need to take a step back and somebody is about to pass behind me in a perpendicular path, I know without looking that I have to take a smaller step and I trust in this “knowing” without questioning it.

The funny thing is, put me in a soccer field where the same skill can benefit me greatly and it doesn’t work. As if the very feeling of wood underneath the leather soles of my shoe activates the ability.

• Saved up enough grocery store gift cards to last me for 6 months now. #
• God decided to take a dump on my life this week. #
• Salsaing. Is that a word? #
• SIA kind of reminds me of Nadia's singing style #
• Current musical addiction: SIA for her imperfect voice. http://bit.ly/1ClSGE #
• Working with German engineers. Impressed. #
• Sending orders faster than the web interface can handle. #
• Is everyone else selected for this new twitter beta thing? #
• Can't believe that I called Goldman Sach's on their bullshit and was right. #
• So, a positive GDP end of recession coming soon. #
• Oh oh. Somebody better come out with some good news soon. #
• Another day of coding well past midnight. #
• I really love VISA CEO's style of answering investor questions: "No, because that's the most appropriate and accurate statement" #
• I am really impressed by Jamie Dimon. #
• LOL deleting 10 emails from my work PC took 30 seconds. I wonder how many 30 seconds I wasted waiting for these type of things. #
• Need to find how to short Chinese real estate market. Preferably through options. #
• If you are cautious. A BAC straddle works too. #
• If you got some money to throw away. BAC is at a good buying point right now. #
• I have to admit. Finding the right co-founder is as hard as finding the right dance partner. #
• The Obama administration have started passing laws that are detrimental to the economy. We are entering the second half of depression. #
• On average, food prices increased by 15~20% from last year. Either by ninja size reduction, size price appreciation or cheaper additives. #

Flexing my fingers

There are 4 months in a year where I become a hermit and simply stops all social activity. If anybody asks about the strange behavior my usual truth reply is: “It’s earnings season” with an It’s-so-obvious-that-I-am-surprised-you-asked look. I guess, for non financier types, they don’t understand why. I’ll let the picture speak for itself.

Performance analysis

Starting balance: $3000

Closing balance: $5149.48

Trade carrying over to next week: $2160.5  (41.96%)

Derivative risk: $12000 (233.03%)

Increase from opening balance: $2149.48  (71.65%)

Cost of capital: $272.52  (12.68%)

Earnings excluding one time lucky shot:  -($1429)

Successful bets: 5/13 (38.46%)

Failed bets:  3/13 (23.08%)

Carryover bets: 4/13 (30.77%)

Why I am doing this

I have tried day trading before on numerous occasions and one thing that I noticed is that it has as much to do with emotional management as well as statistical analysis. To be able to trade and profit, a person need to be completely emotionless. The first roadblock to entry lies in getting past the sinking feeling of taking a loss. No matter how much you read, meditate or reason, you can only improve on this by taking actual losses in your portfolio. I have done just that throughout the past 4 years of my investment. I was able to take losses, change my position and ride the flow to profitability. It is by gaining that confidence that I am able to take losses with sound reasoning and proceed to repositioning.

I am doing this in order to be truthful to myself in order to evaluate if such a life style is possible. I post it for everyone to see to force the truth and prevent myself from pulling a Madoff. On top of that, because I am using only $3000 as a basis each month, I am not disclosing the full extend of my net worth. Which was the biggest argument against showing anything financial previously. In anticipation to the eventuality of doing full time trading, I have started learning Technical Analysis (Trading based on psychology) and options strategies. It took me around 10 months to fully explore the core of the ideas as well as utilising the platform that I will be trading on. It is not something meant for the faint of heart and learning the trade from what I remembered, is an exercise in losing money. Only once you understand and experience the complete wipe out of your capital will you be able to truly trade daily.

Strategy

A wipe out will happen eventually, therefore I have concluded that the only way to mitigate the risk is from the way I allocate capital in a way to limit the risk while maximizing the gain. The chance of meeting a consecutive series of bad bets increases as time goes by without meeting any setbacks. That is the basis of chaos theory. Therefore, it is important to reset the capitals at a predetermined time so you only lose what you’ve put in for that period, while leaving a long enough time frame to profit from the full effect of a swing trade. So here are the conditions that I’ve set for myself for training.

-Reset to $3000 capital each month
-$2000 allocated to weekly trading
-$500 allocated to LEAPS with 1 year time frame
-$500 allocated to write options with 1 month time frame
-Sell all positions allocated for weekly trading.

This way, if I make catastrophic mistakes in a month, the most I stand to lose is $3000 but stand to gain from the profits of $3000. The amount of allocation will remain until I am consistently in the positive for 3 month while getting a 70% or above in terms of correct bids. At which point I will move on to increase the trading capital to 10% of my total net worth. All these numbers are taken based on experience and calculations. I still have to perform some frequency analysis on the stock market in order to fine tune the risk profile.

Reflections

Because I am still working full time, I do not have a chance to trade during day time. All my orders are inputted in the morning before I go to work and adjusted at noon during my lunch hours. This kind of arrangement presented several inconveniences and losses because I cannot nurse my trades and react in real time. Sometimes, only have of a trade in a complete strategy gets executed, resulting in the loss of the partially traded order. Other times, people take advantage of my market order, resulting in a buy or sell out of whack to the actual value. If I have to estimate the loss due to this type of limitations, I have to place it at 30% of my net earnings.

Of all my working years, the tech industry which I belong to are mostly in recessions. The high tech bubble along with the fall of Nortel have shattered most engineer’s dreams in Canada. Still I plowed through, never thinking much about the adverse conditions that I am facing.

That’s probably why I am irritated at all the finger pointing that’s going on right now. Hindsight is 20/20, whoever is wielding it and pointing fingers right now should be taken down by a llama and spit on. On the other hand, all the ego trips and chest thumping by our elected political elite makes for a great movie. Even though the stupid dribbles that comes out of their mouth infuriates me to the point of giving up hope on our government.Then again, the dribbles and foams are probably what we wanted to hear.

What seem to skip most people’s mind right now is that the depression is not caused by bankers, predatory lenders or any political party. It is the pure consequence of you and your greed. It all started with a bunch of people defaulting and then gets exacerbated by a bunch of bad choices. What is it with people who sits on the sideline and vent their anger? Criticizing any and everyone who took what they believed at the moment to be necessary action?

If you don’t like it, do something about it. I am doing everything I can, are you?

The benefit of dancing lies in its hidden ability to pick your mood up and make what would otherwise be a very shitty day the happiest day of your week. The adrenaline rush is a double edged sword though. For there exist events in life where no amount of dancing can improve your mood, especially when you’ve come to rely on dancing for happiness. It is not the be all and end all of picker uppers.

Just like any substance abuse, the more you consume, the stronger the dose you’ll need until one point, you come down from the high the moment the music stops and you feel just as shitty if not shittier as before. That’s when you realize that the supposed happiest thing in your life did jack to improve your feelings of well being and that the event that is stressing you out is THAT serious.

I believe that I am supposed to learn an important lesson about my dancing. There was a reason why I stopped so suddenly, along with a feeling of in adequacy in terms of skill, I’ve always had this weird feeling that I am lacking something in my dancing and that something is from within. I have a feeling that I am going to find this something in my journey through the world of Salsa. It is similar enough to ballroom in style that I feel completely comfortable with the flow while at the same time providing some challenges because I know none of its steps. This gives me the time to ponder through the beginner’s journey with an expert’s mind eye for retrospection.

Before we start, my core beliefs

Politics will make or break the economy. I will go deep into this today, but before we start I just want to let you know the core beliefs from which my views come from. I am part of the minority who believe that less people with higher quality of education is the correct path for the human race instead of the model of bigger population with lower quality per person. Most of you agree with this, but please keep in mind that by agreeing to this, you also agree to a world that not every person deserves a chance and that the world is headed into an unsustainable spiral of over population.

The example for context

I wanted to write about this ever since the US government pay czar announced that he’s limiting the pay of the top executives at 7 bailed out firms. I laughed because it is the equivalent of the government shooting themselves in the foot. Politicians are hired by the ideals they sell, but when they are in office, their actions are dictated by the population’s rage. The population’s rage is not usually a good thing because on average, we cannot see what needs to be done and the underlying consequences of what we are demanding.

What happens when you do this

Here’s a short version of the money flow in a pay limitation discussed in the headlines.

On the first layer, which is what most of us sees, when you limit top performer’s pay that present itself at the company’s balance as a reduced cost of capital. Which means more profit. Investors are happy, tax payers are happy and everyone’s happy except for the top performers. Since they are rich, it shouldn’t matter.

At the second layer, things aren’t so simple. Banks have two choices about this extra cash, either they keep it in their coffers or they lend it out. Keeping it in their coffers is a bad choice since it doesn’t stimulate the economy so they usually lend it out. However, at the current point in the crisis, the borrowers that are requesting a loan are mostly ones on the brink of bankruptcy and ones with credit score that are equivalent to that of a sub-prime borrower.  Since the government owns your nuts at this moment, you lend to them like you are forced to. Congratulations! You have just taken someone’s hard earned money and created more debt for your population. Bad debt at that too. Not to mention that rich people have a better tendency to spend lavishly in the depressed economy and invest wisely. (unless of course, you are the inherited type, then it’s a 50/50 chance)

On a third level, from the point of view of the top performer it only make sense if your compensation is linked to the amount of revenue you bring. Granted, the current system doesn’t reduce your pay if you fail catastrophically, but limiting the amount of gain effectively put a cap on how much a worker is motivated to earn for the company. Here, you are getting into the gray area where a worker has to weigh the pros and cons of just managing money themselves that has compensations that are equivalent to the gains or work for something that say: “Hey thanks for making us 10 million, but we are only going to compensate you for 1 million of the profit you make”. Keep in mind that these people don’t really have to work and from my experience, only 1% of the traders has the skills and the emotional maturity to consistently make money over a 5 year time span.

Fourth layer, the people who got their pay limited have all left in doves, my approximation is that half of them will defect. And here lies the real kicker. They are going to defect to foreign investment banks, such as credit swiss and HSBC where US government can’t impose limits. Guess what they are going to do there? Make money for foreign firms from American clients and American capitals. Yep, all your profits goes to foreigners from now on, leaving the worst of the under-performers for yourself.

End

In the end, this move is mostly politically motivated. A swift action like this is more a show of force to whip people around. It shows that the government is in control to ease the outrage of the general population.  Real legislations that will correct the problem are usually passed with as little fan fare as possible. Because publicity will only bring oppositions from the industry. The recipients of this whipping isn’t even the right firms that are being lavish on their compensation too. So in essence, they are whipping the wrong person just because the person is ugly. What they need to do is give Golden  Sachs a big lashing. They are the ones giving out $16 Billion in compensation for 3 months of trading.

• Lunch with Christophe and Mayira. I can tell that his mind is open and non judgmental. A lifetime worth of experience with all the cultures. #
• You can be perfectly bilingual, but you can only express emotions with one language. #
• As time progresses, the fact that my company is still stuck in the web 1.0 mindset on communication is irking me more and more. #
• Time and money are the ultimate road block. #
• Just realized that my blog to twitter link has been broken for 2 months. #
• The banker's pay cut is ridiculous. I say the politicians are paid too well and need pay cuts. #
• There you go. Loonie headed past parity again. I am sooo going to be pissed. #
• Just realized why I can't make my ideas materialize in code. It's 9:45pm. I've been working since 8AM. #
• Damn Jim Flaherty is patching that TFSA loophole. #
• Rediscovered the comfort of coding that the Financial Crisis took away. #
• Going Salsa. #

It was an impulsive decision. A colleague at work was contemplating taking the lesson and I was extremely bored with my life outside of work that I just want to do anything. That’s how we end up at Salsa etc, 6 hours later, at the beginner’s level. I know you might think that’s overkill for a person who’s been dancing as long as I do, but that’s actually the level that the studio owner told me to take after watching me dance with his wife.

So since then, I’ve been just tagging along and showing up to class late 4 times until one day, the teacher finally had an eureka moment and said: “Vous faites de la danse sociale!!”. Yes, he had been looking at me with a puzzled look on his face because I can miraculously catch up to anything that they show me while asking all the newbie questions. Yes, I did try to dumb it down a bit to look clumsy, but that’s because I don’t want the rest of the class to feel bad.

I think I was dancing up to 10% of my usual full performance at class 4 and I let slip a few pointed foot here and there as well as some really sharp spins that newbies can’t do. Put two and two together: someone who can dance a new move like he’s been doing it for his whole life on top of someone who is completely oblivious to salsa moves and you got a ballroom dancer.

The reason why I only dance at 10% is partly due to not wearing my dance shoes, the rest is because I don’t want to discourage new comers. Especially guys, since they are already rare enough in dancing. More importantly, I don’t want to discourage my colleague. There’s a line that dictate whether or not a guy continues dancing, it’s the difference between seeing someone who’s good and think you can catch up and seeing someone who’s so good that it devastated your confidence. I know because I’ve been there and that’s why I am being extra careful.

The other part is because losing my colleague would mean losing the reason why I took up salsa for now. I wanted to see what it’s like to see dancing as an activity to build relationships, instead of one where you compete with your fellow classmates.

test

test

According to my backup logs, this is the 11th day that I have been working on the game called Zania. No thanks to the financial crisis, I had to put this project in limbo for a while, no more. Wow, it seems like only yesterday that I was still struggling with the physics engine, today it has expanded to involve so much. At the latest tally, I am at around 5000 lines of code.

A lot of thinking went into the architecture of code, interaction between classes, but more time is spent on the art direction. I have an idea of where I want to go, but I never put anything down to say that this is it.

Graphics

Graphical style is going to be a very colorful background in combination with a black foreground. This frees me of the pain of drawing everything in detail while leveraging my already existing skills in photoshop. I can basically just convert photos of real life objects into pure black instead of drawing them. Of course, the style is still steam punk, but drawing inspiration from Braid and this picture.

Voice acting

I think I found a quick, dirty and cheap way to get voice acting in the game to move the story along. The result is something like this:

Transcript: Scanners indicates an energy build up near the last known location of the alien vessels. Dispatching scouts ..

It was a great learning experience playing around with voice. It’s not as straight forward as I thought. Of course, you can probably tell that Karen Sjet’s voice has severe influence in the voice acting. It took me several tries and rewrites to get the tone and feeling right. Who knew that a slight difference in grammar structure can convey a different personality.

Contents

I will have to cut down the content of the first release significantly.  Although the underlying architecture and design choices are made to be able to  scale up to a massive world, I decided that it’s best to test out the idea  first and see if it catches on. On that note, I am at a loss as to what part of Zania I should be presenting.  Preferably the combats, but what type of combat will catch the audience’s  fancy? I am not sure. That’s the part I have to leave to the audience to decide.

Music

I’ve made no progress in music so far. Kind of sad. Hopefully next time I update, I will have a playable demo. A playable demo will include graphics, music, sound, working physics and a functional ship that can be blown up.