A lot has happened since the last time I wrote up a blog entry. We've taken a few trips back to Fargo, had an earthquake, I've started working on a couple of side projects based on the Source Engine, and we've started to make plans to move back to Fargo.
As much as I love California, I'm finding that there are a lot of things that my wife and I miss in North Dakota. The weather in CA is great, I love the mountains, I love the beach, and I love that there are a ton of things to do. However, I hate the traffic, I hate the cost of housing, and most of all I hate how far from friends and family we are. It's strange. We spent most of our lives in Fargo wanting to move somewhere else, and now that we have, we find ourselves missing what we had in Fargo. It may sound crazy, but I'm even looking forward to some snow activities like cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and snowmobiling. I'm not looking forward to the -30F temps so much, but I can live with it.
Anyway, things are in the works for me to transfer back to Fargo. There are no definite dates set yet, and it's not even certain what I'll be working on, but things sound promising that I'll be able to transfer back. I was a bit worried for awhile because they had just hired 10 new people at the Fargo office. I wasn't really looking forward to trying to do the whole long-distance interview thing again. I'm pretty hopeful that something can be worked out now.
Looking back over the last year, I think some of my favorite photos have come from our trips back to ND. Maybe it's just that I'm homesick and it is distorting my vision, but I really think my best photos of the year came from ND/MN. Now that I've been away for a few years, I'm seeing more beauty in things that I didn't while living there and being exposed to them so often. I will probably put a few of my favorites of the year together for another blog entry later.
One of the big cons of living in CA came on Oct 30, 2007. We had a 5.7 earthquake centered on the Calaveras fault about 9 miles from our home in Santa Clara. There was no damage, but it really shook my wife up a bit. It started out with a sound that made me think there was a semi driving by our apartment building. Then the whole apartment started to shake. I got Val and myself into a doorway, though it probably wasn't the most sturdy of doorways and afterwards I found that it would have probably been better to get under our desks or on the floor by our couches and coffee table. The whole thing only lasted around 10-15 seconds. I thought I heard the frame of the building twisting back and forth and for the last couple of seconds I started to wonder what to do if the place started to fall in on us.
In the end, there was no major damage; except for some frayed nerves. It turns out that the quake was very near the Hayward fault, and the earthquake experts speculated that it could be a precursor to a much larger quake on the Hayward within the next 7-10 days. Luckily that didn't happen, and we haven't felt any tremors since except for a small 3.2 aftershock that my wife felt while I was at work. The Hayward generates a large quake approximately 140 years, and the last big one was 139 years ago, so that just gives us one more good reason to think about moving back to ND.
Another big thing I've been working on lately is learning how to do some stuff with Valve's Source SDK. I started out converting one of my old Quake maps into a Portal map. I've got a couple of mod ideas including a simple racing game and a Source engine version of my 3d scorched earth clone, that I am now calling M-198: Source. I'm working on a Team Fortress 2 map next, as well as starting to get an entity created for the M-198 model in my mod. Part of that includes learning Blender again by working on a couple of other 3d models.
I think that is about it for now. My next entry will probably be sometime soon, as I plan on putting up a post with my "Best of 2007" photos.
As much as I love California, I'm finding that there are a lot of things that my wife and I miss in North Dakota. The weather in CA is great, I love the mountains, I love the beach, and I love that there are a ton of things to do. However, I hate the traffic, I hate the cost of housing, and most of all I hate how far from friends and family we are. It's strange. We spent most of our lives in Fargo wanting to move somewhere else, and now that we have, we find ourselves missing what we had in Fargo. It may sound crazy, but I'm even looking forward to some snow activities like cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and snowmobiling. I'm not looking forward to the -30F temps so much, but I can live with it.
Anyway, things are in the works for me to transfer back to Fargo. There are no definite dates set yet, and it's not even certain what I'll be working on, but things sound promising that I'll be able to transfer back. I was a bit worried for awhile because they had just hired 10 new people at the Fargo office. I wasn't really looking forward to trying to do the whole long-distance interview thing again. I'm pretty hopeful that something can be worked out now.
Looking back over the last year, I think some of my favorite photos have come from our trips back to ND. Maybe it's just that I'm homesick and it is distorting my vision, but I really think my best photos of the year came from ND/MN. Now that I've been away for a few years, I'm seeing more beauty in things that I didn't while living there and being exposed to them so often. I will probably put a few of my favorites of the year together for another blog entry later.
One of the big cons of living in CA came on Oct 30, 2007. We had a 5.7 earthquake centered on the Calaveras fault about 9 miles from our home in Santa Clara. There was no damage, but it really shook my wife up a bit. It started out with a sound that made me think there was a semi driving by our apartment building. Then the whole apartment started to shake. I got Val and myself into a doorway, though it probably wasn't the most sturdy of doorways and afterwards I found that it would have probably been better to get under our desks or on the floor by our couches and coffee table. The whole thing only lasted around 10-15 seconds. I thought I heard the frame of the building twisting back and forth and for the last couple of seconds I started to wonder what to do if the place started to fall in on us.
In the end, there was no major damage; except for some frayed nerves. It turns out that the quake was very near the Hayward fault, and the earthquake experts speculated that it could be a precursor to a much larger quake on the Hayward within the next 7-10 days. Luckily that didn't happen, and we haven't felt any tremors since except for a small 3.2 aftershock that my wife felt while I was at work. The Hayward generates a large quake approximately 140 years, and the last big one was 139 years ago, so that just gives us one more good reason to think about moving back to ND.
Another big thing I've been working on lately is learning how to do some stuff with Valve's Source SDK. I started out converting one of my old Quake maps into a Portal map. I've got a couple of mod ideas including a simple racing game and a Source engine version of my 3d scorched earth clone, that I am now calling M-198: Source. I'm working on a Team Fortress 2 map next, as well as starting to get an entity created for the M-198 model in my mod. Part of that includes learning Blender again by working on a couple of other 3d models.
I think that is about it for now. My next entry will probably be sometime soon, as I plan on putting up a post with my "Best of 2007" photos.