When looking for hobbies, I wanted to do something that got me off the computer.   Not just because all my muscles had atrophied into an E.T. like husk…but mostly.

I’ll update this with what the garden looks like now but here’s what I went with:

Here we’ve got onions, lettuce, parsley, carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes. We also planted 1 little Morning glory plant…My son Alex and I “take care” of this one.

here we’ve got some strawberries, black berries, and raspberries.  My daughter and I work together on this one.

Here is where we planted 3 pumpkin seeds. My Son Ryan and I work on this.

As we head into Fall, the first garden did spectacularly well. Tons of vegetables. The morning glory, however, took over. They’re very pretty but very aggressive. But we still ended up with more vegetables than we knew what to do with. It was great fun.

The strawberries just never came in. Not sure what we did wrong. But they just didn’t do anything. The blackberries and raspberries took off and did great. Our daughter loved to come out in the morning and snack on berries.

The pumpkins did well too but we only ended up with a couple decent pumpkins. Still, very exciting since they came just from seeds.

It’s a great activity to do with your kids.

One thing that we did that made life easier is that we had the raised gardens built. I spec’d them to be the same height as a chair so that you could easily just sit on the edge and work on them (weeding, etc.) which helped make the process feel a lot more like a relaxing activity than work.

Recently there was an article on Wired that interviewed some people about how the death of Steve Jobs affected them.  I was interviewed for the article and how I massively cut down my hours and started handing things off to others as I realized that I was slowly wrecking myself working such crazy hours and being away from my family.

One of the smaller changes is that I now bring my dog to work.  Pictured here is Stardock’s Vice President, Derek Paxton with my dog Bailey.  As I type this from my office, Bailey is sleeping I na little cubby by my desk. 

She’s gained about 10 lbs since I started bringing her. I’m sure that has nothing to do with the snacks people give her though. Just coincidence.

I had read about other companies allowing employees to bring dogs to work but I guess I had this vision that doing so would result in dogs running wild in the hallways and such.  I’ve been surprised at how calm they can be and that they’ll stay near their person.  Paul Boyer’s dog (our art director) hung out with him at his desk which is what Bailey does with mine (when she’s not doing her “rounds” to see who’s got treats).

So this year I took up gardening as a hobby. And my boys wanted to have pumpkins and a few of them have already come in. The best pumpkin has already “detached” itself from the vine.  I’m wondering if it’ll “stay good” until Halloween time. Anyone out there with experience in this?

http://www.nest.com/living-with-nest/

Anyone out there get a Nest?

I was thinking of getting one for our cottage up north. It’s a “smart” thermostat that will hook up to the Internet and let you monitor and change the temperature from remote (along with a zillion other features).

But I wanted to find out if anyone has this and whether they liked it or not.

With any luck, we will have Beta 5 for Elemental: Fallen Enchantress ready to go out this week. We’re very excited to hear what you think of the changes as we move into balance/polish/bug fixing/AI refinement/content mode.

Kael will have a change log up as we get closer. Stay tuned!

Due date is currently September 20.

http://www.systemcomic.com/2011/08/03/so-youre-mad-about-something-on-the-internet/

A great way to diffuse a raging Internet troll.

If you’ve been following my blogs on this topic for awhile, you know how I feel about the way DirectX 9 handles TrueType fonts. Terribly.

If we had to do it over again, we would have just hand made each character.  But we didn’t. And the battles to make fonts look good has made use choose font styles that we might not otherwise have used.

Luckily, we may have a solution – thanks to the ingenuity of the lead developer of WindowBlinds and Start8. He also wrote the overlay code and gave me a DLL this morning that may solve a lot of our problems.

The first thing to understand about the magic of Stardock’s non-games business is that they know how to get into other people’s processes and add features without source code.  That’s how WindowBlinds works – it takes over the drawing of every window on the OS to one that is better, faster, and cooler.

So seeing our font issues in Fallen Enchantress, he wrote a DLL that redirects the DirectX calls to one of his own making.

So here’s what a typical screen looks like in the current build. It helps to load this up and zoom in.  If you’re in the beta, you are familiar with the limitations of D3DXFont calls.

And below is the result after his fix:

Zoom in on the various parts.

This opens the door to us being able to eventually be able to do a lot more interesting things with fonts since they’ll not be blocky, artifacty messes.

It’s still being tweaked but it’ll be interesting to see how many people notice when Beta 5 hits (which is why I’m not posting this in the journals section, fewer viewers).

Now, before someone comments, please remember, the fonts we chose for the game were based on what fonts looked best on D3DXFont which tended to be Arial and that kind of thing.

I can’t promise that we’ll be changing the fonts this late in the game. But what I can say is that the existing fonts will look a lot better and it opens things up for future updates to have interesting fonts that look good.

While the unemployment rate nationally remains over 8%, the unemployment rate in the tech industry is basically zilch. Software developers and game studios can't hire people fast enough and fiercely compete for the talent out there.

This is why companies fiercely guard their company cultures. When every person at a given company knows that they can easily find another job if they so choose, the onus is on companies to make sure that the "work experience" is such that they have an incentive to stay.

I've read a lot of articles that imply that terrible working conditions in the game industry. But that's not the norm. Most game studios and developers in general live and die on their development talent and treat them with that knowledge. Horror stories are news because they're uncommon.

In software, a top percentile developer can produce over 20X more usable code than the average developer.  This is why so many companies are willing to do a lot in order to ensure that the culture that attracts and keeps high end talent.

In a small company like ours, our success boils down to attracting great talent but, and this is the key, keeping it.

A lot of the software we make simply can't be made elsewhere. Years after Fences was made, there's still no competitor to it. Same for WindowBlinds, WindowFX, and countless other products that we are, literally, the only provider of at any price.  

The game industry side of the fence is the same thing.  Simply put, a company as small as ours (50 or so) was able to do all the aforementioned non-game software while publishing Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod, develop Galactic Civilizations (And now Fallen Enchantress) as well as design, write and run Impulse along with its international server farm.  

And that doesn't even taken into account that we also run or host many different websites such as WinCustomize.com, Stardock's various sites, Neowin.net, and countless others.  And again, 50 or so people total are making this happen.

That sort of achievement is only possible because of employee retention and that means always providing the kind of company culture that makes people want to get up and come to work every day and do amazing things.

Because if we don't provide an environment that keeps people happy and wanting to do cool stuff, they know that they can go anywhere they want. It's that competitive.

And that, my friends, is why software companies take their company cultures very seriously.

(from a forum discussion)

It’s not that I don’t take the issue seriously. It’s just that I don’t take you seriously.

For the last few weeks, the poor IT team have been battling spam bots. Let’s give a shout out to all our hard working moderators who have been able to clean it up quickly and the IT team that’s been making it harder for them to do it.