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I’m riding to end AIDS

In Cycling on 2 March 2008 with no comments

Last year my former neighbor and good friend Brad rode the 2007 AIDS/Lifecycle ride, a 545-mile, 7-day bike ride from San Francisco to LA. As someone who was just getting into cycling at the time, Brad’s participation and passionate stories about his experience on the ride inspired me to join him on the ride this year in June.

So I’ve been training. I ride to and from work every day (with a train ride in between), and on weekends I’ve been gradually doing longer and longer rides. I’m very lucky to be living on the San Francisco bay peninsula, where there are many, many rides to choose from. So far, training is going well, and I think I’m going to be ready in time.

I have two reasons to do this ride this year:

To help fight HIV/AIDS,
To participate in a form of exercise that I actually enjoy.

#2 is obvious (riding around here is so much better than running on a treadmill). As for #1, I tend not to think about AIDS all that much. I certainly haven’t been personally affected by it yet, or know anyone who has. But to hear some of the stories from the AIDS/Lifecycle folks or from Brad, I feel motivated to try and do some small part to end this terrible disease.

I’ll obviously be riding a long distance, and to help keep me motivated during that time, I’m asking that you please consider donating to support the HIV/AIDS-related services of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center. Please give them as much as you can, and let’s put an end to HIV/AIDS.

Thank you.

Hello Dan

In Cool Web Stuff, Games on 18 February 2008 with no comments

I’m not sure who first directed me to Lost Garden (probably Cal), but it’s been one of my favorite reads ever since. The game design theory posts are interesting, but the prototyping posts are the most inspiring.

After completely skipping over the CuteGod challenge, I’ve taken on a couple of the others. I didn’t get very far with Tree Story, as you can see:

But I did get jumping/backflipping done before I lost interest.

Last week Danc posted a new prototyping challenge: Play With Your Peas. After a few days of playing with it on the train, I have most of the editor done:

The hardest parts are still remaining: AI, pathfinding, physics, balance. And I’ll probably lose interest well before I get that far. But that’s not the point really — just getting this far has been a lot of fun, and a nice break from what I’m normally working on. Who knows? Maybe in a couple weeks, I’ll post a “finished” product.

Back (really)

In mylesgrant.com on 9 February 2008 with no comments

It was about 6 months ago that my blog got hacked. Some Movable Type vulnerability or something resulted in a call from my hosting provider, telling me they had to take my site down. Rather than take the steps to fix it, I left it down, and moved on to other things.

In the time since, I’ve thought about posting one thing or the other to my blog, but the urge was never enough to get me to do anything about it. In the last month or so, however, as the urge grew, I started to take steps to bring it back. I brought the old blog back and updated Movable Type to hopefully block whatever security hole screwed me the first time. But I’m tired of MT and tired of the constant stream of “New comment posted” emails that are just spam bot after spam bot.

So I moved to Wordpress. Why Wordpress? It’s lightweight, more hackable (PHP), Matt Mullenweg seems like a nice guy (we played a strategically horrible game of Werewolf together at Etech, where we were the two werewolves), and it powers the Flickr Blog. Plus, Derek had recently unveiled a nice clean Wordpress theme that I liked. And Akismet is a top-notch spam filter, which has already (silently) protected me from comment spam.

So, there we go. Now then, what were those things I wanted to post?