matt hackmann - web developer - artist - nerd

Well, I am now in the sunshine state's most famous city: Orlando. I'm about 10-15 minutes from Universal, and hopefully, not too far from the school. I was going to do a blog update in Memphis but their WiFi was broken. Kind of funny because they were advertising it to the nines.

I've now flown on two planes and I can say I'd rather be in the cockpit. I have a phopia of needing to see where I'm going and it drives me nuts to just be able to see out the side. Also, night flying in storms is... interesting. Coming in over Orlando was quite impressive. In fact it looked a little like this.

Well, I'm dead tired. As always check out my Flickr page.

TUL, if you need the three letter abbreviation for future reference. We've just sat down and I've paid my $5.96 for wireless internet (sucks). Our flight is scheduled to leave at 4:28 PM CDT and it is currently 2:23 PM CDT so we've got a little bit of a wait. This flight will be taking us to Memphis, TN and then we'll have another two hour layover at which point I will probably be playing Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice For All. I've already played through the first scenerio and it's freakin' awesome. Kind of reminds me of Encyclopedia Brown (and how much I sucked at them). Seriously, though, it's a great game. I'll probably buy the first when I'm done with this one.

Well, I don't have a plug-in here so battery life is at a premium. I may do a quick update when we get to Memphis, but I'll definitely do an update once in Orlando. Be sure to check out my Flickr album for pictorial updates. And, just a note, wireless internet FTW.

As of today (or yesterday now :-P) I've been working at Wal-mart for one week. I've done probably about everything, now, and seen just about everything put on layaway (except groceries). I'm not sure what my standing is now, but I was already getting high praise on Monday (can't let it get to my head). Also, yesterday, the other layaway boy had his first day and I showed him the ropes. He'll be mainly working when I'm not. Just some interesting stats that I'll be updating regularly. To date I've boxed/binned the following:

4 GameCubes

1 GameBoy Advance SP

2 Xboxs

2 PlayStation 2s

1 Laptop

Quite fun, eh? Also, at the request of SeniorUSB, here is a picture of me in my "little vest":

One day after work I went to the electronics dept. to take a look at their laptops because apparently I'll get an extra 10% cupon for Christmas bonus. I didn't really expect to find anything aside from budget systems, but I found this. With the exception of hard drive space it is more powerful than my desktop (which will become a file/web server). A feature I thought was kind of interesting was the fact that it can play DVD/CDs without even booting into Windows (save on battery life I'm sure). But it will be nice to have a portable computing solution, not to mention just downright cool :-).

In programming land, I'm currently working on trying to write an NES emulator. This is pretty much just for the learning experience to help understand the behind the scene ops of computers/game consoles. I hope that by learning that stuff I'll have a better understanding of current systems (GBA, GCN, etc.) and thus develop for them with little or no learning curve. I've found a bunch of handy info at NesDev.com which is helping quite a bit and I more or less understand how the whole internal system works, but figuring how you load things in from ROM sill escapes me. Hopefully this time next week I'll have my mock 6502 running a few opcodes. I'm mainly trying to get the thing to the point that I can run the original Mario Bros. which is fairly basic but it'll be a mighty cool feeling, I'll tell you now :-).

Ah, well it seems I have stuff to talk about again. First of all I've got an idea for a simple short film which I will probably be filming as soon as I finish the script. But until I can get a trailer up, you'll have to live with this poster:

I should be able to finish the script this week and start shooting next week. So keep coming back for updates.

Also, and this is the big news, but it looks like I may have a job pretty soon (as in an actual job). Last night I applied at Wal-Mart and I'm already setup for an interview tomorrow. Now for the moment I may just have a temp job for the holidays (in the lawaway dept. of course :-P), but if I do my job well enough and with enough SpongeBob-like enthusiasm I probably have a chance of becoming a normal employee. We'll see, though. The good thing is is that I'll be making my own money pretty soon (can you spell laptop? :-D).

Well, it was nice to have something to post for a change (and good news at that). Just remember to keep your RSS reader up-to-date or check back for more information on... Ramboella!

It was certainly an exciting weekend for those of us paying attention to TGS (Tokyo Game Show). The new Nintendo Revolution controller was finally unveiled. At first I was kind of skeptical, I mean the thing is a freakin' remote:

Part of me kind of died because I've grown up holding a controller in two hands using super quick thumb reflexes to get myself around. However, the more I thought about the possibilities of the tilt sensors, the more I began to like it. One thing that I would love to see is a Star Wars lightsaber game. I was still kind of leery, but then I heard that there's a conventional controller that you can plug the remote into. Besides, I'll be able to play Tetris Attack, so I have to buy one whether I like the controller or note. Needless to say I really can't wait to get my hands on one of these and see how it works.

On the house front: A good 75-80% of the house is packed now. Mainly just the big things (furniture, appliances, computers, etc.) are left. Sometime tomorrow we'll be getting a dumpster and emptying the garage and packing the U-Haul. It's going to be a long, tiring week but it'll be well worth it.

As an interesting closer I post some things I've unearthed (either through packing or cleaning up my computer):

19 years later

And finally: Jack and Jill (flash)