Busy-ness

After communicating to and from with the journalist I now know that the article on me will appear in the Grazia magazine (www.grazia.nl). The interview will be performed on the 27th of August, with the photographer making an appointment with me for a photoshoot probably before then. I don't have a publishing date yet. I somewhat hope that this article will appear in more magazines and will draw a lot of attention.

Yesterday I got a phonecall from a guy at the IMK (www.imk.nl), who will drop by this week (Friday) to check up on the viability of my company and whether I qualify for the Bbz welfare money. He seemed mostly intent on helping me get things in order than to merely criticize, which was really nice and somewhat unexpected. I hope to ace the check coming Friday. After that it'll still take a month or so before I'll actually get the money (starting from June), but I have the option of asking for an initial amount.

Today I have been mostly working on the Lilium hardware simulator, particularly implementing the Xerces C++ XML library. I hope to have the first demo (demo 1) up and running by the end of next week. Pieter will be helping me with some details as he's the expert on the requirements, and also a really nice guy :) It'll take a lot of testing to figure out the bottlenecks and most importantly scaling factors for the software itself, but also between Lilium and the competitor's software, ModelSim. I can't wait to start on the next Lilium builds :)

In completely unrelated news *wink*, I could use a geForce 8 (8800 GT+) or better videocard for testing purposes in this new crash box I'm setting up. So far it has an Athlon X2 4450e, 4 GB RAM and a built-in nForce 6150 IGP. Can't run PhysX and CUDA, in short. I'm also hoping I don't encounter any of the oddities I had before with this system (mainboard?) with the sound stuttering and the CPU always being at 50% load (1 core 100%). I'd hate to have to shell out for another AM2+ mainboard as well. Perhaps someone has the aforementioned videocard and an AM2+ board gathering dust...? :D

Tomorrow I'll be working a lot more on Lilium to finish the XML implementation and the simulation code so that I can start on the debugging phase. Friday there's the IMK review which starts at 10 AM and will probably last a few hours. I hope to start debugging that same day.

I'll also be working tomorrow on the resources for the first game Nyanko will release. The game is called 'Even Cats Dream' and is a kind of 3D puzzle game from a first-person perspective with a heavy focus on physics puzzles. Within two weeks we hope to begin beta-testing combined with the production of its levels using the level editor which is being worked on by Trevor at the moment. We'll be asking a few people to help us make those levels while beta testing the game simultaneously. It's going to be fun :) With a bit of luck we'll be releasing the game next month as planned.

Finally, this coming weekend I should be finishing the site I promised to make for Jan, many months ago. Sorry for taking so long, Jan :(

Another thing this weekend will be the lack of swimming on Sunday as a guy is coming over from Belgium to pick up the arcade cabinet I talked about before. Pieter will be glad to be rid of it so that he can stuff a table (my future dinner table ;) ) into the place the cabinet is taking up at the moment. That way he has enough space in one room to fit his new organ in, some time in September. Thanks to Pieter's not-so-housebroken dogs, he can't put the organ downstairs in the living room :P

Alright, back to contemplating whether I shall take a sleeping pill today or not...


Maya