rAge on!

I didn’t get to posting this yesterday.. work and all that.

The annual rAge (really AWESOME gaming event) Expo was held at The Dome in Northgate this past weekend (the weekend of October 1^st). rAge is an expo dedicated to all things gaming, and is the largest event of it’s kind in Africa. It includes exhibitors from the hardware, software and gaming culture arenas. Besides including a 700 man open LAN (which I attended for the first time this year), there are official competitions in all the major competitve games as part of the WCG qualifiers track (or something, I don’t know much about ‘pro’ gaming lingo). Also on the competitive gaming side of things, the ‘World’s Number One Gamer’, Fatal!ty made an appearance, and was challenged (in vain) by a number of local hopefuls aiming to win the R20000 cash prize available to anyone that could beat him.

rAge has also become a regular calendar spot for Magic: The Gathering players, and besides the usual pro tournament, this year’s rAge also played host to the launch of a new expansion pack for the popular card based RPG. Once again this year there was also an Anime screen playing a variety of scheduled anime films, and South Africa’s new Anime magazine.. erm.. (ah hell I forget the name ;)) was also launched at rAge.

New to rAge this year was a Game.Dev series of talks (one of which yours truly presented) and I believe this will be the first of many great events on this topic.

The amount of stuff on show at the event this year was simply mind boggling, and I could go on for pages and pages trying to list it all.. A simpler approach is to point you in the direction of the Official rAge Website!

One big mutha of a post (collection)

Well my posts seem to have been getting further and further apart.. I really do have loads of news but just to keep it sensible (and just because I can) I’m goig to split the stuff up across a couple of posts.

First of all, some personal news that (for some reason) I have held off on adding here.. I’m engaged. This happened way back in February (on Valentine’s day to be precise) but I have just been a bit uncomfortable about posting it on a public blog. I don’t know why, don’t ask me why, it probably has something to do with separation of my real-world and online personality or some stupid Psychological thing about getting tickled in the ear by a phallic-looking bug as a kid or some other such rubbish. Anyway, point is I am, and now you all know it.

I did it the way it’s meant to be done: I took Natalie out for a nice exotic dinner. We went to Wang Thai, an awesome Thai restaurant in Brooklyn, Pretoria, after discouraging her from ordering any dessert (we were running a bit late) and picking up the tab, I took her off to a little park nearby, where I had organised a blanket and tea lights next to the water, along with a bottle of bubbly and a giftwrapped jewellery box, in which I had hidden the ring box. To cut a long story short, once she had opened up the jewellery box I had to help her along a bit to find the ring, then dropped down on one knee and tried (unsuccessfully) to repeat the short speech I had prepared. Thankfully I got the basic idea across, and she said yes :)

So after throwing two separate engagement parties for the family and friends, we are now well into the planning of our March 2005 wedding-and I get to fret over the details of the honeymoon.

So sorry ladies, but I’m now officially off the market-not that it was in doubt before ;)

Virtual Job Reality

And the second bit of news for today: I’m moving jobs (again). After fighting off the urge to slit my wrists out of sheer work boredom at Sun (UTi Sun Couriers Division) for a little over a year and a half, I am finally moving on to a company that will hopefully give me a little more job satisfaction. It’s not that there is anything particularly wrong with Sun, I just can’t bring myself to be passionate about working on financial systems-and for me working on something I can be passionate about is really important.

Anyway, my new employer is 5DT, a company in Lynnwood, Pretoria (yay, shorter commute!!) which specialises in Virtual Reality systems for commercial and military use. They do everything from flight simulators to medical simulators, with a combination of Virtual Reality headsets and hydraulic platforms. I will of course be working on the software side of things, developing backend components and working on their SDK in C++. It hasn’t been too long since my last move, so for the sake of my CV this had better be the move, and I won’t need to move on again until we take smallfry fulltime..