New cars and inspiration!

The job hunt goes on. Tech jobs are pretty slim pickings in this area (SC and NC). It is also very hard to look while I am working where I am. I have to request personal time 2 weeks in advance so interviews are quite difficult to set up. However, we (my wife and I) have a plan! She is giving her 2 weeks notice today. She is going to move up to Charlotte (we put a deposit down on an apartment yesterday for May 6th) and look full time for a job. Once she gets one, I will give my 2 weeks notice and move to Charlotte and look full time. We have some savings so even if I go for a couple of months looking we should be fine.

I got a new used car this past Saturday. My '91 Taurus (147K miles) was on its last leg and when it started acting up really bad on Friday I knew its time had come. We went around and looked at a ton of used cars and I ended up getting a black '99 Ford Escort ZX2. It is fully loaded and only has 16K miles on it. I think it is a very cool looking car but if I were 2 inches taller I wouldn't have been able to drive it! It is pretty neat to own a car that isn't in constant danger of breaking down!

I have been so busy running round doing stuff, I haven't even had time to install Visual C++ on my new computer much less do any programming. I had the parts for my new computer for 3 days before putting it together! I am very happy with my new computer!! It is amazingly fast! And stable! I haven't finished testing the stability but I left the 3D Mark 2001 demo looping for 6 hours straight and it didn't hang or crash. I find this very encouraging! I still want to try letting Zoinks! run overnight since some memory leaks in it make it particularily unstable. If it can survive the night running Zoinks! then I will be fully satisfied with its stability! Hopefully, life will settle down and I can get back into my programming soon. If nothing else, while I am unemployed I should be able to get quite a lot done.

I have been feeling the tug to be more creative lately, to express myself artistically. I have decided to get back into some level editing. I have always wanted to master UnrealEd so I am going to be doing some level editing for UT. I might try my hand at some Tribes 2 level editing to give me experience for the V12 engine. I am fairly handy with Worldcraft so hopefully I can do some cool stuff. I have a problem though. I am creative, I just am not inspired. If someone give me an idea for a level or model or picture I can usually produce some pretty cool results but I always have a very hard time thinking up that initial idea. I am trying to immerse myself in architectural stuff and artwork and other people's levels to try to learn what can inspire me. For the longest time I believed that a "true" artist was self-inspired, that they drew all of their inspirations from within themselves. But, in talking with artists, I find that most have routines they use to inspire themselves like going down to the local library and flipping through architectural books or listening to music. I am trying to determine what routine works best for me. I have also been pondering trying my hand at animation. I am a poor modeller at best but I feel like I might have some skill with animating models people have already created. We shall see!