I just finished watching the new "The Andromeda Strain" movie on A&E. Here are my thoughts on it:

There were a ton of differences from the book, especially near the end. It was almost like the writers decided that the book was too "boring" so they added a bunch of extra action crap to spice it up a little. Personally, I think the book was phenomenal and I wouldn't be writing this if they had just kept everything the same.

The ending was not that good, to be honest. Here's how I think it should have gone:

The symbol that was encoded on Andromeda's container should have been the logo for the terrorist group that took over the mining platform. In the future, that same group sent back a sample of Andromeda and their symbol as a sort of warning. Kind of like: "If you keep mining and destroying the ocean vents, we won't have a weapon to fight Andromeda." So, the scientists realize this, force the President to stop mining, and the future is safe from The Andromeda Strain.

But, noooooo. Instead, they made it into some kind of government conspiracy crap.

Oh well, at least the book is still good.

Today, I got my 20th wrong-number in three weeks. Apparently, there's a whole group of people who think I'm either "Doug", "Chuck", or "Darrell". Frankly, I'm pretty much sick of it. I wish I could just up and switch to Sprint instead of using T-Mobile's stupid prepaid plan. But, I just can't afford it at the moment.

I try to use Twitter when I can. Frankly, though, I'm not great at keeping things like that up to date. In an attempt to change this, I decided to try something a little different: Pownce. Now, some may say that the two services are completely different. In fact, they are. But under their very different exteriors, they both do essentially the same thing.

Twitter is simple. I'm a simple kind of guy, so that appeals to me. On second thought, there is such a thing as too simple. Twitter doesn't really have enough fluff to keep me interested in it. With Pownce, on the other hand, I can send messages, files, links, and events. Whereas, with Twitter, I can only send messages and links.

But, then again, is Pownce really all that popular? Am I wasting my time using something that obviously isn't getting as much publicity as Twitter is? The same thing goes for YouTube and Vimeo, actually. Vimeo, in my opinion, is incredibly superior to YouTube. Yet, YouTube gets more members, more videos, and more face time.

Anyway, my main complaint with Pownce is that I can't minimize the desktop client to my tray. That's annoying, since I only like to keep windows in my task bar that I will be switching back and forth between quite often. Pownce is more of a background application to me. I use it only when I get or send an update.

What are your thoughts? Which service to do you use primarily, and why?

As I promised, here is my Future Business Leaders of America flashback video that premiered at tonight's Lincoln FBLA Reception:

I know the YouTube video kind of sucks, but I'll have the full broadcast-quality video up on http://www.lincolnfbla.org for download by the end of next week or so.

I don't like messing with DVDs and their cases when I want to watch a movie, so I went and bought a 250 GB Maxtor OneTouch 4 external hard drive. Over the next few days, I plan to rip my DVD collection to it so I can watch them on Windows Media Center via my Xbox 360. As a test, I ripped "Leon The Professional" to my new drive and attempted to play it in WMC.

The movie showed up in my DVD Library just fine.

However, when trying to play it, I got the following message:

DVD Error:
Windows Media Center cannot play this DVD. Please Restart Windows Media Center and insert the DVD again.

To troubleshoot, I attempted to play one of the VOB files in Windows Media Player. However, I was met with this:

Windows Media Player cannot play the DVD because the disc prohibits playback in your region of the world. You must obtain a disc that is intended for your geographic region.

That's odd. It was ripped from an NTSC disk, so I should be able to play it. The solution?

Well, it's not very obvious. First, I removed the drive from my list of watched folders. Then, I shared the external hard drive to the network. I then re-added the drive to WMC, but this time, I referenced it on the network instead of on my local computer, like this:

Viola! "Leon The Professional" plays perfectly now!

I attended the MBECA State Contest all day, after our Computer Knowledge team won 1st in the district contest. It took place at State Fair Community College, which is where I will most likely be going after high school.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I got 1st place as an individual and our team once again got 1st place. So, I'm pretty excited.

Also, I'm going to be next year's Tech Aid at school. That'll be insane, because I believe they are installing Vista over the summer. Not entirely sure about that, though. The teachers hate changes to the system.

Next up?

Well, the FBLA reception at my school is next Wednesday, where my flashback movie will be shown along with the website that I entered in the FBLA District and State levels. Then, once June rolls around, I'll be off to Atlanta for 3-4 days to attend the National Leadership Conference.

Busy, busy, busy!

I arrived home from the Missouri FBLA State Leadership Conference on Tuesday night and, after 2 days of rest, I believe I am ready to take the time to write this blog entry. There aren't any images, I'm afraid. My camera phone's resolution was set too high, so the images were absolutely horrendous.

Cyber Security was the only event in which I had to take a written test. Nothing had to be done for my Web Development event, since the entry from the district contest was simply passed on up to the state judges.

I took home 2nd place in Cyber Security and 7th in Web Development. So, that means I'll be traveling to Atlanta, Georgia for the National Leadership Conference where I will compete in Cyber Security. That takes place near the end of June.

The school year is quickly coming to an end, which means the local FBLA banquet is coming up soon (May 7th). I'm in charge of putting together this year's Flashback video, so that's been eating up a lot of my time. It'll be on YouTube a few days after the banquet, in case any of you want to see it.

How does that look to you?

I started messing with XNA some more and found a disk containing a copy of the small engine that I was working on before I moved to Vista. Looking over the code almost made me sick. Things were so hard to follow and changing one thing led to a million other changes.

One major problem I noticed was the mountain of objects that kept getting passed around. For example, in my screen manager, and instance of LogManager was getting passed everywhere and sometimes the ILogManagerService was being pulled from Game.Services. There's no consistency. Yes, I am to blame for most of that, but I believe I was inconsistent because there was no one way to do things.

So, for the third rewrite, I figured I should come up with a catch-all pattern that will keep everything organized for me: ObjectRegistry.

Basically, I have some classes, such as InputManager and LogManager that only need to be created once (except in some rare cases). When I create the instance of this object, I add it to the ObjectRegistry, which is a singleton and accessible from all other objects.

InputManager input = new InputManager();
ObjectManager.Instance.AddObject("InputManager", input);

Now, say I want to use that same object in a class that has nothing to do with the class in which the original InputManager was created. Instead of doing this:

public SomeOtherClass(Game game) : base(game) {
    InputManager input = (InputManager)game.Services.GetService(typeof(IInputManager));
}

I do this:

InputManager input = (InputManager)ObjectRegistry.Instance["InputManager"];

I don't even need an instance of the Game class for that to work (which is another part of the clutter). Here's what my ObjectRegistry class looks like for the most part:

class ObjectRegistry {
    // Dictionary<>() initialization stuff and methods
    // to add and remove objects from the Registry
    // omitted because it's all pretty standard

    public object this[string key] {
        get { return objects[key]; }
    }

    // Singleton
    private static readonly object padLock = new object();
    private static ObjectRegistry instance = null;
    public static ObjectRegistry Instance {
        get {
            lock (padLock) {
                if (instance == null) {
                    instance = new ObjectRegistry();
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Anyway, my question: Is this a good solution to the problem or will it soon become just as cluttered as before? Do you have any other suggestions for keeping an extremely clean and organized game engine structure?

Seriously, why are children allowed to play Halo 3?

They all seem to be so annoying. Take the title of this entry, for example. Some little cretin decided it would be funny to kill me in as many different ways as possible. The part I got angry about? Well, we were ON THE SAME TEAM. After every kill, he'd scream "I KEELED U!" (spelling changed to emphasize pronunciation) as if it was some sort of prepubescent battle cry.

Anyway, I'm too tired to make a banner image for this entry. Sorry. And my offer still stands... I'd be happy to play a few rounds of CTF or Infection with some fellow GWB members. Perhaps then I could get a feel for how the game plays in the hands of mature human beings who just want to have fun. I'm not very experienced (as some jerk kept pointing out in the lobby), but I have to learn somehow, right?

I finally got sick of watching Halo 3 matches on YouTube and decided to actually play them. So, I fired up my 360 and upgraded my Live account to Gold. I've never really tried the whole "matchmaking" concept, but it was fairly straight-forward.

I've been playing the Halo series since it started, but I'm still a little rusty at multiplayer, so I went with the Basic Training playlist. After getting matched up with three other newbies, the round started. It took a bit getting used to because humans (most of them) are smarter than the AI in the Campaign. Fortunately, it only took about five minutes to warm up and get my reflexes going.

The second time around, I decided to move away from the training part and get into a bigger team match. I enjoy team games much more than deathmatch, simply because I've always liked working together to accomplish goals instead of running around and shooting anything that moves.

It was CTF on Valhalla with five to each team (me on blue). I actually vetoed the game, because I don't generally like capture the flag, but I was only one of two. So, it went on anyway.

This is where my experience got interesting. It was fun hearing the other players scheme and plan and bark orders. I'm debating whether I should get in on the whole voice thing. I don't like the sound of my own voice, so I thought about using voice masking. But, I read that voice masking is a good way to get shunned.

Anyway, near the end, I finally managed to make it to Red's base on a Mongoose. I drove up to the back, hopped off, sprinted to the flag, grabbed it and made a break for the man cannon. To my surprise, an instant before I hit the beam, I heard someone yell "Don't jump kid, don't jump!". But, I was already soaring through the air. Sure enough, when I landed, I was right in the middle of every member of Red team, who quickly shot me down from all sides.

I guess my mind was so full of "I finally got the flag!" that I didn't have time to react. So, I died, the flag got returned, and the round ended. Red team won. Unfortunately, the lag got so bad that I had to quit in the middle of the next round. That happens at night a lot for me.

Oh well, we'll see what happens tomorrow, I suppose. If anyone is interested in letting a newbie like me join them in a match some time, feel free to add me on Live. My card is on the right side of this page.