kanno41.com | Blog

My annually updated blog

  • Life as an adult

    I am now an adult, here at age 25. I am enjoying my job at Battelle and getting to work on some really neat things. I am starting to lose my inquisitive sharpness and excitement for software development though since I haven’t done much app or video game development in quite some time. I feel truly satisfied as a result of knowing God and developing sweet friendships in our Voltron bible study. I feel that I’ve accomplished everything I’ve set out to do in my life, and I want to use my time to help others and serve. This has truly been the greatest period of my life. I also seem to be at a cross-roads. Most of my life has been focused on my needs and my will. It’s incredibly difficult, yet rewarding to think about others as more important than myself. I seek different things than I would have imagined myself seeking. I simply don’t want anything more out of life, because I am filled up in the most important things. Being married or not, leading a home church or not, studying the Bible with friends or not, I know that it is drawing near to God that fills me up.

    Flying is still fun. I flew to Oshkosh this year despite an incredible amount of drama with the annual. A cylinder needed to be replaced, but no one had any stock of that particular model available. It took months of beautiful flying weather for everything to get worked out. Apparently our propeller had never been approved with the Tri-Pacer, yet it had been flying with that prop for over 40 years! I ended up buying a new propeller, and everything worked out to make it to Oshkosh and camp for several days. Approval for our old propeller finally came through several months later. Along with a new magneto and a new vacuum pump, it’s been an expensive year as an aircraft owner. I did get to fly 20 hours within the next month after having the airplane back in service. Flying as the leaves had all turned color in the fall was absolutely beautiful.

    Is it time to settle down or is it time to put the foot on the gas? My personality will not let me rest, so I’d imagine putting the foot on the gas is going to happen. Get ready world. Here I come.

  • Good timing

    Here is my once yearly blog post, coming to you for another year. This has been going on for the last 7 years without fail. This is the last day of 2014, so I’m glad that I didn’t miss it. It’s been a busy year, like all of the past years have been. Life never seems to slow down or get easier. Knowing this, it is exciting to face life this way. There’s always a response required to a challenge. Do I meet the challenge head on, or do I run away? From my experience, it’s definitely worth it to face challenge head on. In my life, the challenges have always been different.

    Since last writing, I moved in with 8 roommates in Voltron home church, my friend got married, and I have been fortunate enough to help mentor people in robotics and in knowledge of the Bible. I’m incredibly grateful for all of the wonderful relationships that I now have with people. I’ve grown substantially as a person by learning how to rest in God. All action flows from what a person ultimately believes. I’ve had the great privilege of learning a lot about the Bible this year, and it’s been really exciting to critically think about what it says instead of simply having “blind faith”.

    The Tri-Pacer is still flying, and I’ve kept my instrument rating current. Now I need more excuses to go flying! One highlight of flying this year was going to Wolf Run State Park to go camping at their “Fly-in Camp Ground”. It was so fun to fly in and camp. Scott even made a fishing pole, and we caught a fish with it! It was so much fun to enjoy nature and relax. I made it to Oshkosh this year in a Cessna 2010 and camped next to the airplane for most of the week. The Thunderbirds performed this year and put on a pretty cool show. I hope to get to Sun N Fun this upcoming year.

    Another wonderful highlight of my year was going to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference. It was so much fun to go to sessions and see the exhibit hall (and acquire tons of free stuff!). We stayed in a hostel a mile or so away, but it only cost us $70 for the whole week we were there! I definitely want to go back there. There was a restaurant called TBD that we went to that was fantastic. Everything there was cooked on a wood fire. I specifically remember eating this marshmallow “smore” dessert that blew my mind. A lot happens in a year, and I think it’s interesting that a food experience even makes a mention in this post. It was seriously delicious though!

    The real bummer of the year is putting Soulfire on hold due to funding issues. I really hope we’ll have the opportunity to revisit it at some point to finish what we started. The games were fun, but making the games with the people we had was the most fun. Work is still going well, and I’m having the opportunity to work on such a variety of things that I never would have imagined two years ago when I started. A lot of things have happened over this past year that have legitimately allowed me to experience great joy in my soul. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Cheers to another year!

  • Life over the past year

    I’ve been out of school now for one year, and it has been an incredible year so far. I feel like I’ve been everywhere, done everything, and am still just as busy as I was during school. There are always good and bad times, but I am so blessed to be happy and view life as good. Life is about experiences, and I have enjoyed the trials and tribulations to the fullest. That’s what it means to truly live. I flew back from Oshkosh 2013 today, so that is the subject most readily on my mind to start out on.

    On July 24, 2013, I passed my IFR practical test and received my instrument rating in the Piper Tripacer. OSU Avionics did a fantastic job of installing the Garmin 430W in our panel to enable this to happen. This was probably my most heavily ingrained desire that’d been burning for years. With the incredible instruction from John Wilson, I was able to finish my rating in less than two months. I passed my IFR written test with a score of 90% just one week before I took my practical test. I intend to have a future couple of blog posts in the coming weeks that go into more depth of this endeavour.

    Earlier in March, I had the privilege to demo our SignWave hand-based biometric login application at SXSW. SXSW was one of the coolest places to be ever if you love Music, Film, or what they call “Interactive”. Interactive means anything from gaming to entrepreneurship, changing the world, or just changing our perspective of it. There was so much stuff everywhere. I even got to see Coolio and deadmau5. One of the downsides of the life happened shortly after when my car got broken into the day after St. Patricks day. My work laptop and flight bag were stolen from my car. About a month later, they stole my radio and my 12″ JL Audio subwoofers. Yikes. After a few weeks of not having a radio, you don’t really miss it. It’s pretty interesting to see how you “think” you need things (like cable), but when you are without them for a few weeks you don’t really miss them all that much. Humans have survived many thousands of years without the internet or smartphones.

    Soulfire Software is still cooking. We’re still working on our first released 3D game. We hope to finish it by early next year. I’m really excited to see where that leads. Scott should be graduating by December, and that should help spur our progress tremendously. We’re using the Unity3D game engine, which has enhanced our development pipeline significantly. Our team did a gamejam a few months ago which was ridiculously successful. We hadn’t ever built a working 3D game yet to that point. In 48-hours, I think we nailed it. I’ll try to post a link to the version on the Soulfire website soon.

    Work at Battelle has been going well. I’ve been working on some neat projects and learned an absurd amount about working with a team of engineers. At Soulfire, almost everyone is an artist. Everyone is a programmer at work except for one UI designer. It’s fascinating to see all of the pieces that need to fit into place to release a product into the consumer market. I’ve released/shipped over a half-dozen medium-scale projects to consumers. I have a love and passion for crafting fun, high quality product experiences for customers. I’m not a computer-scientist, I’m a software engineer. I know how to get things done, and I enjoy that immensely.

    This last year has been an adventure. In fact, every year has been an adventure. This was the first year that I’ve been able to do things that have been useful other than spending time in school. Just because I’m no longer in school doesn’t mean I stop learning. I hope to never stop exploring and learning. This concludes my sixth yearly blog post. Cheers to another year!

  • Hello there

    I suppose that it is time for my once yearly blog post. A lot has happened over the past year, far too much to explain. I am still alive, and I have made it through college. I am now an alumnus of The Ohio State University. Since last time, Soulfire Software has released onto Xbox Live Indie Games. We are all hard at work on our next game, Project TP (super-secret 🙂 ). We have now released two games onto Xbox Live as Soulfire Software. It is an incredible feeling to be able to work with a team that is so passionate for crafting a quality experience for players. So much polish went in to our last game, and that’s really what made it worth a dollar.

    In other news, I started full time work at Battelle Memorial Institute, and am enjoying it immensely. I just so happened to stumble onto a ‘Googlesque’ environment where everyone is nice, professional, and super smart. There are also free snacks and drinks to keep up the productivity throughout the day.

    Working is far less stressful than school is. I actually have time to do what ‘I’ want to do after work. I usually work on our game for Soulfire when I get home. I am trying to balance working on the game vs. playing them. Zelda: Windwaker is taking up a great deal of my time at the current moment.

    Overall, I can say that I am quite happy. Next on the horizon consists of obtaining my IFR rating and getting the Garmin 430 installed in N41AH. Blue skies are certainly up above.

  • Aero Battery

    Introducing Aero Battery, an application that shows you your laptop’s battery life via the Windows color scheme.  Transitions from green to red as your battery goes from full to empty.

    You’re welcome to try it out and tell me what you think.  It’s free 🙂

    https://kanno41blog-h5bhfgerathdade0.westus-01.azurewebsites.net/AeroBattery/AeroBatterySetup.exe

  • MIX 2011 Bound!

  • Oh how I love technology

    I really like my job.  It allows me to try out new things and I am always learning.  The one thing about technology these days is how one thing evolves into another so quickly that we rarely step back and think about what is actually going on.  I thought I would show how a few cool things working together can make some REALLY cool.  Microsoft has made such an excellent product that truly is an integrated development environment.

    For the airport’s intranet site, I created a CodedUI test using Visual Studio 2010 Premium to exercise the user interface for a particular page.  It consisted of opening up the browser, clicking on links, Assert()ing that they existed and that everything is working as it should.  A CodedUI test can then be “played back” when the tests are run.

    Now on to the next bit.  I am using Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 for Source Control, Work Item management, and Building.  What’s really slick is being able to utilize the TFS server to build the project.  I defined a build specification so that it would work like a Continuous Integration (CI) system.  Whenever code is checked in, the server will build the code and copy the binaries to a directory.  If the build fails, the code is rejected.

    So what makes this even more awesome, is that with Visual Studio Test Agent, I can run CodedUI tests on a separate test machine from my Visual Studio instance.

    Recently, I have been granted access to the network over VPN.  VPN is Virtual Private Networking.  Basically, anywhere there is internet, I can access the servers on the airport’s local network without physically being there.

    So there I was, sitting at home drinking coffee.  I pull out my laptop at the kicthen table and connect through VPN (no wires or anything, wireless is cool beans), and decide to make a quick change to the code of the intranet site.  When I check in my code, the TFS server all the way over at the airport builds the code, copies the build to the test machine, runs the CodedUI test on the test machine, delivers the result to the build server and then TFS accepts the new code (Changeset).

    I think that’s really slick.  It’s truly mind boggling to think of all the underlying technology it takes for that to just “work.”  And this is why I really love technology.

  • It’s been another year!

    I think I’m doing quite well with this once yearly blog.  Oh man, what a year.  Soulfire Software just released SketchBox 360 on the Xbox Live Marketplace.  I’m so humbled by the team with Soulfire and I have so much respect for every one of them.  I am now a Junior at The Ohio State University.  School is back underway and it feels like I’m starting to get used to it or something.  It doesn’t seem to bother me much anymore.  It’s always hard to stay motivated, but the pain will soon end.  Not much else exciting has been going on.  I’ve been living and breathing SketchBox almost all summer long and doing work/school for the other parts.  One might say it is dull;  I think it is incredibly fulfilling.  Nothing can compare to the feeling of accomplishment when we finally finished and released SketchBox.  You learn about things that are more important than one man.  Working with a team of such talent is just awesome.

    Well, that’s all for another year!  See ya next time.

  • Ahh the good life.

    My blog has now turned into a once yearly blog.  As it so happens, I seem to post something about 1-2 a year.  The reason?  I would attribute this to being “busy.”  What does “busy” mean?  Well, I’d say, but I don’t have time.  I’ll give it a go in one sentence.  Mainly stuff related to school at The Ohio State University full time, working with enflight.com (awesome web-based flight planning software), flying to Oshkosh, working with Soulfire Software on an XNA animation tool and game, the Ohio Aviation Association website, fixing and building various computers, and working at OSU Airport maintaining their intranet site,Osuairport.org and the Aviation Department website, both in Silverlight, and ASP.NET versions.  I do pretty much all of this on a daily basis.  To say that I have bitten off more than I can chew is an understatement.  It’s a challenge, certainly, to keep it all straight in my head.  Languages needed for the above projects: PHP,HTML, CSS, Javascript, ASP.NET (built my own CMS), WPF/Silverlight (XAML), XML, C# (XNA Framework), VB.NET, and C.  Oh, and flying airplanes is cool too, I guess.  I’m still working on my IFR rating amongst other things that are missing from this short list.

    I’m going to go to bed now.  I think I need it pretty desperately at the moment.

  • Life.Alive!

    Yes it is true; I am alive!  I cannot possibly sum up all of the things that I’ve been going through since the last post because that would be a waste of time.  A short synopsis in one word: busy.  I am now taking classes at The Ohio State University and have been in a generally good mood, not having to wake up early anymore.  I hate waking up early with a passion.  It may be because I enjoy staying up all night.

    The most exciting thing going on this coming week is Microsoft PDC out in LA.  I look forward to having a whole week of pure techawesomeness (is that even a word?!?!).  While in LA, I will get my hands on a pre-beta version of Windows 7!  I am looking forward also to using the Microsoft Surface while I am there.

    Lately I have been too busy with classes to handle many other projects.  I am currently working on an XNA project with a friend up at Bowling Green who is doing all of the artwork and modeling for the game while I do the programming.

    I simply can’t believe that we are nearing the end of October already.  It is getting quite a bit colder outside, but that’s okay, I like it cold.  It’s 43degrees outside yet you’d see me in shorts and a T-shirt.  Along with other ramblings, Top Gun in Bluray with 1080p is amazing.  It was quite a brilliant idea to include a Bluray player in every PS3.  I would expect it to be a pretty well-selling item this Christmas.  In Apple’s infinite brilliance, none of their computers have support for Bluray or even HDMI for that matter.

    I will likely update this blog a bit next week with all of the coolness going on at PDC, so yea, back to coding like a good little boy for me.