Robin Harbron

My band, The Transparencies, have been practicing for the last couple months for a tribute concert to one of our favourite bands, The Lost Dogs. If you’re in the area, and not watching the Grey Cup, come drop by.

Date: Sunday, November 25, 2007
Time: 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Location: Northwood Park Church of Christ (Basement)
Street: Corner of Redwood Ave & South Edward (in Thunder Bay)

Here’s some (very live) recordings from our practice session today.

A Certain Love
Close But No Cigar
Free At Last
In The Distance
Moses In The Desert
Where To Run
Built For Glory
Reasonable Service
Cry Out Loud
Protect My Child
Blessing In Disguise
If It Be Your Will
Breathe Deep

Okay, this is really late, and I *did* wish my sister a happy birthday way back on October 4th. But I’ve been digging around at my dad’s place for some old treasures, and among some cool old computer game boxes and some old photos, I found a record that Erin got as a present back in 1981, and the sort-of liner thing it came in.

It was an original birthday song with my sister’s name. I assume they recorded 100 different versions of the same song, just substituting one name for another. I feel pretty sorry for the guy who sung that thing over and over again. I guess he’s gotten over it by now. We were pretty surprised they did an “Erin” version; “Jennifer” probably gave them a much bigger payback.

If you zoom in enough on the picture, you’ll discover why there are quarters on the record. I took the picture of the record set up on Erin’s old record player for extra nostalgic effect. In reality, it wasn’t able to play the record at all; the grooves on this super-thin record were far too fine. So I set up my record player with built-in speakers, and managed to break the player almost immediately by dropping it from 45 speed to neutral while the turntable was spinning. So I looked, and found my last record player which I guess I’ve never used before. It was “Made in Germany”.

The record skipped really badly, and did have a pretty nasty scratch running across the first half of the song. But I started experimenting with the player and found I could get it to skip a lot less by adjusting the counter-balance on the arm just right. Then with a bunch of tweaking of the anti-skating adjustment, I finally got a pretty much perfect playthrough. I’m thinking this is actually a really good turntable. In fact, I just checked on eBay and one just went for $89 which seems like quite a bit. It’s a “Dual 1218”.

Okay, enough of the geeky talk. Erin, hope you enjoy listening to this again as much as I did the first couple times!

Listen to: Happy Birthday Erin

It’s been a busy time since my last post: the game is finished and off to be manufactured, should be in stores in September; we took a 7500 km family trip through the north-west of the USA; during that trip I attended the Christian Game Developers Conference and had a very inspirational and enjoyable time. All those things deserve a lot more coverage sometime, and I hope to get to it soon.

3 years ago I blogged about how it had been 7 years since my old band, North and the Sea had finished recording our album. I get into more details in that post, but it’s easy to remember because it coincides with the birth of my first child, Rianna. She’s 10 years old now. She’s a wonderful kid, and it’s hard to believe that we’ve had her so long.

Last summer all three of us NATS were in town at the same time, so we got together for an evening of recording with my gear at Richard’s place. I’ve been meaning to do something with the tracks all this year, but whenever I get over to Rich’s I end up watching movies and/or chatting with friends, and there never seems to be the time.

But anyway, I’ve got a rough mix of the new song we recorded, and in honour of this anniversary, why don’t you have a listen? I hope you like it. I believe I’ve got the title right. Doug wrote it (I think a solo version of it is going to be on his Reliable Toasters album sometime). Enjoy!

Listen to: Set This Captive Free

And you can listen to the whole album from 1997 here: New Material Only

Lots of catch up on…

Went to the Midwest Gaming Classic the weekend before last, for my 3rd time. Once again, an enjoyable drive through northern Wisconsin. And again I stopped at the loneliest Subway in the world, halfway down the inexplicable beautiful divided highway that connects Superior, Wisconsin with Eau Claire, Wisconsin. There were actually a few people around this time in early June, unlike when I visit in the early fall. I used to think they kept the place open just for me.

Stayed near Madison, WI with my friends Jason and Kati who were once again fantastic hosts. Spent all day Saturday at the MGC. Highlights included: meeting Marty Goldberg who runs classicgaming.com, has a way bigger collection of computers and video games than I do, and is involved in a bunch of cool projects including the Atari Flashback series; attending an open meeting of the Madison chapter of the IGDA; filling a *big* hole in my console collection by purchasing an Atari 5200; and being interviewed for podcasts not once but twice, though it looks like at least one of those interviews was lost and not missed by the interviewers.

Went “the long way” home through Minneapolis, and picked up a full-size Tetris arcade game from a guy I sort of knew through AtariAge.com. The game spent 4 days in my truck, then got moved into the garage. It still has to make its way downstairs into my geek room. I didn’t realize how heavy it was until I tried moving it by myself the other day. I’m just a little bit worried about how both I and it will fair on the stairs.

My grandfather Peter Iwachewski passed away last week, and we had his funeral on Tuesday. It was sad because he was doing so well even just a month ago, but he had a good long life, and I’m thankful that he was around to be a good influence even on my children (his great-grandchildren) for so long. I took some pictures of the displays that my mom and her siblings set up. You can see them here.

Haven’t had any pictures of the kids up lately, so here’s one taken at the funeral: Click here.

Work continues on the game I’m programming, and we’ve now reached Beta status on it. It’s taking a little longer than originally planned, but we’re now just a few weeks from it being completed.

Take a look at what $5600 can buy you. Yes, a bunch of gruff half-naked guys wandering around on top of your house. And as a bonus, they put shingles down too. Can’t ask for much more.

In other news, I’ve survived 9 of the 10 days that my family has been away for. I’ve discovered that there is such a thing as too quiet.

Work continues on the game I’m working on. We’re basically “feature complete” as of today, so from now on we’re adding content, tweaking, and fixing bugs. About a month left on it, and then on to the next project, which is nearly lined up already.

Happy Birthday Peter: 6 years old today. It seems to have become an annual tradition to blog about Peter’s birthday because there is usually a video game connection. For Peter’s 4th birthday we made the Super Mario Birthday Cake, and for Peter’s 5th birthday we noticed how popular the pictures of his birthday cake had become, because of Mario’s 20th birthday.

So, this year Peter wanted a Mario cake again, but this time with Yoshi too. I took a close-up photo of the Super Mario World cartridge label, printed out a blown-up copy, and Carla went to work with her cake decorating. Looks pretty good!

I kept the first picture small and Peter-free to encourage the sort of hot-linking in forum threads that was going on last time. The second picture is larger and non-anonymous.

Google Maps has been a favourite site of mine for quite a while, especially for its “Get Directions” feature. Type in the “from” and the “to” locations, and it’ll work out a path, and give a distance and directions.

Frequently I was just as interested in the distance as the directions, and I found myself using it to measure the distance between some of the paths I take in real life. The only problem is that it always chooses what it thinks to be the optimal path, which was often at least a little different than what I thought. To find out a total distance over a different path, I’d have to break the path into pieces small enough that it’d agree with me on the path, and then I’d have to manually enter and add those distances up.

Not anymore! Now you can add extra steps to a path. I was able to easily add up the route I walked today, and even save a link so you folks can see it too, so here it is. 5.2 kms, which is almost exactly what I used to walk at lunch hour.

When I decided to take the new job, one of the factors that helped me in my decision was a bit in our contract that allows 25 working days to decide whether to keep the new job or not. I had that time to see if this could really work, and it was a bit of comfort as I went through a somewhat uncomfortable period of change.

That time period has passed as of yesterday, so now my new job is really my job. There’s no going back, at least, not so easily. If circumstances change and a position comes up in my old department, I’ll certainly consider going back. But for right now, this new job is a good fit. It’s not perfect, but I’m not aware of anything better.

One downside is that I’m not home for supper and bedtime for the kids sometimes. But if I miss that, it means that I was home all day before work, able to help the kids with their math work or let the older girls and Carla head to knitting class while I watch the younger kids.

And by strategically giving away a shift a couple weeks from now, I’ll have 5 days off in a row right before a big deadline for my game project. Pretty nice!

Besides the friends at my old job, the one other thing I miss is the lunch hour. At the old job location, there was a really good neighbourhood just to the south with nice sidewalks and quiet streets: perfect for walking. I got in the habit in the fall of heading out at lunch, and kept it up through the winter. On a good day I’d manage to get 7 km in, including a couple short “coffee break” walks.

Since I know that isn’t going to happen with the new job (I only get a few short paid breaks where I’m not to leave the building) I started walking around my neighbourhood just the last few days. It figures that the first time I have ever walked to pick up our mail at the mail boxes at the end of our street, that a large parcel was in there with a “heavy, watch your back” sticker on it.

Yesterday was my last day in the IT department at work. I started there December 16th, 1996 as a student and became a real full-time employee on May 14th of 1997.

Despite having the same job title all along, I’ve done a lot of different jobs over the last ten years: an Internet help desk guy when Windows 95 and the Internet were a pretty new thing; driving a big telephone truck around town to set-up and repair residential and business DSL (high-speed Internet); running the internal computer help desk for our employees; being a Windows/networking guy, setting up and fixing computers for our employees; system administrator for a few systems; and most recently a programmer/developer.

I enjoyed some of these roles more than others, but all the time it’s been a good job which has provided for my growing family. I’ve been around the same core group of people for all these years, and they’re all great people. I’ll miss seeing them regularly.

I’m changing jobs because I got another game programming contract, and find it too difficult to work two full-time jobs at once. My IT job doesn’t have any part-time job options, so I’m moving within the company to another department that offers part-time work. By staying in the company, I’m not losing my seniority, and it will be much easier for me to return to full-time work in the future if I need to.

Ideally, I’ll be able to work part-time year round; landing a game contract (or maybe two) a year will make up the difference financially, and be more rewarding personally. I hope to fill the time between contracts with other projects that may prove profitable in some way: my own game ideas, or homeschool resource ideas that Carla and I have.

Happy New Year, all of you telecommunicators.

We weren’t feeling 100% today, so we stayed home and had a lazy pajama day. Sorry that we missed Darren and Jenn’s party and our other friends there. Hope you guys had a good time.

It’s been quite a while since I got any game programming done. I’ve got all kinds of big projects in mind, but I’ve found that the bigger the idea, the less likely it is to get done, especially if you don’t start small. So I got to work this weekend on a couple of the smallest ideas I’ve had.

Since I’ve finished projects on my two favourite platforms, the Commodore 64 and the Game Boy Advance, I figured I’d try to get something done on some of my other favourites, the VIC-20 and the Commodore PET.

On the VIC-20 I did a port of my C64 game from 2002, Splatform. The VIC doesn’t have hardware sprites or smooth scrolling, so it took a bit of doing to simulate those features through code. My 750 byte game bloated all the way up to about 1500 bytes for the VIC! It took about two days to do this port. Peter had a whole bunch of fun beta testing it for me on the real hardware; he easily played it for a full hour. I posted a link to download the game on the Denial forum for testing, and will do a full release after it’s been tested a bit more.

On the PET I did a port of the Bounced64 game we released in the summer for the 2006 Minigame Compo. The C64 version was written with a PET port in mind, so it was really quite easy to get working. The main trick was removing the code for the joystick, since the PET doesn’t have joysticks, and figuring out how to directly read the keyboard.

Heidi has always been intrigued by the PET. I remember that green screen and flashing cursor being so compelling when I was seven in 1979; it doesn’t seem to have lost it’s allure to seven-year-olds in 2007 either. She spent quite a while typing messages from Sonic the Hedgehog to Knuckles, and then made various “lace” and “carpet” designs with the PETSCII graphics after I showed her the shift-lock key.

I still want to do a game for each of my other favourite platforms, especially the Atari 2600, and also the ColecoVision, Vectrex, and Timex/Sinclair 1000, though some of my friends think I should quit wasting time and get on with something potentially profitable like Splatform for mobile devices. Of course, some of my friends thought my game programming was a waste of time in general, at least, they did before it started paying.