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There's a lot that goes into making a good platform game, and most of the Flash-based ones I've played I haven't found to be great, owing to a lack of time, ability and/or imagination on the part of the creators. Of course, no disrespect is meant to those people, since most creators of Flash games provide them free of charge and get compensated very little, if at all.

(Un)fortunately, when I do find one that I really like, I'm hooked. Currently, the three Flash-based platformers that top my list are, in no particular order: Portal: The Flash Version, The Company of Myself, and Level Up!.

Portal: The Flash Version
This fan-made game is based on the successful first-person action/puzzle game by Valve Corporation called, you might've guessed, Portal. The premise is simple: as a test subject in an advanced research facility, your only option is to find a way to the other side of the room in a series of tests (levels). But you'll need to go through walls, scale ledges too tall for you to leap, and avoid laser-shooting robots, death spikes and electrified floors. Your only friend is the portal-creating and anti-gravity gun you've been equipped with.

The Company of Myself
In this puzzle game, you play the role of a hermit who is accustomed to, but slightly discontent with, being in the sole company of himself. The goal is to reach a mysterious green square at the end of each level, which requires ascending ledges that are too high and crossing over pits that are too wide by employing the help of, effectively, yourself. The puzzle dynamics are relatively original, and the graphics are minimalistic and serve their intended purpose. But what really makes you want to play through all the levels is the unfolding storyline- throughout each level, you discover more about what's going on in the protagonist's head, and his mysterious past and lost love.

Level Up!
This game fuses RPG and platformer elements and removes the repetition aspect from the concept of leveling up. In this game you play an amnesiac who has a house in the woods, in search of magical gems and clues to her lost memory. What sets this game apart from other platformers is that abilities that are leveled up directly affect interaction with the game world- for instance, leveling up the jumping ability (which passively gets leveled up as you jump around) allows the character to jump to higher ledges (and thus access different parts of the game world) that were previously unreachable. There are no useless quests or side jobs to complete, but instead all emphasis is on exploration, with the storyline unfolding as the character explores the beautifully-animated 8-bit style world around her. My only gripe about this game is that it's too short!

Amazon is releasing a free Christmas/holiday song for download every day up until Christmas. I'm not sure how they'll profit directly from this. They're probably banking on attracting more customers this holiday season, and what little they likely pay for distributing these songs is well worth it. Or they might actually be taking in money from promoting the albums these songs are from, who knows.

Anyway, it's cool to see them doing something nice without requiring something in return.

Edit: Amazon now also has a free 5-song classical Christmas sampler. iTunes is offering a free 20-song sampler of Christmas songs performed by contemporary artists, and then some.

This Thanksgiving holiday, I caught a ride down to LA with Minh and was down there for a few days. I had some good food with family, fun times catching up with CCAC people, and obligatorily spent a lot of time with the girlfriend.

It was also Priscilla's and my three year anniversary, and we celebrated by doing completely everyday things- making turkey tacos, cleaning her messy desk, and having dinner at a restaurant we went to before we started dating.

The next day we had lunch with her parents at a Peruvian place called Las Dunas (their pescado a la chorrillana was really good), went on a prayer hike around Pepperdine University, and had our second session of pre-engagement counseling (doesn't mean we're definitely getting engaged) with Tom and Amanda.

I'm glad we can have fun doing ordinary, practical things without the expectation that fun comes only from spending lots of money or doing exotic things, though there's a place for that too. As long as we keep surprising each other, I think we'll be alright.

I'm really blessed to have everything I do.

Yesterday was my third time representing my company at the UCLA technical career fair. We seem to attend every fall and winter quarter, and I've been volunteering every time. It's a win-win: the company benefits from the recruiting, and I get a free trip to LA to see family and the gf (and I get more Southwest Rapid Rewards points, muahaha).

We're hiring mostly Software Engineers, so we look primarily for CS/CSE students at the fairs. Unfortunately, we didn't see many CS/CSE students this year- I talked to only a couple of CS students, and of the five resumes the other recruiter and I recommended, the majority of them were EE students with strong programming backgrounds. In fact, probably 70% of the students who stopped by our table were EE. 20% were physics majors.

I think it's mostly a branding problem. AST is a signals processing company, which implies that we have a lot of EE jobs. We do, but not entry level. And I think the Software Engineers outnumber the Electrical Engineers, since we have a very large and ever-growing software department. The other recruiter and I brought up our concerns about branding, so hopefully we'll see some changes by the next career fair. We also have a newly-created marketing department, so I'm counting on it!

Other than the career fair, I got to spend more time with Priscilla than I usually do, since I flew into LA a few hours earlier. We spent Tuesday evening trying on Halloween costumes at a seasonal shop (mostly just for fun since the costumes were cheap in quality yet ridiculously overpriced), eating at King's Burger (not your typical burger joint- I'm surprised at how many genres of food they have), and carving a pumpkin since she's had a deprived childhood and never done it before. We also took a bunch of pictures of my rental car, since I got a pretty swanky G6 GT this time. :)

My company hosted a two-day CPR and first aid training seminar that I was fortunate to get a seat for (there were only twelve spots available). The pair of three-hour long sessions were taught by one of the security staff who's also a Red Cross instructor. It was cool that the company covered the costs of the materials, the instructor's time and even dinner for the attendees. Win-win for everybody.

So today was the second session, and since we all passed the (very easy) exams we're now lay responders (certificates pending), meaning that we're allowed but not required to provide CPR and/or first aid, which differs from a first responder, who is required to assist a person in need.

Some cool things I learned:

• You need to identify yourself and get somebody's permission before you can provide assistance. If they're unconscious, there's implied consent, which means you can assume they would've given consent if they were conscious.
• Check, Call and Care. If somebody needs assistance, first check the surroundings and make sure there's no immediate danger to yourself. Move them to a safe area if it makes sense to do so. Call or have somebody else call for help if necessary. Then provide care for the injured person.
• If you're not sure what to do or panic, best to call 911.
• 5 back blows, 5 abdominal thrusts. If somebody is choking, alternate giving them 5 back blows with the bottom of your palm, and 5 abdominal thrusts to the midsection.
• 2 rescue breaths, 30 chest compressions. CPR is performed when somebody has gone into cardiac arrest and involves (at least the Red Cross-endorsed method) giving 2 rescue breaths of 1 second each, then 30 chest compressions to the mid-chest. You should be doing five cycles of this every two minutes.
• To bandage an open wound, first apply pressure with gauze until the bleeding stops. Then wrap the gauze firmly with dressing.
• If somebody has a broken arm, you can wrap their arm in a sling by wrapping it in a triangular-shaped cloth tied around their neck.
• FAST. To determine if somebody's having a stroke, ask them to smile (Face), raise their Arms, note how quickly or clearly they can Speak, and note the Time at which the symptoms started.
• If somebody's having a seizure, help them onto the ground onto their back and let them have the seizure. Don't try to restrain them.
• A diabetic feeling weak/dizzy/light-headed should be given sugar in liquid form. If their sugar level is too low, the sugar they ingest will help. If it's too high, the extra sugar won't cause any extra harm (sounds weird, but that's what the manual said!).
• Overexposure to heat may cause heat cramps, heat exhaustion and heat stroke, in that order. Heat stroke may be fatal. Allow them to lie down in a cool place, place something like towels soaked in cold water on their chest and forehead, and give them small sips of water.

Some of this information is probably inaccurate, which is entirely my fault. Needless to say but for liability reasons, I'm not a CPR/first aid instructor, so please don't read this information and then go try to assist somebody, mess up and then sue me.

Anyway, the training was pretty useful, and though I am by no means an expert, I'll sort of know what to do should a situation arise. I'd recommend to anybody to take CPR/first aid training, as it's offered for free in numerous places. You never know when you may need it, and having training at that time just might make the difference during the crucial minutes before proper help can arrive.

I recently came across mindcipher.net a site that has a small collection of decent user-submitted riddles. Here's one that I particularly enjoyed. It seems elusive at first, but once you figure out the implications of the hints and work it out on paper, it's pretty straightforward. It took me about 20 minutes of thinking it over while eating/showering and 10 minutes of working it out on paper.

Jack and his wife went to a party where four other married couples were present. Every person shook hands with everyone he or she was not acquainted with. When the handshaking was over, Jack asked everyone, including his own wife, how many hands they shook. To his surprise, Jack got nine different answers.

How many hands did Jack’s wife shake?

I saw Wicked the Musical for the second time, this time with Priscilla, Chi and Victor (they were up here for a wedding). Since Priscilla and I loved the show so much last time, we decided to get $100 orchestra seats this time around. Unfortunately, this time Wicked turned out to be not so wicked.

Maybe it was the high expectations we went in with. But what killed the show for us was that Kendra Kassebaum, the person playing Glinda (one of the two principal characters), was nowhere near as good as Natalie Daradich, the person who played the role the first time we saw it. Ironically, Kendra is the principal actress for the role and Natalie is the standby.

No disrespect to Kendra, but she just didn't seem to have the energy or the personality to play a perky, head-above-the-clouds character like Glinda. She sort of tossed her jokes to the wayside, and wasn't completely into her character. She did just so-so with Popular, which is perhaps Glinda's most defining song. However, she doesn't have a bad voice, so she did better in the second act, where Glinda's focus is more on singing than on acting.

Natalie, on the other hand, consistently played her part superbly and really stole the show.

Other than being disappointed at Kendra's performance, I thought Teal Wick's (Elphaba's) singing was a little weaker this time around, though I still thought she was great in both shows. And Lee Wilkof, who played the wizard, was really animated in Wonderful - probably more animated than anybody else in the show.

So it wasn't a bad show and I don't mean to bash anybody, but it left much to be desired, especially given the price we paid for better seats.

This past weekend I went on a cruise to Ensenada with Priscilla and her parents. It was tremendous fun! And Priscilla paid for it, so how could I refuse? =)

On Friday we drove down to San Diego where we boarded the Carnival Elation and set sail in the evening. All of Saturday was spent at sea, on Sunday we made landing at Ensenada from morning till evening, and Monday morning we made it back to home port.

Here are some highlights from the cruise:

• Good food available 24 hours a day. Great food in the evenings in the sit-down restaurant where everything from the bread to the potatoes to the broiled snapper was fine-tuned just right.
• Formal dining night where we got to dress up really swanky and had lobster for dinner.
• Two hilarious stand-up comedy routines by comedian/biker Russ Nagel. PG-13 and R-rated versions.
• Spin - a sort of musical that showcases various cities where different music genres were born.
• An outrageous hypnotist show where the funniest part of the show involved the hypnotist turning one guy into a shoe-loving kleptomaniac, making him steal and hide the shoes of anybody he put to sleep.
• Pris and I getting our pictures taken by professionals in front of various backdrops along the ship's promenade deck.
• Guys vs. girls Family Feud, in which the girls won after trailing the guys 0-200 something because of a scoring rule nobody seemed to know about.
• Tasty tacos and authentic (I think) chips, which were three times as thick as the chips I'm accustomed to, in Ensenada.
• Being approached on the street every 20 feet by people trying to sell necklaces, clothing, luchador masks, food, horse-drawn-cart rides, buggy rentals and sight-seeing excursions.
• Buying a necklace for Priscilla from a street vendor, and haggling the price from an initial $5 down to $2, but I think we still got ripped off. =)
• Getting a different towel animal every night when the cleaning staff would clean up our staterooms!

We moved all the big stuff to our new place two weeks ago, and since then I've been casually moving all the little stuff and cleaning up the old townhouse. We had two weeks till we had to be out, so we weren't in a hurry.

Today was the last day at the townhouse. Whew! Moving is stressful. Hopefully I can stay at this new place for more than a year before having to move again!

This weekend was... Wicked!

Friday night I saw Wicked the Musical at the Orpheum Theatre in SF with Priscilla and some co-workers. I had heard good things about the show, but I was surprised at how awesome it actually was.

The story was brilliant- it fit very well with the original Oz story, and yet managed to turn all the original perceptions upside-down. The singing and instrumentals were superb, and the lyrics were witty and sophisticated.

The only downside of the night was that we were all the way in the back row of the balcony! But that gives Priscilla and I an excuse to see the show again, this time with orchestra seats, next month. I can't wait. But until then, the next best thing I can do is listen to the Wicked soundtrack... again, and again, and again...