Five Months Later...Life is Great

Its been a long time since my last post. I didn't forget about my blog or anything. I just never updated it due to being either too lazy or too busy. But let's spend this time recapping what's happened in life since that time. Here we go.

October 2009 ended with completing my second Half Ironman and concluding my second triathlon season. That race went well despite suffering numerous problems from start to finish, like getting kicked in the face and having my goggles knocked off within the first 5 minutes of the swim. I was happy with the result though and I enjoyed the race more than I did last year. Before the end of tri season I was already working on my next goal, completing the Austin Distance Challenge, which is a series of seven races from a 10K up to a full marathon throughout the fall and winter months. Before my half ironman race I already completed the first two races in the series at a distance of 12K and 10K. The 10K race I ran I set a personal record by over two minutes, which I was really excited about.

In November I ran my first half marathon in San Antonio. Well, technically it might have been my third half marathon, since there's a half marathon run in the final leg of a half ironman. But this was my first time running a half marathon race that didn't have anything other than running to it. It was also my first time staying overnight in a hotel for a race away from home, something I think I'll be doing more often in the future. I will have to say though that I had to learn the hard way how to race these longer distances. In San Antonio I started out at a blistering (but comfortable) pace that put me at sub 20 minutes for the first 5K and sub 41 minutes for the first 10K. I totally ran out of steam in the last mile of that race and I was hurting bad, but I still finished in 1:30:48, which I was pretty pleased with. What was amazing about that race was the sheer number of people in it. I finished in 150th place overall of over 30,000 runners. That's right: thirty thousand runners. And that doesn't even count the few extra thousand runners who did the full marathon that day.

The week before Thanksgiving I visited my mother who lives in Gilbert Arizona, part of the Phoenix metropolitan area. In addition to visiting family that week, I had one other very special purpose behind this trip: Ironman Arizona. I've had my eye on this race for over a year. In fact I intended to register last year, but at that time I didn't realize that Ironman races sell out within hours or minutes after online registration opens. I learned that volunteers get priority registration at Ironman events, and since Ironman Arizona was less than a week before Thanksgiving it just worked out perfectly for me. So I volunteered there both at packet pickup and at one of the run aid stations. I also got the opportunity to study the course, the race, and get some training time in. I have to say that Tempe Town Lake was the coldest water I think I have ever swam in and I am not looking too forward to jumping in there again. But it was a great race to watch and the atmosphere was unlike anything I've ever felt before. It just felt so epic, with so many people pouring in so much time into this single day in their lives. There were motivational signs, chalk writings, and crowds everywhere. And yes, I am now officially registered for my first Ironman race to occur in November 2010. I've got a few months left to get in the best shape of my life!

Since the only racing I was doing after October for the next few months was running, that's pretty much all I did. It was nice to take a break from the continual struggle between wondering whether I should swim, bike, or run on a given training day, but I quickly grew anxious for the next season and wanted to do another triathlon right away. December marked the furthest I've ever ran in my life, getting in a 20 mile and then a 22 mile run. My training was going great until that 22 miler, when somehow my right achilles heel just exploded on me. I took an ice bath after that long run (my first one since high school 10 years ago) and did everything I could but it wasn't enough. The pain was so bad that I was broken and unable to run. Well, I could have ran but I didn't want to develop severe injuries over the winter and then start the next tri season with a beaten-up body. So I took a couple days off, that turned into a few days, that turned into two weeks. Two weeks with almost no exercise. I could have done some cross-training, but I was just lazy.

I sunk into a depression at the end of December and throughout the first part of January for a few reasons. First, I missed triathlon training that much that it affected me emotionally. Second, I couldn't run due to this annoying injury that just appeared out of nowhere with no warning whatsoever. And third, I felt like I didn't have any direction or purpose to my life at the time. I was still unemployed and hadn't found the type of job I want, I wasn't in school or doing anything productive other than keeping my body in shape, and I just fell into a rut. I started playing video games a lot, which is something I have a habit of doing when I get depressed or don't have a social life (sadly I admit that I don't have much of one). Its a self-replicated cycle, because playing games too much makes me depressed, which only makes me play games more to forget about being depressed. Pathetic, I know. During this time of 3-4 weeks I experienced many feelings and symptoms that I had during my fight with my anxiety disorder as a graduate student, which made me recall details about that experience and the hell I went through then. Fortunately, I later managed to get my head back on my shoulders and I feel great about myself now. But that's jumping too far ahead. Lets go back to the end of 2009.

At the end of December I interviewed for a software engineering job at UT Austin. This was the first job I was really interested in since I left my last job in April 2009. The interview lasted a full 8 hour day and I met with perhaps 10 different people on the project, from engineers to astronomers to managers. It was a little different than what I was used to, but not so different that it was unfamiliar. The interview went great (I thought) but I fumbled at the end. They decided to save all of the technical questions for the end of the day, when my mind was feeling a bit weary from the last 6 hours. I hate technical questions, really. I mean I have an undergraduate and graduate degree from two of the top ranked engineering universities in the entire world and I've been successful at two full time engineering positions in addition to being an active member of the open source community and founding and leading my own project. Why does it matter that I can't tell you off the top of my head what the standard signature is for a pointer to a method of a C++ class? I know the answer: because somehow people seem to sleaze their way through college and work by relying on others instead of being diligent with their own studies and work. I know because I've observed and worked with some of them. But I still find technical questions irritating, especially because they're often the weakest point in my interview. Anyway, the technical questions I was asked weren't too difficult, but I gave poor/incorrect answers to a small number of them because I was so anxious to spit out an answer that I didn't take the time that I should have to really think through the problem. This happens to me sometimes in interviews and I need to work on it. Well a week later I am told that neither myself nor the 4-5 other people that they interviewed were hired. They decided that they wanted to have another round of interviewing candidates but would still consider me, basically not giving me a yes or a no. A couple months later I learned through UT's system that they hired someone (I was told that they'd keep me informed but I guess they forgot). So it was disappointing, but I wasn't exactly holding out hope that they'd reconsider me anyway.

Now on to January. I start my first race of 2010 with a 20 mile race on January 10th. I had barely run or done any exercise for two weeks prior to this race and my achilles injury wasn't completely gone either, so I went into this one not feeling very positive. What I had learned from my training runs is that I can run for a few miles just fine, but my achilles starts acting up after maybe 7-8 miles and it really kills me. So my plan for this race was to go out at a speedy pace and get as far as I could before the pain disabled me. The race happened to be on a freezing cold day too, below 20F, easily making it the coldest race I ever ran. Well I held a 7:00 minute pace for 9 miles, which was as long as I could. And then I fell not due to my foot injury, but to exhaustion. My legs were practically suffering from atrophy due to all my non-exercise (mostly composed of sitting in a chair and playing video games all day) and I really paid the price. I only got slower and had to walk more and more as the miles wore on. The last 5 miles especially were sheer torture for me. Cardiovascularly I felt fine, but my leg muscles were so fatigued they could barely support me. It was a horrible race for me. So bad that it knocked me back from 2nd place to something like 6th place in my age group in the Austin Distance Challenge rankings. That sucked, but I was glad that it was over. Surprisingly, my achilles didn't bother me one iota that race. So the good news was that I was healed. The bad news was that I was out of shape, with a little over a month remaining before my first marathon.

After that race I started coming out of my depression. I got working on Hero of Allacrost again, that open source game project I founded oh so many years ago in June 2004, a few months before I first started writing to this blog. I had repeatedly tried to get myself back into working on it, as I had been lacking motivation/interest for some time, but it just wasn't happening. Then suddenly one day, it did. And since then I have been working on this project like crazy. It feels great, and I've helped our team to accomplish so much in such a short time of a few weeks. About a week and a half ago we made our first release since 2008. It's an unstable beta, but its also the best thing we've ever released in my opinion. I may comment more about this project and my roll in it in another post, but for now I'll leave it at that.

Toward the end of January I had another half marathon race (my third, as I had one in November and December last year). It was two weeks after that awful 20 miler race, but I had renewed energy and my body wasn't making any complaints so I went into it feeling good, though definitely still not 100%. Friday night before the race I did a swim workout and some light weightlifting, then went to the grocery store. And then it happened. I still don't understand what "it" was, but suddenly my right foot started hurting so bad I couldn't even stand on it. I was baffled. I was shopping and I got injured? I thought I must have just temporarily sprained a muscle somehow, but it was still there the next day. I had a friend come in to town that weekend and we did a lot of walking, which was painful. I was not happy with my situation at all. Sunday morning was race day and my foot pain was worse than ever. I couldn't do my usual warm up run because it hurt so much. I even avoided standing on it because it hurt. This particular race had a start delay of almost an hour due to high winds knocking over police barricades and making the course unsafe, so I had to stand there, on one leg, wondering what was going to happen to me. I was prepared for the likely possibility that I might DNF (not finish). Finally the race starts and the first mile is torture. I was wincing in pain with every single step. I took it out really slow and easy. Then at about mile 1.5 my foot started to feel a little better and so I started to go a little faster. And the pain gradually subsided and eventually I was able to run my normal pace. I did have a few instances where the pain suddenly came back strong if I landed on my foot wrong and I was also unable to make sharp right turns, but other than that I was good to go. I had a great race after that. Actually thanks to that injury, I managed to run that race in negative splits (a good running strategy where you run your last half of the race faster than your first). I'm still not sure what that injury was all about, but within another couple of weeks it was gone for good.

Then came February, and on Valentine's Day my first marathon. Due to these wacky injuries I had been having, I was nowhere near the shape I wanted to or should have been in coming into this race. But as in life, things don't always go your way and you have to make the best of what you got. One thing I had learned was that races tended to go my way if I started out slower than my goal pace and then sped up along the way. If I went out too fast in a race, I would die well before the finish and end the race on a bad note. I had run the entire marathon course (not all at once, but in two pieces) during my training so I had a strategy for every section of the race. I have to say my strategy worked well and things were looking good. Unfortunately though I just didn't have the endurance for a full marathon in me and starting with mile 19, I started to falter. But I still had enough left in me to finish those last 7 miles with dignity. My total finish time was 3:17:54, but I wasn't too upset about it. In fact, immediately after crossing that finish line I knew that I wanted to do another. I knew that if I trained properly and diligently and didn't let these injuries put me down, I'd be able to cut off 10 minutes or more. I don't know when my next marathon will be yet though, and I've backed off of running those long distances for now as tri season training has officially begun for me at the conclusion of this marathon.

Its March now. I'm starting to feel pretty anxious about still not having a job. Next month will mark the one year anniversary of resigning from my last position. Money isn't a problem yet, but I find myself wanting to buy things I want/need but having enough sense to know that I should only be spending my money on essentials right now like food, gas, and rent. I'm also so happy and busy working on Allacrost that part of me doesn't want to get a job now, which will greatly reduce the amount of time I have to spend on one of my favorite hobbies. I had an interview earlier today for a job I'm really interested in, but unfortunately even though the interview went well the likelihood of me getting the job is low since I am missing experience with some of the libraries and toolsets that they are using. But we'll see. I might actually work on the project pro bono if I don't get hired. I really do need to get on the ball and be more proactive about job searching and not restricting myself to non-corporate jobs. I don't feel I have the luxury of time anymore to wait around. I do get contacted by recruiters maybe once or twice a week, but usually I'm not interested in what they're selling.

So I guess I'll start to wrap this up. Its 5:30 in the morning and I was unable to sleep last night, hence why I decided to kill time by writing to my neglected blog. I've been on a really weird sleeping schedule and even I don't know when I will fall asleep now. 2010 is going to be a year of many firsts for me. Next month I'm riding in the MS150, a 150 mile bike ride to raise money and awareness for multiple sclerosis research. If you'd like to make a US tax deductible donation to help me raise money for this cause, I'd greatly appreciate any help you can give! I've heard of this cause for some time and finally decided its time to do it. I've already finished my first marathon last month. Before summer begins I plan to complete my first century, which is a 100-mile bike ride (the 150 mile ride for MS150 is split across two days). And then of course in November I'll be competing in my first Ironman. This is going to be a big, successful year for me I can already feel it. And not just with regard to athletics either. Oh, and in case you were wondering yes I still have many things to remark upon and criticize regarding religion. I've actually found a lot more material and continue to study and learn all that I can so you can expect many of those things to show up on here soon. I'll try to write here more frequently than I have in the past few months, but I'm not making any guarantees! Thanks for reading.

A New Direction

I'm taking a break from my religion/science blogging this post to talk about life. Actually I've been wondering lately if I should start a new blog dedicated to the topic of religion since I write about it so much lately. Right now I don't think I will, but if the readers of this blog tell me that they are only interested in a specific topic that could influence me to do so.

Anyway, other than my studies on religion and science there isn't a whole lot for me to comment on right now. Sadly I admit that my time spent on Allacrost has fell to almost nothing. An upgrade cycle I did back in February somehow rendered my Linux images unbootable and I haven't had the time and motivation to fix that yet, so that's a major contributing factor. I hope to get it fixed in a couple weeks and slowly get back into the swing of things, but I realize now that I have other interests and hobbies outside of Allacrost and I don't think its feasible for me to dedicate myself to that project at the level that I did for so many years. I'll continue working on it until the final release or until my death, whichever comes first. :)

I've been struggling to get back into good shape for triathlon season. I've mostly been focusing on my running now that I have custom orthotics and shin splints don't seem to be a problem at all for me anymore (YAY). But I've been plagued with some sort of problem in my throat for nearly two months that has left me with a chronic cough. The doctor said he thought it was a bacterial infection and the medicines he prescribed worked great, but as soon as they ran out it came back. I coughed so hard that I actually damaged my ribcage and its pretty painful. So the coughing and damaged ribs really hindered my training in a big way. So I wasn't in top shape for the Capital 10K race which I ran last Sunday. It was disappointing because I had been looking forward to that race for an entire year.

That race last Sunday, by the way, was the one year anniversary of my return to competitive athletics. The race itself went better than I expected to and I actually beat my time last year by a little over a minute. I finished at 40:59.4, which is 6:36/mile pace. I think the reason I did so well was because I ran it smart, conserved my energy, and ran negative splits (last year I ran the first half of the race too fast and died in the last half). I didn't take my splits, but I know my first mile was 6:50 so that means I definitely sped up as the race went on. As I was on the final stretch, I knew the 41:00 mark was coming up and I wanted to beat it, so I sprinted as hard as I could for about 10 or 15 seconds. And then about 20-30 seconds after I finished, I threw up. And I mean I really puked my guts out. I threw up at three different places in the finish area (all off to the side). It felt good because I know when that happens, it means I really pushed myself beyond my body's limit. I haven't done a post-race puking since my last race in high school in early 2000, where I ran the 2-mile race at the regional track meet in a personal best of 10:24 (I think I PRed that race by 12-20 seconds).

And now an important announcement. I've decided to leave my current job. In this economy I know its a bit crazy to do that, but I am financially stable and I feel confident enough to make this move. The reason I decided to do this was largely because I'm not interested in the work I'm doing there. It was a really hard decision to make because I love the company and the people, but I'm still pretty miserable when I have to spend 40 hours a week doing something that I don't enjoy and that is not intellectually challenging for me. My manager (who has been totally awesome about this) helped me try to find other work in the company to see if there was another group I could transfer to where I could find my niche, but even after looking around and working temporarily with another group it just wasn't happening. My last day is April 10th (next Friday).

So what do I do now? Well I don't have anything lined up yet, even though I've kept my resume posted for the past four months or so. I've been keeping an eye out but I just didn't find anything that really fit my interests and my preferred technologies. I really want to go back to a Linux development environment. I hate dealing with Microsoft, Windows, and all of their crap. Sadly, the best positions that I have found that meet what I'm looking for have been with defence contract agencies. I'm a bit apprehensive about designing "tools of war", but I've decided that if another defence opportunity presents itself to me, I might as well interview and see what happens. I'd prefer that the results of my work go to the betterment of life, not the destruction of it (I know that defence is a necessary industry and war/conflict is unavoidable, but I would like to avoid having a part in it if I can). I'd really like to work for a research lab or institution and help design software to enable scientists and engineers to better do their jobs. That way, I can also learn about another field. I would really love to be able to design simulators. Biological, chemical, structural, electrical, any kind of simulator really.

But I'm not limiting myself to just a typical job either. I had dinner with my friend Hari a few weeks ago and he actually proposed that I try out working for myself as an iphone game developer. Apparently there's a lot of money in that if you develop a popular game. It sounds simple enough and I think I'm easily capable of doing that work on my own, so I think I'm likely to look into it and give it a shot. If I can make a living that way, be my own boss, and not have to put a ton of time into it, I think that would be great. I could spend more time and effort dedicated to causes that I care about that way. I've also considered going back to school to get my PhD, either in computer engineering or possibly in another field like neuroscience or psychics. My primary concern with returning to grad school life though is how much time working on my PhD will consume. If you recall some of my posts from my grad school days, they were not happy times for me. I got physically and mentally sick from working myself to the bone every day without respite. I started a thread on the PhD comics forum asking about time commiments in different majors.

I'm also open to the idea of moving away from Austin if the right school or job opportunity presents itself to me. I love Austin a lot and it is difficult for me to part with it, but a part of me feels like I should not stay in place for too long. I need to shake things up every few years and intentionally put myself in a new environment where I am not comfortable. I don't want to live in a bubble called Austin, or anything else, for the rest of my adult life. I've been considering California or perhaps somewhere in Europe, perhaps Germany. I don't know German but its a language that I would like to learn one day. I could try Japan too, but I don't know if that country would be a good fit for me to live in. I'll visit it someday to be sure, but living there is another matter entirely.

Anyway that's my life for now. Hopefully my life will become more interesting as I leave my current job and I'll provide more frequenent updates on happenings in the near future.

Victory and Defeat

So my race season has come quite aways since my last post. So far this year I've done one 10K run, five triathlons, one duathlon, one aquathlon, and one open water swim race. It feels kind of cool to be a more dynamic athlete than just a runner, which is how I competed in years prior to this one. I've done well enough to win a few medals and trophies in these races as well. In less than a month I'll be doing a half ironman, which is a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, and 13.1 mile (half marathon) run. I'm looking at this upcoming race as something completely different, and unlike my other races my goal isn't to win....its just to survive. That will be my last triathlon for this year and I'm kind of looking forward to the season being over so I can recover myself a bit. Other races I have coming up are a 5K run, another aquathlon, and a 10K run. Next year I'm going to do the Austin marathon (which I've trained for twice in the past, but got too injured both times to go through with it). I'll do a half marathon race before that as well. Anyway let me focus on what's been going right and what sucks.


Swimming was what I thought would be the biggest challenge for me going into triathlon, but it really hasn't been. I'm a pretty decent swimmer and I've done very well in the swim leg of several of my races. What I hate about it though is that I'm so inconsistent in my results. The pace they report in races is the average time it took you to swim 100 meters. My fastest pace was a 1:30 I swam at that aquathlon, and my slowest pace has been a 2:10 I swam at one of my triathlons. There are things that definitely make me faster or slower on the swim, the big one usually being getting in a bad position relative to the other swimmers and ending up trapped behind a pack of really slow swimmers. But I can't *feel* how fast I'm going when I swim. At the last race I did on Labor Day I thought I was having a fairly fast swim, and later when I looked at the results my pace was 1:55, and that was even with me wearing a wetsuit. I was not happy with that time at all. I was expecting to swim around or below 1:40. And during swimming efficiency is so crucial that I constantly have to check myself and think things like "Are my hips high enough? Are my arms entering the water at the right distance and angle? Are my legs kicking too little or too hard? Are my hands and fingers shaped correctly?". The list goes on. Its not too bad, just annoying sometimes.


The biggest problem I have with cycling are my technical skills. Things like making turns, mounting/dismounting, or taking in fluids on the bike are major challenges for me. I can go fast and straight on the bike but that's about it. I've been slowly teaching myself to do more and more though. My last race was the first time I've used aerobars in a race and I really think they helped me a lot. But I still feel kind of nervous whenever I'm on the bike because my balance is pretty bad. My biggest strength on the bike though is hill climbing. In a race whenever there's a hill, I always blow by at least a couple different cyclists. But sometimes I leave my bike in too high of a gear when going uphill, and after doing that a few times my lower back begins to spasm and eventually destroys me. I've had this happen to me in one race and I've been battling back problems on the bike occasionally ever since. I like cycling though, its a lot of fun. Especially when you're going fast, although going too fast (on downhills) can scare me enough that I end up riding the brake a lot.


Running what was got me into triathlons in the first place. Specifically, I have a history of shin splints and that constant injury prevented me from running as much as I would like to, which brought me to cross training via cycling and swimming, which naturally turned me into a triathlete. Even though I've been running less through my triathlon training, my shins have still hurt enough to cause me major problems throughout the year. I finally got fed up with it and a few weeks ago, went to get fitted for custom orthotics for my running shoes. They've been a great help so far and the pain in my running legs continues to drop more and more. Although I've had enough injuries in other areas that it might just be I notice the other areas hurting more than the shins lately. :/ After triathlon season is over though, I'm going to turn my focus back to purely running for a while, and I'm looking forward to that.


Earlier this week something horrible happened to me which has never happened in any race I've ever done. The race was the Austin Triathlon and I signed up for the Olympic distance, which was a 1500 meter swim, 25 mile bike, and 10K run. I thought everything was going fine during the race. I felt sluggish on the run, but that's nothing unusual for me. With about 400 meters, or less than 100 seconds, left in the race, I suddenly lost consciousness and collapsed. About 15 minutes later I woke up in the medical tent, and couldn't remember a thing about what happened. The last thing I remembered was about another 400 meters back from where I passed out. My memory was in a horrible state. I couldn't remember a lot of things, like people's names, or my own phone number. I couldn't do math either (I was trying to calculate what time I would have finished based on the progression of events). I was really upset when they told me I didn't finish the race, because I have always finished every race no matter what. It upset me enough that I cried a little and was having trouble accepting what happened. In fact I *still* have trouble accepting what happened, because I felt fine on the run. I wasn't feeling dehydrated, or exhausted, or too hot, or anything like that. And I also didn't have any damage from when I fell on the pavement. When the medics got to me my body temperature was 104F, which is a really dangerous state to be in (according to Wikipedia). Once I regained consciousness I felt fine, other than being a little freaked out about the memory loss. I wanted to get up and leave but they made me stay there lying down for what felt like forever. So yeah, I was pretty disappointed with the outcome of that race, especially because I was expecting it to be a really good race for me. But its a learning experience I suppose.


Well that sums up my race season up pretty well. If I wrote these posts more often I'd go into more detail about the specific results and outcomes of each of my races, but that's way too much for a single post. Next time I'll be talking about Allacrost, so look for that in another 2-3 days.

And... I'm back

So the last two months have been reasonably eventful (for me anyway). Yes, I'm still unemployed, but I can't get these damn recruiters to leave me alone. I get a call/e-mail from one nearly every weekday and I'm getting sick of re-telling my life story to them. I'll be looking for a job soon though, and I'm hoping that I'll find something I don't detest by the end of this month.

At the end of April I became a member at Lifetime fitness and ever since, I've been spending more and more time at the gym. One of the first things I did there was take a fitness assessment test that tells you your "body age" compared to your chronological age by measuring your VO2 max, strength, flexibility, and body composition. I did fairly well and my body age was 18 years old (my chronological age is 24). So that made me kind of happy to hear that. :) I spent most of May focusing on my weak point, body strength, but I also started cycling in addition to running. Towards the end of the month, I started swimming too, which has been a difficult challenge for me because...well, I like to breathe when I'm working out. :) Over the past 3 weeks I've been self-teaching myself how to front-crawl properly and I've come pretty far in such a short time. Now I can easily do bi-lateral breathing (turning your head to the left and right for breaths of air) rather than always trying to keep my head out of the water. The furthest I've swam in a day so far has been about 0.8 miles.

Yesterday my roommate (who is a cyclist and occasional triathlete) invited me to go swim in open water with a bunch of people that meet weekly to go swim. I went and it was fun, although a little freaky since I haven't properly learned how to sight. Most days if I'm not tired, I try to do two forms of cardio, but today I went all out and did three. I swam for half a mile, cycled for 12.4 miles, ran over 3 miles, and did about an hour of weightlifting. Needless to say, I'm totally exhausted as I write this right now, but in a good way :) Even though I won't be anywhere near race condition by the time it comes, I'm thinking of doing a 5K race on or around July 16th, which will be my 25th birthday. It is to be my official "come back" into the world of competitive sports. (For those that don't know, back in high school I ran cross country and track and I loved racing more than anything at that time). My roommate is trying to convince me to do a triathlon, and I actually think I want to do one too, although not until after I get comfortably back into running races again. Plus the way my training routine is going, its almost like I am already becoming a triathlete. ^_^

A couple days ago we finished our second release for Hero of Allacrost. Its a major improvement over the first demo we released in October last year. So far we've seen a pretty good stream of publicity and positive feedback. The most important thing about this demo, in my opinion at least, is that now our code base is mature enough that it is extremely easy to build onto what we already have. I re-wrote some major subsystems of the code after our first release, particularly I re-designed that map code nearly from scratch (to add free range movement support among other things) and I re-wrote the global code, which is the code that manages all of the data that different portions of the game share (characters, inventory, skills, that sort of thing). I haven't announced this on our site yet, but the plan from here is to make smaller, more periodic releases that add a small number of features/improvements over the previous release. We're also going to start a recruitment hunt tomorrow to increase the number of programmers and artists on our team to help speed up production. Needless to say, its an important turning point for our project (which is now 3 years old by the way).

Well I'm exhausted and need to get some sleep. Tyler out.