Dark Messiah: Elements (XBox 360)

I don't know how I let this game slip by me. This looks like Oblivion dungeon fighting gone bloodlusty insane!

New Song - "Você vai andar sozinha você vai"

A few days ago, November 19, my daughter Thaísha turned 6 months young. Walking to the nurse's office to get her vaccines I made up a song in Portuguese and sang it to her. It has the same rhythm as "If you're happy and you known it clap your hands..."

"Você vai andar sozinha você vai"
(You will walk on your own, yes you will)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-==-=-=-==
The Chorus, denoted "[Chorus]" from here on out is:
Você vai andar sozinha você vai,
Você vai andar sozinha você vai.
=-=-=-=-=-==-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

[Chorus]

Você vai andar sozinha, (you will walk on your own)
Você vai pular da linha, (you will jump over the lines)
Você vai andar sozinha você vai. (you will walk on your own yes you will)

[Chorus]

Você vai atrás da fila, (you will go [walk] behind the line [of people])
Você vai pegar florinha, (you will pick little flowers)
Você vai andar sozinha você vai.

[Chorus]

Você vai andar sozinha,
Passará na padaria, (you will pass by the bakery)
Você vai andar sozinha você vai.

[Chorus]

Você vai andar sozinha,
Você vai tomar vacina, (you will take a vaccine)
Você vai andar sozniha você vai.

Why you should NEVER live in Brazil

A friend of mine recently asked me about how it is living in Brazil. After I responded, I decided it'd be a good idea to Blog it since it is on my mind.

I can answer this in different ways; some long, some short. I will try to give you the quick, dirty, straight version....

Postive:
1. Family is great! They miss the beach, but at least this city has other attractions. The baby girl will turn 6 months in 6 more days.

2. Work: I love working at Google Brazil. The people are awesome!! BHZ is an all engineering office mostly working on Orkut. Great staff. We speak 60/40 Portuguese/English.

3. Business opportunity here is amazing if you're an American. E.g. They lack many proven technologies here in Brazil as a whole.

4. If you're single... well just call this place icandy-land. Truly breath-taking.

Negative:
1. NEVER LIVE IN BRAZIL! The U.S. is the best damn country in the world, PERIOD! :-D

2. Electronics or anything techie is WAAAY more expensive (they lady wanted to charge me $120 USD for a D-Link wireless router which didn't even have a built-in switch)

3. Brazil is full of a LOT of beauracracy and government corruption way beyond the acceptable level of modern countries like the U.S.

4. Everything here is PAPER, PAPER, and more PAPER! They have no since of a system, only a process filled with paper which needs to be authenticated on top of authentication

5. I just got my furniture last week (God I miss my bed and TV), as Brazilian Customs held it and tried to suck $5000 USD out of me in the meantime.

6. Nothings ever on time so any apointement you have with a bank or hospital or anything is usually delayed by 2 hours and the lines here are way too long for everything

7. Imagine a system where your "credit score" is not linked to a number any business can look up, but linked to a series of signed, original paperwork, co-signers, past-paychecks, past bills, cash money, home and work address/number with contracts, and special identification documents. Anything you do, business-wise you need to present all this EVERY TIME! Even today, I can't even rent a movie without all the above information; I mean ALL of it.

8. The list goes on...

Conclusion:
Vacation here for as long as you want; It's awesome especially close to the beach like in Salvador, Brazil; But the moment you try to live here is the moment your life gets immensley complicated and set back about 100 years.

1 Year Marriage Anniversary

I have been married for one year!!! This time last year Nov. 9th, I was signing my life away on a piece of paper in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil to the woman of my dreams. The funny thing is, is that i feel that time flies but at the same time it seems like it's been 5 years already!

Many things happened including moving to a different country, culture, and society. But things have work out in the end and have had a great 1 year and look forward to have great years to come.

Great news!

There's been lots of fun activity this week. My furniture which I shipped from the U.S. finally arrived at my home after being stuck in Brazilian Customs since June 4 five months ago! I haven't even seen my furniture since March. Brazil is very bureaucratic and lacks technology, so it's very tough to get things done without doing a ton of paperwork and paperwork for the paperwork. I had a very painstaking time getting all my documents in order; Every time I completed and sent the local shipping company ¨Worldmover Brazil/Interpol" a completed document, they either said there was something wrong or said "great" and sent me yet another document to fill out. Even at the end Brazilian customs stuck a big fat R$ 10,000 reais price tag on me because it stuck in Customs several months. They make a business sucking money out of foreigners, it really sucks. This equates to about $5000 USD. Luckily, I got Google to pay for it since I transferred to the offices down here. Phew! I even forgot about some of the things I had except the important things like my rear-projection Flat-screen 50" LCD TV, 3 computers (including what used to be a "monster" game machine), a ton of data-backups, pictures, more electronics, books, etc.

In other news, Google has made two great announcements this week. Project Android, an open mobile platform which allows phone manufactures to build on top of Google's free, mobile operating-system and provide great applications atop this platform. This is huge and something I and many people have wanted. Better mobile software in an open platform, unlike WindowsCE. Just lookup Open Handset Alliance.

Secondly, Google announced project OpenSocial, which is another product or way of standardizing the way social networks operate. I have or at least have used in the past: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Orkut. I've tried maintaining these all at the same time for a while. But it's tedious, and my friends are scattered all over the place. OpenSocial is a standard, open set of APIs design to enable developers to create "write once, run anywhere" type of applications that will run on all these platforms that use the OpenSocial API. I will spare you words...for now... and just show you the video below:



And finally, for the last bit of news, Call of Duty 4 is alive and released!!!!! I still haven't gotten my copy (I need to get it shipped to the U.S. but i'm waiting on a few other game releases first [i.e. Assassin's Creed, Virtual Fighter 5]), but it's a hell of a great game. The perk system is simply brilliant and you will have hours and hours of fun! Below you will not only find a great video of Call of Duty 4 but also the side-by-side comparison of the XBox 360 version and the PS3. They both look great and pretty much equal. Infinity Ward developed their systems with both platforms in mind from the ground up , so this is not just some XBox 360 port to the PS3.



That's it for this week. Go play!!!!

I want my Figurines!

I haven't been a big fan of figurines since I was a kid; I always found them to be kinda childish. However, times have changed and I have a craving for figurines from some of the great games I've played. The figurines are a reminder to me of all those great moments during gameplay and also inspire me to be creative in my own work. Check them out...

BioShock Big Daddy!


Gears of War (Marcus Fenix)


Assassin's Creed (Altair)


Splinter Cell (Sam Fisher)


Devil May Cry 4

Devil May Cry 4

A friend of mine is a Final Fantasy Fan, and he showed me a cool vid:



I like Final Fantasy as well, mostly the old-school Final Fantasy; I started off with FFIV. However, in my opinion there exists something better. Enter Devil May Cry. I haven't followed closely to the Devil May Cry series, but coincidentally I am going to start to follow the franchise beginning with Devil May Cry 4. And here's the video that convinced me:



Beautiful story (the girl and guy both grew up in an orphanage together as friends), nice characters, and best of all AMAZING Gameplay!!!

Reflections...

As a first entry for my new, personal blog (I maintain 3: this one, family blog, and work internal blog) I want to reflect and sort of summarize the past few years as well as guess what the next few years will bring.

2000-2004 - The Years of Academia
These four years are my college years spent studying, researching, interning, and making lots of friends.
I'm often nostalgic of my academic years except when I remember how broke I was and how much
chicken-noodle soup I consumed.

2005 - The year of Exploration
I started working for Google a couple days after graduation in May 2004, however, in 2005 I began to explore many things at work and in my personal life. However during this time, my work was sorta my personal life as well. I started to seek particular career paths and also did a lot of traveling to many cities including Toronto, Canada....mostly for work. Good times.

2006 - The year of Change
Many things happened this year. I frequented Brazil. I learned to speak fluent Português. I got married to a Brazilian. I also got promoted at my job.

2007 - The year of Family
I moved to Brazil via transfer to Google Brazil in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. (wife is from Salvador, Bahia, Brazil). We have 3 girls, the youngest one is 5 months as of the writing of this blog (born May 19, 2007 @ 8AM GMT-3). I also traveled a lot to see family in Virginia and Washington.

2008- The year of Business
I have been perfecting many particular skills in technology since the previous year (mostly Java EE 5 and other web technologies), as well as always trying to come up with the killer app or killer business. Living in Brazil is a land full of opportunity waiting to be pounced upon, if you're a skilled American, especially in the field of technology. Brazil is behind on many things and sometimes just flat-out lack the resources and accessibility. This is where *my* start-up business comes in. I am looking to launch Q1 of 2008. Stay tuned...

2009 - Back to the Future of Academia
I have decided to change industries from the web world to the game world. This means I need to gain more education points and begin to build a portfolio of "this is why you should hire me" documents/demos. I have chosen to attend UGA's Artificial Intelligence Center in the Fall of 2009 (applying Fall 2008). They have a Masters of Science degree in AI. And my goal is to get one! My focus will be on AI in the interactive entertainment business so it's really not limited to games per sé, but I imagine I will be doing things like helping build the new AI systems in Tom Clancy games (aka Rainbow 6, Ghost Recon, End War), or the next AI in the Halo Series. In the gaming industry they usually call the AI folks "Gameplay Engineers/Programmers" or "AI Engineer." What a dream to work at Epic, Ubisoft, or Blizzard. This also means my family will be moving to the U.S. as well, and will begin their journey of living abroad and learning all about my country including building great relationships with the university and taking courses in English.