AJ Henderson AJ's Blog

Well, well, well. I’m guessing anyone who stumbled across this site probably thought it was dead after not being updated for a year and a half. The truth is, the hosting company that hosts this page had to change their main hosting center because of a problem with their Internet connection, but I wasn’t able to get a stable enough connection to download my site to be able to move it from their old servers to their new servers. Rather than put in the needed time and energy to fix it I just let it sit and then when I tried to retrieve my site in class the other day it worked. So anyway, now the site is up on the new server so it should perform much better and be easier to update.So what has happened in the last year and a half? Well, I’m now in my Senior year at RPI which is incredibly hard to believe. The super secret project for GameCube Café was the E3 DVD which was delayed by a year and then ended up falling pretty much through the floor because Nintendo dropped a big fat goose egg and gave no useful information about the Revolution. Since that was our main marketing point we were kind of sunk from the get go. The DVD came out really nice though.

In other news, I started playing a MMOFPS called PlanetSide in January. I immediatly became a fan. Basically it is a futuristic war sim. You take the role of a soldier in one of three empires battling for control of a planet called Auraxis which had a bunch of advanced technology on it, some of which caused the planets continents to each split to being their own planet. (Wierd yes, but it gave them a reason to expand the game and make different types of climates and such.) Each continent/planet holds up to 133 people from each of the 3 empires and you battle for control of bases on each continent. (You capture bases by either hacking a terminal in the base and holding it for 15 minutes or by hacking that terminal, picking up the LLU (a ball basically) and getting it to another one of your bases.) The reason I love it so much is that it is like a real time strategy game, but every character is a real person. You level up by getting kills and helping capture bases. This gets you BEP (battle experience points) and when you get enough you get a battle rank (BR). You can also get command experience points(CEP) for helping with captures while leading a squad. There are 25 BR levels and 6 CR levels (BR 1-25 and CR 0-5) BR gets you implants for special abilities (3 total), Certification points (1 for each of most battle ranks), and cosmetic changes such as armor color. Command rank grants different special abilities such as placing 4 waypoints on the map for all squad members(CR1), revealing the locations of all friendlies on the continent (CR2), EMPs that take out or disable all mines, turrets, vehicle weapons and implants in the area of the EMP (CR3 – CR5 getting bigger each level), Revealing enemies in an area on the map (CR4 and 5), Orbital Strikes from space (CR4 and 5) and the ability to send messages to all players on your empire on the server (CR5). Each CR also has a cosmetic armor change and access to a command chat channel with others of that CR level within a growing area. (CR2 – base, CR3 – region, CR4 – continent, CR5 – server) I joined up with an outfit (guild/clan) pretty early on called Forgotten Soldiers. They are probably one of the best outfits on the server. I worked my way up through the outfit and I am now an officer with them. I have a BR23/CR5 character and a BR13/CR0 character. I’m also involved with several websites related to PlanetSide. http://www.forgottensoldiers.us/ is the homepage for Forgotten Soldiers. http://www.ncallianceps.com is the website for the New Conglomerate Alliance (NCA) which is an alliance of various tactical outfits. http://www.emeraldnc.com is a community site for all people that play an NC character on the Emerald server. A friend of mine from PS and I started it about 3 weeks ago. Mostly I do coding on all these sites automating different things based on stat tracking and such. All in all, I love the game because it is so tactical and so large scale.In other big news, I have decided to break from my original plan to start a company writing computer graphics and video software. Instead I plan to apply to the FBI as a Special Agent. This decission came about when I realized that the FBI is looking for Computer Science majors and I realized they pay on par with the rest of industry. I hope to work with both computer related investigation and SWAT. I may even eventually try to make it on to the HRT (Hostage Rescue Team [Think FBI version of the SAS.]) I can’t apply until I’m 23 though, so it gives me a year to kill after I graduate. I have begun to workout to prepare physically and I am also learning Arabic, continuing my training on rifle marksmanship and will be applying for a pistol permit in December so that I can work on pistol marksmanship.

Lets see, school has been interesting and fun so far. I’ve signed up for SCUBA certification and bought my gear. I’m REALLY looking forward to SCUBA. I want to learn to SCUBA Dive, skydive, and fly, so learning to SCUBA dive is a big step. I can’t quite figure out what my DSA professor means by “constant” memory on my project, oh well. I guess that is what I’ll have to do after class this week. The laptop is working out great. Rensselaer Christian Association rocks and everybody should at least check out one meeting. It’s sort of funny, I’m getting more sleep on weekdays than I am on weekends. I guess that is a change from high school. I’m working with Video’s for Change over in the incubator chamber as a part-time editor/consultant. I’m also working with UPAC Lights and UPAC Sound as a tech. I’m glad AIM exists, cause it is a really easy way of staying in contact with my friends that are out at college. Oh, and I got one of those wireless optical mice. It’s really nice when I’m working with Maya. Maya, for those of you who don’t know is a piece of computer graphics software. Alias/Wavefront makes a free copy called Personal Learning Edition. It’s available at http://www.aliaswavefront.com/ . It has a really good tutorial if you have never done computer graphics but have been interested. If you want any help with it, just IM me or e-mail me and I can help you out.