Quick update, in tandem at GameDev.net and trazoi.net journals.

Firstly, I’m making good time in my Internet challenge round-the-world balloon race. The winds across the Pacific were incredibly favourable, and I’ve now made it to the west coast of the U.S., as can be seen in the photo. The trickest challenges have been maintaining my internet connection and in training the fruit bat to use the camera. Darn bat can barely aim the thing at the balloon, and when it does there’s always a bit of wing in shot.

Secondly, my PhD thesis is now at the printers, which makes it really and truly “almost finished”. This means the document is now unchangeable and submission will be in around a week. While I’ve only been doing touch-ups in the last couple of weeks which didn’t take a lot of my time, it’s a big difference psychologically to know it’s untouchable now. It’s like a huuuuuuuge weight off my mind. Now I’m really keen to start game development tasks, 100% guilt-free.

Today I’m going to start work on the first “official” objective - constructing my new website. I’ll be experimenting with a few different navigation designs and I’m not going to rush, so it might take a while before its done. This site will launch at a new domain that I’m hoping to build into a company site.

The future of trazoi.net, my personal blog site, is undecided. I’ll keep the site running for a while once the new site launches. However, I will mostly be using the new site to blog. I thought about splitting the content into a business blog (at the new site) and a personal blog (at trazoi.net), but honestly I just don’t blog much about personal stuff. The only things in my personal life worth blogging about are big enough to post at a more formal site anyway, and my usual day-to-day life that isn’t development oriented is frankly too boring to share with the world. It’s not as if you’re dying to know I had fruit toast for lunch today, even if it was particularly tasty fruit toast.

The future of my GameDev.net journal is likewise undecided. I can guarantee though that the journal will not close and that I will occasionally put posts in here. However, all my regular full posts will be at my new blog. I’ll either put links to the posts at my GameDev.net journal, or occasionally post a big special summary post.

However, I suspect this won’t happen for a month or so at least. It’s going to take a while for a new website to form, and it’s not as if I don’t have a lot of other tasks on my plate. Kickstarting game development, practicing my drawing, steering this balloon into the Mid-West, it’s all go in March.