“It’s cold downstairs in my office.”

“You’re right,” I thought.  I really don’t want to ice over, but if I can find my slippers quickly, so that my toes don’t freeze to death, then I’ll go work.  Of course, at the time, I assumed that my slippers were on another level of the house, where I wouldn’t easily find them, and therefore I could go on my merry way, click on the TV and turn into a zombie for a few hours.  Little did I know that my slippers had another plan in mind, because when I stood up from the couch to go “look” for them, there they were, across the room from me, almost directly in front me.  It was like they were just watching me, and waiting for that exact moment.  The moment when they could say, “HA! I got you now. Go be productive.”

In reality though, most everyone will need these little nudges in the right direction, be they from inside yourself or a friendly hint from a personified household item.  We’re human, we falter.  Heck, sometimes the break we get from that stumbling can be a good thing, because it gives us time to regain our composure and come back with a fresh mind.  The key to being successful at any project isn’t about being infallible and working non-stop any chance you get; the key is about always coming back, motivating yourself to get the job done, and to have fun doing it.

Obviously I have to say all of that a little tongue in cheek because you’re here, reading this, and I really have nothing to prove that I’m right in my thoughts.  I’m still a nobody with really nothing to show for my efforts.  That’s why I am writing this though, not to just help you out, but to help myself.  Same as everyone, I need to understand my faults and work through them in order to better myself and actually get some shit done.

This first ‘article’ in the series is going to be about something that I have been struggling with recently, passion.  I truly believe that if you want to get something done, and done well, you need to be passionate about it.  For some that might be an obvious statement; you should want to work on something if you’re doing it for fun.  What isn’t so obvious is what keeps that passion alive.  I’ve worked on numerous projects, most of which have slowly died out for one reason or another.  None of those projects, while possibly great ideas, have driven me to come back, time and time again, to finish them.  Why?  Because passion had died.  I had no real connection to the ideas beyond the fact that I had thought them up and put work into them.  That has help me to realize that real passion lies not necessarily in great ideas, but in selfishness.

Yep, you read that right, greed is passion.  The best way to generate a strong connection and passion for an idea is for that idea to be something that you want.  Focus on something that will help you or directly make you happy.  If you plan to continuously use something when it is done, you have exponentially more reason to finish it.

Given that information, I’ve decided to temporarily shelve my previously mentioned project, ‘Bevel Suit’, in favor of something that I want to be selfish about.  This is being done for more reasons than just that, such as the fact that BS would have had to start out with much more minimal functionality due to some serious limitations that will hopefully be nullified by the creation of my next project.  And then, someday, the two will tie into one another and thrive together.  Since Bevel Suit was stuck with the epic initials BS, the new project will hence forth be dubbed simply ‘POS’.  Don’t worry, just like Bevel Suit, there is more to the name than meets the eye.

That’s all I have for now.  Hopefully soon I’ll have more to tell you about POS and many more things.

Yep!  I’m back, risen from the ashes, and better than ever.  Okay, I’m probably not all that much better; that’s something that I’ll just have to work on in the future, get off my case. Sheesh!  I’m sure that you all (and by, ‘you all’, I mean the two people who will probably look at this in the near future) have a lot of questions for me.

“What have you been doing?”
“Where have you been?”
“Why did you disappear?”
“How have you been?”
“Who the hell are you?”

I hope to answer all of those questions, from the bottom up.

If you don’t know who I am, my name is Chris Parker, and if you couldn’t tell by my pseudonym, Null Parameter, I’m a bit of a geek.  I partake in just about everything from video games to card games to web development to game development.  Yeah, I do just about anything and everything.  Wait a second… why are you reading this if you have no clue who I am?!  Oh well, I guess it doesn’t matter now.

I’ve been pretty good, thanks for asking!

My main reason for disappearing: Life.  It’s the usual excuse on the internet.  Things get in the way, other things take precedence, stuff like this falls on the back burner.  This answer coincides pretty well with the next couple as well, so I’ll just crush them all together into one ginormous response.  I’ve been at home, at work and when I’m not working or playing with my family, I’m usually trying to catch up on my backlog of games (stupid Pile of Shame).

Now I’m trying to balance everything a little bit better, especially my free time, so that I can more easily focus on awesome stuff like this and my upcoming projects that you may or may not know anything about.  So you will hopefully be seeing a lot more of me here.  I’m going to definitely try to post on a more regular basis, about all kinds of random things, and probably lots of details on those projects I mentioned.  I’ve also been trying to mess around in Gimp a fair amount, so that I can get used to it to help aid in designing the artwork for all of those projects (Yes, I made that amazing Phoenix at the top of the post).

That’s all I’m going to say for now, but I hope to be feeding you a lot more details very soon!

As I just mentioned, this is a website project that I have in the works. It is currently a solo project, and it is in the pre-pre-Alpha stages. There’s some minimal functionality already up and running, and it is gathering more speed nearly every day. I don’t have too much that I want to show off just yet, but lets just say that I’m liking how it is going so far (which is more than I can say about some of my endeavors).

Just know that all of this downtime on the blog isn’t because I’ve been really lazy, it is because I’ve been devoting time to this project. In the near future, you’ll see floods of information about it, coming through here.

Before I go, I’ll leave you with this:

Previously I only had a laptop, so I just made use of wireless internet, but now that obviously wasn’t really an option.

Luckily, my entire house is wired with ethernet cable, so I should be able to just find the ethernet port in my office, plug it in and be good to go. Check all the open walls, no ethernet jack. Hmmmm. Move everything away from the walls, including two overly full bookshelves; no ethernet jack. Damnit!

I go through the process of tracking down wires and following them through the house. Yep, there’s definitely an ethernet cable going to that room, but there’s not one to be found. Well, there is the cable/phone jack, but what are the chances…………..?

…………. Let’s just take a peek ………

Of course! There’s the damn ethernet cable, entirely unutilized and just shoved in a wall plate where it may or may not someday be found. Laziness at its finest.

Well, I guess I’m gonna just have to do this myself. I’ve done it all before, so it isn’t a big deal. But, for the rest of you that might not be the case, so I’ll walk you through the steps, just in case you’re ever in this position, or something similar.

I decided not to be lazy and hide away a cord, just because I wasn’t going to use it, so I am going to extend the wall plate to have three plugs, Cat 5E (Ethernet), Phone Jack and Coax (Cable). I’m gonna need some supplies.

“Alakazam!” *POOF!*

What you see before you is a 3 Port Wall Plate and the 3 port types that I already mentioned. As well as a general purpose wiring tool for cutting, stripping & crimping. I actually didn’t have any of that on hand at the time, but I was able to pick it all up for about $30; the tool being a majority of the cost.

First things first, lets undo everything from the original wall plate.

First up, phone jack. They make these things pretty damn easy nowadays. Basically, you just match up the wire colors, put the applicable wire into the slot and push it down using the little tool that comes along with the jack. Here’s an example of putting in one of the wires:

And here is the finished product:

After you put in all of the wires, throw the dust cap on and you’re complete. Easy as that!

The coax is almost too easy to even mention. You literally just screw it in. I know it will disappoint you, but I’m not really gonna show any pictures of that.

On to the part that started all of this, ETHERNET! The ethernet wiring is basically a more advanced version of the phone jack wiring. Since the ethernet hadn’t been used yet, it needed to be stripped. Do that with the fancy wiring tool.

becomes:

What you see inside is 4 wires. Wait a second, nope, it’s EIGHT wires!

There are four wire pairs. Two wires of each color, one solid and one “striped”. You’ll hear the solid wires referred to by just their color, “Green”, and the striped ones referred to like this: “White/Green”.

So the 8 wires you have are:

• Green
• White/Green
• Blue
• White/Blue
• Orange
• White/Orange
• Brown
• White/Brown

and those colorings are going to be important later, on several occasions.

There’s two “standard” ways to wire a Cat 5E cable, T568A and T568B. The “B” method was used in the past in older buildings. The “A” method is the more current method that is used. I decided to use “A”, for that reason. As I said before, this is just a fancy version of the phone jack, so it’s the exact same process, just with more wires. Just follow the colors, push the wires in and you’re good to go.

After all three cables are connected, you just have to snap them into the wall plate.

Then you screw it all into the wall.

Plug in the ethernet cable, and continue the adventure.

Now that that is done, we need to test it!
There are about twenty ethernet cables going throughout my house. I know that two of them go towards my office, and one is labeled “Office” (from the last owner), so that seems like a logical option to choose, so I plug that into my router.

Hmmmm…… no connection. I take a look at the plug and realize that this end is wired to the T568B specification……..

Rather than tear apart the work I already did, I cut up this wire and redo it. This is just a matter of aligning the wires in the correct order…..

putting them into an RJ45 jack…..

and “crimping” the jack, using that handy dandy tool that I showed you earlier….

Done!

Hmmmm……. still no connection. I guess my “Office” wasn’t the last guys’ “Office”. Time to try the other cable. Of course, that one wasn’t capped either, so I need to do that all again……

2 minutes later……

Plug that cable into my router.

Oooooo, another pretty light lit up on my computer. That’s a good sign!

Everything works, now I just need to make the internet usable……

The reason that I am sitting here writing this right now is to educate.  After I tweeted my little story with the #Catch22 hashtag, I took the time to explore other people’s Catch-22s; what I found was appalling.  There were nowhere near any real Catch-22s, and they were almost all so far off base that my jaw hit the floor.  For the record, the fact that you don’t want to eat spaghetti because of the carbs is not a Catch-22, neither is trying to decide between different phones, or deleting a phone number so you can’t drunk dial somebody.  No, those are just all decisions with consequences, plain and simple.  If you do one thing, another thing happens.  Congratulations, you figured out cause and effect.

To take a step back, let’s take a look at the original Catch-22; it began in the novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, which I would highly recommend reading, by the way.  In the story, Catch-22 holds several purposes, and ends up being a universal trap to stop characters from making choices for themselves.  But the main Catch-22, and the first one that you’ll encounter in the book, is meant to keep pilots flying, through cyclical logic.  The only way for a pilot to stop flying is if he is declared unfit to fly due to insanity, in order to be examined to be declared unfit a pilot needed to request an examination with a medical officer, but upon requesting the exam the pilot shows that he is mentally stable enough to know that he probably shouldn’t be flying, and is therefore mentally fit enough to fly.  This whole scenario provides a logic trap that can never be escaped, thus forcing the pilots to continue to fly, no matter what.

Now that you have hopefully started to understand what actually makes a Catch-22, please, please, please, please, please try to use it correctly.

Due to the fact that, on top of having no goal, I also have no audience in mind, I also have no clue as to where to focus my ramblings.  It’ll probably be a lot of little updates on my current projects, possibly with a smattering of programming lingo.  Don’t worry though, if you don’t care about the nitty gritty details of coding, I won’t punish you for not reading them.  On the other hand, if you’re curious to learn, I always found the most effective method is to learn by example and by doing.  There might also be a random foray into gaming from time to time, because that’s a small past-time of mine.

If you’re actually reading this first post, you probably personally know who I am.  In case you don’t, or just want a more in depth view of who I am, feel free to visit the About page.  Sadly though, that’s about all I have to say at the moment.  Sometime in the very near future I’ll be posting some details on one of the projects I’m working on (it’s something that hits pretty close to home in the videogame realm).  Until then, I know you’ll miss me, because I’ll definitely miss you mysterious blog reader person.