I am not much for begging or asking for help. I prefer to try and get results myself rather than have to rely on someone else to get things done... But the fact is that after a few months, I am getting some traction but am not making too much progress with my debt reduction effort.

Having cut most expenses, the bleeding of money has been reduced to a bare minimum and I can say we are mostly balancing our finances right now. Of course, this does not leave much for any unexpected events nor does it help towars an accelerated replayment of my debts. So I have decided to create a little contest which may help jumpstart my debt replayment.

The contest is quite simple, join for a free trial of Amazon Prime or purchase an Amazon Kindle eBook reader and you are entered to win a $1000 Amazon gift certificate. You can also be entered in the drawing simply be referring others into the contest. You can read more details about the contest here: http:\\www.SebbyLive.com\HMOContest1.aspx.

I have tried to keep the rules to the contest as simple as possible and you can enter via either a purchase or by referring others to the site (in hope it encourages my readers to spread the word). The only real restrictions is that the drawing will only occur if at least 200 subscriptions/purchases occur, which allows me to ensure sufficent referral funds are earned to at least cover the cost of the gift certificate. I will post frequent updates as to how the contest is progressing....

I have recently dedided to go to the dark side and get myself an iPhone.

Finances aside, my older Windows Mobile phone was falling appart and my service plan costs were about the same. Worth a try at least :)

That being said, I will post some of the tips and tricks that I either find online or discover myself. My first entry isn't really a tip, but just a list to a few websites which contain wallpapers compatible with the iPhone... Enjoy!

http://poolga.com/en

http://www.interfacelift.com

http://www.sciphone.net

This is somewhat offbeat from y traditional posts. But I stumbled upon this funny tidbit.

At work, when we make a change, we need to send out a check-in mail which contains a list of the changes made, as well as a description of the impact of the change. As part of the practice, it is also common place (although not required) to submit images with the mail when the change affects something that is visual. In this specific post, nothing really visual changed but it was a change intended to improve usability of one of our product. A few minutes to kill, and a little sense of humor will get you the following...

Maybe they should use those on the "pain charts" they use at the hospital to rate your pain from 1-10

I know, I am getting tired only posting about depressing things. And yet again, it has been a few months since my last post and I will admit I am far from having anything joyful to talk about. Although in general, life has been somewhat strenuous for me and my wife for the past 4-5 years (since we moved from CA to WA), the past 18 months have just brought us to probably the lowest I've ever thought I could be at.

I know, you are probably saying "enough with the whining already". And I can't agree more. But part of the idea behind keeping a blog for me is an outlet to vent. And quite honestly, besides my wife who is i the same boat as I am, I do not have a lot of people in my life I can just spill my guts. Out.

So there it is... My up to date story, from best to worst...

JOB

On the bright side, I really enjoy my position within the Media Center Extender team. Although my schedule has been quite busy, there has been several new and interesting developments. Of course, since most of it is not announced, I cannot really mention much, at least nothing specific.

Part of my current work includes changes to the installation procedure (we call it FRUN for First-Run) for extenders within Media Center. The bulk of these changes are intended for the next version of Windows (currently Code Named Windows 7) and aim mostly at making the install procedure simpler and more understandable for our less tech-savvy customers. This applies to both making customers more happy but also in an attempt to reduce the volume of calls to the product support hotline. All this Windows 7 work this is something I have been on since almost the beginning of my employment within this division but at this point the bulk of the feature work has been completed and we are focusing on fixing bugs and improving stability.

In addition, I've spent a good amount of time over the past 2 months implementing some new features for the Media Center Extender portion that exits within the new and improved Xbox Dashboard that will be released this fall. I cannot get into much details at the moment since I am unsure of what has been announced. But overall, as with the Windows 7 work, we are improving the setup experience and also adding a few features which should improve the discoverability of the Xbox 360 extender.

Lots of work, very little time. Been somewhat stressful from that point of view as I have been dealing with several overlapping deadlines. Plus, to be honest, my multitasking abilities do let me down on some days...

HEALTH

On another "not so grim" note, my health has been doing better since my last post. After pestering my Dr's to death, they finally took action and ran more tests. Finally, that beats the usual "you're going to have to live with it answer" I have been used to...

For my digestive problems, it turns out I had signs of a bacterial overgrowth. This involves what is called a breath test. The test itself is very easy, you ingest a lactulose sugar based solution and then, you blow into a tube. Yes, that's it. The problem is that you have to repeat the blowing procedure every 20 minutes for a total of three hours! Like I have said, it is quite and easy BUT BORING test. From my understanding, the bad bacteria that can overgrow in your small intestines really likes lactulose and will feed on it like crazy. As a consequence, the bacteria will release some methane as a byproduct which can be measured through your breath. The test measures the variation of your methane level over time and based on the results, the Dr an determine if a bacterial infection may be at the source of my IBS like symptoms.

It does turn out that the test returned positive which was a sigh of relief since there was now a treatment plan that could be taken. The treatment involves the use of an anti-biotic (sorry can't remember the name) which is generally used to cure other type of digestive infections (such as traveler's diarrhea) but at a much higher dose and longer period than normally prescribed. The treatment work great for me at first. However, a few weeks after I had completed it, the symptoms came back slowly and after a few months, back to square one! On the bright side, I will return to see the specialist shortly and maybe the treatment can be retried at a different dosage level...

As for my other general issues (constant tiredness, muscle pain, ...), it turns out that the solution to the majority of the symptoms was just way too simple! Some of the symptoms combined together lit a light bulb in my PCP's head. A quick blood test confirmed her suspicion... Low Vitamin D... The average blood level of a healthy person should be in the 50-60 range, where as in my test it was reported as N/A (which, for this lab, mean a level below 7). This is somewhat scary. Turns out that very low Vitamin D can cause all sorts of problems, including generalized pain, tiredness, sleep disorders,.... I have been taking special supplements for a few months now. Although I do still feel sluggish at times, I do not feel like a cast member of Dawn of the Dead.

My wife's health is fairly good there days. She still has her ups-and-downs but overall she has been pretty stable over the past year or so. Well , except for some expensive dental issues (which will be covered in the next section), she takes care of me more than I take care of her these days.

FINANCES

Ah... Money... This is where my situation becomes much more complicated... Well, to put it in simple terms... WE'RE FLAT BROKE!!!

I know, everybody says the same thing from time to time. However, this time it is beyond bad. A nice combination of bad choices, poor decisions, bad luck and several visits from our friend Murphy has put us in the depths. As with everybody, I have been carrying some debt ever since I have completed high school and this has never really been a problem. I had good paying internships during college, combined with student loans allowed me to easily afford my tuition. Then after college, with always a continuous source of employment, having a few credit cards and the standard car loan we not out of the norm but payments were also within what I could afford.

Everything started to turn sour about 2 years ago. Of course, I did not see it coming, just slowly building up until it recently hit critical mass and my own personal finances just blew up in my face...

Although we did have a fair amount of debt about two years ago, what we owed in payments was around 60% of my take home income, leaving more than enough to enjoy life and not really have to worry. My only regret at the time was that I could have been investing more in my 401K. However, we were living in a townhouse and some members of the HOA were driving us up the all and decided it might be time to move into a real house. Initially, we were not seriously shopping for anything specific but wanted to get a feel for the current market. Although we did not have tons of equity in the townhouse (about 20k for a 320k house), it was enough to cover our moving costs and the house was in a good area and we felt it would be an easy sell.

We probably spent a good two months looking around, we were in no rush... But Mistake #1 happened... We fell in love with this little area around a like, which was about 10 miles from my work. Not that there is anything wrong with a lake, but for one, proximity to water does significantly inflate housing prices. And for two, we became emotionally attached to the area. At that point we were looking at two specific houses. The first one was mid-sized, in fairly good condition and on the market for around 550k. The second one was a little more secluded, larger but also older (hence needing a little more TLC at first) and was priced at 650k.

And here was Mistake #2, we became attached to the more expensive house. But even realistically, the lesser house at 550k was still almost twice what our previous house cost. We were not struggling with the payments on the other one, but in hindsight, the mortgage on the townhouse was at the limit of what is considered reasonable housing expenses (about 1/3 of take home pay). But we decided to move forward anyways and managed to get the price of the second house down to 605k. The house itself had been on the market for several months and the seller was stuck with two mortgages and was getting desperate to sell.

Getting a mortgage on the house was somewhat of s struggle and should have been a sign this was too much house for our budget. And this was Mistake #3... To make the deal happen, we ended up having to go with a non-documented income loan and a interest only payment structure to allow us to afford the payments, with the thought being that we could clear up the rest of our debt by the time the P+I portion of the payment kicked in ~10 years. With the no-documentation loan, I was also able to have my hypothetical home business income factored in (which I estimated at 30k/year at the time). Although the home business income estimate was accurate at the time, it did not account for any fluctuations and difficulties which could arise on that end, but I will talk more about that later...

As for Mistake #4, well decided to move forward with the purchase despite the fact that our townhouse had not yet sold. The market was good at the time and the townhome was priced well and in a good area, it seemed like a good deal. But it wasn't as easy as it sounded, the house sat on the market a few months. We did get three offers, but all of them fell through for odd reasons. At this point, we were fairly strapped as we had two mortgages to pay and used up most of our reserves. At the moment, our real estate agent decided to come through and she purchased the house from us using a "Deed In Lieu". The mortgages would remain in our names for the short term and she would make payments to us. I do not want to call this a mistake since it saved us at the time, but it is something we are still dealing with 20 months later. The agent has paid off the second mortgage on the townhome and the first mortgage is still in our name. She obviously has not managed to sell it yet, and it is understandable under the current market. But this extra mortgage on our credit had made our lives even more difficult.

Now, the house purchase was being completed, and it was time for the inspections... And Mistake #5... Turns out that the inspector was somewhat of a flake and did a fairly poor job. He did point out a few minor problems that are to be expected from an old house. The back patio had some dry rot in some areas, the roof was showing its age and would likely need to be replaced in 3-5 years, the furnace looked old and may need to be changed in a few years. These can all be big problems but were significantly downplayed by the inspector as items that would need attention but nothing immediate. The reality is that all these little items should have raised a red flag. And as we moved into the house, our friend Murphy followed us in.

A few days before our move, once the deal was completed, we ha a roofer come by to fix a few little issues with the roof. Was not supposed to be anything serious. Well in the few days between the closing on the house and the roofer's visit, there was enough rain to cause a portion of the drywall to collapse upstairs. Turns out the roofer found a damaged tile and someone had stuffed a piece of plastic underneath it to "fix" the leak. Also turned out that there are some leaks in the garage and around the skylights and we are still dealing with those as of today. And to add to this, one year after we moved in, our furnace is starting to become very temperamental and would need to be replaced. Ouch!

Now, we go back to about 18 months ago, Mistake #6 (or this one is more a S**t Happens event) occurred...

Without getting into specific details, I fell ill and had to take an extended leave from work. Although I did have short-term disability insurance, I still had to take a 40% pay cut for about 10 weeks. A 40% pay cut may not seem like a lot, but when you are living paycheck to paycheck, this can truly be devastating. Although we did survive and I finally got better, we did have to incur more debt to simply survive through that period.

Shortly after my return to work, my home business started having troubles of its own. There was a certain amount of implied income from the business that was expected since our mortgage was issued on that assumption. However, a large number of sudden returns, combined with a few non-paying customers had left another huge gap in my finances and income. Also, at about the same time, one of our two vehicle’s engine died and left us stranded. The SUV needs a brand new engine, but at about $4000 for the repairs, there are no way this could happen at the time (and has yet to happen still). And of course, this is a car for which we still owe about $8000 at the bank so we are essentially trapped with the car until we can either fix it or somehow dispose of it and repay the loan.

Since then, I have been living paycheck to paycheck, every bonus, ESPP, … Drained automatically into surviving and keeping up with our accumulated debt. Although I knew we were having some problems, I was living day to day like an ostrich with my head in the ground.

Forwarding to the present… Our other car is starting to break down (need a new $2500 catalytic converted), barely making it by paycheck to paycheck, bad customers not paying their large orders or simply defrauding us by using chargebacks on their credit card when we can prove that their order has been delivered to them,… It is just too much and I have finally come out of denial. I cannot deal with the stress anymore, this whole situation is simply making me constantly ill, and driving my quality of life into the ground and I must start taking action in order to dig myself out of the hole.

Of course, there is no magic solution, and this is quite frustrating for someone who like to have a solution and a plan ahead of time. I am reading a few books on the topic and starting to work on the problem. There is unfortunately no quick fix but I now have a better understanding of our situation and some of the steps needed to take care of it. It may take a few years overall, but we’ll get there… One day at a time…

What is my plan? Short term, I am still working on a budget (or I should call it a Spending Plan) so we can at least be balanced at the end of each month instead of digging ourselves deeper into it. But there are obvious money black holes at the moment that will need to be addressed. The first item is our house. We love the house, but the reality is that the mortgage is probably twice of what we should be able to afford. Also, with some many repairs that are needed in the short term, there are no way we can keep up with the maintenance without a significant other source of income. The second item is my home business, especially the online bookstore portion of it. Although it generally nets about $500/month in revenue, it also consumes significant amount of time in regards to dealing with customer service, returns and shipments. In addition, I have had a bad string of non-paying customers over the past year (I am currently owned over $6000) and although most pay in the end, the stress related to the collection process and day-to-day customer service is simply not worth the small reward. There are other smaller projects I could be working on which could generate better income. Therefore, I will likely shut down the bookstore operation over the next few weeks but I do intend to keep the book publishing portion of the business active for at good while, at least until current titles do not sell anymore.

I do feel like I need a small miracle to keep going. But the best I can do right now it to deal with the situation one day at a time and focus on one problem at a time. This keeps me much more focus on making progress towards the solution but also prevents me from feeling so overwhelmed by the overall situation that I feel helpless.

I can't believe it's been nearly 3 months since my last post. Somewhat scary that time flew by so fast!

Well, over the last few months I have been very busy with work and my other projects. On top of being somewhat ill, it just seems that I cannot catch up on anything. And I have to admit it is quite depressing. Maybe it is just the winters here (yes, I need daylight!!) but the energy levels over the past few months have been really low.

Struggling both with my bipolar disorder and some digestive problems which have been getting progressively worse, some days, I feel like I am just sinking in quick sand!

About the bipolar struggles this winter, well I have been a little more "volatile" than normal. To me, this has been induced be either a combination of the yucky winter weather out here and stress, or simply that my medication isn't working as well. I am holding on for now at least until the spring weather comes in and hopefuly it will clear it up. If not, well a medication change might be in order, something that I am really not looking forward to. Oh, and to make things worse, well my cholesterol is high so my Dr does want to put me on some medication for that. Well the problem is that the Bipolar medication is already harsh on the liver (which comes up as already elevated in my blood tests) and well, the cholesterol medication is pretty harsh also. Maybe I should start looking for a liver donnor right now

What really bothers me however is in regards to my digestive problems. These are not new and I have had some problems for about 6 years now, getting progressively worse over time... This past year has been horendous... I will not get into the yucky details but lets say that on some days I simply cannot go to work due to the pain and the fact I spend half my day in the bathroom. Yet, my Dr's do not really seem to care!! Last year, I did see a specialist who did a few tests including a colonoscopy (not a fun test I can tell you that). However, the few tests did not reveal anything really wrong and the Dr decided it was easiest to simply label me as having IBS. Now, don't get me wrong, it is quite possible that I do have IBS but the problem lies in the fact that IBS is not really a diagnosis but is intended to be a diagnosis of elimination (i.e: you have problems but we excluded everything else which may cause these symptoms). And from what I read, the list of other tests that should be run is much longer than a few blood tests and a colonoscopy!!  In the meantime, I am left to suffer. Both my work life, love life and social life suffer from this. And no matter what I eat, I am almost guaranteed to feel sick afterwards. I do have another appointement with another specialist in 1 month. I hope that it will yield more information this time...

Either way, with both problems combined it does feel like I am fairly disabled. Missing way too much work, never knowing when I will need to run to the bathroom, feeling miserable every other day, ... To be quite honest, not the best way to live a happy life...

Ok, enough whining for today, I promise. Hey, after 3 months, I had a little venting to do. I will try to post on a more regular basis and will try to talk more about the things I am working on at my new (well not so new now) job...

So far, I have not gone into any much details about my new job. I wanted to settle into the position before giving a more complete overview of my job. Of course, I cannot say everything, especially when it relates to upcoming releases but an overview would be a good idea.

New new job is as part of the eHome Devices division, which focuses mainly on the Media Center Extender technology. Overall, Media Center Extenders are devices which can connect to a Media Center PC to share multimedia content. Until recently, the only extender out there was the Xbox 360 which could connect to Media Center PC to share video, pictures and music across a wired or wireless home network. But recently a first wave 3rd party extenders by manufacturers such as Linksys, D-Link and HP were released; essentially giving the same functionality at a lower cost than to have to dish out for a full Xbox 360.

Personally, I really like the new HP televisions with the extender technology built in. Simply plug your television into your home network and you can then browse your personal library of media content directly from your TV without the need for any external hardware. I think this is critical, especially for me, who envision the scenario where a single Media Center PC takes care of acting as a household DVR and all televisions simply act as extenders who access the video stream from the central computer.

You can find more information about the Media Center Extenders here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/mediacenterextender/default.mspx

So where do I fit in the scheme of all this? I am still technically a graphics programmer and will be focusing on the user interface technologies used by the Media Center Extenders (or MCX). This includes both the Xbox UI and also the needed technology for other 3rd party extenders. Although still graphics, it is done at a much lower level (especially on 3rd party extenders). For me, it is a move closer to my "Demo Scene" roots and should be an interesting challenge considering that most of 3rd party extenders run on fairly low-end CPUs where the user interface needs to be processed in real-time, even at 1080i resolutions!

The time has come for me to move on to another pasture. After 4 years as a graphics developer (and more than 8 as a game developer), I have decided to take the plunge and explore something new and different...

Yep, starting Dec 3rd, I will be moving from the ACES team to the Media Center Extender team.  Although somewhat of a sharp direction change from my previous position, the new job is still graphics related but obviously focuses on low-level and embeded technologies. I always wanted to work on something that was more of a driving technology than a singular product. Although this is not within the console environment as I would have initially thought, the Media Center Extender is essentially at the center of the digital home (or at least will be) and it is actually exciting to be part of such a central piece of technology!

Why am I moving on? Well this is a tough question. There is alot of factors, some personal, some professional. But overall, suffice to say that I had reached the point where I needed new challenges. With the new year comming up, the best time ever for a fresh start :)

I do wish the best to the ACES crew... They have alot heading their way, but I also know they can step up and deliver!

The purpose of this post is to address a question that was sent to me in regards to water reflections in general. The question actually is two questions... The first one asks me to explain the difference between the various Water 2.X settings (Low/Mid/High/Max) and why these settings have such an effect on perf. The second question was in regards sd to why dynamic reflections are only on bodies of water and not other wet surfaces (such as a wet runway). I want to keep the answer as simple as possible but at least provide some insight as to how things work and why we have to make some specific decisions some times...

Why no Reflections Elsewhere? 

This is actually a good questions. We do apply "reflections" to the other wet surfaces but the reflection map that is used is static and is not dynamic as with the water. There are a few reasons for this but I will cover the main ones. The approach that is used with water surface reflections is to assume that the water is a flat surface and to treat as if it was a plain mirror. With this assumption, we can generate a reflection map simply by reflecting the camera around the plane that is generated by the water surface and taking a "screen shot" from that point of view. This is a really nice and easy way to accomplish water reflections and when dealing with waves, we simply distort the lookup into this reflection map. This is far from perfect but does the job really well in this case.

But what about adding reflection maps on everything else? There are a few problems with this in general. The first one was implied in the first paraghaph "to assume that the water is a flat surface"... This is not generally true for general objects and this method breaks down rather quickly as soon as a surface is not planar. The next best alternative is to use a cubemap as a reflection map, but this automatically increases the cost by a factor of 6x. Going back to the specific case of runways and wet pavement, in the majority of cases, we could likely assume a flat surface. But there is another overall problem (which is also a problem with water in genral). What if there is more than one planar surface in view? What to do in the case where you can see two lakes that are at a different altitude within the same view? The correct approach in this case would be to generate a seperate reflection map for each planar surface that is visible. But as you can imagine, that would be impractical and would make the cost of rendering the reflection maps unpredictable. For water, we simply look at what is in view and make a good faith guess as to what is the predominent body of water and use its elevation to generate the water reflection map.

Also, in the case of water, we have nice vector data which outlines the contour of the body of water, making it easy for us to determine the outline of the bodies of water. For generic reflective materials, it is more difficult. We do have similar information for airport related asphalt but not necessarily for other reflective surfaces in the game. Dynamically generating a reflection map is something that can get hairy real quick so it was decided that, at least for FSX, we would focus only on water reflection.

Visual Results for the Various Detail Settings 

Instead of writing a long paragraph on this, I think a picture is worth a thousand words. I have captured a snapshot of the same scene using the various 2.x water settings. In the caption below the image I indicate what is rendered inside the reflection map and I've also turned on a debut feature which shows the content of the reflection map in the top-left corner. I will not go into the details of where all the performance goes, but you can likely extrapolate from the amount of detail in each map that the Max setting is going to cost LOTS MORE than the Low setting.

Water 2.X Max - All is rendered, equivalent to rendering the whole scene twice with the exception of a few optimizations which take advantage of the autogen and batching LOD system to reduce the overall number of draw calls.

Water 2.X High - Only the aircraft, full sky (with clouds), terrain and non-autogen scenery is rendered.

Water 2.X Med - Only the aircraft, full sky (with clouds) and non-autogen scenery is rendered.

Water 2.X Low - Only the aircraft  and sky (without clouds) is rendered.

About time hunh? I know, acceleration is already out and I was not even finished with the overview of all the features I worked on for my blog. That's life for ya...

Before I start explaining anything, the two videos below compare the DX10 and DX9 water effects...

See the difference? Well I swear there is one, and the quality of these video clips sure doesn't give it justice. Of course, those that remember this magical "PR mock-up" screen shot showing what DX10 could be, you probably say the dynamically moving water with waves crashing on the shoreline,... Obviously this did not happen. Probably the best way to approach this topic is to start explaining what happened and then go through the things that didn't happen and explain why.

What Did Happen in DX10

Most of the work for DX10 was kept as small size chunks. This was on purpose to try and keep our work balanced between the various features. But overall here is a breakdown of the improvements made:

• Performance improvements to the generation of the reflection map. Turns out we were doing alot of useless things to generate this low-resolution texute. This is still not perfect but in some extreme cases it did create a 20% performance improvement on my DX10 system.
• Significant enhancements to the water shader. For the most part this includes the addition of more bump for the water so the bumpiness appears less repetitive and more dynamic. I have also added a new "detail bumpmap" which only kicks in when the viewer is closeby. This is to compensate for the lack of resolution of the bump when on the water (which created really blocky lighting and reflection). This texture does fade out with distance to avoid any aliasing problems.
• Also, I added support for simple whitecaps. At this time, it isn't done through dynamically generated particles or other geometry but it is actually done procedurally within the pixel shader based on an estimation of the local turbulence. It actually looks quite nice considering the simplicity of the algorithm.
• I also started the implementation of the framework needed to allow the variation of the water settings on a per-waterclass basis. The code that is in place is not complete and was disabled. This feature came in too late and was too risky to turn on so we did have to "ditch it" at the last minute.

What Didn't Happen in DX10 :(

Actually, the main thing that did not happen and which is the main feature that is noticed is the dynamically waving water. This was indeed in the initial plans for SP2/Acceleration. Actually, this was even in the initial FSX plans but at the time the only solution was to do this on the CPU and seeing that it would consume 30-50% of the CPU on complex scenes, we decided to postpone this feature until it could be done on the graphic hardware.

Of course, DirectX 10 was a prime opportunity for this. However a few problems caused us some grief. The initial plan was to leave the water geometry as-is and let the GPU tesselate the geometry within the new geometry shader. Well once the real hardware came out, it turned out that geometry shaders we not performant enough to accomplish this. The second option was to pre-generate the water geometry but let the dynamic update happen on the GPU. The problem in that case is that it would roughly double the terrain/water geometry memory footprint.

In other words we were doomed either way and deemed this was just too risky at the moment, at least until we could fully investigate the consequences of each option and to see what else could be done.