From September 2005 to June 2006 I was a teacher at Livingston High School in Livingston, NJ. One of the classes I taught was AP Computer Science, and one of my APCS students was Meryl Federman.

Meryl recently participated in the Jeopardy Teen Tournament and won the whole thing! This surely comes as no surprise to any of her teachers - she's one smart cookie. Not only did she win, but she went from 3rd place (and no money) after the first day to winning by $1. Wow.

Congrats to you Meryl.

There are two types of video game players - those that are indifferent towards the Advance Wars series (for Gameboy Advance and DS) and those who think it's the greatest game ever made. As you might guess, I'm in the latter category. I got the first one as soon as it came out, based on strong reviews and its similarity in appearance to Command & Conquer (in actuality, Advance Wars is more like a cross between chess and C&C).

I got hooked immediately and played through both normal/hard campaigns and unlocked everything in Advance Wars 1 and 2. Advance Wars DS has taken me longer, due mostly to how insanely deep the game is (and how smart the computer AI can be). Recently I've been travelling a lot, and once again, I find myself spending my idle moments thinking about how to beat certain maps. Even with over 90 hours (!!) logged, I have a lot left to unlock, and I haven't even finished the hard campaign yet (though I'm near the end).

I love this game for many reasons, but I think my favorite part is the problem-solving aspect of it. Each game is full of a zillion small situations where you have to make lots of little decisions, and they all have to add up to support your overall strategy for the map. It seems like on most maps, there's a unique approach that'll allow you to not only win but get an S-rank (280 points or higher), and if you can figure it out, you're set.

However, the one War Room map where I've NEVER been able to get an S-rank, going all the way back to the first AW game, is Ridge Island (see map below). There, your opponent is Grit, and the map seems laid out perfectly for him - his base is surrounded by mountains, with only three narrow passes into it, and he has the starting resources to quickly build rockets/artillery for bombing the shit out of anything you send at him. If I had to describe this map in one word, it would be "frustrating". I can certainly beat it - but I've never come close to getting an S-rank (my closest was a 17-day, 256-point win using Hawke).

Any other Advance Wars junkies like me out there? Is there a secret to Ridge Island I'm missing?

(UPDATE: Okay, so I've found an S-Rank walkthrough for Ridge Island in AW:DS. Sigh... I hate walkthroughs. I couldn't resist skimming it though. It involves ignoring the neutral cities and rushing Grit's HQ with recons. Hmm...)

Wow... Comic-Con was fun. As the days in San Diego wore on, I spent less time at the NG booth and more time wandering around.

Some quick background info: during my college years, my interest in comics waned. Later, soon after college, I started getting back into older stuff, and now, thanks to San Diego, the web, and recommendations from friends (and blog commenters on here), I'm pretty much back. It seems like there's so much good stuff coming out right now - I'm way behind, and there's so much I can't wait to read.

Here's my Comic-Con rundown:

Panels I attended:
1. Discussion with Matt Wagner (Grendel) - cool, Wagner seems like he really "gets it". I need to read more Grendel.
2. Discussion with Joe Matt (Peepshow) - super cool, I was amazed to find out that Joe truly is as neurotically pathetic (pathetically neurotic?) as he portrays himself in his comic.
3. Remembering Valiant Comics - mostly lame, a bunch of third-rate (other than Bob Hall) Valiant creators who mainly contributed to the company's post-Unity downhill slide.
4. Scott McCloud's Tour Recap - terrible. I was hoping for some comics stuff from Scott, but instead it was his two daughters and his wife recounting their recent "world tour", accompanying Scott on his talks. His daughter was beyond annoying and I had to leave after ten minutes of her frantic, screechy voice.
5. Q&A with Joss Whedon - I had no idea who he was before Comic-Con, but a friend I met up with on Saturday is a big fan. Sounded like some big announcements for fans of his - but I guess that's every panel at Comic-Con.

Comics I bought:
1. Astonishing X-Men TPB vol. 1 & 2 (Marvel)
2. Fortune & Glory: A True Hollywood Comic Book (Oni)
3. Clumsy (Top Shelf)
4. Scott Pilgrim vol. 1-3 (Oni)
5. Bone: One Volume Edition TPB (Cartoon Books)
6. I Shall Destroy all the Civilized Planets: The Comics of Fletcher Hanks TPB (Fantagraphics)
7. The Walking Dead TPB vol. 1 & 2 (Image)
8. Y: The Last Man TPB vol. 1-3 (DC/Vertigo)
9. Fables TPB vol. 1 (DC/Vertigo)
10. Ultimate Six TPB (Marvel)
11. Grendel #23, 26 (Comico - completes my run)
12. Captain America #200 (Marvel)
13. Marvel Spotlight vol. 2 #? (Marvel - completes my run)
14. Scout #1-24 (Eclipse)
15. Some classic Marvel (Hulk, Ghost Rider, Avengers) t-shirts

As you can see, I got a TON of good stuff to read, and there was a lot more I could've bought (I have no idea how I got all this home on the plane). What I've read so far:

Ultimate Six TPB - Started great (I always enjoyed the Sinister Six), some truly amazing art, but thought the ending was lackluster. It had such a great build-up, but ended with a generic fight scene? And why did they suddenly attack the White House? I don't understand the motivation there.

Y: The Last Man vol. 1 TPB - Very cool so far - I love high concept stuff like this (a mysterious event leaves Yorick, the protagonist, as the last living male human on the planet). Can't wait to see where the series goes.

Scott Pilgrim vol. 1 - I have a friend who thinks Scott Pilgrim is the greatest thing ever (he even plunked down a few hundred bucks for some original Scott Pilgrim art at Comic-Con). I like it - it's fun, it's got style, it's entertaining, it's a neat combo of American (actually Canadian) comics and manga. Looking forward to reading the next two.

Clumsy - I have a soft spot for books like this. Crudely drawn, autobiographical, lots of emotion. I feel like I'm the guy pouring his soul out on paper. If I ever did a comic, it would probably be in this vein (though I can't draw at all).

Fortune & Glory - I expected more. I thought I'd get some real harrowing tales of mistreatment by Hollywood nutsos, but instead it was more of a run-of-the-mill "My project didn't get picked up" type of story. Still, I need to read more Bendis.

Astonishing X-Men TPB vol. 1 - Not even done with it, but wow. Can't wait to read more. Some great old-school X-Men comics. Just not sure how I feel about the White Queen being a good guy now (as well as her near-nakedness - come on, that get-up just isn't practical in any way).

... meaning Comic-Con, of course. It's way bigger than I ever imagined - more people, more booths, more stuff to buy, etc. It's overwhelming. And, being a good geek, I've bought a bunch of comics & t-shirts already.

If anyone's coming by the Newgrounds booth, bring your DS! I need entertainment! (Afro-Ninja kicked my butt in Tetris earlier.)

Over the weekend, I finally saw SiCKO, Michael Moore's latest. Seeing as how he's one of the most polarizing filmmakers out there, let me preface this with my take on him:

I've never seen Roger & Me, the movie that made Michael Moore. I was first exposed to him via his short-lived TV show TV Nation, which was great. Canadian Bacon was mildly amusing. I liked Bowling for Columbine a lot - its examination of America's obsession with guns and the paranoia underlying it all. Fahrenheit 9/11 had its moments, but it had too many crazy conspiracy theories and was ultimately a partisan attack job. All in all, I like Moore's work, but feel he yanks a bit too hard on the viewer's heartstrings and sometimes fudges things to reinforce his arguments.

So that brings us to SiCKO. In short, I thought it was a great movie. For those who haven't seen it, it's an indictment of the American healthcare system, where many people have no insurance and are sometimes forced into financial dire straits by their huge medical bills. In addition, even when they are insured, insurance companies are motivated by the bottom line to deny benefits whenever possible. America is then compared to places like Canada, France, and the United Kingdom, all of which have some form of public or socialized healthcare, available to every citizen.

The movie starts with an endless parade of people who've been screwed over by the insurance industry, and who can't relate to that? My family and I have been there. As I watched, I found myself thinking over and over - how did we (America) let our healthcare system get so messed up? Where did this idiotic system originate, where some basic necessities (police, fire department, schools) are available to all, while others (healthcare) are for-profit, where you're only ever one job away from losing it? Why is it that if you're retired of self-employed, you have to decide how valuable your health really is, since being fully-insured costs an astronomical amount of money? And even if you think you're covered, why is using that coverage often such an uphill battle? I've long seen the insurance industry as the ultimate legalized racket, and this movie engraved that opinion in granite.

In the countries mentioned above, anyone receives healthcare, in some cases without regard to whether you're a citizen or not. Here's where I think the movie does itself a disservice - it makes a strong case that these other systems are better than what we've got, but it glosses over the shortcomings in them, and makes them seem so wonderful that we in America must be fools not to embrace them immediately. After watching the movie, I did enough online reading to understand that it's not as cut and dried as Moore makes it out to be. Things aren't perfect in those other countries, and public healthcare does have a price (in taxes, at the least). Still, a system where healthcare is seen as a basic right of every person is, in my mind, much better than the system we've got, where you just hope you stay lucky and never get screwed by your insurance (or lack thereof). Our current free-market approach to healthcare is clearly flawed.

His main point - that a modern society should take care of everyone - is a good one, and even with the extra silliness (like taking boats of sick people to Cuba), it comes across well. I enjoyed the scene in the movie where the Canadian golfer talks about how it all comes down to (paraphrasing), "I take care of my neighbor, because if the tables were turned, I know he'd take care of me." As a big liberal, "we're all in this together" is always on my mind. This is in contrast to the right-wing rhetoric about "personal responsibility" and "self-reliance" - which is another way of saying, "I've got mine - why don't you?" I think we can do better as a society, and if it ever came to a vote, I would support a true national healthcare plan. But with the entrenched corporate interests and the members of Congress they bankroll, along with our American attitude of "I am an island / take care of yourself", I don't see things changing anytime soon. Sadly.

On Wednesday (July 25th) I'll be flying to San Diego to man the Newgrounds booth at the famous San Diego Comic-Con. I must be the biggest comic book-nerd in America who's never been there - part of the reason being that San Diego is on the opposite side of the country from me. I'm also a little put-off by the apparent shift in focus from "comics" to "multimedia entertainment" or however you want to describe it - movies, TV, video games, anything that might appeal to the comics-reading demographic. But judging by the program listing for this year, I should be able to find plenty to nurture my inner comics fanboy (provided I can sneak away from the NG booth long enough to catch some of it). Plus, I'm getting to attend Comic-Con for non-comics-related reasons - so I guess I need to get over myself. I'm excited for next week, and judging by the responses to Tom's post, it sounds like a lot of NG users are planning to stop by.

If you're going, I'm curious - are you a comics reader? If so, what do you read - mainstream Marvel/DC superhero stuff? Indie comics? Graphic novels? Manga? I've fallen somewhat out of touch with new comics (I mostly focus on the period 1961-1991) but a friend of mine is lobbying me hard to get back into some current titles. So far he's recommended Ultimate Spider-Man, Fables, Y: The Last Man, and Scott Pilgrim. Anyone have any other suggestions?

I can't believe we made it. We've been working furiously on the redesign for what feels like an eternity, and it's neat to see it finally being used by more than the handful of us at the office. (This is one of the great things about working on Newgrounds - you never feel like your hard work goes to waste. At a previous job, I spent two years working on a big web application, only to watch the project get shelved. That was sad.)

So here we are, at last. Unlike previous NG redesigns, this one was more of a "reinvention" than a redesign. Normally when people hear "redesign", they think it only applies to the cosmetic aspects of the site. Which it does - this was a total XHTML/CSS overhaul, not a single scrap of HTML (outside of NG Mag) lives on from the previous site, thanks to Stamper and Bob.

But the really juicy part was the total back-end rewrite James and I did. When I first started programming Newgrounds in late 1999, I was motivated and hardworking - but very inexperienced, with little appreciation of good programming practices. The site worked, but I made a lot of bad decisions that resulted in a messy and largely unmaintainable codebase. (Not to mention that PHP 3 was the state of the art at the time.) Miraculously, after I left, James was able to figure out what my code was doing and change/rewrite/extend it to suit the site's ever-evolving needs. However, its fundamental flaws - lack of centralization and modularity being the big ones - grew more pervasive.

By the time I made it back to Newgrounds a little over a year ago, I was a changed programmer. I've become a big believer in object-oriented programming (thanks to Java), something I would've never dreamed I'd become when NG first started. I've also learned a lot about software design in my time in the wilderness - what works, what doesn't, and most importantly, what happens when design is an afterthought.

The site you're using now was almost completely rewritten in object-oriented PHP 5 and JavaScript - I'd estimate at least 90% of the back-end code was rewritten from scratch for the redesign. On top of that, the site moved from being an old-school site (click a link, go to a page) to a more modern Web 2.0-type site, with lots of AJAX and in-page interactivity. This required coming up with a whole new framework for doing things - I could write a book (or a series of blog posts?) on the things I learned while working on the NG redesign. It's been quite a journey, and of course I'm still learning.

However, we're not in Xanadu yet. There remains a lot of troubleshooting to do - many users have probably picked up on a glaring bug or two. (I'd be fixing them right now, if I wasn't on a train, without Internet access.) But I'm really proud of what we accomplished with the redesign, and I'll be even happier in a few weeks once we've gotten most of the kinks ironed out. There are a lot of fun features in the pipeline - just with respect to blogs, I'd like to add things like tagging, searching, rich text editing, the ability to save drafts, and more.

But that's for later. After almost 72 hours straight of redesign work (with a few breaks to eat and sleep), it's time to spend some time with my wife, who's probably forgotten what I look like. :)