Responding to any sort of spam message, whether it be SMS, email, or even a phone call just lets them know they hit a warm body. Not only that, but with SMS you may even get charged (not for sending the SMS, but for their service). They are guessing phone numbers people, don’t let them know you live! That’s like trying to run from a T-Rex. Just sit still, and wait until it goes away…

But sometimes it doesn’t. This morning I got four text messages from the same source, each about fifteen minutes a part. I was pissed. I use an Android phone so I am able to blacklist phone numbers, but it just doesn’t work with SMS. I did a little research and actually learned a new (to me) and useful tip! First, my research confirmed that replying to this particular spammer not only did not stop the messages, but people DID end up paying ten bucks for their trouble.

Don’t despair! Now, the specific instructions for my tip are for T-Mobile, but there is a way to do this for just about any carrier. You see, what I didn’t know was that spammers are able to get away with this shotgun approach because they use e-mail as the source, not SMS. This means they don’t have to pay for the spam you get, only YOU do. I’ll also take a moment to mention that the fact that we are charged for receiving texts in the US is such a big scam. I had texts blocked entirely for a while I was so annoyed by it, but pressure from friends and family eventually forced me to cave in. Anyway…

Chances are you have a special e-mail address associated with your cellphone account that people can use to send you direct text messages. This was news to me. The good news is you can turn this OFF. Well, at least in the case of T-Mobile you can either turn it off entirely, or if you do wants people you know to still send you texts this way, give it an alias so it can’t be so easily guessed by spammers.

1. Login to T-Mobile
2. Click “Mobile Life” on the top tab bar
3. Click “Configure E-Mail”
4. This opens a bubble, click on “Create E-Mail Filters”
5. Toward the bottom there should be a Yes/No radio button preceded by “Block all messages from E-Mail to handset”
6. Set this to YES and click the “Update E-Mail Filters” button

I haven’t received another spam since setting this so I’m hopeful, but you never know. Also note that it won’t stop a spammer from texting you directly, but that at least costs them money too so is less likely. I hope this is helpful to you! If you need help with your particular carrier give Google a holler! Let me know if this is helpful and seems to work for you. Thanks!

Take back your phone!

My Tuesday beverage consumption isn’t the point of this however. I sat on my celery green couch (which I love very much, not IN love, but definitely love) and stared through the large TV like window to the world placed conveniently above my actual TV. It’s nice to have a reality TV installed above my fantasy one where I can watch the clouds, airplanes, storms, and (my personal favorite) the moon. As I stared into the night sky I pondered a place where I could work without the type of people who would enjoy pointing out how absurd it is that I would make my way to that specific bar and work, showing up and doing just that.

Why not the place where everybody knows my name? The 331 is great, but I’d never sit with a laptop there. Suzi’s new site, however, has a wonderful porch right on the Mississippi. Beautiful! So I went.

I worked on filling in scenes in an episode of our nautical television show project (which I will get around to talking about, but development is too active at the moment). I managed a couple solid hours of writing before I got tired of working, and had some solid funny to show for it. Getting back to writing has also been a recent thing so there is a certain challenge just getting back into that frame of mind when most of what you have done is coding.

After writing I went inside (do to the increasing chill) and ate a delicious Canadian bacon and artichoke pizza while I read. It was nice having familiar faces around to socialize with amidst my working and reading, feeling more myself than I often do at home.

So I mark it as a success! Progress was made without that sickly anxious feeling fluttering around my gut like a bat trapped in a closet.

CONvergence is nigh (an annual sci-fi geek convention) which means extra work on my plate preparing for the shows and panels I’m involved with, but I enjoy it a lot and am excited for the long weekend of awesome friends and a bit of theremin playing under the influence. Until next time.

extrovert (1): An outgoing, overtly expressive person

I would consider that a true statement about myself. The second definition appears to connect very directly to my first personal declaration:

extrovert (2): A person predominantly concerned with external things or objective considerations

I do seem to have an obsession with objectives, of which the feeling of being productive feeds back into.

Now, I don’t know if this directly feeds into what defines an extrovert, but I need people and feed off them in what feels like a very literal way. I gain energy when I’m around others, and inversely get very lethargic and lose motivation the longer I am alone, especially at home. I admit I’m not particularly good at approaching complete strangers in public without some sort of pretense or established connection. People generally have their guard up around strangers and despite the possibility of having a thousand coinciding thoughts, it seems impossible to find that out. Of course, some people seem to have the incredible gift of being able to disarm people quite quickly. Establishing the most basic form of trust that allows for real discovery to begin. I’m not so sure I’ve got any of that.

I do, however, feel right at home in situation where there is some commonality. For instance, I love going to parties or events where I only know the host or one of the guests. That first step is done! By being there, an implied connection exist. Or rather, a separation by just a few degrees which allows for comfortable exploration of who those around you are. The tension is eased, even if I was only imagining it in the first place.

The reason I’m rambling about any of this is because my progress oriented nature lends itself to generating certain amounts of anxiety. I don’t believe I’ve ever actually had an anxiety attack per se, but I’ve certainly come close, and the closest I’ve come was very recently. It’s no mystery to me why, which helps in figuring out how to cope with it. I’ll simplify life into three categories: work, self, and relationships. For work I meant the getting paid sort. Self can mean many things, but for me it means my interests, passions, and things that I do to satisfy my personal urges. Relationships of course means family, friends, and if you are so lucky a significant other.

It started with me having a minor personal crisis realizing that I wasn’t sure why I was working so hard on my personal pursuits (self). I felt like I was doing much of it because I HAVE to do something (see: need for feeling productive). I recognized this as a problem and decided I needed to step away from many of my personal projects (which often involve other people as I am, as stated, an extrovert and love collaboration). Not easy for me but it felt like the right thing to do. Instead, I decided, I would relax and focus on the relationship I had with a lovely girl. Ah, you caught that did you? Past tense…you see where this is going now!

Work (getting paid kind) also happened to be a bit stressful for a couple of weeks, or at least very draining. I had some new projects that required learning a lot of new tricks. Now, this I actually quite enjoy. The stress was fine and just a product of having to really apply myself to understand and learn new things. The problem was simply that it left less energy for dealing with the other two categories.

Finally, relationships. Sadly the lovely girl decided, quite surprisingly at the time, that we weren’t for each other and ended things. Now the nexus of the three was complete! My usual instinct is such situations is to immediately dive into whatever projects are going on. It was too late however, as I had created a personal embargo against them for the sake of my mental health. That combined with little energy remaining in the first place put me in an awful spot indeed. I felt trapped between what I had just lost and the wall I built up in front of my usual outlet, with the ceiling lowering slowly in a very Indiana Jones like fashion.

I’m in the twilight years of my twenties, with thirty plodding towards me quickly. I’m not so worried about that, but the point is that of my many important friends, most are at very different stages of their lives. Married, engaged, or simply busy with their others (as I have been myself for years) and best friends just aren’t the people you spend most of your days with anymore. Things are different now, which means more time with myself.

The evening where I was in the eye of the storm is uncomfortable to think about. Nothing is more terrifying to me than losing control of my mind. It doesn’t help that I read a lot of books about mental illness and asylums (morbid curiosity I guess). Days and weeks have passed, and predictably I feel better. My life is in a pretty fantastic place so even at the worst I find myself bouncing back pretty quickly, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying to find a way to make things better. I still, and always have really, had trouble working on things at home. Too distracted, too tired, and lacking in inspiration. Hell, I even have trouble READING at home (and I love to read), unless I’m in bed but I don’t make much progress that way.

Thankfully I live in the city now (for just over a year) which seriously does make a huge different. I would get anxious and antsy at home in the suburbs, but there was no hope…there was no life outside. Here, I know people are mere blocks away drinking at one of the many local bars! That’s a start, but only if I take advantage. I decided to make a few rules and goals.

1. No ‘working’ with the TV on. PERIOD. It is impossible!
2. If at all possible, work outside of home. A local coffee shop perhaps.
3. If you are at home feeling anxious, get out of the house whether there is anyone to hang out with or not. Even if you DON’T want to hang out with anyone.

I’ve done much better at number one, but it’s also a pretty obvious point. Two was more difficult because I do really like my place, and I have an awesome office setup. I’m able to sit down and get things done, but the time I’m able to commit never seems to add up to much. I’ve made more trips to my favorite local place Diamonds to get focused able to produce content. The third has been the toughest and I didn’t really know what to do about it until spending time with a good friend that went through a divorce in the last year. That forced him to face a few of the same challenges and he was infinitely helpful to me. Some other good friends also helped me discover the project that is particularly important to me, one that I just can’t set aside. Feeling passionate about what you want to work on definitely helps.

The reason that I’m writing all of this is because my evening has been a very successful execution of these strategies. After getting home from work I made some dinner without loafing about first, watching a bit of The Office while I ate, and then immediately packed up for Diamonds before the fatigue set in. Once there I was able to focus and work without feeling drowsy or uninspired. The project I’m doing now involves a lot of writing, which went well enough and I expect will improve if I keep this up. After Diamonds closed at ten, I proceeded to the 331 bar for a pint of Surly Furious (a personal favorite) and I read a book, “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti”, for a couple hours. It was fantastic. I was focused on the book despite all sorts of interesting folks and music around me. The beer didn’t make me the least bit tired, and I really enjoyed the few interruptions from fellow patrons when they occurred.

It did sadden me that the last two times I’ve been to the 331, the same bouncer ended up shoving someone to the ground while yelling obscenities at them. The first time was a young woman, quite petite, which made me cringe. Now, to be fair, in both cases (the second being a small Mexican fellow), they were drunk, and refused to comply with many adamant requests to leave due to breaking rules and being too damn drunk. They got slightly physical but not violent, and since the bouncer was physically trying to remove them it’s understandable to try to protect yourself. The bouncer eventually gets to the “fuck this I’m calling the cops” point, but far too late in my opinion. Anyway…

I’m home now, and managed to write this extremely long post about my little exploration into improving how I cope with that thing we call ‘life’. I’m terrible and sitting down to write so this is great evidence for me that my little experiment is working! I intend to continue, and hopefully get the handful of articles I’ve intended on writing that will probably be more interesting to people than a long-winded ramble about my issues. If you actually read all this, wow and thanks! It was really just for me to get it all out I guess. Thanks, and goodnight!

Free Astral Entertainment Games Page!

Two friends of mine during high school, Brian and Garth, made the original Pac-Guy games. There are a few details about the first game being made that I am choosing to withhold, as it’s not my place to speak of for the sake of privacy. Anyway, the original game was installed on all the computers at school for general fun and entertainment. It was a simple parody of Pac-Man and whatever they liked at the time, which if I remember correctly was mostly Star Wars. Somehow Garth came upon the publisher ValueSoft, which packaged together the existing library of games into the Pac Pack (such as Pac-Guy Christmas, Atomic Edition, etc) giving them a single CD-ROM to sell on those turn styles in Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and many other stores. Evidently videos of some of the games are even alive on YouTube!

In any case, the Pac Pack was published with six games and sent out into the world! Holy crap, you can still buy it on Amazon.com! Of course, of the $10.00 sale price I think Astral Entertainment got $0.50 per sale, which ended up making our publisher ValuSoft ($2.50 per sale) and GT Interactive ($7.00 per sale) a mint (read: millions) and Astral Entertainment a meager but nice sum for a couple of high schoolers. This didn’t stop ValueSoft from trying to rip them off however, because they are greedy and of course able to take advantage of indie developers with no danger of recourse. A few more games were made, and a new version of the Pac Pack was released with ten games reflecting the new simple Pac-Guy games made since the original. This isn’t about that though. I was interested in games and quite good with computers so decided to get involved. Of course the possibility of actually having games published was particularly appealing at the time as well. Shortly after I entered the picture our relationship with ValuSoft seemed to crumble away, along with the possibilities of publishing anything through them in the future. I think we thought that the sheer number of sales of the original Pac Pack combined with the big ideas we were working on would open up new doors. The Pac Pack was released at the same time as Microsoft’s “Return of the Arcade” which had the original Pac-Man on it, and we outsold it. As I said, GT Interactive especially, did very well.

I ended up being the lead developer and designer of “Pacula’s Curse”, featuring Vampacmires and all sorts of other bizarre creatures. It was an absolute blast to make, and I was largely unable to keep myself from introducing some new game mechanic every level or so. I even tried to dabble in adding a bit of horror to the game which, although wasn’t very scary, I think added a nice atmosphere to the mix! I worked on the other major Pac-Guy releases to varying degrees. Brian stayed only partially involved in trying to keep Astral Entertainment alive; occasionally working on a game idea but leaving Garth and I to be idealistic. He had also been doing a lot of 3D modeling work and dabbled with the idea of creating a show or movie about the characters. Garth and I tried for some time to find a new publisher to release Pacula’s Curse and future games under. A few years into college I managed to get the ball rolling with Xing Interactive, a company in the Netherlands.

I worked out a deal with them to publish Pacula’s Curse (this is now a few years into college, some time since I’d done any game work) and was quite excited as it would mean motivation to make games again! We signed contracts with Xing as our new publisher excited about the promise of getting back in stores like Best Buy here in America, but nothing every came of it. It was pretty obvious they were ripping us off, but impossible to tell exactly how or do anything about it. When we fought them to get sales records or any other kind of information we were put off, and eventually just handed a check for $600.00 (likely to just shut us up). I’m quite sure they sold it and made some money off it, but there was nothing to be done about it, and no way to prove any wrong doing.

Somehow, a community of Pac-Guy lovers had survived and kept up with the very little going on with us. A contest was put on to compile together fan made games. I was personally very uninterested in this concept as the quality would be spotty at best, and of course the additional work of splitting up royalties (not that I was worried there would be any). Someone even made a radio show using the Pac-Guy characters and sent us a few copies. I’ll get that uploaded and linked for the pleasure of whoever happens upon this! Evidently someone was making a fan game as recently as 2010!

A few years after college, probably 2005 or 2006, Garth was sick of running the virtually non-existent company. He did have the foresight years prior to incorporate to protect us in case of any silly lawsuits or other issues that come up when you work with parody and satire, and running a business even if it does almost nothing still takes time. He offered to sell it to me at a very reasonable price, including all the rights and assets which I decided to accept. I was getting into other types of freelance, especially videography with Brian as we shared that interest as well.

I continued selling the games, burning them as they were ordered for a few years which covered the costs of running the skeleton company until I finally got too sick of it and stopped taking orders in 2008. Brian and I had also had the name of the company legally changed in 2006 so we could start using it for our other works, which is when “Monkey with a Mustache Entertainment, Inc.” was born. The purpose of the company wasn’t entirely clear, other than just having an entity to do any of our creative works through.

We have continued doing small jobs on the side as a hobby, and over the last year have been slowly inching back towards creating new digital entertainment for mobile devices like phones and tablets. It’s been amazing to see how iOS and Android especially have reopened the door for successful indie development. These aren’t the only outlets of course (xbox Live arcade, simple online distribution, and even the new Mac App Store to name a few others), but they were the main inspirations for getting back into the game. Will there ever be a new Pac-Guy game for something like the iPad? Very doubtful. I’d personally rather the character stayed in his grave this time (See Pac-Guy: Resurrection). There would have to be some very supportive people banging down our doors to make anything new in that series. So never say never.

I even got emails as recently as last year asking about Pac-Guy for iOS which to me is just astounding. At some point I lost my heart to respond to the remaining fans and really just wanted it all to be forgotten. I don’t feel so bad about it all now, which is one reason I want the games to be free. Maybe they don’t have any life left in them, but what the hell.

I’ve been doing professional development for numerous different platforms for about eight years now, including many apps for iOS in the last few. It’s been great getting to the point in my career where I feel like I have the freedom and ability to create the things I can imagine. It’s always a struggle of course, as I am no artist and without collaboration quickly lose interest. Luckily I’m not alone and am looking forward to what the next few years will bring for both myself, and those that I have the pleasure of working with on projects for work, and fun projects on the side. I’m a firm believer in having passion projects as I think that’s where I end up learning a large percentage of the cool things I now know how to do. I absolutely adore my day job and think my hobbies only make me better at it.

To the fans…

I apologize for how bad I was at responding to so many of you over the years. There were hard times and we were all moving on with our lives, trying to find better work that didn’t feel so much like a failure. We are here though! I’ve been making a concerted effort to start being a more public developer, and hopefully you will all find this and possibly enjoy the games once again. More importantly, I hope you will all return to support us with our new projects and games we are working on, and plan on working on.

Former VP of Astral Entertainment

Jerry Belich

The Hardware

As I mentioned in part one, I started with the hardware list found on one of the Lifehacker articles. The first problem encountered was that the motherboard they used, the ASUS P7P55D-E Pro ATX Intel Motherboard was out of stock at my usual stop Newegg. After some research I landed on the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4P motherboard as Gigabyte boards appeared to have great compatibility.

Other than hardware and a good walk through, the site you really need to visit is http://www.tonymacx86.com/. The DSDT Database, you’ll notice, has fantastic support for a wide range of Gigabyte boards, hence my choosing. The DSDT is the piece of this puzzle that tells the OS how to interact with the hardware provided by the motherboard. There were a lot of new terms I had to learn when embarking on this journey, so check out this great post that gives a quick overview of important terminology.

I’ll be honest, it’s been a little too long since I built the hackintosh, and at the time I wasn’t thinking about documenting the process. It was actually a pretty painless process, thanks to the right hardware and the hard work of others, with only one real ‘gotcha’. I attempted to use a 10.6.4 OSX install disk, but it just wouldn’t work. It would get stuck during the install process. Frustrated, I found my 10.6.2 OSX install disk that came with my MacBook Pro and it worked flawlessly. After that I was able to update without any issues, and as of writing I’m at OSX version 10.6.7 and running great.

I intend to do better in the future documenting my projects as I am actively involved, but admittedly there are a few that were happening while I was deciding if I wanted to even attempt a blog so they aren’t going to be as ‘complete’. I figure something is better than nothing, and how am I going to get in the habit if I don’t force myself to just POST? I also haven’t found a WordPress theme I actually like yet, so sorry for the visual chaos. I don’t know how people find the time to blog. Maybe they just enjoy it more so it fits better into leisure time, but I struggle to squeeze out the minutes!

I hope this is at least helpful as a link dump, since it obviously isn’t a guide. In the end, I’m very happy with my Hackintosh. It cost a little over $1,000.00 and has performed exceptionally for I think almost four months now! I did an Xbench score, and compared it to a brand new high end Mac Pro I got for work and it beat it. The biggest score sucker was not having an SSD (I’ll get there, just waiting a little longer) and I got a pretty cheap graphics card. I’m not using it for gaming though, and what I have tried on it has been fine.

That’s all. More backlog of my life to come soon, and eventually, in more or less real time if I can get the discipline!

A good question to ask yourself before you embark on this mini-adventure. As you’ve probably seen if you are reading this, articles continue to pop up at great sites like Lifehacker with step by step instructions how to build your own Mac. Straight forward enough, but certainly some concerns. What if I want to deviate from the hardware choices? How risky is that? What the hell are the kexts that Hackintosh builders keep mentioning? Shows how much I knew about OSX in general. These questions became clearer to me as I went through the process, but lets take a step back first…

My reasons why:

1. Needing a new Mac desktop (you can Hackintosh certain laptops, but this article is focused on building from scratch).
2. Cost: Saving yourself from the premium Apple price tag.
3. It’s fun! Using your hands to make something functional. The thrill of that first boot!

Before I go on, here is the Lifehacker Hackintosh Article that I used as my starting point for this adventure.

Need

I switched over from being a Windows user in 2008 when I started a new job and got my choice of laptop. I figured I would get the nicest MacBook Pro at the time, install Windows on it’s own partition, and see if I could transition over to OSX. It took a few months to do it, but I did and I never looked back. I had two windows desktops that I had built for video work and general messing about that suddenly stopped being used altogether. I’d like to point out that when I was a Windows user, I mean just at home. At work I used flavors of Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NeXT, Alpha 5, HP-UX, and more. Developing code that has to be so cross-platform is even less fun than it sounds. For quite a while now the laptop has been enough, but this last summer I started realizing that I was pushing the poor girl too hard and needed a workhorse that could stay at home and take the brunt of the load. I needed more storage space, memory, and raw CPU power!

Cost

A new Mac Pro with the trimmings I would want (keeping in mind I could do some of my own upgrades to save) would be at LEAST three grand. The benchmarks I was able to find showed that a Hackintosh built with about $1,000.00 in hardware outperformed Mac Pro machines that cost from $3,000 – $3,500, sometimes significantly. The point is, for a third of the cost you could have a faster machine while only losing out on Apple’s intensely aluminum case.

Fun!

Aside from the Dell I bought myself back in Highschool, I have built every desktop I’ve owned, including multiple desktops for friends and family. I enjoy it! Looking for parts, pricing it out, and ultimately plugging in those pieces feeling like there is no way that it’s just going to ‘work’ after I flip that switch. The thrilling moment when I hit the power for the first time and see the BIOS   WHAT IS BIOS?come up, or the sinking feeling when I hear a few beeps and nothing happens. I feel good about my track record as every machine I’ve built has functioned, with my only errors being simple steps being overlooked which were quickly remedied.

Here though was a unique challenge. Hardware choices are certainly available, but they don’t come with the same guarantee of compatibility. Of course the guide linked to above is a great starting point, or even an easy way to just build it as they describe and not worry about it. It wasn’t quite so simple however, as I immediately found that the motherboard they used was out of stock and not planned for restocking. I’ll admit my heart sank a little as building my Hackintosh was already turning into a more complicated venture than I hoped.

It was too late though; my heart was set on making a Hackintosh. Even though it was the beginning of December and Christmas stress was beating down upon my head, I had to decide on and purchase parts before the end of the year.  I was building this machine for my work and spending it before 2011 would benefit my taxes. The pressure was on, and I knew I was taking a chance on wasting a cold grand. So, there you go. Now that you know my reasoning for giving it a shot, hopefully you will stay tuned for my post walking through my experiences building it.

Part Two of this article will go into my actual hardware list and the challenges I encountered while putting it all together!

(Skull & Crossbones Hackintosh image credited to Deviant Art user Jonzy, will remove upon request)