I will try to leave out names as much as possible until this is completely resolved.  Rewind to last week.  I get a call from our realty company telling me that the laundromat we live above had a fire.  I am told that it took the fire department 45 minutes to determine the location of the fire.  Apparently some insulation in the walls caught fire due to some faulty wiring.  To get water into the wall, a hole was cut in our floor, near our kitchen and water was pumped through.  Also, a fireman took an axe to our door to open it.  (Pictures to come).

I should mention that my roommate and I have not been at the apartment for about a week now due to some much needed vacation time.

Well, I promptly informed my roommate of the… interesting news.  This apartment of ours has had some issues from the start of our lease that we mentioned to the realty company, but they neglected to fix.  These were documented as part of our check-in process and are legally the responsibility of the landlord as is noted in the signed lease.

Now, at this point we have talked to the owner of the property and asked to be let out of the lease.  He refuses to drop us and we’re told that we’re being relocated while the damage is being repaired.  They have a month to fix the damages and when it is repaired, we’ll be relocated back to the insect-infested, pipe leaking, smoke smelling apartment.  We did not have renters insurance, which is admittedly our fault, which means that the cost of moving, and anything not directly related to the fire is up to us to cover.

With the whole fire incident, my roommate and I are pretty much fed up.  We will have to go through the moving process to a new apartment and back again and then deal with the problems that the landlord will continue to neglect.  So thus begins our journey into real-estate law and breaking free from our landlord in the most painless way possible.

Now, our realtor has actually been quite understanding of the issue, but tells us that the owner of the property decides when to break the lease and they can’t do anything about it. I am hoping I will be able to make them understand that the people they do business with, namely the owner of the property, reflects on them as to what type of business they are, and that if they’re going to continue to do business with this man, then they are as responsible in our eyes as he is.   More to come as more develops.

In response to:
how’d the Dare go?

Awful. Not enough developers (Me and Max) and we just weren’t prepared. Next time, though, we’re winning.
So for next time my plan will be as follows:

• Build the engine for the game before hand. Hopefully, generic enough to build any game type, but fully featured.
• Not build my own physics engine (pybox2d)
• Build a couple of test games before the event so we have experience.
• Get more people who do art (we had 1 guy and there was just too much stuff)
• Music people need to decide on their tools before hand and how they’re getting it into the game. (To be fair, Jim didn’t know he was a music person until the dare started.)
• Schedule programming shifts and tasks
• Not occur at the end of finals week.
• Food plan. Not just wing it.
• Single location for the full 72 hours.
• No remote developers maybe. It was just too hard to communicate with them remotely
• Make sure everyone is there during the first 5 hours or so for planning and during the last 5 for final testing and packaging
• dedicate time to building tools for non-programmers (we had a lot of time where non-programmers were waiting on us)
• Make donut runs mandatory!
• Make sure everyone developing has all the required tools beforehand. Will probably package everything in a zip file next time.

Team:

• 2 or 3 people for music
• 2 or 3 people for sound effects
• At least 3 for art
• At least 2 programmers
• At least 1 buffer person for additional help (level design/story/etc)

WordPress Code tests:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
// I don't recommend 
/* 
 * Compiling
 * this
 */
extern long double int char volatile unsigned typedef variable = 3;
 
int main( int argc, char* argv[] )
{
  cout << "Hello, World!" << endl;
  return sqrt( -1 );
}

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import this # Zen of Python or something.  I don't remember
import httplib
 
if __name__ == '__main__':
  print 'Hello, World!'
  print 'line number test'
  # I don't know if any of the following 
  '''
  is 
  right
  '''
  conn = httplib.httplibOrSomething( 'jacobvgardner.com' )
  r = conn.request( 'GET', '/' )
  print r.getrequestdata().read()