It’s the Hols! Day 6, 7 (Xmas and Boxing Day Edition)

So what did I do for Xmas? I counted money.

To be exact, I finished tabulating my expenditure for the year 2010 (up to Nov) with the recent arrival of my utility bill for Nov. A summary below with nice colorful graphs:

For those who want to use my template for their own expenditure monitoring, below is the link to a preview/download page.

Expenditure sheet for 2011: Preview (Google Docs)

Note: I have to apologize for the messy layout. This spreadsheet kind of grew organically; I tend to tag on new stuff as I discover I needed them from month to month.

The quick Summary

I want to acknowledge the fact that the money I spent monthly is unrealistically low for most people. Why?

First, I do not have to spend money on rental or mortgage for the roof over my head. That will easily double to triple my monthly expenditure.

Second, a third to half my meals are eaten at home, and I often bring leftover food to work/school for lunch as well. Again, this can easily double to triple my monthly expenditure, especially if you work in the city area where food is alot more expensive.

With that said, I do firmly believe that it is possible to spend less than $1,500 if you plan ahead and commit to being frugal.

“Analysis” of my Year’s expenditure (TL;DR section)

I started monitoring my expenditures in Mar 2010. The number in Feb’s Savings column represents my total “emergency” fund, or monies that I keep on hand to deal with those hiccups that crop up in life.

My work as a contract teacher earned about $2900 a month, which dropped to $2400 once I deduct my CPF contribution. As you can see from the picture above, slightly more than half my paycheck went straight into savings, mainly because I wanted to fatten my fund till it hit $20,000 (my original target).

In June I left the job and went on a trip to visit some family in San Diego, which explains the $940 deficit in the month of Jul.

Starting Aug, I embarked upon the SPUR programme with Digipen, which paid a monthly stipend of $1000. Expenditure from Aug onwards contracted sharply as well.

By the end of Nov I have saved a total of $14,000 in my “emergency” fund.

In conclusion, I have failed to meet my $20,000 savings mark. Mostly this is due to the loss of income from Jun onwards. However, I am happy with my monthly saving rate.

On a side note, average figures at the end of the summary are on the “optimistic” side because there were no figures for Jan/Feb expenditure.

The year ahead – 2011

For this coming year I doubt I can make the $20,000 savings mark again – $400 saved a month for 12 months = $4800 saved + $14,000 original = $18,800.

What I can do is to push my monthly savings to $400 on average. The extra $100 in savings will go towards some long term goal that I will decide by New Year’s Eve.

It’s the Hols! Day 5 (Xmas Eve Edition)

9am: Woke up. Surprisingly, a good night’s sleep managed to clear up most of the cold.

10am: Went for a short run/walk around the neighborhood and then some bat swinging to round it off.

11am: Youtube surfing (Starcraft II quotes are addictive to listen to) for almost an hour.

7pm: I spent the day clearing my D drive.

8pm: After dinner some last minute xmas shopping at AMK Hub and Serangoon Nex. Expenditure exceeded expectations, but considering my expectations were extremely frugal, it’s still within my limits.

10pm: Still clearing space in my D drive. With luck I should have 50GB of free space by the end of this session. Also started on a bottle of Cienna, a sparkling red desert wine.  I find it a bit too sweet, but it definitely will go well in a cocktail. Ah well…

12am: I have little tolerance for alcohol, or to put it in a positive light, I enjoy the full effects of alcohol at maximum efficiency. I am still sober, but light and heavy headed at the same, which will definitely help in sleeping tonight. Oh yeah, Merry Xmas, here’s a song to commemorate that day.

It’s the Hols! Day 4

This is the day I end up sick-ish. Progress of illness over the day.

Morning 0900hr

Woke late, and lethargic. Minor headache from oversleep. Spent the morning sorting through my music and drafting more changes to the Human Race GDD.

Afternoon 1330hr

Lunch: laksa. Reading my readings and surfed Gamasutra. Headache cleared up but aching back due to cool weather.

Anyway, news from Gamasutra is depressing to read, with lawsuits and haggling hogging the headlines. Class action suit against EA for illegally abusing its Madden/football license, more animosity in the ongoing soap opera that is Activision vs Infinity Ward vs Treyarch with Activision adding EA to its list of legal targets (MOAR DRAMA), Viacom defends itself from shareholders in Harmonix looking to sue the pants off someone for their money back.

On the flipside, the features have churned out more interesting stuff. Art director Brian Thompson talks about how art drove the game direction in Drawn (PC casual adventure game), a fascinating perspective on game design.

Eun-Seok Yi from Nexon (Korean studio specializing in MMOs, famous for Maple Story) talks about the future of MMOs.

Lastly, an analysis of the Left 4 Dead franchise with respect to SRK (Skills, Rules, Knowledge) cognitive framework, i.e. designing based on how players approach/understand new information, then introducing variation in an established knowledge/understanding framework.

Evening 1900hr

Runny and sensitive nose. Finished a few stages in Ace Combat 5 but losing momentum in the 2nd playthrough. Forcing players to play exactly as you design or facing an instant Game Over is extremely demotivating.

Night 2230hr

Frequent sneezing, dry and red eyes. Slight fever as well and my back is aching to the point I have to lie down.

Edit: Added readings to post for those interested.

It’s the Hols! Day 3

Woke late today to an early brunch. At 1.45pm I popped into school to observe a Dungeons & Dragons (DnD) session. For those wondering what a DnD session looks like, here you go:

Yes, a bunch of grown men huddled together staring at pieces of paper (character reference sheets) while moving tokens on pieces of paper and talking in turns. It is pretty amazing how Final Fantasy, Dragon’s Age, World of Warcraft and pretty much most RPGs are evolved from this single idea of roleplaying using dice and a table of values. More photos of the guys, this time with a game board:

It’s the Hols! Day 2

Woke at 7am, had a very hearty breakfast consisting of eggs, ham, mash, mushroom soup, buttered bread and coffee. Gosh I feel fat writing about it.

Started editing the Human Race GDD while munching through the spread. List of amendments (crossed out indicates completed):

• Be pronoun-neutral where possible.
• List advantages of target platform (half done).
• Highlight strengths of Human Race as compared to other existing products in the market analysis section.
• Combine Sample Playthrough together with Design Setting section. Sample Playthrough should be placed after General Overview.
• Remove arbitrary constant in the fulfillment equation.
• Determine the typical number of Myers-Briggs questions as the industrial standard (88) .
• Create a section within GDD to accomodate sample questions for the Myers-Briggs questions. (Verifying questions for inclusion)
• Fully describe the Sample Playthrough, particularly actions taken by player Bill within a stage. Playthrough should fully describe at least a single game “turn”, the smallest iteration of a player’s decision-action sequence.
• Are Xbox or other USB controllers supported out-of-box? If so, list controls and state explicitly if the controls can be modified by user.
• Rework menu/screen flow chart into a proper decision flow chart. Use Visio if necessary. (In process of acquiring Visio for home com)
• Describe elements of HUD in text to supplement mock-up picture.
• Rework Resources section in Excel.

Lunch was light considering how heavy breakfast was, and then I sat down and got in a lot of time with Ace Combat 5.

The “leveling” system to unlock new planes within Ace Combat 5 is fairly interesting, although I definitely prefer the Ace Combat Zero’s method of achievement-related unlocking. Having to buy planes for my wing-mates is annoying because they really do little to support my fights except to pick off tails on my 6. After 1 playthrough of the game over all 27+1 stages, I have 766 kills versus a combined total of 110 kills for my other 3 wing mates. Arcade mode in AC5 is the biggest disappointment; I was expecting something along the lines of a rail shooter a’la Afterburner, not some empty stage with a kill counter and a mission to destroy X number of planes.

Evening, went to the pool for a swim. Very much out of practice, I could only manage 10 laps. Topped up the tank at the gas station, pumped the tyres, home for dinner.

Finished 3 more readings, more AC5 (completed first playthrough of game at about 1am), sleep at 2am. No nice pictures to share this time, but AC5 really is the most innovative of all the AC games. First you sink 1 submarine carrier that does an AOE that hits all targets below 500 feet.

Some stunt flying next, and typical Ace Combat fare (bombing runs, close air support, air superiority battles). Next you have to shoot down a stratospheric flying fortress that fires a freaking laser beam at anyone under it (and all its launchers/engines are on its underbelly).

After this you discover that the enemy wants to drop a colony, I mean an artificial satellite on your capital city a’la Gundam, so you got to pull off a Stars Wars number and perform a Trench run on an underground facility to take out its control facility because the Army just cannot seem to get vehicles there.

If all that was not enough, you have to shoot down a falling artificial satelite that looks suspiciously like an [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Three]O’Neill cylinder[/url]:

It’s the Hols! Day 1

Starting from 20th Dec 2010, I have a 3 week break (lasting till 10th Jan). Just to keep myself motivated and focused on the stuff I need to do, I decided to maintain an informal log of my activities over this 3 weeks…

(Besides, I really need the practice in writing.)

20th Dec 2010, Monday
Woke at noon, ‘coz I partied too hard at Audrey’s & Leow’s place the night before. Brunch, worked out some tasks to complete during the hols, list as follows:

• Revise Human Race GDD as discussed in the meeting: schoolwork that has to be done, and the list of changes covers an entire A4 page.
• Complete the DnD Character sheet for my half orc Warden: better do this by Tue so I can get Leonard to vet for the next chapter in his campaign.
• Tar, Road & Santa v2 board game: I need to read my observations & analysis to get back up to speed on the changes the me of 2 months ago decided.
• Start Push/Pull GDD: The germ of that game idea really needs to be put down on “paper”.
• Finish the present batch of readings: Readings have been piling up on my inbox for the past month, it’s time to make a sizable dent.
• Finish uncompleted games: Incomplete list of games uncompleted: Persona 3 (Last 2 months of the game-year), Ace Combat 5 (loan from Poon), Ace Combat Zero (3rd Ace path and Bronze Wing achievement), Front Mission 4 (Last simulator mission and last story mission), Fate Unlimited Codes (do 1 playthrough and figure out the mechanics), Shatter (2nd world and counting)
• End of Year Budget: Time to tally up my expanses and see how much I saved over the year. I can’t make my 20k saving goal (income 1/3 of projection because I quit my teaching job) but I should still be able to make my saving/spending ratio.

So first up: Ace Combat Zero. Finished the Knight Ace playthrough, but Mission 18 ended in a A rank… no Bronze Wing. Unlocked the 2 super planes though (Falken and Morgan) which look really sweet, especially the 360 panorama view screen in cockpit view. I will push the Bronze Wing back together with getting all the Knight path assault records, need to make a list of names and stages.

Ace Combat 5 next. If there is 1 thing that Ace Combat 5 has, it’s cinematics. A lot of it. Finished up till mission 7 with a mixed bag of ranks. Having to repeat an entire mission if you die at any part can get extremely tiresome.

Dinner started late, at about 6.40pm. Had to rush through dinner because I have to attend this concert down at Singapore Conference Hall.

Still ended up late, missing the first piece on the repertoire. El Camino Real was not bad, the enka medley would have been better with a singer, the choice of Japanese anime theme (Galaxy Train 999, Space Battleship Yamato) is unfortunate because it’s not that well-known in Singapore, even with the “revival” Yamato movie out recently. My favourite would be the Riverdance piece, Rwinds should introduce more energetic pieces in future performances.