Aquaria: A Beautiful Game

I just beat the Indie game Aquaria, and I'm very impressed with the game. I got it through the Humble Indie Bundle not long ago, and that was my first time hearing about it. Of all the games I played from the bundle, Aquaria was the best experience, more so than World of Goo (Though World of Goo was quite good as well).

I rarely use the word beautiful to describe a game, but that's the word I would use. The artistic style given to the game, along with the scenery of the underwater world that Bit Blot created is wonderful. What added to the beauty as well was the story and voice overs. The story isn't as deep as something like Lunar 2, but it's good, and the voice for Naija was done very well. After playing the game for a while I became very interested in the characters, and hoped for a good ending (Which it did). The gameplay started out slow, but as you gain more powers along the way, things really picked up.

For an Indie game, this was very well done, and for whatever it's worth, I give my recommendation.

Search2mzIdentML: A Simple Ruby mzIdentML Converter

I've been working on building software to aid research in proteomics. With the suggestion of my professor, I created a Ruby implementation of a pepXML to mzIdentML converter. Proteowizard already created one, but through the power of Ruby and Nokogiri, Search2mzIdentML is simple, clean, and easy to expand. There were some challenges that came along while creating this, but I believe that Search2mzIdentML is now a releasable program.

I know that my blog only has about two readers, but just in case there's someone out there who searches for an mzIdentML converter that happens to come across this, I hope they'll find it useful. What's more, if that person could give some input about any problems or concerns, that would be even better.

Carl's Jr.'s Mockery

Back where I grew up in California there's a restaurant called Green Burrito. The food is really good, and I consider it to be my favorite Mexican food (Americanized Mexican food to be technical, but I actually prefer it over authentic Mexican food). Depending on where you've been, you may have noticed that Carl's Jr. has a "Green Burrito" menu. Since coming to BYU, Green Burrito is something I've missed, so I decided to go to Carl's Jr. and try out their "Green Burrito" nachos.

Now, keep in mind, that I went into this place expecting to be disappointed, because I was sure that Carl's Jr. wasn't going to deliver the same thing that the original restaurant could. What I got, however, went even lower than what I was expecting. Green Burrito's nachos have just about everything you would want on it, refried beans, cheese, steak, salsa, sour cream, and guacamole. And for about $5, you got a lot.
Carl's Jr.'s "Green Burrito" nachos, however, can only be considered a disgrace to the name of Green Burrito. The chips weren't as good, and all it had was refried beans, lamesauce (Nacho cheese sauce, as opposed to real, grated cheese), some beef in some lame sauce, and some guacamole. They were pitiful. They were worse than Taco Bell's nachos. And to add it insult, it was about half the size as Green Burrito's nachos for almost the same price! Augh! I was thoroughly disappointed.

As my closing remarks, I just want to say, this is truly a disgrace to my favorite Mexican restaurant! What Carl's Jr. exec had the gall to call this "Green Burrito?" And for any of you that have only experienced Carl's Jr.'s version, please, know that Green Burrito is far better than this!

Another GT Feature

Wow, my second Starfox Vs. became a featured video on GT, just like the first one. While I come up with a lot of ideas for videos, I don't find them to be anything grand. It's not original, either. But then again, no one else has done it before, and I suppose that's the same case for everything that gets attention.

One person's comment said to the effect: "While this is cool, what would posses someone to actually come up with this?" All I can say to that is "I'm a weird guy."

My Current Job

I currently have a job as a research student working at Prince Labs at BYU, and so far it's been good. The funny thing is, though, that it's a Proteomics lab, and I know very little about that stuff; I've never even taken a chemistry class! But that's okay, because what I do is write Ruby programs to accommodate the Mass Spectrometry stuff. Aside from learning a lot more about Ruby and Linux, I've been able to see more how a CS degree can allow me to work in just about any field. I really don't need to know a whole lot about what the program is for, just how to get it to fulfill the required tasks.

What I'm currently working on is a Mass Spectrometry pipeline, which will allow users to execute a single command, and raw MS data will be transformed into identified proteins. My work can be viewed at Github.

I'm also working on an mzIdentML converter. My mentor (Is that a proper term for him?) thinks that if I make this converter then it will be something used by lots of people and maybe even get me mentioned in a paper. I have trouble believing such high claims, but I can at least say that no one is making a Ruby implementation, and with the power of Nokogiri, it's a clean and fast implementation. It would be cool though to create a program that would be useful to others.

My Recipe Book

Last Christmas I made a recipe book program for my Mom as a present, and I've found it useful. If anyone wants to use it as well, you can get it here. Below is a picture of the program in action, as seen in Windows 7.

Clean Music

I don't like profanity, so it bothers me when music I like uses it. To fix this problem I edit the songs, and now I'm uploading some of them to Youtube in case anyone else is interested.


Drop the Dodongo

Oil Ocean (WT-40 Mix)