Timothy Wells (profile), an adjunct professor from the IT department at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology), has been charged with second degree murder the afternoon of December 1st, 2009, WHAM reports. The murder was of Christine Sevilla, his wife and former RIT Professor

Wells, who was arraigned in Perinton Town Court, allegedly strangled his wife, Christine Sevilla, around 10 a.m. Monday in their house. Sevilla was a published photographer whose photos and politics favored wooded areas and wetlands in Monroe County. She co-authored a work with Wells entitled “Where the Wild Things Are.”

WHAM falsely reports that Christine Sevilla co-authored a work titled “Where the Wild Things Are.” The actual book was “Where the Wired Things Are” and is actually just PDF. (source)

Timothy Wells was also responsible for putting together the Knowledge and Learning program with Professor Yacci that Choof was considering.
The original article can be found here

Here are some hardly relevant links I found as well:

• Colloquy: A Project of Timothy Wells (unverified)
• List of books by Timothy Wells
• List of books by Christine Sevilla

h/t Adam

I recently wrote a tenure review for a Professor at RIT that deserves it.

It was interesting to write. One of the questions was, roughly, “Is the Professor concerned for the individual student?” The question is pretty standard and applies to all majors and programs I am sure, but I had to stop and think about what it means to “care” about your students.

I started to answer the question by addressing the obvious: If a student is struggling, does the Professor help them? Does the Professor give each individual fair warning when they are not keeping up? Is any child left behind, basically. All of which was answered appropriately and accurately.

The students that are left behind are not all the students in the spectrum of the classroom, however. What helps make this Professor special is the attention he gives students that are bored, that want to excel. This Professor enabled students that could do better to do better. Shouldn’t this be recognized more?

And perhaps this is why I like the education I got from RIT. It was project based, which has its down sides, but also lets a student go further than they would with a scan-a-tron test. It has vocational practicalities, of course, learning just a touch what the real world is like … but it also lets the student go well outside of the spectrum of what is expected. It lets them find what they enjoy the most.

For me, personally, I owe a lot to the format of projects and I owe a lot to teachers that enable students to push themselves. I think that allowing students to go as far as they can is just as important as making sure students keep up.

Did this make any sense?

I found this pic on my hard drive while doing some cleaning.  Thought you guys would be interested in having a copy.

Hey guys. Just an update to when a will have videos online of Army Ants and Warship Armada: We are getting a new image set up on a single computer in the lab soon that will have Fraps on it (Fraps doesn’t offer a site license which has been our hold up this whole time …) so I will eventually have videos of both games up soon. Also, we will be showing Army Ants at GDC for the whole week of GDC (the week before Mayercraft) in case anyone is there.

Until then, I have decided to post the music I wrote for each game. BLin, Adam, Choof and Beej may recognize most of them, as they were around during most of the writing of the songs (BLin and Adam during Warship Armada)

So here they are. They are tagged up for iTunes, but I will warn you that they aren’t balanced very well with the audio levels, so some songs may come out quiet and others may come out loud… I hope that is okay. Feel free to use them for whatever you want, commercial or not. If anyone actually tries to use these songs for commercial use, well … good luck. They aren’t that great. Feel free.

WARSHIP ARMADA

Warship Armada was a naval battle game that takes place during the 1600’s, so the songs are all very instrumental. The game was developed in the Spring of 2008.

• [DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – MAIN THEME: This song came out pretty cool. I was really happy with the movement that the song had. Had some variety to it. Also was happy with the way the instruments blended together. It is the music that plays during the menu sequences and when the game boots up.
• [DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – BATTLE THEME: This song is more ambient and loops with less of a melody. It was supposed to be tense and “battle like.” It is the music that plays while playing the game.
• [DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – ENDING CREDITS (MAGGIE SONG): This song is a little goofy. It’s also called the Maggie Song because it was written in about 10 minutes while on the phone with Maggie. I wrote it as a joke, but when we came down to the last minute, we realized that we wanted a song to play when the end game statistics were being shown. It’s not even really an ending credits song at all. Short and weird. Also had input from Choof and BLin and maybe Adam and Beej for the tuba farts at the end.

ARMY ANTS

Army Ants was a game that was a little less “serious” than Warship Armada. It was exaggerated and modern, highly fictional and action oriented. When writing the music, I was aiming for “epic”, to basically not only excite the player but also to poke fun at the whole thing. The game centered around turn based real time battle in a dynamic environment.

• [DOWNLOAD] ARMY ANTS – ITS GAME TIME: I have never worked with e-guitar sounds before, simply because they are much more work on the digital end than other instruments. This guitar patch was created by actually filtering a basic noise through several channels and hooking up separate damping tracks and the like. So technically I was happy with the way it came out. I also liked the sound in general and thought it was pretty over-the-top “epic.” This song plays during the menu sequences and during the game itself.
• [DOWNLOAD] ARMY ANTS – END THEME: The end theme to army ants was completely out of place, but I still love it. One of my favorite songs is John Murphy’s “Sunshine” track from the movie Sunshine (also in the beginning of the X-Men trailer) because it is so ridiculously epic. After toying with ideas, I decided to literally rearrange that song. This version is shorter, sped up and incorperates more percussion and other instruments. I wanted it to be epic. It plays during the credits of the game after a match is won.

So that’s it! I hope you all enjoy it. I would love to post more music. Eric and I wrote a song back in the UC days called Cumulorockin or something like that that I would love to throw up here.

UPDATE (by eric): Here’s some Cumulolyrical action. Everybody rock out please.

Hey everyone!

We presented Army Ants on Wednesday. It is done! And I am incredibly proud of the results. I will be hopefully uploading a video today of our final project. It won’t be a well edited video or anything, but it should show what we worked on.

As some of you may know, I’m an avid fan of TED talks. One of my favorites to this day is Ray Kurzweil’s talk about technology and how it will transform us all. Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to actually attend a lecture by Kurzweil at RIT. The talk, just like his TED talk, was about technological singularity and how it is rapidly approaching.

Below is a slightly abridged version of what we saw at RIT this month, and if you haven’t seen it, I strongly recommend watching.

Technology has changed us so quickly in such a short period of time it’s absolutely astounding, and the change is growing exponentially. Some of the predictions Kurzweil is making for the next 40 years are downright mind blowing. We’re the last generation to know what life was like prior to the internet. We lived the transition from no internet to ubiquitous use. We’re ARE the crest of this new era and we’re riding it right into the future. Juice.