0707

Tired, so tired.  In a matter of hours this month will be effectively dead to me, and I can start my physical and mental rehabilitation. I can finally get back to working on solving real problems with real code, starting with stripping out all of the awful hacks from the previous 30 days.

More importantly I can start thinking about thing that aren't work related. You know, things like my wife, unborn child, dogs, friends, family, house, swimming pool, diet, exercise, money, and sleep ... all of the things I've not been able to give my attention throughout this entire useless venture.

In three weeks I get to add 'school' to that list, but I've decided to lighten my load and only take one class this semester. Since some of those things on that list (e.g. the transition of unborn child into born child) are going to be requiring an additional portion of my 24/7, I ultimately decided that I'd be happier and more successful by reducing my school load by half, at least in the short term.

As I told my wife last night, my plans for the immediate future are to:

1. Leave work at around lunch time today.  
   
2. Play the lottery tomorrow night.
   
3. Profit
   

It may be a flawed plan, but it's a plan nonetheless.

My other plan for this month (hopefully less flawed) is to build a for-profit website that provides a useful service at a very low price.  I am not going to reveal specifics at this time, but those who have heard my idea have given a positive response.  The startup cost is low (mostly just time), and it has some potential to bring in a few pennies so I'm going to go for it.  I will soon be looking for alpha testers;  if you are interested please respond here or email me.

A'ight, I'm gonna hogtie this li'l doggie and get the fark outta here.
/Texan

The Jinxed Position

Yesterday we lost another Defense Against the Dark Arts receptionist. In 3 years we've lost 6 people from the front desk.  Most of us weren't here when it went down, as we had gone to visit our fallen comrade in the hospital.

According to rumors she was given an option to keep working here until she found another job, but that wasn't good enough for her.  She stampeded throughout the office yelling obscenities at her now former coworkers before evacuating the premises. 

Of course 5 minutes later she called the office to see if the given offer was still available. Gee, ya think?

Anyway, today's bagels sucked but that has really been the only noticeable impact of her departure.  The Captain won the pool with his guess of "2 to 3 months" since she lasted longer than the Linguist's guess of "6 to 8 weeks".

Sheep Thoughts I, by Ankhorahil

The only thing worse than a deadline is having that deadline extended shortly before it's due.

Gap Shooting

This July, as with the previous 4 years, has been crazy as hell.  I've been putting in somewhere between 10-14 hours of work each weekday, and slightly fewer (8-10) on the weekends. We have fewer developers than in years past, and last week we lost one to the hospital due to stress-induced illness. I'd like to think that I'm close to 100% recovered from my medical issues, but I am still occasionally distracted by the pain of my scars.

My normal 7am to 9pm awake schedule is completely blown. I've been getting up around 9:30 and not going to bed until at least midnight. Last night was particularly bad on my sleep schedule. After getting home at around 11:30, I decided to peruse the web for 30ish minutes until today's lame Woot! update and then head to bed. Unfortunately I got tangled up in Gravity Pods.  I finally ended up calling it quits around 2am after my mind was so tired that it could not comprehend the playing board (somewhere around level 45, I think).

It may be a rash generalization, but I'm pretty sure all the stupid drivers do all of their business starting shortly after 10am.  I left the house at 10:05 this morning, and in my 10-minute drive to work I saw no less than two Crazy Ivans and one Mile-wide-gap shooter.  I'm so ready for a flying car, provided that I'm the only one allowed to have one.

A few more days of work madness and I'll be able to relax for at least 2 weeks until school starts again.

I wish the GMail WYSIWYG editor had superscript, so that these could be properly cited above:
1.  Crazy Ivan (n) -  Driver who has no idea of the direction in which their final destination lies, and rapidly changes across multiple lanes at the last second to catch their exit / turn.  (ref: The Hunt for Red October (1990))

2.  Mile-wide-gap shooter (n) - A person making an unprotected left turn across a medianed thoroughfare who insists on quickly and aggressively reaching the median even though there is no traffic coming from their left for at least a mile.  The more rational driver would simply wait until the cross traffic from the right was also clear and just make a normal turn, instead of scaring the piss out of the cross traffic by almost hitting them. 

Random Crap

As I sat here waiting for the woot.com update, I thought to myself, "You know, Woot hasn't had a non-woot-off bag of crap lately. I wonder if they were to have one up tonight, if I would get one or just pass on it, since they generally are, really, crap. "

The clock on my computer hit 11:59, I hit F5 just for the hell of it.

There was no hesitation.  Like a well oiled machine I clicked I want one!  followed by I want three!, entered my CC security code, and clicked This stupidly large button.

I bought them before my conscious brain could even comprehend the action. I'm officially brainwashed.

Traffic Signal Madness

Traffic signals are some of the most reliably consistent devices on the planet.  If you drive the same route every day, it's easy to get a feel for durations, patterns, and the proper routes. And of course the great thing about traffic signals is that they always change from green, to yellow, and then to red.

Except, that is, when they don't.

The main path from my work is a street that condenses down from a 6 lane thoroughfare to a 2 lane residential road.  Intersecting this road is another main traffic artery on which I travel the final leg of my journey home.  On Friday I sat at this intersection waiting to turn left.  The traffic in the perpendicular direction came to a stop, and the protected left turn arrow turned green. The two cars in front of me went through the intersection, and then the light turned red.

Not yellow; red.

I slammed on my brakes to avoid entering the intersection, and tried to figure out what had just happened. I looked both directions to see if an emergency vehicle had triggered the abrupt change, but saw nothing. Traffic in all directions was stopped.  After an unusually long period of time, the light turned green for the remainder of the traffic on the street.  I made my left turn after yielding to oncoming traffic, and continued perplexedly along my way.

It took me a few minutes, but I finally realized why the change from green to red was so abrupt.  In actuality, I had been given a yellow turn arrow, but that bulb was broken. Since the solid lights are always red when the turn signals are active, it appeared in my mind as though the signal had gone straight from green arrow to red.  I suppose I did the right thing in making the abrupt stop because technically I had a red light, even though I was supposed to have a yellow turn arrow to go along with it.

PC Gaming a la 1993

Playing PC games in the early 90s was a real pain in the ass.  For all of the good games, e.g. not solitaire, there was a significant investment in getting the games to run.  Only those who have fooled around with HIMEM.EXE , CONFIG.SYS, and AUTOEXEC.BAT files for days trying to free up enough 'conventional RAM' can truly relate to the plight of the early PC gamer. And once that was all working, you then had to worry about sound card compatibility and whether your CPU would be able to handle the 256 color 2-D graphics -- there was no 'hardware acceleration'. If you were trying to get a "network" game working ( i.e. a direct modem-to-modem connection), both parties had to have two phone lines - one for the modem and another to verbally negotiate the connection.  Once I tried to connect Falcon 3.0 over my brand new 9600 baud modem, I think it took an hour to finally get connected for a mission that lasted 10 minutes.

Today's PC gamer has it easy.  Stick in the 10 CDs (which is better than the 10 3.5" floppy disks for Conquests of Camelot), install the game, put in your registration code, and you're good to go. That is of course assuming your video card is good enough, you've got plenty of free 'extended' memory, and you're running Windows.

In order to bring PC gaming to the masses, some sacrifices had to be made. For a span of many years (10? 15?), I have not played several of my all-time favorite games. Over the past two weeks, however, I've gotten my X-Wing Collector's Edition CD to run using DosBox, and have spent on it a significant portion of time. The graphics are awful compared to any game made in the last decade, but the gameplay is still amazing.  With my X-Box style Logitech controller I have pretty much all of my essential functionality (throttle, shields, target acquisition, weapons selection) mapped, and I rarely have to touch the keyboard or mouse.

So far I'm loving it, although last night I attempted the Death Star "trench run" mission a few times and got obliterated ... I thought now that I am older and wiser that mission would be a little bit easier, but no. I think that since it was originally the last mission of the game (pre-expansion) that they made it nearly impossible to complete on regular settings. Aside from my recent defeats, I am still pretty good at picking off TIE fighters at a distance and single-handedly destroying unescorted Star Destroyers. I've not yet seen if I can complete the 'one minute minesweeper' mission, which I know took me weeks to accomplish in my youth.

I'll make a separate 'How-to: XWing with DosBox' post at some point in the future, in case someone else wants to play a great old game.  I've also got some links to X-Wing sites with utilities (campaign, mission, ship, and pilot editors) on my del.icio.us page.

Ressurrected

No matter what the service is, these days it seems like the only choice you have is between the provider that sucks, and the provider that sucks less. If I want channels for my television, I choose between DirecTV and Comcast. If I want a cell phone, I choose between Sprint, Verizon, or AT&T, each of which are constantly looking for a way to steal your money. Of course when you make your choice you're stuck with it for a one or two year contract.

Luckily, the Internet is free of most of those restrictions for the time being. Usually there's a billion sites providing their own different flavor of service, and even better is that there's at least a few that are free. I like free things.

With this in mind, I've decided to move away from LiveJournal since they do not support the features I want at the correct price point. Namely, they wan to charge me $25 per year to be able to post by email, and Blogger charges nothing. Have I mentioned that I like free things?

I know it's going to be inconvenient, and people aren't going to want to visit my blogger site, or even add my Livejournal syndication feed to their friends list, but that's a risk I'm willing to take. I'm pretty sure the right people will make the transition, and everyone else can snarflag a spork.

This feed will encompass the mandate of the previous blog (video games, sports, poker) as well as other random content about myself, friends, family, and useless time wasters. Since I will be able to post by email I'll post more often and try to keep it entertaining or informative, depending on my mood.