Mundane

Filler:

Yesterday I had lunch with TJ. He asked for more blog entries. I can completely understand why someone immersed in SIG-Graph preparation would want to keep a back pocket full of 5-minute distractions. In paper deadlines of my own, I've browsed TJ's blog. TJ has several hundred entries. I figure I owe him.

He suggested reporting on the goings-on of my life; the mundane. By reporting on my every day, I have some topic that I can discuss that's mine. And I won't have to worry about a bitch fest. That sounds good. I'll do that.

Problem is: I had lunch with TJ yesterday and already unloaded my recent mundane experiences. He's itching for a SIG-Graph break, and all I've got is leftovers.

Leftovers:

So as a gift-for-us, I gave Pants the first season of "Lost" on DVD. On Wednesday, we hit the half-way mark. Last night we put down another 3 episodes. We're now 15 epsidoes into the season. We've had the DVD's out of their gift wrap for 5 days now. I think that qualifies as an addiction. It's a compelling series. I'd recommend it.

I won't be loaning out our copy of the series. Pants has this thing with me loaning out the gifts I give her to my friends and never getting them back.* By "this thing", I mean she doesn't like it. I can't understand why. But I'll respect her wishes.

*The "Outfoxed" DVD - I think I got that back, but now I don't remember.

Done

The semester's over. I submitted my grades on Monday (It's Thursday, now). I wrote a bunch of my A and A- students to encourage them to further pursue computer sciencee. I was really happy with how a lot of them performed this semester; I was less happier with a few, but over all, a very intelligent and hard working group of kids.

I got a few emails back thanking them for the encouragement.

One email I got back was a guy who is friends with a CS major. Apparently this friend has had a really bad experience here. One of his teachers barely spoke english. He tried to take the data structures class, but there were so few people who wanted to take it, that the class was effectively cancled - it got merged with some other class - short story is he didn't learn anything about data structures that semester.

Is our undergrad department that bad? Should I refrain from encouraging students to major?

Trader

I've been playing this game that Pant's bought called Fable. It's this RPG like game where they've replaced the turn-based "choose attack from the menu" (e.g. Dragon Warrior, 1988, Final Fantasty XLIV, 2005) with what I'd say is a pretty decent fighting interface. You buy armor and swords like in RPGs but then you actually see the armor and swing the swords. There are some interesting quirks to the game: your morally approbatable actions gain you "good points", while your morally disapprobatable actions get you "evil points". There's of course a sliding scale morality meter: killing a peasant is equivalent to kicking a chicken 18 times. It's fun, and adds an interesting dimension to the game. There's a rich trading system where you can buy cheap at one shop and sell high at some other shop. You can play dress up, mixing and matching your armor, just like the dress up I play in SSX 3.

Except, the time that MS put into all the quirks came directly out of the plot development. The game is almost over for me. I've only had it for a little longer than a week.

In undergrad, I put in like 90 hours into Final Fantasy 9 and I don't think I even beat the game.

What little plot there actually is to the game is so thin it's barely worth worrying about. You're this hero who's battered around from one task to the next with little reason, except that there seems to be this grand scheme against you for utterly no reason. There's a bad guy who's had it in for you since your birth. There's some sword he's trying to get and you must stop him because clearly there's no urgency that needs less explanation than an evil super villian getting their hands on 20 pounds of steel. Because, in a world where every town (and there are 4) contains a sword store, there's nothing more menacing than one guy with one sword. He'll probably take over the world if he gets it.

So I've been avoiding the conclusion of the game and instead just wandering around trading diamonds from one shop to a guy at another shop. It's way more fun to set your own goals in this game than to follow the story.

Cast and crew

In an attempt to keep this blog from ever hurting my political career, I'm going to adopt the well used practice of nick-naming the real life people and objects I interact with when referring to them on this blog.

Nicknames so far:

Pants - my fiance whose puritanical upbringing compels her to attach "pants" to all words, lest their immodesty cast us all into hell. (e.g. "That was tasty-pants")

TJ - the cunning ice-bullet assasin with a founding-fathers fetish.

Stromk - The swedish weight lifter / pun spinner. His name is swedish for "swedish for." He gets a real kick out of explaining it to people.

Sprat - my boss

Croquetta - the video game I program. The source of all the delightful "I found a bug" posts that I know you're all waiting to hear.

Alcohol - the "drug" I'm "addicted" to that's destorying my "life"

Bug found

I don't want my blog to turn into a bitch fest. A friend of mine up in DC, let's call him Snorty, was telling me that he kept up with another one of our high school "friends" by reading his blog. This guy's blog - and I haven't read it - is a bitch fest. He rants and raves about all of the things go wrong for him. Snorty enjoys the blog since he hates the guy. What's better than reading about shitty things happening to dipshits?

I have too many enemies that would love to hear about how I stubbed my toe on the way into my office, or that my coffee had gone stale after sitting on my office shelf for weeks. I will not offer them the satisfaction of knowing that anything in my life is less than perfect.

So as a big f-u to all of the people that read my blog to know how much my life sucks, I will spin every post positively.

For instance, I found a bug this morning in the code I've been working on. I started looking for it yesterday and it's very possible that the program I'm working on will function properly.

See. That's good news.

Aeon Flux

Pants and I went to see Aeon Flux today. We went to the Timberlyne (with a 'y'). There were three overweight people who sat in the otherwise empty rows in front of us in the theater. They all had pony tails.

I made a list.

Things they have in common with the agile, sexy assasin portrayed in the movie:

Tetris

I spent Monday to Wednesday preparing to distribute to my class their final programming project: Tetris. I wrote the game Tuesday afternoon while in Caribou. It went smoothly, but still took me 5 hours. How much longer does it take a novice to write a program than a veteran? 4x? 20x?

I have this growing fear that majority of my class won't be able to step up to the plate in few days remaining of the semester. I didn't sleep last night... kept waking up every half hour and my brain would start racing, kept re-thinking how to best present the assignment.

For the most part, though, they seem motivated and interested in the programming assignments. I kinda like that about a game-based set of programs. Games are fun - playing your own game is rewarding.

If you want to play tetris in Applet form, you should wander over to my real website (assuming you know how to get there). I have the applet posted on the webpage where I posted the assignment.

I was one of those guys

I resisted buying a cell phone.

Then I caved.

I resisted starting a blog.

Now I've caved again.

Other items on my resistence list:
- diptheria
- mumps
- rabies

Testing

The bombing will begin in five minutes.