furtive explorations

Still, if you are writing and getting paid anything at all and you can't remember which of your, yore, and you're or of their, there, and they're to use, just stop now and back the fuck away from the keyboard slowly. Keep your hands in sight. Now, you're to smash your keyboard like a rock star in the days of yore.

The game was quite fun, all in all. I think the highlight of cooperative play had to be the warthog vehicle. It was joy to ride and play in. We had a bunch of fun driving around and smashing stuff but best part had to be accidentally driving off cliffs and trying to "X" out of the vehicle in time to not plumet over the cliff with it. When ever there were soldiers around, you could park next to them and they would hop on board to help out.

Throughout the game, the various audio quips that the soldiers and enemies bark out made us laugh. The soliders would get excited when you helped them and start cheering, bitch when hit by crossfire, and occasionally freak out and start cowering or panicing. I figure it took us about 20+ hours to beat it on the second level of difficulty, 2 player all the way. I was a little annoyed with the repetitive level reuse but they tied it into the plot well and having the Flood in there made the level strategy quite different.

If I get the time tonight, I might play a bit more on the hardest setting. It is almost as bad as Doom's Nightmare mode...

First and formost we must avoid what I call the Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse: Sun, Oracle, EMC, and "Core Consultants". Trust me on this, two or so of those are survivable, all four are sure death. If you pick all three vendors, your best people had better know your business inside and out and should have experience in at least two of the three vendor's gear. If you are going to pay consultants to build your infrastructure, buy cheap -- no matter how loud they bitch -- or you will surely see your financials in the toilet rather than gold-plated fixtures.

Speaking of gold plated fixtures, of the Four Horsemen rides an Aeron Chair. Another rides in a brand new super cubicle, the third drives a company Hummer/SUV, and the fourth rides to work on the shoulders of the people he conned you into hiring to do his work for him.

We also chatted about what I call Hieranarchy which is where you employ approximately twice as many people as you have hierarchial levels. Companies need about 5 or 6 levels, that is all, until they get over about 1,000 people. Then they might need 10 at most.

That last insight led to us joking about corporate structures vs. data structures which I'll get into later...

We're of the opinion that, to see where things are going, it is best to first understand how we got here. "Excuse me, how did I get to Phoenix?" ... "You came by bus, sir." "Where was I going?" "No idea, sir."

Space War, truly, was the first first-person shooter console game. Uh, SW was a 2-D head-to-head space simulation, with gravity and weapons. In no way, shape, form, or fashion was it "first-person". You saw an "overhead" view of both ships... moron.

Parallel with the rise of the onscreen console-based game, however, came the text adventure. Space War: 1960; The Underground Adventure: 1972. Hmmm.

1979 [...snip...]
Parallel to the efforts to market their business software, programmers started to deploy graphics on their machines, and text-based adventures lost their shine, though the idea of the immersive dungeon lived on.

[Page transition] Doom was released upon an unsuspecting world on December 10, 1993 and sold over a million copies, even though most of it was available as shareware. Yeah, the intervening 14 years really were all about the downhill slide of text games. Yup. Hell really the only good graphical game in all those years was some shitty thing called Ultima.

Doom basically created a paradigm shift in the way gaming was played. Free blades (with reduced levels) got you hooked, better blades you were willing to pay for kept you begging for more, and suddenly a market for add-in sound and graphics cards opened up. OK, the first sentence is true since Doom opened people's eyes to network multiplayer. However, shareware was well established by then and Doom was just about its deathknell. His real point -- that Doom drove a hardware frenzy -- is still quite true.

Other than goofy shit like that, it is an OK look at the console wars, just skip the first 4 pages or so...

But the THEL is expensive to fire, costing $3,000 or more per shot because of the exotic chemicals used. It also requires supply lines to keep the weapon charged with chemicals.

There's another possibility. A new type of solid-state laser that can be powered with rechargeable batteries also is being developed and tested at the facility. A whole bunch of the plot of RG consisted of them giving up on lesser states to make a laser that lased while it exploded into plasma. Here, in real life, they need to fire more than once so they are heading back to solid-state.

Look at it this way. Considering the type of people you are and the environment you're in, this may be the only chance you ever have in your entire lives to have sex!

Amusingly, this is kinda broke in Mozilla right now so all I noted for a while was the title, which perplexed me greatly. Why would someone send me "I love cooking"? Too bad it is just stupid spam, for a while I was excited by the hopes of increased random surreality in my life.

Not only is the pursuit of normal more likely to fail than the pursuit of perfection, it is less productive. Attempting perfection, knowing all the while you will fail, is still a noble task. It brings about any number of improvements to your life and each step forward is truly a step forward. Conversely, the pursuit of normality has no equivalent benefit. It drains one of individuality and self. Worse, conformance doesn't guarantee improvement, only a modicum of acceptance.

Striving for normality is counter productive to the goal itself

Normal people don't try to be normal, if you are striving you are failing.

The Quick Search Toolbar rules my whole world. I'll be putting it on the work computer tomorrow. Every frigging kind of search you can imagine right at your fingertips in one monster -powerful mouse-small super form. And the installer is 73KB. Of course you have to not mind it loading IE when you search... I give it 13 hamburgers on the arbitrary axis rating scale.

His other tool, Realtime Javascript Editor is also extra supremo cool, as well as also being IE only. I had a lot of fun with this at work. In fact, I had tweaked out this little javascript before I made my fatal mistake.

var h = 180;
var s = 8;
draw.Opacity(0.2);
for (i = -h; i <= h; i += s)
{
  draw.line(i, 0, 0, h - Math.abs(i));
  draw.line(-i, 0, 0, Math.abs(i) - h);

  draw.line(h, i, -i , h);
  draw.line(-h, i, -i, -h);
  draw.line(i, h, -h, i);
  draw.line(i, -h, h, i);
}

It is sexy, cool, and fun. It also points out two nasty faults that don't exactly taste great together. One, the page auto-reruns your script when you change anything. This means it is broken most of the time since you are typing in the window. No biggie by itself and very fun for twidling with numbers. (Try changing s or h in my script.) Then there is the other problem. Javascript under IE is evil and will happily consume all your resources and beat your machine down if you type the wrong thing. For instance, rather than deleting the = in i <= h (which makes a line disappear) if you delete the < the code goes into an infinite loop and eventually freaks out windows so bad your only hope is CTRL-ALT-Delete and pray it lets you kill IE before the BSOD! Fun for me but a shitty thing for my first post about it...

1. Assembler and C or Forth. Core libraries. You do hardware integration and deep OS magic. Critical tasks push down to this level and the heavy lifting in upper layers is written in this level. Bits count, loops are tight, you know what the entire state of the processor is, most of your work is register level and you tinker with memory directly.
2. C, C++, and other systems languages. You write OS level stuff at this level, and most of the higher levels are coded here. Bytes count, memory allocation is semi-manual, you know what the general state of the processor is and you work mostly in static variables.
3. C++, perl, python, Pascal, Cobol, VB, and basically every other language you've ever heard of. You write the core logic at this level, and tie your libraries together here. You move data around and let the lower levels deal with the details. The logic and flow of the program are here. Strings and arrays count, memory just happens most of the time, you can use semaphores if you have threads that need to know what other processes are doing and that is all the processor state you need.
4. User Interface, mostly API calls to lower levels but with a highlevel mapping above your language. VB, TK, and others. Mostly button pushing and praying, you only care about signals and settings. Memory is someone else's problem, you just hand it formatted data and wait for it to get back to you when done. Only its state matters.

Still working this one out: gosh its not a toy let Hume or Goa way.

• Stadium Unstable... It seems that naming a stadium after your company is the kiss of death for a company's bottomline. Not just the millions poured into the naming fee, not just the epic shame of turning a wholesome park into blatant advertising, nope this here is hubris at its finest. Salute these pioneers of advertising who clumsily named stadiums after insurance forms, crotch maintanence creams, and crop-blight reduction poisons as they bravely sink their own ships.
• Music Tele Vexing... Hmm, who would have guessed that the MTV saturated generations of today have too short an attention span to sit through a 3.5 minute video. Duh... just about anyone you fucking asked. If they/we want music to listen to, we downloaded it last night off KaZaA. Multimediasaturation has been taken to such a level we now leave the TV on while surfing/instant-messaging/chatting and shouting/texting into our matchbook-sized super PDA-phones.
• Photon Ravn Mad... Yes, a modified keychain light specifically for rave dancing and playing with in the dark is stupid. So stupid they deserve the massive piles of cash they will earn. The only reason 90% of anyone ever got a keychain light was to play with it. If you have one, or have a friend with one, mentally sum up the times you used it as a flashlight in the dark vs. the number times you simply flicked it on and off or spun it about your fingers for fun. Uh huh...

Oh wait, maybe they want to make it so bad some of the men hop disciplines. Then the unemployment crisis in IT wouldn't seem so bad... same number unemployed but women's lower salaries would drop the cost of unemployment drastically.

please don't mail me anything rude about that, it was a joke. Unless the "rude" stuff is you naked and you are a hot, unemployed, female IT worker. It that specific case, bring IT on... ;)

The new server will feature up to the minute code, eight times the storage space, about ten times the computing power, and all of the wasted hours of slack-inducing partially completed tasks.

My thanks to Bud who donated a 20GB drive, a defaulting customer for the 9GB drive, my roommate for the handy video card, my dad for the extra power cable, the now defunct Darwin Networks and Dave for the ATX rackmount case (I took a reciprocating saw to the back to make the new mobo fit,) a snazzy network card from Sean's hoard, Dave's handy Mandrake 8.1 install disks, a stupid hardware place in California who sent me the wrong number of Celeron's and wound up with no cash and short the Celeron once they forced me to get American Express involved, Garnet (my PC at home) who has given up 1/3 of his memory, and a whole lot of open source love...

no idea...

It:Did "Big Oil" sell out America again. 10:41AM PST, Dec 3, 2001
Shortly after "It" made the news. I read on the internet where Bush and Cheney both had visited Kamen individually. Before this, it was well known that "It" would be hydrogen powered. Has "Big Oil" sold out America again, or should I say bought out again. Hydrogen powered vehicles would save the world from pollution and solve our energy problems. But would break " big oil," I was hoping it wouldn"t happen again.

Isn't that a wonderful thought. Of course, a small hydrogen engine, Stirling or not, won't ever be as efficient as the power company's big engines. And I suspect that a battery-powered vehicle will match any hydrogen engines produced for the first few years they are out. You just don't get something for nothing.

Today was sort of a weird day. I wound up sleeping in later than I meant to... mostly thanks to staying up too late killing aliens in Halo. =)

What awakened me finally was a weird "Thwong-thwap" noise. After I didn't hear anything else I started to pull the covers back over my head and then noticed a strange electrical smoke smell. After running around the room smelling things I noticed it was centered around the air vent so I stuck my head out and asked my roommate if he had started the heater (which always burns off dust when first started) or if he was soldering something.

Once he said "Nope" and then pointed out that he didn't smell anthing till I opened the door I got a bit worried. Then, I noticed that my router linux box was turned off. A quick check of the power switch leaves me convinced once I notice it is still in the on position. It seems the magical blue smoke had escaped the power supply when I wasn't looking. *sigh*

So after making a quick run down to my parents to drop off 2,000 golfballs I got a older computer out of storage and spent the evening switching power supplies from case to case. Very sad. Ruby is feeling better now so I can post and check e-mail... aaaahhh.

Oh yeah, I am now yet another day delayed in replacing Emerald with a new yet to be named webserver. I'm pondering Jade as the new name and retiring Emerald since only a reformatted hard-drive will remain of the old machine.