Plaidophile

I think we should just realize that people have their specialties, and when they know what they're doing we shouldn't waste time debating with them.

— James, in response to Antoine spending about two hours arguing with me about a window-drawing mechanism he couldn't wrap his mind around

I've suddenly gained a lot of respect for him — he actually does know where his knowledge is lacking, and actually does want to learn!

I will be really happy when the primary dev cycle is finished, because I'm getting pretty sick of 10-hour workdays.

At least I finally got my travel/hotel/etc. reimbursement today so I can actually start buying furniture.

Yesterday I picked up an amazing little multitasker: a toaster oven which also functions as a bread machine. It has a little slot on the bottom to slide in the loaf pan (which is horizontal). It was also only $40 at the local discount department store, probably because it had been in some overstock warehouse for years (the free bread mix and coupons which came with it expired 5 years ago).

It's a good thing that I have this for cooking, because it looks like it's going to be the only way I can cook things for a while.

I finally decided to get off my ass and see some of the live music that NYC had to offer. On Craigslist I found a thing for a mashup of Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon, with the twist being that DSotM was to be played live.

Argh. Trying to choose which broadband provider to go with has been a much more difficult decision than I thought.

So, yeah, I'm finally moved in to my new apartment. There is so much space in it... and all I have is my luggage, and the futon I bought this morning.

It turns out that Ridgewood is actually in Queens, though just barely (it's right on the official edge of the borough). But it's still basically Brooklyn. Actually I think the grocery store just across the street is technically Brooklyn. Though maybe not, since the food is a lot cheaper here than in Manhattan or Brooklyn. :) (Still more expensive than NM though.)

(Totally unrelated self-congratulatory note: The phpBB mod team has finally seen fit to accept one of my mods. Maybe they'll see fit to incorporate it into 2.2... I haven't had one single piece of comment spam since I wrote it, even though there have been plenty of attempts!)

<fluffy> I still think I should implement a proportional font renderer. It'll look better.

<James> It might, but it'd take you like four days to write it!

Or three hours, including the time to draw the font and write a conversion tool and a minimal tile-graphics emulator to test the output. Whichever.

The whole time I've been here I have been on a quest to find a good hamburger.

I have finally found a good hamburger.

My plan for today was to try to leave work early and then move into my apartment afterwards. But then I got so heavily into DS programming and got a great handle on programming the main screen, but then discovered that I had to change like everything to get the second screen going (thanks to the excruciatingly messy memory mapping). But it's not that big a deal all told. But by the time I was done discussing that with Antoine (mostly just trying to explain what I'd found about the memory mapping issues) and also going over the animation compression with him some more, it was like 7:15 and I was pretty wasted.

So I emailed Antoine and told him that I'll be coming in around noon tomorrow so I can move in to my apartment. I'll probably buy some furniture too. Since having a place to sleep will be rather nice.

Unless they're chewing on one's underwear.

Sometimes I can't help but wonder how much truth there is to a certain saying.

So, yeah. Nice big spacious airy bright sunny corner loft in a converted factory in a quiet neighborhood, with hardwood floors, a full kitchen and bathroom, and nice tall ceillings (so I could get even more space by getting a sleeping loft put in or similar).

"Only" $1200/month. Ugh.

I can move in Thursday. Yay!

• Sales tax: 8.5%
• State income tax: 6.85%
• City income tax: 3%
• 2-liter bottle of Coke: $1.80

I think I finally found an apartment which I can both afford and view before it gets snatched up! Always a good combination.

1. It's better to check which train you're getting onto before getting on
2. The doors to a subway are not like the doors to an elevator. Having them close on you actually kinda hurts.
3. When you ask for the address of "the apartment on Franklin which was listed on Craigslist," consider that the landlord may not even know what Craigslist is, might have multiple apartments on Franklin, and will probably send you to a roach-infested crumbling two-bedroom shithole in a neighborhood full of drug pushers instead of the newly-renovated place you wanted to go which happened to have its open house at the same time (god damnit)

Here's how my little apartment-hunting notes file looks right now.

When a subway ride can be measured in terms of how many complete albums you listen to on an iPod, it's a bit long for a commute.

I'm desperately seeking an apartment around here, but so far I'm not having much luck.

Right now I'm staying in the same hotel as when I was here for my job interview, but this time it's even worse:

So, on the first day of my job, I have already managed to become the de-facto audio lead (in addition to platform graphics lead), thanks to having a great idea on how to take advantage of the first game's design (and the design of the Nintendo DS's audio engine) to drive the music as an integral, emotion-enhancing experience rather than just being the add-on that it would normally be. (I strongly feel that games which make the music part of the game are always going to have a deeper emotional impact and just plain be Better.)

Also, I was extremely lucky to get this job — not just because of the "OMG I'm a game programmer!" bit, but because of the chain of events which led to me getting it.

Guess the sequence of events which led to this dialog.

Grumble. T-Mobile lets you change your phone number, but they don't provide any sort of forwarding/notification on the old one — it just gives callers a "This number has been changed" message.

You are missing out on one or more friends-only entries. Please log in, if you have an account.

Might as well set my weblog and forum to Eastern time now.

I'm gonna be a New Yorker in less than 24 hours! Eep!

I'm done packing. My move to New York will be pretty cheap. I ended up with eight boxes; five will be shipped by FedEx Ground, and the other three via USPS Media Mail. Assuming I end up in Brooklyn, the total comes to $140 and change.

That's just for immediate needs though (you know, things like my CDs, DVDs, and all my video games and all systems except the NES, though that does include my NES cartridges).

On the NYC MTA map, if you look carefully in the lower-left-hand corner, you might notice that one of the stops is about 2 years, 10 months and 1 day out of date.

(It's the last stop on one particular line if you're not sure where to look.)

So, I can recover my CVS repository now. Though at this point it's probably easier to just build a new one anyway. :D

Today I was working on arranging my possessions and such to filter out which ones I want to take now (very few), which ones I want to get shipped out later, and which ones I don't care about and will just set aside for a yard sale.

One of the things I was going to take now was Zorkachu, my fileserver box. But I couldn't find it anywhere. I have a sneaking suspicion that it's still in my last house's utility room in Las Cruces. Oops.

I called them to do the 0% APR balance transfer to pay off my car loan (though that won't happen soon enough to sell the car before I leave anyway, go figure) and got that all set up. Then I also asked why the normal APR on my account keeps going up.

The CSR said he had to transfer me to another department to answer that question. I said okay.

Five minutes later, I heard a woman ask, "Hello?"

I said, "Yes, I had a question about my account APR—"

"I'm sorry, you have the wrong number. This is a hotel."

"Uh, the credit card company transferred me here—"

"Yeah, I don't know why they keep doing that. Goodbye," she said, and hung up.

I have a feeling that MBNA does this on purpose whenever there's a question about their ever-increasing APRs.

Jeeze. I've been back all of half an hour and they're already pissing me off.

But hey. I'll be gone in a week. After that I can just get nagged on the phone instead, and guilt-tripped for not going out of my way to meet distant relatives I've never met or cared to meet while in NYC.

Grumble.

I had scheduled a pickup for 2:35 from the hotel, so while waiting in the hotel lobby at 2:34 I pulled out my laptop, thinking I'd have at least five minutes to read my email. Stupid shuttle showed up at 2:35 exactly!

I've noticed a pretty disturbing trend with a lot of the music being played on the radio here, which I'd noticed starting back when I stopped listening to the radio to begin with: A lot of so-called "remixes" of popular songs where they've just taken the existing song and dubbed in a crappy hardhouse beat loop.

I mean, I already have a pretty high standard for what makes a remix worth listening to, and this is just way below that standard. But it seems like this is the only way classic rock is played on the radio here. Do people just have specific expectations for the percussion and EQ of a track nowadays?

I have a job

I have come to the conclusion...

It's pretty obvious that I have the job if I want it. But I have only four hours to make a decision whether I want it or not. (Yes, I do need to decide.)

Last night, due to a combination of the coffee soda and extreme nervousness, I was up until 3. So of course, right now I'm still nervous, but also exceedingly tired.

Also, I didn't win anything in the nigritude ultramarine contest, and the winners of the bonus prizes were fucking retarded linkfarms. WTF? My weblog (and definition entry) are way better than the ones which were selected as "best weblog" and "best definition." I smell a circlejerk, or (equally likely) inattentive judges.

Yay.

(The attendant thought the guy at the front desk said 507 instead of 607, though I was at the front desk when he called and it sounded pretty clearly of a 6!)

All the sudden, T-Mobile isn't filtering out non-web/email ports on their free WAP service (which I discovered when I suddenly started getting instant messages, apparently prompted by suddenly appearing on AIM). Either someone made a mistake or they suddenly came to their senses and realized they weren't really making any impact since probably 99% of the bandwidth usage is still web/email anyway. Or maybe someone pointed out to them that not all web traffic is on port 80.

Who knows how long this'll last, though.

I also still haven't gotten my damn ice.

The elevator always gets confused and gets stuck on floor 5, and won't go anywhere until one of the maintenance guys resets it. Which does no good when the maintenance guys aren't very responsive.

There is no hotel information in the rooms themselves, including information on how to call the front desk, or anything about room service costs, not even on the surface of the phone, which is as clean and pure as the driven snow.

There are no guest-accessible ice makers. Instead, you have to call the front desk and order it to be sent up, which I found out when I went to the front desk to ask where the ice maker was half an hour ago. The guy got on a walkie-talkie and ordered some ice for me. It still hasn't arrived — are they freezing it especially for me? Will I be charged for it?

Blah.

Today is the day I get a job.

Wish me luck.

4:55 EDT Back at the hotel room.

I almost had my first bit of culture shock. I needed something to drink, and I headed to the corner market to pick up some Negro Modelo.

Which, apparently, isn't so easy to find in New York. (It turns out it's 2,000 miles away from Mexico. Who knew?)

Fortunately, Corsendonk, a Belgian ale I'd never heard of (I was attracted to its champagne-esque packaging, to the point that I didn't notice the $7 pricetag for a pint and a half), is plentiful here — and tastes way better.

I just had the best bagel ever.

Or at least the best bagel I'd ever had.

I'm running Airport at the airport!

'Course, even though it's free it requires a stupid clickthrough thing to establish a browsing session once an hour, to let me know that yes, I am, in fact, connecting to free WiFi. As if I didn't already know that. And it's not even selling any advertising or saying which company provides it. Weird.

Also, I guess I could have gotten up an hour later after all, since I've been sitting here bored for a while and my flight doesn't leave for an hour. (Oh, and no meal service on any of my flights. Arse.)

Subject: yo, dude

Okay, so lately I've been getting a lot of phpBB comment spam. Fortunately, drawing from previous inspiration I have come up with a very simple but effective fix.

Hey, speaking of Google pagerank whoring gone wrong, I'm ranked 35th right now. But I'm sure I could do better.

I don't actually care about winning the monitor (it doesn't have a DVI input as far as I can tell) but it'd be really neat to get a page with real content higher up than the various linkfarm spammers.