Plaidophile

That was way too fucking difficult.

Various backlogged entries to be posted tonight. :)

I just thought I'd mention two things:

• I actually work about 10 blocks away from the site of the Republican National Convention
• Aside from traffic cones and a slightly higher-than-usual police presence, there seems to be absolutely no effect whatsoever

Though, ask me again when I'm trying to get home tonight.

(I should finally have DSL when I get home, too. Only I actually mean it this time.)

The following companies FUCKING SUCK today:

I just held, in my very own hands, an actual Nintendo DS.

(The new dev kits finally came in. Yay!)

1. Spammer sends out a random message appearing to be from forged random address A to a real random address B, with a random trikuare.cx address C in the To: message line
2. real address B has a bayesian filter which is set to whiny-autorespond. Said response goes to random address A, but (in order to make sure it gets to the right non-removal list) uses the random trikuare.cx address C for its From: address (thus also being a forgery)
3. whiny "please don't spam me" autoresponse gets sent to random address A, which may or may not bounce, looking like it comes from trikuare.cx
4. Even though I had absolutely nothing to do with the actual message up to this point, one of the following happens:
   1. I get a bounce for the whiny autoresponse
   2. I get a "turn off your whiny autoresponder" rant from random address A which turned out to be a real person

Isn't email fun?

Or, more generally, coworkers.

My irony meter got overloaded. Anyone care to figure out whether this is clever satire making fun of NASA conspiracy theorists, or if it's an actual NASA conspiracy theorist?

Saturday night I went to see Young Zombies in Love, an amusing musical written by fellow songfighter Damien Hess (of Milwaukee Youth Center Choir, Duboce Triangle, and is affiliated with MC Frontalot in an undisclosed capacity). Conveniently enough, it was also the night that a whole bunch of other Songfighters came out of the woodwork to see it.

So like, some of the dialog the writers are putting in is a bit... edgy. Not only are words like "bitch" and "slut" used freely, as well as expressions like "take your head out of your ass" (and common variations), but there are lines like, "Next time you shave, try focusing more on the wrist area."

You should see some of the lines which the producer nixed. Like, "The abortion clinic called. They've been looking for you for the past 18 years."

I seem to spend more time being forced to explain every stupid little bug and fix than I do just fixing the bugs. I also spend a lot of time writing my code to work with the stuff James hands me, only to be told that most of everything is going to change and it will have to be rewritten anyway. But yet I still need to write the disposable version. Argh.

<CSR> Hi, you put in an order for digital cable and high-speed Internet?

<fluffy> Yeah, about a week ago. Since you guys took so long to get back to me I just ordered DSL yesterday. Sorry.

<CSR> What about the digital cable?

<fluffy> Sorry, I only wanted cable TV if I was already going to be paying you guys too much for crappy brodband anyway.

<CSR> Oh. Have a good day.

Next Thursday (ack) I should finally have the ability to get online from home. I ended up going with Verizon DSL. $35.95/mo for the DSL, $8/mo for the barebones phone line. 3.0Mbps downstream, servers and multiple computers allowed.

I really need to get an Internet connection again. right now I'm just online from Ed's (a coworker, whose party I'm at) OS9-running Mac, and unable to find a working ssh client for OS9. And I really gotta check my email.

I swear, there's got to be a support group for this.

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My new toys vital pieces of hardware arrived today: an HP L2335 23" LCD HDTV/monitor, and an Airport Express base station.

I'd post a screenshot of my desktop, but at 1920x1200 it'd probably crash everyone's browsers. ;)

trikuare.cx is up for renewal at the end of this year.

.cx domains used to be really cheap, which was one of the many reasons I went with one. But now they're US$38/year! (Not to mention their policies have changed dramatically.)

I might be moving to another domain soon. Meh.

It's about freakin' time.

Oh well. It's better to be done right the first time than rushed and kludgy.

Don't trust Windows-based CVS stuff to not mess up branches, especially when the reason for the branch is to protect a major milestone internal build from getting messed up when I rearchitect things for the next phase of development.

Right now I wish I could wrap up a blowjob and send it by mail, because Alton Brown totally deserves one for his show on omelets.

I finally made an omelet for the first time since I saw that particular episode, and it is, without a doubt, the best omelet I've ever had.

because James decided that an 8x8 font is too small (which is crap, most GB games have used an 8x8 font) and that I need to totally rearchitect everything so that we can use larger fonts. Whatever.

I've been told that I tend to focus on the negative. James makes it a pathology. (Earlier today he was also telling the writers how much they should focus on just a single storyline since there's no way they could write all of both storylines within our production schedule.)

The Nintendo DS graphics engine is now finished, and aside from performance tuning and such down the road, that's the last of the fun code to write. :( Now it's on to integrating James' "platform-independent" (meaning, "Windows and MS-STL") code with it and so on, as well as writing DirectX rendering code (since we're doing all the content creation on Windows and are basically developing DS and DirectX versions with a common codebase to make the overall dev cycle arguably easier).

According to my first paystub:

• FICA: 7.65%
• Federal withholdings: 16%
• New York State: 5.2%
• New York district: 0.05%
• Manhattan: 3%

This is the first job I've ever had where I haven't kept my eye on the clock all day long, and have actually ended up going home at, like, 8:30 PM without realizing it.

James has reverted to not wanting to believe that I know what I'm talking about, but he doesn't seem to understand the difference between cycle-accurate and high-level speed-accurate emulation, and that the developer kit uses a cycle-accurate emulator, and that the reason that the samples in the kit run at 40-60fps is because they're not using the emulated CPU much, and that if the code weren't fast enough to run at 60fps then the display would be totally garbled because, unlike PC-based platforms, the DS is not double-buffered, and no, adding in our own double-buffering is not an option. (Well, technically it is, but it's a waste of memory.)