Plaidophile

Damn that prior existence thing.

Argh.

One spring sprung,
The other undisturbed
One mammal sleeps well
The other lays perturbed

The mouse hangs around my kitchen,
wondering whether it's safe to eat the peanut butter
on the two loaded-and-wound traps.

I look over, see it sniffing,
whiskers quivering with anticipation.
I wince and look away,
bracing myself for the snap and crunch,
not wanting to see the dirty deed or its aftermath.
Like the spring I am tightly-wound.

My heart freezes for a short eternity.
There is only silence.
I look back over, and the mouse has not tried to eat.
It has won, for now; It will survive another minute.

Another easy recipe, which will probably also serve as my lunch for the coming week.

This is probably the least-Jewish dish I've ever made, because it prominently features pork. OMG.

Argh. Crunch time means just adding on more and more layers of how to do complicated things in a slightly less complicated way, in a way which makes simple things really fucking complicated.

There was a major scientific discovery in the world of botany: bananas would relay sound vibrations to other bananas through unknown means. The closer the bananas' genomes, the clearer the relaying would be. Two bananas from the same bunch could be used as an effective form of communication.

The cellular phone companies all went out of business practically overnight. Acoustic modems were fit to bananas to provide an instant world-wide communications platform.

Getting up at 7:30 AM so I can get to work by 9 isn't a problem.

Staying at work until past 11 PM (or, as is usually the case lately, midnight) isn't a problem.

Doing both, however, is a problem.

Buh.

I got a lot of grief on a particular forum about my deep/inline-link prevention stuff, as if it's everyone's right to borrow images without attribution. But then I realized that the particular wording was a bit whiny and too verbose and that was causing a lot of people to assume I was saying things I wasn't (like, someone took it to mean that I was going to be one of those retards who makes legal threats and so on), so I simplified the wording.

Jeeze, some people.

When hyperlink metadata attacks.

Am I the only one reminded of those stories in Highlights where they put a picture of every noun after the noun is used?

Incredible as it may seem, I actually got home before midnight tonight!

Tonight on the subway ride home, a guy was going between the various cars and ranting about how everyone needs to register to vote and vote for anyone but Bush or else we'll be stuck in martial law and so on. Even though he was preaching to the choir, his speech was quite motivational and inspirational; for example, he was saying how it's safer for him, as a member of the Crips, to walk in Blood territory and shout "HEY Y'ALL I'M A BLOOD-KILLER!" than it is to have Bush as President for another four years.

He also engaged various people on the train but in a non-threatening way which actually put people at ease, and also made it about racial unity and being for the good of everyone and so on.

So, right now I'm well on my way to an 80-hour workweek (14 hours a day M-F, then another 10 on Saturday).

Last week I ordered a few things off of eBay (like a DDR pad set and a copy of Rez). Two days ago the pad set arrived, but of course I wasn't home, so the UPS guy left it with Charles, who left a note on my door saying that I could get the package from him before 11:30 PM or after 9 AM.

Had some inspiration for how to make the touchpad interface not suck. Implemented it. Also finally got the code running on SDK 2.0 and the real hardware (though I'm having weird issues with sprite data only coming through in a piecemeal manner... I think it's a cache coherency issue, and I probably just have to issue a cache flush or similar — yes, the DS has a software-controllable cache, mostly because of the broken memory bus which is also related to why it has software-controlled bus-locking for SMP). It's kinda weird to play it on the real DS instead of on the computer.

Also, the real DS has way better debugging support than the TEG board did, though the visual debugger app is still pretty gimpy.

Meh. Today was a crappy day. I got very little done (what with working on the stupid touchpad interface), and yet was still at work until past 10 PM.

Also, James and Antoine must have no taste. They actually like McDonald's. Eegh.

I hate marketing-driven technology decisions.

Aall of my interface designs were totally easy to use and intuitive. We had zero complaints about any of my UI stuff in the focus testing. It's a very good, strong, optimal interface which makes use of both screens.

So, the complete game (which is now entitled "Hooked Up") needs to be done and submitted by October 1. There is no way we're getting done by then, and my motivation is currently in the toilet. Yay me.

The N-Gage's game library has suddenly gotten very very big.

Of course, the display resolution is even smaller than the NES, but we'll see. :)

It should be self-evident.

(Thanks to Erik for the link)

I tried replicating the Ikea crawfish-on-pasta dish which I had when I was there the first time.

One big problem is that I guess I didn't wash the basil well enough, since the pesto (which tastes amazing) is kinda gritty, which is a big turnoff. But the worse part:

I never ever want to touch a whole crawfish ever again. All I could think about while shelling them was how similar they were to really big cockroaches, and that they're so full of icky stuff like organs I didn't want to try eating. But it also seemed wasteful to use just the tail (especially since the easiest way to get to the tail seemed to be popping off the back first).

So what should I do with the other three and a half pounds of cockroaches gourmet mini-lobsters?

Two things to notice about Apple's security patch disclosures:

• They're extremely thorough and don't just say something like "miscellaneous fixes to the Finder" or whatever
• They give credit where credit's due

9:02: Arrived at work

12:55: Successfully convinced James and Antoine to go somewhere else for lunch (we went to New York Burger Co.)

1:40: Returned to work

It is very unlikely that we will have the game done in time for system launch, though at this rate it shouldn't be extremely late.

In the meantime, Gérard (the company president) has this odd notion that we can get this game done and get the next game done by the end of December. (The next game is way more complicated.)

So, today was the big milestone which we were pushing so hard for.

Last Friday the game wasn't even working. Today it was test-played for a focus group.

It's amazing... just when I was starting to think that my Powerbook was a bit too heavy, I had to work on the work laptop to try to figure out a timing issue with the prototype.

It's a Dell. It's extremely heavy. It's also making me realize why so many people hate touchpads — most touchpads suck.

♥ Apple

Subtle variations on blindingly-obvious recipes which I've been enjoying lately.

Last night I dreamt that Shooby had just been hiding in my parents' attic, and had forgotten how to climb down the stairs.

When I woke up I remembered my parents don't have an attic.

I've been pretty fed up with the T610 for a while now (making it my shortest-lasting cellphone), and looked at all of the phones on the market which met my needs (decent PIM/smartphone stuff, bluetooth preferably with SyncML, Clicker support, speakerphone, etc.), and the only one which was affordable turned out to be the N-Gage QD.

My coworkers still need to be hit with a clue-by-four repeatedly now and then.

Our hours are getting longer and longer because our artificially-imposed deadline is coming up much more quickly, and we're suddenly realizing that there's a hell of a lot of stuff which needs to get done by then.

The hours are the worst I've ever worked, as are the pressures and bullshit stress factors.

And yet, I love this job.

The producer has various Japanese video game magazines on his desk all the time. I just leafed through one of them, and noticed that it was very thick — 230 pages thick. Which is about as thick as all of the monthly American video game magazines combined, when you remove the redundant information.

It was also a weekly publication. (And ¥330, which is around $3.)

So like, there's a major milestone coming up which kind of appeared out of the blue, and so I'm still at work until like 11 PM tonight even though I'm not being terribly productive.

A quick post of a comic I did a few days ago. (I'm still at work, but fortunately I've already got my remote access mojo going on, and I'd already prepared this comic for posting.)

Songfight now has artist information pages.

• Viragelic — neat generative music (though it needs more sample sets); seemed like something my friend Jared would do (so I sent him a link, and he liked it of course)
• Pymprovisator
• Intuem Squared — Nifty-looking multitrack audio/MIDI system which actually seems functional, useful, intuitive, and reasonably-priced (i.e. everything which Cubase/Logic/etc. aren't)

(This is work-related audio research. I'll add more as I come across it.)

So, yeah, if you didn't guess, I finally got working Internet at home. I went back and posted some backlogged entries (thanks to the MTTimeTravel plugin, to be developed in 2071).

So far the main problem with it is that for some reason, I can't route to songfight.org. Which means I'll either have to make some sort of proxy to it, or figure out some way to efficiently update from the Songhole mirror. Since I'm sure that if I call Verizon to tell them about a routing problem they'll just tell me I have to reboot my computer and modem.

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I finally have my DSL modem. But still no service.

Verizon claims that the service is active. The modem says otherwise.