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.

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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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