05 Feb 2008
It seems that the older I get the later I am at arriving to the party.
I used to be an early adopter. Some new hardware came out for PC; I picked up the parts. A new console came out; I snapped it up. A new, highly anticipated, game hit the shelves; I bought it at release. I watched every movie in theatre. I was always there on the bleeding edge as they say.
Now, well, now things are different. I have a stack of unplayed games that, for lack of a better word, is simply daunting. I just finished Halo 3 a couple of weeks ago. I’m just now playing through Gears of War. I don’t own a copy of Call of Duty 4 yet. I haven’t even unwrapped Crysis, then again my computer also won’t play it.
I’m not sure exactly when this shift occured. I know that it was at least a few years ago.
The only way that I seem to get anything done these days is by scheduling it. One of the post-Christmas initiatives was to schedule some time to play games every Friday night with my brother-in-law. So far it has been pretty great. We have been making some good progress through great games that came out over the last year or two.
Something else that has been slipping has been blogging. I don’t seem to have as much time for it as I used to. Part of this has been the job change. I am a lot busier here than I was at my old job, so I can’t just take a morning here and there and blog.
I have also taken on a coding side project at home. I’m stripping down the open source zlib project to its bare essentials. So far it is going quite well. I’ve stripped away the majority of the code that it ships with, as well as gzip, zip and pkzip support. I just want the compression and decompression components. The point of this is to roll a well tested codec into my game engine’s codec library.
05 Feb 2008
I would like to share with you the efficiency of the Canadian Postal system. The following is the shipping status of Holly’s Birthday present:
| Date |
Time |
Location |
Event Details |
| Feb 3 2008 |
07:53:00 |
AM MISSISSAUGA ON CA |
— |
| Jan 25 2008 |
04:38:00 |
PM MISSISSAUGA ON CA |
— |
| Jan 25 2008 |
01:45:00 |
PM MISSISSAUGA ON CA |
— |
That makes it 11 days that the package has been sitting in that warehouse. They’ve moved it around a few times, but it still hasn’t left.
It had an original delivery estimate of February 1st. Clearly they failed.
I have had an insane day. I’ve been running around the studio like a chicken with its head cut off putting out fire after fire. Memory problem here, replay snafu there, weirdness everywhere.
I still have a ton of my own work to get to.
Honestly, I do have to say that it is nice to be busy though. It keeps me a lot more focused and a lot more motivated.
22 Jan 2008
This week started pretty much as poorly as weeks can start. My car was broken into. I guess this is my final rite of initiation into ghetto life.
I have to say that it was just a horrible feeling to get to the car and see that there wasn’t a front driver’s side window anymore. Then to look further in and see the contents of the glove compartment scattered all over the car.
The real kicker is that nothing was stolen. I never keep anything in my car specifically to try and keep it from becoming a target for theft.
In the end it did cost me a full day’s pay plus another couple of hundred dollars to replace the window. Hopefully I won’t need to get the electronics in the door rewired too.
I still don’t have the window replaced. That was supposed to happen this morning. Unfortunately when I was 20 minutes away from the glass place they called me and told me there had been a computer glitch. They didn’t actually have the window available. The nearest one they could find was in Edmonton and it would take until Friday to get here.
So I have an appointment for Saturday to get the window replaced. The guy is nice enough that he’s going to come in on his day off to fix it for me.
For the rest of the week I get to drive around with a nice and ugly barely transparent sheet of plastic stuck to my door. Joy…
All of this makes me miss Holly even more than I already did. I can’t wait until she gets back on Friday night. I love you Babe.
I’m expecting to be mugged any moment now.
17 Jan 2008
There is an epidemic passing through our office. It has been nicknamed The Grey Plague. One by one, almost the entire programming team has been hit by it and taken out. It seems to be really bad for a couple of days, then okay for one or two, and then really bad again for a couple of days.
I’ve been out sick two days this week and I feel bad about it. I feel physically horrible, but I still feel like I should have been in at work on those days.
When I got in today and found out just how many people had been out for 2+ days I didn’t feel quite as bad. I’m doing my best not to cough or breathe on people.
11 Jan 2008
Apparently I haven’t blogged in a while.
Well, it is now Friday and I’m still pretty much asleep so I’ll do this while I wake up.
Christmas was fantastic. I had a great time going back to see my family!
Unchristmas, which followed, was also fantastic. I got so much that I couldn’t even begin to list it all. The Zune was a complete shock. I can’t even imagine what the look on my face must have been when I was rooting through my new laptop bag and found that!
This past week we have been getting up crazy early. You see, we were given notice that there was going to be construction going on that would block off the driveway to our building. Supposedly it would be starting at 7 am, so we had to be out of the house by 7 am.
We set the alarms for 5:15 am and tried our best to make it out by 7 am. The first day we did great. We were out of the house by 6:30 am and went for breakfast. Breakfast was mostly unsuccessful for me. For some reason I just couldn’t get the omlette down. I still say that it was just too god damned early for my tastebuds and my stomach.
The second day was a little rougher. We made it out about 7:05am. No construction crew in sight.
Today, the third day, we slept in. Holly got up at 6:30 am and called the construction foreman who informed her that they wouldn’t actually be blocking off the entire driveway when they finally got around to doing the work. Back to sleep we went. I slept in until 8:15am. It was glorious.
As a side effect of this I have learned some interesting things about traffic while trying the commute at different times this week.
| Day of Week |
Time Leaving Home |
Time Arriving at Work |
Total Time |
| Average Previous Day |
8:00-8:15am |
9:30am |
75-90 minutes |
| Wednesday |
7:30am |
8:50am |
80 minutes |
| Thursday |
7:10am |
8:50am |
100 minutes |
| Friday |
8:45am |
9:30am |
45 minutes |
So what I’ve learned here is that the longer I procrastinate, the faster I get to work. That’s a great life lesson.
Interestingly the commute home gets shorter at the same rate as the commute to work. To the point that if I leave at 6pm, I get home at the same time as if I had left at 5pm. I essentially get home at the same time, no matter when I leave. It is a twilight zone-esque situation.
Other than that the only news is that I have officially started what I call “The Atkins”. I look forward to my reunion with carbohydrates.