19 Jul 2007
It has been a long time since I put words in this place.
I guess it has partially been because I have been too busy with work and partially because I just didn’t seem to have anything to say.
Work has been… intense. That’s a sugar coated way to say crazy. Last weekend was the first weekend I’ve had in as long as I can remember. One good point of my first game job was that, while we might have worked absolutely insane numbers of hours during the week; we always took the weekend off. People need that time to keep from burning out.
As I haven’t had that time, I have been burning out. I’m blackened and crispy.
But, enough about work. It depresses me.
This Friday, I guess that’s tomorrow, Holly is going away on a trip with her Girl Guide Troop. She’ll be gone for 7.5 days, which is 7.4999999 days too long. We haven’t been apart for that long since Christmas. I am already missing her and she’s still here.
I honestly can’t remember what life is like without her. I don’t want to. She’s so wonderful. I love her so much. She makes me smile every single day.
18 Jun 2007
I have this irrational fear that I am slowly becoming a vegetarian. I have a slightly more irrational fear of being consumed by a bubble. To complete the trifecta, I have a slightly less irrational fear of being suffocated in my sleep by a kitten who shall remain nameless.
Irrational is a good word. Irrational fears are the best kind to have. Especially if you yourself can recognize them as being irrational; without reason or understanding. Silly is another word for it.
Real fears are much worse. I have a few of those as well. I find myself growing more and more afraid of the state of humanity as I get older. Specifically with the rate at which seemingly unimportant things start to accumulate to the point that they do indeed then become important.
A good example of this is how people can’t follow or adhere to simple rules:
Simple things like the escalators used at SkyTrain stations. They all have arrows on them that ask you to stand to the right hand side. This allows an uninterrupted flow of people who choose to walk up the escalator along the left. When someone breaks that flow, they end up with a line of angry people behind them. That one sidestep left of the posted rules impacts tens of lives.
What about the people who light up a cigarette in the middle of 15 very clearly marked no smoking signs? It is true, that they might just have put those up because they don’t think you should smoke there around other people, but what if it’s because there is a propane line, a natural gas line and an oil line that cross underneath your feet? It’s not about personal liberties at that point. It’s about the fine art of staying alive.
Things like this have been observed for years. There are entire theories about them. The Broken Windows Theory. The Tipping Point Theory. None of them have ever been conclusively proven. This leaves me wondering if you really need proof for common sense?
All it takes is one person to leave their tray on a table in the cafeteria. Soon there will be two, then three, then four, and on and on. It simply self-multiplies. People start to wonder “If they don’t have to do it, then why do I?”
I have an answer for that question. I propose what I like to refer to as the “Dumb-Ass Principle”. You have to do it, because you’re not a dumb-ass. Consequently, if you don’t do it, then you are a dumb-ass.
13 Jun 2007
Imagine this in your mind. Some really loud guitar, playing a sweet, sweet, rocking rhythm. Now bob your head back and forth; do a little head banging.
That’s my day. You see, we’re finaling at work.
What is finaling you ask? It is the process of folding time back into itself. Thickening and slowing it down like a cooling pot of caramel that is soon to become fudge. It is like the watermelon from Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension; abstract and curious.
If you were someone possessing religion, you could consider finaling a time of miracles. For truly, it is a time during which miraculous things happen (or as I have seen, it is when they let the big dogs (systems/low level/pure programmers) eat).
Most of the team is fixing bugs in the game. That is their focus. It is their purpose in life. Their reason for existing. They have giant fly swatters and use them with a reckless zealousness unknown to the world at large. I was one of them once. It seems years ago.
Then there are the rest. The last. The remainder of seven divided by four. I am one of the remainder of seven divided by four. You could call us R0S/4, SWAT, The Cleaners, The Closers; you could call us lots of things, good things and truly derogatory things.
You see, in addition to doing everything that isn’t a bug to make our product actually work and be shippable; we also fix whatever other people can’t fix. So when, we’ll just call him “Jack”, stops by to say hi; what “Jack” is actually doing is stopping to say “Hey. Did you see Bug XXXX that I forwarded to you? Yeah, I looked into it for a couple of days and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I tried to push it off on all of the other programmers and they all said a very exclamatory no. Since you aren’t allowed to say no, I’m giving it to you. Have a nice day.”
Then you see what we do, those of us in the R0S/4, is we fix it. Like last week, just some random decaffeinated morning, I made the game run twice as fast. I just sat down at my desk that day and said to myself “I want to go fast.” in a very Ricky Bobby way. So I did. I pulled the average sim time from 21ms to 10ms. I did it before lunch. People both love and hate you for doing things like that. You see you get some people who go “Yes! The game finally runs fast” and you get others who say “Well damn! I’ve been working on making the game fast for the last month with three other people… I hate you.”
So how does it all work? It’s simple really. There is a single principle at work here. For some people, stress is a killer. Stress is like a parachute behind your car as you’re trying to break a land speed record. For other people, stress is like rocket fuel. I fall into the latter category.
And while it all happens. All of the crazy little things. I bob along in my own little groove. Listening to the guitar in my head. Coding to my own beat. I don’t think everyone has that groove zone. That’s probably why they all get stressed out and go insane.
Athlete’s talk about the zone. The zone is alive and well in all things that one can do. From reading, to writing, to arithmetic. From jumping off cliffs, to running, to sleep. The only zone I can hit with any amount of relative ease is the coding zone. It’s the place where everything slows down and all of the hard things become easy. Thought and action become one and the same.
At times like this code can truly be seen as the art that it is. A gifted painter can touch the canvas with the brush and it all jumps to life, while the average artist, only able to make stick men, can cover the canvas in paint ten times over and it still won’t work, and when it does, you can see the evil of bloat radiating from it.
The part that really sucks though, is when you miss date night because you have to work :(
05 Jun 2007
Last night Holly and I went out to the birthday dinner of one of my best friends. It was a fun adventure for everyone as we all finally got to meet his new girlfriend.
I have to say that it was all a success. She seems great for him. They make a cute couple.
While we were out at the dinner the cats were at home doing truly foul deeds. By accident of course.
When we walked in the door the first thing I noticed was that the freezer door was open. Max, our three year old cat, has decided recently that he really likes to sleep up on the cupboards over top of the refrigerator. We had just brought home a few groceries the night before. A lot of these groceries were piled on top of the refrigerator, and this didn’t give Max much room up there. It appears he was probably standing right on the lip of the freezer door when he tried to launch himself up and over everything to his spot on top of the cupboards.
I can see it all very clearly in my head. That first moment as he hunkers down and tries to push off with his hind legs. The thrust of his feet pushing open the freezer door. That first moment of surprise as he realizes that his back half moved further back, instead of his front half moving further up. And then, the falling. Dropping backward toward the floor with no control. That would have bothered Max the most.
Of course, by the time we actually got home everything had already happened. We were left with a mass of melted and ruined food in the freezer that had to be thrown away and cleaned up. Melted ice cream bars. Thawed out black bananas. It was a chaotic site. There was a pool of I don’t know what, and I hope I never know what, in one of the curved shelves on the door. It was emitting an absolutely putrid stench.
Hopefully when we get home tonight the freezer door will still be closed.
31 May 2007
Well, it turns out that there won’t be any grand adventure in San Francisco. I’m still not completely sure how I feel about it. A little bit sad. A little bit relieved.
I guess now it is time to focus a little more here locally in the here and now and figure out what will be happening after this project.
There are certainly things that I would like to do on my current project next year. I’m not sure if they will let me, but I need to do them for my own sanity.
At the same time, a new project could also be interesting.