Jay McGavren’s Journal

I wonder what the limit is on the number of enemies Geometry Wars can throw at you at once? ‘Cause I don’t think I’ve hit it yet, and I had 100-150 objects on the screen.

This game blows Robotron 2084 out of the water, BTW.

I was running late this morning, and when I walked into the office it was completely empty. Crap, I thought, today must be the off-site meeting. I looked up the address and raced off, in gross violation of the speed limit. Arrived at the meeting site to find an empty parking lot there, too.

I headed back to work to doublecheck the address and time, wondering if my boss would write me up for this one. I run into Dean, who works in the cube across from me, and in a half-panic ask him where the off-site meeting is. “That’s tomorrow,” he says. “Then where is everyone?” I gasp. “It’s MLK Day,” he says. “I’m just here to drop off a photo someone ordered.”

Whew. I seriously had no idea that my new company took Martin Luther King Jr. Day off. Well, now I’m just annoyed that I drove all this way needlessly. (When your commute is as long as mine, it’s not a trip to make lightly.) Guess I’ll spend some time coding on Zyps, since I have a nice quiet office to do it in.

That’s my top score thus far on Geometry Wars (XBox, not XBox 360). My thumbs are about ready to fall off, but God, I love this game. Thanks go to for the recommendation!

> From: Me
> To: Gary
> Subject: Holy crap…
>
> $ rm -r /cvs
> rm: remove write-protected regular file
> ‘/cvs/foobar/Attic/DateComparator.java,v’?
> ^C
>
> Can you help me figure out how much damage I did?
>
> -Jay

For those who don’t know, CVS is a program used for storing source code. An entire development department’s source code is usually stored in a single directory. And “rm -r” nukes entire directories (and all subdirectories).

Someone up there must like me, because that “write-protected file” was the very first thing it hit, and I cancelled it immediately. Otherwise, it would have nuked the entire department’s work (for the day, at least). In Gary’s words, they would have had to string me up.