Jay McGavren’s Journal

I dug out the archive of my old gaming site from 1999, and uploaded it here.

Rage Games

No need to rely on GameSpy and their ads for hosting any more. (Although it’s still up at its original location.

There’s a defunct game reviews section of the site (it’s not even linked from the main pages) that I’m trying to salvage. For your amusement, I parsed out my favorites and posted them here.

The baby is currently seeing or needs to see the following types of doctors:

-Neurosurgeon
-Plastic surgeon
-Neurologist
-Geneticist
-Urologist
-Ear/Nose/Throat specialist

The most serious problem is that a “suture” between the plates in the front of his skull fused prematurely and can’t grow properly. They’ll need to open it up and insert a piece of donor bone. This doctor has a 0% rate of major complications over 17 years, but it’s still majorly scary.

When they’re done, he’ll be normal and healthy. But this is going to be a very stressful and expensive year.
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I know nothing about Jack Kerouac, but a commenter quoted him in a friend’s blog, and I found it compelling…

“…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn…”

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There’s a study group at work for the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam; just finished leading the session for collections and generics. This is not because I have any particular expertise in the area; we just each take a turn writing a study guide and leading the discussion for each chapter.

Man, am I fried. Collections are fine, but declaring classes with parameterized types (need to make a DogList class that only takes Lists of Dogs, anyone?) was confusing to everyone at the table, not just me. Good thing we’re not likely to need any of this after the exam.
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Diana and Lenny have both been playing Viva Pinata nonstop, and I’ve got the nocturnal theme (accented by squeaky animal sounds) stuck in my head. Aaaagghh!Judy only stops by once a week or so, and has already expressed her personal hatred for the game.

Diana tolerates the following things on a daily basis that only my immediate family and closest friends can (and then only occasionally), and I love her for it:

my squeaky-voiced impressions
my digital photography (which consists of snapping 50 jillion shots, often unposed, in hopes of getting a few good ones)
my bizarre sense of humor
my long-limbed klutziness

….there’s more, but that’s what comes to mind for now.
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Diana likes the following things that only a male japanophile nerd would normally like, and I love her for it:

sushi
Tivo
Mahou Tsukai Tai!
HD television
Soul Calibur
Dead or Alive
Halo
Tetris Attack
Tenchi Muyo!
Howl’s Moving Castle
digital photography

….there’s more, but that’s what comes to mind for now.
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This was supposed to be a quick procedure, but stuff like this inexplicably didn’t work:

#DOESN'T WORK; retrieves the same page repeatedly.
25.times do |i|
	command = <<-EOF
		curl --cookie "my/cookies.txt" "http://www.netflix.com/MoviesYouveSeen?so=1&sc=0&lnkctr=ListSort_0&pageNum=#{i}" > #{i}.htm
	EOF
	puts command
	system(command)
end

At least parsing the pages did:

movies = {}
while line = gets
	title = $1 if line =~ %r|<div class="list-title">.*>(.*)</a>|
	movies[title] = $1 if line =~ %r|class=star alt="(d).d+ Stars">|
end
movies.keys.sort.each do |title|
	puts [title, movies[title]].join(”t”)
end

Once I looked everything over, there were a couple in there that simply didn’t make sense (but that reflected the ratings on the Netflix site). Either my mouse slipped, or Diana rated a couple. Anyway, here’s where my Netflix ratings stand as of now:

Continue Reading »

$160 for the Chuck E Cheese party Saturday, plus $20 for a cake (which I didn’t really get to see before it was cut to pieces). Only 5 kids showed, but there were a ton of grown-ups. It was loud and chaotic and I had no idea where Lenny was half the time.

Fortunately Holly, Amanda, Bryan and Katrina all helped with watching the baby (who slept through most of it), writing down givers of gifts, making sure people had pizza, keeping tabs on kids, etc. so that Diana and I didn’t have to do much of anything. So except for the amount of cash we spent, it was a pretty positive experience.

Heck, the pizza even tasted decent.
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All a developer should have to worry about is coding his API and *maybe* his user interface. Networking, permissions, input, rendering to the screen - all of that should be taken care of for him. He shouldn’t need to worry about whether an object will be accessed from a PC, a cell phone, or a dumb terminal on the other side of the world.Because the moment he *does* worry about any of these things, the solution he comes up with is gonna be “wrong” from *someone’s* perspective.