Jay McGavren's Journal

I feel much better now.

I was reading an op-ed about the coming oil crisis when I had a thought. A thought much broader than the energy crisis or the environmental crisis or the democratic process crisis or any of the other crises we face today. And it’s a thought that’s been had before, so I’ll just borrow the words it was phrased in before:

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Of course we’re facing an oil crisis and an environmental crisis. We haven’t invented alternatives to fossil fuels, because it’s never been necessary before. Now it is, so we will. Of course we’re concerned about the lack of voter-verifiable paper trails. But now that we’ve realized they’re (still) necessary, we’ll (re-)invent them.

Insert your favorite emergency here, and then relax. As soon as people start dying from it, the solution is coming.

Attempting to run Zyps on Linux (Fedora Core 5) has been unproductive at best. Part of the problem is Ruby-Gnome2. wxRuby seems to be a bit more respected (and has better Mac support), so it’s time for a few experiments…

Ugh.

Baby was up at 6:30 this morning after sleeping about 6 hours. I got about 5, for the third time this week. I’m so tired I’m dizzy.

Configuring a new (used) Fedora box at work. If I was more used to Linux’s quirks I would probably enjoy setting up a new system, but right now it’s just a pain.

I was picking Lenny up from school today, and I walked by a fourth or fifth grader who was asking his friend, “So does the Master Chief die?”

Halo 3...

Jeremy and Nate had the good sense to get to bed at 1 AM (their time). Why didn’t we?

Halo 3 isn’t spectacular, just rock-solid. On a system plagued by connection issues, it hooked us up to people 2,000 miles away without a hitch. In an era where split-screen gameplay is rapidly being abandoned, my wife and I were both playing co-op (not just deathmatch) over Live. We fired up the movie editor and reviewed a game that was (automatically!) saved, and marvelled at explosions frozen in time with a flick of the pause button.

I am not a game developer, but I know enough to know these features were not easy to implement. They required careful forethought, and in some cases, intentional sacrifices in game performance. And they are great. It’s nice to see a company care about the overall quality of the game experience, rather than fitting a few more polygons into the back-of-box screenshots. I hope they license the movie, party, and lobby features as a framework, because I know other developers won’t (can’t?) do this stuff if they have to code it from scratch.