I'm sure there was never any doubt...
…but our Halo 3 is on pre-order from Best Buy, for in-store pickup September 25th. See you all that evening.
Read more...Guess I'm an OK bartender after all.
Recipes learned this weekend:
-Mojitos -Blue Hawaiian
All girlie drinks tested and approved by our QA department (Diana and Katrina).
Read more...The slide continues...
$ itch --find "Chemical Brothers We Are the Night" --print-info "%n: %r stars" No Path to Follow: 3 stars We Are the Night: 1 stars All Rights Reversed: 2 stars Saturate: 5 stars Do It Again: 2 stars Das Spiegel: 3 stars The Salmon Dance (feat. Fatlip): 4 stars Burst Generator: 3 stars A Modern Midnight Conversation: 2 stars Battle Scars: 2 stars Harpoons: 3 stars The Pills Won't Help You Now: 3 stars
…Come on, guys. Where’s the next Dig Your Own Hole? At least Saturate was good. (Blessed, blessed distortion!)
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Man, Ruby-Gnome2 widgets are an absolute breeze. I got a GUI slapped together in four hours, and I had never even used input widgets before.
Read more...Going back to the Bhagavad Gita… I don’t have my copy handy to quote from, but it also talks about following your duty in life… I emphasize “your” there because it’s easy to find yourself doing the duties of another, in the pursuit of wealth. Your duty is determined by your inner nature, and going against it is the path to unhappiness.
I am rather literally doing the duties of another right now - the guy before me who retired. Writing convoluted programs in archaic languages to update mundane databases was this man’s nature. It is not mine. I’m being paid rather well to maintain these programs, but I am rather unhappy right now. It is my nature, and therefore my duty, to produce work that is substantially more elegant than this.
There is hope, though - evidently support for this old language might be going away, and that’s creating a drive in the organization to rewrite everything in a more modern language. It’ll be Java, of course (yech), but anything’s better than the mess we have now. My schedule’s a bit packed to be doing full rewrites, but I can barely motivate myself to keep working with the old stuff. I think I need to be looking very hard at reimplementations.
Read more...Scratch
Reminds me of Logo, but the turtle can be any sprite you want, there can be any number of turtles, and there’s sound support and collision detection. The language itself is cooler, too: I don’t remember Logo having event handlers.
Lenny wants to program a game with me, and I think this is what we’ll be doing it in.
Read more...“Desire for the fruits of one’s actions brings worry about possible failure… When you are preoccupied with end results you pull yourself from the present into an imagined, usually fearful future. Then your anxiety robs your energy and, making matters worse, you lapse into inaction and laziness. … The ideal, Arjuna, is to be intensely active and at the same time have no selfish motives, no thoughts of personal gain or loss. Duty uncontaminated by desire leads to inner peacefulness and increased effectiveness. This is the secret to living a life of real achievement!” -Krishna, The Bhagavad Gita chapter 2
Read more...Oh, the irony...
I tossed out all my anime posters when it became clear I wouldn’t be a bachelor much longer. After all, surely no woman would tolerate them decorating her house…
Well, guess who just got an Inu Yasha wall scroll from a relative for her birthday? She actually intends to hang it, too.
Read more...Went shopping for a birthday gift today, and realized a few things…
-I haven’t been to a shopping mall in about a year. -The main purpose of malls seems to be for teenagers to walk around trying to look pretty and/or tough. (This is common knowledge, of course, but it only sank in today.) -Malls contain things I don’t want to buy at prices I’m not willing to pay.
This year, I’m gonna start my Christmas shopping early enough that I can just order everything from Amazon.
Read more...Karaoke itinerary...
Time for the annual birthday celebration for the girls at First Round Draft. The playlist at this point:
Jay and Diana: Barenaked Ladies - Call and Answer Jay and Katrina: Scorpions - Wind of Change Diana: Counting Crows - Round Here Diana and Holly: Prolly some Dixie Chicks song John: Ensuring his request slip mysteriously disappears from the queue so he doesn’t have to sing
Diana hasn’t done any singing for months, nor have I. We should’ve been practicing for the past week, but 24 hours will have to do.
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