prog | Entries tagged with frivolity

Thursday: Worked from home. Lunch with M. She provided what she claimed to be her first attempt at soup; I think she is not correct here, but anyway, it was very good. We talked about something that, in my thinking about it a little while ago, moved me to start this post, but now I cannot remember it. I will instead randomly say that M uses the Spanish words caliente and picante when she wants to specifically refer to a food's temperature-heat or spice-heat (respectively) and that's so handy that I'll start doing it myself, I bet.

Friday: No MFA with

colorwheel because it would have involved a significant amount of walking, and it was Just Too Cold. Hoping to make up for this week sometime.

At work, styled up one project's Web interface and took a screen shot that Boss will present at a department-wide Monday meeting. Absurdly nervous, just because it contains a real researcher's name and a tiny bit of numeric data (out of context and therefore meaningless). Like I'm afraid he'll stand up and thunder "That is not my data! This is an outrage!! The Royal Society shall hear of this!" I dunno, I'm a spaz.

After work, Annie's Mac (it's so cold that I'm actually cooking and eating the food in my kitchen), Stargate SG-1 with

cthulhia. Pomegranate eaten. Decided to be insane and attend

jhango's hastily scheduled 2^30 party, celebrating that many seconds having passed since the Unix clock started, some 34 years ago. The precise moment wouldn't arrive until early Saturday, so she declared a Friday all-night thing. Shmike and I were the only ones to stay through the whole event, which is fine, since he is one of the few people in this group who is as good or better at twitchy video games than me, and video games were the predominant activity, so. Cthulhia there at the start (and we got in a few games of David Crane's "Freeway" via jhango's copy of the PS2 Activision collection), and the Freaks arrived the next morning, in time to see the new bit come in. We watched its arrival through a script that displayed the current time as one big, green, OCR-font binary number, and that explains that strange photograph, for those who were asking.

Saturday, after getting home, was: shower, work on Volity a bit, watch TV, sleep.

Sunday was a busy day. Mostly in Volity-land. Packaged up the latest Frivolity release and put it on SourceForge. Created a new website for Volity, which looks very nice. Wrote a long email explaining Volity programming concepts to the client developer, who so far is proving his value more as an asker of challenging questions (which force me to think and write answers that will surely show up in the book) than anything else, and I surely can't complain.

Next weekend is The Hunt!! I must really set aside some time before then to go over the warm-up puzzles. I have a feeling that no matter what I do I'll feel overwhelmed once the time actually arrives.

This week has been quite fun and productive so far. Swung back into the groove at work fairly well, and got back into Frivolity code hacking. Got the test suite, running on my laptop, to work locally, and again when pointed at the new volity.net Jabber server that

daerr set up. Hope to post a bugfix release by this weekend, and then start in on the new stuff that K will need for his client to work correctly.

Good game night yesterday, for me.

dougo suggested we play Currents, which I haven't tried in years. Playing with three highly critical game geeks resulted in many rule-change suggestions being collected, some of which I can't wait to try. One in particular makes me especially excited because it might let me do away with those lame Goaltending rules. The last time I worked on the game, I was puzzling about how to fix Goaltending; it didn't occur to me to just throw out the rule entirely, making the game simpler, which now strikes me as something to strive for. I like to think this is a reflection of my growth as a writer/programmer since then!

Also got to talk about Volity with this group for the first time, which was neat. (It was a natural segue, as playing Currents reminded me that it was one of the reasons I started to invent Volity -- I wanted to be able to rapidly create computer versions of new board game ideas, allowing me to test them out with both humans and bots.) I also got to show off my pure-SVG/ECMAScript rock-paper-scissors game (sorry, not on the Web yet, though it probably should be), running in Squiggle. Oh, and I learned to pronounce "Batik" correctly, since it hadn't occurred to me Google for its real-wordedness. (It's [bə-TEEK].)

(And, link of the day: IPA alphabet table with Unicode keys and full names, the latter of which I've never seen before. All the letters are named, not after their sound, but after the position or activity of lip, tongue, tooth and lung necessary to produce the sound. Yes, you've known this for years, but it's new to me.)

And I won a hand of Lamarckian poker! And then Shmike won with a royal flush (of the strongest suit, too) and rightly declared victory over the entire concept of that game. (In Volity vocabulary he could have said, "I have beaten the ruleset", or colloquially "I have beaten this URI".)

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A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

That's awful high, Jason. That's awful high.

Entries tagged with frivolity

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