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

I will be giving a technical presentation about Volity to the Tuesday, April 10 meeting of the Boston Perl Mongers. The meeting runs from 7 to 9 at MIT E51-376, and it's open to the public, so you should totally come if you're in town and want to see me jabber about Volity from a hackerly standpoint. I would love to see some familiar faces in the audience!

Due to the venue, the talk will have a Perlish bent, but as it intends to introduce the Volity concept in its entirety it should prove interesting to any game hacker. Part of my goal here is to create a presentation that I can modularize for other types of audiences as appropriate - if it goes over well (and I think it will) this will be something I'll want to take to conferences.

A typical Boston.pm meeting has two presentations, and I don't know whether mine will be first or second. Yes, this conflicts with at least one local social event, but that is not in my control. Sorry!

Opening announcements by guy in purple robe .

It is the hunt room. Yay.

Mislaying my Palm shoots my whole schedule to Cucamunga and back. I raced to the Brattle, where I now sit typing, only to discover that this film doesn't start until 4:30.

I haven't knowingly been this early to a film since I went to go see Batman 12 years ago. That would have been in Ellsworth, at the Maine Coast Mall. (I think that's what it's called. It's the one with Pop's Chowder House in it.) I can't even remember who I saw it with, if anyone. My dad? Shrug.

Meant to do lots today, but hit only some of them, due to timing (maybe I will rename my consultancy (is that an actual word? Mac OS X's text editor red-underlines it) to "Late Start Productions" or something) and circumstance. Here is a little map. Imagine little prog running like Little Billy from the family circus all over a map of Cambridge, leaving a dotted line behind him as he gets into all sorts of trouble.

• Walked to Central, took the T to Davis Square. Relaxed with coffee and new Ursula K. Le Guin novel at the Diesel for a half hour or so.


• Walked to O'Reilly, intending to pick up my own draft copy of The Book. Peeked in the window, and saw only my cupped-face reflection. The office was dark! I had forgotten that the whole joint's on an involuntary two-week vacation. Foo. I had also wanted to chat with Jon about my latest grad school adventures, and print out some evaluation forms to present to the evaluaty types who work there, but it was not to be.


• Walked to Porter and took T to Kendall to make a 1pm appointment with my friend's boss at the MIT LCS. Thought I knew which building the LCS was, but I was wrong. Last year, when Noah (the friend in question) gave me a mini-tour of the campus, he pointed to a very tall building that had a giant metal ball on its roof and said: "There's the earth sciences building, with that big radome." I remembered radome, because not too long before that I was playing the PSX game "Metal Gear Solid", the endboss of which is a giant robot that you must destroy in parts, the first of which is its radar-encasing radome sphere, a word I had not heard before then. So in my mind, the connection was made: Noah == LCS == radome. After finding a phone and making two 50-cent calls to Noah, I was set straight, and the meeting occurred as planned.


• Having been once again reminded of my lack of a cell phone, I wanted to go to the phoney place, now that cthulhia had explicitly shown me where it was. But: no time!


• Had to T back home to fill out the long-delayed account-change forms for the house cable bill to my name, then tape them to the door for the former housemate to later fetch and complete, and then I


• scooted up Putnam to Harvard Square and the Brattle to see Little Otik. Once again told myself to restart my media log website.

Things went on their own from there. I met, uh, the skull-clown-nose person whose name I am too lazy to look up, visiting from SF, and after hooking up with some other locals we ate stuff at the Cambridge Common and then saw a Jim's Big Ego thing downstairs. The concert was... very.... long. It was one hour longer than Fellowship of the Ring. If it was all Jim, and half as long, and with less drunk people shouting drunken comments standing 5 feet behind me in the crowded venue, it would have been perfect.

As it was, I was happy that the evening's audience-participation thing was Napkin Poetry (where Jim does a scat riff on bits of doggerel that people write on cocktail napkins and then pile at his feet), which was different than the one I saw last time, Celebrity Deathmatch (where Jim and the band improvise songs about fighting various entities that the audience suggests (and which turns into a love song at the end)). Jim saves a few of the napkins that he reads through to make a final refrain when he's done, and two belonged to me and Karl -- my "That wasn't chicken" and his "Gravy floats". So, we felt that we had won.

The opening act was sort of lame. I can't remember his name, but he has built himself up around being "anti-folk". I suppose I felt the same way about him as I do about evangelical atheists. Why are you telling me this? I don't care enough about God or folk music to connect with either of you, I guess.

The Diesel, I see, has embraced the strange weather by removing the wintertime battens from its roll-up front facade. I still feel the need to have some token acknowledging that these temperatures shouldn't be here: I'm wearing my corduroy sportcoat, something I wouldn't do were we having this very same weather in June.

I wasn't nervous until two people at the Sunday gaming group agreed: "That's it. We're done, we're doomed. Head for high land!" While their attitude was ha-ha-only-serious, seeing any amount of fatalism in my friends still fills me with dread. This, and the constant little reminders of the oddball atmosphere (here comes Charles in the door wearing shorts, listen to the squeak of the air conditioner at the office), has put a dint on my ability to focus on things.

Internet access at home has been squidgy for over a week now, despite Charles' efforts to make the new would-be firewall machine, the scrounged Alpha, work. Last night we went shopping at Micro Center, and I picked me up a new Netgear wireless router. Though it has its own firewall capabilities, Charles wants it sitting behind the Alpha-based one if at all paossible. If we determine that the box is simply toast, we'll fall back to using the Netgear as the house firewall instead. Tonight should hold the moment of truth.

(I played with the router's Web-based configuator a little, enough to change the admin password from the factory-default "1234" (There's a tip for all you 1337 1s) (Also: insert quote from "Spaceballs" here, if you are Carla; I'll have to tell her about this and see if this triggers her automated quote mechanisms as I predict) and make its broadcast identifier string "Chez Chestnut"... @whee)

Today, though, I'm on my way back to O'Reilly to hang out (uninvited, but I'm fairly certain I'm welcome, given my goal; see below), since Internet access is out-and-out dead at Chez Chestnut, the Alpha idling with a screenful of kernel compilation error messages until we decide what to do with this mess. Charles is sincere in his belief that we can hit a working solution tonight. I just hope we can hit one before Saturday.

The pressure to not spend this Netless afternoon reading or watching movies comes from the imperitave to Finish The Book Dammit that Erik and I received yesterday. I must spend the next week and a half in hack-and-describe mode in order for this to work according to schedule. Strange and Wondeful fact: I think I can hold up my part. I don't know how, but over the last mangle of weeks (maybe since autumn) my confidence with the project has risen a lot, and stayed there. I've managed to get a lot done, and the path ahead of me seems reasonably well-defined. I'll say no more on this, though. I know myself a little too well for that. Mmm-hmm.

I'm also making progress on the other thing I told everyone I'd put off until the move was done, and have completed the first draft of my Statement of Objects essay for my MIT application and vetted it by Jon, my principal sponsor in this crazy endeavor. He filled my head with ideas for stuff the essay still needs, so that's gotta happen today, because there's now one month left for me to finish filling this thing out. I still have to choose who to tap for writing a third recommendation letter, but after speaking with Jon yesterday I have some ideas, at last.

Finally, my first-ever contracted programming job reached feature-complete stage this week. Yay. Now comes the part where the customer tells me about all the changes they need. It's just like I read about! But in this case the customers are also my dear friends, so it's all good.