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A little late
Oct. 30th, 2008 10:12 pmCongratulations, Philadelphia. We remember how it feels, over here. (And then some.)
use Antigravity;
May. 10th, 2008 09:49 amMan, nothing was bumming me out so much yesterday as learning that Randall "xkcd" Munroe publicly switched his (non-Lisp) programming allegiance from Perl to Python. I read that cartoon when it was new, but I didn't bother rolling over the alt text (I seldom do) until ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
radtea made reference to it yesterday. Munroe drew the cartoon just a few months after drawing a great one that celebrated Perl (if somewhat backhandedly), so I just thought he was giving equal measure to both languages.
I don't know why I care about stuff like this, but it seems that I do. It's pragmatically meaningless to me; jobs.perl.org continues to have more postings every month than the one before, and the rare times I run into a direct challenge of Perl's authority in my professional life, I have always been able to swat it down easily. (I mean, usually they're something like "So-and-so told me that Perl is just a glue language, and it's outdated even for that. And that it's ugly and unmaintainable! He said we should use PHP instead." Hurr.)
And it's not like I'm against learning new languages. I'm picking up C# for another project, right now. (Yes, there's an overdue post there.) But switching one's home language in a particular work-area, and then flaunting it (while being an in-circles ultra-popular cartoonist), I dunno. Imagine a media personality you enjoy, and who happens to be a Red Sox fan, going onto the Daily Show to renounce the team and put on NY pinstripes while the audience cheers. (Er, also imagine that you grew up in a Boston-area sports-loving house, OK?) I feel like that. It's nothing that affects me directly, but I still feel a loss, somewhere.
radtea made reference to it yesterday. Munroe drew the cartoon just a few months after drawing a great one that celebrated Perl (if somewhat backhandedly), so I just thought he was giving equal measure to both languages.I don't know why I care about stuff like this, but it seems that I do. It's pragmatically meaningless to me; jobs.perl.org continues to have more postings every month than the one before, and the rare times I run into a direct challenge of Perl's authority in my professional life, I have always been able to swat it down easily. (I mean, usually they're something like "So-and-so told me that Perl is just a glue language, and it's outdated even for that. And that it's ugly and unmaintainable! He said we should use PHP instead." Hurr.)
And it's not like I'm against learning new languages. I'm picking up C# for another project, right now. (Yes, there's an overdue post there.) But switching one's home language in a particular work-area, and then flaunting it (while being an in-circles ultra-popular cartoonist), I dunno. Imagine a media personality you enjoy, and who happens to be a Red Sox fan, going onto the Daily Show to renounce the team and put on NY pinstripes while the audience cheers. (Er, also imagine that you grew up in a Boston-area sports-loving house, OK?) I feel like that. It's nothing that affects me directly, but I still feel a loss, somewhere.
What's new
Oct. 8th, 2007 09:46 pmI stopped panicking about money after I was reminded that my accounts receivable has got stuff in it. This is not money in the bank, but it is the next best thing, and it's from clients who are good about paying on-time. I am fine.
All that said, looking for more work remains my ay-numbah-wun priority. Things I did this afternoon included uploading my resume to dice.com and setting up Google Reader to start eating various job sites' RSS feeds. I was pleased to see that many sites let you subscribe to feeds with search strings attached, and happy to see that, say, "perl telecommute" is rather well represented.
The Andys and I met for an in-person webclient test this evening, and quickly found some zonkers that I wouldn't have ever found by myself. On the other hand, the damn thing is running on a volity.net subdomain and actually working in every other way. I'll fix these bugs in the next day or two and resubmit them to my colleagues. It would be nice to agree that it works before I vanish for vacation on Saturday. (Well before, actually.)
But, yeah. It's October, so there is now undeniable schedule slip. But there's equally undeniable release-type activity happening now, so I am not sad.
Saturday nightmr_choronzon had a little birthday gathering. I was reminded that I forgot to blog about one of the most WTF things that's happened to me this year, when he and I and lone_phaedrus were hanging out at his place a few weeks ago. Somehow the conversation turned to nunchucks, which is allowed because Mr. P is a ninja. Mr. C's reaction to this was to produce a pair of nunchucks and commence to flipping them around with the genuine skill and confidence of someone's demo reel.
I was as WTF about this as you'd be if, like, some random friend of yours suddenly did exactly the same thing. I guess it'd be less completely reality-jarring if we were all, like, 15, but this was just odd. In a delightful way.
All that said, looking for more work remains my ay-numbah-wun priority. Things I did this afternoon included uploading my resume to dice.com and setting up Google Reader to start eating various job sites' RSS feeds. I was pleased to see that many sites let you subscribe to feeds with search strings attached, and happy to see that, say, "perl telecommute" is rather well represented.
The Andys and I met for an in-person webclient test this evening, and quickly found some zonkers that I wouldn't have ever found by myself. On the other hand, the damn thing is running on a volity.net subdomain and actually working in every other way. I'll fix these bugs in the next day or two and resubmit them to my colleagues. It would be nice to agree that it works before I vanish for vacation on Saturday. (Well before, actually.)
But, yeah. It's October, so there is now undeniable schedule slip. But there's equally undeniable release-type activity happening now, so I am not sad.
Saturday night
mr_choronzon had a little birthday gathering. I was reminded that I forgot to blog about one of the most WTF things that's happened to me this year, when he and I and lone_phaedrus were hanging out at his place a few weeks ago. Somehow the conversation turned to nunchucks, which is allowed because Mr. P is a ninja. Mr. C's reaction to this was to produce a pair of nunchucks and commence to flipping them around with the genuine skill and confidence of someone's demo reel. I was as WTF about this as you'd be if, like, some random friend of yours suddenly did exactly the same thing. I guess it'd be less completely reality-jarring if we were all, like, 15, but this was just odd. In a delightful way.
Maze thing, again
Oct. 1st, 2007 01:27 amSpent Saturday stomping around the Davis cornfield maze thing in Sterling with friends. From pre-maze breakfast to post-maze dinner the whole adventure took close to 10 hours, somehow. It was OK but I this will be my last one for a long time. I love the concept of life-size mazes, and I love seeing "normal" people attracted in great numbers to unusual games like this. But as for me, I've seen enough of them for the time being.
I have been able to get into the spirit before, but when I'm not I just end up following someone else until I'm bored and tired and ready to do something else. And then I look up and discover I'm stuck in the middle of a giant maze. Doh.
Deeply unfortunate: Apparentlydictator555 and company got stuck in a loop because some pranksters rearranged some of the maze's many DO NOT ENTER sawhorses specifically to trap people. It took them a long time to figure this out, and they emerged an hour or so after everyone else. This makes me sad. It feels like a betrayal, even though it isn't the maze's fault.
I have been able to get into the spirit before, but when I'm not I just end up following someone else until I'm bored and tired and ready to do something else. And then I look up and discover I'm stuck in the middle of a giant maze. Doh.
Deeply unfortunate: Apparently
dictator555 and company got stuck in a loop because some pranksters rearranged some of the maze's many DO NOT ENTER sawhorses specifically to trap people. It took them a long time to figure this out, and they emerged an hour or so after everyone else. This makes me sad. It feels like a betrayal, even though it isn't the maze's fault.Crazy weekend. There were the movies on Friday, then shopping and cleaning on Saturday (I bought nice new shoes, by god), and Sunday held more mini golfing and, finally, a video game party of the sort I've been threatening for a long time.
Golf was all right. It was kind of a cheesy course out in Billerica thatdougo had happened across earlier. He, classicaljunkie, dianamp04 and I hit the greens, which were decorated with lumpy Fiberglas dinosaurs and bunnies and chipmunks. The holes were oddly cruel, relying heavily on subtle topographic twists to send balls into forsaken corners or even flip them off of the green entirely. We each maxed out the stroke limit several times, and I didn't feel that the course was clever or pretty enough (that the water was shut off didn't help) to justify its meanness. I like Kimball Farms' mini golf better, and still hope to play on a really nutty windmills-and-all course sometime soon. (Suggestions welcome.)
The video game thing went splendidly. Thirteen people mooshed into my apartment at peak; I went so far as to set up a table in the kitchen but it didn't get used because everyone was in the front rooms Wiiing, DSing, or playing board games. Several people were exposed to the Wii for the first time, and after lots of the mandatory Tennis there was WarioWare and Mario Party and Monkey Ball ahoy.
I am under the impression that half or more of my guests didn't really play video games at all until the recent advent of physically engaging home games, from DDR through Guitar Hero and on into the Wii. It is a Good Thing.
I got some comments early on that both my TV and my living room were kind of small, but I think everyone had fun. I certainly had fun being host! I don't do that very often.
Oh, what else... the client slid some work at me after I was like "dude?" at them, and I finished the Jmac's Arcade but will sit on it until I hear back from the band owning the music I like. Half of them did in fact write me back, and advised me to wait until the other half got back from vacation after Labor Day. In any other situation I'd just go ahead with what I have but since the thing's like five months overdue I may as well stick it out another week.
In Volity-land, I'm in the process of insinuating the successful test-firing from two weeks ago (already? sheesh) into a branch of the volity.net website. It's tricky and I'm trying to do right by my future selves who will have to maintain what eventually comes out of it, the poor bastards, so I am not predicting that there'll be demos in August. Early September, I bet. As per my annual habit I'm retreating to Maine for the long weekend and plan on making a working vacation out of it.
Broke personal policy to make a post to the Looneys' "geeks" mailing list tonight, finding myself completely unable to keep my mouth shut after a thread with people wishing that there were some way to play Treehouse on the web. Well... uh, there still isn't! But there will be, this year, since the first thing we're gonna wanna do around the pre-beta phase will involve porting over our current games. I normally avoid writing about all the totally awesome stuff duuuude that I'm working on oh boy you'll be so impressed, a firm believer that the more you pump that sort of thing up the further from your grip it floats. But in this case, I really can't see a reason why it won't happen, lawd willing and the crick don't rise.
Golf was all right. It was kind of a cheesy course out in Billerica that
dougo had happened across earlier. He, classicaljunkie, dianamp04 and I hit the greens, which were decorated with lumpy Fiberglas dinosaurs and bunnies and chipmunks. The holes were oddly cruel, relying heavily on subtle topographic twists to send balls into forsaken corners or even flip them off of the green entirely. We each maxed out the stroke limit several times, and I didn't feel that the course was clever or pretty enough (that the water was shut off didn't help) to justify its meanness. I like Kimball Farms' mini golf better, and still hope to play on a really nutty windmills-and-all course sometime soon. (Suggestions welcome.)The video game thing went splendidly. Thirteen people mooshed into my apartment at peak; I went so far as to set up a table in the kitchen but it didn't get used because everyone was in the front rooms Wiiing, DSing, or playing board games. Several people were exposed to the Wii for the first time, and after lots of the mandatory Tennis there was WarioWare and Mario Party and Monkey Ball ahoy.
I am under the impression that half or more of my guests didn't really play video games at all until the recent advent of physically engaging home games, from DDR through Guitar Hero and on into the Wii. It is a Good Thing.
I got some comments early on that both my TV and my living room were kind of small, but I think everyone had fun. I certainly had fun being host! I don't do that very often.
Oh, what else... the client slid some work at me after I was like "dude?" at them, and I finished the Jmac's Arcade but will sit on it until I hear back from the band owning the music I like. Half of them did in fact write me back, and advised me to wait until the other half got back from vacation after Labor Day. In any other situation I'd just go ahead with what I have but since the thing's like five months overdue I may as well stick it out another week.
In Volity-land, I'm in the process of insinuating the successful test-firing from two weeks ago (already? sheesh) into a branch of the volity.net website. It's tricky and I'm trying to do right by my future selves who will have to maintain what eventually comes out of it, the poor bastards, so I am not predicting that there'll be demos in August. Early September, I bet. As per my annual habit I'm retreating to Maine for the long weekend and plan on making a working vacation out of it.
Broke personal policy to make a post to the Looneys' "geeks" mailing list tonight, finding myself completely unable to keep my mouth shut after a thread with people wishing that there were some way to play Treehouse on the web. Well... uh, there still isn't! But there will be, this year, since the first thing we're gonna wanna do around the pre-beta phase will involve porting over our current games. I normally avoid writing about all the totally awesome stuff duuuude that I'm working on oh boy you'll be so impressed, a firm believer that the more you pump that sort of thing up the further from your grip it floats. But in this case, I really can't see a reason why it won't happen, lawd willing and the crick don't rise.
Wikistumbling OTD: Kirkwall Ba Game
Aug. 23rd, 2007 12:24 amThe Kirkwall Ba Game sounds a little like something from Zarf's Left Foot Living Review universe, but it's actually from Scotland.
Lethal! En, forcers! Player one! *bang*
Jul. 19th, 2007 01:07 pmToday's Wikipedia featured article is about fighting in hockey and I read the whole thing. I found it fascinating because I grew up in a hockey-loving house (by virtue of my brother Peter being in it) and watched and enjoyed countless Bruins games on television, and then went on to a hockey college and couldn't help but follow all our boys' (and, separately but lesserly, ladies') exploits there, and still I had no concept at all until now of NHL teams having unofficial "enforcer" players who protect the smaller players, punish perceived transgressions, and generally only fight with other enforcers. This is apparently a tradition far older than I.
I haven't followed or even thought much about hockey in years, and now it all seems rather bizarre for the reason the article states, that there's no other professional team sport in the western world that tolerates and even encourages on-field pugilistics like North American hockey. When I was a kid it seemed as natural as anything but now it strikes me as the output of unregulated testosterone poisoning, and simply distasteful. The purposeful and oddly abstract tackles and collisions in American football is just as physical but a hundred times more nuanced. (As is the checking and such in hockey, sure.)
(Subject line is what the arcade machine "Lethal Enforcers" would say when you put a quarter in and then started a one-player game, and otherwise has nothing to do with anything.)
I haven't followed or even thought much about hockey in years, and now it all seems rather bizarre for the reason the article states, that there's no other professional team sport in the western world that tolerates and even encourages on-field pugilistics like North American hockey. When I was a kid it seemed as natural as anything but now it strikes me as the output of unregulated testosterone poisoning, and simply distasteful. The purposeful and oddly abstract tackles and collisions in American football is just as physical but a hundred times more nuanced. (As is the checking and such in hockey, sure.)
(Subject line is what the arcade machine "Lethal Enforcers" would say when you put a quarter in and then started a one-player game, and otherwise has nothing to do with anything.)
Weekend report.
Jun. 18th, 2007 10:36 amIt has been a full weekend.
Saturday saw a lot of Volity hacking, breaking ground on the web client's server-side component. Once the complete skeleton is built I'll commit it as v0.1, but my fugue state didn't last more than a few hours and I had to be all "whoah" and raise my hands and step away before I could quite get there. Maybe I'll finish it today. Anyway, this will be the first Perl-based Volity sub-project that I've started since I got religion via Perl Best Practices, which taught me to start major projects by writing the tests (and, in so doing, designing the interface) first. So that's exciting. If you're me.
In the evening,radiotelescope, cthulhia and I saw Day Watch, the sequel to last year's Night Watch, a.k.a. the crazy Russian vampire movie that everyone except for me and the people I saw it with hated. I liked this movie too, though not as much as the first. It replaced the crazy imagery and action of the first movie with some fun plot development. I dug it, but I missed the other stuff. It also contained one completely irritating character, who (among other things) failed Mo's Movie Measure the instant that she was able. Worse was that this occurred during an egregious and overlong "Freaky Friday" sequence, and so I spent five or six minutes in a sustained wince in the middle of this otherwise enjoyable flick, and that was unfortunate.
Sunday wasclassicaljunkie's birthday! Following plans that dougo initiated a while ago, and also accompanied by Cthulhia, we drove to Kimball Farms to play miniature golf, or "putt-putt" as CJ calls it in her native language. I hadn't played since I was a kid but I'll be damned if I still didn't have reasonably good chops for it. My friends laughed when I said it was all the golfing video games I play, but I wasn't entirely joking! The place has two courses, and we played both, with me winning the first round and CJ the second (after Cth left), though the point spread was fairly tight.
The courses were enjoyable but rather bland, with one real standout whose like I had never seen before: one hole split in a vee a few feet away from the tee, with one arm snaking towards the cup in the usual fashion, and the other dumping into an artificial stream. As it turns out, the best solution involves purposefully putting into the water, which carries your ball under a platform and through a hidden tube, ejecting it right at the cup. But there's no explicit documentation about this; you either need to watch someone do it, or be intrepid enough to figure that there had to be some reason for the hole's stairway-to-nowhere design, making the leap of faith yourself. Doug was the brave one in our party, and he and I both got holes in one.
The rest of the course was really nothing special, but I just couldn't shut up about that one hole. Great design!
Also did some unexpected networking: the dad of the family playing behind us turned out to be a publisher of some computer and video game magazines from the 1980s and 90s that I loved as a kid! He couldn't help but overhear Doug and I talk about Volity and iPhones and such, and we chatted for a while. he was interested to hear about my startup, so I need to email him a little follow-up today. Had no business cards on hand, but wrote my info on the back of an extra scorecard for him.
Then we went to dinner withdictator555, at Pigalle, in the Boylston vicinity. This was the first time I'd really experienced a fancy-dan restaurant where you pay exorbitantly for very little edible mass. It felt like something from a New Yorker cartoon. I ordered a $15 a menu item describing itself as gnocchi, and it meant this quite literally, featuring a gnocchi, one single piece, on a little bed of vegetables; an island in an otherwise large and empty plate. I did appreciate this, though perhaps not in the way they meant me to.
It was delicious, what there was, and I also quite enjoyed the sampling that my dining companions allowed me from their dishes. I said that I'd consider returning the next time I felt the need to really impress someone.
Saturday saw a lot of Volity hacking, breaking ground on the web client's server-side component. Once the complete skeleton is built I'll commit it as v0.1, but my fugue state didn't last more than a few hours and I had to be all "whoah" and raise my hands and step away before I could quite get there. Maybe I'll finish it today. Anyway, this will be the first Perl-based Volity sub-project that I've started since I got religion via Perl Best Practices, which taught me to start major projects by writing the tests (and, in so doing, designing the interface) first. So that's exciting. If you're me.
In the evening,
radiotelescope, cthulhia and I saw Day Watch, the sequel to last year's Night Watch, a.k.a. the crazy Russian vampire movie that everyone except for me and the people I saw it with hated. I liked this movie too, though not as much as the first. It replaced the crazy imagery and action of the first movie with some fun plot development. I dug it, but I missed the other stuff. It also contained one completely irritating character, who (among other things) failed Mo's Movie Measure the instant that she was able. Worse was that this occurred during an egregious and overlong "Freaky Friday" sequence, and so I spent five or six minutes in a sustained wince in the middle of this otherwise enjoyable flick, and that was unfortunate.Sunday was
classicaljunkie's birthday! Following plans that dougo initiated a while ago, and also accompanied by Cthulhia, we drove to Kimball Farms to play miniature golf, or "putt-putt" as CJ calls it in her native language. I hadn't played since I was a kid but I'll be damned if I still didn't have reasonably good chops for it. My friends laughed when I said it was all the golfing video games I play, but I wasn't entirely joking! The place has two courses, and we played both, with me winning the first round and CJ the second (after Cth left), though the point spread was fairly tight.The courses were enjoyable but rather bland, with one real standout whose like I had never seen before: one hole split in a vee a few feet away from the tee, with one arm snaking towards the cup in the usual fashion, and the other dumping into an artificial stream. As it turns out, the best solution involves purposefully putting into the water, which carries your ball under a platform and through a hidden tube, ejecting it right at the cup. But there's no explicit documentation about this; you either need to watch someone do it, or be intrepid enough to figure that there had to be some reason for the hole's stairway-to-nowhere design, making the leap of faith yourself. Doug was the brave one in our party, and he and I both got holes in one.
The rest of the course was really nothing special, but I just couldn't shut up about that one hole. Great design!
Also did some unexpected networking: the dad of the family playing behind us turned out to be a publisher of some computer and video game magazines from the 1980s and 90s that I loved as a kid! He couldn't help but overhear Doug and I talk about Volity and iPhones and such, and we chatted for a while. he was interested to hear about my startup, so I need to email him a little follow-up today. Had no business cards on hand, but wrote my info on the back of an extra scorecard for him.
Then we went to dinner with
dictator555, at Pigalle, in the Boylston vicinity. This was the first time I'd really experienced a fancy-dan restaurant where you pay exorbitantly for very little edible mass. It felt like something from a New Yorker cartoon. I ordered a $15 a menu item describing itself as gnocchi, and it meant this quite literally, featuring a gnocchi, one single piece, on a little bed of vegetables; an island in an otherwise large and empty plate. I did appreciate this, though perhaps not in the way they meant me to.It was delicious, what there was, and I also quite enjoyed the sampling that my dining companions allowed me from their dishes. I said that I'd consider returning the next time I felt the need to really impress someone.
"Fever Pitch" (U.S. version) micro-review
Sep. 29th, 2005 11:28 pmMeh: romantic comedy; meh: "normal" people; meh: women incapable of conversation topics among themselves besides men. (I am being strict counting a (male) boss and a father as "men" here, but that was only one brief conversation apiece. Everything else was husbands & boyfriends, real & potential, which is all that movie-women usually ever have to talk to each other about.)
Kind of unfair because duh I knew it would be a romantic comedy and the latter two meh are formulaic elements thereof. I wanted to see it anyway because E&R loved it (though I find myself listening only to E these days, because R lately strikes me a total ass). I liked it for the same reasons they did, depicting how a truefan's obsession can get in the way of romance, especially when said fan can no longer walk away from it than he could his religion. Which is to say: he could, and many movies would take the easy love-conquers-all route, but this one doesn't play it like that, and it works. I guess. Speaking as one who hates romantic comedies. Which this was.
And I liked all the Boston stuff of course (loved the establishing shot of the old Hancock reflected in the new one; I mean, I see exactly that every time I ride the Red Line but it's neat to see it in a movie as a visual shorthand for "we are in Boston now"), and all the Red Sox stuff. There were some nice carefully researched bits, my favorite being the male lead's ballcap. He never talks about it but it's clearly his years-old lucky cap, just as you'd find atop real-life hard-core fans. It's filthy -- there are deep salt stains on it in mid-summer -- and according tojhango the "B" logo on it is old-style, without a white border. (His friends sitting beside him wear newer caps, as a clue to the viewer.)
Bonus meh for multiple "ball washer" jokes and uncomfortable-gay-moment jokes. Oh you Farrelly brothers, you couldn't help yourselves, could you. Minus half-a-meh for a great blooper reel, and the DVD's inclusion of the film's original ending, where the Sox lose. (We didn't watch it. Minutes later, the Sox won their game against Toronto iRL. Coincidence??)
I am reminded that I really want to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which from all that I understand is an entirely un-formulaic romantic comedy. And therefore might not even be a romantic comedy even if it's funny and there's a romantic relationship as its driving force. I also have the intriguing comment fromtemvald that the main character in that one (Jim Carrey in one of his "no really it's not a Jim Carrey movie" roles (yeah, speaking of the Farrellys) (I think also I'm conflating him with Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love here but who's counting)) is reminiscent of me. Were I in that situation, anyway.
Kind of unfair because duh I knew it would be a romantic comedy and the latter two meh are formulaic elements thereof. I wanted to see it anyway because E&R loved it (though I find myself listening only to E these days, because R lately strikes me a total ass). I liked it for the same reasons they did, depicting how a truefan's obsession can get in the way of romance, especially when said fan can no longer walk away from it than he could his religion. Which is to say: he could, and many movies would take the easy love-conquers-all route, but this one doesn't play it like that, and it works. I guess. Speaking as one who hates romantic comedies. Which this was.
And I liked all the Boston stuff of course (loved the establishing shot of the old Hancock reflected in the new one; I mean, I see exactly that every time I ride the Red Line but it's neat to see it in a movie as a visual shorthand for "we are in Boston now"), and all the Red Sox stuff. There were some nice carefully researched bits, my favorite being the male lead's ballcap. He never talks about it but it's clearly his years-old lucky cap, just as you'd find atop real-life hard-core fans. It's filthy -- there are deep salt stains on it in mid-summer -- and according to
jhango the "B" logo on it is old-style, without a white border. (His friends sitting beside him wear newer caps, as a clue to the viewer.)Bonus meh for multiple "ball washer" jokes and uncomfortable-gay-moment jokes. Oh you Farrelly brothers, you couldn't help yourselves, could you. Minus half-a-meh for a great blooper reel, and the DVD's inclusion of the film's original ending, where the Sox lose. (We didn't watch it. Minutes later, the Sox won their game against Toronto iRL. Coincidence??)
I am reminded that I really want to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which from all that I understand is an entirely un-formulaic romantic comedy. And therefore might not even be a romantic comedy even if it's funny and there's a romantic relationship as its driving force. I also have the intriguing comment from
temvald that the main character in that one (Jim Carrey in one of his "no really it's not a Jim Carrey movie" roles (yeah, speaking of the Farrellys) (I think also I'm conflating him with Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love here but who's counting)) is reminiscent of me. Were I in that situation, anyway.OK, just glarmfed in all the changes I've made throughout the Book over the last month, and declared that to be The Second Draft, Dammit. Erik is now busily prepping it for production. This gives him no additional stress, since this is what he does all day long with other books, anyway.
Last night I went out for coffee at 10:00 pm after declaring to Carla that I was going to pull an all-nighter. Upon my return, I messed around on the Net for four hours and then went to bed.
(Truth: I don't think caffeine has any appreciable effect on me after a certain point in my daily cycle. But that's not really the point of this story.)
I have done all I can with this thing for now. It will be a good book, and yet I take frustration from the fact that it won't be mine, not really. It's half-or-more Erik's words, in the end, and it's not on a topic I feel really impassioned about. I'm too tired to be proud of it yet.
Maybe tomorrow.
For now, hum. I should go watch a movie or something. On second thought, it's too cruddy out. Movie tomorrow. I go to Micro Center again and buy extremely time-wasting game. Mm: and tell Arcus that I'm ready to work again. $$$.
My entire opinion of the Superbowl thingy:
While walking around outside and thinking about stuff, I realized that the Rams' helmet design, with the stylized spiral on either side, suggests that the players' heads are actually horned, as per their team's eponymous animal. I find that kind of neat, and shows a level of subtle totemic identification that I haven't seen elsewhere in professional sports.
Last night I went out for coffee at 10:00 pm after declaring to Carla that I was going to pull an all-nighter. Upon my return, I messed around on the Net for four hours and then went to bed.
(Truth: I don't think caffeine has any appreciable effect on me after a certain point in my daily cycle. But that's not really the point of this story.)
I have done all I can with this thing for now. It will be a good book, and yet I take frustration from the fact that it won't be mine, not really. It's half-or-more Erik's words, in the end, and it's not on a topic I feel really impassioned about. I'm too tired to be proud of it yet.
Maybe tomorrow.
For now, hum. I should go watch a movie or something. On second thought, it's too cruddy out. Movie tomorrow. I go to Micro Center again and buy extremely time-wasting game. Mm: and tell Arcus that I'm ready to work again. $$$.
My entire opinion of the Superbowl thingy:
While walking around outside and thinking about stuff, I realized that the Rams' helmet design, with the stylized spiral on either side, suggests that the players' heads are actually horned, as per their team's eponymous animal. I find that kind of neat, and shows a level of subtle totemic identification that I haven't seen elsewhere in professional sports.
Who told the weather that it could be all warm again? Grah.
Again I say: why isn't this business headline news? Gorgeous weather spikes paranoia in area man or its equivalent would fit in nicely under all that Patriots plap.
Speaking of, I enjoy seeing cool people enjoying sports, even though I do not at all. I think being uninterested in sports is one thing, but it takes extra mental focus to live in Boston and not care at least a little about Boston (or New England) teams. (And it requires vein-popping psychic resistance to feel nothing for the Red Sox, but it's not time for that yet.)
Anyway: yesterday I finished my rewrite of that section (it's about Perl and XML and Unicode, yus, funsy-wunsies) and the combination of feeling satisfied with a writing assignment and the warm weather made it difficult not to misperceive myself as having just finished a spring semester term paper for college. Hum.
In Diesel now. Happy. Other things about this place: it has a higher Room rating than the 1369 (to further abuse The Sims as a metaphor generation unit). More space, big glass front, booths and couches in back if you're lucky enough to score them. And, yes, as cthulhia points out, I'm more likely to bump into friends here. (However, I should note that my reuniting with Noah and Melissa occurred the very first time I ventured into the 1369, last summer.)
On the minus column, my cellphone doesn't work in here. It does in the other place. I just now wandered outside to call Erik, and ask if he wanted to sink some time into rewriting one particular section that we've been getting some strange remarks about. He said: Uuurgh, because he is swamped in his own work. So it looks like it's all me for the next two days. Hum hum hum. We'll see.
Again I say: why isn't this business headline news? Gorgeous weather spikes paranoia in area man or its equivalent would fit in nicely under all that Patriots plap.
Speaking of, I enjoy seeing cool people enjoying sports, even though I do not at all. I think being uninterested in sports is one thing, but it takes extra mental focus to live in Boston and not care at least a little about Boston (or New England) teams. (And it requires vein-popping psychic resistance to feel nothing for the Red Sox, but it's not time for that yet.)
Anyway: yesterday I finished my rewrite of that section (it's about Perl and XML and Unicode, yus, funsy-wunsies) and the combination of feeling satisfied with a writing assignment and the warm weather made it difficult not to misperceive myself as having just finished a spring semester term paper for college. Hum.
In Diesel now. Happy. Other things about this place: it has a higher Room rating than the 1369 (to further abuse The Sims as a metaphor generation unit). More space, big glass front, booths and couches in back if you're lucky enough to score them. And, yes, as cthulhia points out, I'm more likely to bump into friends here. (However, I should note that my reuniting with Noah and Melissa occurred the very first time I ventured into the 1369, last summer.)
On the minus column, my cellphone doesn't work in here. It does in the other place. I just now wandered outside to call Erik, and ask if he wanted to sink some time into rewriting one particular section that we've been getting some strange remarks about. He said: Uuurgh, because he is swamped in his own work. So it looks like it's all me for the next two days. Hum hum hum. We'll see.
