Just another useless personal blog
Some photos of the rising river I’ve recently mentioned (click for full versions). This is after it’s receded a bit, even, but unfortunately I don’t have ‘normal’ pictures to compare them against right now. (Update: There’s a decent view of the normal water levels around the middle of this page.)
Normally there are a few sprawling sandbars around the base of this bridge pillar.
Subject: Everyone qualifys for our Diplomas! Cneitz
Hey, I’ve always wanted a diploma in breathing…
Subject: King of Pharmacy 8v
That’s only slightly more impressive than Duke of Deli Counter 3B.
Subject: Make big points with your boss!
I don’t think he’s the type to play video games, unfortunately.
Subject: Improved IMMUNITY
But can you get me diplomatic immunity? That would be sweet…
Subject: Don't condoms suck?
No, you need somebody else’s assistance for that part.
Subject: What are you doing with all that pain?
I keep it in a desk drawer, in case I get unwanted visitors.
Subject: We got what you need cheap! To your door! OVERNIGHT
Wow, I didn’t know you could order swift kicks in the ass online.
Subject: Monkeys turned into workaholics
Uh oh, hopefully they’re not after my job…
Yeesh, out of the last two weeks, I think there were only two days where it didn’t rain fairly heavily. At one point, the Bow river was just slightly spilling onto the nearby bike trail as it passed under a bridge. And there’s more on the way for the weekend.
Still, having grown up in B.C., I’d rather have this than two weeks of 30°C+ heat…
So, if I’m not really happy with IDEs, what can I do to improve my development environment? Well, I’ve discovered a few other tricks…
Continue reading “Dis-Integration”
Judging by the recent comment spam attempts, the hottest thing online is no longer poker or V1AgR4, it’s…backgammon.
(Backgammon?)
Last night I passed the magic 25% completion mark in Gran Turismo 4. Besides rewarding me with a nifty new Audi, that unlocks one of the restricted areas: the endurance races.
Continue reading “There Better Be Bathroom Breaks”
Normally I’m not too fussy about the rough, unpolished nature of a lot of free software, but when you’ve been editing for a half hour and accidentally hit the ‘Clear Clips’ option right underneath the ‘Save Clips’ option in the menu and there’s no Undo implemented…
Spammers are always waging an ever-escalating war, and it’s interesting to note what tricks they get up to. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of hits with referrer strings back to various top-level domains, obviously hoping to show up in a site statistics page. And now, I’ve seen referrer strings that are actually actions to secretly add someone’s RSS feed to your own portal page (mainly with Yahoo so far).
I’d be impressed, if they weren’t such sleazeballs.
I appear to have lost my primary ladder characters in Diablo 2 for some reason.
Normally they expire after 90 days without being played, and I haven’t had much time to play it lately, so I’ve just been logging in every once in a while just to reset that expiry timer. I was cutting it close this time, but still within the limits — after logging in, each character displayed an “Expires in 5 days” warning below it.
Except that when I actually tried to select a character, a popup window declared “The character ‘Soandso’ has not been used in 3 months and has expired.” Way to keep your schedules straight, Blizzard.
Oh well. I generally don’t go back to older characters once a new ladder season starts anyways. The current season has been running for a while, so I don’t want to risk starting new characters only to have them cut short by a sudden ending of the season, so I’ll just wait until the start of the next ladder season before playing again.
My development environment at work is pretty primitive, being a collection of largely unrelated programs loosely tied together with some scripting. Integrated environments are where it’s supposedly at nowadays though, so I figured I should give some of them a shot.
Continue reading “Integrate Me”
I just spent over an hour struggling to get a set of class templates to even compile properly. It kept complaining that a base class was undefined, so I kept tinkering with the template parameters, thinking that I was using them incorrectly or there was some subtle behaviour that I was failing to account for, since it’s a moderately complex template (multiple levels of derivation, multiple template parameters at each level).
But no. It was simply because I had copied the base class header file for the derived classes and forgot to change the multi-inclusion-preventer #ifdef on one of them, making it completely skip over the definition of one of the intermediate classes. Duh…
It’s hard to compare the upcoming Nintendo console to the others since much is still unknown about it, but there was one announcement that caught a lot of attention: they say that you’ll be able to download and play *any* game Nintendo produced for all of their previous consoles, right back to the original NES.
That alone is very tempting. Emulators and ROMs are easy enough to get, but running them on your PC still doesn’t have quite the same nostalgic feel as running them on a proper console with appropriate controllers on your living room TV does. Of course, the danger is that it’s easy enough to fall behind on current games let alone find time to indulge that nostalgia, so it could wind up being one of those things bought and barely used…
And they *finally* got around to announcing more of their primary titles for the DS, and they look fairly impressive, so I may finally have a reason to pick one up after all.
The E3 revelations have started, and more information is finally available about the upcoming next-gen consoles. It’s still early yet, but on a purely published spec basis, the PS3 will be a bit ahead of the Xbox 360.
But, of course, there’s always more to it than that.
Continue reading “It’s The Games, Stupid”
I find it a little worrisome that a growing percentage of the spam I receive is for AIDS ‘antidotes’ or treatments or magick talismans or whatever…
Though I don’t have an XBox, I keep running across bits of information about Forza Motorsports here and there.
The good news is that it features the ability to highly customize your cars, including custom paint jobs with a lot of detail, and race them against others online.
The bad news is that it means you may wind up suffering the humiliation of being beaten by someone in this. (From the Forza Customization site.)
So named because that’s about all the time I’ve had to play them recently…
Champions of Norrath (PS2): It bears little resemblance to the original EverQuest, and could be any old generic fantasy environment with the names swapped, but it’s still a fun hack-and-slash Diablo-II-esque game. Sometimes you just want to run around and Beat Stuff Up, and this fills that need perfectly.
God Of War (PS2): Wow, a fighting game I might actually not suck at. Great graphics (and not just for the prurient reasons), smooth controls, and plenty of action and puzzles.
The Simpsons: Hit And Run (PC): The Simpsons meet Grand Theft Auto. Much like the GTA games it’s fun to just randomly explore and find hidden stuff. Missions are challenging, but not impossible, and usually quick enough that you can retry it a few times without getting too frustrated. Plus, it’s fun to drive around like a maniac in the various vehicles, knocking lampposts and mailboxes over and sending people diving for cover…
Gran Turismo 4 (PS2): This game is a continual reminder of how awful I am at driving. But, it’s at least still fun to collect all of the exotic cars, take some action shots, and fiddle with the B-spec mode on the longer and more difficult races. I just wish I had the time or patience to dedicate to actually putting in some real practice.
As part of the effort to work more exercise into my day, I’ve been taking the stairs instead of the elevator whenever possible. It’s a lot more practical at the office now that we’re only five flights of stairs up instead of seventeen.
Unfortunately, the building staff is being a bit lax in their duties. About half the time, I come in in the morning, walk up the stairs, and suddenly discover that the stairwell door is still locked, even though they’re supposed to have opened it an hour earlier. So, then I have to go back down and take the elevator up anyway.
At least I still get the exercise, but it still feels pointless sometimes…
(Update: And it’s still locked as of lunchtime…)
Every year I swear I’m going to get them done as early as possible, but once again, the tax deadline looms large and I’m frantically filling out forms…
