Checksum Arcanius

Today started out good and proceded to better. The first order of business, after kicking slightly more demon butt in Doom3, was to head out to watch the Blue Angels perform. I was supposed to meet up with Scott and Katy, but they got stuck in traffic even as I cruised across the bridge on my bike. However, they didnt’ miss much. The show was only mediocre, with no spectacular tricks, and no high tricks, despite the absence of cloud cover at the performance area. The best we got was a couple low fly-overs with high power. Also, it was my first time there without GMS Scott in a long time, which was kind of sad. It was, however, very nice to do something physical again, even if it wasn’t frisbee (which I’m sad I missed). I’ll be there on Tuesday though.

After getting home from the somewhat disappointing but still good, as far as things go, Blue Angels show, I, yes, played a little more Doom3, before heading off to Everett’s Memorial Stadium. My employer, Microvision, had their annual company picnic there. Much of the company, plus family, came and ate in the Pepsi Picnic Pavillion food that was actually quite good. There was a pitching game set up, with a radar speed measurer, and I was one of the first to try my hand at it. Among the six balls I threw, I managed to hit 64 mph, but my arm felt pretty bad after that – thanks to no warmup at all. When I returned about an hour later, at 6:00, someone had set the mark at 73 mph. I had another six balls, and managed, barely, to tie the 73 mph mark. My arm was hurting, but not as bad as the first one. I returned again, at 7:00, to find that the new mark was 75 mph. With another six balls, and every ounce of strength I could muster, I tied the mark – and then broke the record, pushing the max to 76 mph. I was happy, considering that the prize was a $100 gift certificate to Target, and that seemed like a swell thing to win. However, I was then informed that the contest actually ended at 6:30 – I had lost by thirty minutes! Oh well, at least I have the knowledge that I could have won, had I paid more attention to the details.

What was originally going to be one 9 inning game turned into two seven inning games due to a rain-out yesterday. The Everett Aquasox (A single-A short season Mariners affiliate) were taking on the Eugene Emeralds. Things looked grim for the Aquasox for most of the first game, until the bottom of the 6th, when the bats came alive. Five runs scored, and the final score was 7-6 or thereabouts. Things got a lot worse for Eugene, though. In the second game, the Sox struck early and often. The 5th and 6th innings were brutal to Eugene’s pitching staff. Think two solo home runs followed by two triples and then a double. Yeah. And then a three run home run. The Aquasox ran away with that game 12-1, which entitled all of the stalwarts souls who stayed on to $10 Gameworks Coupons – yipee. After the game, there was an excellent fireworks display put on by what looked to be a bunch of escaped convicts in their birght orange flame retardent jumpsuits. This was no computer controlled event, the guy down on the field were lighting these things by hand. I have some video of the show, but there were no children that I was cruel to at the time :-).

It was a long day, but it was far more rewarding, an much less expensive (think free), than a similar outing with the Mariners. Not such a bad way to spend a Saturday. Upon getting home, I even got to have a short conversation with a person with whom I very much enjoy chatting. However, the plan doesn’t seem to be going so well, judging by the post times of my last few entries.

Peace.

After work today, I picked up Shai, bought Doom 3 at Best Buy, went home, made and ate tacos (yummy), then installed and played Doom3, intermixed with writing some microcontroller code. The game is well done, very taxing on the computer hardware, and phenominally… dark. id still hasn’t figured out that there is more to a game than scary demons and cutting edge graphics. But the engine is pretty cool – the real time lighting effects and hot air distortion are the “coolest” effects. Unfortunately, the lighting doesn’t reflect off of mirrors (although there are mirrors), and the corpses dissolve away completely unneccesarily. The game tries hard to keep the tension turned up, but it should try harder to stop me from getting lost in its maze of rooms, or else I will get bored and stop playing (as I just did). id needs to learn how to lead the player on while still making them work, as in Half Life. I don’t see the game winning any awards outside of techincal merit.

Furthermore, for a game that has the nearly the exact same storyline as the original Doom, I was somewhat disappointed to find that the first mission wasn’t at all reminiscent of the original game. Sure, the rest of the game could be different, but everyone remembers (or at least I remember) the precise layout of e1m1 in doom. How cool would it be to have it start out that way. Instead, we got Quake 4 with more advanced lighting and more advanced scripting. As nice as these things are to ooh and aah over the first time you see thim, they don’t hold an audience for long.

Oh yeah, multiplayer sucks trash too, as does pretty much every multiplayer game outside of counterstrike. Oh well. Hopefully some more play time with surround sound enabled will help my opinion of this one some, because I did pay a pretty penny. Of course, I probaly would not have purchased it had HL2 come out, but that looks like its never going to happen, so I had to try a stop-gap. Maybe CS:CZ would have been a better purchase? Hmmm.

Well, ok, I’m not great, but I’m incredible in comparison to the last two days. I didn’t feel at the top of my game this morning, and after a short day at work today, I came home with a headache. But then I took an Aleve and rested, and things just keep getting better. Tomorrow I’ll feel confident saying that I beat this cold, and it was a doozie.

After work, Shai and I worked on a function that would monitor an anolog input for a second to determine its zero-point with high precision. Its a work in progress, but I think I just figured out fixed point fractional numbers, so I’m gonna work on it just a little more as my energy winds down for the evening.

Well, it seems that nobody’s well-wishing has done me much good yet, as I remain feeling still quite sick. I don’t seem to be getting any better, but I also seem to notbe getting any worse, either.

Its been a while since I’ve felt really sick, and truth me told, I am not really that bad (no fever, no throwing up), but I just don’t feel at all good, and nothing is pressing at work or elsewhere, so I’m going to try to expedite my recovery through proactive rest (if that makes any sense).

Not too long ago, I came up with a plan to go to sleep earlier. Its not working very well. The cabin trip didn’t help – I stayed up till 2:30 the night before getting ready and also the night I was there. And last night, I didn’t get to sleep until 12:30, and I’m on track for that time or later tonight. The results are already painful – I’ve come down with some sort of disease that has me feeling none-too-good. The plan will have to be restarted, but stragely, despite its obvious benefits, I’m not feeling too motivated to start it right now. That might be due to the three hours of sleep I got right after work.

Saturday Morning, I picked up Shai and Joel and headed North to Greg’s Cabin, where Greg, Katie, Beth, Ethan, and Mike already were. Once there, we had lunch, and five of us headed out on a hike in the Mt. Baker Wilderness area, up table mountain. The view was incredible; it was certainly the most beautiful hike I’ve been on in recent memory (I may post some photos soon, if I ever get around to making this web photo software I’ve been promisng my brother). Ethan and I had fun tossing rocks off the edge of cliffs (making sure, of course, that no one was below). We walked around the entire table mountain area before heading down. Once back at the cabin, we played frisbee and volleyball, and at the very end of the volleydisc game that emerged, I went down on my left knee in a very bad way. I was able to walk, but I am also still limping from the incident. After this, we had burgers for dinner, and settled down to play card games, chess, mind games, and finally, Mafia. I love that game. I managed to be mafia in the first three games, and was a townsperson the other two times. My team managed to win four out of five times, and I survived to the end of the game three out of five times (two as mafia), which I think is a pretty good average, especially considering that I was the first one to be offed in the first and last games.

Upon returning home, the planned TRC hack session was cancelled, so I set about blogging, continuing to rest my knee, listening to music, and ignoring suggestions to go hear some old guy talk that I’ve never heard of before.