I suppose I should be happy that, as idnight approaches, I am getting tired. But there are so many good things I could be doing. But I guess thats why there’s tomorrow.
In other news, I talked for about two hours with Scott (GMS variety), which was cool cause I hadn’t talked to him in a long, long time. Thats all you get for now.
Apparently, 49,000 is greater than 64,000 – at least this is the conclusion that the program we made at the TRC hack session tonight came to – consistently. And yes, before you ask, everything was cast to unsigned ints. It was head-wrenching trying to figure out what wasn’t working properly, and after several hours of this, we finally gave up with the robot still either spending endlessly or not at all – and just had the robot move around more or less randomly. It was a fun end to a frustrating task.
After giving up on the robot for a while, we moved on to PHP and CSS and getting Paypal’s Payment Data Transfer working. If you want to see our progress on this, you should go ahead and donate some money to the TRC. Otherwise you can just trust me when I say that its not done yet. But pretty soon, it will be done, and it will rock, and then y’all best be donating ;-).
For the first time this week, I woke up before 8:00am – before 7:00am today, even. Hopefully this means I’m getting back on track in that department.
I’ve been having some good email discussions with Theo, who is deployed in the Stryker Brigade in Iraq. I will let you know more bout those later, when traffic isn’t getting worse at a steady pace.
Today, I woke up, and finished writing up a description of the two robots the TRC would be presenting today, went to work, talked to Austin about the TRC presentation, worked a little, ate lunch, talked to Austin again, worked a little more, got a call from the front desk telling me the TRC crew had arrived, picked them up with Larry and Dave, got them set up in the room, spent the next two hours watching and participating in the demo, helped break everything down, worked a little bit more, went home, held a hack session, and finally, played a few games to end the night.
Thew. TRC is life.
I just discovered that HTML tables are about 9 million times cooler than I had previously known.
In other news, I saw the Bourne Supremecy last night with Maneesh, Amy, and Donna, a friend of Amy’s. It was a well done action movie that veered ever futher from the book’s plot.
Political discussions before and after abounded, which was much fun, especially the “living wage” issue. I’m going to miss Maneesh a lot when he leave for New York. We’ll have to hang out a lot before then. As for now, its off to my house to host the TRC for final preperations for their Microvision presentation tomorrow.
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.