derpdate

Got lazy with teh blog again.


In other news:

-Killed my old workphone, got it replaced by a big, ugly, Chinese knockoff Nokia analogue. Not a smartphone, less friendly UI, and will be measurably harder to kill. Not that I want to, but being a figurative ape in a land of supermen is starting to get old.

-Still playing WoW, but would really like to kick it before The Hitch. It's not an addictive thing, but I guess I'm just getting tired of doing the same thing over & over. Still don't have an 85, and I think that'll be the yardstick by which I'll measure having 'done' the game. Maybe that's why I'm avoiding it. As if I don't have enough digital goodness yet to play with; wanna finish Batman AA, have preordered Skyrim (hells yeah), and still haven't uncrated New Vegas yet. Decided I'll wait til all the DLC has dropped for that last one, then I'll blitz it.

-Moved locations at work, twice. Last time I was updating I was in a literal hole in the ground, left that, now gone back to a (different) hole. Shows potential, if I show a little motivation. Not nearly as mindnumbingly boring.

-Projects: OUA training needs to get back on tracked after I bombed it last. PieOhm dev has stalled, but I run over the details for PurpleDB and CMPD in my head almost daily. Will have to go check up on the Wolfire guys too, really should pick up the Overgrowth Alpha so I can consider the engine.. I know The Big Project is a pipedream, but how awesome if it actually got off the ground, and I could share the spotlight with a group of motivated indie developers. I should get Overgrowth really anyway, even if the genre isn't my thing, the story looks great (see above paragraph about towering stack of unfinished games).

-Might be changing residences. Pretty excited about this, theatre room, opportunity to get my network on, etc. Contingent on difficult sale, so I guess we'll see.

-Dicking around with Twitter again, mostly just following OZHH news and comedic tweets. How those pricks get so much humour in 140 chars is beyond me. Nothing else big happening in Social Media, except I got my Google+ invite, which I accepted and summarily did nothing with. Guess I'll move in if it really does start looking like a serious fb competitor. I like The Goog, I really do, but hey, eggs-in-one-basket etc. (And as ridiculous as it sounds, if any one company could get a Death Star going, they're the guys.)

/streamofconsciousness

Dumbphone

Sigh.

I need a smartphone.
Sure, I have the company phone.. but it's not a smartphone, and it's locked out of data use anyway.

I thought getting a company phone would be awesome, but now I've realised I'm a mile behind everyone else. I can't access a calendar or basic web resources on the go, and I'm rapidly realising that those are some of the things I've been dreaming about being able to do for years.

I'd even settle for an iPhone at this point, although tinkering with the calendar features on Android devices has led me to beleive that they might have the superior 'daily planner' setup. That being said, owning an iDevice would lend me a certain amount of group conformity, and as a result, an improved understanding of the device and it's troubleshooting quirks, which would be a major help if I ever follow through on some of my dev ideas.

Oh well. I guess I could always aim for a promotion into a position that entitles me to a Blackberry (ick).

Wow! Belated Gratitude.

The title of this post is more than a terrible pun.

Perhaps a month ago it was a typical workday, but I had a meeting scheduled at around 9am, at an office closer to home than my normal base of operations. The net result was that I had an extra hour or so to kill before starting work. Jules had already shot off for the day and I had nothing better to do, so I fired up WoW and logged in to my brand new Shammy.

I was dicking around near the edge of the Northern Barrens, perhaps level 8 or 9. All of a sudden I get a wisp from somebody I don't know. Shift-click, what? An 85 Orc Shammy. What does he want with me?

I don't remember the dialog exactly, but it basically boiled down to this guy claiming he was leaving WoW and wanting to spread his accumulated assets around before he left. Admittedly I was pretty skeptical but I figured since he wasn't asking for anything in return, what was the risk? All of a sudden out of freakin nowhere, this giant drake descends from the skies, with him riding it. Keep in mind I'm a practically naked Tauren in greys/whites slaying wandering wildlife. Him coming down and landing next to me was fucking majestic.

Up pops the trade window, and with no questions asked, a bunch of greens, level-appropriate gear appears. I grab it, and it wasn't until the trade was completed and I open my inventory that I notice the cash. 30,000 Gold. Thirty Thousand.

Now I'm not some mad farmer or hardcore player, so even 1K is a big deal to me. But Thirty Thousand G? Jesus. It's like somebody handed me an envelope with.. Christ, I don't know how much. Let's get some perspective. Depending on where you shop, WoW gold is valued at around $0.01 USD a piece. So in that sense, it's like somebody handed me $300. But in game, Buying the parts and tipping for assembly for, say, the motorcycle mount, is around 12 to 16,000 gold. He gave me enough money to buy two motorcycles.

In the end, he was really nice. He was moving on to Rift, he'd been a part of the WoW scene for a few years, and it was time to move on. It seemed to mean a lot to him that I was an enhancement shammy, as he was, and he asked to follow me around and slaughter a few beasts with the new gear I'd been gifted. I was more than happy to oblige. It was part RP, part charity, and all awesome.

I'm not going to post his name here, in case somebody stumbles across is and starts bugging him for free stuff. But for what it's worth.. I don't know how many others got gifted that day, but I feel that in some way I'm his in-game spiritual successor.

So thanks, friend. Thanks for the stuff, thanks for the cash. Thanks for being so friendly. And most of all, thanks for creating an immersive, amazing experience that will stay in my memory for years to come.

Yarr?

>quiet day at work
>google up sum PDFz
>feel guilty about reading a stolen ebook from an author who is awesome and deserves to get paid
>realize I actually already own this book these books in hardcopy and just haven't gotten around to reading them

Geography vs Science Fiction

Eastern European SF is not the same as Western SF. Not better or worse, just different.

I don't know much about Asian SF. Will have to investigate.

Robutts

To any moderately advanced robot civilisation, wouldn't our pervasive use of computers look unnervingly like a society that keeps brains or hearts in jars?

Length is Relative

While I'm here, I might also reflect on the fact that I've always maintained a distance from the activity of blogging mostly because where I'm from, blogs are typically these long, laborious, self-indulgent and generally quite wanky series of articles. But I guess some exposure over time to the net has dulled these reflexes, because I am reminded that the length and nature of an article are not fixed properties.

So what I'm nominating is the concept of shorter, snappier pieces. They don't have to be much, perhaps 100-400 words, one or two paragraphs max.

I'm calling it microblogging, since it's snappy and arguably in tune with the mobile-yet-online lifestyle that has developed over the last couple years. Get an idea, throw down the basics, post it up and let the peanut gallery argue over the fine print. Sure, you could say that Twitter has already garnered this market, but after an abortive one-month stint using it I realised that my best thoughts are far too beefy to fit into 140 characters. That, I would call nanoblogging.

A Brief Sabbatical

Hello little blog.
Did you think I had forgotten you?




...well, I had. For a while, anyway.
But lately I've been streaming things through my mind that might be worth writing down, if only so I can consult them later. Had a few things brewing up in the back of my head that I should really get around to putting in action. Or at least put into words so I can hash out my processes a little.

Things to do:
1) Fix the boot.ini on my work laptop (eugh, maybe I should just backup and request a reimage).
2) Load up the other partition on my personal laptop with Snow Leopard again, and see if I can't track down a fix for the lack of Mac support for Intel integrated video chips.
3) Set up J's Chumby properly.
4) Level a toon to 85 in World of Warcraft so I can say I've at least seen endgame content.
5) Sniff around for some digital copies of the textbooks I'm going to need for SP1 of my OUA course. I have a horrible feeling that saving %25 by ordering from Amazon is going to burn me in the delivery window.