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Excellent Engineering, Hacks
Monday, April 8th, 2002 01:20 amRealizing that we hadn't seen each other since August, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mgeorge and I decided to meet up for dinner and a few beers at Connor O'Niel's, what passes for an Irish pub at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Excellent break after four hours of TITAN programming. We reminisced about old friends, talked about future times, and complained about present circumstances. After about three hours and five beers between us, we decided to depart. Within a block of Pearl St. a cop pulled us over for not stopping at a yellow light. Mike dutifully handed over his license and registration, carefully positioned so that the officer would notice Mike's military ID. After some conferring, they had Mike walk in a line, balance on one foot for 35 seconds, and blow on a tube (which he got as a souvineer). With a little tough talking from the officer (an ex-Marine), Mike got off with a warning and a business card. One rite of passage down.
Returning to my room, I exchanged a piece of paper representing data in a nearby computer for a G4 Cube. It's so beautiful. 8" cube, with plastic feet so that cables can come underneath it. It lacks a fan, so is beautifully serene. It can't even make sound if I tell it to. And just a few days before I was researching how much pain and money it would take to get my original G3 to do USB (and thus print from OS X). Not to mention it has a DVD drive and Firewire. It also has interesting design features such as a power button that's not a button. I'm still trying to figure out how that one works. And you can pop out a handle and pull the core out of the box. Once I transfer necessary files, I can relegate the G3 to a music box. A noisily idle music box.
So, in my infinite wisdom, what did I do last night? Of course I had to download all the software I might need. As the clock skipped 2 and strcuk 3, I decided I probably ought to retire. My body, the punk biznatch that it is, though, decided that sleep wasn't worthwhile and that I should get up and websurf at 5:30 am. Falling asleep at 6:30 am had better not be a habbit for the rest of the year. <mumle grumble>
So, rising early (11-12), doing some more download and orging about fast graphics, processing, and ethernet. A committee meeting to which I and another member arrive. And then more TITAN coding from 3:30 to 10:30! Our most used sentence of the day? "Okay, it should work now." The second? "Oh, I'm a fucking moron." Sleep deprived, I stuck in a hack to fix one thing, which broke everything else. Unclear about what happened, I put in a hack to fix that problem, which broke something confusing. Wait... I'm assigning element 0 to element 1. Facepalm! Frequent line #2! Frequent line #1! I was able to make up for it with some keen debugging insights that had confused the rest of the team mightily. (Not even looking for bugs, I spotted an illegal identifier out of the corner of my eye in a log message. I didn't think it would change anything, and that I was just being anal. But it fixed an obscure bug. I guess rewiring my bran to think in regular expressions was a good move. (Other parts of my brain think in context-free grammars. Anyone who's observed my parenthetical though patterns will have observed this. (My brain as a whole is really an unrestricted program with architectural constriants. Maybe I'll get sick again and solve some NP complete problems polynomially. Maybe I'll stop geekly ramblings. Does this parenthetical halt? We'll never algorithmically know.))) But the game is almost fully playable. General movement works like a charm, like it has for some time. Battle movement is implemented, and mostly works. Now we just need to be able to whack each other around, and we'll be set.
And, joy of joys, my favorite week of the year has arrived. The 54th Conference on World Affairs. It's really astounding how many people have been around Boulder/CU for many years and don't even know what the CWA is. Only the best reason to skip class ever! Featuring perrenial favorites like Roger Ebert and Andy Ihnatko and newcomers Patch Adams and Danni Ashe. And, as always, loads of titilating panels. (Unfortunately, I'll miss Orgasm, Schmorgasm in favor of Mulholland Dr., Uninterruptus.) Look forward, my adoring readers, to musings, insights, stories, and jokes from the World's Best in Boulder round about Saturday. Until then, my goal is to not get sick and FALL THE FUCK ASLEEP. GRRR.
mgeorge and I decided to meet up for dinner and a few beers at Connor O'Niel's, what passes for an Irish pub at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Excellent break after four hours of TITAN programming. We reminisced about old friends, talked about future times, and complained about present circumstances. After about three hours and five beers between us, we decided to depart. Within a block of Pearl St. a cop pulled us over for not stopping at a yellow light. Mike dutifully handed over his license and registration, carefully positioned so that the officer would notice Mike's military ID. After some conferring, they had Mike walk in a line, balance on one foot for 35 seconds, and blow on a tube (which he got as a souvineer). With a little tough talking from the officer (an ex-Marine), Mike got off with a warning and a business card. One rite of passage down.Returning to my room, I exchanged a piece of paper representing data in a nearby computer for a G4 Cube. It's so beautiful. 8" cube, with plastic feet so that cables can come underneath it. It lacks a fan, so is beautifully serene. It can't even make sound if I tell it to. And just a few days before I was researching how much pain and money it would take to get my original G3 to do USB (and thus print from OS X). Not to mention it has a DVD drive and Firewire. It also has interesting design features such as a power button that's not a button. I'm still trying to figure out how that one works. And you can pop out a handle and pull the core out of the box. Once I transfer necessary files, I can relegate the G3 to a music box. A noisily idle music box.
So, in my infinite wisdom, what did I do last night? Of course I had to download all the software I might need. As the clock skipped 2 and strcuk 3, I decided I probably ought to retire. My body, the punk biznatch that it is, though, decided that sleep wasn't worthwhile and that I should get up and websurf at 5:30 am. Falling asleep at 6:30 am had better not be a habbit for the rest of the year. <mumle grumble>
So, rising early (11-12), doing some more download and orging about fast graphics, processing, and ethernet. A committee meeting to which I and another member arrive. And then more TITAN coding from 3:30 to 10:30! Our most used sentence of the day? "Okay, it should work now." The second? "Oh, I'm a fucking moron." Sleep deprived, I stuck in a hack to fix one thing, which broke everything else. Unclear about what happened, I put in a hack to fix that problem, which broke something confusing. Wait... I'm assigning element 0 to element 1. Facepalm! Frequent line #2! Frequent line #1! I was able to make up for it with some keen debugging insights that had confused the rest of the team mightily. (Not even looking for bugs, I spotted an illegal identifier out of the corner of my eye in a log message. I didn't think it would change anything, and that I was just being anal. But it fixed an obscure bug. I guess rewiring my bran to think in regular expressions was a good move. (Other parts of my brain think in context-free grammars. Anyone who's observed my parenthetical though patterns will have observed this. (My brain as a whole is really an unrestricted program with architectural constriants. Maybe I'll get sick again and solve some NP complete problems polynomially. Maybe I'll stop geekly ramblings. Does this parenthetical halt? We'll never algorithmically know.))) But the game is almost fully playable. General movement works like a charm, like it has for some time. Battle movement is implemented, and mostly works. Now we just need to be able to whack each other around, and we'll be set.
And, joy of joys, my favorite week of the year has arrived. The 54th Conference on World Affairs. It's really astounding how many people have been around Boulder/CU for many years and don't even know what the CWA is. Only the best reason to skip class ever! Featuring perrenial favorites like Roger Ebert and Andy Ihnatko and newcomers Patch Adams and Danni Ashe. And, as always, loads of titilating panels. (Unfortunately, I'll miss Orgasm, Schmorgasm in favor of Mulholland Dr., Uninterruptus.) Look forward, my adoring readers, to musings, insights, stories, and jokes from the World's Best in Boulder round about Saturday. Until then, my goal is to not get sick and FALL THE FUCK ASLEEP. GRRR.
