driving sideways

2009-02-01T14:09:00.003-04:00

First post here in over three years - I'm curious as to whether anyone still has my RSS feed in their reader. :)

So I joined Twitter. Not sure whether I'll embrace it or not - I'm not big on the whole "I'm eating chips!" constant status update thing, but I don't think it has to be that way. I like the idea of Twitter as microblogging - forcing yourself to express a thought concisely - since I too often suffer from verbal diarrhea. I'm curious to see what conversations evolve out of this.

I toyed with the idea of keeping this post under 140 characters. Like that was going to happen. :)

neglect

2005-12-07T23:12:00.000-04:00

Dear Blog,

There's no question I've been neglecting you.

I know it's happened before and I meant it when I said it wouldn't happen again, I really did, but wouldn't you know it.

I almost blogged a couple of weeks ago. I watched an old Jays game on ESPN Classic and I took a bunch of notes for a nostalgic look back at the '92 and '93 World Champions that I was going to call "glory days" – I never got around to writing it and the moment was lost. Isn't that always the way?

The only reason I'm posting at all is to point what few readers I have to Scott Feschuk's Blackberry Blog. Feschuk is Paul Martin's chief speechwriter and he's been writing some very funny stuff online throughout the campaign.

It's not that I don't like you, Blog, you know I do. It's just that I met this girl, and I like her much, much more.

Jeff

Now Playing: Sarah McLachlan, Afterglow Live
Current Mood: vous devenez très somnolent

12 steps

2005-10-15T23:43:00.000-03:00

There must be a program for this.

As I've mentioned previously on ye old blog, I've been doing a lot of Sudoku puzzles in my copious free time. I noticed Book 1 of the Times series on a table at Chapters one day a few months ago and it piqued my interest. I've never been very interested in crosswords [1] [2] but the logical nature of Sudoku appealed to me. I did a puzzle here and a puzzle there for a while. I'm not sure when I started chain-solving but I can now while away multiple hours at a time, happily marking and erasing until I solve one, then eagerly turning to the next.

I Googled "Sudoku anonymous" and found others in my predicament but no help.

I'm not sure whether I'm responsible for spreading this to my co-workers but a few of them have gotten into it as well. I think this is perfectly logical (smirk) behaviour for software developers, because at its core, development is about problem solving. There's also something very appealing about knowing the problem you are trying to solve definitely has a solution. This is all too frequently not the case in IT.

As if the books weren't engrossing enough, I have recently been introduced to two new wrinkles which have only intensified my obsession.

The first is samunamupure, aka Killer Su Doku. The grid is overlaid with "sum boxes" which connect multiple cells. The digits in those cells must sum to the number on the sum box. Often these puzzles have no starting digits at all. John and I went to Chapters on Tuesday; I picked up Book 3 of the Times series and he picked up the Killer book. I took one look at it and chickened out. No starting digits? The hell? I was intrigued, though, and I decided to try one at lunch later in the week. I proceeded to completely geek out over it and after work, I went immediately to Chapters to pick up my own copy. It is truly diabolical.

The second is websudoku.com. Tracy sent me the link on Friday afternoon. I shared it with the guys and went back to work. Turned around ten minutes later and they were all still there. This should have been a warning sign... hehe. The virtually unlimited supply of free puzzles is compelling enough. They really nail you with the ability to work out the puzzle in the browser, including multiple entries per cell. It's like the difference between word processing and writing longhand. You can erase so much faster. They also compile stats - you can see how well you're doing compared to the average, which is kinda cool.

In hindsight, the Wiktionary link for "geek out" was probably unnecessary. :)

In other news...

John played a short set at the Right Spot last night. It was a charity coffeehouse organized by one of the help desk techs. I knew John wrote songs and I knew he played a mean guitar, but I've never seen him rock out like he did last night. He played four or five originals and about as many covers, including a seamless melding of Beck and Weezer ("Loser"/"Undone - The Sweater Song") plus an encore of "Underwhelmed" and "What You Waiting For?" It was spectacular. He should be quitting his job and heading out on the road any time now.
I picked up Season 2 of Arrested Development on DVD this week. My love for this show knows no bounds. The DVDs are a little light on special features - the highlights are three commentaries and a gag reel. I'm enduring a short hiatus to accommodate baseball playoffs, so anything new is welcome. The gag reel actually ends with a profanity-laced tirade from David Cross on Fox's inability to effectively market the show, which gets pretty low ratings despite being a critical darling. It was awesome, and I still can't believe they included it.
Some of you know that I've got a couple of academic credits to my name. When I was at UNB, I did a co-op term and some part-time work as a research assistant to Dr. Colin Ware. The work I did with Colin served as the basis for two papers, one in a conference proceedings and another in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. I wrote the software, recruited subjects, conducted the experiments, and edited the text. Today I got to wondering whether those papers were ever cited by other researchers in the field, and with remarkably little effort (I typed "colin ware jeff rose" into Firefox) discovered that they have. I highly doubt I'll ever continue my academic career, but I still think that's really cool.

I started writing this post two hours ago as methadone for the heroin of websudoku.com. I think it worked. Let's find out...

[1] Once upon a time I did the TV Guide crossword regularly. This will not come as a surprise to those (Will) who believe I am the epitome of pop culture geek.  (back)

[2] I'm trying out footnotes for my longer diversions. I picked up the technique from alt.sysadmin.recovery and used it quite a bit on FTE back in the day. I think it's less annoying for tangents than dropping a sentence for a line or two and picking it back up. Yes? No? Anyone? Bueller? [3]  (back)

[3] Yes, nesting footnotes is all too common. My Atom feed specifies a base page for each article. When I read this post in Thunderbird, the footnote links launch the post in Firefox instead of scrolling the message. I doubt I can do anything about this. Hrmm...  (back)

Now Playing: Franz Ferdinand, You Could Have It So Much Better
Current Mood: you are getting very sleepy

simple pleasures

2005-10-11T23:19:00.000-03:00

new Vonnegut
playoff baseball
Teen Girl Squad!
Goldfish crackers
Clublife
citrus toothpaste
The Times Su Doku Book 3
#4

wild turkey stampede

2005-10-10T01:55:00.000-03:00

Thanksgiving always reminds me of a sound clip that Tracy sent me a long time ago, that got a lot of play around ED&T after I left. It was a turkey gobbling overlaid dozens of times and it sounded like a wild turkey stampede. I know I missed out on a lot of fun never having shared an office with Tracy, Dan, and Stewart. Wild turkey stampede! That's nothing but fun. So that's how I got from this Thanksgiving Sunday to 1996 in just two moves. Wild turkey stampede.

Anyway...

I'm at my parents' house in Minto for the long weekend. Shelly picked me up in Fredericton on Friday and we went to Swiss Chalet and saw Into the Blue. The HBS reviews are pretty much dead on - the story and the acting were lame, the ocean cinematography was gorgeous, Jessica Alba has a fantastic body, fullstop. Spent some more time on a D&D module I've been adapting to run for some friends, finally gave up and settled on a plan B. Did a bunch of Sudoku puzzles. Played some Wizard with the parents. Had a turkey supper which was <SPAN STYLE="ACCENT: French taunter">very nice!</SPAN> Man, I'm a geek. This may be the geekiest paragraph ever written on ye old blog.

Johnny Five was my personal patron saint of rock and roll this week, loaning me the new Franz Ferdinand, the new Sigur Rós, and also the Frontier Index album he picked up at the Sadies show last week. All very nice. (French taunting is of course implied.)

Fiona Apple's third album, Extraordinary Machine, finally got an official release last week and it's #1 on iTunes. Her web site is streaming the whole record, which is très cool. The eleven tracks that were leaked this spring are all there in one form or another, with one new track. When I talked about the album in March, I noted that it was taking a while to get used to, as her stuff usually does. Well, I really fell in love with it. Those tracks in that order feel like Extraordinary Machine to me. The arrangements on the official release just aren't doing anything for me yet. They leave me wanting the "original" which is, fortunately for me, on my iPod anyway. I'll keep trying.

Haven't been playing much poker lately. In theory we have a home game scheduled for the 21st, if only everyone is allowed to come out and play. Here's hoping. Not sure if more PokerStars will help or hinder after the Tim/Marius debacle. :)

Still plugging away with Ultimus at work. What doesn't kill me can only make me stronger, right? Or weak as a sack of kittens. Something like that.

Go read about Sealand - a case of truth being stranger than fiction. I think John's going to write a concept album about it.

I love Firefox tabs. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't know where they've been all my life.

Wild turkey stampede? That's gold, Jerry, gold!

Now Playing: Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine
Current Mood: rapidly sleepier

a spring in his step and a song in his heart

2005-09-13T09:37:00.000-03:00

I was standing in line at Tim's this morning when a guy walked through from the BMO building. Impeccably dressed. His umbrella had a little gargoyle for a handle. He cheerily excused himself cutting through the line, said "good morning!" to someone standing in line, and went out the door. He said "good morning!" to someone sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette.

And as he passed from the sidewalk to the parking lot, I swear he skipped.

I couldn't help but grin.

#4, mark two

2005-09-11T21:19:00.000-03:00

fumbling wouldn't boot this morning.

Then it would.

Then it wouldn't.

Then it would. Then it crashed. Then it went back to Future Shop. I cleaned up after myself except for my Passport account, which I couldn't disassociate from the user account before it crashed for the third and final time before Rob picked me up to take it back. (Thanks Rob!)

On what I think is an unrelated note, the guy who sold it to me doesn't work there anymore. Hmm...

I have an identical box sitting here now, working fine for the time being. We'll see what happens when I boot it up first thing tomorrow morning. My monitor has a burnt pixel, but they didn't have a replacement today so I have to go back later in the week. I still have to try out the printer. I'm treating the second box like somebody else's PC for a few days until I'm confident I'm keeping it - I don't want to have to change my Passport password again.

Now Playing: Jimi Hendrix, Live at the Fillmore East
Current Mood: cautiously optimistic

#4

2005-09-10T17:51:00.000-03:00

I've owned three computers in my life.

Until today.

If you were to ask the people in my office how I should format the phrase "I finally bought a new PC," I believe the consensus would be that "finally" should be 72-point, bold, italic, underlined, and blinking.

The first, the one that turned me into the geek I am today, was a Tandy Color Computer 3. We got it for Christmas in 1986. When others were messing around with Commodore 64s, my CoCo was packing twice as much RAM, and could manage 640x192 with 256 colours. My career path started with transcribing BASIC programs out of the manual at age 9 - that's Extended Color BASIC 2.0, baby. We got a disk drive the following Christmas (and Disk Extended Color BASIC 2.1) and I could finally save my own programs. Later, my mother found a guy in Fredericton who was into CoCos and provided us with hundreds of games and other programs. One thing that sticks in my mind about the CoCo - you could overclock it by putting a value into a particular memory location. The normal speed was 0.89 MHz, and "POKE 65497, 0" jacked it up to 1.8 MHz. A number of the games I had required this "high speed poke" to play correctly.

The second was the only reason I got my first job. It was May 1992, I'd been using PCs at school for a few years, and I decided I wanted one of my own. I started working at Save-Easy as a cashier and stock clerk, three weeks before my fifteenth birthday. I remember my first paycheque was $115 for 23 hours of work. By November I'd made enough to buy the PC I wanted and she was a beauty. 386SX/33, 2MB of RAM, 512K video, and an enormous 107MB hard drive, with a 24-pin colour printer (the ubiquitous Panasonic KXP-2123) following a few months later. It served me well throughout high school and the first few years of university, and the time I spent learning that machine inside and out pretty much got me my first Co-op job as a help desk tech.

The third came along out of necessity more than anything else. My 386 (and it feels funny saying "386" when in reality it was just a lowly SX) had been pretty much taxed to its limits running gcc under Debian Linux for my Data Structures assignments in early 1997. (At that point I had a 130MB drive with a 60MB Windows partition, a 60MB main Linux partition, and 10MB of Linux swap space.) The NB government put on a promotion in the fall of '97 where they rebated the HST on any new PC purchase. It was time - I finally broke down and upgraded to a Pentium/166MMX with 32MB of RAM, a 4MB video card, and a 4GB disk. That box lasted me seven years and eleven months.

It's not that I'm a masochist. Let the record show that my employer and the agency to which I am contracted out have seen fit to provide me with very nice laptops over the last several years. I'm not a big gamer, and the Pentium was, until recently, an adequate machine for web browsing and email when I didn't have the laptop at home. So the CD writer hadn't been working right for months - it still played PokerStars just fine. Note the past tense.

I name my boxes after Sarah McLachlan songs. I dare you to laugh. Fine, go ahead and laugh, I don't care. elsewhere started freezing up Thursday night. I tried booting my rarely-used Linux partition. I worked on a Sudoku for a couple of minutes, then looked up expecting to see a login prompt. Instead I saw a stack dump and "kernel panic, aiee!" (or something to that effect... it really did say "aiee!" though, which made me smile despite the impending death of my machine - gallows humour can be comforting). I opened it up, swapped the RAM to another bank, pulled and reseated some of the connectors, started it back up, and it was fine. For about fifteen minutes.

At work on Friday, I made an appeal for 72-pin SIMMs. I dare you to laugh. To hell with it, that is funny. Andrew thought he had some kicking around and offered to bring them in. Phil chimed in that Andrew was just enabling my continued presence in the PC dark ages. Coming back from lunch at Mexi's, my stomach full of nachos, I decided it might finally be time. With the 386 (SX) and the Pentium, I bought from local independents and spec'd out every last detail. My interest in PC hardware had not yet waned to its current state of near non-existence. This time, I went to Russ, the acknowledged master of cheap PCs. We talked for a bit, and he emailed a friend that works at Future Shop. There's a Compaq Presario on the front page of this week's flyer. P4 3GHz, 512MB RAM, 80 GB 7200rpm HD, CD writer, DVD-ROM, 17" LCD monitor, Epson printer/scanner combo - $799. I bought one.

And the peanut gallery rejoiced.

I've still got #1 and #2, packed away in my storage room. I dig the CoCo out every now and again to play an old game. It freezes up occasionally but it still runs pretty well. Not sure why the 386 is still in there - though it is the only PC in the house with a 5 1/4" floppy drive, and you never know when you might need one of those. The new box doesn't have a floppy drive of any size.

fumbling, I hope you're still kicking in 2012. And I hope I can get your big brother kicking again - it might make a decent little toy Linux box. Andrew, about those 72-pin SIMMs...

Now Playing: Jimi Hendrix, Live at Woodstock
Current Mood: utterly delighted

bloglets

2005-09-07T01:00:00.000-03:00

None of these topics could justify a post of their own but together they might just.

Back on the horse: The first day of school was hopefully the day I got back on track with walking. I pretty much wasted the summer as far as exercise is concerned. I spent a few days in my parents' pool, walked a bit, played tennis once, and that was it. I've been eating OK and I've pretty much maintained but I should be losing. Winter's coming soon with its own set of excuses - I really can't let myself fall into that trap again this year. It felt great to get back out there and when I got home my muscles were twitching like they were hooked up to one of those Dr. Ho machines from old infomercials. Hooray for electrically-induced muscle spasms.

Revenge of the Yars: I bought Oatmeal Crisp last week. I didn't buy it for its oaty goodness. I bought it because it came with a CD of 80 classic Atari games. It's got a bunch of stuff I've never heard of, a few that I've heard of but never played, and a few that I owned: Combat (a classic), Asteroids (iconic), RealSports Football, and most importantly, Yars' Revenge. When my brother and I got our Atari 2600 (and commenced many years of fighting over it) it came with Combat, Space Invaders, and Yars' Revenge. Yars' Revenge quickly became my favourite - a true battle of dexterity and determination against overwhelming force. I spent a couple of hours playing it this weekend, and I must say, it's as good as it ever was.

A new nadir of geekdom: I've gotten hooked on Sudoku logic puzzles.

Gasping its last, tortured gasp: I think my venerable Pentium is dying a slow, painful death. I played a Sit-and-Go earlier tonight and it was fine, but ever since I got back from my walk it's been freezing up in Notepad and IE with nothing else running. I had to resort to DOS mode to finish typing this - I think it's the first time I've used EDIT in a couple of years. Just hold on for a few more months, baby, and you can go to the great PC roundup in the sky. Russell will have a field day if he finds out I had to resort to "EDIT BLOGLETS.TXT" - ha!

Now Playing: The Vanity Project (yet again)
Current Mood: wide awake / frustrated

review: The Vanity Project

2005-09-07T00:06:00.000-03:00

Fans of Barenaked Ladies have known Stephen Duffy's name for a while. The English singer-songwriter's entry in the All Music Guide calls him the Pete Best of the 80's - he was a founding member of Duran Duran who left the band before they became stars. BNL frontman Steven Page discovered his solo work at 15 and sent him a fan letter. A correspondence ensued and evolved into a working relationship. Duffy co-wrote four songs with Page on BNL's 1994 sophomore release Maybe You Should Drive and contributed to each album through 2000's Maroon. Their collaborations include three singles ("Jane," "Alternative Girlfriend," "Call and Answer") and are characterized by strong pop hooks, smart wordplay, and a dark lyrical edge.

The Vanity Project's self-titled debut consists of songs that Page and Duffy worked on together from 1999 to 2004. The two play almost everything, with the exception of some keys and live drums on a couple of tracks. The traits that characterize their BNL work are here in spades. These cuts range from hard-driving rock ("Hit and Run") to darkly stripped-down acoustic guitar ("By the Roadside") and everywhere in between. Strong guitar work is omnipresent, and there's gorgeous harmonica on a couple of tracks. Lyrically, there's a great deal of interplay between relationship issues and current events, often blending seamlessly into a cohesive whole. With due respect to BNL, and especially Ed Robertson, this is some of Page's best work in years. The album's standout is "Everything's the Same," a sprawling six-minute opus whose lyrics exemplify that theme of romance and politics, intertwining in discontent. Great driving bass in places and a 90-second outro of Page repeatedly droning "everything's the same" under a guitar solo, finally ending with a few seconds of poet Ezra Pound reading from one of his Cantos. It's weirdly cool.

Page hopes to collaborate with others under this name in the future. I'm hopeful, too - The Vanity Project is anything but.

Clips available at www.vanity-project.com.

New Orleans is sinking

2005-09-02T01:48:00.000-03:00

I'll never hear that song in the same way again.

Wikipedia has a good summary of the events so far. I've heard bits and pieces over the last few days, and I knew it was bad, but I didn't realize quite how bad until I read this article. I find my thoughts dwelling not on the people who've lost their lives, their homes, and their peace of mind, but on the assholes who see a disaster of this magnitude as an opportunity to line their pockets and do whatever the hell they want because they can finally get away with it. Police were being distracted from search-and-rescue efforts to deal with looting and violence. What the hell is wrong with people?

On a happier note, Johnny 5 is back in Moncton, on a one-year term contract at ACOA. John's always good for some laughs, and pads my "single friend" total by a significant percentage.

I'm getting ready for a weekend of mostly staying in (and probably playing poker online) as tens of thousands of people descend on Moncton for a huge outdoor concert headlined by the Rolling Stones. My brother and a friend are crashing with me for the weekend and I don't get to see him that often so that should be cool.

I'm continuing a pattern of staying up too late this week. Tonight it was another poker tournament and then the urge to blog. It's always something. I must now put on Conan and fall asleep. Final thought, courtesy of The Vanity Project, whose album I have still not reviewed: "Summer feels like a lover leaving, Oh / Don't go" - fitting for the first of September.

Now Playing: JSB, The Rebirth of Hooch
Current Mood: sleepy

tongue in groove

2005-08-23T00:13:00.000-03:00

Slave labour is hard. (No offense is intended to actual slaves. You probably don't have net access anyway.)

Helped lay a new laminate floor in my parents' bedroom this weekend. Also did a lot of cleaning and moving furniture. I was on my feet or my knees for most of the weekend. My legs feel like they did last year after playing five sets of tennis. I gave thanks, more than once, that I don't have to make a living at manual labour. I really don't think I could handle it. Of course, if I did, I'd be in much better shape. :)

Had The Vanity Project playing in the car on the trip there and the trip back. Can you tell I'm a little fixated on this album? Little snatches of a hypothetical review kept running through my head on the way home today - comparisons with BNL, guesses as to the meaning of certain lyrics. I wonder if I'll actually write it. The blog is supposed to be a creative outlet, but it's a little scary to contemplate actual creative writing in a public forum as opposed to the standard issue "about my day" crap where the attempt at creativity or humour is in the way I turn a phrase here or there - there's certainly no expectation of a coherent whole. I suppose if I consider my audience (or what I suppose my audience is) here, they likely don't expect coherence from me in any event.

Surprise, surprise, I played a little online poker when I got home tonight. Exhaustive (and possibly exhausting) report is up at Busted Aces, where I'm talking to myself so far. Rob has joined but not yet posted, still waiting on Andrew and Will. I don't really expect Will without a lot of wheedling, and I don't really have it in me for something this trivial. It's bad enough at work when it's something important... hehe.

did I really need another blog?

2005-08-18T23:35:00.000-03:00

Clearly, the answer is yes. Yes, I did.

I started another blog, Busted Aces, for poker stuff. I'm hopeful that the other guys at the office who are playing PokerStars will be interested in contributing - I'm really enjoying our discussions of different games we've played and I thought it would be cool to record some of them for posterity. I started it off with a tale of two SnGs.

I mentioned The Vanity Project the other day. It's a great pop record - a little uneven but the highlights are outstanding. I might actually write a review at some point, maybe next week.

This weekend, I have to go home and help my parents replace the carpet in their bedroom with laminate flooring. Move furniture, remove baseboards, rip up carpet, hopefully not have to sand or plane the wood floor, put down the laminate, put up new baseboards, and move furniture back in. Fun stuff!

Blogger 1, sleep 0

2005-08-16T23:14:00.000-03:00

I stayed up way too late last night.

I'm practically falling asleep as I type this on my woefully inadequate home PC, yet I continue typing for woefully inadequately explained reasons. (I wonder how many adverbs I could chain together without it becoming ridiculous.)

I mentioned yesterday that I didn't get up until 11 - that was because I was up really late the night before. So last night, instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour, I found myself wide awake working on my blog template. I'd grown tired (smirk) of my existing layout - in particular, the sidebar just wasn't doing it for me anymore. I was up past 2 working on a new layout. I was as tired at work today as you would expect.

Tonight, I played a couple of Sit and Go tournaments at PokerStars (27-seat, 10K play money buy-in, placed 5th in the first one and went out something like 14th in the second when someone loose-called my overpair all-in on the flop and caught one of five outs on the river - if you understood all that you have my sympathies) and then set to work tweaking my layout some more. The hell of it is, I enjoy tweaking the layout almost as much as composing. It's the software developer in me. I wouldn't be surprised if I've actually spent more time on layout than on content. This will not come as a shock to anyone who knows me. :)

So, it's just after 11 and I think it's time sleep got a point on the board. I was going to sign off with a haiku about my 2nd SnG, but seventeen syllables just isn't enough. :P

this is the greatest thing in the world...

2005-08-15T22:02:00.000-03:00

...I mean it's like I'm right there at the pond. Come here, ducky!
- Strong Bad, sbemail14

Actually, I was right there today. It was day 7 of my every-Monday-off summer vacation. I slept in until 11. I messed around on the Internet for a while, mostly reading forums at Daniel Negreanu's site, which is quite good if you're into poker. Later, I decided it was too nice a day to stay in and I went out, bought a paper, and went down to Jones Lake. Sat on a park bench facing the lake, surrounded by ducks. Read the paper and listened to Steven Page's side project on my iPod. It was very relaxing. It would have been perfectly nice on a Sunday, but what made it perfect was the fact that almost everyone I know was at work and I wasn't. Came home, put on McCown, cut up a mess of vegetables, and made chili. Forgot the chili powder... oops. Old School was on TV tonight - pretty much uncut except for some of the swearing. Bare breasts on CBC at 9pm - I guess whoever watches out for that is on strike... heh. Probably the same guy responsible for Will Ferrell's ass being seared into my brain. My eyes! :)

So, yeah, a quiet day but an enjoyable one. I wasn't sure about this every-Monday-off plan when I started, but I really like the way it's worked out. As much as it's nice to be able to go away for the weekend and stay an extra day, this summer is really about some more time to relax even if it's just bumming around. The geek in me can't help noting that the ratio of days working to days off in a week is 1.3 instead of 2.5, which seems much more dramatic than simply one more day off out of seven. And geekier, of course.

CBC is running a newscast from BBC World instead of the National. I suppose that's better than some manager in Peter Mansbridge's chair. Bizarre, though. Is it just me, or does it seem like this Gaza withdrawal might not go as smoothly as Israel's government might hope?

Come here, ducky!

World of Warcraft is to heroin as PokerStars is to...

2005-08-08T23:16:00.000-03:00

...sweet, sweet, crack cocaine, apparently.

It's another of my SAT-esque analogies. I seem to come up with one about once a year. In this case, the post actually has something to do with the analogy.

If you'd spent any time at all around my office over the last six months or so, you'd have heard something about World of Warcraft. It's a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. I think most of the guys in the office have tried it, and a few of them have been playing it regularly and talk about it a lot at work. I have taken every opportunity to make fun of those who are for the amount of time they put into it.

First things first, I'm hucking boulders around in a reasonably fragile house. I am the pot, they are the kettles, etc. I dived wholeheartedly into pen-and-paper fantasy roleplaying when Rob first invited me into his D&D campaign almost five years ago, after insisting I was just wetting my feet. I have spent many, many dozens of hours poring through rulebooks, working on characters and campaigns, and generally driving my friends crazy talking about them. I got completely hooked on Neverwinter Nights a few years ago and spent many late nights at it before I finished it. I've never played WoW myself - my home PC won't run it for one thing - but I know what I'm like and I'm pretty sure that if I tried it, I'd get hooked on it pretty quickly.

Despite all of this, my uppance had not truly come until now. PokerStars has become my World of Warcraft.

I get together with the guys every couple of months for a poker game. We usually play dealer's choice which gets pretty ridiculous. We've been working no limit hold'em in here and there, and we've occasionally played a night of nothing but NLH. We haven't gotten together in quite a while, and a few weeks ago I wanted a game, so I downloaded PokerStars one night to try it out. They have play money ring games and tournaments in hold'em, Omaha, and stud. There are some really loose players, but there are a lot of people on there who are trying to improve their game, and they treat the play money with the respect you need in order to succeed at that. You wouldn't think people would take play money seriously, but if you've been playing an NLH tournament for an hour, someone with 9,000 chips goes all in on the flop, and you've got 6,000, top pair, and a weak kicker, you think long and hard about calling. It becomes about time instead of money. And winning. Don't forget winning.

To qualify as somebody's World of Warcraft (stretch with me, now) I believe a game requires three things:

1) friends who are also playing
2) regular discussion with those friends about playing
3) playing and/or watching those friends play at lunchtime

Oh, and fourth in the trilogy: spending a lot of free time playing it. That's very important, too.

So, let's see, here:

1) I told Rob about it, he started playing, and it spread pretty quickly to Andrew and Will.
2) Over the last couple of weeks, we've been talking about various games and hands we've played.
3) At least twice last week I sat and watched Will play at lunchtime.

I've been spending an excessive amount of free time playing myself. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Now, it's not as if I'm playing all day at work or anything. It's free time I'm filling, but at some point, don't you have to ask yourself whether there's something more constructive you could be doing with your time? Like watching TV, for example. Kidding. This all reminds me of a Bertrand Russell quote I used to have in my sig at UNB: "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." I'm not sure why I'm thinking about this quite so much - how is this any different than pool or D&D or reading or any of the other things I fill my evenings and weekends with?

Maybe it's not and I just thought it made good blog fodder. I've been in a drought. :)

I'm curious as to whether all this online NLH will affect us all the next time we get together for poker. I think it might. And that can only be a good thing. Raising the skill level and all that - if you're going to do something, do it well. Or something. :)

Must spread addiction to others... www.pokerstars.com

Finally, a plug for Arrested Development - quite possibly the best comedy writing on TV today. My brother got me season 1 on DVD for my birthday and Fox has been running Season 2 reruns in four-episode marathons on Friday nights. I don't know where it's been all my life.

A new post should come in January if history is any indication. Heh.

what is it about 7:19 PM?

2005-03-29T19:19:00.000-04:00

It seems I always get the urge to post when I'm still at work at 7:19 PM. When I toyed around with LiveJournal last year, two of my three posts were at 7:19 PM.

What a lame opening. I'm losing my touch. Or I never had it. Whatever...

Incidentally, long weekends with family are not conducive to getting any work done. Fortunately, there isn't much left to do on the project I've been working on the last little while – should be ready to go to production this weekend.

I just felt like mentioning two new things I discovered over the Easter weekend.

1) I read Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule over the weekend. I started it on the bus on Thursday night and I just couldn't put it down. It's the first book in his Sword of Truth series. My father's been reading them and loaned it to me. It's cool and unexpected when your parents' tastes coincide with your own.

2) Remember Fiona Apple? She had a couple of big radio hits (Criminal, Sleep To Dream) back in '96 when she was all of 19 years old. Her last album came out in '99 – it took me a while to get into it but I really like it and I find myself playing it a lot. Anyway, on the weekend I was trolling the web for upcoming new releases from artists I like. I found out that she recorded a new album in 2003 but her label hasn't released it because they don't think it's commercial enough, and some high quality MP3's have recently been leaked. Score! I'm having a similar experience to the last album - it's taking a while to get used to, but I'm speeding up the experience by playing it non-stop. :)

I just know you had to know those things. This will be a good test to see who has my RSS feed in their newsreader... hehe. I'm off to either cook some kickass chili or eat raisin bran and toast. (I also always seem to be thinking about making chili when I post at 7:19 PM. What is going on?)

Adios.

9:30 on a Tuesday night

2004-10-14T00:20:00.000-03:00

Actually, it's 12:20 on a Thursday morning, but I had BNL running through my head as I was walking home.

I just got home from work – I haven't had to work this late for a while but the CIO is doing a presentation next week and there's some stuff that absolutely has to get pushed to production by Friday. Yay 15-hour day. I had coffee around 7 and I don't feel like sleeping yet so you get *bullet points galore!*

Speaking of work, there's a quote from Microserfs (a book that you should read, by the way, especially if you're a programmer) that has stuck in my head since I first read it years ago – "There's an endemic inability in the software industry to estimate the amount of time required for a software project." I don't know if it's necessarily true (though I think it probably is) but I do know that I have an awfully hard time reliably estimating how long it will take to complete programming tasks. I always have and I don't know why. I need to do something about this.
Andrew was also working late tonight and I could hear bits and pieces of his music. He had a bunch of different artists on shuffle, while I was listening to complete albums. This struck me for some reason and I mentioned it to him – he said he doesn't usually listen to complete albums because the songs all end up sounding the same to him. I find that songs on an album are like chapters in a book – I can enjoy a chapter by itself but I appreciate the chapters more as a cohesive whole.
Andrew and I talked a lot today, actually. We got into a fairly animated discussion about the NHL lockout at lunch. It went on for half an hour or so. My feeling, at least right now, is that the players should be able to make whatever they can on the free market and that the owners are using the players as a scapegoat so they don't have to blame their own poor management. There's an interesting and entertaining book by Michael Lewis called Moneyball about how the Oakland Athletics have been able to win so many games with a very low payroll. I guess I'm lumping hockey owners in with baseball owners – and baseball owners have been crying poor for years, holding cities hostage for publicly-funded stadiums, not spending revenue-sharing payments on player salaries, that kind of thing. People wouldn't be so eager to own sports teams if the teams weren't a good investment or the people didn't have massive egos and a desire to be in the public eye. Maybe it just boils down to me rather having the money go to the players than to the owners, because I don't like the owners. Heh.
The Shaye/Symphony Nova Scotia show on Friday was incredible – I'll leave it at that for now. I've been meaning to post a full review but just haven't gotten around to it.
I bought my parents a new computer for Christmas. I still have a Pentium 166/MMX at home. What's wrong with this picture?
My ankles are still sore from tennis and I haven't played in a week. I wonder what I did there. I'm still not walking, both because I haven't been getting up early enough, and because my ankles are sore. I really need to get back in that routine. Soon.
Almost everyone in the baseball media has been making such a big deal about Boston versus New York in the American League Championship Series. I'd rather have a team in there that it wouldn't kill me (figuratively) to root for. I watched a bit of last night's game. Mike Mussina was pitching a perfect game through 6 innings and the Yankees were up 8-0. If I'm Joe Torre, there's no way I send him back out for the 7th, despite the perfect game – I take him out to rest him in case I need to ride him hard later in the series. Ah, the joys of playing armchair manager. In this case, Mussina gave up four runs in the 7th and the Sox came back to 8-7, so maybe I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. :)
I'm totally hooked on J. J. Abrams' new show Lost – it's a ridiculous premise but incredibly compelling.
Sue Johanson is on Letterman – WTF?
Anyone want a Gmail invite? My Mom has Gmail now – I think that's cool for some reason.

It's now 1:10 on a Thursday morning. I think I've rambled enough for one night. Zzz...

pain, thy name is "tennis"

2004-10-07T19:20:00.000-03:00

I am experiencing pain.

Ow.

Ow.

Did I mention ow?

This is how you know exercise is working, right? :)

I started playing tennis again a couple of months ago. I hadn't played since high school. A friend invited me to play and I decided to try it out. I was in the best shape I'd been in in five or six years (I've lost 65 pounds in the last year and a half or so) and I used to enjoy playing tennis. I thought "why not?" We played for a couple of hours the first night – I sucked, but I had a lot of fun, and I was pretty sore later that night and the next day.

It's the running. It isn't as bad playing doubles – obviously you don't have nearly as much court to cover as in singles – but the running is awfully hard on the legs when you're still carrying 215 pounds around.

I've gotten into a once-a-week routine with a couple of friends, but I've played five times in the last two weeks, including a couple of hours Tuesday evening, and 2 1/2 hours bookended by half-hour walks on Saturday afternoon. Then another 2 1/2 hours tonight.

Singles.

Five sets.

I wonder if I would be this sore if I was still walking every day? I really need to get back into that routine – I'm not sure why I'm out of it. I'm hobbling around my apartment like a feeble old man.

What doesn't kill me can only make me stronger, right?

Right?

au revoir, Expos, et bonne chance

2004-09-29T13:21:00.000-03:00

It should be announced today that the Montreal Expos will be relocated to Washington, D.C. for the 2005 season. I'm a Jays fan myself, but as a Canadian baseball fan, I must say I'm sad to see them finally go.

The franchise has been on life support for the last few years, and attendance has dwindled down to just a few thousand a game. It's easy to forget that Montreal used to be a great baseball town, and fielded some awfully good teams over the years. Who knows how far they would have gone in 1994 if the season had not been aborted in the name of the almighty dollar – they had the best record in baseball at the time.

I'm a big fan of a web site called Baseball Prospectus. It's some of the best online baseball content available, put together by a great group of people who have an all-consuming passion for the game. It's a pay site, but there are a couple of free articles every day. One of the guys is a Montreal fan, and said goodbye in this article far more eloquently than I could possibly hope to.

random thoughts

2004-09-29T01:43:00.000-03:00

Not sure what I'm still doing up – I'm watching Letterman for the second night in a row, which is not a good sign as far as getting enough sleep goes.

Today I said to Rob, "posting on the blog is a lot like if you threw a party and nobody came." I'm not sure how far the simile goes, but I'm enjoying it anyway. For the moment. I think I'm finally happy with the layout.

I love Aliant voice mail. Ever freeze up leaving a message? I do it all the time. I just have to press * and I can start over or decide not to leave a message at all. It's awesome.

I feel like I need to justify this blog's existence, but why should that be? If people read it, great. If they don't, whatever.

I'm wondering again how long this burst of creativity is going to last.

Is it actually creativity, or is it just uncontrolled textual diarrhea?

healthy respect for logic

2004-09-28T13:11:00.000-03:00

To quote or paraphrase (I'm not sure which) Jeremy from Sports Night: I have a pretty healthy respect for logic. That is why I was so frustrated with my 8-ball team last night.

Before last night there were six players on my team. Five play every night. One guy had to work last night, and I found out on the way to Dooly's that another one had to quit the league. So I was short a player. Happily, I was able to arrange for a spare. Not having a spare is bad, because you have to play short and it's very difficult to pick up any points that way.

I don't think I can adequately explain my frustration without getting into some detail about the way we keep score. There are five rounds of 10 games (five guys play five other guys two games each). You get 10 points for a win and one point per ball sunk for a loss. The team that scores the most points in a round wins that round and counts two points toward the night. Five rounds times two points is 10, plus two points are given to the team with the best score overall. So there are 12 points available every night.

The league is handicapped. Each player has a handicap which is their average rounded to the nearest half. You sum the handicaps and spot the team with the lower total.

My team's handicaps last night: 9.0, 8.0, 7.5, 7.0, 6.5 (the spare).
My opponents' handicaps last night: 8.0, 7.5, 7.0, 7.0, 6.5.

The handicaps do not linearly correspond to skill level – a 9 is an elite player, think top ten in a city of 100,000, and there are only a couple of them in the league. An 8 is very good, and a 7 is about average. The other team had a total of 36, we had a total of 38. So we would normally have spotted them four points a round ([38 - 36] x two games).

Now, when you play a spare, you have to count his handicap as 3 higher than it is – the idea being to deter teams from playing a spare in place of a worse player if they don't really have to. So the 6.5 was treated as a 9.5, our total handicap was 41 and our spot was 10 points a round instead of four.

My team lost it. Actually, to be fair, my two best players lost it, and the other guy didn't really care that much. The match was a mismatch; we should have walked all over them. Six more points a round should not have made any difference, but it made them tank. We lost 10-2.

Here's where the healthy respect for logic comes in. We were straight up outplayed. We lost the overall points even before the spot was applied. There was only one round where the other team failed to cover the spot – where we would have won except for those extra six points. But all these two guys could talk about was how a 10-point spot was too big a hole to dig out of.

My 9.0 shot 82 (an 8.2 over 10 games) and didn't come close to running out a table all night (which is what 9's do – this one usually runs two tables a night).

My 8.0 shot 56.

But all they could blame was the 10 points. Because the alternative was to blame themselves.

Now that I think about it, this is fairly common human behaviour, especially at a pool table. It's difficult to take responsibility for a poor performance – excuses come very easily. It's something I'm trying to combat in my own game.

Anyway, this story doesn't really have much of a denouement (thank you Mr. McLenahan for grade eleven English :D) but it feels good to get it out.

Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!! :)

Sprite is to lemon/lime as Fresca is to...

2004-09-28T01:36:00.000-03:00

...grapefruit, apparently.

I'm going to rant for a bit.

I'm going to see Shaye in concert with Symphony Nova Scotia in Halifax in a couple of weeks. The show is going to completely rock. I really can't wait.

I ordered the tickets over the phone – I live three hours away from Halifax, so it wasn't really convenient to drop in to the box office. The tickets came in the mail the other day, and when I opened the envelope, I found another envelope inside (containing the tickets) with a sticker bearing the following notice:

--
RESPECTING YOUR PRIVACY IS IMPORTANT TO US

Thank you for purchasing tickets at the Arts Centre Box Office. Some promoters/production companies would like to keep you advised of upcoming performances and activities, including some fundraising activities. As their box office agent, we provide such companies with mailing lists comprised of patrons who recently purchased a ticket for their event. If you prefer not to be included in such a contact list, please let us know, by marking the box below, and dropping it off at the Box Office, or by contacting the Box Office at 902-494-3820.
--

Buh?

Dear Dalhousie Arts Centre,

Thank you so much for giving me the option of calling you long distance or dropping in to your conveniently located box office. I suppose it would have been inconvenient for your clerk to ask me on the phone whether I wanted my personal information shared with someone else. I suppose I should thank my lucky stars I was given the option to opt out at all. Sorry to have bothered you.

I'm pretty sure I can find a toll-free number to opt out, but that's so not the point. This is standard procedure now. At least Dal is giving me the option; I ordered Sarah McLachlan tickets from admission.com several months ago, and in the confirmation email, I was informed that the act of ordering the tickets constituted consent to having my address added to targeted mailing lists. It so does not.

I'm half tempted to let them send me their crap just for spite, but it's really not worth the time it would take to drop it from the mailbox to the trash can immediately under the mailbox. I know this is a small annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but this kind of thing pisses me off.

This concert had better completely rock.

procrastination is expensive

2004-09-26T01:06:00.000-03:00

Here's a little story about how procrastination can end up costing you in the end.

I rented a car this weekend. My plan was to visit my friend in Quispamsis on Friday night, then drive from there to Minto (where my parents live) on Saturday morning. It was a relatively simple plan, as plans go. All the plan really required was for me to pack a bag for the weekend sometime before leaving Friday night.

I somehow managed not to do this.

I played tennis on Thursday night (losing every set, IIRC) and was tired and stiff once I got home. I didn't feel like packing a bag. Friday morning came, I snoozed until I didn't have time to pack a bag before work. Since I was only going to get to spend a few hours with my friend, I came up with a new plan sometime Friday morning. I would drive back to Moncton late Friday night, get up early on Saturday, pack the bag, and drive to Minto. Sounded like a good plan at the time.

The new plan was working great until I started getting really tired on the drive home.

People that don't know me (and some who do) should note the following:

I fell asleep at the wheel two years ago and wrecked my car.
I was 90 minutes into a 100-minute drive at the time.
I knew I was tired but pushed myself to make it home.

Conversing with myself in the car about whether I should try to make it home, I decided to stop in Sussex and get a motel room for the night.

$92.

A little thing called procrastination, my friends. It always gets you in the end (and I'm sure it will again).

post 1/?

2004-09-24T15:08:00.000-03:00

A friend just started a blog here and I wanted to reply to his first post so I had to create an account. I did this once before, on LiveJournal.com – it lasted for a couple of days and then the creative spark burned out.

Hopefully Andrew won't feel like I'm copying him – I've been toying with the idea of a new online presence on and off for six months or so. I actually wrote a skeleton for a new web site but didn't do much in the way of content. I haven't written much of anything but email in a long time, and I used to really enjoy writing when I was in school. I have no idea how often I'll write (or if I even will again) but it's nice to have an outlet.

(Note to readers – I'm all about the parenthetical thought. That stuff about my train of thought derailing isn't just an overused play on words. I've been known to resort to nested parentheses in rare cases. :D)

I'm always surprised by the personal stuff that people put in their blogs – WWdN is a good example. At this point, I'm pretty sure there's a line I won't cross, and I'm pretty sure I know where it is, but I can't help but wonder if everyone who blogs starts out feeling the same way.

So let's see where it goes. If you bothered reading this, please leave a comment so I'll feel like there's some point to continuing.