You know you’ve been programming to long when ….

you can miss-read “You don’t know whether they’re laid out from left to right or right to left in memory”, as “You don’t know whether they’ve been laid …”, and then can’t stop laughing lol.

O.K. I think I have seriously been sitting in front of a computer wwaaaaayyyy too long for one night…….

This morning H.R.P. scheduled an appointment for the cheapest eye place in town (listed in the yellow pages of course) and canceled work for the day. I reported last nights findings and we ended up instead at what is likely the most experienced of the two most ‘suitable’ places I looked up. On the upside of using the Internet rather then the yellow pages, was finding a coupon, haha! Plus being able to download, print out, fill out, and therefore skip filling out the paper work in office. After everything was sorted, ma went out shopping (I refused to comply), whilst I tended to trying to enjoy what little time remained. Personally, I think she likely took more joy in going shopping then she would have in getting paid from work lol.

It has been maybe a decade since my last eye examination, so I knew what to expect but not quite the level of outcome. The doctor was exceptionally nice and I would recommend the place to others here. One thing that I very much like about people practicing locally over a franchise of some sort, you know if they are horrendous they would be out of business quickly. I found them professional and easy to communicate with; it’s also nice when they have a sense of humour :-).

The general outcome, my vision sucks for distance but they have yet to figure out why. Once my glasses are ready, I do very much wonder just how big a change it will make, these are the eyes I was born with: there is no other form of vision I can compare them to, unless someone wants to loan me their eyes for a few days o/. 2 weeks after getting the glasses, I’m supposed to go for further testing, which I *hope* happens. Then again, I also hope my toe eventually gets medical attention… :-/. On the subject of frames, that basically took all of 3 minutes. I don’t care very much about how they look so much as how well they work! You could say, I strongly believe that form follows function. The glasses are fairly plane, and I most likely rather then having the super geeky brain, I will now also look like a dateless nerd lol. Then again, I’m not sure if one can avoid that with glasses, unless you are dumb as a ….

My brother who was not even present, has succeeded in making my mother feel like 2 cents (a family super-power), ragging on the doctor and his practice, and bitching about the frames without even seeing them. My response to that? Well, to quote Doc. Holiday as portrayed in Wyatt Earp: all you can kiss my rebel dick! I make my own decisions, period – don’t like it, then put up and shut up.

😉

OpenArena – addictive Quake III style!

Finding myself a bit light on time today, is tarted looking again at the ioquake3 engine with an interest in playing around with it. Of course, there is nothing better then a real world example – I tested Urban Terror and OpenArena, two games based on ioquake3 and Quake III: Arena game play. Urban Terror applies modern weapons and equipments but beyond that is not really a realism game IMHO. OpenArena on the other hand, sticks close to the core—it is as Quake like as the game play lol.

OpenArena is addictive and you can just feel your brain cells rot away as you engage in the carnage! The game is fairly simple and straight forward, you spawn, you run around, you blow people apart (gibs all over), oh yeah, and there are power ups here and there. Really, there isn’t much more to say about it then that, other then it is strangely enjoyable; no wonder the Quake franchise has made millions.

Ahh, sitting here with my foot in a pale of water & Epsom salt, laptop for the music and the dog for company lol. Fools Gold also just started, so I’m set for the next couple of hours. I love this movie, you can’t beat a good sense of humour xD. Fools Gold also reminds me how difficult it can be to get someone out of your life…

Just got out of RvS, figured it would be best to soak my foot now so I do get some sleep tonight. On the upside though, I don’t have to get up early tomorrow, unlike the rest of the week! Down side obviously being that I’ll be workin’ later hours tomorrow :'(. Today’s job was a headstart on Thursdays work load, all the heavy crap is starting to come out of the wood-works, sigh.

Continuing my hunt  over the eye glasses issue. H.R.P. has taken out a loan to deal with the cost, and it was the toe issue that pushed things over the edge lol. Ok, so many I should be thankful… if this thing ever heals correctly that is. Most people would use the phonebook, me? I use something called the Internet for my initial scouting ;). As usual I started with the cities website (more useful then most folk here would ever dream) an dhave since moved onto Google Maps. The best eye doctor I know of is quite a distance away, so local research is required. Seems that there are at least 4 optometry practices here, at least 2 of which look suitable. Interestingly, it seems that one of optometrist also comes from Ft. Lauderdale—as do I lol.

Ahh, I love the internet, who needs to dig out a copy of the yellow pages anymore?

So far experiments continue with SWAT 4 performance issues. Deeper testing has shown that it is no longer connected to graphical issues, not when running on my current hardware/driver config; nice to be able to max out the graphics online *and* in single player.

What happens is periodically when moving through an area, I get a stutter-lag-warp like motion: as if the whole game stopped spinning and then suddenly unlocked. The only consistency I’ve noticed is it happens when entering a region of the map that I have not been in previously—or have not been in for a while. One thought is that perhaps it occurs when the cache must be updated with stuff that has already been moved out of the games memory cache. My machine has RAM to burn so I have been testing the game with various cache sizes, but don’t honestly expect any positive result. On modern machines, cache size shouldn’t matter to much with the Unreal Engine 2.x lol.

Atm I’m defragging a few disks, maybe that might help a little. I don’t know if it is just the much greater frequency of crashes with Windows XP, or that NTFS really sucks that much worse then FreeBSDs UFS2 system. But for one reason or another, my windows file systems always end up very highly fragmented. Although on the upside, unlike Win32: FreeBSD does kind of encourage you to fsck afterwards hehe.

Hopefully my experiments will yield some fruit, and I can stop warping all over the place lol.

Goodbye toe, hello pancake!

Ok, so far my toe has been slammed into a couch and healed… then slammed into a step at work, and healed improperly. Last week I showed it to an acquaintance who is a nurse, and she came to the same conclusion I had – time to see a doctor (and have the dead tissue removed).

This morning when getting ready to leave for work, 12 hard cover books fell off the table and landed on the same damn toe lol. I’m lucky they weren’t novels 350-450pg thick, or there wouldn’t be a foot left let along a toe! No serious damage added, if there is actually anything more to damage… just a bit of blood flow. Cleaned it up and threw a bandaid on it before heading out the door, it likely stopped bleeding by the time we got to work.

In some ways, I think I now will look at Spaceballs with an extra chuckle: whenever Barfs foot gets crushed under a Yogurts statue…

Writer’s Block: Childhood Firsts

What was your first word?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

My first word ironically was “No!”.

I reckon all parents go through the usual “Say daddy” or “Say mommy” kind of thing when their kids are young, mine did, and I told them NO! hahaha!!! I guess I was just born stubborn as a mule xD

Haven’t been updating my LJ much this week, as usual that means either I am highly depressed or extremely busy, and often both lol.

This week that has started also promises to be a very hard and busy one as well :-(.

The upside is Operation Redeemer may be moving ahead soon……

Rcent business

As much as I hate to not be working, I am kind of happy about this recent turn of events.

Yesterday the after work down-time was interrupted with a job interview: one that I’ve had apprehensive thoughts about, in regard to Operation Redeemer. We didn’t get it and apparently, my remarks about “32 hours” and needing 12 people to do the job, “Queered it” as H.R.P. put it. I also reminded my mother that she should be careful what she wishes for, since she had asked me to speak up! For better or worse, I prefer to speak honestly and don’t like to mince words. Also on the flip side, we got something else (and less painful).

Thursday was supposed to be a trial-run, in which I have wondered just how much stuff could be done in 6 hours of labour. The place is so big, to clear it from a SWAT point of view, would take 20 men and at least 5 minutes. Cleaning the place as a 2-schmuck team would take all week! It is just to freaking BIG.

As I often say, things always balance out in the end. The 2 jobs that virtually evaporated have also come back online in force, and after yesterdays interview, H.R.P. is most certainly less inclined to whine about them lol. For me, work is work; that’s roughly all there is to it. Although that being said, I would love to have a career that I can wake up in the morning and actually want to do the job :-/. (Ok, so a crazy spider can dream…)

The positive side is that

In sleeping on it and having a job, that frankly leaves my mind free: I’ve come up with an idea for the tpsh problem.

The tokenizer is beautiful, the only problem is it does the expansions through a table of call backs. Now if I was to modify that so that it instead attaches meta-data to each token instead, those expansions could be delayed until later without major redesign. It will be necessary to redactor the lexer in order to handle the change in data structure. The code generator can then be tasked with completing any expansions during generation, by expanding lexemes to corrisponding code as it goes. After wards, re do the code generate into something more elegant and voila…. we have what it should’ve been in the first place!

A good nights sleep always helps the code[r]