School starting again and its back to the grindstone for me. I’m really excited about the classes I’m taking this semester: Operating Systems, Intro to Algorithms, Software Design, Computer Ethics and Scientific Presentations. I usually have high opinions of my classes when they start and through the semester those good feelings begin to erode. I’m holding out for this one though, with two semesters left I’ve got to enjoy ‘em while I’ve got ‘em.
D: The world is too grim of a place, you can’t take it too seriously. That includes yourself - if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?
M: Other people.
D: Oh, right. Of course.
Hey, its summer! Like all summers it’s flying by far too quickly. We’ve finished the moving part of moving, but there are still plenty of things to do around the apartment before its ready for guests. I imagine buying a house is a bit like this, but much, much worse. Once we’re settled I think I’ll feel more relaxed, but for now, with boxes still piled in the dinning room, I feel like I need to spend all my time tidying, cleaning, sorting, arranging, a generally wishing I had less junk.
One of my new projects is to digitize all of my paper records. I’m eager to reduce the piles of paper I’ve been keeping (I’m aweful about filing them when I should and they just end up cluttering my desk). I’ve already moved all of my bills over to e-bills, but I still get an impressive pile of paper mail. I’ll let you know how my paperless home-office works out.
For my birthday last year my wonderful family gave me an iPod Touch. Some feel its the red-headed step child of the iPhone family, but I think its wonderful. Its like having an iPhone without the phone bill. The first thing that I did, after marveling at the touch screen and its amazing interface is, was to jailbreak it. I wont go into details (use the google) but its essentially modifying the firmware on the device so that you can run 3rd party applications natively. Why would you want to do that? you might ask. Tons of reasons. Some of the great ones are:
SwapLibrary -Sync your device with multiple libraries (only two actually, but who needs more that that?)
NemusSync - Sync your calendar with your google calendar!
Games! - GemLogic, ParkingLot, Lexitron - enough goodies to fill a 45 minute commute
ruBooks - Use your touch like an ebook reader
I haven’t look into the legality of this but I’m sure its not 100% legit. This is why I’m a big fan of open source. I think the iPod Touch is great, but I’d really like a better ToDo list application. I could either(pre sdk) cross my fingers an hope that apple does something about it or take the law into my hands and jailbreak+write something myself. If the iDevice operating system was open (like linux or BSD or etc…) I could joined the community of active developers, learned a lot of things about a really interesting project and give something back. Ah well, its a dream world where companies write open source software and still make money (or so I’m told).
Anyway, put that economic stimulus package to good use and go buy yourself an iPhone or iPod Touch.
School finished up this week and I’m scott free until the end of August (Work full time free, not summer vacation free). There’s a lot on my to do list, most of it vague and unachievable - stuff like: read more, exercise, become a better person - and I don’t intend to accomplish much of it, but I am looking forward to knocking a couple things off the list.
First and foremost, reading for pleasure. There’s a pile of books that I’ve been meaning to pick up and now that I’m not burried under text books I’ll take a stab at some of them. On the top of my list: The Last Samurai, Midnight’s Children, The Translator and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. We’ll see if I can at least get through those, hopefully more.
I’ll be moving in June to a new place with a little more space and hopefully I’ll be able to set up a little workshop/office/not my bedroom space where I can tinker a bit. I’ve been meaning to work on some simple electronic projects (CVS camera hack, TV-B-Gone) and maybe I’ll finally get a chance to. This may be pushing into the not-truly-achievable part of my list, but we’ll see.
For my birthday this year M. gave me Shadows Over Camelot, a card based board game produced by Days Of Wonder, and I’ve been totally thrilled with it. A review over at Board Game Geeks will give you an explanation of the game play, but let me add my experiences for good measure.
Things I liked:
This game is hard, I’ve played three times and haven’t come close to beating it. Even with such a slim chance of winning I find it incredibly fun. The cooperative game play element is refreshing, keeping everyone playing invested in the game, while the element of a traitor keeps you on your toes. The turns are quick and everybody’s luck is the same - because it’s cooperative nobody ‘wins’ while everyone else loses.
Things I don’t like:
The first time set up takes a long, long time. This is balanced by the quick game play, but when you’re introducing a new player (or worse, a group of them) it can be a task to explain the rules and get everybody up and running. I would like explanation to take less than ten minutes. Also, with only one positive action per turn I feel its hard to get things done. This might be a problem in the strategy we’ve been using, but it seems that it is too easy to lose quests. But maybe thats what keeps it fun, I’m still debating this point. My last complaint is the figurines and their somewhat low quality. I’ve got a couple who don’t stand up straight or feel a little delicate, but this is a minor complaint.
Overall I think the game is quite a bit of fun, challenging, well made and its certainly going to provide many more enjoyable hours of game play.
To help speed up the re-familiarization process with the rules I’ve compiled an abbreviated list, the quick play set of rules (see below the cut)
I’ve been taking a computer architecture class where we’ve done some MIPS development and while there’s an IDE available (MIPster) I’ve preferred to do most of the my development in vim. As most of you know Vim is Vi Improved, a text editor that allows you to do all of your editing through keyboard shortcuts and the command line.
I recently ran into an error while using Vim on my university shell account:
E667 Fsync Failed
It turns out that the error was caused by Vim’s inability to write to disk. I had a core dump that was using up most of my disk quota which prevented vim from allocating space to save the file. Once I deleted the dump, freeing up some space, I was good to go.
At work I am part of a team that mostly uses C#. Because I’m new to it (and sorely inexperienced) a coworker loaned me a copy of C# Design Patterns by James Cooper. I’ve found the book to be quite informative, a little too remedial at points, but generally quite enjoyable. You can look forward to seeing some of my notes from it, namely summaries of the various design patterns.
When I was 10 I had two best friends, Mikael and Alex, and we would spend all of our time together. One of our favorite activities was playing role playing games. (D&D, TMNT, Ninja’s and Superspies are the three I can remember of the top of my head) . Before we learned about girls we would spend our recesses hunched over a desk rolling die for initiative and combing through the Dungeon Masters Guide.
I’ve grown up some since then, but I still haven’t given up the nerd in me. I channeled that nerd towards technology and put aside the role playing for many years, but a couple of years ago Mary gave me Settlers of Catan for my birthday and I fell in love instantly. How could there be a whole realm of interesting, challenging, fun boardgames that I had never heard of?!? A way to exercise my love of fantasy/sci-fi and role playing without losing friends, personal hygiene and self respect! I was thrilled.
Since then I’ve picked up a number of other titles and have enjoyed them all. My friend Charlotte has organized a gaming group and we get together every couple of weeks, have dinner and play games. This has been a great experience and wonderful way of learning of (and playing) new games. Zombies, Apples to Apples, Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride, 5 Crowns to name a few.
Long story short, I’ve added a new category for games. In future you can look forward to hearing more about my game playing experiences. Let me know if you’ve got any questions/thoughts about the games I talk about.
Happy New Year everyone.
I asked M. what I should write about and she recommended that I write about how awesome she is. I thought that was a good challenge, though I don’t want to call it a challenge… I mean, it’s almost too easy, right? Let me first start with the home made bagels that she made for our New Year’s brunch yesterday - salted, poppy seed, and sugar-cinnamon toppings. It doesn’t stop there, she’s an amazing cook - come over for dinner sometime and see for yourself.
Then there’s the buttons that she didn’t sew onto my coat. I pestered her for like 9 months for her to sew a button back onto my coat. And though she never did she taught me a valuable lesson about self sufficiency. Had I not sewn that one button onto my coat myself I wouldn’t have known how to sew the other three on that fell off not long after. Or, you know, she could have sewn all four of them on for me and I could have learned how to Tom Sawyer people into doing my work for me.
M. does a wonderful job correcting my atrocious spelling and grammar and she can even diagram sentences (but can’t manage to keep her shoelaces tied).
I also think that my M. is awesome because she’s reading this over my shoulder and I couldn’t really say otherwise at this point, could I? And that she’s patient and kind and most of all because she puts up with me.