journal for 2003-03-09
the sims
What was I thinking? I let myself rent The Sims. Step one is to admit that we are powerless against The Sims, sayeth the Twelve Step Program. Why did I rent it, then? I think I was just curious. I wasted about five hours on it today. I say wasted because The Sims is all about building a house on sand. Worse, it’s a house on sand on a slope with heavy seasonal rains. My poor Sim. Once the rental is up, Maxi Trout will (God willing) never be seen again.
the gym
So far, we’re keeping to six days a week, and I’m pretty darn happy about that. Yesterday I was pretty crappy-feeling during exercising. My guts were being a little weird, and I just didn’t have a lot of energy. I still did sixty minutes on the lifecycle, though, so it wasn’t a loss or anything. Today, I felt piles better.
In part, I attribute this to my new shirt.
the tees
I am a simple person where fashion is concerned. I don’t like to think about how I look, and I don’t like to look awful. This has traditionally led me to keep it boring: solid color shirts and pants and hair so short that it is incapable of looking different from day to day.
My stockpile of black t-shirts has been dwindling in number and quality. I also wanted to get some plain shirts to wear while exercising—I don’t know why, but I wasn’t thrilled with what I’d been wearing. Yesterday, we went to the mall and I picked up about a dozen new t-shirts. I spent most of today wearing the most elaborate of them, a green and blue ringer. It is wicked comfortable, and it has some kind of pleasant “new t-shirt smell.”
I wore a grey shirt from the same batch at the gym, and it was just about as comfy as the ringer. I’m guessing it would’ve been as good, if I broke it in more.
the ring
We also rented The Ring and Ringu, the movie on which The Ring was based.
We watched Ringu first, and I’m sure that made The Ring less interesting, but I think that Ringu was plain ol’ better, anyway. It was the details that did it: the specifics about the adversary, the specifics about the protagonists, even some of the visual effects. The only thing I liked better in The Ring (at least, the only thing that springs to mind, now) was the general feel of the islanders when talking about the late unpleasantness.
It still weirded me out, and even now I’m looking over my shoulder uncomfortably. The movies’ creepiness is contending with my ringer’s comfiness. I’m hoping the shirt wins. That would really prove its value.
the job
The work week went quickly, last week, and it was semi-productive. I got some conceptual work done (but mostly just laid out) on the API rewriting I need to do. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much work done for database replication, which I’d wanted to do before Trevor got back. Stuff kept happening that made it impossible for me and Godfrey to collaborate—at least on the SQL issues. We did talk about some other problems. None of them, sadly, were very interesting.
Apache continues to work well, and I’m itching to get it put in place doing more than it is at the moment. Once we’re committed to that, I can start really speeding stuff up and doing some crazy porting.
the perl
mdxi asked, last week, whether there was a way to have Perl read subs from a tokenized plaintext file at runtime. I gave him a simple sketch of how I’d do it, and he implemented it. We spent a few hours each on weird tweaks. By the time I was done with it, it was reading from multiple files and creating subs in multiple namespaces, along with some other weird stuff. It was pretty cool, and good practise for storing hooks in the RDB. I’m pretty psyched about doing that stuff, but I need to get the projects that will use it officially approved! I guess, in the end, I can try to find a way to play with that stuff at home. I don’t like the idea, though, that I should spend my free time at home building job skills so that, if this job goes away I’m still marketable.
the snooze
Ok, I’m sure there’s other stuff I should record, but I’m tired. The last things I can think of: I need to submit my IntroComp entry soon, and I’m thinking about entering the IF Art competition. I need to think more about my idea.