I got up sort of early, considering I’m on vacation, but I just wasn’t tired anymore. It’s weird since I had such a hard time getting to sleep last night. I even watched the last half hour of Hypercube, which was utterly dreadful. Gloria went off to work at the yoga studio and I chilled out, poking at some code and playing a little bit of GTA. Mostly, I vegetated. When she came home, we went out to Granny McCarthy’s for lunch. As usual, it was slow, mediocre service, and too expensive. My sandwich was really quite good, though, so I forgive them. It was nice thick slices of roast beef, a nice strong Swiss cheese, and a good baugette.

I want to RELAX on my vacation. Sometimes, I relax by playing video games. Even if I get frustrated, they are usually fun. GTA:SA is not being fun, right now.

It seems like there’s no big consensus on “Good Mac Chess Software.”

I want to play more chess. By “more” I mean “more than one game each year.”

I am getting freaking /sick/ of O’Reilly!

Metroid Prime 2 remains great. I had my second boss battle today, and it was good. I now have quite a bit of new gear, and I’m enjoying doing all the usual Metroid stuff. Around 20:00, Gloria had been home (from teaching Yoga) for a little while, and I thought we’d watch some of the Jeeves and Wooster we had from Netflix. It took me nearly forty minutes to find the next save station, having just entered a new zone. There should never come a point in playing a game where you are frustrated that you can’t turn it off without losing a lot of work. Ever.

I’m endeavoring to use Firefox instead of MSIE at work. There are a number of things that require MSIE on our intranet, but not many, and I’ve been slowly making sure that all the JavaScript in our internal apps is cross-platform friendly. (The last WebKit upgrade made that much easier, as it finally decided that yes, THEAD elements are part of the node tree.)

I spent a lot of my weekend playing GTA: San Andreas. A lot. Maybe too much. I got to the pleasant part of the game where I had four or five missions available at any given time. As I recall from Vice City, it’s the best part. Once you get to a bottleneck of one or two missions, it gets really frustrating. There’s an extent to which you can just tool around and have fun, but when large sections of the game are still off limits, that gets frustrating. Anyway, it’s staying fun, although I’m still a pretty horrible driver. I do feel like I’m better this time around than I was in VC. I’m thinking about sticking Vice City in sometime to see if I can beat any of the missions that I left undone.

The index cards and push pins I ordered arrived today. I took down the cards for the aborted “let’s code together!” project, but I haven’t put anything new up. The cards for the characterization system are still there, mocking me. I need to put up a card for the current blocker, “dynamic by-variant widgets.”

I get to work and stare at my whiteboard, index cards, and screen. If I turned on cursor blinking in Vim, I’d become hypnotized and sit transfixed until my phone rang. I’m not sure what’s happening. I think that it’s a combination of a lot of things. I feel like the systems I’m working on are destined to be eternally unreleased, remaining forever in the ivory tower, which is exactly what I don’t want. I know that’s not the plan, but it’s how it feels, lately. I’ve been working on the same project for months, and with no real back and forth with the users. They green light just about everything, which isn’t a lot of fun. I want an exchange of ideas, and a challenge.