A fifteen hour day at work. Including the commute, seventeen. Got the bulk of my work for E3 checked in, and ready to go into the testing pipe, so I’m actually quite happy. Almost energized, but for the anonymous note we got in the mail today.

Anonymous note, you say? Yes, indeed. And you can imagine it’s not good. Someone threatening to call Oakland Blight Control on us because of our front yard. Yeah, it’s overgrown, yeah, the grass is six feet tall. Why? Because I’m so allergic to grass that if I spend about half an hour in it, for the rest of the day, I’m sneezing like crazy. But, it looks disorderly, so I can understand where the letter-writer’s coming from, sort of. They took a really obnoxious, threatening tone, which I thought was inappropriate, particularly given that no one’s ever said anything about our yard, and it’s not the worst on the block by much.

But the weirdest thing of all was that we *are* working on it, and have been for the last couple weeks. We’re making progress, and it’s only NOW that this jackass decides to send us threatening letters. Whee! Did they not see the one section that’s been entirely pulled up, and is ready for planting? Did they not see that about a fifth of the grass in the front yard has been pulled up? Sure, it’s gonna get uglier before it gets better, but the thing is that it’s *OBVIOUS* that progress is being made. So it’s just fucking stupid that someone would write a threatening, anonymous note about our yard, when it’s plain as day that finally, something has actually started happening.

So, they take something that’s provided us with some real sense of satisfaction and progress, and turn it into something negative. At the end of a fifteen hour day at work, that even turned out pretty good, it definitely ruins a day. And a sense of camaraderie with the neighbors, that makes me want to egg the shit out of the houses of the two people I think it probably is. Mind you, one of them would have their house unjustly vandalized, but fuck ’em, they’re both assholes anyway.

Bastards.

Been really tired lately – not enough sleep. Last night, I decided to go to sleep (relatively) early, and was actually feeling really quite rested when I heard Mobius barking his ass of in the backyard at 6am. Not rested rested, mind you, but like the potential for feeling rested was there, had I not had to get up and drag his ass back indoors so he’d stop barking with the neighbor’s dog. Probably the first time I’ve ever wanted to really smack the dog, but since he was just doing what dogs do, it’s hard to hold it against him. Brought him in, closed the dog door, and went back to sleep. Of course, now it’s 9, time to go to work, and I’m totally fucking beat.

If you haven’t seen Firefly yet, do it now. Seriously. Best show EVER. Then, go watch Serenity, on Sept. 30th. The trailer’s out on www.quicktime.com. I’m so looking forward to this, it makes my brain hurt.

At the Home Depot Sunday, picking up stuff for the garden, we passed by two people, one of which I instantly recognized as an acquaintance from MIT – another MechE, who I took almost all my classes with. I remembered she was from the area, but what were the chances of running into her at HD? Well, I figured I’d ask, and indeed, it was her. She introduced her husband, and we chatted for a bit. After a few minutes, I realized that I knew her husband from somewhere, and so I asked him if he was also from MIT. He wasn’t – apparently, he went to Stanford. But then it dawned on me that I used to commute with this guy to the Bay Area Wind Symphony when we were both in 8th grade.

So… yeah. It’s probably not so strange, since they were both from the same area, and may have in fact gone to high school together, but it was really weird nonetheless to find two people from totally different areas of my life at the Home Depot, married to each other.

Saturday morning, we ripped out all the existing plants in one of the dirt patches by the sidewalk (there’s sort of house-side lawn, and street-side lawn, and this was one of the two pieces of street-side lawn). This took about two hours (we’d torn out the bulk of it the Tuesday prior), and since it’d rained lightly on Friday, it was actually pretty trivial to do. Then, we went clothes shopping, food shopping, and cooked up some citrus soy/ginger marinated salmon, ATK southwest-style marinaded tri tip skewers, and a buttload of veggies for about eight peeps that came over ostensibly to see Oldboy. But, since the showing of Oldboy was at like, 9:50, we settled on watching Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… Spring instead.

Oog. There’s a movie with some really memorable imagery. I liked it, and it really affected me, but it sits very uneasily with me, and even after talking about it for a good long while with Ei-Nyung, I can’t really put a solid finger on *what* it is specifically that makes me feel this way. Definitely recommended viewing, but I imagine it’s not for everyone.

A bunch of people came over, including one person I haven’t seen in a year +, so that was nice. Also got some multiplayer Lumines on, and wow – there’s a game where your skill rapidly degrades after a week of not playing it. Fun stuff, though.

Sunday, we did more gardening, combing through the area for rocks, turning all the soil with one of these four-pronged manual tiller things. My back and arms are a little sore, but a little exercise was definitely good for me. We ended up pulling out probably a cubic foot of stones, which was pretty insane, given that the space is only maybe 6×3′ total. Still, it’s definitely stripped, we covered it with a black sheet of plastic, and “stapled” it into the ground. We’ll leave that for a couple weeks, then ideally, plant some ground cover.

The current candidate is Irish moss, and we’re seeing whether that will grow on a small patch on the house-side patch of lawn. If it sticks, we’ll use that. Otherwise, next week we’ll go grab some other ground cover, and give that a shot. Definitely satisfying work, and the visible progress is huge. Of course, at the rate we’re going, it’ll take us two months of working every weekend for about five hours to do the whole front lawn, and that’s an *optimistic* assessment. Whoo.

I’ve had a pretty weird career, so far.

1.) Life Guard – Piedmont Swim Club
2.) Bike Mechanic – Open Road Cyclery, Syracuse, NY
3.) Product Design/Mechanical Engineering: designed parts of an electronic drum kit, and automated mixing board that was never released – Alesis Studio Electronics
4.) Product Design/Mechanical Engineerin: designed an enclosure for an industrial intercom system, a stadium-level PA system, a DSL modem, and various other thingamabobs – Argyle Design
5.) Scripter, for Seaman, for the Sega Dreamcast: Coded almost half of the game script logic, controlled the facial animation, performed content builds, and managed tens of thousands of audio files – Sega/Vivarium
6.) Teacher, after school robot design class: Created a basic curriculum of an introductory robot design class for an after school program for middle schoolers – Albany Middle School
7.) Mechanical Engineer: Designed and built a crystal growth reactor, and processed wafers for rectifiers and LED’s – The Fox Group, Inc.
8.) Object Engineer/Game Designer: Coded game logic for in-game objects for The Urbz, and designing several critical systems for a new project, to be released later this year – Maxis/Electronic Arts

That’s a pretty weird bunch of stuff, and not exactly connected in too many ways. The gap between Sega and Maxis was about three and a half years, extended from what I thought would be at most, about a six-month stint at The Fox Group. Still, I’ve gotta say that the diversity of experience has been interesting, from being completely swamped under consistent 15 hour days while working at Sega, The Fox Group, and teaching *concurrently*, to having basically nothing to do and sitting on my butt for the last few months of 2003, while my project was cancelled due to a lack of funding.

It’s been interesting so far. I can only begin to imagine what the future holds…

Re: Adam’s question in the comments field of the last post – for my money, Lumines is far and away the best game out for the PSP so far. Running a relatively distant second is Wipeout Pure, followed by Metal Gear Acid, NFL Street 2, Untold Legends, and in distant, distant last, Need for Speed Underground: Rivals (just due to the really awful rubber-band AI, and unpredictable NPC traffic).

MGA isn’t for everyone, and if you can find people to play multiplayer Untold Legends with, it probably gets tenfold better, but otherwise, it’s got enough problems (mostly screen ghosting, which is really, really prevalent in UL) that it doesn’t get much playtime.

… is an Altoids Sour container. You can find ’em in the grocery store checkout counter in a little aluminum can. I got the Orange flavor. They’re tasty, too, so you can eat a bunch, then rinse and wipe out the container. Three discs will fit in, with the last disc a bit of a tight fit – it’s actually perfect, because it holds the discs really snugly – they won’t move around, and above the discs, there’s space for your cleaning cloth. Because the top of the container’s a touch narrower, you can’t fit more discs, and the space is literally perfect for the cloth. I had a jelly bean container I was using previously, but this is way better, even though I’m short storage for one disc – I doubt I’d ever need more than four games with me at any one time anyway. $2.09, plus free tasty candy.

Sometimes, it’s weird how a small change can cascade into a big one. Ended up changing something big based on the way something really small didn’t work out the way certain people expected, and it could have lasting, and large-scale ramifications on the game. It’ll be interesting to see if this goes through, because for me, it’s something that I’ve been pretty unhappy with. I got handed the system as it was, and something had always bugged me about it. I knew what it was, but since it had gone through so much review, it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that I could change, since it had been passed to me as-is. Still, one thing that people really wanted simply wouldn’t have worked as designed, and because that thing was broken, it leads to the opportunity to see if I can make larger-scale changes for the better. Keeping things as straightforward as possible, naturally, but it definitely makes things interesting… er. Interestinger.

EA
Originally uploaded by helava

I’ve got a great cube, overlooking EA’s football-sized field. When it’s nice out, I can roll up the blinds completely, and bask in the sun. On top of that, because of the way the cubes were laid out, I’ve essentially got about 20 sq. ft more than anyone else around me. It’s a cube, but for a cube, it’s pretty rad. Exactly where I sit’s on the second floor, about the middle of the photo.