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.

Saw Sin City again tonight, and it was as stunning as it was before. This time, rather than really marvelling at the technical beauty of it, I got to sit and watch the stories unfold, and try to watch them for how they were in the movie, rather than how I remembered them in the stories.

I know this is weird, but Mickey Rourke’s performance as Marv is, to me, Oscar-worthy.

There were some really weak performances, most notably Brittany Murphy, but also to a lesser degree, Jessica Alba – though she does a pretty good job, Nancy Callahan is, in the comics, essentially the perfect woman, and as good a job as she does, there’s no real way to compete with the “real thing.”

All in all, though, both the fidelity, and the quality of the movie is astonishing – just a fantastic film all around.