Not long after we got the house, I bought a hammock and stand. I loved lying out in that thing on cool summer evenings, or reading a book in the middle of the day… man. Good stuff. We were lying out on the hammock the night I proposed to Ei-Nyung. There’s just something calming about sitting there, hanging just above the ground, gently swaying in the breeze.

About a week after we got engaged, that hammock broke. I hadn’t taken it in in bad weather, and the rope can only take so much before it snaps. I replaced in a little bit later with a cheapo hammock from IKEA, but it broke quite quickly (someone else broke it – sort of irritated me that they never even offered to replace it).

Anyway, the hammock stand stood there, hammock-less for the better part of two years. The blackberry vines had grown over part of it, and I’d just never had the time to deal with it. Today, we went to Target to get a bathroom organizer for the downstairs (damned tension rod thing had rusted, and fell over on me the other day, so I threw it out). While we were there, they had a cheapo hammock for $20. For $20, I couldn’t pass it up. Brought it home, got some chain to run to the stand (the hammock was too short), and spent the afternoon lounging.

There are really few things that are better than lying on a hammock, your dog lying at your side on the ground, on a beautiful warm summer evening.

You know, I wish I had something more interesting to say, but I really don’t. Took Mobius with me to work today. It was sorta tricky, ’cause it was his first day in a new environment, so he was really skittish. But everyone at work seemed to like him, which was cool, and frankly, it’s pretty awesome that dogs are welcome at work. I just wish I had more to actually *do*. It’s just one of those weird things – you come on at the end of a project, and everyone’s so focused on wrapping that up, but there’s really not much I can do, so I spend a lot of time writing, or doing busywork. I just wish there was something more substantial to do.

Playing the Halo 3 Beta – it’s good, but already some people are *so* good that the game’s getting a little frustrating. I guess maybe people aren’t working, or have taken time off work or something, because there are people who are insane already, and the thing’s only been out for a day. I suppose if you were good at Halo 2, your skills transfer pretty well intact. Alas.

Other than that, basically swimming in games right now – stuff for the Wii, stuff for the 360, and even a couple games I really want to spend more time with on the PS2, like The Red Star and God of War 2. Battlestations Midway is one of those games on the 360 that I’m really itching to try – it’s a combination action/strategy game. A friend of mine was picking up some copies of C&C3 – I’m looking forward to that as well. I liked BFME2, but not many people I knew got it. I doubt more of my friends will pick up C&C, but I know Klay will, so at least we’ll be able to hit up some multiplayer…

The house is in a bit of a state of flux – Joe’s moving downstairs, Colin & Jess are officially out, and we’re interviewing architects for the upstairs renovations. It’s pretty zany. No real “progress” progress yet, but yeah. It’s a start.

Also kinda weird – there have been seven muggings in something like four weeks in the neighborhood, one of which was only a couple houses down from us. Pretty scary. There was a neighborhood-wide meeting on it tonight, and so it was sort of interesting, meeting some of my neighbors, and actually interacting with them. Good to know there are a lot of people in the area who care enough to meet and take some sort of action.

Yeah. Wacky stuff.

So, a game I recently worked on’s first review just came out, and it’s less than stellar – averaged about a 50%. Seems fair, to be honest. Yeah, it’s the worst review score I’ve seen on a game I worked on, but while on other games, I thought those review scores were low, and they tended to be outliers, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is about what the game ends up getting.

So, it’s not really that the review score is a letdown – it’s about what I expected. It’s that the game is a letdown. I put a lot of effort into it, but knew that ~50-60% was the best we could hope for. Games are about both structure and content. You could have great level design in a FPS, for instance, but if the mechanic of shooting didn’t work, no one will care how good the level design was. Similarly, a great mechanic can’t make up for bland or boring content.

The game simply has weak mechanics in every respect, and the original content was also incredibly poor. While I had time to bring the content up to what I think was a decent level, for the characters I worked on, that was only maybe 1/4 of the content of one part of the game, and it still rested on weak mechanics.

*sigh*

Oh, well. It’s not like I didn’t know it was coming.

So… for the last few years, the only efforts we’ve really made in terms of home improvement have been the front yard, and getting the #($@(T*&#$&*@*!!!!ing leak fixed. Now that that’s done, and we’ve had some time to recover from the hell on Earth that was the last batch of major renovations, and now that Colin’s moved out, freeing up actual space (for the first time ever) to do the renovations in, it’s time to start looking at how to approach it.

We talked to an architect last week, and it was really educational – we realized that the *bulk* of what we want to do isn’t necessarily the domain of an architect – *most* of what we’re looking to do is to make our living space aesthetically coherent, which is something that just requires money on our part, and some research, in terms of window trim and the like, which was done with no consideration for aesthetics the first time we did it.

There is one major part we do need an architect for, however, and that’s the “doorway to nowhere” that leads from the kitchen into what was once the hall, and is now a gaping void above the stairs, as well as the inaccessible closet that’s next to that door. Thing is, we know what we want to do with that space, we just don’t know *how* to do it – that’s where the architect would come in.

The last two things we’d really like to do would involve the kitchen, and the upstairs bathroom. The bathroom can wait, frankly, and the kitchen is secondary to the living/dining rooms, but it’d be good to have a plan as to how to approach it.

But basically, I think the goal is to fix the things that aren’t done (door hole, closet, and the bannister that separates the living room from the stairwell – turning that into a half-wall) with an architect, and then talking to either an architect or the kitchen planners at Home Depot, or IKEA or something to try to get that space laid out in a pleasing manner.

Fun.

1.) I was going to be post this exact thing.
2.) Why would you take the Transformers, whose defining characteristic was that they were actually physically plausible, and make them *not* physically plausible?
3.) They’re FUGLY. More than that, they’re not distinct – it’s incredibly difficult to tell “Megatron” from “Jazz” or “Whateverthefuck” at a glance. The old Transformers were incredibly iconic, unique, and distinct. Gah! Stupid.

So, it’s relatively simple and straightforward, but I did this on Sunday, and posted my first Instructable about it.

Wacky fun. The end result’s been really useful.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
– William Hazlitt

I read this, and the only thing I could think of was the Bush Administration. I laughed, then wept…

Hayfever. In May. WTF?

Got up this morning and felt like someone was sitting on my chest, and my eyes had been glued shut. Oh, and a tap had been turned on in my nose, and no one was turning it off.

A combination of Allegra, Flonase, and an inhaler I got from the doc (can’t remember what it was specifically, too lazy to go look) have made most of the symptoms at least chill out a bit, but yeah… unpleasantness.

So, staying home from work today, trying to not have my brain run out my nose.

Fun times.

A long time ago, I got a pair of *excellent* AKG headphones (K240’s), which were hands-down the best sounding headphones I’d ever had. Problem was, while at EA, I ran over the cord in my chair, and both tore the cord and broke the 1/8″ headphone jack. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get a good signal in both ears – the right ear would cut out periodically. Turned out, I’d actually run over the cord in two places – one near the jack, and one near the headphones themselves.

To repair the cord, I’d basically need to break the headphones open, and I wasn’t really keen on doing that.

I finally realized that the 2G shuffle that Ei-Nyung had gotten me was really, really light, and given the weight of the headphones, would be basically unnoticeable if I just clipped it to the thing that goes over your head.

So, yesterday, I cut the cord, leaving about 3″, got a new jack from Radio Shack, soldered the new jack on, and now, it’s a perfect fit – the cable runs up to the headband, where the shuffle sits comfortably.

Today, I’m listening to the shuffle, and I’m just still astonished by *how good* these headphones sound. The Shure E40’s I’ve got are great, but these are leagues above them. Yeah, it’s because they’re *enormous*, but still.

Now, I get good use out of the shuffle *and* the headphones. w00t.

Had a nice, laid-back weekend. Hung out with friends on both Saturday and Sunday, did some crap around the house, watched some Ninja Warrior, got some food. Good stuff. Nothing really earth-shattering. No home renovations, or gardening, or even epic cooking. Just laid-back, relaxed, chilled out.

Now, to sleep. And it’s only 11:30.

Woo.