I’m a facts-based guy. I believe that there are things that are quantifiable as “real,” and that ones understanding of the universe should be based on those facts. Still, there are some times when perception creates reality – or rather, whether my perception is correct or not, it is what matters, not what is actually real.

In some sense, that’s not really contradictory, because the perception is an aggregate of many small details, most of which are insignificant or inconsequential on their own. The perception is the bigger picture, even if I have difficulty quantifying what the actual details are that are making me think in a particular way.

What’s really bringing this home to me is a bit of conflict over my job.

My perception, by and large, is that our process is really, truly hosed. That the management of the team is pretty much lost, or is taking long enough to figure out where they are that they might as well be lost. That marketing is running off into their own little world, and paying little if no attention to what it is we’re actually making. That our production process is so completely alien to the people who are trying to implement it that we might as well be talking different languages.

Is that the reality? I don’t know. I’ve read enough people to know, though, that the perception is that we’re screwed, and getting screwed-er by the day. What to do? Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know if the leadership this team has will drag it out of the chaos into which we’ve descended. I don’t know that the leadership understands the dynamics of the team, the interactions with the other teams involved in the project, or whether they’re even competant enough to deal with it, even if they understood the rest.

It puts me in a difficult position, because my loyalties are then split. We have, I believe, a very interesting, potentially quite compelling design. It’s innovative, it’s coherent, and by and large, has the potential to be *great*. I want to make this game. I want it to be excellent.

My other loyalty, of course, is to me. To my life. To my family, friends, etc., that I don’t let work suck the life out of me yet again, for months on end. And that depends on a reliable, well-oiled production team, and good management. Neither of which have been apparent in the last week and a half, on this project. And in terms of our timeline, that’s an eternity.

So… the question is this: I see a sinking ship. It’s a really nice, well appointed ship. I have a lot of opportunity here, and I feel like I could really be captaining the ship with the right moves, in a relatively short while. But, the ship’s still sinking. WTF? Why am I still on it? And most importantly, why am I even considering remaining on board?

drmcninja.com is the best new webcomic I’ve seen in some time. Great stuff.

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The dirt outside our house is incredibly dense, and tightly packed when it’s wet.

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Work has me very subtly, but constantly stressed, pretty much all the time. Not just when I’m at work.

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I only see friends when I have regularly scheduled events with them.

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I haven’t gotten enough sleep lately.

I would make an absolutely terrible politician. Dealing with a small batch of random work politics is nearly making my head explode, and I just feel terrible all around, even though there’s nothing actually really *bad* happening, no one’s being backstabbed, or anything of that nature. Just weird, because basically, we had some *really* nasty political nonsense earlier in this project, and this, on the surface, feels similar.

There’s a couple other people on the team who, I think, could fill this role quite admirably. One might jointly end up doing this thing with me, which is fine, and the other might not. It would be weird if we all went to these meetings – hell, it might even be strange with two – sort of redundant. Not that I have a problem with it, but I don’t have a problem with all three of us going, either. Gah.

So, it’s strange, trying to juggle the various repercussions of this sort of “office politics,” and trying to mitigate the various disappointments and expectations that people have, versus practicality, efficiency, etc.

Makes my head spin, and I cannot imagine how people deal with this sort of crap on a day-to-day basis.

Gah.

Ah, Nintendo. Every iteration of hardware, you do something completely new and stupid. How you’ve survived as a hardware company this long completely baffles me. That, above, is the redesigned DS. Yes, it was announced just over a year after the original model, which is next to the Virtual Boy, from an ergonomic perspective one of the absolute worst designed pieces of hardware I’ve ever used.

The problems with the original DS are numerous. The screen, which is periodically used as a fake analog stick, is too far away to actually reach with a thumb comfortably. The edges of the unit eat into your palms, and the corners deaden the nerves in your hands. It looks like they’ve rounded off the edges, but the fundamental problem of needing to *reach* to the screen, and thus, press up against the edges of the unit have not been fixed at all.

The position of the buttons, so close to the right edge, means that you can’t rest your thumb in a comfortable position anywhere on the unit. It looks like there’s some potential that the gap between the screens has changed, which would be a pretty fatal flaw. I’m going to assume that it’s just an optical illusion created by the fact that the unit’s getting smaller overall, and not that Nintendo’s hardware engineers are insane.

So, fine. It looks more iPod like. Welcome to 2002. It maybe looks more congruent with the Revolution design. Good for you, turning something that was probably the ugliest handheld ever, into something that doesn’t make my eyes want to vomit.

The games are good – no question – the DS has been worth it two or three times over, just for Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! but the hardware itself… oh, man. And this redesign really just doesn’t do shit for it. What a shame. Talk about a missed opportunity.

So, not a whole lot going on. The usual work rigamarole, and a couple new food.helava.com entries, but short of that, really not a whole lot going on. Got Mobius a dog bed, which was pretty damned expensive, but it’s the only dog bed Pet Food Express had that was big enough for the ol’ mutt. So, hopefully, he won’t end up pushing us over to half the bed anymore, which would be good, since it’s strange that we’d end up cramped into the corner of a California King, when the dog’s taking up half the bed. Wacky stuff.

Starting to assemble wedding invitations. Learned one interesting thing: The HP 1200 series Laserjet printers are unable to print on thick paper, and laser printing doesn’t seem to work properly on particularly fibrous paper. Some of them turned out ok, some of them turned out a bit smudged. Either way, each one has to be manually fed into the paper feed, or the rollers don’t catch it properly. Whee fun. So, gotta run to the paper store to pick up envelopes, then invites should be heading out in the next week or two.

My mom’s been tearing up the front yard like a psycho. It’s really just crazy. She’s doing a fantastic job, and it’s really shaping up. We’d killed most of the stuff out there, and I’d gotten about 3/4ths of the way through murdering a quartet of bushes that had gotten a bit out of control. We’re gonna end up leaving one of them to grow back, which means I’m almost done, and only really have half a root to chop through left to go.

Borrowed Lego Star Wars from the IRC – EA’s internal library thing. It’s quite entertaining – the storytelling is merely evocative of the movies, without actually bothering to do any silliness like speech, or what have you. The animation is simple, and cute, and they do everything they can to embrace the Lego aesthetic. Force powers include disassembling chunks of bricks, and reassembling them into something else. Great stuff. I think if I can find it cheap somewhere, I’ll actually purchase this one. Multiplayer hack and slash, that’s both entertaining, and funny, to boot.

Right.

So, I’ve been sick for the last few days. I managed to kick the flu sometime on Saturday, but by midday Friday, I’d gone from just a cough, to cough + asthmatic wheezing. Now, I don’t know if anyone else who reads this (save probably my cousin) has ever had a wheezing spell – basically, exhale ’till your lungs are nearly empty, and when you squeeze out that last breath, constrict everything you possibly can in your airway, until you emit a weird rattling sound, like you imagine a dying person might make.

Do that with every breath you take.

The cough, coupled with that, kept me from any reasonable amount of sleep, both Friday at Saturday nights, and by about 5am Saturday, I wondered if I’d ever sleep again. I checked out the Mayo clinic website, and they say that asthmatic wheezing is a side effect of the flu, and can last up to two weeks after the cold’s been kicked.

I thought, can I go two weeks without a good night’s sleep? We’re talking one, maybe two hours of undisturbed sleep, coupled with about five hours of tossing and turning each night, before I’d just get so frustrated I’d get out of bed. Both Sunday and Monday, I was basically the walking dead – every time I got up, I’d almost pass out.

I’m sure a lot of it is psychological – I should be able to sleep, even with the wheezing, but I couldn’t – the sound, the inability to just *breathe* properly – it drove me completely nuts.

Finally, Monday night, I was just going to take a couple Tylenol PM, which tend to do a pretty good job of putting me to sleep, when Ei-Nyung recommended that I check out what was in Benadryl, since it was probably something similar, without the painkiller. Indeed, it’s exactly the same thing, but it’s listed as an antihistamine when it’s in Benadryl, and a sleep aid, when it’s in Tylenol PM. So, two Benadryl tabs later, I finally got a solid four hours of sleep. It was like gold. I woke up, almost indescribably happy – I was rested, I knew that I *could* sleep, even with the cough, and the looming fear of a repeat of early last year, when I had to go to the emergency room *twice* just to get a good night’s sleep… yeah, not a happy thought.

Ended up with some really weird dreams – my grandparents on my father’s side (who have both passed away) bought a house in Albany, CA, and a white Audi TT. My cousin, my parents and I were all staying with them, and for some reason, I had to go to work, but ended up at a car dealership. It made no sense. 😛

Anyway. Yeah. Sleep. Good.

How has the internet changed everything? This question pops to mind every once in a while, and I wonder if there are weird little longer-term repercussions that aren’t completely obvious. Well, they’re not things that immediately jumped out at me.

Information: What is the value of retention of information? That is, there used to be people who were more or less “human encyclopedias” – people who *knew* things. They were important, because they had the information in their heads. They had pored through the books, and could access it quickly. The value in knowing something was the ability to use that piece of information to draw a conclusion quickly, or see the connecting links between it, and other information. Now, if I get into an argument with someone, and the facts are in question, it’s no longer a question of who’s right – we can find out, relatively easily, in most instances, for most facts, with a quick search. There is instead more of a value on being able to connect facts, to draw complex conclusions from large pools of information, but it’s not the retention of the information that’s important anymore, it’s the understanding that it’s out there, and the ability to retrieve it quickly and accurately.

There’s obviously still value in knowing things – you really have to *understand* something deeply to truly wield the information properly, but I wonder if our school systems, and methods are able to take this shift into account? I suppose I’ve always been irritated at how much rote memorization of stuff we did in school, but it feels like with the essentially instant accessibility of obscure facts and information on the ‘net, I’d much rather be focused on how all those things tie together. A James Burke’s Connections-style of education, rather than the “read this timeline, and spit it back at me,” sort of thing.

Sex: A lot of reactionaries dislike the pervasiveness of porn on the internet. Ok. Let me temporarily put any moral questions about the porn industry aside, though – I’m just talking about essentially free access to a huge variety of people, doing a huge variety of things. I remember, as a teenager, the mystery of women – what did they look like, under all those clothes? The slightest glimpse of anything would send my imagination and hormones into a frenzy. Whee, the joys of teenagerism! But a lot of it was the mystery.

I wonder if, for instance, adultery will decrease, because people have access to remove the mystery – they can say, “Ah, this is what other people are doing. They’re not doing anything substantially different, or better.” Maybe instead, it’s, “Hey, that might be fun.” Point being, without that sort of reference, there’s always the question of, “What’s out there? Is it better than what I have now?” To me, that’s a pretty … er… powerful motivating force – the desire to know whether you have it good – to get another point of reference. So, I wonder if the internet, in some respects, provides that point of reference, and whether that what the longer-term implicatoins of that would be, on the rate of infidelity in the population?

Any others?

Caught wind of this on IMDB’s front page – it’s apparently a joint production between the BBC and A&E, and it’s airing now on A&E at some pretty oddball times (it runs 1:15 per episode, ’cause they cut in 15 minutes of commercials). It’s about a group of grifters, and that’s more or less all I’ll say about the plot.

Direction and acting aren’t as tight as something like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which isn’t to say it’s bad, but it’s also not really great. It ends up taking on a more natural quality, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are some interesting narrative “tools” they use, and the plots (I’ve seen the first two episodes) vary, from the first ep’s relatively straightforwardness to the second episode’s … slightly surreal nature.

All in all, though, I quite liked it. It’s like Ocean’s 11 (the new one), the TV show, with a little British flavor.

So, I’ve had what has to be the flu, for the last four days. Body aches, cough, blah blah blah. Yesterday, I had a moment where I was certain it was over. I felt fine. The mental haze lifted, I wasn’t coughing, and the aches and pains, despite a lack of painkillers, had gone away. Ei-Nyung had picked up a bit of a cough, though, so I figured, I’ll bundle up and take Mobius out for his evening walk, so that she doesn’t get worse.

Of course, despite four layers on top, and two on the bottom, and wool socks, I instantly froze, going outside. I guess since you have to say, breathe in the cold air, there’s only so much you can do to insulate yourself. Instantly, I knew that I had set myself back by a substantial amount. The aches came back, the wheezing, etc. Gah. Stupid.

So, it looks like I caught a cold. That’s not all that weird, to be perfectly honest. What *is* weird is that it’s markedly worse when I’m at work, than when I’m anywhere else. Yeah, I felt like crap yesterday, even after leaving, but this morning, I felt fine. Now, I’ve got pain in my legs, sinus pressure, a runny nose, and my right wrist really hurts, for no apparent reason. Thinking feels like swimming through syrup, and basically, mentally, I’m shot.

Whee!