Anotherblog

Pool comp

The pool competition at work has started. There’s a challenge ladder of about 35 people. I got (randomly) put at 15th place initially, and I’ve won two matches to get to 9th place now. I’ve got a game on Monday that should get me to 6th place, with any luck. The highest you can challenge is three places above you.

Ben

Ben was my supervisor at work - also left two weeks ago. He’s only a couple of years older than me, but he has that indefinable air of authority that I’ve come to realise as “being a parent”. He was one of those unusual managers who could both manage and program - he’s a rather good Java coder, and would often get his hands dirty with bug fixing. Also a good table tennis player, he used tremendous amounts of undercut that unfortunately proved useless against my and Carlos’ styles. I look up to him a lot. He likes good design, and is very, very smart. A great person to bounce ideas off.

Ben joined us for lunch today. He’s looking happy and healthy - he left work with another job lined up, but a three week holiday in-between. Lucky man. Lucky man.

Pool
I started a practice game of pool today, and lost count part-way through which was a real pity - I think I only missed five times, which would have made it a record. The reason I lost count was that four of the misses were early-on, and I figured I couldn’t top my score - but I potted nine balls in a row, and only missed the last shot. I’m getting into the vibe of the whole practice session thing now.

Most of the game is alternating potting between the bottom- and centre-pockets. The shots to the bottom-pockets should be fairly hard to bring the white out for a shot at the other bottom-pocket, or the other centre-pocket. The centre-pocket shots are soft, partly because that’s the only way to pot the balls, but also so that the white doesn’t go too far up the table. You usually only have to pot one or two balls in the top-pockets. It’s a very different style of game from normal pool, obviously. I think the thing it teaches the most (at least for me) is potting centre-pocket shots from fairly acute angles. Oh, and setting the ball up, obviously. And hitting the ball so that if it misses, it doesn’t end up safely against the the middle of a cushion.

Yes, I know it’s boring for you
But it’s my blog, so I can write what I want. Speaking of which, I wrote an entry yesterday, but I encountered an odd error in which the “Post & Publish” button wasn’t working. It just occured to me today that this was probably a result of turning off “Active scripting”. Silly me. Back on it goes. Ninda worm! Come and GET ME! I fight with LEG-ENHANCED POWER!

Anyway, here’s that entry.

Lindsay
Lindsay also left the week before last. Like Rhandy, he was a programmer with an artistic streak - most of the splash screens for products coming out of our office were designed by either Lindsay or Rhandy. Lindsay was, if anything, even more laconic than Rhandy. Also an outstanding table tennis player. I beat him very rarely, due to his devastating backhand smash delivered as a casual, almost floppy, swat. I dunno, I thought I’d have more to say about him, but he was so laconic that I can’t even remember anything that he’s said. He played Age Of Empires II after hours at work with a whole bunch of people - Fotini, Raj, Mark, and so on. Apparently he won a lot.

As a curious aside, when I roleplay with Chris Amanda and Andrea, we often use character portraits taken from the web. For one campaign, Amanda found a character portrait for an NPC that I’m certain was of Lindsay, though he wasn’t aware of having any pictures on the web. It is not unknown for me to make mistakes on this kind of matter. I often see resemblences while others shake their heads, bemused. I pretend this is my artistic or imaginative side, seeing what others miss, but I have a deep suspicion that I’m full of crap.

Roleplaying even more
Played D&D with the work crowd at work again last night. We’ve started a new campaign, having given up on the extremely difficult “Return to the Tomb of Horrors”. Frankly, we were first-level characters pretending to be fourteenth-level - we generated high-level characters without getting the experience of actually knowing what they could do, and so spent much of the gaming sessions puzzling over our spell and equipment lists, trying to remember what we were capable of. Tomb of Horrors is a particularly nasty adventure. You have to be extremely careful in almost everything you do. If you lose patience, you tend to die horribly - this happened with alarming frequency, and we ended up pawning quite a few of our powerful magical items for a rod of resurrection.

Anyway, the new adventure is better. We’re playing first-level characters who are quite young, so it’s OK to be idiots. There was still a lot of reading in the first session because we’re also trying out 3rd Edition, and Forgotten Realms, and I for one wasn’t familiar with either. Much looking at character sheets to remember our names, and the names of our parents, and the names of the villagers we’d spent all our lives with, and so on…

Too much?
So now I’m in three roleplaying groups - the Saturday group (more often Sunday), in which we play all sorts of weird and wonderful games (including, shortly, one set in a giant underground rail system), the Tuesday group, in which we play 3rd Ed D&D, and the Wednesday/Friday group, in which we play Basic D&D. It’d almost be too much, except that the weekday ones are extremely intermittant - we’ve only had one session of the basic game, due to unavailability of players.

Pool
Did well today in practice - 23, 21. The latter is a record, and about time, too - I’ve been on the verge of getting 21 for a while. Actually, the 21 also had a diagonal long shot to get 20, which would have been fairly outstanding. Next game! Donncha is setting up a pool challange ladder, so I think I should up the practice levels a bit. There are many, many good players in the company, even after the purges. My picks for six of the top ten in the challenge ladder, by Christmas:

Bud
Alistair
Chris Nguyen
Donncha
me
John Ferguson

Rhandy

Another week-before-last leaver. He decided to accept the redundency and travel the world - he’s already done a hiking trip through Nepal for three weeks, and now wants to explore the rest of asia. He’s strikingly handsome, very laid back, and a fine table-tennis player - he usually played against Lindsay, and they often teamed up together to play Carlos and me. He worked with Carey and often did graphical design work as well as his usual programming load. Rather cool person, I’m afraid - I really can’t imagine anyone disliking him. It’s suddenly struck me that all this was a very careful front. What was his dark secret? Why did he incinerate his hard drive before leaving? What was the significance of his removal of the keys “e”, “r”, “u”, “d” and “m” from his keyboard?

Guitar
I’ve restarted guitar lessons. There was a bit of a break when I wasn’t sure whether I had a job, but I finally couldn’t put it off any longer. I used to be rather intimidated by my teacher, but despite being shaky from caffeine overdose, I was pretty calm and it was a very productive lesson. Guitar is one of those areas that I’m really not much good at, but I persist anyway because it’s good for me. I tend to be very hasty learning a piece. I don’t form musical phrases very well, being content to get the notes without making too many mistakes. I think the quick and rough learning style is kind of indicative of my approach to life (he said seriously, not noticing any potential for innuendo whatsoever), so it’s nice to do something where I’m striving for perfection, taking it slowly and getting it right.

That’s the idea, anyway.

C4

Carey For, a.k.a. C4, also left the week before last. She’s a bright, bouncy computer programmer who enthusiastically helped out on several of my short-film projects - assistant director in Once Upon A Time, and appeared in Bullet Hole, which I actually did a bit of editing for on the weekend. Carey was the youngest programmer in Baltimore for a very long time. She looks about sixteen years old, and is the height of a 12 year old - it is quite funny that she works nearby Rajesh, who looked even younger until his hair started turning white. And the fact that they collected and tossed around fluffy toys at work. It positively made Carlos and I look old.

Carey and Winnie were best friends at Baltimore - they arrived at roughly the same time, and immediately bonded in much the same way as Carlos and I. Interestingly, they would also play table-tennis almost exclusively with each other (though they would sometimes pair up against me and Carlos) and became very good - they would have extremely fast, dangerous smash-rallys.

Weekend
That weekend passed like a dream. Anna and I went to Woolongong and beyond, to buy some sign boards for Anna’s work. It was a nice drive - we stopped at a surfing beach on the way back and watched people getting dumped by the huge waves. Very relaxing. But I got barely anything done at all. It feels like all these projects are slipping through my fingers. Having trouble getting motivated at work, too. Ugh.

Pool

Played some more pool against Donnca today (3-0, lucky). Donncha was originally going to stay in the company, but then decided to leave. Now he’s been asked to stay again… it’s all very interesting. He’s an Irish guy, a swimmer, and an excellent pool player. We’re working together (along with Elanor) on one of the last products still being developed in Sydney. Ironically, since Elanor arrived, our product has more developers than it ever has had in the past.

Karen
Karen also left last week. She studied as a biologist, and got into the company as a test engineer, though she was told she’d be a programmer (she eventually became a programmer after proving her mettle in the test department for a whole year. Urgh!) She’s been around for about three years - we used to occasionally head home in the same direction, as she used to live about a block away when I was in Dulwich Hill. She sat next to Carlos for most of the time she was at work, but for some reason never joined in with our bad joke telling, instead opting to shake her head slowly, with a wry smile on her face.

We had Yum Cha at lunch today and met up with Karen again. She looks happy and very healthy - she’s been to the beach several times in her holidays already. Good luck, Karen!

Carlos

Carlos left work on Friday, made redundent. Thought I’d write something about him here.

Carlos was an extremely evil workmate. He readily admitted to having been a bully in high-school, something remarkably foolish considering that all his workmates were computer programmers. He and I used to torment Owen Roberts, who sat between us, by humming catchy tunes in stereo until they were stuck in his head.

He is remarkably technically proficient. He quickly rose from programmer to system architect withing two years, and has been the Person-to-go-to for answers for a lot longer than that. In fact, he says that he’s currently looking at a job with a salery twice what he was being paid here. Despite this, and his habit of telling awful jokes and puns, he’s likeable. This is how I know that he is evil.

We played ping-pong every lunchtime for over a year, at work. The games were always close, and we became so accustomed to each others style that we were never able to play other people with quite the same skill. When we got the pool table, we played that as well, though it was never quite as close. We’ve done stuff together socially, and I am hoping that this will continue. I suspect he would be a good actor. His enormous grin could turn a gritty slice-of-life drama into an all-dancing Australian Gothic piece in a second.

Video non-watching solidarity

I would like to express my feelings of solidarity with MagicTed by saying that I too have rented at least one video three times and not seen it - the video in question being “The Insider”, which I’m sure is very good for a three-hour long film.

Better
Well, after a weekend of lying around, the fever broke again on Sunday morning and I felt considerably perkier, to the extent of visiting Ted and walking around town a lot. I feel better for the exercise, too - now to get back to trying to be fit again, and trying to do creative stuff. Writing. Editing. Programming.

Sick

I’ve been terribly unwell over the last couple of days - in fact, it became apparent I had a virus on Monday afternoon, in time for me to woozily watch all the news reports on into Tuesday morning, of the terrorist attacks in the US. Horrible. I kind of went to sleep through some of it, and had dreams of nuclear attack in Sydney, looking out of my bedroom window and seeing big mushroom clouds coming up from the direction of town… I haven’t had nuclear holocaust nightmares since the gulf war. So, I woke up every now and then and couldn’t believe they were still showing the footage, cause it was all just a dream, wasn’t it?

I lay in bed for all of Tuesday (getting up to watch television occasionally), and again on Wednesday, and then decided to head to work in the afternoon, to show that I wasn’t, in fact, bludging. Bad mistake. Anna drove me into work, and then picked me up again an hour later, having said good-bye to Ben, my supervisor, made redundent (and moving right away into a much-better-paid job). The fever finally broke on Wednesday afternoon, but I wasn’t able to walk around much until this morning. Yuk.

Powermac
I can’t believe I didn’t post on this topic earlier… I got the powermac! And it work real good, except for the speakers which were dodgy and are being replaced. I got FinalCut Pro 2, and had much fun doing editing of Bullet Hole on a system that actually works, and doesn’t crash every twenty minutes. Oh, joy! Oh, bliss!

Yike!

So I was riding down Pyrmont Bridge Road about 45 minutes ago, cruising down the last hill before work - I’ve counted them, there are four significant hills between work and home - when I noticed a car in a left alleyway (Brougham Lane) kind of edging forwards onto the road. I was pretty sure there were no cars following me, as I’d gone through the lights as they were turning orange, and any car that had gone through since would have passed me. So, I went around the car, gave them a bit of a frown as I went past. Stupid car. Went around the corner, picking up speed, checked behind me to see whether edgy-forwardy-car was following me - it was, but a fair way back - turned back - and there was ANOTHER car edging foward onto the road from an alleyway, Allum Pl., and it was right in the middle of the road after a blind corner. I slammed on the breaks and started skidding, let them out a bit, went across the road around the front of the car, where there was another car coming in the opposite direction but a little way off, swerved back into the correct side of the road, and kept going, but shakily. Wow! Buzz! Time slowing down! The slope was quite downhilly, so I didn’t really have a chance to stop and rebuke the driver, but if they’re reading this message now, I’d like to thank them for the adrenelin buzz, and please don’t do it again or I shall purchase a rocket-launcher. They’re cheap, you know, as the following article will illustrate…

Rocket-launcher madness
Following a link from Dave’s blog, I came across this, which I feel compelled to pass on. I was particularly impressed with the price of rocket-launchers in europe - 300UK.

Prototype of Machina Venefici Combat system
Yay! Got the GUI madness working for my java project. Happiness is mine. Next stop: something less flaky.

Weekend

Well, like a true nerd, I worked a lot of the weekend on the Machina Venefici combat system - I got it to the stage of having two computer opponents having at it. Now I’m struggling with a user interface so that humans can play too - tricky, but an excellent exercise in the Swing user interface. I think I’ve got it, but the code is extremely messy - once I have a working system I’ll have to put some serious effort into tidying it up before moving on to the next stage. Here’s what I’ve done so far:

- two players
- matrix of result determination from an XML configuration file
- arbitary number of states - each state has its own matrix. For example, the default state in my test file is “Guard”, which describes both opponents in the combat, standing separated. Depending on the result of the combat round, the state might change to “Close-combat”, in which the opponents are closer together, so damage is greater, etc.

I’m still working on getting the following going, though I think I’ll wait for later versions for most of this:
- more than two opponents
- combinations of different weapons
- differences in speed, skill, strength and endurance having a result on the combat.

Farewell dinner
The farewell dinners continue - quite a lot of people left work on Friday, so we had a big dinner on Saturday night. Sad. The office is getting very quiet and still - most of the still-employed people are on the floor above us, now. People will continue leaving until the end of September, when there’ll be fifteen of us left - about twenty people on our floor compared with about sixty on the floor above. Genuinely emotional times. I’ve had to keep the black humour in check, especially since I found that I was being required to stay.

Writing
I’ve gotten back into writing again - there was a bit of a break when I was working really hard, and then I found I was being made redundent, I figured I’d get back into it in my time off - oh well. I’m snatching bits of time here and there, but I get obsessed about only one thing at a time, and at the moment, thats the Machina Venefici combat thing. It kind of feels like that bit in the Matrix where Keanu wakes up (”Whoa”) into the real world, only in this version, he wakes up again and it was just a drug trip in the first world. Darn.

Pathetic catch phrase of the day
Wave your hands feebly and cry “Life Hard!” in a wheedling falsetto.