Infinite Loop

Damn. Sit down to get some work done, and before you know it a year's already slipped through the cracks.

I've been entranced lately by the DS, the little handheld that could. Tim's already said it, and I'll say it again: if you have a DS, get yourself a homebrew cart. The homebrew community has some amazing toys that you can easily spend hours lost in, such as:

- Pocket Physics - a physical construction kit, based on Crayon Physics. Basically, you can draw different objects and pin them together, then press 'play' and watch your creations go. I spent an hour and a half last night constructing a little stick-man and elaborate setups to punish him, pushing him down stairs and whatnot. To be fair, near the end I just had him doing stunt jumps onto his motorcycle.. anyway, for an application with no real objective, scoring, or point to it it's an incredible timesink. Go here to see some of the creations that others have made with it.

- POWDER - Also previously mentioned by Tim, it's a game that's light on graphics and amazingly deep on gameplay (definition of a 'Roguelike', I guess). Last night I managed to stomp my way as far as I've ever gone by forsaking magic almost entirely, relying instead on my Artifact sword and throwing weapons. Unfortunately I got crushed randomly by an angry god, and my beautiful sword crumbled to dust to resurrect me.. it was all downhill from there, until I found myself dissolved by the breath of an Acid Dragon. It's primarily written for the GBA/DS, but it's available for Win/Mac/Linux PC's as well - give it a try.

- NitroTracker - A nice little tracker for the DS. For those who haven't used them, trackers are synthesizer programs for writing MIDI-style music, allowing you to download or record samples and create your own songs fairly easily. While some types of music come out sounding a bit canned, you can make some incredible videogame and techno tracks with it.

- Colors! - a paint program. With a wide array of tools and features, Colors! is capable of producing some stunning artwork (examples here).

Yeah, I'm still alive. Been busy, what can I say? So, here's what I've been up to, in order of importance:

- On May 27th, I popped the question to Dom in front of the Madison city skyline at night. (She said YES!!) We'll be celebrating the start of the rest of our lives together on September 27th of next year.

- Tim is my best man (of course). I wouldn't have it any other way.

- I moved in with my lovely fiancee a month and a half ago, and this past weekend we moved into an incredibly nice place here on the north side. We're still picking out the last few essentials for the place, but after only a week it feels like home. Housewarming party soon!

- I got promoted at work: rather than just the entry-level tech ninja, I'm now the lead Network Engineer. Not only that, but the final slot on our team was filled by none other than Zach Kahn, old-school compatriot and networking guru of several years' experience. The time commitment has delayed my degree by a semester, but the money and the fulfillment are both infinitely worth it.

- Speaking of school, Communication Skills 2 sucked ass. I liked the teacher, but the basic focus of the course was on business communications (simple memos, requests for information, etc.). We weren't given much room for creativity or even picking topics which appealed to us, so every assignment was an exercise in tedium. Really, what's the point of learning to write formal memos when every correspondance at my actual job neglects spell-checking and punctuation entirely?

That's the last few months in a nutshell. Soon I'll have pics and video to share (new camera phone).

I've had a nagging feeling lately of something bad just over the horizon, a sort of economic storm descending on us from the west. Let me kick a few odd jumbled things at you for a moment:

- Gas prices are on the rise, again. Go figure. The Republicans have a troubling election to deal with, and their handmaids in the oil industry drop gasoline prices to sudden lows. The Democrats try to enforce the will of the people on ending American military involvement in Iraq, and gas prices just as suddenly skyrocket. Whether or not you agree with my shoot-from-the-hip analysis of their motivations, the fact is that energy prices are spiking rapidly.

- The bees are still disappearing. It's odd - they seem to just vanish into thin air, and nobody can figure out why. Is it a virus? Some sort of parasite, or maybe a pesticide which was fast tracked by the now-politicized EPA without really considering the consequences of its use? There are even theories floated that it may be due to electromagnetic interference created by mankind's rampant usage of the spectrum for communications, perhaps overwhelming bees' natural sense of navigation (although that seems farfetched). Whatever the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, it's wreaking havoc on the agricultural sector - those bee farms are responsible for the pollination of $14 billion's worth of crops annually (or roughly one third of the US food supply).

- Due to ethanol's popularity (and profitability), an increasing portion of the corn market is being ploughed into ethanol production. It's a veritable goldrush. Unfortunately, at the same time the resulting sharp increase in the price of corn is putting a lot of strain on the livestock industry. Though they are sensitive to demand and will eat most of the initial cost to keep meat prices fairly stable, you can expect the high cost of feed to be reflected in the cost of meat over the next year or so.

- Finally, the tainted pet food saga continues. As the bureaucracy and ineptitude of the FDA continues to unravel in the case of the pet food which killed thousands of pets nationwide, you can expect massive recalls to begin in the human food markets as well. It has already been revealed that some of the melamine-tainted wheat glutens had made their way into the feed at large-scale hog farms, meaning that the melamine which caused kidney failure in so many pets may already be on grocery store shelves in bacon, ham, and who knows what else. Aside from that, it's still not clear how widespread the wheat glutens were actually used in other areas of the food industry - next time you tear open a bag of chips, cookies, or noodles, check the ingredients to see if 'wheat glutens' are listed. Then ask yourself where Nabisco or whoever got those glutens from. (Then ask yourself what the hell a gluten is, and why it's in your food to begin with.)

Each of the above random factors would be bad enough by itself, but with them all hitting at once I see a bumpy road ahead for food prices across the board. Keep an eye on the news for the next big development, and let's all hope I'm wrong.. but I'm going to tighten my belt a notch or two, just in case.

I don't even really know what the word 'redux' means, but there you go.

- She is a far better person than I. See, that's one major difference between us; I occasionally donate a random dollar amount to charity (good karma in the tip jar), but she donates her time and effort to noble causes all the time. This weekend she's walking in the March of Dimes' Walk of America. As she was born a few months early, I owe the March of Dimes a particularly large debt; my Dom is easily the best influence in my life, and I don't know where I'd be now if they hadn't intervened so many years ago. Check it out.

- This is one of a very few things that has actually left me breathless lately. A series of carvings in an ancient cathedral (the very cathedral featured in 'The DaVinci Code') has finally been decoded, revealing an achingly beautiful melody hundreds of years old. The carvings are based on the geometric patterns each note makes in a sprinkling of sand on a drum.. It's taken hundreds of years to solve this puzzle, and the result is a spectacular blend of symphony and chant composed by the mathematicians who finally made sense of it. Watch the video - it's worth it.

- On the other hand, monks of the Dark Ages could be astonishingly nearsighted. This one in particular 'recycled' parchment manuscripts a millenia old written by several scholars including the great Archimedes, all to put together a simple prayer book. I guess a powerful metaphor can be drawn between this story and the current efforts to destroy science in the name of religion; on the other hand, you have to ask yourself: would we have ever discovered these texts if not for the church's intervention? If Myronas hadn't been inspired to write this holy tome, would we have ever known of this interaction between the scholars of old?

Ugh. One more test down - didn't study much for this particular one, but it was on an aspect of Psychology that I'm fairly familiar with. I felt it went okay but I'll know for sure next week - now I'm stuck wandering the halls until my next class starts, as Psych tests are fairly short and my next class isn't for half an hour yet. So here I am.

The latest incarnation of the Almighty Algorithm (codename 'Metric') has finally been implemented, though it has taken several weeks of neglecting my sleep and schoolwork. And, wouldn't you know it? It's a complete failure. It's falling short on every level - it's not accurate yet, and I don't know if there is a way to even make it so. The concept is flawed on a fundamental level, and it's the same concept I've been running into with every other incarnation: with specific sets of numbers, there is a certain level of arbitrariness that confounds the algorithm. That sounds vague, I'll admit, and maybe I'll geek it up in another post later on and explain myself. Suffice it to say that 'Metric' falls prey to the same basic design flaw that 'Analysis 1' and 'Analysis 2' did. I may yet be able to tinker with it and come up with a solution, but adding code raises the second spectacular failure of the exercise: more code means more processor overhead, and it is already slower than even 'Brute Force', the oldest and theoretically slowest of this set of algorithms (although to be fair, also the only one with 100% accuracy). I can deal with accuracy issues, and I'm not squeamish about sacrificing style for raw speed (that's optimization in a nutshell), but both at once has been the death knell for the other incarnations. I have one more Hail Mary idea.. but we'll save that for another day.

---

Another bead of sweat trickled down, tracing a bright, shining line through the dust and grime caked to his forehead. It meandered back and forth through leathery creases and finally came to a rest in the corner of his eye; irritated, he blinked and shook his head, sending sparkling drops flying from his matted hair. His hand twitched briefly toward his eye to rub the stinging droplet away, but he tensed his muscles against the reflex and kept his sword unwavering between himself and the thing before him. To break his stance now would mean death, and he'd been through too many fights to make such a greenhorn mistake.

Sneering, the goblin feinted nimbly with its cudgel and lunged for the warrior. Quicker than thought the warrior spun, slipping around the deadly blow; his sword flashed brightly in the hot sun..

---

..So, we know what happens: sword, plus goblin, equals dead. Simple, right? But how does it happen, exactly? The sword slices the monster, but which is the focus of that action? Does the blade cause the goblin damage, or does the goblin take damage from the sword? It sounds like semantic jibber-jabber, but it's an issue I've been pondering to no small extent lately. Ostensibly, the answer is that they interact, each affected by the action in quantitatively equal portions, but when you're designing a physics engine there's no such easy way out. Does the monster evaluate the type of weapon colliding with him and 'react' accordingly, reeling from the blow and losing valuable health? Does the sword itself know that it's being wielded and inflict the damage, forcing the goblin into a predefined motion pattern? What about other weapons? Should the goblin have a listing of preset reactions for each possible weapon? Should every weapon have a preset list of reactions it invokes for each different monster?

**Sigh**.. this is why Dragonrider has been derailed so long. I guess I should be googling 'artificial intelligence in gaming applications' or some such, but I'm too stubborn. If I build a new engine, it's going to be entirely my creation (minus a few utility libraries, but meh). Guess I just have to keep thinking about it, and hopefully write some preliminary code over break.

Saw something sticking out from under a half-melted pile of snow today, something shiny which caught my eye. I gently brushed the snow off it, and what should I find but my long-misplaced sanity.

I was kinda wondering where I put it.

So as with every year around this time, I'm feeling the motor starting to rev up in my head. I want to do stuff again. Maybe it's the feeling of things clicking at school as I settle fully into whatever programming language I'm learning, maybe it's the bits of usefulness I'm achieving at work; maybe the sweet warmth of spring.. don't know, don't care. All that concerns me is that I'm in a mood to create again.

It's a great feeling, isn't it? A sudden rush of inspiration, a burst of excitement over a revelation after months of stagnation. I'm suddenly having ideas again - not just ideas, but possible breakthroughs on several fronts, including the graph theory project and Dragonrider (though that project's kinda dead - if I resurrect it, it'll be a new engine, from scratch, again).

Not only that, but I want to sit down and crank out another comic. That venture got derailed for certain time constraints, but I think it died before its time. I even have an idea for a new strip which involves pee. Highbrow stuff, this.

Anyway, I do hope this sudden blossoming of spring is hitting everyone the way it's hitting me. Cheers, all!

Figured I might as well update - I'm pretty sure there's a limit to how long you can be inactive before they suspend your account. So..

Yes, I'm still alive. I've been incredibly busy since my last post, what with the new job and all; it's amazing to have my weekends back, and it's incredibly relaxing not to have to concern myself with other people's safety, but the new job doesn't afford me nearly the leisure time I used to have. I actually have to do homework on my own time these days, and gaming is a pursuit that I have to find odd moments for here and there, rather than being a staple of my work environment.

The new job is pretty exciting: I sell internet. More specifically I'm involved in tech support and marketing (read: answering phones and putting up posters) for a fledgling ISP in downtown Madison. It's a welcome change of pace to finally be working with technology. My teammates are a varied group of computer geeks like myself, surly and antisocial, and I find myself blending in rather nicely; I'm also the first member of the team to have specific technological training and background, and it seems like the lead tech is preening me to take over some of his duties building and maintaining the network so that he can focus more on sales as the company grows. Of course, my background is mostly in algorithm writing and graphical programming and not so much in networking, so it's going to take time for me to get to the point where I'm comfortable with all the systems, but I feel like I'm up to the challenge.

My only gripe lately is with the ferocity of busywork in my classes this semester; I seem to have chosen all the teachers who love having assignments due for every class meeting. Where the hell were these people when I had 25 hours of dead-time a week on the night shift? I manage to scramble my ass off on the weekends and stay at least somewhat caught up, but I am really looking forward to the day when I'm finally done with awkward school/work scheduling and able to reclaim all my free time.

Is anyone else familiar with a holiday tradition called White Elephant? It's something my extended family picked up years ago, and has done at every family Christmas party for as long as I can remember. Basically, each person who wishes to play brings in a present with a theme: "Crap That Nobody Would Want". Some bring hideous old dishes or pottery, some bring broken or worn-out junk, and some bring Bears and Vikings merchandise. All of the gifts are wrapped and heaped together in the center of the room, and then each player draws a number. The players then take turns in order of their number, with a choice of taking a gift from the center or from another player (with the exception that a gift can only be 'stolen' once per given turn, and only three times total before it's out of play). If someone's gift is stolen, they can steal another player's gift, and so on until someone takes a gift from the pile (voluntarily or otherwise). After everyone has had their turn, the players then open their gifts in the same order to see what they got.

..Phew. Long-winded explanation for such a simple game.

Well, Dom and I hit the jackpot. She opened our 'gift' with mixed curiousity and dread, and there it was, a legend of my youth. For eternity, the Miller clan has passed around a certain relic year after year. It's old and dusty, its contents a bit faded with age, and it perfectly sums up the absurdity of the game itself: a microcosm of the very concept of useless crap.

I speak, of course, of the Jar of Pickled Assholes.

It's exactly what it looks like, a mason jar filled with nylon asses, cheekily mooning all who behold it. Old as the hills and with no true origin - not one of my aunts or uncles could remember where it may have come from, or even which of them unearthed such a marvel and unleashed it upon their own brethren. I choose to believe it simply is and always has been. Now it belongs to us, and next year we will have the upper hand.. after all, it's pretty hard to accidentally get the Pickled Assholes if you're the one who wrapped them. (Though my dad could find a way, apparently.. but that's another story.)

Nine times out of ten my cuts hide a pointless, pretentious metaphor of some sort. This is one of those times.

( Short-range Flight )

So, yeah, that's how my holidays were: amazing. The last two weeks were a departure from my usual routine that I sorely needed, a string of drinks and laughter with my love Dom and her family, my best friend Tim, and my family. X-Mas was a blast, and I managed to pull together and give some pretty satisfying gifts (although the girls already had a Glow-Doodle Bear - ah, well). Dinners, amazing Chocolate Martinis crafted by Dom's ma, nights spent laughing and relaxing - hell, even work was a pleasant change of pace with an empty building, nothing to do but kick back and make sure things kept on keepin' on.

And now for my crash back to earth. Once again drastic change is looming in my life, and I'm not sure if this landing is going to be a smooth roll across the sand or a broken leg. But damn.. that was a great holiday break.

- Finals are over, and that's a good thing. Now for a bit of much-needed rest before Round 4.

- Last weekend was a great one - I hung out with Dom and her family Saturday afternoon, and wrapped presents for youths at their church. It was a load of fun, and I feel like I put a little karma back in the tip jar. I've been borrowing of late, and I don't like feeling a cosmic deficit over my head.. But anyway, we drank hot chocolate and spiced cider, wrapped presents, listened to music, and joked around for a few hours. Definitely have to do it again next year!

- One other thing - while shopping today, my meanderings took me through Waldenbooks. As I browsed, I happened across their stock of books about the Iraq conflict.. and they were all in the 'True Crime' section. Waldenbooks just went up a notch in my book.

( Infinite Loop #2 )

Workload update: ASP project,JavaScript project,CCNA Case Study Project,CCNA online exams,CCNA labs, Intro Java project. I've thrashed through a hell of a lot of work in the last week, but I'm quickly losing steam as I near the end - I can feel my eyes glazing over, even now. That's okay. I should be as done as I need to be after tonight's shift. Half-ass my way through finals, and call it a wrap on Fall 06.

Other notes:

- I find this story pretty intriguing. A YouTube-style homebrew depository on XBox Live? A freely-downloadable (albeit rudimentary) SDK? This tweaks my geek-strings in a big way, and makes me move up my timetable for buying a 360 from 'never' to 'maybe in another few years'.

- I'm okay with people who walk slower than I do, and I'm okay with people who walk a bit erratically, but when people do both it kinda pisses me off. You know who you are, fellow Hallway Pedestrian. My mind may wander but my feet are on a mission, and they don't appreciate you zig-zagging slowly back and forth and taking up the entire stairwell so I can't pass you.

- Scientists are currently observing a black hole devouring a star - or what's left of it, anyway. Makes my end-of-semester woes seem a bit insignificant..

- This, this, this, and especially this are piquing my interest in a big way. How can anyone not love the sound of a game where the main object is to rescue a cake? Yeah, I'm a Nintendo fan.

The semester is quickly swirling to a climactic close like water in a drain: everything moves faster, circling in a tight torrent toward dark uncertainty, and the only direction I'm sure I'm moving in at any given moment is down. Why is it that instructors never pack material in during the early half of the semester, so when crap happens and the class gets behind (as it always does and we inevitably do) we aren't shafted with such a nasty load in the back half? Let me sum it up with a short list of the crap due next week:

( Workload )

On the bright side, it should all be over a week from Monday. Then I can relax-ish for a month during sweet, sweet Winter Break. Cross some fingers for me.

Update: I feel like I may either have been too pessimistic last night, or I'm tired to the point of giddiness after this night shift. Whichever is the case, things are looking up: significant progress was made on the CCNA project, and all 5 online tests are cashed. I also realized that Web Dev class is canceled for Monday night, leaving me with a wealth of precious lab time I can actually use. With some luck, smart preparation, and enough caffeine to tweak a horse, I think I'll be able to wrap all this up - whoever crossed their fingers like I asked, keep doing it.

I was stumbling around on BBC.com this evening (instead of, you know, paying attention in class), and I stumbled across an article on this little gem. It's nothing new - discovered roughly a century ago in a Roman shipwreck - but this is the first I've ever heard of it.

An analog computer, built from a complex array of gears, able to precisely calculate the motions of heavenly bodies. This thing was constructed before the birth of Christ, and used technologies previously thought to have been invented in the 1600's. Some attribute its creation to the scholars of the Island of Rhodes, while others theorize it to be the work of the great Archimedes, whose developments in the field of geometry would've been crucial to its design.

Scientists are pretty sure it's not unique, either - whoever built this had to have built other odd gadgets, just waiting to be discovered in a mouldering storage locker somewhere under Cyprus, perhaps. It reminds me a lot of Final Fantasy. I'm sure any day now someone will accidentally unleash the Technology of the Ancients upon an unsuspecting civilization; I hope it turns out to be flying cars. Ancients always have flying cars.

( Early O'Clock )

Anyway, it was now 6:00am and thanks to Mickey I wasn't going to get any more sleep. Instead I forced myself out of bed and into the usual school attire of T-shirt and jeans and moved to the couch to gather my scattered wits. My eyes fell on my lappy, the TV, the DS, the PS2, and several other things with acronyms.. and lo and behold, before me was the last of the Red Bulls that Dom gave me last week. I guzzled it greedily, shuddering at the sickly sweet taste and reveling in the surge of energy. Thus fueled I boldly grabbed my backpack and lit into the homework due for Econ. Dispatching it quickly, I glanced at the clock - still only 7. Carried along by the rush of the energy drink I jumped in the shower and headed to the lab to crank out my weekly assignments for my Cisco class.

Remarkably, I'm ahead for a few brief moments - a rare occurrence for the back half of the semester. This weekend I can breathe a little easier with only one pressing project to work on. I guess the point is that I have two notes of thanks for my unusual productivity this morning - Dom for the Red Bull, and Mickey for the wake-up call. I don't have such ambition on my own; credit where it's due, and all that.

Now, back to slacking!

( Infinite Loop #1 )

First comic - be gentle, cruel Internet.

On a partially related note, be extremely cautious when using Photobucket. They're not very discerning when it comes to advertisers, and banners will rotate in randomly that upload tons of adware garbage to your system. I'm still fighting a bit of it off - tenacious stuff, that adware.

Halloween weekend is finally past. Thank Jebus.

It really wasn't too bad this year. Yeah, we had a few tense moments, but all in all it went smoothly. Security-wise there weren't too many issues. The cops kept State Street locked down nicely (to the point that they didn't even need the tear gas this year) and the kids kept the mischief within reason inside the building. Staffing was adequate between myself, several RA's per night, and a security guard. All in all, I'd say this was the easiest Halloween this city has seen in a while.

Then again, I shouldn't really say anything 'til I've checked the police blotter. Langdon Street seemed to be the nerve center of things after bar time, and considering the violent crimes occurring there lately I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear of damage in that area. Meh - for me it's entirely academic. My building is in one piece.

There was one fun moment when I got to represent: some jackass decided that our policy of not letting random drunkards in was unjust, and tore a sign off its mounting in the foyer. After a short scuffle I ended up dragging him in to the security guard by the nape of his neck, and he was forwarded to the police to the tune of $150 for disorderly conduct. It was pretty satisfying - the tension had built up steadily all weekend, and ticketing that idiot was the perfect release. This is my building and these are my residents, and I don't tolerate that kind of bullsh**.

But anyway, kudos to the police for keeping order on State Street, to my fellow crew for keeping order inside the building, and most of all, to the students for keeping a level head through the whole thing. I'm actually starting to dread next year's Halloween a little less.

Wow. Just.. wow.

( Heroism )

I'm aware they train dogs to help people with special needs, and I know these are some exceptionally smart and loyal creatures. But damn. This canine was the stuff of legends.

So I was moseyin' along today, having a stroll through the caf on my way to class, and my eyes lit on a few tables along one wall. Today's display seemed to be some sort of sales pitch. Bottles, tubes, and jars festooned the blue dropcloth in a tightly-packed melee, looking for all the world like an army of cosmetics, and overseeing their grim march were several lady generals dressed in their best Business Barbie gear. They all had that Mary Kay attitude, the sickly-sweet overcaffeinated friendliness just barely masking the vicious high-school snark they mutter to each other about every passerby. Maybe they were selling, maybe recruiting.. didn't matter. They were only scenery, which they knew as well as I.

( Subconscious Substitutions )