A Nitrous Crouton

Out at 9AM, back in at 3AM, back out again at 9AM and home once more at 9:30PM. My thoughts will not be examples of staggering intellect.

RSS is the first indication that I'm turning into an old man set in my ways and rocking grouchily in my chair. All these crazy young kids out there with their podcasting and syndicated feeds and CSS DHTML gooberwhazits, where's my cane? Good gravy, I don't even use bookmarks a lot of the time, I type in URLs by hand. Granted, I've grown soft in my old age, I'll take advantage of autocompletion. But by gum, I've never syndicated a darn thing!

One of these days I'll sit down and figure it out. Perhaps at the same time I write something in this new-fangled thing called 'Java'.

LDA #$D00D

I'm now writing this at 11PM as I wait to be able to go home and crash. My brain is mush, no further productive work today will be possible. I do still need to run another build once something gets checked-in, so here I wait.

These entries are vapid self-indulgent exercises in attempting to shake the rust off of creaky writing skills. I'm not sure I'm doing myself any favors by attempting to force something out in the late night states I find myself in these days. At least there are constraints on me throwing caution to the wind and turning this into a vicious little narcissistic mobius loop of whining.

I have no interest in covering politics on this blog. There will undoubtedly be exceptions, usually when politics intersects with something else that just begs for comment. Today is one of those days. Perusing the transcript from the Presidential address regarding Iraq, I couldn't help but notice:

The Department of Defense has set up a website – AmericaSupportsYou.mil.

I was amazed in 1997 at how far the Internet had come. At that point I was already an old hand, having hit some of the first graphical web pages in Mosaic 0.9 (SunOS/Motif) all the way back in 1993. Yes, I had to compile the executable myself and tweak the xmakefile. In 1997 I was preparing to move to California from Scotland and was boggled by the online map resources that were coming online (I don't recall if it was MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, or a combination of the two). This was still before the dot.com era really kicked into high gear, but you could see the future.

And now it's here, the Web is beyond mainstream, so taken for granted.

Can I have GEnie back?

Another week closer to ship, but another week closer to total body shutdown. Yesterday was once again my day off, allowing my body just enough time to catch up to the fatigue latency. I managed to snag Battlefield 2, but haven't actually gotten around to playing it yet.

I buy games like some women buy shoes.

As previously discussed, I generally only play one game at a time, and play that game almost exclusively for an extended period of months (or even years). This has not prevented me from accumulating a rather impressive library of games. Which I rarely play.

Now granted, I do have a legitimate professional interest in checking them out, for good or ill it is the industry where I've been working for over ten years now.

However, I have this tendency to buy games on sale, or buy games when they go on clearance, or think, hmm, that game is going to be hard to track down later on, and it would look so good in the dvd rack…

I own one decent pair of jean shorts.

At least my habit has dramatically decreased as the years have gone by, although that's more a measure of available disposable income. And don't get me started on books!

Ahh, Monday. Lunch brought in, have been sitting in office for twelve hours straight at this point. Sentences fragments. Waiting for build to finish. Want to go home and sleep. Send Elf.

At least this week is looking like an improvement on last week. How can you not love a week where you start a day with your main C: drive eating itself and end it with a traffic jam at 11:45PM when you're trying to get home?

Please excuse the incoherent ranting. Yesterday was my day off. Even though I needed the downtime, slowing down for a moment almost does more harm than good at this stage. I slow down and think: why exactly am I doing this again?

The answer, of course, is because I have to. For now.

Coming up next: my equivalent of a shoe sale. No, really!

The Battlefield 2 demo had the fortuitous timing to be released on Friday. Saturday morning I installed it, played with it briefly, came to the realization that although I'd much rather blow things up all day I needed to go to work, slaved over a build for 14 hours then slept.

And today I blew stuff up all day. I'm going to be useless for a whole week by the time this project is done.

Speaking of blowing stuff up, I'm a professional mercenary. However, I can't actually use that terminology to explain myself to people due to the misconception of what a mercenary is.

At this point in my life, for a variety of reasons due to a multitude of choices I am working in a job that I don't terribly like, on a project I'm not necessarily enthused by. Does this matter? No, because I was hired to do a job, and that job is to ship software. I ship software, I'm a professional. Don't expect me to care passionately about your company (country) or your game (war). I might go through a lot of sacrifice getting it out the door if that's what it takes to get the job done, but I'm doing it for a paycheck. I'll fulfill my contract, won't quit, won't switch sides and won't quit. However, I'm not going to commit suicide, nor am I going to drink any Kool-Aid.

The ultimate outcome is death or retirement. I'm hoping for the latter, but I still have at least another 15-16 months to survive in the meantime.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to put on some oversized sunglasses to go with the stubble and crank up some Don Henley.

They're picking up the prisoners and putting them in a pen
And all she wants to do is dance dance…

One day closer to ship.

Unfortunately there are still quite a few long hard days in between that date. Today was one of those periodic ventures into Fun with Bug Metrics. On any large commercial software project, towards the ends up development the bugs can really pile up. It isn't uncommon to have to sort through thousands of bugs with a limited number of people in a very limited amount of time. Sometimes it can be a delicate balance managing expectations between bug closure rates and getting critical issues resolved that are blocking testing or keeping the product from being Shippable. One of my responsibilities to my programmers is to make sure quantity of bugs fixed in a given time period isn't the only measure of how 'good' someone is doing. Metrics can be useful, but are oh so easily abused.

I feel like I'm writing for the sake of writing, just to get back into some kind of familiarity or groove. Eventually, things will get interesting.

This blog is not a source for personal emotional venting, it will not become an angst ridden Son of Livejournal. It is tempting at times, one of the side effects of grinding a product out the door is my emotional and mental state starts riding on a bit of a ragged edge. Which is a contributing factor to being hit hard by an old estranged childhood friend getting married tomorrow. I do wish him the best, and am very happy for him, observing from a great distance as I am. Although it's not like I would have been able to attend given my current circumstances, I don't think I realized how gut wrenching it ended up being to not have been invited. The cost of the very valuable knowledge and lessons I have learned in my 20s has been a staggering amount of toil, pain and heartache. I need my upcoming decade to be different.

I know many corners will be turned soon, but for tonight I am weary and sad.

Out at 9 A.M. back at 12:45 A.M.

I am getting too old for this.

Unfortunately I am not of the 'immediately collapse and fall asleep' school. I need to unwind. Blogging isn't quite a way to unwind, but I do wish to redevelop the writing habit.

At present I'm quite bushed and not even fit for throwing pies. This is when I curl up in front of the telly and watch something brainless.

It's never too late for Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

Due to the strenuous nature of my last couple years, my precious moments of 'free time' have revolved around relatively trivial pursuits in a quest to recharge myself to continue onward. These activities tend to be a rotating troika suited to my limited energy, resources and penchant for recovering at home. At any given point in time I tend to waver between gaming, reading sci-fi or watching shows.

Of course I feel like I should be doing something more constructive, but learning to be realistic took a good portion of my 20s.

Typically my gaming habits tend to revolve around a single online multiplayer game, played almost exclusively for an extended period of time. Being 'in the biz', I will sample other games, but for the most part I am a serial monogamist of games. It's rare that a single-player game will captivate my interest, I much prefer playing with/against other people. And I'm an introvert, go figure.

Late last year, as I was reaching the end of a project (and the end of my strength having put in a year of crunch mode and/or project multitasking) my workload finally lightened a bit just as World of Warcraft hit retail release. I'm still not sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing.

I'll let the measure of how busy my last few months have been stand by this: my priest has been stuck at Level 59.7 since February.

When I'm tired and need a gaming fix? It's been Toontown Online. Sometimes all you can do is throw pies…

Well then. My life has been bereft of such minor details as spare time, energy and ability to pursue my personal interests, blogging included.

On the other hand, if it's important enough, I can always make the time, even if the resulting posts end up being rambling, poorly written and having even less point than usual!

The primary enemy is work; I am under more professional stress than at any previous point in my life. That was a tough record to beat! Silly me was foolish enough to sign on as programming lead for this title. Nothing like tight deadlines, unfamiliar codebase, new team, and all those details that come up in software development.

Good experience, good project, but it has made my life "interesting" but my life not very interesting.

I did, however, manage to find the time to see Episode 3, and catch an early screening of "Serenity" the movie continuation of the "Firefly" TV series. I missed "Firefly" when it was on (except for catching the not-really pilot episode and being underwhelmed), only to discover it later on DVD. Unfortunately this resulted in me being more angry about a cancellation than, well, ever. A couple years after the fact. Ah well. Stupid Joss Whedon, under torture I might even confess that he managed to get me to develop a crush on a fictional character, but I digress.

Anyway, story in contrasts: Serenity, visually solid but nothing mind-bending, solid characters and sharp dialogue. Episode 3, visually overwhelming, paper characters and oh-so-painful dialogue. And probably a hundred times the box office of Serenity when it comes out in September. Ah well. I enjoyed it and I got my Kaylee fix.

Serenity also didn't play it safe. Unless you really need spoilers, avoid like the plague, you'll be glad you did.

Now if I can just survive the next 30 days...