A Nitrous Crouton

Now the waiting game and crossing of fingers begins. Hopefully, at long last, I will have some personal time for rest and recuperation. Unfortunately, I do have backlog of assorted odds and ends to catch up on. Heavy sigh. After the past 90-hour week, I once again liken the process of shipping a commercial software project to childbirth. This makes women unhappy, unless of course, they are programmers.

Murphy decided to pay a little visit yesterday evening. I suppose several hours of tranquility might have been a bit much to hope for. Thankfully, getting stranded at the parking lot of Target when my beloved 323 refused to start wasn't more than a minor inconvenience. I was only a couple blocks away from home and managed to get it jumped. If I had gone to Wal-Mart I would have been set, a new battery would have been moments away. I vastly prefer Target, but their automotive 'section' is a joke. I couldn't find fuses or a battery contact cleaner brush. They did have no shortage of crappy licensed steering wheel covers though!

Now I'm just hoping I got what I paid for with the last cheap battery; I bought it (yes, at Wal-Mart) less than three years ago. If my alternator is going away I will be most displeased, although the car is over twelve years old.

I'm not typing this from my cozy new keyboard, alas. I'm still in my office, banging away on the laptop while waiting for tonight's build to finish. My brain is mush, I want to go home, but I have another couple hours of waiting ahead of me. Isn't that just a tasty recipe for quality blog material?

Today might turn out to be a watershed day in another realm, we will soon see. It's interesting how such things don't happen when you try to plan them, but rather in the middle of an afternoon while trying to track down a rather persnickety bug.

No I don't have the latest Harry Potter book.

I am taking today off.

As it turns out, I faced quite an internal dilemma when processing the decision of whether or not to drag myself to the office. I know I have at least two programmers slaving away trying to wrap up bugs in the network code. I feel a certain responsibility in my lead role to share their pain. Wrestling with the potential guilt yesterday afternoon, I eventually came to the decision to stay home today ‘unless something catches fire with the latest build’. My cell phone has been quiet and I have been in my infrequently utilized domicile.

This was a good decision. My crispy levels were definitely on overload and I feel much more rested and it’s only mid-afternoon. Besides, my bug list is now dominated things like “Crashed once on screen X on track X when soaking for 15 hours”. I need to let my dev kits, uh, soak today, yeah, that’s it!

My energy levels were low enough, however, that I still haven’t tackled some weighty pending action items on the personal side of the fence. Those will have to wait for another day. As will comprehensive cleanup of my home studio, the clutter buildup from the past couple months of neglect is truly astounding.

I have felt inspired to do some virtual housekeeping, which has actually felt quite refreshing. My Windows desktop and laptop were due for some updates, and the G5 needed to be bumped to 10.4.2. Alas, the 10.4.2 update still doesn’t allow for portrait displays on nVidia cards. Sniff. Thanks to an evil Fry’s sale, I now have a fresh 200GB external Seagate Firewire/USB drive. My backup procedures for the laptop (which remains my main email machine) have grown a bit lax as of late, so installation of the BounceBack software and running a proper backup was Long Overdue. My ghetto scheme of .raring Documents and Settings technically works but leaves something to be desired.

So far I’m quite happy with the Seagate. I’ve learned my lesson on being ‘thrifty’ having been burned twice this year with a combination of cheap Maxtor drives and cheap external Firewire enclosures. I do mean burned in the literal sense, overheat, cook, melting chip, bye-bye drive! I’m not sure I entirely blame Maxtor, as the drives were being used in an, ahem, read/write/seek intensive regimen but I’m not buying another Maxtor anytime soon. These drive failures were mostly just really inconvenient, I am property paranoid about critical data, but it was still most annoying.

This afternoon has also given me the chance to hook up and try out my new Mac keyboard. I never much cared for the standard keyboard Apple ships with the G5. It was usable, but felt kind of ooky to type on. The keyslope and angles felt slightly off to my fingers and the key response was far too soft and mushy. I do hail from the old-school realm of keyboard preferences; my desktop Windows box has an original IBM Model M mechanical keyboard thanks to eBay. If you know your keyboards, this should tell you much. I’ve been tempted to bring it into the office, but everyone works with the doors open and I don’t want to drive my co-workers completely crazy.

As I fully intend to use the G5 more often and migrate more of my daily activities over to OS X, having a keyboard I actually want to type on was going to be important. Thankfully, a little minor thing on the horizon gave me the excuse I needed to buy a Matias TactilePro. Purchasing hardware sight unseen and untested is always a bit of an adventure. This blog entry is the inaugural use of the keyboard and so far, I am extremely pleased.

I’m far less pleased with the patched Battlefield 2 1.01 patch. Yes, you read that last sentence correctly. I had to dig through message boards to figure out how to manually run the low-level patcher since it refused to Just Work. The explosions and impending virtual carnage coming up a little later this evening better make the pain and agony worthwhile.

Bumper sticker on the way to work: "Lets Honor All Our Fallen Hero's"

Hate shipping software. Hate it hate it hate it. Must crush, destroy, rampage.

One of my arms is noticeably more tanned than the other. This is because the only sun I get is driving to work in the morning. My beloved 323 has no a/c, so cracked open window ahoy! I almost feel self conscious, but then I remind myself I haven't even shaved in a month so what's a little tone discrepancy between friends.

Obviously the solution is I need to start driving backwards to work on the freeway.

It's a shame I can't put a "Lukewarm Tea" easter egg into my current project. A little hacking and you'd unlock a mini-game set in a Victorian era parlor involving button mashing to make comments about the work Lord Uppington is doing on his manor. Tut tut.

No, I didn't go into work today.

There are lots of little loose end and cleaning tidbits that need to be taken care of in the apartment. They will have to wait until the project is done. Very soon now, really, no fooling. I actually managed to play a couple games on Battlefield 2 today. I think it was relaxing, but in my current state it's awfully hard to tell.

I did have a thwarted moment of geek bliss today. I discovered that OS X 10.4 supported portrait mode on LCDs that swivel. I have one such LCD, a Dell 2001FP which is currently slaved to my rarely used G5. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on nVidia boards, phooey! Such is life with Apple video driver support, even though I have the ultra-macho GeForce 6800 (thanks nVidia!), I don't get my swivel support. Sniff sniff.

I keep meaning to use OS X more. But considering how little time I spend at home, and how little I do on the computer when at home other than a little web surfing or game playing, the Macs just tend to sit idle. Portrait mode on the G5 would have been a little inspiration to use it for writing. Maybe it'll be fixed in 10.4.2, I can only hope.

Today, I celebrate my 4th of July with White Castle, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ben & Jerry's and whole milk. Viva la something. Alas, the inspiration to rewatch "Team America World Police" struck me too late in the day.