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Vlad's disease

Yesterday got a call from a headhunter. Oh joy - why oh why do I harbor such enmity towards members of that profession? Could it be that I don't like being dicked around, sent to poorly managed cattle calls, treated as a commodity, or as a commission bonus? Actually, yes - that's it ;-)

I played it straight through the end. Because hey, you never know, it could pan out for a really great opportunity and the only parts that I really hate are them trying to grill me for who still works with me, and of course actually meeting them in person.
Unfortunately for the recruiter, he wanted me to come in for an in-person "qualifying" interview with other applicants. This is where things went a bit awry.

I had to explain that I had UVA and UVB chromodermal hyper sensitivity disorder, or "Vlad's disease"¹ for short ;-) The condition (as I made it up) leads to painful blisters when exposed even to even indirect sunlight. And unfortunately I would not be able to come to the recruiters office until I got the new reflective tinting on my car windows. Even worse, the film is on special order from 3M - and the earliest it'll be here is in two weeks. And the install, because I can only do it at night, is difficult to schedule. But I'm still really interested in the position... bla bla bla.

It's amazing how interest can change from sincere to feigned. Something tells me that I won't get a follow up call in a few weeks. ;-)

¹ for Vlad the Impaler, foundation for the Dracula legend. Get it?

Why watches? (or is Pr0n dead?)

I've been using SpamBayes with Outlook for a while now. I've been fairly happy with it. Anything 50% is spam, and anything 15% is suspect. Even at that level, it's rare that any unwanted junk finds it's way to my inbox. More often than not auto-generated Evite party invites from friends may inadvertently get marked as "Suspect". But that's OK, I have the social skills of a... .... well actually I have none to speak of - something about issues keeping the quiet thoughts quiet.

::cricket sound::

Anyways, back to spam. I've noticed the type of "Suspect" email has morphed over the last year. No longer are "adult themed products" the reigning king, instead it's comprised mostly of offers for rolex knockoffs.

Could somebody please explain to me - what's so special about a rolex? From what I can gather from Froogle they seem to range in price from $8K(USD) to $48K(USD). Quite a bit of cash for an ugly watch (damn - there goes any hope for an endorsement contract in the future). But again - I'm not a wrist watch sort of guy.

But maybe this is more ominous than anyone realizes? Can pr0n, the worlds premiere indicator of what new technology will be widely successful in the marketplace, be loosing ground to the old standby - cheap trademark theft of luxury goods? I mean, come on (pun intended), if knockoff coach handbags and rolex watches outsell pr0n - what will happen to this "new internet economy"? Has the internet finally lost it's luster as the hot new thing?

::sigh:: I was really hoping for a new internet dot-com bubble.

Note to self: Invest in any new technology that Pr0n is invading and sell at the first hint of a rolex.

It's Tuesday, I'm on (mandatory) vacation, then why am I at work?

...because I'm a disruptive employee that can't follow explicit instructions to take time off.
No that's not entirely it ;-)

You see, I've got deadlines, the office is nearly empty - and daytime TV is to painful to watch. All three are incentives to get my butt in gear and get work done - regardless if I'm supposed to be on vacation.
Truth be told, Brenda is 38 weeks pregnant (full term is 37 weeks) and could deliver at ANY TIME NOW. So it would be in the best interests of the Gant chart that I code like a crazy M#^43%F*CK3R while I can - because when the baby gets here I don't think I'll be that concerned with work.

Let the merriment commence!

• Friday GameSpy will be shut down for the rest of the year - sort of a forced vacation for all the non-on-call people
• Friday Morning, I'm driving to lancaster :( for x-mas eve with her family & spend the night
• Saturday Morning, before the crack-o-dawn, drive down to Murieta for xmas morning with my mom and sister
• Saturday Afternoon, drive to Hemet for xmas with Bren's cousins
• Saturday Night, try to make it home
• Sunday - crash/burn/coma

It looks like about 500-600miles of driving in two days. I better gas up ;-)

137

That's how many people I have on my Trillian contact list. There are definatly a hell of a lot people with more contacts than me - but it just cracks me up whenever I see a screenshot of an IM product that has only a handfull of contacts that are nicely laid out.
I wonder if there is a "picture" based contact list plugin out there? Nested groups are one thing, but when you have nestings 3 or more deep, it gets extremly cluttered .
I envision a visio like office layout where you can place contacts - in such away you could mimic their geographic positions to each other.
For instance, around here there are a lot of people in various locations and or buildings. I would be estatic if I could draw a crude line map of the buildings and the cubical farms and place my contacts on the map.

Sure - it would take a bit more screen real estare than a simple list, but I'm a "tactile/kinesthetic" learner that's better at maps than lists. And besides - I'm certain that most of us can remember seeing at least one movie where they had a lame 3d wireframe of a building and little red dots to indicate employees/intruders. If hollywood says is it exists it must exist eventually - right?

In other news, I'm testing out the MT Textile2 v2.0.2 plugin for MovableType. It's based upon Textile, A Humane Web Text Generator . I would strongly suggest clicking on the "Text to HTML" button down the page to play with it. I don't know how similar it is to the text formating on Wikipedia, but it rocks!

The one thing that I definatly approve of is the formatting of links...
"PlasticBanana.com":http://www.plasticbanana.com
becomes PlasticBanana.com instead of having to type out <a href="http://plasticbanana.com">PlasticBanana.com</a>

It makes editing posts in MT's little window a heck of a lot cleaner

Being Responsible with the car

Since Bren is due in a few weeks it seemed only appropriate that we trade in the Silver MBZ C230 Kompressor Coupe for a new Blue Saturn VUE v6. You see with a kid on the way you need a lot of room for a lot of junk/supplies - and the MBZ didn't have enough of what we needed. I'm certain that taking baby in and out of the back seat would have thrown out both Bren and myselfs backs. :(
Now we've got space for stroler, pack'n'play (a.k.a. the the porta-jail), a few hundred diapers, and room for baby.
On the plus side - it's got XM - OH YEA!!

I'm getting crotchety

Last night was the IGN/GameSpy annual Holiday party at the Crazy Horse saloon in Irvine. Maybe it's age, or maybe it's the fact that it was impossible to distinguish the kicks of our unborn son Seamus (due Jan 14th) from the MIND DRILLING BASE of the SUPER LOUD HOUSE MUSIC as it resinated with Bren's womb. It was weird, I would put my hand on Bren's abdomen to feel for kicks - and they were ALL in rhythm with the shaking of the table. That just can't be right.
Damn it, I just hope that I don't turn into a friggin nimby or join the PTA. Oh no - it's already started - I used "friggin" instead of f*cking. Nooooo the self censorship of language has already kicked in.
AAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Pool filter couldn't take the pressure

You may ask - WTF is this image? Well, it's the snapped remains of the pressure relief valve atop my pool filter. The part that screws in is still IN the filter, while the rest of it is resting on it's side. Funny story, not funny HA-HA mind you, apparently it was spraying water all day Monday into my neighbors back yard and he left an informative note on my front door. When I saw it, it was still attached - but loose. I thought that it wasn't screwed in all the way, I mean - it screwed with minimal effort. So when I turned it to tighten it (following the arrows on top to close it) it snapped off.
I've never heard of these things breaking off. Now I'm trying to get a hold of the pool company that put in the solar heating system and the new pump/filter combo - I'm presuming that it's still under warranty and all - I mean - it's brand spanking new. I just hope this doesn't turn into a mini battle - I just want it fixed.

Odd COM Concept - successful failures?

Every once in a while, usualy after getting luled into a false sense of understanding and confidence, Microsoft's functions and COM interfaces smack me on the back side of the head as if to say "hey idiot - you forgot to read the fine print on this interface and mysticly infer that while the function, whose sole purpose is to get a valid interface pointer, did not fail simply because it returned a NULL interface pointer"

Excuse me, but Huh?

It would be as if you had a
HRESULT IColorWheel::GetPanatoneObject(IPanatone** ppPanatoneResult);
That returned S_OK but ppPanatoneResult was invalid (null).
All I can conclude is that it's a successful failure?

::sigh::

Update: I'm a dumbass - I was forgetting about S_FALSE (0x00000001), and it was the cause of my successfull failure.

ASE? + Yahoo? + GameSpot?

I'm not sure what to think just yet after hearing that Pat Ford, my ex-co-worker / ex-VP of my dept here at GameSpy, who left for "the enemy" ;-) a.k.a. ASE, is now working for Yahoo - who it turns out has apparently purchased ASE and teamed up with GameSpot to make a larger player in the market.

I'm conflicted - I mean I like Patrick and all. But Yahoo? They're an unclassified onomatopoeia.

You know, it would be cool if MobyGames (a site for tracking who worked on what game) had a plot of employee / employer migrations. I somehow envision a giant swirling pattern - with little eddies around publishers (EA?) or engine/platform technologies (iD).

securom is now disabled in hl2

http://www.steampowered.com/index.php?area=news&id=372

To quote:
"Half-Life 2
* Solved disc in drive incompatibility error by removing Securom disc check routine"

It was bugging me that valve (or maybe vivendi?) was insisting that the retail version included securom to enforce a physical media check when launching the game - all the while allowing the online (steam) purchased versions to not have such a check (for obvious reasons).

I wonder, was the presence of securom a test of sorts to help guage the effectiveness of steam's DRM against physical media security techologies? I expect that somehow it will come up durring a talk at this years GDC, probably as valve tries to pimp steam to game developers.

But now that the stupid check is gone, all I can really say is: Finally.