Author Archives: Alan V

Karaoke

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Today we went to YamaSho and sang karaoke. They are a really nice place and the song selection is excellent. They also deliver excellent Japanese food right to your room, which is awesome.

It was a good break from what is turning out to be a horrible week at work. The issues have been piling up and this morning (after a bad dream and walking to work in tons of rain and wind that soaked everything I was wearing), I was basically getting constant emails and bugs for 4 hours. Context switching between 6 issues every 5 minutes is… not pleasant.
This week will just get worse from here, as Friday is a major release and both my manager and our QAs’ manager are out. This… will not end well.

But blah. This weekend, unless horrible things happen and I am forced to work, I am spending doing random things completely unrelated to coding or bug fixing or troubleshooting.

Edit: Shower, and now feeling better. As long as I don’t get shittons of emails and bugs again tomorrow, I think I can tackle the stuff I got these past few days and be ok. Hope.

Also just realized that the release means I have to be working this weekend. Meh. Oh well. I can at least do things unrelated to bug fixing or troubleshooting. :P

Life updates

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Life.alanv.org has gotten another update, which brings it up to date to this past weekend.

RPG Get has also gotten its first expansion set. If anyone actually has interest in it, you should playtest it and give me feedback.

Life has been fairly uneventful lately. On Saturday, Charles, Mark, Evan, and I went to the SF MOMA. They were celebrating their 75th anniversary and had free admission.


I will never understand modern art.

At least they had an entire floor of photography (including San Francisco after the earthquake) that was really interesting.

Work this week has been kind of frustrating. A lot of the stuff I’ve been doing hasn’t worked out like I planned. As a result, I had 6 things to deal with today, 4 of which were issues that I thought I’d taken care of but that ended up being an issue anyway. Blah.

Also the bay area is drowning. We’ve gotten so much rain these past few days, and it’s supposed to continue tomorrow. Blah. I walked to work this morning in the worst of it, and it took almost 4 hours for my pants and socks to dry out (despite me not wearing my socks or shoes).

Lalala

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So recently I discovered (or, rather, was introduced to by Sharon) this awesome service called Lala.

Basically, you can “purchase” rights to stream a song as much as you want for $0.10/song. (You can also stream any song in their database once for free.) Signing up gives you credits for 25 songs. And if you like it, you get the $0.10 off the cost of the MP3 download (which is normally $0.89, so already $0.10 cheaper than iTunes).

If it was just that, it would already be kind of awesome, but annoying to use as you’d have to re-buy all of your music (which is the main annoyance of digital distribution). However, Lala also provides a program that can run through your MP3s, match them against their database, and then give you access to them online (either immediately if it’s a song they carry, or by uploading your file if it isn’t).

This basically means that you can upload your entire music library to Lala and listen to it anywhere you have internet access. Convenient.

I’ll make a proper post one of these days, but meh. You should give them a try*. Signing up is free, and you get 25 free songs to stream.

Also, yes, Southwest found my bag. They also gave me $50 for the inconvenience of having to go get it. They should lose my bags more often. :D

*I get 5 free songs to stream if you do. I don’t get paid and I don’t get song downloads. Also, it will automatically make you follow me and make me follow you.

I Hate Flying

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Today has been way too long.
– Woke up too early to a lot of snow and headed to the airport for a long flight (with two layovers) home
– Waited in the terminal with way too many people (due to two flights from the gate being delayed a few hours) and broken wifi
– Had flights, which were actually not too bad except for the fact that I developed a horrible headache during the last leg
– Got to SFO and waited for my bag with a headache… and waited… and waited
– Went to the baggage office to file a missing/delayed bag claim
– Headed to the bus stop and missed it by literally 30 seconds
– Waited another hour and a half for the next bus… headache getting worse
– Caught the bus at 9:20 instead of at 8:00 as I was planning
– Am now sitting at home pondering clothes for tomorrow (most of my good pants were in the bag that is currently missing) and being way too annoyed by kitty mewing in the other room and pondering taking some advil and going to bed

At least I was smart and carried on everything I didn’t want to lose (camera, cables, laptop, batteries). Still, that’s a lot of clothes (and boxes of red velvet cake mix, and Christmas presents) that I’ve potentially lost.

Ugh.

Hate.

My head hurts so much. :(