I find myself increasingly cynical about the state of the world.
Or maybe it’s just today.
Author Archives: Alan V
Zoooo
Matt, Katrina, and I went to the zoo this weekend. The first animal we saw was an ostrich, which proceeded to turn its butt towards us and pee, and then poop. Other animals throughout the day also did so, including a rhino who sprayed pee all over the metal bars of its enclosure. It was very odd. We also saw them feed the penguins, which was awesome. Apparently the chick of the two gay penguins is named “Chuck Norris”…?
I have been playing PSO again. I miss having friends on there to play with, because public games are full of greedy and/or incompetent people. Blah. On the plus side, 3 level 80+ Fomars (I’m 150) versus vhard TTF = massive pwnage. There was gifoie everywhere. Vol Opt’s first form died in literally 15 seconds (one set of screens and a couple pillars was all that got destroyed). Yay for spellcasters.
Workwise, we moved buildings this weekend. I am not a fan of the new place. The kitchen is tiny (and there’s only one, versus the three in the old building), the bathroom is tiny (and there are huge gaps in the stall walls so you pretty much see someone sitting on the toilet when you walk into the bathroom), and there are only two conference rooms. Meh. Hopefully it will grow on me.
More Coding
Today I finally achieved my goal of unifying my journal and photos pages on my main site.
From the main page (if you’re using skin 6, as I haven’t added the links to the other skins yet, even though it works correctly), you can now have one-click access to see my latest three journal entries and my last three uploaded photo galleries.
The journal syndication is built on top of a generic RSS parser that I wrote, so it can theoretically syndicate everything from XKCD comics to slashdot onto my site. Right now it’s just being used to pull data from this journal.
The photos syndication is a custom-written parser that knows about my directory structure in photos2 (since I didn’t add an RSS feed for that). If I get around to doing that, this parser can go away and they can both rely on the RSS parser, which would be kind of awesome.
So yeah, that was my bit of accomplishment for today.
Yay for coding!
Edit: For those of you who don’t even want to click once, there’s now a “dashboard” on the splash page. When enabled, it will show a summary of the latest journal entry and my latest three photo galleries right on the front page. Yay laziness?
RPG Get! and Coding
This has been a good week for completing old goals.
On Saturday and Sunday, I worked on the RPG Get! CCG website and got it (along with a beta of the base set cards) up. This is a game that has been in progress for over four years, so finally having something to show for it is awesome.
Today, I decided to finally finish up the AlanvDotOrg backend rewrite. This had been started over a year ago, and stalled due to my computer catching a virus, rendering it unable to connect to the internet after Norton had its way. Nevertheless, I had a bit of inspiration today at work, came home, and started hacking on it at around 5:30 PM. It is now 10:30, and it looks like it’s mostly complete. The backend is done, so you can once again comment on news posts. I also got three skins ported over, so you at least have a little bit of choice there. I’ll work on porting more skins tomorrow. I also have a couple ideas for new skins that I think would be awesome, so there will definetly be some of that too.
Work has also been full of accomplishing old goals. There’s been a few bugs we’ve been pushing back for a few releases, waiting for the right time. This week, we squished most of them dead (or are at least in the process of doing so). Yay for working on old bugs. We’ve also been increasing code coverage in our packages, including some of the legacy code we inherited. A little boring, but it’s nice to see numbers go up and to have increased confidence in the correctness of the code.
So yeah. Two of my big projects have finally reached some level of completion. This is awesome.
Life lately
Life has gotten another update, bringing it up to today. Yay life.
I also got inspired to start working on the RPG Get! CCG again. I got the website up after about an hour of playing around with CSS and figuring how to hack stylesheets so IE does what I want it to (stupid non-standards compliant IE7). No cards yet though… still finishing up the base set.
Didn’t go to Capture the Flag with Stuff in the park today, and I’m very glad I didn’t go. Instead had a nice quiet day by myself (making tasty chicken and rice and beans for lunch, and working on RPG Get!) and then had some social activity at Sharon/Charles/Matt’s housewarming party. CtFwS would have been too much crazyness.
This is basically a dump of photos from the past few weeks:
Played with the zoom on my 18-200mm lens.
Went to the SCS picnic.
Went to Dim Sum with coworkers.
Went to Trisha’s to watch movies. Saw Smart People (finally) and decided it was a horrible movie. Dueled with Alfred with my new (very slow to reload) camera.
Had Sharon, Charles, Justin, and Mark over for games.
Went to Sharon/Charles/Matt’s housewarming, where there was Space Munchkin and N64 and Wii and lots of tasty food and wine.
