Department of Unwise Studies

Apparently some people I actually know are playing City of Heroes now? I'm curious what they think, but then, I did smoke that crack for three years!

I just got some of these to try as German Longsword gloves:



What the description "Naginata Kote. The indicator finger is in a separate chamber than the rest of the fingers. Deer leather." does not tell you is that this is smoked deer leather. It smells distinctly and strongly like a certain tea snob's lapsang souchang = "smokey bacon tea".

J. suggested that I put them out on the deck for a while. This at least seems to have let the odor disspate enough that it only stinks up the area immediately around the gloves. When I wear them for practice I may end up with smokey hands for weeks.

You know you've been out of work a while when you think, hey, I'll learn some haskell.

Next time you have to write a complicated, important technical document and you're pretty sure people aren't going to hold up their responsibility to read and understand it, ask yourself: what would Van Halen do?

Tonight the bunnies are flopped on the floor making a lambda. Apparently they're programmer bunnies. Good to see that they're using a powerful language, because they're pretty slow so they need all the expressive power they can get.

I'm pleased that now I can read the english translation of The Flower of Battle and pretty much picture the longsword plays and how they work in my mind.

Part of it is that this is relatively straightforward compared to most German longsword texts which often run to the counter-counter-counter and use more varied initial cuts. But I'll take it anyway.

Consuming any star wars media always makes me want to run a star wars game. You can get older but there's always a child inside.

Well in a week of leisure I've managed to revise my resume from two years ago ( it's up at http://web.mit.edu/~ashultz/Public/resume09.pdf )...

... and watch a couple of seasons of 30 rock.

... and there was probably something else. I went to the library, or something.

I'm not cut out for unemployment, I'm too something something to be unemployed!

Upon being laid off along with a large chunk of the company, my primary emotion is... relief at not having to deal with the mess management was making. And extreme relief at not ever having to look at that contractor Java ever again.

My apologies to those left to deal in the wreckage.

I should get my resume together some time soon. But not today.

Just finished the massive tome "The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters" and I can't recommend it. The post title above is not actually a joke - the heroine and heroes get captured with ridiculous regularity. And amazingly the author manages to make a plot involving steampunk and blue glass dream-eating alchemical books not actually that interesting. It comes across as more of a comedy movie, in which the too-many different bad guys to distinguish and the heroes run around in large Victorian sets doing the doors-and-hallway routine.

Apparently this is a best seller, which adds another datum for my "if you give the bookreading masses the permission to read genre fiction they love it because it's not another dry bite of literary ficiton" theory that started with the potter books and of course "Johnathan Strange and Mr. Nothing Happens in this Book".

To make things worse "Glass Books" is book one of what must be a trilogy, though it is basically self-contained. I started book two "The Dark Volume" and realized I couldn't take it, so I skipped to the end to determine that yes, the story is expected to continue from this one as well.

You check in code that does not even parse.

You don't check in code at all.

Your editor is notepad.

Your response to tabs or spaces is "wha?"

Your first code tool is Ctrl-C and your second is Ctrl-V.

Every time you want a connection you make a connection pool with one item, pull it out, use it, don't put it back, and then throw the whole thing away anyway.

... and yet you can get paid as a programmer doing all these things and many more.

Apparently one of the sources of our troubles if you are drinking management kool-aid is bad code quality.

This puts a serious strain on my apathy.

Presently I'm surviving at work on a large amount of apathy. Sadly, apathy is not unlike depression and saps ones energy. I'm greatly saddened by the idea that some people go through their entire work lives in this state.

Even more because it's so rare I'm pleased to see that we're a nation which not only includes the religious like it does in every inclusive political speech but also includes those without religion, who are generally spat on by politics.

a somewhat long article but interesting:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/03/society-politics/print

Every now and then the RPGnet forums remind me why I still sometimes read them. This thread describes a truely amusing idea for a superhero campaign:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=431330

The Mountains of Madness:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081106-antarctica-mountains.html?source=rss

Mysterious! Antartic! Eldritch! (The last not verified by science yet.)

Actually perhaps a boring post about shaving, but as I sit here with my (shaved) chin in my hand I feel like making it.

( post shaved down to a minimum )

this may be one of those games that I feel compelled to buy a bunch of and never get a chance to play. At least they're prepainted though.