What you say?

What you say? I posted more when I WAS working? Well, I guess I had a routine going at that time. Now I rarely have scheduled events. Hell, I have lunch at a different time each day, sometimes have breakfast, sometimes not.

What you say? Interview went well. Why, if the job was anything like what the application said it would be, I'd be a great fit. But it isn't. I don't want to say I'm too advanced for it, but it's just a different field. Development is different from deployment, even though they share some of the skillset.

What you say? Nah. I'm tired. Word is that I may not have to pay that cancellation fee. We'll have to see. It's gotta go through their "people". I had to get nasty with them (on a land line phone, naturally). I hate getting nasty just to get things done. If I'm going to be nasty, I'd rather be nasty for fun.

What you say? Well, I DID make $100 building a computer for someone. That was pleasing. I'd like to build more for some other people to make some money, but it's a lot of time getting things done. While it wasn't my best work, it was the fastest. I reused their old case which didn't have a lot of opportunities for clever cable routing. Things were all kind of cluttered and even then some of the cables were too short to route anyway even if I did have the space.

What you say? Nope. No costume. I'm lame.

*shrug* I guess that's it. I feel depressed.

Wireless Noose

Remember how the big deal with an unlocked phone and shopping for rebate-less service meant I don't have to have a contract? Well someone fucked up.

When I lost my job one of the first things I did was change my plan. I went from 300 minutes to 100 and cut out all the internet goodies. Total no frills. No problem, right? Well, I get this bill in the mail for a $200 cancellation fee. WHAT CONTRACT, BITCHES?! Now I have to get this all straightened out. Not only do I now have a crippled plan that ALREADY has overages (since I use my cell number as my work contact because I can't rely on anyone giving me my messages), but I gotta deal with the hassle of getting that charge off my bill.

Gah.

At least one thing is looking up for me. I've got an interview come Monday. Office Depot Corporate. Network Developer. Yeah, that's what I'm a-talkin' about. And if they called me, they like me. Gotta make sure I don't disqualify myself. If it works out for me, might be headin' on over to Boynton Beach.

I havn't posted lately because it'd all be negative. I'm not a negative person: it's just slightly consuming. When I have back the security of a full featured phone plan, knowing I'll be able to make my car payments, not having my wrist hurt, and other things then All Will Be Well.

Wasted Effort

Gather 'round, childrens. All you boyzes and girlsies. Let me tell you a tale.

Back in the day, you know, the days when the mighty Griffon flew freely, we accessed hardware directly in code. That's the way it was done to get any kind of speed out of it. And it was FINE, nevermind what all the naysayers said, which, coincidentally, was "NAY." The reason we were supposed to use BIOS for graphics and things was so that we could keep compatibility with a wide variety of platforms.

Ultimately, things became unified and we didn't really need it. Anyone with a VGA video adaptor plugged into their system means that THAT card will use selected ports and memory addresses: END OF STORY. If it didn't obey, it wasn't VGA. $A0000 was the start of video memory when you set it to 320x200x256. Select a color to define by sending one of those 256 colors to some port (I think it was 0x3c8?), then start feeding three byte sequences coinciding with Red Green Blue into some other port (0x3c9) and keep going for as many colors starting from that first value that you want. Drawing offscreen meant allocating memory from the heap and putting some data there and literally memcpy() from that memory space into $A000:0000, depeding on where you wanted it.

It was great. Then VESA came along to make a specification so that people can just program that and video cards were free to implement things any which way they want. It didn't insulate the coder from the implementation details: they just made hard code values and intuitive things to teach into variables. A resolution of 640x480x256 was around 300k... the maximum size a segment could address is 64k. So you had to call a writing function. Kind of like how those mapping chips (MMC for the rest of us) inside NES cartridges allowed games have more than 16K of addressable ROM memory. Some video cards chunked it at 64k, some at 16k. You see how things get complicated.

From humble beginnings. DirectX today tries to unify very complicated and different hardwares under one control. The thing is, there has been 8 different interface designs for it. Yeah, it's backwards compatible, but, it's HARD to find details on ONE specific implementation. All the information of DirectX I could get ranged from DirectX 6 to DirectX 9. And some DirectX 9 stuff doesn't work with DirectX 9.0c (unless I specificly ASK for the vintage interfaces... *rolleyes*). And they rarely say what version they're using.

Anyway, I coded for the last week to make a pretty comprehensive sprite library for DirectX. It wasn't clever, but it was supposed to get everything. Rotation. Per pixel representations. Everything so far was perfect.

...

And then I tried some animation. BZZ. WRONG. I wanted perspective, but at the edges of the screen the pixels weren't matching up. I changed resolutions and the display wasn't even the same. GAH.

While stumbling through the documentation, I found that the sprite library I was developing WAS ALREADY MADE. GAH x 2! And it supported translucency (I only supported 1bit alpha channels) AND tinting (something I didn't even know I wanted, but, now that I think of the practicality, HELL YEAH!). That made me feel teh-stupid.

I don't mind working hard, but I hate WASTING my time on bullshit. Now I can't adapt my library to do those tricks because I'm not sure I would know how to do it. So I turn everything around and use the Direct X sprite thing. NOW I discover it doesn't support rotating along X and Y. I gotta use negative scaling to flip. Pain in the buttocks, mang.

I'm just bitchy lately. My favorite chores lately? Driving out of my way to COSTCO to pick up something off the shelf that NOBODY ELSE CAN LIFT. Um, I'm not really that strong, you know. You don't want to hurt your back? My back isn't expendible... you should have thought about YOUR back BEFORE you got breast implants. Yes, but money's too short to have me stop paying my Manx Tax.

I need work NOW.

...

At least I found this absolutely hilarious:

 > Link < 

Juggler

Dang, it's like 2am. I'm back to where I was while I was working: biting off more than I can chew. Always.

It's because I have a lust in my soul to be a living node of knowledge and experience and skill. Or just have an itch I can't scratch.

I am currently playing the following games, trying to juggle them in attention:

1. Final Fantasy IV for GBA. I'm in the exclusive new content. So far it's not too hard. I actually had to reach in my items for a boss, though, since everyone ran out of MP and I was nearly done for. If you've ever seen me play RPGs, I *HATE* using items unless I really have to. So, naturally, games where I can't hold 99 of everything at a time are a form of suffering for me.

2. Legend of Legaia. I was playing it emulated even though I own the game because it just looks so damn NICE in high res. UNfortunately, epsxe 1.6.0 has a problem in some sections of the world map where the fights freeze the virtual machine before they start. I think it has to do with loading up an enemy model that it doesn't like loading since it's only in certain areas of the maps. I have to walk over from that city in area 2 with the big tower ALL THE WAY to that stone flower thing. 75% of the area is prone to those errors so I have to do "tool assisted" techinques just to get across. I stopped it, but I want to continue.

3. Thief 3. I LOVED (loved, seriously) Thief and Thief 2. This is a fine game as well. I remember reading up on this game while I had a shitty computer and could never play Thief 3 and reading up on things like "you can see their faces... some people are genuinely scared of you!" and now that I'm playing it, it's like, "um, nice feature, except if I get close enough to see it then I'm already discovered." Some stealth. I got arrested in the game and am trying to break out of jail. XD

4. Ragnarok Online. Again. H-RO shut down, taking with it my level 70 something assassin. I'm back but this time on Ceres. I'm in Payon getting Soldier Skeleton cards. Again. So far I havn't had ONE card dropped. And I'm playing on the server where the drop rates are 3x what they should be. Playing an official RO server sounds like torture. But this one seems to be very nicely paced. Well, I guess all MMORPGs get torturous when the levels start getting high. I often wonder if a game with linear level gain would REALLY break it. I'm guessing it will since there just isn't a game with linear gain. Who knows. Who cares?

5. Company of Heroes. I helped multiplayer beta test it thanks to Jed. When it went gold I sort of missed getting iced in multiplayer so I picked up a copy *cough*. I can't go multiplayer with it but the single player campaign is pretty fun as far as RTS games go. Of course, the way things go, the game will get insanely hard. I already hit a part where I wish I could be in multiple places at once to babysit my troops and the action is frantic and slightly hard to follow. Which is the whole problem with RTS games to begin with. Units are inherantly stupid and have no sense of survival skills. I like having control, but, sheesh, if I can't see you AND I can't zoom out or quickly select you from the minimap, please, grow a brain and a pair of balls, please?

6. X-Change 2. After finishing X-Change 3 and the original, I went after this one. It's pretty good. It's got a lot more decisions than XC3 and is MUCH more limited in the number of save games so it's quite a challenge doing my spider technique to get everything. The art is beautiful. And, um, hot.

7. Lensmoor. Diana has been pushing me to go play. I havn't played in just about a year. I log in every now and again to make sure I don't get the axe during a player wipe. I logged in just now and some random player instantly sent me a message asking how I've been. Damn friendly folks, I'll tell you what. And it isn't the first time, either. I guess I made some impact. Yep... I know I'm awesome. People all want to be on my good side.

8. Hexen. After finishing Doom in Ultra-Violence difficulty thanks to the power of mouselook and strafe, I figured I'd apply it to Doom 2. Well, fuck me, I can't finish Doom 2. I tried Heretic and it just bored me. Hexen is pretty exciting but the game dynamic is so different from Doom. I don't think I'll be able to finish it, but with like 40 levels, I'd like to at least try. One thing about the source port I'm using is that I wish it still had that spinal column loading screen. That was cool. After this I'll probably look into playing Hexen 2. I remember finding a copy of it years ago but at the time it wouldn't play on my machine.

And... non game projects:

9. Write my 3D game engine. Game companies either license an engine or build their own and then stick with it (save for minor improvements) for a platform. I tried OpenGL. I don't like it. I don't have a lot of header files and it's a hassle to expose new functionality. DirectX is a pain in the butt because it does the fundamentals a bit differently. Unfortunately I never really understood what goes on under the hood so it's more of an uphill battle than back when I was in school. I had to walk 20 miles to school. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways. Well, maybe not, but it's still hard. I spun my wheels for a few hours today on this only to delete the trash I was holding onto for dear life and trying anew. Bah, happens all the time. At least *I* am one person. 3DRealms is a bunch of people... and Duke Nukem Forever has been in production, well, forever.

10. Figure out how to use at least ONE modeller. Maya is hard and nonsensical and likes to use a set of origin axes that are wholely incompatible with the axes in my head. Months playing around with POV Ray really screwed me up, I think. Milkshape doesn't like me, and I want to avoid ever thinking "gee, I should make my own modeller" because THAT will be a world of hurt for me.

11. Relearn piano. I used to play. I don't know. I want to regain skill and get back to where I was. It's pretty fun... except it's a timesink in which I can't do ANYTHING except that. Monotasking For The Lose.

and...

12. Look for work (damnit). I need MONEY. Wii is coming out after all.

All this while avoiding getting hassled by my folks. How do I keep it together? Well...

...

Who says I'm keeping anything together? >>