10/6

Ugh.

Let me repeat: Ugh.

Today my boss, Van, said he’d “wanted to teach you a lesson about not drinking on work nights.”

The time from when i got on the subway last night to when i woke up at 1:30AM on my bathroom floor is lost to me.

Waiting for a hangover to mogrify into hunger sucks.

to all the people responsible for the plethora of drinks that seemed to magically appear before me to replace the last one i’d drunk, many thanks, and many curses.

I’m off to get on a plane to vegas for defcon; hopefully i don’t vomit over whomever i sit next to for the 5 hour flight.

little over 2 weeks til stacey is back. it feels like a marathon, only instead of running, i’m sitting on my *ss doing nothing and b*tching about it.

To quote TMBG (”Wearing A Raincoat” on “The Spine”):

Being awake is swimming around in a lake
Of the undead
And the undead are like
A bunch of friends
That demand constant attention

and yet people always think these guys write happy music. They write happy tunes. happy lyrics? not so much. so good.

Had my first day of work today. It was pretty cool, not too much going on. My first 3 weeks are just training; my first 6 month rotation is doing novell stuff. Gotta learn NetWare. Should be interesting to say the least. I have to wear business casual mon-thur, basically meaning i have beaucoup clothes shopping to do now.. sigh.

lago - Finally commited the latest round of changes to lago. Everybody interested should check it out. No ebuild yet, but it’s a really straightforward learning project for someone to do it; lago is now using all autotools for it’s stuff. I’ve made up a real development release which can be downloaded here.

All and all i’m happy with it. I need to fix a bit of the GUI code for the actual board that i haven’t touched in a few weeks now, and then either work on the preferences stuff, or start pondering either SGF file format or GTP players. Any other suggestions/features people would like to see? As usual patches are welcome, the code is finally starting to get to the point where i don’t feel bad recommending that. as of even a week ago, i would have said don’t bother as the code is changing to frequently to make it worth it.

work - talked to HR today at Stern, mainly about my benefits, etc. i’ve now figured out why my tuition was so high when i was a student:

• Holidays - 14 paid holidays a year
• Vacation - 22 paid vacation days a year
• Sick - 20 sick days a year for the first year, then it’s up to 40. (not sure if they’re paid or not, probably not)
• Tuition - i can earn up to 2 masters degrees and one doctorate, all on them

this is madness! i intend to use these benefits to their fullest, to make up for the thousands and thousands of dollars i gave NYU as a student.

My first project it seems will be to move us away from netware and onto linux (i imagine SuSE) running novell’s linux solutions. should be fun.

So today i finally got an official offer for the job at Stern. Making more than decent money, and the benefits are amazing. very relieving for me. now i can buy stacey nice things (her words, not mine). i start monday. turns out my first 6 months will be doing the novell stuff. one of my first projects is going to be moving us away from netware and onto linux w/ novell’s linux services stuff. sounds like fun to me.

stacey saw the running of the bulls in pamplona this weekend. to be exact she saw the running of two bulls, besides that she was busy wading through three inches of human vomit, feces, wine, and beer. can honestly say that i don’t think i missed being there (besides missing her of course). august 15th. it is the guiding light on my calendar. (and oddly close to my birthday)

Got Lago’s load game stuff mostly working, and in the process have done some more major code overhaul. In particular, i’ve solved the nagging issue i was having with the flow of data between the GUI and the backend. i’d had the Game object listening to the board itself, handling when a stone was attempted to be played in a given spot, etc. This made the code really fugly and tied to the GUI, not to mention making the “what is telling who what and why” part of the code confusing (just ask todd). Refactored this into an abstact GoPlayer class that people must subclass when they want to say “I can be half of a game of Go.” For local games *these* are the guys that listen to the board for input. This makes later implementation of network games, etc a *lot* easier too. Hope to commit something tonight or tomorrow for people to whack on.

Peitolm: I like the export/import idea. Better differentiates the two, and gives a sense of “you don’t need to do this unless you plan to use the game file elsewhere”

Somebody posted to the Mono+NPTL bug on bugs.gentoo.org saying they’d gotten it working with the latest ~x86 glibc… i tried again, no luck. the burning rage about this bug is starting to come back. not a good thing for my blood pressure.

so i started work (thanks to some help with XML serialization from todd) on the save/load stuff for lago. todd had the wonderful idea for how to do the load game dialog, and i’ve taken it and run with it. i can load games by hand, and i have the dialog almost done, i just gotta add the signals to the load game dialog so it actually opens a game when selected. you can see the new dialog here

</nerd stuff>

Sometimes i lose perspective on things. i’m so lucky in so many ways, but i have a tendency to dwell on the things that aren’t going like they do in movies.

things that make me really happy (by no means restricted just to the items on this list):

• a wonderful GF who (although she’s across an ocean in spain) still makes me laugh, and makes me feel things i didn’t think i was possible of.
• an amazing friend in noah. he’s always there, even if we’re 2 1/2 hours away. i don’t know anyone else i’m so comfortable and happy hanging out with.
• an awesome brother who randomly buys me tickets to las vegas. i don’t even like gambling and hookers.
• friends whom i haven’t seen/talked to in ages, who still randomly get in touch, and don’t let things be awkward.
• having enough $$ to buy the NYTimes every day to fuel my puzzle obsession.

there’s plenty of things i could harp on that don’t make me happy in life, but sometimes you just gotta take a step back and look at what’s there.

NP: Jets to Brazil - Sea Anemone

This concludes the sappy portion of our program. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.