Majcher.com

Hey, so, my World of Warcraft finally showed up on Friday. Taking time out for game night and an AGD board meeting at noon on Saturday, I got in a good twenty-odd hours on my undead rogue before deciding that it'd be best to sleep on Saturday night, sometime before the hallucinations really started to kick in. That went pretty well, and I just woke up again after a little nap, and now my sleep schedule is all askitter, even more than before. Bedtime is a bit of a moving target at the moment. I'm not exactly tired right now - although I could probably find some sort of remedy for that around here somewhere - and I have yet another interview tomorrow around one, up at ncsoft. So, the question is, do I try to knock myself out now, or see if I can hit that early morning window in five or six hours? Maybe just I'll head back to Silverpine and think it over...

I've been on my night schedule lately, staying up until 6am or so, waking up around 2pm. It's actually been good, since I moved the operation Majcher Worldwide Enterprises (that is, my laptop) to the living room a week or two ago, I've been pretty productive, banging out some good chunks of one of my seekrit projects, and shaking a handful of job leads out of the trees. (And getting a bit of pillaging in when I need a distraction.) I had to wake up early today, at the utterly uncivilized hour of noon or so, for an interview for a gig writing lab software for a place down here in South Austin. The guys I talked to were very cool and seemed like they had their technical shit together, and it looks like interesting work, so, that's cool. Not sure if it would be another contract deal or full-time, but either way. I'm also hopefully wrapping up my current contract before the month is out - which means I get paid! - and I've got some more educational Flash stuff lined up for the next while or so, which is also good. And other little things coming in here and there, which I have to figure out how to handle along with all the other stuff. So weird, after such a relatively long dry spell, all of the sudden, people are coming at me from every direction with work. Not that I'm complaining, but come on, spread out, guys.

Anyway, that's not what I came here to talk about. I came here to talk about the draft. No, that's not right. I came here to talk about a book. As I mentioned above, staying up late, got up early today, leading up to getting tired a bit earlier than usual. So I pick up Frek and the Elixir, Rudy Rucker's latest book, which has been sitting next to the bed for a couple months, because I tend to get to bed in the middle of the night, when it's already late and dark and Bernie's asleep, I'm totally ready to go to sleep, so, generally, very little reading happens there. So, around 10pm, I say to myself, "self, why don't you grab that book you've been meaning to start for a while, and read for a little bit until you fall asleep?" Astute readers will note that the timestamp on this entry is a bit after 4am. 168,000 words and 475 pages or so later. That was a really good book. There was an hour or two in the middle there where I really had to pee, but I didn't want to stop reading to get up. Rucker's stuff definitely isn't for everyone, what with the deliberately unnecessarily goofy future language and customs, and the far-out biotech kick he's been on lately, and the usual mix of pseudo-mythical quantum manipulation and high-dimension multiverse stuff, but it sure grabs me. I think I was reading somewhere about how he was talking about the chapters being pretty much a one-to-one mapping to the steps on Campbell's hero's journey thinger, but I can't find it now. (Oh, duh, it's in that last link to his site. Tired!) Anyway, good stuff.

Let's see if that sleep thing works now.

HI MY NAME IS GUNNAR AND I LIKE TO READ THE BLOG THAT IS NOT A BLOG OUT LOUD TO MY CO-WORKERS AND I LIKE READING WEB PAGES THAT ARE ON THE INTERNET AND HI MY NAME IS GUNNAR!

We just finished watching the season finale of the new Battlestar Galactica series. Now, I'm not a big teevee guy these days, but Holy Crap, that's the best season finale I've ever seen. I think we're both going to need some heavy sedation, here. I'm not going to say anything, because most of you losers are stuck on SciFi's American schedule, but damn, it's going to be a hard year or however long until they get the next season together. At least we've got the pilot miniseries on DVD now, with extra stuff to tide us over a bit. Maybe Deadwood will start up again sometime soon and keep our minds off of what happened to poor Adama for a while...

Yay, mandate.

Hm. I wonder if eating toothpicks is bad for you.

This, my friends, is what we in the webernets business like to call "amateur hour".

My floaters have gotten really bad in the last couple of days. It's almost like I'm trying to see through bubble wrap sometimes, only the bubble wrap is alive! The darker bits dart around in my vision as my eyes flick back and forth, and I've caught myself more than once trying to swat away the invisible things flying around my head. Not in public, though, I don't think. Not like I'm in public that often, anyway. Probably for the best.

It's really hard for me to conceptualize how far away from where I'm sitting now these pictures were taken.

Go Team Huygens!

Okay, you bastards, you win. I broke down an ordered one of your new little iShuffle thingers. I still use my old Rio Volt for my mobile mp3 needs, but this thing seems like a pretty logical step up, and I can live with that price. A gig of music in a solid-state stick the size of a pack of gum? Yeah, okay, you got me. Like I ever look at the display on my mp3 player, anyway.

I've been meaning to look into doing some work on OSX as well, so if I get another paycheck or two soon, I might be looking into one of those little minimacs, too. Again, with the small, decent, and cheap. I think the last product I bought from Apple was.. the old PowerPC tower that just got put on the curb. So, a couple hundred bucks every five years or so doesn't seem so bad. Stack that little sucker on a nice little shuttle PC, and get the KVM goodness going, and I'm pretty well done.

Speaking of paychecks, my BREW programming project is finally looking like it's going to wrap up in the next week or two, so, yay. These guys said that they might have some more work for me coming up, doing the same sort of stuff - it pays pretty well, but it's busted-ass C on a busted-ass platform, so, not so much fun. But hey, I'll take it.

In other news, my knees and shins are totally fucked up. The last real run I did was last weekend, our sixteen mile long run. I put in a few days doing eight or five miles at the gym, but it's not the same, and my joints and stuff aren't getting any better by aggravating them like that. Hopefully, I'll be able to ramp back up quickly enough - this weekend and the next are eighteen miles, and then we start tapering off for the marathon in February. Worst comes to worst, I can run the first half or so, and then just walk the rest of the way. Not like my running speed is all that much faster than a brisk walk, but, again, I'll take it. And then, no more running for a while. We're thinking of signing up at the boat club and doing some sculling or crew this summer, which sounds fun. We'll see how that goes when we get there.

(Meanwhile, still working on game design documents for Gizmet Gameworks in the background. One of these days soon, I'm going to have to find myself a steady art buddy.)

I took a break from nerd stuff for a day to clean out some closet space. We've got two pretty good sized closets in the room that we use for an office here, but for the last two years, they've just been crammed full of (mostly my) crap. So, I went to the local superstore and bought some plastic bin-type containers, and spent the day pulling stuff out and sorting stuff and packing it away in a more orderly fashion. I've also got about a cubic yard full of junk to throw away, including the husks of three or so busted old computers that I've been carting around for way too long. Now I just need to find a dumpster somewhere to toss it all.

Anyway, the upshot is, when I finish up tomorrow, we'll have all sorts of new space to store all sorts of new crap in. Along the way, I've uncovered a few cool things that I'd forgotten about. I actually came across my first Palm Pilot, from like 1998 or so - I popped a couple of fresh batteries in, and it started up just like the day I bought it. I want more stuff that works like that. I also found a big stack of random old trading cards, including fifty or so KISS trading cards. They are awesome. I decided that I would print up some stickers and stick them on the back of the cards to use for business cards for the cool kids. I would normally slack on something like this, but I couldn't sleep, so I threw this together:

I know, it's bad ass. You don't have to say anything.

I just got a joke that I made without realizing it, almost ten years ago. Man, what a retard I can be.

Hey, check it out, it's 2005. I think I need a nap.