SpaceRodent

I found www.gametap.com tonight and signed up for a two week free trial. In a nutshell its this. You pay $9.95 a month to get access to 500+ games (and growing). You select the game you want to play and it is downloaded to your system and cached. You then play.

What’s the cool part? They have all types of systems: DOS games, Sega Genesis, Atari 2600, Arcade game, Dreamcast, Intellivision, etc…

I have already played the original Zaxxon, Kings Quests 1, Zork 1, Defender, Astrosmash, etc.

I don’t know how they are doing the emulators but it is flawless. I am really impressed.

My favorite editor just got better! vim 7 has been released.  Features I am most excited about:

• Tabs
• Unlimited undo/redo with branches
• The new brace matching

I just read a great article on Lisp called the Nature of Lisp as someone who has been trying to figure out why Lisp is so cool to so many people this helped a lot. I suggest you read it.

I haven’t written anything in the last week because I have been slammed at work. I moved to a new team and I am doing more development work. This is good because eventually I want to be a full time programmer. Right now I am working in the high level languages like Perl and Python but I do have C training and I think I would like to do more lower level stuff.

I also am getting my first taste of what it means to be a programmer. Being a system administrator is fun because you can program when you want to – if I ever got bored of a script I was working on I could do something else. Its another story when your primary role is to write that script. Getting bored? Too bad finish it.

My first project is a Perl script about 2,000 lines long with lots of mySQL interactions. This also marks the first time I have worked with databases in any meaningful way. Took me about three or four days to get to the point where I was comfortable writing SQL queries. The Perl DBI layer makes a lot of this easy.

I am also now writing code that other people depend on which is a lot different from the system administrator scripts I usually write. Now my code needs to do the right thing under a variety of circumstances. I am making liberal use of Perl’s eval statement so I can have some sort of deterministic behavior.

Recently I read a Damien Katz blog entry called Error codes or Exceptions? Why is Reliable Software so Hard? which really spoke to me on my current plight. I am doing a combination of his three error handling styles – including the travel back in time one (I have rollback queue that gets poplulated with the actions to undo a step, in the case of an error I just run through the queue and have gone back in time:))

Writing a Perl script this big has really made me appreciate Perl more in its flexability but has also made me yearn for Python more for its cleaner syntax and excellent exception handling.

At this point I am on the fence whether I want to be a full time programmer but this experience is a great way for me to get my toe in the water without jumping in.

I shut down my Tor server this weekend. I ran it for about 10 days. More than anything it was really messing with my interactive performance when I worked from home so I guess I couldn’t spare the bandwidth.

On the advice of a friend I picked up a new DVD player this weekend. Up till this point I have been using my PS/2. I recently downloaded some videos from the internet and and a heck of a time transcoding them to DVD. I tried twice on my PC and finally succeeded on my MAC.

My friend at work explained that new DVD players could play PC/MAC videos burned on a disc.

I got the Toshiba SD-3990 from the evil empire (no not Microsoft – Best Buy).

Sure enough it played everything I threw at it:

• MPEG
• DIVX
• WMA

(I haven’t tested Quicktime yet)

UPDATE: No Quicktime.

The best part – it only costs $59!

I also picked up Top Gun to add to my 80′s action movie collection.

This weekend I had to watch 80′s action movies so I went DVD shopping. I picked up

• Above the Law
• Beverly Hills Cop
• Bloodsport
• Die Hard
• Lethal Weapon
• Total Recall

(Okay so Total Recall is from 1990 but its pretty close to the 80′s:))

Yum. All of these movies impacted me when I first saw them so they will always have a special place in my movie-viewing heart. This is also the first time I have seen them in widescreen with 5.1 surround sound and uncut!.

Well today marks the third week since I started exercising six days a week. I only missed two days (Monday and Tuesday of this week) because I hurt my back last Saturday.

Well so far it is not getting any easier. I still have to will myself out of bed and I still don’t want to exercise every morning.

I am still going to do it of course but I really thought it would be automatic or habit by now.

Tonight I setup my Linux box to be a Tor server – a network of virtual tunnels to aid in anonymous internet use. I encourage you to do the same if you have some spare bandwidth (you can rate limit).

Been playing Oblivion most of the weekend since I hurt my back Saturday morning.  Wow this is a great game.  I play World of Warcraft for a while but stopped because I didn’t like having to team up with people to do certain quests – of course the $13.95 a month after paying $50 for the game was hard to swallow as well.  One thing I miss from WoW was exploring and fighting creatures in the wilderness.  You never knew what you were going to find.  Oblivion, for me, is like WoW offline.  Its perfect for me.  Recently my character was bitten by a vampire and so now I am one.  My face has changed, I am stronger and faster, I can’t be in the sun without taking damage.  I keep having nightmares about “feeding”.  I am really impressed with this game.  Though I said I didn’t lilke Morrowind due to its look and feel I think after oblivion I am going to give it another try.  I have the gold edition and one of the exansions lets you be a werewolf!  The down right sexy engine of Oblivion pulled me in but its the great gameplay that is keeping me there.

 If you like RPG games at all you must get Oblivion.

 Oh, I am about 6 hours into the game and I have only done the first part of the main quest which by itself is like 40 hours.