The Mothership

I must be well on my way to becoming an old fart — I’m starting to get pissed off a lot more at the little things like graffiti.

It’s not like this area of the city is Graffiti Central, and there’s actually been fairly little in the time I’ve lived around here, but it’s been on the rise lately. The sides of the LRT walkway bridge, the pedestrian overpass, and the bridge supports at the ends have been particularly favourite targets. The city occasionally comes out and paints over it, but lately it seems to come right back again.

This latest round even seems to be directly mocking the efforts to stop it: on one large wall they’ve written “DON’T LOOK DIRECTLY AT IT” in large letters, and along the walkway they’ve scribbled brief sentences along the lines of “they suppress what they can’t control.”

Well that’s all fine and dandy…except they’re not really saying anything. Spraypainting vague little platitudes that everyone already knows doesn’t make you a freedom fighter, it makes you a bored little punk who wants attention.

My development environment at work is pretty primitive, being a collection of largely unrelated programs loosely tied together with some scripting. Integrated environments are where it’s supposedly at nowadays though, so I figured I should give some of them a shot.
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I just spent over an hour struggling to get a set of class templates to even compile properly. It kept complaining that a base class was undefined, so I kept tinkering with the template parameters, thinking that I was using them incorrectly or there was some subtle behaviour that I was failing to account for, since it’s a moderately complex template (multiple levels of derivation, multiple template parameters at each level).

But no. It was simply because I had copied the base class header file for the derived classes and forgot to change the multi-inclusion-preventer #ifdef on one of them, making it completely skip over the definition of one of the intermediate classes. Duh…

It’s hard to compare the upcoming Nintendo console to the others since much is still unknown about it, but there was one announcement that caught a lot of attention: they say that you’ll be able to download and play *any* game Nintendo produced for all of their previous consoles, right back to the original NES.

That alone is very tempting. Emulators and ROMs are easy enough to get, but running them on your PC still doesn’t have quite the same nostalgic feel as running them on a proper console with appropriate controllers on your living room TV does. Of course, the danger is that it’s easy enough to fall behind on current games let alone find time to indulge that nostalgia, so it could wind up being one of those things bought and barely used…

And they *finally* got around to announcing more of their primary titles for the DS, and they look fairly impressive, so I may finally have a reason to pick one up after all.

The E3 revelations have started, and more information is finally available about the upcoming next-gen consoles. It’s still early yet, but on a purely published spec basis, the PS3 will be a bit ahead of the Xbox 360.

But, of course, there’s always more to it than that.
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“A dry crack is a happy crack!”

I find it a little worrisome that a growing percentage of the spam I receive is for AIDS ‘antidotes’ or treatments or magick talismans or whatever…

Though I don’t have an XBox, I keep running across bits of information about Forza Motorsports here and there.

The good news is that it features the ability to highly customize your cars, including custom paint jobs with a lot of detail, and race them against others online.

The bad news is that it means you may wind up suffering the humiliation of being beaten by someone in this. (From the Forza Customization site.)

So named because that’s about all the time I’ve had to play them recently…

Champions of Norrath (PS2): It bears little resemblance to the original EverQuest, and could be any old generic fantasy environment with the names swapped, but it’s still a fun hack-and-slash Diablo-II-esque game. Sometimes you just want to run around and Beat Stuff Up, and this fills that need perfectly.

God Of War (PS2): Wow, a fighting game I might actually not suck at. Great graphics (and not just for the prurient reasons), smooth controls, and plenty of action and puzzles.

The Simpsons: Hit And Run (PC): The Simpsons meet Grand Theft Auto. Much like the GTA games it’s fun to just randomly explore and find hidden stuff. Missions are challenging, but not impossible, and usually quick enough that you can retry it a few times without getting too frustrated. Plus, it’s fun to drive around like a maniac in the various vehicles, knocking lampposts and mailboxes over and sending people diving for cover…

Gran Turismo 4 (PS2): This game is a continual reminder of how awful I am at driving. But, it’s at least still fun to collect all of the exotic cars, take some action shots, and fiddle with the B-spec mode on the longer and more difficult races. I just wish I had the time or patience to dedicate to actually putting in some real practice.

As part of the effort to work more exercise into my day, I’ve been taking the stairs instead of the elevator whenever possible. It’s a lot more practical at the office now that we’re only five flights of stairs up instead of seventeen.

Unfortunately, the building staff is being a bit lax in their duties. About half the time, I come in in the morning, walk up the stairs, and suddenly discover that the stairwell door is still locked, even though they’re supposed to have opened it an hour earlier. So, then I have to go back down and take the elevator up anyway.

At least I still get the exercise, but it still feels pointless sometimes…

(Update: And it’s still locked as of lunchtime…)