Running is therapy

Cheers to my online buddy Mello, he’s gettin hitched tomorrow…poor bastard.

One thing I do like is board gaming. Not monopoly or other Family/Party games (though I do play a wicked scatagories), but…hmm…what is the word. Nerd games? Games where there is a lot of strategy etc. Anyway, some buddies and I get together semi regularly to play. For the most part we played Risk…but always meant to spread out. And lately we have been.

Over lunch I went to Six Feet Under Games, and picked up Carcassonne. Looks like a really cool game and I hope we play it tomorrow when we all hook up to play Settlers Of Catan.

Either way…should be a blast.

Ask around. I am sure someone you know can direct you.

If your job is to give people money, with interest, who are waiting on a settlement…You might be a scumbag.

Worked on Tada List Clone last night and this morning. I should be ready in a day or two for a new release. Have to redo some of the edit feature and add a page for adding new users. Other than that it’s pretty well done. It now supports multiple users and multiple lists per user.

Long time readers, those that followed me here from my last blog (all two of them), know I am not much of a video gamer, but I do play from time to time. I bought a game cube about a year ago.

Two weeks ago I picked up some really cheap games for it. Namely, Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers, Zelda – Windwaker and Medal of Honor Pacific Rising. Played some Zelda lsat week and it was ok. Tonite I popped in LOTR. I played for about 40 minutes (that is about my attention span for games). It was fun. I believe it was what the magazines call a Hack and Slash. But it was kind of cool. One of the things I liked about the movies were the epic battles.

This game starts out in the epic battle at Mordor. You kind of get your feet under you here. I was mashing buttons like no man before. The story goes along and you find youself as Aragorn at Weathertop trying to protect Frodo. It took me a couple lives to realize what I was supposed to do, but then it got quite fun. You have a torch and it goes out from time to time, so you have to keepo relighting it and sticking it to the ring wraiths. Pretty fun.

Then you can switch chars and march off over the mountains. That is where it got kind of hard. I played as Legolas (my favorite character from the movies). I got my ass handed to me by archers though after a while.

I hope to play again some day as I had a lot of fun.

A difference I discovered between Ruby and Perl.

Perl:

my @foo = (1, 2, 3);
print $foo[0] + $foo[2] . "\n";
print "This is the number " . $foo[2];


If you popped that into a perl scipt it would print:

4
This is the number 3


Pretty straightforward. However similar code in Ruby, if you expect it to work like Perl, would have a different outcome.


foo = [1, 2, 3]
puts foo[0] + foo[2]
puts "this is the number " + foo[2]


Popping that into a Ruby script, would cause an error:


test.rb:5:in `+': can't convert Fixnum into String (TypeError)


As you can see Ruby enforces typing on you, in order to use a number as a string, you have to cast it to a string. (Namely: foo[2].to_s).

Eh. I am not sure how I feel about that. I am sure strong typing advocates love it. I have gotten used to Perl’s behavior though. Perl does what I mean. If I concat an int to a string, well obviously I meant for the interpreter to use it as such. However, and this is the opposing point of view if you want to argue, it can, for those unfamiliar with it’s behavior have unintended consequences.

Much like the new user who doesn’t understand scalar and list context in Perl, weird things happen, and no errors are thrown. That I guess can be confusing.


my $bar = @foo;


Prints, 3

I have an external usb HDD case. I needed to use it to format a drive. Having never used it before I didn’t know how well it would work. I plugged it in and ran dmesg to see if it was discovered, and the output struck me as mildly amusing.

usb-storage: device found at 5
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning

Heh, SETTLE DOWN MR. USB DEVICE!

I bought my house about 6 years ago. When I moved in it was all brand new on the inside (for the most part). And so I haven’t had to do a whole lot of work on it over the years. I have painted a few rooms since they were all white when I moved in.

However this weekend I decided it was time to paint the kitchen. It’s funny, while I never thought about it before, the smell of the paint reminds me a lot of moving into a new apartment. I have lived in a lot of different apartments and usually I have asked the new landlord if they would pay for the paint so I could paint it before I moved in (when renting a place that hadn’t just been painted of course). They usually allow that. So I suppose I am saying sitting here smelling the drying paint in the kitchen reminds me of a lot of good times in my life. Funny that.

But think about it. Usually when you are moving, it’s because, you broke up with someone and were starting over. Or perhaps you got a new job. Or maybe you and someone are getting a new place together. Those are good times. At least in my mind :)