Saturday, August 31, 2002

Who's the bitch with 22 Shines?

Awwww yah. That's me.

I should play in the morning more often. I'm far more co-ordinated when I just wake up.

On a sad note, I am sick. My head is full of gunk and I'm all woozy.

posted by pookzilla at 6:43 PM - 0 comments

Friday, August 30, 2002

Today is shaping up to be a real clusterfuck. Our Cobalt Qube has this annoying habit of disabling remote logins for all users except for admin and root on startup. Sometimes. This is the second time we've seen it. I think I've managed to track the problem down, but whether it stays fixed is another matter... the Qube software has this annoying habit of 'fixing' itself.

Mario Sunshine is giving me fits. It's so damn hard. After another 4 hours of playing I managed to get only *2* more Shines. I need to hire a small Asian child to teach me the game.

Not to be outdone by CBS releasing a reality TV show based on The Beverly Hillbillies, Fox has decided to do a reality TV show based on Green Acres.

It's a wonder. With so many signs of the Apocalypse apparent, how is it that people aren't running through the streets screaming?

posted by pookzilla at 10:29 AM - 3 comments

Thursday, August 29, 2002

You know what I really believe in, possibly more than anything else?

THE SANCTITY OF LINES

Our society requires a foundation of order despite what anarchists may think. Without that kernel of order our society would fall apart. We would savage one another over every little thing. Most people understand this and respect the basic orderly devices our society requires. My favourite of these devices is the line. Without lines, my daily coffee fetching exercise would turn into a brawl. And this is what almost happened today!

The line at Tim Hortons was fairly short today, 5-7 people at most. When it was time for the person in front of me to go to the counter she couldn't hear the employee call for the next person. It took about 5 seconds for me to realize that she didn't hear her and I tapped her on the shoulder an pointed. By the time I had done this the 4 or so people behind me all started rushing forward, trying to get the spot. The line collapsed! Where there was civilized order now there was animal anarchy!

I have a very large temper. Especially when it comes to lines. I don't really know where it came from. Possibly I experienced some line-related trauma as a child. At any rate, when the lady in front of me was dispatched I went to go to an empty space at the counter when some wonderfuck assmunch who had just arrived rushed in front of me. I'm pretty big. He was smaller than me, but a lot beefier. It took all my willpower not to slug the greasy little fuck.

I'm of the opinion that people who disregard the building blocks of civilized society should be cast from it forever. They should be castrated, stripped naked and sent to live far away from the bulk of humanity that understands that some degree of order needs to be maintained. They can tear apart raw flesh with their fingers while huddling in a cave for all I care. One day I'm going to kill one of them. I can see it happening now. And they'll label ME the wrongdoer.

Fucking savages.

posted by pookzilla at 7:47 AM - 0 comments

Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Super Mario Sunshine is great! I managed to play it for about 4 hours last night and I could've gone for another 4 if it wasn't for the pain in my eyes and hands. :) The graphics are colourful and vibrant, the sound is great (especially the a capella rendition of the mario theme!) and the gameplay is solid. If I had a complaint (other than somewhat sketchy camera movement) it would be that it's HARD. I was never that good at Mario 64 but it was very easy compared to Sunshine. After 4 hours I only managed to get 8 of (IIRC) 120 Shines. It took over an hour to beat one of the stories in the first world (although this was mostly due to ineptitude... I am blind to red coins). This game should keep me busy for months at the rate I play!

Looking at my back last night I realized that she got a lot more done yesterday than I had thought. I thought she only had done one feather on the last row but it turns out she had done all but 4. SO CLOSE.

posted by pookzilla at 7:44 AM - 0 comments

Tuesday, August 27, 2002

Super Mario Sunshine: bought. Last copy too. Sucks to the punk behind me.

Back: tattooed. Sarah (the girl who's virtually all of my work) had her machine break down today so she had to borrow one of her bosses machines. It was a DREAM. It ran slower than her shader and it didn't hurt a bit. Usually colour brutalizes me, but this machine felt even better than a liner. We got most of the other wing done but decided to cut it short while the going was good. We'd need another session to touch it all up so we might as well do it all at once and leave me feeling OK today. This was fine by me!

Woo. Day: salvaged.

posted by pookzilla at 4:07 PM - 0 comments

Monday, August 26, 2002

I've been stomping bugs under my angry heel with such zealotry that I failed to notice the day is half gone. YAY! I can't wait to go home and sleep. The concert really threw my sleep schedule out of whack and it'll probably take a few days to recover.

To celebrate my productivity I suggest you contimplate this (care of fark.com). I know *I'm* thankful that they wont go on strike.

posted by pookzilla at 11:27 AM - 0 comments

Sunday, August 25, 2002

We almost didn't make it to the Tool show last night. The bus we were supposed to get was packed and it passed right by our stop. So did the second one. If it weren't for some balsy punk flailing his arms like an idiot in the Transitway we might not have stopped the third bus and made it there at all.

The concert rocked. If I had to guess I'd say overall attendance was around 10,000 or so. Standing room was packed and the first and second levels of the Corel center were packed.

The opening act was Tomahawk and they were pretty damn poor. The audience really couldn't get into them at all. I don't know if their recorded performances suck as much as their live ones because they were little more than distortion, noise and screaming last night. I could definitly have missed them and not given a damn.

Tool, however, kicked some serious behind. Their presentation was amazing. Forgetting the music for a second, they had excellent visuals. There were two screens that were showing animation/CGI/claymation suitable for each song. Some included footage from their videos. Almost all of the Stinkfist act was accompanied by the music video which had recieved very little airplay on release (I've only ever seen it once before).

Onto the music itself - they were immaculate. I can't remember the exact set list (I had better things to do, damnit) but it included Sober, Stinkfist, Aenima, 46&2, (-) Ions, The Grudge, Schism, Parabol/Parabola, Lataralus, and Triad. There seemed to be some sound problems early on, but the quality improved as the show went on.

The highlight of the night for me was Triad which was AMAZING. They brought in a second drummer (the drummer from Tomahawk) and together they put out a furious (and fucking LONG) version of the instrumental. They could've played that all night long and I would've been thrilled. It just had so much energy to it.

The crowd was into it for the most part. A good portion of the front floor section was moshing the entire night. Personally I don't think Tool is music to mosh to. Maybe that's why Maynard sings from the back of the stage facing away from the crowd... he can't stand the sight of annoying fratboys acting like assholes in tune to his music. The section we were sitting in was pretty lively but not obnoxiously so. We were all on our feet for the first half of the concert and the cheers were plentiful.

I hope I get to see them again. Minus Tomahawk and the idiots of course. ;)

posted by pookzilla at 10:25 AM - 0 comments

Friday, August 23, 2002

Oi. Good god. I ate too much. I thought I could handle it, but I was wrong.

First I started with a pumpernickle breadbowl full of cheese dip. This was accompanied by bagel bits and apples. I then moved on to 2 large pieces of battered haddock with fries and slaw. I washed all of this down with a pint of Stella Artois. I briefly considered a piece of apple pie for desert but I decided against it.

I'm glad I did. I feel like I'm dying.

posted by pookzilla at 4:20 PM - 0 comments

Thursday, August 22, 2002

I've been frothing and foaming over this stupid little bug in my code since yesterday. Today I find the culpret: FilterConfig is not the same as ServletConfig. That'll teach me to use the right template next time.

Pookzilla = Stupid.BITCH;

To compound my idiocy I managed to forget Aarons birthday! Happy birthday Aaron!

For those of you that are interested, he was asking me for a hooker for his birthday. I think we can do better. C'mon guys, get out your chequebooks and make his dream come true!

posted by pookzilla at 10:43 AM - 0 comments

Wednesday, August 21, 2002

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

This is what I want when *I* die, baby.

posted by pookzilla at 3:58 PM - 0 comments

I'm crushed.

I have a wound that will not heal.

A&E has cancelled Nero Wolfe.

:(

This was the only fiction left on TV that was worth watching. It's back to a steady diet of pre-90s re-runs and sports for me... :(

*sends off a barage of nasty emails to A&E

posted by pookzilla at 12:10 PM - 0 comments

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

I'm all scattered and befuddled today. I went out at lunch to see if I could clear my head. Looking on white-wolf.com I saw that Silver Snail comics was one of their known resellers. That's pretty close to here and I've never been there before so I went.

White Wolf needs to set new standards. A few used supplements in a discount box shouldn't qualify a store as an official WW reseller. Oi.

The walk really didn't help much. I'm still feeling rather vacant. I wonder when my co-workers will start lobbing crap into my slack-jaw...

posted by pookzilla at 1:37 PM - 0 comments

Monday, August 19, 2002

5 days until I see Tool live. I can't believe it's time for that already. It seems like only yesterday that I ordered the tickets. I booked an appointment for more work on my wings for the same day, and I had to cancel. I just wasn't thinking the concert could be so close at hand.

After yet ANOTHER unhappy reboot due to the fickle Java IDE I decided to plunder unused computers of their precious RAM. Unfortunately, my computer only has 2 RAM slots and I couldn't find any 256M cards. I may have to go buy some later. Working is now quite painful.

I was talking to my mother last night and she reminded me of something that totally slipped my mind. My niece is pregnant. I'm about to be a great aunt... my mother a great grandmother.

Age++;

*sigh*

posted by pookzilla at 11:03 AM - 0 comments

Saturday, August 17, 2002

I saw Triple X today. It was like staring at a picture of Vin Diesel for 2 hours...except for the annoying words. I don't usually like the beefcake type but he's seriously scrumptious.

Preseason football time.

posted by pookzilla at 7:51 PM - 0 comments

Friday, August 16, 2002

Remember I met up with some of the geeks I know via the internet? Here's the photographic proof and boy do I look fat and sweaty! I must have been about 35 C that night. Ouch.

Photo 1 (left to right: Nick, Andrew, Colen, Pete, myself)
Photo 2 (left to right: Nick, Colen, Brian aka Lexington, myself)

Maybe I should stay off the pies for a while.... :P

posted by pookzilla at 7:03 PM - 0 comments

Thursday, August 15, 2002

IDE Memory Consumption: 256 meg.

God. Fucking. Damn.

I'm rebooting my machine every hour or so just to keep the damn thing working.

I could continue this asinine ritual or I could watch Invader Zim. HRM. This is a tough choice. I'm going to have to sleep on it.

posted by pookzilla at 12:25 PM - 0 comments

Wednesday, August 14, 2002

Update: I managed to temporarily fix my broken sandle only to have my OTHER sandle break in the exact same place when I went for lunch. Something is out to kill me.

posted by pookzilla at 12:46 PM - 0 comments

Tuesday, August 13, 2002

So help me God if I ever catch a woman pissing on the toilet seat in this building I'm going to stick her head in the toilet and drown her. There is NO REASON a woman has to piss on a toilet seat. It's fucking ridiculas. *rant*

posted by pookzilla at 12:23 PM - 0 comments

It's hotter than Hades today and I've got an appointment for work on my leg. I must be mad. Nothing is quite as comfortable on a 35-40C day as plastic wrap sealed around an open wound on your leg. :)

I found an interesting (and brief) article on this years USENIX JVM Symposium on Slashdot. Nice and brief. The section on adaptive garbage collection was interesting - I'm a person who likes to see optimized code. My stuff is full of object pools and the like... being able to rely on the garbage collector to manage my stuff sensibly would be MOST cool. Pooling can get really ugly depending on the nature of your app.

posted by pookzilla at 8:11 AM - 0 comments

Monday, August 12, 2002

Anyone else here have the problem of being really horny early in the morning? *cough* My busrides to work have become an exercise in distraction. Eyes forward, hum to yourself, think about that football game last night... lalala. Etc. Oi.

I got quite a bit of work done on the design for my right sleve over the weekend. I had the idea for the front done months ago (an female elf/faerie kneeling in tall grass holding a baby) but the back just wasn't coming to me. I have to work around the moon that's already there and it's kind of peculiar. But I think I'm done now. I have several other 'dreamy' images back there along with some geometries, numbers and words. I have a rabbit with polka-dot socks hanging from a cloud, reaching for a carrot hanging from a stick just out of reach. I have a man sitting on another cloud looking skyward. He's holding a schimtar in his hands that's dangling near his knees. On another cloud I have a sleeping cat with a string tied around his tail. At the end of that string is a star (identical to the stars hanging from the moon that's already on my arm). This is all unified by segmented arcs and lines. At each segment marker is a certain number (from my favourite number sequence - guess which!). On each arc is a word and a splash of colour. The words I have chosen are Veritas, Sagacity, Hope and Chrysalis although I'm not entirely sure if I like the selection yet. It all ties together pretty nicely. I can hardly wait to get started! I actually drew a lot of the imagry from Changeling: The Dreaming. The game is weak but the artwork ROCKS and the theme is just what I was going for on the right arm.

posted by pookzilla at 7:54 AM - 0 comments

Friday, August 09, 2002

Yay Friday.

My computer has been acting wonky all morning. I blame this on BADLY WRITEN SOFTWARE. *ahem* Java is good for some application designs. A fucking IDE is NOT one of them. *sigh*

I think I'd like to get involved in a in-person gaming group. Looking for groups in Ottawa has proved fruitless, however... maybe I should just go back to MUSHing. I promised myself years ago that I wouldn't but eh... things change, times get desperate and so do I. :P

posted by pookzilla at 10:33 AM - 0 comments

Wednesday, August 07, 2002

It seems to be another one of those "Listen to the same RUSH song over and over again" days. Today it is Totem from Test For Echo.

posted by pookzilla at 1:13 PM - 0 comments

Tuesday, August 06, 2002

Left wing on my back: DONE!

It took close to two hours of work but by God it's done! I now have a little less than half of the other wing to do. I'm not sure how or when they got out of sync, but they did. But who cares! The end is in sight! I go in next week for the next 1/3 of the band around my leg, then after that for the last 1/3 of my leg, then after that for the other side of my back . It's funny - I've been living with at least one fresh tattoo for about 9 months now. Ok, so it's NOT funny. It's pretty irritating actually. But that's the cost of it all... what can ya do?

posted by pookzilla at 6:03 PM - 0 comments

Monday, August 05, 2002

I haven't touched a paint brush or modelling knife in anger for 13 months. I buy some Necrons and I manage to slice my thumb open on the second model. Mother fucker. :P

posted by pookzilla at 3:54 PM - 0 comments

Last night I was bored so I wrote a white-wolf dice-rolling app in .NET - I wanted to do something simple in .NET using Windows Forms (the .NET windowing API). After that I moved onto modelling the WW trait/attribute system..and then a character... suddenly I find myself with all the pieces necessary for a character generator. Why do I get myself into such situations? I feel somewhat obligated to finish it off just so I can have some freeware under my belt. No matter how trivial it still looks kinda nice on a resume. So I think I'll finish it. It seems pretty simple at this point. I'll finish modelling it all in XML and create the ruleset that'll allow for creation of Mummies and then I'll put it on Sourceforge or something for someone else to flesh out.

posted by pookzilla at 12:18 PM - 0 comments

Sunday, August 04, 2002

Guess who gets Monday off? Oh yah bay-be, thats me. I didn't know until mid-day Friday that Monday was a provincial holiday. No reason in particular, just a day off. WOOT. There is some work that's fresh in my head that I may work on for a bit but otherwise I doubt I'll be doing much.

Mummy: The Resurrection arrived much earlier than Amazon had said it would. It's pretty solid although there are some gaps in the rules and some truely egregious editing at points (something White-Wolf is infamous for). The thing I generally dislike about White-Wolf games is that they're so damned negative. In Vampire you're doomed, in Werewolf your race has failed AND you're doomed, in Mage you're doomed, in Changling..well, in Changling you're really just irrelevant. After awhile you just get sick of how every possible player-type is fundementally flawed and doomed to failure. The only game of theirs I really liked was Wraith and that's because it was actually kind of positive. Superficially it's the most depressing game of all. You're dead and living in a shadow of your former world that reeks of entropy and death. While you may be dead you also have unfinished business to take care of and are given a chance to end things on a positive note. Mummy is very similar except that you're truely immortal and there is no end to your life unless you chose to end it yourself. It's an unusually positive game for them. Your character is, by virtue of being a Mummy, less flawed than most. The flawed parts of their psyche have been burned away and replaced by the stronger aspects of an ancient egyptian soul creating a more perfect creature. Some of your moody, whiny White-Wolf regulars probably dislike this, but oh well. Sucks to them. They can continue being melodramatic elsewhere, thank you very much.

posted by pookzilla at 9:56 AM - 0 comments

Friday, August 02, 2002

Freedom....

I have now finished my contract at The Large Japanese Corporation I work for. I am free. Free to wake up in the morning and think "What am I going to do today?". The possibilities are endless (although I'm sure I'm spend all my time sleeping and surfing the Internet :P).

5 weeks of that and then back to uni. Yay! :D

posted by pookzilla at 1:52 PM - 0 comments

Man, prehistoric animals were so much cooler than the boring shits we have living now. I want a demon duck or a tree-croc.

posted by pookzilla at 10:28 AM - 0 comments

Amazon.ca order: shipped

Woot.

It's Friday. That means I'm getting all excited that the weekend is almost upon me. Of course, when it arrives it'll dawn on me that I really don't have anything to do with my offtime and I'll probably spend it in bed. Brian Wilson doesn't hold a candle to me...

posted by pookzilla at 7:38 AM - 0 comments

Thursday, August 01, 2002

Christ almighty is today shaping up to be a total clusterfuck.

It took the better part of an hour just to transfer a file from home. When you need to resort to using Kazaa to transfer files you know there is a problem with the Internet. Guh.

It looks like Amazon.ca has my order in stock.. its status now reads 'shipping soon' instead of 'item not yet shipped'. It could be that Amazon is being a cock tease - maybe tomorrow I'll get a note saying "It's shipping really soon. Can't you feel it? *grunt grunt*". Sigh.

Is it wrong to want to be drunk at 8:00AM? :P

posted by pookzilla at 8:13 AM - 0 comments