No Business Naming Things

This winter is becoming one of the longest and most depressing that I’ve ever known.  In many ways I feel like this winter began last January.  After we decided we needed out of our rental and into our own home life kind of went on hold for me.  All of the time from the moment we bought our house until we moved into it was spent with me wishing it away.  What’s more, once we moved in the next few months flew in ways that make them seem like mere weeks.   I crave a normal summer in our new house desperately and some days I feel like this winter is never going to end.  I think tomorrow is going to be one of those days -  we have another 30cm of snow plus freezing rain plus wind coming our way.

Guh.  I am going to go mad.

Today was a crazy-productive day, the chief accomplishment being that we went and booked our wedding reception hall!  The first (and most expensive) part has been squared away.  It’s finally starting to feel real.

I thought it’d be nice to celebrate Burns day at home this year so I managed to snag us a haggis from the Scottish and Irish store the other day.  On the way home from work today I stopped in at Rainbow Foods to get us some potatoes, mushrooms, and turnips.  After putting the haggis in the pot to simmer we both set to work cutting and preparing the vegetables.  We ended up with mashed potatoes, mashed turnip with maple syrup, caramelized onions, mushroom gravy, Yorkshire pudding, and the most delicious haggis I’ve ever had.  Ohhhh boy was that a good haggis!  While I really enjoy the crispy bits that accompany the haggis at The Highlander pub on Rideau Street I have to say the flavour in this one was far superior.  I’ll definitely buy more of the food products at the Scottish and Irish store in the future.

We have leftover haggis and mashed potatoes for tomorrow.  I REALLY want to fry up some taters with some eggs int he morning.  I haven’t had fried potato patties in ages.   I’m not sure what to do with the haggis but I suspect there’ll be some more frying involved.

I wanted to give a heads up to anyone who’s currently using the org.eclipse.equinox.transforms projects that live in the Equinox incubator. They will be changing shape shortly in an effort to resolve some intractable build issues (alluded to previously). While providing transforms will be virtually identical there will be migration path for older transform bundles. I will outline the changes when the new code is in the incubator which I expect to happen sometime in the next week or so. In the meantime I’ve gone and tagged the existing code with Version_1 for any clients who were making use of it.

In yet another example of our fiscal responsibility we purchased Zack and Wiki the other day.  It was inevitable - I spent a lot of time extolling its virtues and I was starting to feel like a hypocrite for not buying it.   When we saw it at EB Games and Lexy suggested we buy it I couldn’t help but agree.

We put about 5 hours into it yesterday, getting roughly 2/3rds of the way through.  My review is unabashedly positive.  It’s an excellent game that really shows off the potential of the Wii.  The art direction is great (making up for the lackluster horesepower of the Wii), it’s funny, the puzzles are intuitive but satisfying, and the controls are spot on with the exception of the difficult rhythm game.  If it doesn’t spawn a sequel I hope that it at least spawns some quality imitators.

I’m totally late to the party on this one but I got a chance to play Fatal Frame 3 for PS2 last night.  I really enjoy survival horror games.  They rarely actually scare me, but they do get my heart racing which I really enjoy.  Up until now the pinnacle of that sensation was brought to me by Resident Evil 4 which was, IMO, the best game ever made.  However… Fatal Frame 3 is by far the scariest game I’ve ever touched.  I only played through the first day but by the end my nerves were a wreck and I honestly didn’t want to be alone in the dark.

I was loaned Fatal Frame 1 which I’m going to try and power through just as fast as I can.  I cant remember being so stoked about a game before.

I was excited by the prospect of Cloverfield from the moment I saw the teaser at Transformers.  I have this thing for the apocalypse you see - I am convinced it’s just around the corner and if it should happen via a large monster all the better.

So, my review in an nutshell is that it’s awesome.  I can’t remember the last time left a theatre more excited than I was when I left Cloverfield.  Except for some minor plot quibbles I thought it was excellent.  The monster was excellent, I was on the edge of my seat the entire time, and the characters (if not likeable) were largely believable.

I can’t wait for the DVD.

We just survived what is the most harrowing cab ride of my life. There were moments I honestly thought we wouldn’t make it home alive - the man had no idea where he was going; he was going the wrong way down one way streets; he got us going the wrong direction on the Queensway; he was swerving all over the road while trying to dork with his electronics; he was nattering on incessantly about how long a day he had and how tired he was; when we finally arrived he disputed the fare and didn’t know how to use the credit card machine. We should have been home almost an hour ago. I guess we should be thankful we’re home at all.

While applying a patch for the About->Plug-ins dialog the other day (a patch that gets us off of deprecated code.  Yay!) I was struck once again at how homely our certificate tray slide out is. It’s really quite ugly and it got me thinking: It’s an isolated piece of code; It’s a low-risk change; It’s potentially a very fun problem to work on (especially if you dig into the custom SWT controls).

It’s a perfect bug for some young would-be committer to step up to.

While trying to clean up and refactor the Equinox XSLT transform code (a moderately complex Equinox framework extension broken out among several bundles) that I wrote last year I find myself in one of three situations:

1. I can have code that doesn’t compile without discouraged access warnings but works just fine in a running instance.
2. I can have code that compiles cleanly but wont actually work in a running instance by virtue of how Equinox loads framework extensions.
3. I can have code that compiles cleanly, runs fine, but is held together by spite, twine, and reflection.

Sigh.

Some days you’re the windshield, other days you’re the bug.