The Middle

After another gift from my friend in brown, I'm a few hours into the lastest masterpiece in Shigero Miyamoto's seemingliy never ending mega-hit streak. Bottom line, it's Zelda, and it's as good as ever. Bar none, this is the prettiest game I've ever played. The cel-shading will absolutely knock your socks off, and the gameplay is everything that was great about Ocarina of Time with another four years of polish (and a little borrowing from Kojima, which is great). Just go buy it already. If you don't have a GameCube, go buy one so you can play this game. Get Metroid Prime while you're at it.

It's in the mail, coming at me like bat out of hell. Bye-bye free time.

12 hours of sleep and 6 hours of wakeful recuperation after landing back in NC, I think to myself, "I should go to work, what time is it?". The answer immediately comes to me, "Vegas, Daddy." Then the real answer comes to me, "5:30 AM". Ouch. It's going to take me a while to get back to normal.

Just home from my first trip to Las Vegas, and I've come to the conclusion that everyone should be required to spend 4 days in the desert once a year or so. I must now spend the remainder of the day, and probably most of the next few as well, letting my body attempt to expunge four days of Vegas.

I'm off to Vegas for a little well deserved R&R tomorrow. I'm just posting this so everyone understands that if I seem to drop off the face of the Earth after this weekend, it's because I got a little too deep into Guido and couldn't make it out of the desert.

While lost surfing one day, I came across this article by Richard Florida for "Washington Monthly". Florida is understandibly peddling his book, The Rise of the Creative Class. From the article and several reviews I've read, the book seems to be a long winded diatribe that amounts to saying "Where there are lots of smart people, they make more money and buy more stuff from the dumb people who work at Starbucks and Target". Genius, I know. Anyway, what amused me was his ranking of cities by an "Inequality Index", his way of measuring the difference between the "Creative Class" and the "Not-so Creative Class" (sorry, never caught a name for that one). My new home, RTP, NC, ranked second only to San Jose, CA in his rankings of large regions. And for those of you keeping tabs on the fiancee formerly known as gnubbs, Boulder, CO ranked second in the small regions rankings. Gnubbs and I live with the new bourgeoisie, how pleasant. Sadly, The Cleve didn't make the list.

So I've now spent the entire day transfering my worldly digital possessions from my old T23 to my shiny new T30. Ahh, 2Ghz, 1GB of RAM, 60 GB HD, DVD + CD/RW. A quick format and many hours of installs later, things are approaching a usable state. This is how they trick you into working for The Man, I just hope I don't have to pawn it in the desert later this week.

Okay, now I've changed my mind, I'm all for it.

Omar Qureshi's getting married. I don't know why I didn't get that guy into The Pool.

So there was a little mix-up over the weekend, the company hosting this site decided to switch the server that was hosting this site. There were kind enough to do a full backup and move the site's content to the new server, unfortunately, there was a period of three days of content that got into the MT system while the DNS changes propagated. So we had a little period where the site went back in time a few days, but a little MySQL backup from the old host put things right back in order. So one of these days I'm going to get around to putting up some good stuff I've earmarked for the site, but for now I'm going to continue slaving for the man.

Today I read Who Says Elephants Can't Dance, Louis Gerstner's account of how he came into IBM as they were on the brink of failure and turned the company around. The standard discliamer of course, is that I am currently employed by Big Blue. I read this book on the recommendation of one of my fellow IBMers, and was somewhat pleasently suprised by it.

So, it's just now approaching mid-March, and I've already been out golfing multiple times this year. I knew there was a plus side to this whole NorthCa thing. In an effort to rectify the shortcomings of my previous outings this year, I went out and hit the "super-jumbo-hope-you've-got-three-hours-to-kill" size bucket of balls at the range today. The good news is that I finally was able to hit the ball with some semblance of aim and distance, the bad news is I can no longer feel my hands, nor lift them above my head were I so inclined. Ahh, golf.

This amuses me to no end.

Here's a great list of slogans for each MLB team in the coming season. Baseball fever is officially starting, it would seem.

Baseball was on TV today. Sure, it was the Cubs, but at least it wasn't another NBA game. Plus, Baseball Tonight is back in 22 short days

So I was talking with a bunch of my fellow geeks at a little soirre last night, and my infamous list of "Things that are deprecated" came up, since lubed up geeks at parties obviously don't have anything better to do. So, to see the list in all its glory, read more below

BikeWeek is on TLC right now. It's calling us, J$. Can you hear it?

Is it just me, or was it really sweet of our nation's President to end his (totally-scripted) address after exactly an hour so NBC could get a full "Friends" episode in?

President Bush just used "He [Saddam Hussein] doesn't believe in the values we believe in" as a reason for going to war with Iraq in his current TV address. Guess what, neither does Canada, are they next? Who says sovereignty is dead? Full Transcript

Okay, so J$ got into a big discussion here about distributed comments and how cool we would be if we had mad P2P bloggin' skillz, and J$ recommended we promote the discussion to it's own thread. Here it is. I'll post the original comment stream below, and the raving discussion can continue.

Joel's diatribe begs the question, "Do I surf becuase I'm lonely, or lonely because I suf?". Deep.

My weblogs.com pings keep timing out, normally about 2 out of 3 attempts. They should really fix that.

According to The Columbus Dispatch's review of The Ohio State University Theater Department's recent presentation of Comic Potential, "repeated laughter greeted several supporting actors", among them "Susan Wismar (as a farmer's wife and sassy prostitute)".

I just referred to my sister as a "sassy prostitute" on the internet. I figure she'd get a kick out of that.

Not many people are actually aware of this, but the "Big 5" record companies and their henchman may in fact be the purest form of evil currently plaguing the Earth's surface. So, if you want to get some of your money back from artificially-inflated CD prices, check this out. Act fast, the free money sign ups end on March 5.

This is, of course, not guaranteed. Read up on some case history.

In an effort to avoid breaking the 5th Commandment of Blogging, I thought I'd put up a little something about myself, preferably more accurate and detailed than J$'s highly entertaining version of me.

It's gotta stop, man. You know where the OCD can take this, don't you? Don't let it begin, or it will never end.

In another bold attempt to keep working on the site, which is something at which I excel, as opposed to contributing content, at trait at which I'm obviously not so well versed, I've gone ahead and stolen J$'s one-liner idea.

Not bad, although I think I may have to play with the CSS to get the spacing smaller, I think it's just too big for now. COUGH more stalling COUGH.

And on a related note, I'd like to welcome the infamous Sarah, J$'s "soft-spoken Hungarian Devil" as the site's second visitor. Look out, /., here I come.

Come on, J$, get your act together:"Enjoy high velocities..."

Grammar don't get any easier: "Enjoy long walks, sunsets on the beach..."

J$ has issues with that singular/plural thing: "Enjoy reading, movies..."

Okay, so now I've gotten the layout thing hammered out, crunch your browser window as narrow as you want, things'll crunch down and not drop from the right to the bottom. So, now I've pretty much hammered out my whole list, stay tuned for my rantings on Mardi Gras, SUV's, and Apache installs. Oh...wait. Nevermind, I'll come up with something else.

So, I finally wrapped up the categories and the archive/recent duality thing with some php and MT Templating. I can add a category, get a "recent entries" view and an "archive" view, all without any modification to any templates, it's just all automagic. Hooray for me.