About this Weekend

Posted on 28th February 2011 in Something Daily

One of the busiest weekends in recent memory transpired recently, starting on Thursday evening and not really ending until late last night. Like I mentioned a few days ago, I did in fact attend the taping of VH1 Storytellers My Morning Jacket on Thursday, and I did in fact briefly meet Jim James. I had another big work day (two five-hour shifts) on Friday, which was broken up by a very enjoyable lunch with my friend Ja-Ann at El Cantinero. El Cantinero probably has the best enchilada’s I’ve tried, and the fried ice cream is incredibly incredible. I think I remember getting a lot of work done Friday evening while at work (nobody comes in on Friday evenings), but I was in a bit of a haze as a result of getting about five hours of sleep the previous night. Still, the number of pending objectives before my Spaceratops project is complete is getting slowly smaller and smaller. If I keep up the pace, I’ll be right on track for a mid-March completion (and/or release…yeah, maybe you do want to play it).

Saturday involved walking over to Tompkins Square Park with Sarah and ogling other people’s dogs – going to dog parks is something that, when I think about doing it, I’m all “yeah, that would be fun I guess”, and then when I’m actually there I’m all “OMFG puppies”. So what I’m saying is that it was awesome to go hang out with other people’s dogs and feed fat black squirrels. We also stopped by the flea market on 11th and A, and I picked up the nice white Apple keyboard on which I’m currently blogging this blog for twenty-five bucks (actually it was supposed to be twenty, but I absent-mindedly overpaid, and it’s a flea market, so I’m not going to just say “hey, sorry man, could I have five dollars back please?”). Still a great bargain.

And then yesterday I’m watching Ferris Bueller and the oscars with Jen in between getting my hair cut for free with Sarah’s roommate Claire – I now have a sweet sweet rad awesome smaller mohawk that requires no gel. It’s awesome. And I got a ton of work done in the morning yesterday – my recent Data Structures assignment required a lot of different skills and knowledge of a lot of ADT behavior. But I just now finished that one (infix to postfix conversion and evaluation) and it feels awesome.

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My Ninja Jacket is Black

Posted on 25th February 2011 in Something Daily

The last few days have been quite eventful. On Wednesday I celebrated my roommate’s birthday with him at a restaurant called Ninja. I’d heard vague rumors of the place before, something about the servers being ninja and jumping out at you from behind stuff and being all sneaky. It turns out that’s more or less totally true…we were screamed at and startled on five separate occasions, twice surrounding our traversal of the purposefully terrifying “ninja tunnel”, which we had to go through to get to our table. There were several occasions through the meal on which the servers would reach in the window behind my friends’ heads with their hand or a dull knife and startle the crap out of them. We also noticed on the menu that “If you find a prize in the miso soup, you may be assassinated!?” – so of course we all had to get the miso soup. Our friend Josh ended up getting the prize (a big carrot bit) and spent the whole night really jumpy. That was kind of the point of the place, to make you really really jumpy. There was also a magician who came by to do some sleight-of-hand, and he made a Dragon Ball Z reference which was totally awesome…London, amazed by a trick, said “his power is great!” to which the magician replied “it’s over nine thousand!” That was awesome. Also the food was really tasty. And we got free stickers. Good time.

I also got the rare privilege of attending the taping of the My Morning Jacket edition of VH1 Storytellers last night. Justin and I were in the second row, right on the end, so we’re probably in a ton of the shots. Once it comes out I’ll link to it. The show was incredible though – Jim James was a great speaker and they all completely rocked out. Highlights were “Dondante”, “Smokin’ from Shootin’”, and “One Big Holiday”, which was a huge shredfest of monumental proportions. And since Justin has the coolest father in the known universe, I got to go backstage after the show and meet Jim James. I told him he’s awesome. And I shook his hand. Get at me.

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Command Line Tip – pushd & popd

Posted on 7th February 2011 in Something Daily

I learned a fun command line trick recently. I typically use cd to change the working directory, which is great, but I’ve found that a lot of time gets wasted if you need to frequently move between two or more directories – you have to type the path every time you want to switch, which adds up to a lot of typing. I discovered pushd and popd, which place your directory changes into a stack, allowing you to recall your directory history in a last in, first out configuration. For example, I’m in ~/Music/Gang Starr/Step In the Arena and I want to go to /usr/bin. I type $ pushd /usr/bin (the $ indicates the command prompt), and my working directory is changed to /usr/bin. From there, I want to work in /mnt/mac/Users/emmettbutler/Documents, so I again $ pushd /mnt/mac/Users/emmettbutler/Documents. Then, I want to go right back to the Gang Starr directory without having to type the whole thing – I just $ popd and I’m in /usr/bin again, then $ popd once more to get back to ~/Music/Gang Starr/Step In the Arena. The last item to be pushed onto the stack is the first one to be popped off. Neato!

I spent a really substantial amount of time today working once again on my long-term Java game project – it was the first day of real work on it since early November. I’ve made a bunch of decisions that should help to significantly decrease the amount of manual labor I’ll have to put into the project; namely, I was originally going to have several levels with giant, independently drawn maps, and part of the reason I stopped working that way was because I realized that I don’t have the necessary means or drive to do that much 8-bit drawing. So the new strategy for “level design” is that there will be no distinct levels in a setting sense, just a randomly ordered series of single-frame panels with stars, asteroids, planets, spaceships, and the like. The combat will now be wave-based, with increasingly diverse waves that get harder to kill over time. Those two decisions alone, along with the choice to randomize the settings and precise configurations of each wave, have both eliminated a lot of the work I’d been anticipating and added a lot of potential replay value. If my vision for the random waves is realized, it’ll never be the same exact game twice, but it’ll have the same general difficulty curve each time. It’ll be good. So the work I completed today was the drawing of about 20 background panels and the coding necessary to loop and randomize their scrolling motion downscreen. I also cleaned up some of the parent classes that I wrote back when I was just learning Java. That’s a funny thing about this project, it’s spanning a long enough amount of time that my knowledge base is changing significantly, and my code often has to update with it. But with this new plan laid out, I feel optimistic about the end-of-semester prediction.

I found out today that Jim James of My Morning Jacket and M. Ward of She and Him have a blog dedicated to creme brulee entitled the Cremebrulog. The mere fact that such a site exists is awesome. And it really makes me want some creme brulee.

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Munch Up

Posted on 4th January 2011 in Something Daily

Downingtown, PA – Day 11

My time at home so far has been marked by a surprising lack of downtime compared to previous winter breaks. The family trip to Canada to see family took up a lot of my on and around Christmas day, and our recent day trip to our beach house to do a bit of housework for the coming summer season interrupted what I had anticipated would be a relaxing break. I might mention here that, based on my past experiences with winter breaks in my family, this anticipation was unfounded…but I’m still allowed to dream.

Apart from these family trips (with another to Las Vegas upcoming), I’ve been seeing a lot more of my friends at home than I expected to – so much so that it’s actually taking up most of my time on any given afternoon at home. I bowled, walked dogs, and video gamed/bro chilled with three different people yesterday, and it was a bit draining, to be honest. They were all fun, but I was so tired at the end of the day (at 2 AM, go figure). Speaking of, I did something very much unlike myself this morning: I slept until ELEVEN THIRTY AM. I honestly cannot remember the last time I did that. It feels kind of bad, actually. My whole morning was gone! I mean, I’m well rested now, but my plans for the morning are in shambles.

So that’s why I’m currently eating a bagel, drinking some Florida’s Natural, and listening to My Morning Jacket while blogging at 1:30 PM. It’s the breakfast of champions. Today I may draw (more like start to draw) a new Three Stegosaurus Moon header; at the very least I’ll try to come up with some ideas for one. I’m getting tired of my poorly googled and GIMP-ed travesty, so I’m thinking about some different designs that are interesting but not too hard for me to doodle well. I think that’s a better description of what I do. I hardly consider it “drawing”, at least in the sense that I wouldn’t tell anybody that I “draw” – I feel like doodling is a much better way to describe it.

I installed Skype on my new Ubuntu MacBook Pro this morning, a process that I expected to be a huge hassle like my attempt to do the same on my white MacBook. Of course, I don’t mean the actual installation of the program itself, but the activation of the built in camera and microphone for video calls. On my white computer, this ended up being more trouble than it was worth at the time. I did manage to get both working in Ubuntu, but even after that, the response from both was still choppy and unusable for conversation. I expected the same with my newer computer, but as it turns out, the camera and mic work out of the box! I didn’t have to do any additional setup this time. In case you’re wondering, it’s Ubuntu 10.10 on a MacBook Pro 5,4. I did have to unmute the mic and use alsamixer to unmute the front speakers, but that’s it. No configuration required. Ubuntu is fantastic. I want to find some cool new software. I just got Skype, VLC, and NetBeans this morning, and I’ll do a bit more searching and configuration.

It’s been a while since I recommended music. My Morning Jacket are awesome, specifically their albums Evil Urges and Z. I’m listening to Evil Urges right now, appreciating even more the idea I have that My Morning Jacket is “big room music”, meaning that it sounds awesome when you play it on big speakers in a huge room that adds a lot of reverb to the track. Jim James’ vocal typically has a lot of reverb on it anyway, and putting it in a big space definitely adds something to it. That being said, it’s just good music – it hardly matters where you listen to it. If you ever get the chance, though, play “Mahgeetah” or “I’m Amazed” in a big auditorium. Make sure you’re in a transitional period first, or at least in the right state of mind – it’ll change your life (thanks, Natalie Portman).

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