Didn’t do too much this weekend. It was kind of exciting seeing the Blue Angels buzzing the skies above Seattle. Seafair was on this weekend but I didn’t feel like taking part in the festivities. Being oncall sucks sometimes but that is the only downside of my job I guess. It was a pretty good weekend though. Stayed around the house and got a whole bunch of things done. Laundry, put up the photos taken from Rainier and Hurricane Ridge the last two weekends, played a whole bunch with photoshop elements manipulating photos, read a whole lot about TCL and TotalView.

In general, it was a nice weekend. Quite stress free. Did a lot of things I wanted to do.

Wikipedia is a great example of how the internet is making a difference. It’s an online encyclopedia whose massive content is exclusively done by volunteers (and extremely up to date). One of the things I plan to do this summer is to give them a donation.

Learning OCaml, for C, C , Perl and Java programmers

My problem with OCaml in the past has been the lack of any good reference material online. This one seems pretty good, maybe I’ll finally getting around to picking it up.

Mac Buyer’s Guide: Know When to Buy Your Mac

Looks like I will hold off on that PowerBook purchase for a little bit.

perl.com: Installing mod_perl without superuser privileges [Apr. 10, 2002]

Spent the last couple of days trying to install apache, mysql and various other mod_* modules onto my powerbook. Looks like I won’t have time to write any MT plugins. Oh well!

For someone who grew up on Linux, Mac OS X has some quirks with packages I’m used to installing on Linux. With apache, I’m used to setting the prefix flag and having everything install into that directory. This turned out not to be the case with Mac OS X. I had to set the additional –sysconfdir –datadir and –localstatedir to get it to install completely in my home directory.

I’m getting terrible at video games or video games are becoming terrible. I use the excellent service provided by Gamefly to rent many video games. I’ve started renting video games because of the general dissatisfaction with video games I’ve bought in the past. Renting games allows me greater freedom to experiment with as many games as I want to. Within 10 minutes of playing “True Crime: Streets of LA”, I sealed it up in the return envelope ready to be shipped back. The control systems were crap, it was unintuitive to fire my weapons, driving the vehicle was next to impossible. I hate games that require you to go from point A to point B without instructions on how to get there. “Medal of Honor: Rising Sun” was back in the envelope within 20 minutes. I died a couple of times in a mission and each time was brought back to a previous save point which was pretty far back. I want to replay the part I died at, not the preceding 10 minutes until I succeed. “Halo” does a great job of doing this.

I know video game companies face a dilemma. Make a game too easy and the hard core / early adopter gamers get bored to fast and start to bitch on the comment board. Make a game too hard and you won’t appeal to the majority of players out there. It just frustrates me when I give up on a game so quickly. Oh well, Champions of Norrath and FFX2 seem at the right level for me. I’ll play those instead.

I’ve been playing around with consolidating little posts into big posts. I’m wondering if I should post little posts individually. Combining the little posts into a larger post amounts to the same thing. Consolidating posts also requires more effort on my part. I’ll experiment with making little posts for the next week.

GIRL: a page by alex

Some really pretty pictures I found today while exploring various weblogs.

Google has been pretty generous with me and given me a bunch of invite codes. Since my mom is visiting me right now, I decided to give her a gmail invite code. She currently uses YahooMail. Yahoo is pretty good (definitely better than hotmail) but its interface is still bad. The prototypically clean interface of Google was superior I thought. Imagine my surprise when Mom mentions that she prefers the YahooMail interface. What did she find confusing? The email threading for one. I thought that was a great part of the GMail interface. Just goes to show that if somebody has been using something long enough it becomes hard for change to using something else. Another reason why switching operating systems is hard for most people.

Still on the subject of GMail. Interested in getting a GMail account? Gmail Machine is running a lottery. If you hit the right number, they’ll give you one. Here is another interesting site GMail is too creepy. Food for thought. It does not mean if you are paranoid they are not out to get you.

After my TV died last week, I had to buy a new TV. Finally I can play FFX2. Bought it last December but the text on my old TV was always too fuzzy to read the text. It’s not a bad game. The story is linear, formulaic but still endearing to watch. The multiple endings is the worst idea in video gaming history. It is a crappy way to treat gamers who will invest 80 hours in the game only to discover they missed doing something at the start. If I hadn’t bought the guide book and had not read that I needed to find the moogle during the first mission, does that mean I need to replay the entire game again? I have a limited amount of time to play video games every week and this just sucks. Come on Square Enix, what were you thinking?

Yesterday I learnt how to change a tire. Lets say it was a little embarrasing that I didn’t know how to change a tire. On the other hand, its not happened to me in the past. I figured out where to put the block. Just could’nt open the lug nuts. Called roadside assistance (with my insurance company). Some guy decided to help me out after seeing me have problems.

Audible is having their summer sale til Jun 21. Everything above $9.95 is being sold at $9.95. That’s a tremendous offer. When I discovered this, I picked up a couple of audiobooks I wanted to listen to for a while, Naked in Baghdad,Defying Hitler,No Ordinary time, Truman. There are a couple more books I want to pick up. Audiobooks are a nice compromise between reading books or not reading at all. They allow me to use my ~40 minutes of commute time for something useful. Ideally I would read books onboard the bus but I like to rest my eyes before and after work.

Playing a musical instrument is kind of like running. In order to get any good you need to practice/train consistently. That is my problem. Not enough practice time. Not enough playing with other people. If I really want to get better, I need to put in 30 - 45 minutes a day into it. I enjoy playing and wish I had more time.