yotogi.net

on thrusday, my ol' faithful laptop finally started to show its age. one of the hinges decided to completely fail, making the laptop almost impossible to use. we had planned on replacing it this year, but the failure accelerated our timetable. you see, since we got porter...

melissa has spent a lot more time away from her desk in the office. as a consequence, she spends a lot more time on the laptop, which failed finally. so out shopping we go...

and we become one of "those people". i am actually really excited about getting to use OSX and all of the nifty iLife software that the machine comes with by default. so far the experience has been really easy. the machine is running well and seems to be all that i hoped it would be.

i should really feel complemented. well, i should say that i should feel MORE complemented. back in december 2005 when i started at retro, i was assigned one of those entry tasks that you get in order to get your feet wet and feel comfortable with a new job. for me that was a creature AI for the game that we are working on.

well, a month or two ago, i find out that we will be taking that ai, and using it with a different model and slightly different behavior (with no modification to the code, yea data driven programming!). that is cool. i kinda like my little beastie and hope that the players enjoy smiting him repeatedly.

well, last week i find out all about the uber-version of my creature. tougher and more threatening. cool, more fun with no data change.

well, today i find out that we are going to add some features to the little guy for one of the variants. no big deal, shouldn't even be a day's worth of work. oh, and there is a fourth version that we are going to do.

talk about getting your milage out of a few thousand lines of code!

monday night i suffered from insomnia for the first time in over a year. this didn't make me happy in the least, but is really not much of an interesting point. it does, however, mean that i was tired yesterday, and when i am tired, my brain works slightly differently than when i am rested.

case in point, although not the first time that i noticed it, i found an interesting slice of time yesterday. if you have a nightlight that automatically turns on and off in a room that you commonly turn the overhead light on, the bathroom for example, you may have found yourself passing through the moment that i am about to describe.

there is a time between when you turn off the overhead light and when the nightlight comes on. visually, it is a strange transition. the bright light goes away instantly but the little nightlight takes a moment to get going. this leaves you in the dark for just an instant and to me is a strange visual transition. probably not all that interesting to most people, but i have always liked the way that it worked.