Surprisingly, WoW was not the main culprit today (although I did get work done on my project),but instead it was spending quite a bit of time doing work for the Game Engineering Conference next year. I was busy at UTD making appointments with people, then when I got home I was calling people at UTD who I didn’t see while I was there, then I was emailing people to follow up with them about stuff that we had discussed earlier. I’m really glad that the project isn’t sue tomorrow, although I’d like to think that if it was, I would have done more over the weekend and would be finished right now.
Andrew is picking up one of my projects that I was working on over a year ago since it interfaces with one of his sites, but in order to help him understand some of my logic, I’ve been explaining parts of the code to him and helping him debug problems. I really have no desire to start working on it as one of my “new” projects so I’m perfectly fine with just occasionally helping him. After all, the whole reason I stopped working on it in the first place was because I wasn’t having that much fun doing it. I may be many things, but I’m not bipolar enough to magically start loving something that I previously didn’t without some reason for me to change my mind.
Personal - Dallas
Over the past week or two, I’ve come up with no fewer than four project ideas. Some are much more conceviable to accomplish in the short term, but working on them all at once would most likely end up being a disaster. So, what obviously needs to happen is that I need to prioritize them in the order that I want to work on them. Many factors can play into this prioritization, but one of the main one will be the amount of new material that I have to learn. You see, none of the projects are just simple things that I can accomplish with my current skill set; they all require me to learn something new, so the time/difficulty of that must be taken into account as well.
The Dark Knight seems to be a gigantic hit, and it’s still on my radar for next weekend. Part of me also wants to see Mamma Mia! since I like the musical so much, but it’ll likely become a rental movie. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing new coming out next weekend that I want to see, so that should work fine for then going to see the new Mummy movie sometime during the week(end) after Quakecon.
Personal - Dallas
While doing some general internet browsing today, I ran across a tech site that made me rethink parts of my upcoming computer build. Ultimately, while I plan to stick with the same basic specs as I have planned out right now, I think I’m going to drop down from a quad-core to a dual-core for the time being. My reasoning for this is that Intel will have a new socket coming out next year, so I can do a much smaller scale upgrade next year and get my quad-core fix then when it’ll be more worth it (PC games have yet to really take advantage of anything beyond 2 cores). Everything is, of course, subject to change, and I may decide in the next few weeks that I would rather go with a quad-core now. My final decision will probably come from looking at some more benchmarks and determining what would be better for my needs.
For better or worse, I didn’t make any progress on my project today as I was too busy playing WoW most of the time. I’ll say that I’m going to work on it tomorrow, and that really needs to be true; just saying it doesn’t make it happen though. Some of our requirements got cut at our last class, so fortunately the dwindling time also comes with dwindling stuff to do. My procrastination kept me from working on something that would have been unnecessary. We wouldn’t want to take away from my video game time with worthless project work, would we?
Personal - Dallas
I don’t really know why (and it’s very likely I’ll change my mind), but I started considering today the possibility that I’ll buy Rock Band 2 when it comes out in a couple of months. I still think the price would be ridiculous for the amount of entertainment I’d get out of it, but if I got the 360 version I could at least in theory play with some of my friends who have the original (and will theoretically upgrade to the newer one). While it wouldn’t sell me on the whole cost, I still want to play “Still Alive”.
I was mentioning to Andrew that I had no real ideas for what to include on this post, so he suggested that I talk about the fact that everyone who had registered for Quakecon up through today will be receiving a beta invite for Quake Live (no relation to Xbox Live). Basically, this is a free version of Q3 that also supports matchmaking and many other features that new games have, and like with ET: Quake Wars last year, Quakecon is apparently going to be the beta ground for this “new” game also. Free event, free game… now if only I could get a free computer upgrade!
Personal - Dallas
During class today we “voted” to move our project so that it wouldn’t be due until Thursday, so I therefore have another approximately 48 hours to finish it. Granted, taking into account sleep and working and all that fun stuff it becomes more like 10, but that’s still 10 more hours than I would have had otherwise. Actually, I don’t intend on planning to use those 10 hours to finish it up; I’m considering those my “emergency hours” for when everything blows up in my face and there’s no way I could get it done by the original due date.
If I magically get my progam done by sometime this weekend, part of the remainder will probably be spent on upgrading our HTPC to Vista using the copy that I got from UTD. That will (ideally) allow the use of one of the capture cards to record HDTV streams from our cable since that’s a feature of the Vista driver. We’ll see how well that ends up working, but being able to record HDTV on it might take it’s usefulness back up to where it was originally planned to be.
Personal - Dallas
I actually got work done today on my SE project!! I know, I’m so proud of myself. I’m still nowhere close to being done and I probably should do some more work on it tonight, but I can at least say that I made progress today. Grade wise that doesn’t count for much, but I’m not quite at the grade stage yet.
Tomorrow should be a normal day between going to work with Mr. McDonald and then having class. It’ll be out last class before the project is actually due, so it’d be a good thing if I made sure that I have no more questions about how to finish up the project. There’s always email, of course, but you tend to have a higher chance of getting an answer asking someone in person than waiting on a (possible) email response.
Personal - Dallas
The AT&T store that I was going to go to today to get my iPhone was out of them (but fortunately we knew that ahead of time), so I shall remain with my Curve for a little while longer. Granted, it’s not like I *need* an iPhone for any reason other than I think it would be cool to have one. I can be patient until there becomes a more steady supply of them, just like I did with the Wii.
As of right now my HP meeting for tomorrow hasn’t been cancelled or rescheduled, so I still plan on being there at 1:00. I’m going by a friend’s house after that, but that’s all I really have planned for the day. I really do need to start working on my SE project more, so that will be something on my schedule at some point.
Personal - Dallas
My mystery movie of last night was Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and the title of this post is one of the best lines from it. It had been so long since I’d seen it that I had forgotten quite a bit of the details, so it was fun to watch knowing that I enjoyed it but remembering parts (and even seeing things before that I didn’t remember). It’s more “old school” animation than most of the new cartoon movies coming out, but it still really, really good. My score: 8.5/10.
Enchanted was about how I remembered it; while I enjoyed watching it a second time, I still think I made the correct decision of but permanently adding it to my collection. So, I was 1-1 on the new movies and 2-1 overall on the rentals. I’m not sure that we’ll be renting a bunch more movies anytime soon, but in another month or so there should start to be some more boxes arriving for me with the Amazon logo on them.
Personal - Dallas
10,000 BC was your run of the mill, entertaining enough but on the border of being boring, average movie. It probably wouldn’t have even made it to the rental pile if I’d seen it initially, but on the bright side it only cost $4.50 this way. If there was any ambiguity, this one won’t be seeing the light of my Amazon shopping cart. My score: 5/10.
I have nothing planned for tomorrow besides hanging around my house (and ideally getting some SE project work done), so that means there will probably be some WoW, Ratchet, and maybe even a little MGS4 action. At the present time, however, I’m shutting down to start watching yet another movie, this one part of my collection for a long time. I’m actually not sure if I’ve ever reviewed it, so that may just be part of tomorrow’s post…
Personal - Dallas
Journey to the Center of the Earth was an ok movie, but nothing all that special in my opinion. I guess I was just expecting to like it more than I actually did, so I was slightly underwhelmed by it. It was entertaining and fun to watch, but probably destined for the rental pile. My score: 6.5/10.
We didn’t watch 10,000 BC tonight, so that review may or may not some as a part of tomorrow’s post. I actually don’t know much about that movie aside from the trailers I’ve seen (including whether or not people thought it was good/bad), so even if we do watch it, I guess I could theoretically not sit through the whole thing and not have a review to write that way.
Personal - Dallas