Today managed to keep me entertained quite a bit without actually getting a whole lot of writing done that I probably needed to do. Strangely odd since it wasn’t really any more or less busy than other Mondays, but apparently that wasn’t all that important. Tomorrow is fortunately less busy calendar wise, so hopefully everything will align and be like it should be.
My dad informed me today that he will be flying in from Chicago on Friday, so I’m off the hook for needing to go pick up my mom at the airport Friday afternoon. Awesome for me since it means I don’t have to make a round trip there in traffic, plus there’s an extra person around over the weekend to help me do stuff like disassemble desks. In addition, the weather forecast has it not being insanely hot while they’re here for once, something I’m sure they’ll be happy about. It still doesn’t seem like any of that elusive Seattle rain will be paying a visit while they’re here though…
Personal - Seattle
So, I finally got around to actually giving a meaning to the existence of my external hard drive by connecting it to my WHS machine and actually telling it to backup everything on there. At this point the amount of data hasn’t grown beyond what can be backed up onto the external drive (this includes all of my video files, but the capacity is most definitely there for it to expand far beyond what will fit), so I’m able to do a full backup. The great part about this is that it will just keep itself backed up automatically, so all I need to to is just make sure that anything I’d prefer not to lose lives somewhere on the server as opposed to just my desktop.
As it turns out, Scott Pilgrim vs the World isn’t going to be the next Dragon. It was average with a few funny parts, but even the gaming references couldn’t give it a big enough boost to put it in the upper tier of my rankings. The one thing I was impressed with though was the art direction; I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see it nominated in some category for that come Oscar season. My score: 5.5/10.
Personal - Seattle
The title of this post may not be completely accurate as Peggle might just be the game with that title, but at least the second best one just got better. When I logged into Steam today, what news item was greeting me? Oh, just a little thing saying that Plants vs Zombies was getting Steam Cloud support, so switching computers, reformatting, and all that fun stuff would in no way impact my saved games. I’ve still yet to actually beat the entire adventure mode of PvZ, but I bet I’m played it enough to have gone through the mode about twice.
I finally got around to actually getting some moving boxes today, and I’ve been packing up my games and DVDs since those are the easy things to do. Having them all back in boxes just reminds me once again that having a catalog would be a great idea, so I’ll likely invest in some software relatively soon and do the cataloging at the unpacking stage. A barcode scanner also isn’t entirely out of the question because have you ever seen how many games I have? Now, if I could only rip all my (console) games and have them on my WHS machine also, then we’d be in business and I could just leave 90% of my cases packed up for all eternity.
Personal - Seattle
After a couple episodes of Lost, I felt like my 360 deserved to have some games played on it. As I’ve already started to put a few things into boxes, I realized this limited my ease of game playing since my games are one of the things (fine, the only thing to this point) that have been pack. Ah, but wait! What is this stack of games that seems to have escaped packing so far? Turns out it’s the stack of games I bought over Christmas that I have yet to finish playing, so at least I have “new” titles to keep me entertained in the near future. So what did I choose to play? The original Modern Warfare which was sitting over there only because I wanted it to hang out with it’s younger brother for when I did get around to playing them. Yes, there is a single player component to that game, and I know I’ll never get around to touching it after I spend time with MW2.
As for a movie this weekend, I think I might just have to go see Scott Pilgrim vs the World. It wasn’t a movie that was even on my rental radar really, but it’s been getting good critical reviews and good word of mouth, I figure it might be worth the investment. After all, How to Train Your Dragon was a movie like that, and we all know how that one turned out…
Personal - Seattle
Behind every great piece of software is a great spec (or there should be, otherwise they’re doing it wrong). Behind every great spec is a lot of thought and effort. Behind all the thought and effort are mockups, many of which are quite analog in their embodiment. Let’s face it, sketching something out on a sheet of paper is infintely easier than doing mockups in a program, especially when you’re still brainstorming what something should look like.
Friday = tomorrow = start of weekend = my last free weekend for quite some time (assuming everything goes according to plan. Not to point all the fun, but here’s an preview of what’s upcoming. Next weekend, my mom is here to help me pack. Weekend after that, PAX. Following two weekends, possibly in Dallas depending what my travel schedule ends up being for the recruiting trip. In other words, maybe by the last weekend in September my schedule will be open once again. Maybe.
Personal - Seattle
Ever since beating SC2, I expected to get back into WoW full force, but you know what? Aside from latter the launcher load to patch it, I haven’t even started it up at all. In fact, aside from some D2 time just to help Andrew trade items around, I actually don’t think I’ve played any games at all recently. Shocking, I know, but I’m just able to entertain myself at the moment without them. Don’t worry, I’m sure this phase won’t last long.
Today ended up being quite productive for me at work, and hopefully I can carry this through to the weekend. If I can get as much done tomorrow and Friday as I did today, I think I’ll be in great shape as far as next week goes for having almost everything ready and in place by next Friday. The reason that date is so important is because of how busy I’m going to be that next week, and I’d rather frontload all that I can to reduce the amount of work I need to do then.
Personal - Seattle
So, in my attempt to maybe, kinda start to use Twitter again, I actually started following quite a bunch of people. Primarily Microsoft related (hmmm, I wonder why?), but it is pretty cool as far as getting news and updates. For example, the WP7 game news yesterday? First heard about that through Twitter, not Engadget’s homepage.
Tomorrow is a pretty empty day for me, good for actually getting work done I guess. Yes, now I actually sort of like empty days because I have a reason to be in my office. It’s only when I’m not in full out document writing mode that I really like lots of meetings to keep me out of my office. You’ll figure this out soon enough; it’s really just a cycle that repeats itself every few months, so if I’ve been complaining about something for a while, it’s likely to change soon.
Personal - Seattle
Sure, Microsoft, partially my decision was made for me (no good Android phones when I was eligible for upgrading, and the iPhone 4 has been off the table for a while), but you just continue to make me happy with my decision to stick it out for WP7. First a free phone, then there’s stuff like this – I guess there’s still the chance that something could go horribly wrong, but it’s all looking pretty good from my perspective right now.
Tomorrow is just as, if not more, full than today was. I have: meeting, meeting, lunch, meeting, meeting in the middle 4.5 hours of my day. In a way this is nice because it means that 1) I don’t have to wake up insanely early for anything, and 2) after my last meeting, I actually have a block of time that I can use to get the other stuff done that I need to rather than having it split up all over the course of the day.
Personal - Seattle
Andrew arrived in Seattle today, and since he had yet to eat anything by that point in the day, I drove into downtown Seattle to visit him at his corporate apartment. Aside from the almost certain driving issues, I am yet again reminded of why I think I’d love living in the downtown area. His corp apartment is basically on the waterfront with a view that looks out over the bay. I’m not sure I want to think about what it costs, but I’m sure it’s not exactly cheap.
My calendar this entire week looks pretty full, helped in part by the fact that I have time blocked off each afternoon for me to actually get the work done that I need to. I’ve also scheduled review meetings that will force me to get stuff done. Hey, whatever form of motivation is required, I’ll take it.
Personal - Seattle
Starcraft, Diablo, Diablo 2, all the Warcraft games…up until today, I had never beaten a Blizzard game. Now with SC2 done, I can finally say that I have. It turns out that a single playthrough of the campaign is 25 missions since there are a few that are different based on choices that you make, and of course the achievements provide an incentive for replaying the game over and over. Fortunately I am not addicted to getting achievements on any platform, so I won’t be spending another couple of months trying to get every last one. I actually feel quite proud of myself that I was able to beat SC2 in such a timely manner. Now if I can just avoid falling too far back into the trap known as WoW, perhaps I can carry this momentum into actually beating some of my other games.
One project that I decided to start today was utilizing OneNote to make copies of all the datasheets for the various components I’ve bought to play around with in conjunction with my Arduino. My initial thought had been to print them all off, but I decided that was highly against my “minimize paper” initiative (to prove how well I’ve been doing, I only just this past week changed out my print cartridges for the first time). As a bonus, I have have it set up as a workbook on Skydrive so that if I ever want to access it in the future from my laptop (or say, a slate), it should be super easy to do.
Personal - Seattle