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The drive back from Chicago across Indiana and Ohio is the cherry on top of a nice weekend of seeing Peter, Audrey, and Banks.  The flatness of these states allows for a golden hour where the world goes from being dipped in honey to on fire and back and I have no compunction about staring out the window at the setting sun.  John and Suzie are of a fundamentally different driving stock as myself and are blessedly capable of falling asleep in the back of the car, reminding me of my promise to Suzie to try and get a shot of them being a couple.  They fell asleep holding hands with their heads on each others’ shoulders and I pondered taking a flash shot after the sun went down.  I wasn’t sure if the pre-flash or the flash would cause the probably glare of terror but decided against a picture when I realized the internal reflectivity of the car would probably have me seeing orbs which can be somewhat dangerous at the speed I was traveling.

We dropped off Suzie and I took a nap after John began driving.  I woke up later after my car-dar went off, not because John was being either reckless or going too fast but the opposite.  Maybe my sympathetic nervous system could detect the vehicle velocity being below 70 MPH or the lack of sharp turns, but I asked to switch back so I could tear across the Allegheny Mountains.  I tend to speed a bit more on holy days of obligation.

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The march of atoms is sometimes a novel change from directing the flow of bits as objects were hashed into banker boxes, moved via UDP to the truck whose packet size was about 600 cubic feet.  The routing protocol used was hardcoded with no QoS as the path didn’t change but there was some traffic shaping in that jumbo frames weren’t accepted after 5 PM.  Once in the condo building, we switched to TCP and Peter managed the SYN, ACK, SYN/ACK three-way handshake which allowed us to avoid packet collision.

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A view I hope to see a few more times.

The analogy does eventually break down though as no level of the TCP/IP stack has to deal with being told to die in a car crash for not donating bandwidth to a lost payload but nor can any specific layer know the joy of a handmade vanilla malt.

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At some point, John convinced me that we should leave for a weekend trip to Chicago directly from his house Wednesday evening was a good idea.  I presumed him a capable driver and his parents outfitted us with dinner and a care package of iced tea and popcorn before we went west over the Appalachian mountains and into the west.  John and I didn’t have much overlap in musical tastes and he didn’t seem one to complain so as a last resort I started a 12 song play list of Beatles hits and promptly fell asleep in the passenger seat.  I woke up 3 hours later where he looked at me, then the radio and said “make it stop”.  My radio apparently defaults to loop for playlists and he’d now heard the set 5 times but didn’t want to break my radio by changing anything.

We arrived in Cincinnati at 7 AM and the number of sleep-deprived car members increased by one.   The drive across Ohio and Illinois was uneventful outside but inside the car I got to hear someone being fired, and then a recounting of their attempt to steal a cash register tray which was way better than anything else on my iPod.  Peter met us at around 10:30 AM, gave us a tour of his new apartment and I showered and changed before driving John, Suzie, and I to meet a fellow outside Chicago for lunch at Portillo’s, a purveyor of fine cased meats.  The call agent used rhyming announcements which made me wish silver, month, and orange were numbers and I had a mediocre Vienna beef sandwich as I talked with Ty about things while in a hypnogogic state.

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At some point I said something funny.

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Oddgo's spider senses activate.

John was made to volunteered to drive us back to Peter’s where I learned two things quickly:  He didn’t appreciate the wanderlust of my GPS and he does not enjoy city driving, where city is defined as within 4 miles of anything larger than a tool shed.  He did not enjoy driving around Chicago.

Back at Peter’s, we engaged in lively discussion:

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A lively debate

After a nap, we started putting things into boxes.  We stopped putting things in boxes when we ran out of boxes.  There were many boxes.  Tomorrow, there would be more boxes, a box-like truck into which the boxes would be placed, and two boxy freight elevators to hold our then-filled boxes. Boooo……ooooxes.

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My current work project has required some long days as each sample can take unattended hours to test.  I came in at around 4 AM, did a sample, setup up a new one, and drove to Best Buy to have my car stereo repaired.  The person who took my keys looked more likely to jack car stereos than repair them but there appeared to be cameras about I needed to admire his consistency when asking me questions:

Agent: What’s the problem with the radio?
Me: A few things, for one it’s fugly.  Also, the iPod connector doesn’t seem to work.
Agent: What is?
Me: The install, I really suck at this.
Agent: You did this yourself?
Me: Yea, any professional should have probably just slit their wrists if that were the quality of their install.
Agent: What do you mean?
Me: Well, there were wires, of various colors that had words written on them like “To Brake Cable” and “To Battery” and not seeing directions on what to do with them, I bunched them up and rammed them behind the head unit.
Agent: Ok.  Let me look.
*Minutes later*
Agent: Sir, this make a while.

I promptly fell asleep in the waiting room and at some point I recall waking to a kid saying “he sounds like daddy”.

Agent: Sir, I believe I updated your install.  Here the video display now works when parked.  You can adjust the date, and the battery display info is now also available.
Me: What about the iPod connector?
Agent: I’m not sure, just in case I wrapped it with electrical tape.
Me: Is there a shock hazard or something?
Agent: No, the grey plastic looks ugly.

Thank you, tattoo, nose-ring, and beard-having scruffy Geek Squad Man, you’ve made Wanda sound grand.

 

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Note: I play 2 video games a year, and I’m good at saying why they suck. Oddly, I can generally say why a movie is good but not why it’s bad.

I wanted to finish Portal 2 single player before leaving for Chicago and did… in under 6 hours. While the co-op may prove much better, I was underwhelmed by the single player version of the game to the point that I’m telling people to wait before buying until the game’s cheaper. Despite the awesome voice acting and humor of the game as well as the reasonably high level of visual polish, the flaws of the game were glaring.

My qualms:

  • UI Tweaks – Portal 2 has many more Aperture Science Material Emancipation Fields, so instead of the semi-circles around the reticule showing what can be targeted, it instead shows what portals are deployed. This made some areas a tedious case of “fire until it sticks” as the visual clue for Portal adhesion in the first game was flatness, here, it’s largely color (sometimes) and other times flatness.
  • Confusing Environments – HL2:E2 showcased the Source engine’s ability to render large scenes. Portal 2 also contained these elements but often in the vintage Aperture Science areas, I found this eye candy disorienting as sometimes those massive objects in the distance are where you’re going, or where you came from, or are just background effects. Puzzles required more footwork than I’d want as a solution often involved just walking around to find the right surface rather than the puzzle unfolding.
  • Embedded Test Sequence – My response to learning that Wheatley had generated test chambers was a sense of dread at the realization that the game had introduced another countdown.
  • Ending – Really? The moon? The portal beam moves as a finite speed that seems slow AND while the paste made of moon rocks makes something a portal-able service, I am skeptical that the portal would apply properly to lunar regolith.
  • Linear puzzles – Few puzzles seemed to have multiple good solutions and their spareness made solving them easy as one could pick out the game elements present and just figure out how to jam them together for victory. Kind of like how you can brute force a jigsaw puzzle.
  • Interactions with GlaDOS – The reasons why GLaDOS or Wheatley couldn’t interactive with you were stupidly forced. “I’m going to think about this” *silence for rest of test chamber*

Things I did like:

  • Voice acting and dialog – Awesome.  I hope that I can quote “if we’re going to explode, let’s explode with dignity” until I die.
  • Fluids in games usually suck.  This didn’t appear to.
  • Sound cues to new mechanics.
  • Introduction of mechanics without a formal explanation until later.
  • The portal aim-assist and magnetic falling where helpful.

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The refrigerator at work currently contains 14 containers of yogurt which I thought was so 14 people could have 14 snacks generating 14 smiles, but today, a chronic yogurt bringer was browsing through the canisters:

Me: It’s tough to figure out which one is yours with so many, no?
Coworker: Nah, they’re all mine, I’m just not sure what flavor I want.
Me: All yours?
Coworker: Well, all the Dannon ones, the Yo-Plait ones are some other woman’s.

This means, of the 14 yogurt containers in the fridge, 12 are from 2 people meaning a total of 4 people  at work consume yogurt in my area.  I felt bad putting in 2 cans of soda, but now I think this is just the start.  I’m going to clean out the bottom row, bring in a 24-pack of Pepsi Max to put there, and slap a sticky note on there that just says “Your move, Marketing Lady.”

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The Maryland Zoo may have its busy times, but a warm spring Sunday did not appear to be it as the only other people in the part were the rare family and a goodly number of Orthodox Jews.  Most of the animals appeared largely bored, which I suppose is superior in some ways to either running for your life or having to run down something to eat but there were animals that appear to have adapted:

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African Leopard, living the hard life of a top level carnivore

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The Dik-Dik that cripples hunters with oppressive cute

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No predator will touch the Okapi for fear of being labeled racist

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The Arctic Fox and it's amazing camouflage

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African Penguins: Nature's middle managers. He looks like he should have a fedora and briefcase.

The polar bears looked warm yet none of the primates were out.  Maybe some other time.

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The April work weekend was very damp, forcing the candidates and brothers into the dining hall for much of the afternoon during which the chief described the OA to the assembled Scouts.  I remember having been in similar situations where I had to fill time with stories and such and at first I smiled at our shared pain.  That is I smiled until his talking hit the 1:15 mark and my compunction against commentary dropped and wrote “stop talking” about 30 times on the Chief’s Facebook wall.  He stopped talking after about 95 minutes and then the true reason for the wall of speech became obvious.  The candidates were supposed to happily and silently toil to set up the camp as part of the Ordeal, instead they undertook the far more difficult task of happily and silently toiling to remain conscious.  They will be our lodge’s greatest generation.

 

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My work umbrella was recently taken and not returned, and today it was again raining so I steeled myself for more work inconsideration as I folded my new umbrella and prepared to place it in the umbrella rack.  Again, the rack was a field of courtesy umbrellas into which mine would disappear, possibly for ever.  I glanced at the secretary who wouldn’t notice, the man in the lobby who wouldn’t care, and the gaggle of laughing employee’s who would become impromptu thieves were I to leave my new 44″ gustbuster with a rubber grip umbrella, nay, rain shield with the rabble of other folding rain domes.  There, I decided that I would not let myself be a victim and walked back to my car, folded up my umbrella and walked back in the rain with a dedication unknown to my normal walks into the building.

I felt good in my dampness until I realized 3 things:
1) I could have stored my umbrella in my cube.
2) I could have brought a courtesy umbrella with me to my car so I wouldn’t have to walk in the rain.
3) I could have filled the walk in the rain in slow motion with a brooding guitar line playing in the background to highlight my new status as a weather protection iconoclast.

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I don’t like when store clerks try to make commentary of what I buy.  Today’s basket included chocolate morsels, pudding mix, and butter.

Attendant: Baking something sweet, are we?
Me: Nope, just trying to finally off my diabetic neighbor with a fake peace offering.  If I’m lucky, his dog will eat the dropped chocolate and I’ll get a two-fer.