10 February 1998: Stalemate

Tuesday, 10 February 1998:

Stalemate

Boy, was today a frustrating one at work. We uncovered a really nasty error in our Visual Basic code, and me and one other person spent six hours trying to track it down. Finally, a third person, apparently on a lark, made a suggestion which turned out to solve our problem: Some of our forms had a flag not set. It seems when this flag is set, everything works fine. When it's not set, then your forms get all fucked up. So I've started calling it the "fuck up your forms flag", since it seems to serve no other purpose.

Sheesh. Talk about no forward progress.

Oh, yeah, and I also overslept my alarm by about thirty minutes. Still got to work before 9:00, though. That's my goal; I went through a phase where I was always getting in between 9:15 and 9:30. I prefer to get in a little earlier and leave a little earlier. There's something depressing about being at work when it's dark out.

I sleep a lot. I think even if I were in decent shape I'd sleep around 9 hours a night. Lately I sleep about 7-1/2 hours on weeknights and 10-12 hours on weekends. Not a great cycle. Must get to bed earlier.

This evening I helped my friend Karen with buying a filing cabinet and hoisting it into the attic of her apartment building and lifting some stuff up to put in it. It was much easier work than expected, and definitely worth her buying me dinner.

I also went across the street and bought a hardcover copy of George R. R. Martin's The Armageddon Rag from some fans who live in town. Cool book; I decided I needed the hardcover.

You know you have too much disposable income when you buy extra copies of books you already have. I upgraded my hardcover copy of Vernor Vinge's Across Realtime a few weeks ago, since mine was rather dog-eared. What extravagance!

Spent half an hour playing Myth earlier. I think I'm making a little progress on the second scenario, even if the Ghols did make short work of me in one game. At least I've finally found where the stone circle is! Ack. So I think I have a new plan to try out.

One strange thing about the game is that the standard deviation of my performance is huge. One game I'll acquit myself well, even if I don't win, and take out a whole bunch of enemies before they get me. The next game, playing the same scenario, I won't even take out the first wave of bad guys. I'm not sure if this is because little adjustments have huge effects, because the bad guys play significantly differently from time-to-time, or just because my own units' minds-of-their-own make each game an additional challenge as they react a little differently. It's very unlike other computer games I've played in this regard.

For instance, the old Mac standby Strategic Conquest had very logical, predictable moves by the computer. I remember one game I literally found the computer to a standstill; we were producing units at equal rates, and no strategy (and tried many) would break the deadlock. Even the tried-and-true wargame strategy of "set aside a unit every so often until you have ten or twelve units built up, and then come at him in a big wave" didn't work. I don't know whether he did the same thing, or if extending my supply lines just made it impossible to progress. It was strange. I did eventually give up.

Boy, I really hope SimCity 3000 comes out for the Mac.

I got a number of interesting e-mail messages today, none of which I've yet responded to. One involved the interesting context shift of changing my perception of someone from "someone I've heard about" to "someone I've had actual Internet contact with". It actually surprised me that this was even any sort of shift at all, but clearly I use different filters in my perceptions of someone. How strange.

Some of the other e-mail just involved the hot disagreement on the Boston Red Sox Mailing List about the merits of second baseman Jeff Frye (many members of the list are content with him, but I am not a believer, and we all simply don't see any sense in each other's justifications for our opinions). Ah, I love baseball. Spring training's right around the corner! Seems like only yesterday that the Sox were knocked out of contention for 1997... in fact it was last May or so!

Michael Rawdon (Contact)