Well, I managed to go through the holidays without making any blog entries. I guess I just wasn't in a writing mood. I gained five pounds over the last few weeks, so I will have to start Atkins induction all over again starting Monday.
I had most of these last two weeks off of work. I'm a little disappointed with myself, because I really didn't do much of anything with that time. I did see "The Return of the King" three times, so I suppose it wasn't a total waste. I had intended to do a bunch of work during the break, but once the break got here, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. As my dear friend Gandalf would say, "It was the deep breath before the plunge."
Tomorrow is my first day at my new job. I'm very excited, and very nervous about it too. To be honest, I don't exactly know what it is I'll be doing. I don't know if I will have an office or not, or just how terribly awful the commute will be. We did have a couple days of 70 degree weather, which I spent driving around town with the top down on my car. However, right now it's pouring down raining and getting colder by the second. My first day commute could end up being on ice slicked roads!
I've been thinking about how to survive the commute. I've considered getting audio books to pass the time. I bought one recently called "Prey" by Michael Crichton. 11 CD's, 13 hours, unabridged. It is simply awful. I listened to most of it while on an airplane flight, so at least it passed the time, sort of. Listening to the final 2 CD's was just utterly painful. I'm not up for a big fancy review here, but let me summarize "Crichton sucks Ass".
The Crichton book cost almost $50, so it didn't seem reasonable that I would be buying huge numbers of audio books for the drive. I have decided to try something different. For decades Americans did not have television for entertainment, but rather instead listened to the radio. Radio programs were operated like today's network TV, with regular shows, comedies, dramas, and plays. There is a huge group on the internet that collects these shows, under the acronym,OTR, which stands for Old Time Radio. The legal status of these shows are a little bit questionable. The reality is, nobody really cares. You can download over 200 gigabytes of OTR from the internet for as low as $7.50 a gig. I bought mine from the OTR FTP Server website. You buy credits, and then can download OTR from their FTP server whenever you want. I downloaded a wide variety to see what, if any, of it I would like. I think the plays are going to appeal to me the most. I have over 2 hours a day of my life that is now going to be spent in a car in rush hour traffic. Finding a coping mechanism is a key concern of mine. Of course, once baseball season starts my home commute won't be nearly so bad.
On New Years Eve my wife talked us into spending $125 a couple to go to a party with a band. Well, the band was not that great and because I felt obligated to recoup as much of my $125 investment as possible I drank way too much. Which meant, New Years day, I spent most of the day in bed sick. It wasn't really all just the alcohol, I have that flu or whatever is going around and that's the main reason I didn't get too much done this Christmas break. I was just sick a lot. Hopefully it's all out of my system by now though.
I did do a little bit of programming on break. I wrote a very cool utility that will convert a high resolution heightfield into a highly optimized static mesh in VRML 1.0 or 2.0 format. You can download the source code to the tool and one small sample file as TER2WRL.ZIP There is a larger download with some fantastic looking sample data at TERDATA.ZIP. To view the output data you can use the very popular VRML viewer called GlView, written by Holger Grahm. To edit the heightfield data you use a program called Leveller written by my friend Ray Gardener. I wrote this utility in preparation for my new job where one of my key goals is to work with real environments early on.
I have recently decided I want to start a regular poker game. It's something I have been thinking about doing for a very long time, but I would like to make it happen. It's very difficult to start up a regular poker game but, then again, it's very hard to join one too. I outright tried to invite myself to one I heard about in our neighborhood. However, I discovered it's too rich for my blood. What I am looking for is a poker game that runs about once a month, with about 5 to 7 guys, with stakes such that nobody could typically lose more than about $50 in an evening. At that price, it's just good entertainment. So far, none of the current group of guys I hang out with play. I used to play poker many years ago with Dan Bunten (later Dani Bunten), Ray Tobey, and a bunch of the guys from Electronic Arts.
Well, I've rambled along enough for today. I suppose I'll spend my last day of freedom watching football. If you have some good ideas about how to *productively* pass time during a lengthy commute, please let me know.
Happy New Year!
I had most of these last two weeks off of work. I'm a little disappointed with myself, because I really didn't do much of anything with that time. I did see "The Return of the King" three times, so I suppose it wasn't a total waste. I had intended to do a bunch of work during the break, but once the break got here, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. As my dear friend Gandalf would say, "It was the deep breath before the plunge."
Tomorrow is my first day at my new job. I'm very excited, and very nervous about it too. To be honest, I don't exactly know what it is I'll be doing. I don't know if I will have an office or not, or just how terribly awful the commute will be. We did have a couple days of 70 degree weather, which I spent driving around town with the top down on my car. However, right now it's pouring down raining and getting colder by the second. My first day commute could end up being on ice slicked roads!
I've been thinking about how to survive the commute. I've considered getting audio books to pass the time. I bought one recently called "Prey" by Michael Crichton. 11 CD's, 13 hours, unabridged. It is simply awful. I listened to most of it while on an airplane flight, so at least it passed the time, sort of. Listening to the final 2 CD's was just utterly painful. I'm not up for a big fancy review here, but let me summarize "Crichton sucks Ass".
The Crichton book cost almost $50, so it didn't seem reasonable that I would be buying huge numbers of audio books for the drive. I have decided to try something different. For decades Americans did not have television for entertainment, but rather instead listened to the radio. Radio programs were operated like today's network TV, with regular shows, comedies, dramas, and plays. There is a huge group on the internet that collects these shows, under the acronym,OTR, which stands for Old Time Radio. The legal status of these shows are a little bit questionable. The reality is, nobody really cares. You can download over 200 gigabytes of OTR from the internet for as low as $7.50 a gig. I bought mine from the OTR FTP Server website. You buy credits, and then can download OTR from their FTP server whenever you want. I downloaded a wide variety to see what, if any, of it I would like. I think the plays are going to appeal to me the most. I have over 2 hours a day of my life that is now going to be spent in a car in rush hour traffic. Finding a coping mechanism is a key concern of mine. Of course, once baseball season starts my home commute won't be nearly so bad.
On New Years Eve my wife talked us into spending $125 a couple to go to a party with a band. Well, the band was not that great and because I felt obligated to recoup as much of my $125 investment as possible I drank way too much. Which meant, New Years day, I spent most of the day in bed sick. It wasn't really all just the alcohol, I have that flu or whatever is going around and that's the main reason I didn't get too much done this Christmas break. I was just sick a lot. Hopefully it's all out of my system by now though.
I did do a little bit of programming on break. I wrote a very cool utility that will convert a high resolution heightfield into a highly optimized static mesh in VRML 1.0 or 2.0 format. You can download the source code to the tool and one small sample file as TER2WRL.ZIP There is a larger download with some fantastic looking sample data at TERDATA.ZIP. To view the output data you can use the very popular VRML viewer called GlView, written by Holger Grahm. To edit the heightfield data you use a program called Leveller written by my friend Ray Gardener. I wrote this utility in preparation for my new job where one of my key goals is to work with real environments early on.
I have recently decided I want to start a regular poker game. It's something I have been thinking about doing for a very long time, but I would like to make it happen. It's very difficult to start up a regular poker game but, then again, it's very hard to join one too. I outright tried to invite myself to one I heard about in our neighborhood. However, I discovered it's too rich for my blood. What I am looking for is a poker game that runs about once a month, with about 5 to 7 guys, with stakes such that nobody could typically lose more than about $50 in an evening. At that price, it's just good entertainment. So far, none of the current group of guys I hang out with play. I used to play poker many years ago with Dan Bunten (later Dani Bunten), Ray Tobey, and a bunch of the guys from Electronic Arts.
Well, I've rambled along enough for today. I suppose I'll spend my last day of freedom watching football. If you have some good ideas about how to *productively* pass time during a lengthy commute, please let me know.
Happy New Year!
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