Archive for May, 2006

Life Equation

Wednesday, May 31st, 2006

Working a lot + Not sleeping much + Very little gaming = Where the hell is the weekend?

I don’t really mind the working so much. Any time work ever seems to be too much I just think about how I used to have to work. That’s called “Putting things in perspective.”

Hell, I got up this morning, and started working before I had breakfast. I just needed to solve the puzzle before I could start the day. I’m a puzzler. The miniscule amount of sleep helped me figure it all out.

Basically, the STL has some really slow algorithms. So I by thinking about it and messing around a bit with a few ideas I sped up a critical path in the code by a bajillion percent. It went from sometimes taking up to 41% of a frame, to about 0.35%. That’s what I call progress.

Tomorrow, or tonight after I get home, it’s time to get those loading times down. I have a plan as they say. A plan to take over the world! Well okay, maybe not to take over the world, but to put the files in order… oh yes, to put the files in order.

Time for some brain dead time on the bus now.

Night all.

The Big Blue Room

Monday, May 29th, 2006

Yesterday was kind of a sad day. Meghan resigned from the guild/raid in World of Warcraft.

It reminded me of when I stopped playing Ragnarok Online. Ilona quit, Jeff quit, Kim quit, I got really bored because none of my close friends were still playing, and then I quit. I didn’t even so much quit, as I just sort of drifted away from it. After they were all gone, other things were just more fun.

I guess I’ll see how things fall out. I don’t really have anything keeping me in the guild at this point. The beating heart and soul of the guild is gone now. I really only joined and brought a few others over because I knew it was something that Meghan always wanted. I am an “officer” of the guild, but I’m not actually involved in any decision making.

I have heard others say that they would leave if Meghan left. So I’ll see how many people are left in a week. Maybe I’ll go back to Affinity. Maybe I’ll go back to Soldiers of Ragnarok. There are probably like three people left in those guilds.

I think there are still about a dozen people in Soldiers of Ragnarok in iRO. At least there were last time I checked in on everyone.

I had some good times in iRO =) People used to stop and stare in awe as SoR rolled through the dungeons. Nothing could stop us in our prime. We were one of the only guilds that even tried to take on the world bosses. I can remember one night we were rolling through the big undead instance, which then was probably the hardest in the game, and people kept saying how they had never seen anything like that before. Even priests wanted to be in our guild.

There was a limit in iRO as to how many people could be in a guild. We always had a pretty steady flow of people wanting to join. Guild membership had a sense of pride to it. It was so much more special because it was limited. There was no room for alts (which we got around by having a few seperate guilds like Merchants of Ragnarok). It was also special to someone new to the guild, because they knew they beat out a bunch of other people to get in.

I’ve never found that feeling again since.

I have been mulling the idea of quitting WoW over for a long time. There hasn’t really been any single contributing factor to it. Just lots of little things adding up:
- The rep grinding is tedious and boring.
- The direction that the raid is heading I don’t really agree with. Mostly because I don’t enjoy AQ40. I believe there is one upgrade item in there for me. There are a couple of other items that are like 0.001% or 0.002% better than what I currently have. Hardly worth the effort.
- Work is going to be getting a lot more demanding between now and September.
- I have more and more of my friends heading out to Vancouver.
- A few other things…

But hey, maybe it’s just time for me to take a break again. I’ve had a couple of one month breaks in the past.

At the same time, I don’t want to quit. It’s cheap entertainment(fifty cents a day) that fills my days and nights with fun most of the time (although the fun factor will be significantly diminished now I think, at least for a while). At some point I know I will need to really step back and re-evaluate my life and where things fit into it (tends to happen around September and December/January of each year).

Maybe this will all pass in a couple of weeks. I honestly don’t know what I would do to fill my time if I quit playing WoW. I think that I used to write, and play other games. I seem to remember spending time in the big blue room with the bright shiny orb at the top and the living green rug once in a while as well.

Brunch

Friday, May 26th, 2006

dark and secret
all things perfect
wandering around
in the tall concrete
sneaking beneath canopies
as the rain pelts down
soaking and drowning
smiling wetly
dodging street people
with organizers
who knew the homeless
required schedules
past the japanese tourists
taking pictures of everything
of the 24 hour McDonalds
so much taken for granted
across a busy street
through a crowd of people
up the steps of an unsigned building
arrival at Saturday brunch

It’s been one week… okay… maybe more…

Thursday, May 25th, 2006

Being sick, is really not fun. I worked from home the last two days because I was sick.

I’m not sure what it is about moving to a new city that makes me seem to be so prone to getting sick. The same thing happened when I moved to Montreal. I guess it has something to do with adjusting to the public transportation or maybe some stress I don’t notice that is affecting me.

Regardless, it very much sucks.

Ilona and I talked for the first time in a while yesterday. That definitely cheered me up and made me feel better. She wrote something new, and it was absolutely amazing. I was tingling.

Life here has been good overall. I think next week when Shaun gets here it will be more fun. It will be nice to have one of my good friends who is my age and still single to drag around the city with me. It’s fun to go wandering around and exploring on your own, but it’s better to have a partner in crime to back you up when you see something or something happens that no one will believe.

Tomorrow night a few of us are getting together for dinner. Yet another friend from my HB days is coming out to Vancouver for a few days. Someday they’ll all end up out here. He was going to be crashing at my place Friday night because his travel arrangements got messed up, but I heard today they are all sorted out.

At least it will give me a chance to have a couple of beer with the team here at work tomorrow since dinner isn’t until 7pm. I’ve missed every once a month social team night because of raiding. Don’t get me wrong, I love my raiding, but I need to get to know the team here at work better too.

Holy fricking wow! They just dropped off a new 23″ high definition widescreen flatpanel tv at my desk at work… and hooked up cable for me! I have tv at work! How amazingly cool is that? Pfft. Good bye 20″ crt, you’ve served me well, may you find peace in your next life at the scrap heap.

The whole week has been like that. Happy and sad. Gratifying and frustrating. Up and down. Push and pull.

Is everyone alright out there? I hope so.

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

This morning I woke up at 5:15am frozen and shaking. It wasn’t actually cold in the apartment or outside. I tried to cover myself with a mountain of blankets, but it didn’t help. I just couldn’t seem to get warm or stop shaking. Shaking violently to the point that it was hard to get out of bed.

I filled the tub with very hot water, but within five minutes of submersing myself in it; it felt luke warm. I continued to shake for about 20 more minutes.

It’s a scary thing to go through, and it’s not the first time it has happened. It has been happening once in a while since I was in highschool.

There is an odd tie between me getting these freezing shakes and the people I know and care about. The last time this happened was the day that my friend Ilona was in a car accident. Usually the worse it is, the worse the problem or the closer the person is to me.

I didn’t get any sleep after 5:15am, so I’m running on about three and a half hours of sleep. I tried to go back to bed at around 8:15am, but my body kept alternating between being too hot and being too cold. I made it to work though. Now I just have a massive headache and a sense of uneasiness.

Life is so weird.