fine whine

So with the holidays lately I've had a few weekdays away from my desk*. As is often the case when this happens, I had some errands to run, and interesting stores in which to stop nearby. At one point I found myself wandering through a MicroCenter (though I bought nothing), and near the video game section I saw something I wish I could've caught on video (and posted to youtube). But I didn't have a good camera handy, and my phone's movie mode would've been rather a bit lacking. So it's time to dust off your imagination (take that, you click-happy tweens).

In front of me, there was a kid playing Guitar Hero. For those not in the know, Guitar Hero is a console video game that comes with a plastic guitar-like controller, and players push fret-like buttons while doing a motion similar to strumming, in time with popular rock and metal songs (or cover versions thereof). The kid appeared to have average skills, hitting the correct buttons at the right time. This was not the remarkable part, of course. Much more interesting than the player, was the kid standing next to him, fingers in the air, miming the same notes.

He was playing air Guitar Hero. There was, of course, a second guitar controller on the demo kiosk, but I think he was probably having more fun playing his fantasy version of the song than actually hitting the buttons. Or he was trying to be supportive of his buddy. Or perhaps he was doing a very convoluted form of mockery.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty funny. Guitar Hero, from my feeble attempts to play it, is already once removed from the actual experience of playing the guitar. This kid found a way to do it one better, I guess. And about 50 to 80 bucks cheaper, too.

* I almost wrote "...weekdays I wasn't working" there, but with something of a slowdown at work I don't know if I can count all the hours I was there as hours I really worked. I was there, and available for work, there just wasn't any to do at the moment. Hence the deathmatch tournaments of Nexuiz, and before that, Marathon Infinity (through the magic of AlephOne).

I remembered something else that was somewhat notable for 2007: it marked the first time I'd ever eaten guacamole*.

* For the curious, 2006 was the year of the cantaloupe.

I didn't post as much this year. Notable things about which I wrote nothing:

• Both of my grandfathers died in December. I still haven't figured out what I want to say about that.
• I failed once again to complete a 50,000 word novel in November. But I came up with a much better idea for next year's.
• Natalya turned 1 year old in October, meaning we could finally officially stop worrying about SIDS. Not that I ever did anyway.
• I left the fashion industry in September. I also read the complete Harry Potter series (for the first time) in under four weeks. These two events are not at all related.
• In August (I think) the guy housesitting for my neighbor across the street passed away in her house, and was not found for a week. I was one of the few people on the street who had ever even met the guy, and I didn't even know his name until he was already gone. In cleaning up her house, my neighbor gave me a nice desk ending the four years I'd used my computer with it and me both on the floor.
• I can't really remember much of anything from July. So ends the monthly portion of this wrap-up.*
• The two hundred or so photos I've posted on flickr aren't even a fraction of the over seven gigabytes of JPGs I've created this year.
• I survived watching 61 movies from India, most of which could be considered "Bollywood". Two I watched without any subtitles at all.
• The entire year passed without me attempting to access the internet with my mobile phone, despite it being capable of doing so.

More ideas may occur to me - I just didn't want to let December pass without any posts at all. Happy new year.

* The only other month-based item of note is in January, wherein I visited Chicago the weekend of B-Fest but was unable to attend it because I was in Illinois for less than a total of 24 hours. Eating dinner in the Signature Room of the John Hancock Tower was superb. Being back at my desk eighteen hours later was not.

I've been meaning to post this for several weeks now*, but I had some trouble getting back into this kind of Flash animation. Basically Natalya did something small and simple that I thought was, well, pretty cool.

It wasn't so much what she did, as the apparent thought process and (very short) time it took to do so. I think we're beginning to see the early flickers of some sort of intelligence brewing.

Enough about intelligence though. Check out my cheesy animation. There's no sound, so don't worry when you don't hear anything. Hit the big green button to play it.

* I'd like to think that now I'll get around to posting the stuff that I meant to post after this, soon. At least, I don't have this as an excuse anymore. I'm backdating this about a week just because it really shouldn't have taken me this long to make a simple animation like this.

I shot this footage yesterday. If the player below isn't working, click this link to see it. It's not long - around eleven seconds.

For over three years the front page of my website has been relatively unchanged (take a look), and to be honest, it looked more like 2002 than 2004.

Until today. Today I finally switched over to a new design, and completely new underlying programming, that I began working on back in March. I'd intended it to be an April 1st prank (the working title was 417), a past-the-trend Web2.0 redesign, but April 1st came and went and I was nowhere near being able to flip the switch.

Well, now I've flipped it.

It's still not 100% complete - I really wanted to build my own photo gallery, and intend to do so still, but the two boxes of thumbnails on the front page are actually the result of a fair amount of coding, and more than a few tools for fetching the images from Flickr and showing them. A complete list of the tools I used and am using is beyond the scope of this post, but the number of them that I tried and didn't use would be four or five times as long.

I still have a long way to go with bringing all of the old stuff to match the new, but given what I'd done with those pages sometime between 2004 and now it won't really be that big of a deal to update them all together.

One thing I'd really like to highlight, though, is the code directory. Right now there's only one page there, the monkeymaker, but I think that my fellow Columbus residents* may find it to be useful. Launching that has been something I've meant to do for quite some time, but I never got around to writing up that post.

For that matter I'd been meaning to do the rest of these updates back in August when I discovered that my web hosting had changed, breaking almost all of what I'd coded, down to how I'd referenced filenames. I made enough of a nuisance with the hosting company to get some of what I needed fixed (Not bad considering how little money they'll ever make from me), but the rest of the broken stuff I needed to fix by hand.

It's been an interesting challenge - there are a lot of things that just don't work right, but coding around them has been almost fun, and certainly educational.

It's a never ending learning process, though - and if you happen to find something I still need to fix, or have any suggestions, please feel free to contact me. Thanks in advance if you do.

* At least the ones that use both Firefox and the local library with some regularity.