I found this story in my journey, and it’s a familiar thing, so I thought I’d repost the guts of it here. The original article is at Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Our company financial controller and acting HR lady, Jen, came in to see what incredible things the engineers and artists had come up with. Everyone was staring at a television set hooked up to a development box for the Sony Playstation. There, on the screen, against a single-color background, was a black triangle.

“It’s a black triangle,” she said in an amused but sarcastic voice. One of the engine programmers tried to explain, but she shook her head and went back to her office. I could almost hear her thoughts… “We’ve got ten months to deliver two games to Sony, and they are cheering over a black triangle? THAT took them nearly a month to develop?”

What she later came to realize (and explain to others) was that the black triangle was a pioneer. It wasn’t just that we’d managed to get a triangle onto the screen. That could be done in about a day. It was the journey the triangle had taken to get up on the screen. It had passed through our new modeling tools, through two different intermediate converter programs, had been loaded up as a complete database, and been rendered through a fairly complex scene hierarchy, fully textured and lit (though there were no lights, so the triangle came out looking black). The black triangle demonstrated that the foundation was finally complete – the core of a fairly complex system was completed, and we were now ready to put it to work doing cool stuff. By the end of the day, we had complete models on the screen, manipulating them with the controllers. Within a week, we had an environment to move the model through.

They apparently referred to these kinds of advancements as a Black Triangle, a metaphor indicating possibly massive progress, but in a framework or engine or supporting code, such that the current results give you (or rather, people looking at it) no sense of progress. For me, it was usually a white triangle (on a black background) when dealing with 3d graphics, but similar events have occurred, like when I got a tile displaying in one of my 2D games, or when working on an automated script for work creating many large templates and supporting code when the test itself is actually not that long or complex, or Curtis’ graphics project, that had all sorts of physical simulations going on with real-world formulas being applied… but for a long time all he had was a text console spitting out numbers.

I like the Black Triangle metaphor, I will try to remember to use it in future, even if no one knows what the hell I’m talking about.

Sorry, I just had to put this here. I threw on Tron to fall asleep to (as I’m sure Alicia and Curtis would say, because it’s soooo boring that it’s suuure to put me asleep…. *coughbastardscough*)

Anyway, I hit this bit, and It’s just painful.

LORA
Here goes nothing

GIBBS
Heh. Interesting, interesting. You
hear what you said? “Here goes nothing.”

LORA
Well, I –

GIBBS
Whereas actually, what we propose to
do is to turn something into nothing
and back again. So you might just as
well have said, “Here goes something
and here comes nothing.” Heh?

LORA
…. Right….

This is in reference to their molecular disintegration and reintegration laser wotsit.

It’s just… awful.

Sorry again.

Oh, it’s you again. Has it been a year already? What? No, nothing’s changed, you can read this or this, in which I managed to plagiarize myself in the second one, heh.

It’s probably a stereotype that someone like me would dislike this day, and I do. But it’s just another landmark in time, as bad as xmas, or birthdays (which are worse since I get another little tick over my head counting towards death, or at least baldness).

Oh yeah, I guess that’s relatively new. I’m starting to go bald, my hairline is receding. Not with the rapidity as was seen with my brother, but it’s happening. The rest of my hair is really thick, so eventually I’ll probably look like Doc Brown from Back to the Future. The perfect triumvirate, fat, ugly and bald. It’s baffling that I’m single, it’s that supposed to be the new physical ideal? what? it isn’t? Oh.

Tomorrow I’ll celebrate annual February 15th day.

Looking over some old code for various classes at waterloo, stumbled upon this, which if I recall correctly, was one of two songs we came up with during cs342 during long lab sessions only interrupted by massive hand trauma. We actually put an .cpp extension on this so it would be submitted along with the code, but not being in the make file, wouldn’t screw anything up. Anyway, here it is… and boy, is it geeky. How I miss concurrency…. “You… shall…. not….. pass!!’

I Will Debug
(sung to the tune of I Will Survive)

First I was naive
Life was so sublime
Just a casual geek
Coding from time to time
But I spent so many nights
Trapped infront of my screen
Hooked on Caffine
Because these assignments are all mean
and so you’re back
from dinner break
You just walked in to find me here
with that stunned look upon my face
I should have released my stupid lock
I shouldn’t have blocked in your queue
If I had known for just one second
that this deadlock would ensue

Go on now debug that code
just typed in gmake
damn stupid server load
wasn’t that your class that was compiling when it died
you think I’d not compile
you think I’d deadlock and die
Oh no, not I
I will debug
as long as I make mistakes
I’ll have coffee in my mug
I’ve got all my code to write
I’ve got to stay up all night
and I will debug
I will debug

It took all the Coke I had
not to fall asleep
kept trying hard to make
myself stop counting sheep
and I spent oh so many nights
just thinking to myself
I used to try
Now I just give up and cry
and you see me
somebody old
I’m not that happy little person
just bitter and cold
and so you asked me if I passed
and just expect to say yes
but I just say kiss my ass
’cause my life is such a mess!

hey hey

Went to Fat Cat with some friends for Winterlicious, which is a set time when restaurants pretend to offer a lower price prix fixe menu, but in fact charge a large amount for merely worse food. Well, to be fair, the food was alright, but the service was pretty bad.

So some of us arrive, we are originally 11 but one couldn’t make it, 10 is still a respectable number. But at first, only 4 of us are there, and the staff badger us a number of times about whether the rest of our party is coming. Yes yes, we say, they are just a little late. Like 10-15 minutes, not terrible. But in that period they ask three times, go away already, surely there are other customers to harass.

So we utter the phrase that seems to be the bane of our waiter, “separate cheques”…. “No, no” he says, “No, that’s just…… impossible… we can’t do that… with…. we’ve got a lot of people…. we just.. No… no, it’s impossible.” Hmm, I wonder how many decades we will have to wait for the technology for separate cheques to catch up with our fanciful dreams.

The next thing is the sort of thing people experience often, but man, it’s hard getting his attention, and we were trying to buy wine… wine!, don’t you want to sell us your relatively expensive wine?

Two stragglers finally came, but they didn’t seem inclines to sit apart. We had one spot at one end of the table on one side, and one on the far side on the other, but one sat at the head of the table where there was a chair but no plates or cultery. We started shifting down, but the waiter jumps out again, “No no, don’t move around, you’ll mess up the seating order.. we can’t handle that.. no… no…..”

The food was alright, nothing particularly fancy. One of my friends said, quite loudly, but not knowing the waiter was pouring water two seats down, that Winterlicious isn’t a good time to try to experience a restaurants best food. Heheh, unfortunately, it was accurate enough. I won’t talk about the food, curtis can do that himself I guess.

Anyway, we were there for a while, got the bill, paid, and then were told we should be on our way. Thanks.

Conclusion, if ever you have Fat Cat’s food, it’s probably best to get it to go.

I just watched this again, I caught it years ago. I’m referring to the 80’s movie version of it. It’s a story of rabbits and their adventures through what I’m told is analogies to various political systems. Regardless, it’s a decent movie, that is also pretty graphic. It’s also kind of sad as you see how bad humans are in it, from the rabbit’s point of view. But a few times a human stopped a cat, so it’s all good.

I think the part I liked the most was the concept of the rabbit having their own creation fable, and the style in which it was done is really nice.

As usual, Youtube has it.

I suggest watching the movie if you can.

My first embedded movie, joy.

My friends and I finally exchanged christmas gifts. It was delayed by going home for christmas and not having a chance to meet up beforehand, and then by the plague I contracted and other general delays. But the exchange was made, and I got some very nostalgic gifts. I also got a watch, which is very nice, too nice for me, heh, but I need to take it to a jeweler to shrink the band a bit. But that’s not the nostalgic bit.

I got the Space Quest Collection (the latest one, I read there was another created by that name years ago), containing the 6 games, for the PC. And I also got the Activision Anthology, 45 Atari 2600 games, for the PS2. Lots of nostalgia. Oh, also, the title is just a joke, in and of itself, but it’s not meant to imply I don’t like the nostalgia I go into detail here.

I played Space Quest I today, I was a little dissapointed to see that the version provided was the VGA version. See, Space Quest I was originally an EGA game, and that was the version I knew and loved. They remade it a few years later, redoing all the graphics and changing it from a text parser game to a mouse-action game like some of the later creations. Still, I had never played that version, and I managed to beat it today, being a relatively short game when you know what to do (and I still know most of the puzzle elements by heart). But it was funny to be stuck on the little differences made to the VGA version, most frustratingly being the copy-protection they introduced. Most of their games have that kind of crap, and you have to refer to the manual, which they provided… as a PDF. They also recommend printing out the PDF as well. Heh, no thanks. But as all the games run in a licensed version of DOSBox, it’s easy to ALT-Tab out. I already had a version of the original EGA version of the game as well from a couple years back, so no matter.

Space Quest I, the EGA version

Space Quest I, the VGA version

I had played Space Quest 2 and I think 3 in the past, so I’ll play them again here, plus I’ll have 4, 5 and 6 from this collection, so it’s pretty kickass. The real selling point is that it’s all supposed to work flawlessly in Windows XP. Well, they cheated and used DOSBox, but still, presumably they tested it. I did discover a weird bug in Space Quest 2 during the save screen, it sort of screws up and leaves a bit of the screen on the game screen, which gets refreshed as you change it (like walk over the corrupted area, or just leave the screen and reenter). I hope in the damn police guys in the arcade (vaguely remember it from one of the Space Quests) are managable, as running it directly on a fast computer tended to make it impossible.

The Activision Anthology is actually kind of interesting. You pick from the 45 games from a rack, and play them on a TV (by which time it goes fullscreen). There are a lot of good classics on there which work as well as I remember them, like Plaque Attack, Crackpots, Dolphin, Oink, and my personal favorite, StarMaster. Those are some of the ones I used to have way back as cartridges. They also included some decent ones like Kabobbler and Pitfall, and some trash as well, heh.

StarMaster – The Great

Plaque Attack – The Good

Demon Attack – The WTF

It includes a set of 80’s songs that play in the background of everything, which repeat just a little too often, but still add a lot to the nostalgia factor (though ironically most of them are songs I liked much later in life, not in the 80’s). They also offer some interesting things to unlock, like commercials for some of the games, and patches (which I assume are graphical renderings of the real patches you could win by submitting proof of score to activision for certain games). The lamest attempt of value added crap to the collection are different viewing modes, like playing games where the game screen is textured on a rotating cube, or rotates slowly or zooms in and out. These games are meant to be pretty damn hard because there’s no ending for most of them.. you play until you die. I can’t imagine why you’d want clouds or stars interfering with your Dolphin run. But fine, they are there.. and they are turned off, heh.

The thing is with most of the early Space Quest games, and with all of the atari games, I doubt most people could just sit and play them and enjoy them. They are archaic, the atari games especially, playing for points, most of the time no ending, graphics quite startling at times… even I look at some of them and go “wow” because I remember them being so much better, but I’m sure that’s just because back when they were new, anything was amazing. The nostalgia power is high, I can still enjoy such games. Can you?

So it’s 2007, hurrah *waves flag*

Resolutions, the same as they have always been, lose mass and/or alternately find partner who isn’t concerned with my mass. Both are equally improbable as in 2006.

As I wrote in my holidaymas entry, I’m still sick. Under the advisement of my mother, I struggled into the walk-in clinic that’s relatively close to me. I as yet haven’t obtained a local doctor.

It was mostly an excersize in futility as I was waiting there for 2 hours, sucking up all the other ailments around me, and then got invited into to an office which doubles as another waiting room. I’d just call it a Personal Waiting Room rather than a doctors office, because when you wait in there 20 minutes, but the doctor only looks at you for 5, then I think the majority function should rule when deciding it’s name.

And of course, as it’s been for the last couple of times where I had a terrible strep-throat feeling, they say they can see nothing wrong at all. So of course the constant pain I’m in and having been unable to sleep for 3-4 days at this point (can no longer remember how long I’ve been awake at this junction) must just be in my head or something… like my gall-bladder pain was until someone spotted the real problem.

He was unwilling to just give me a general antibody prescription, and so I asked for something to manage the pain. I got a gargle which works maybe slightly better than the Chloraseptic spray I’ve been using, but at least I don’t swollow the gargle. That spray really upsets one’s stomach when you end up having to go 5000% over the daily limited dosage. I also got some pain killer drug called Tramacet which I’m allowed to take 1-2 pills every 8 hours. It’s not that I’m adverse to pain medication, I wanted it, but I also wanted something to deal with the root of the problem since I’m not sure this will go away on it’s own.

So I took 2 pills, gargled, had something to drink, and eventually did finally fall asleep. I woke up about 6 hours later. My throat was a bit sore, so I got up and opted to just gargle again so I could more quickly sleep. Now I don’t know if my body just wanted me to sleep at this point, or if I was having an adverse reaction to the pills, but I felt *awful* when I got to the bathroom. I felt incredibly lightheaded, dizzy, and was afraid I was going to throw up. But I managed to quickly gargle and stumbled back to the bed, and realized I was covered in sweat and the bed was soaked (er… from sweat) but I just decided to sleep again.

Now I’m awake again. It’s been 12 hours since the first time I fell asleep, so that’s not bad, I still have to catch up through I think, after missing so much sleep. I decided to just take a single pill now that it’s past the 8 hour dosage period, just in case it is the pills causing the side-effects. I don’t care ultimately, just as long as I can sleep. Unfortunately, this will be useless for work tomorrow, since being dizzy and nauseous won’t really help my productivity, unless we manufacture vomit.

One thing that might suggest I don’t have a strep throat after all is that when I woke up now and went to the bathroom, my throat was actually pretty sore again, but then I started coughing. I tend to check the colour of my phlegm… sensitive people/sana’a may wish to stop reading at this point…. anyway, earlier on in my sickness it was pretty much white and bloody, which is how it always goes with me. During the past couple of days, I didn’t really have much phlegm but I coughed up little bits of it regularly and whenever I looked it just looked whitish. But now that I’ve been able to sleep, a lot built up, so I coughed, with apologies, a large amount up. And the colour is sort of in-between the ones to look out for. It’s sort of a yellowy-greenish, but much darker than I would have expected, I don’t understand that. As it’s more yellowy than green, I will assume my body is fighting the infection. Which still could be strep, but from the first statement in this paragraph, it’s because my throat hurt less after I coughed all that crap up. I don’t recall having that effect with strep, so maybe I just have a really really really bad cold.

In any case, it’s been the suckiest week of my life (in recent memory)

I guess I’ll try to avoid a repeat in 2007. I’m dizzy again, back to bed I guess.