Lowering the Ears

Today I got a haircut, the first one in about 6 months. It feels strange, the cold cuts through to my head and ears much more easily than before. Something about it makes me feel different, perhaps more attentive to the environment. I was reading an article in one of those Southwest magazines during a flight one time and there was an article a head-shaving type of guy wrote. He explained that it makes you feel good, your scalp feels tingly against the wind. I'm getting some of that, but I do not wish to brave that territory anytime soon. It's cold, Sadie wouldn't appreciate it, and moreover, I don't have the desire. I'll know the time is right when an inextinguishable flame is lit in my heart to become a Buddhist monk. I think I'm all ready to fly out to Philly tomorrow evening, but we'll have to see how ready I am to start this LoadRunner scripting. Baptism by fire, I suppose.

Well Stymie My Windpipe...

Is a very Señor Cardgage and/or Homsar thing to say.

Learning Loadrunning

I have about 2 days to get my ass in gear and learn Loadrunner so I can try to implement some testing next week somewhere near Princeton University. HB mentioned some bullcrap about not getting raises this year, but thankfully he's going to have a talk with Mel and Nate about it. I'm wondering how much strictly enforcing this policy will affect employee turnover because I have a feeling a few of the guys (myself included) won't be too thrilled with this idea, especially if they've improved their skillset a considerable amount since last year. I suppose we shall see. I am hoping it won't fuck us too badly since that would likely mean more work dumped on my shoulders, but it's not likely I'll quit anytime soon since it affords me many opportunities to go and visit Sadie.

Pain in the Wallet

Ended up going down the worst route... got an Arcade plus an EXTENDED fucking warranty. Never again. To add insult to injury, I'm not going to be able to use all the hard drive space from my Elite drive because for whatever stupid reason this XBox doesn't recognize a few of the games are already installed to the hard drive. Urgh. I guess I should be glad that's one of the biggest problems in my life.

FUCK THE XLOSS 3SHITTY

I smoked some salvia divinorum on February 17th, and again on February 2oth. The first experience was nothing to write home about, I had a strange feeling of pins and needles all over my body and distorted vision, but I didn't feel or see anything. However, on the 20th, shit got real. I took a hit, relaxed, and fell into another dimension. I didn't get the full trip effect for there was no full disassociation of body and mind, but I definitely hallucinated. I was hearing and seeing things that weren't there, or more accurately, seeing things that WERE there in a completely different way. I got the pins and needles sensation once again but this time it was accompianied by visual distortion that can be best described as "making the world 2D." I felt like i was running along boundaries that didn't exist where two colors from separate objects formed one contiguous plane. I could have sworn the music that was playing was describing the situation in my mind as it happened. I would like to do it again, this time for real. I want to break through and place my conciousness into another entity, whether it be a brick, a rabbit, or another human.

XBox in a Messbox

So I still haven't been able to fix my XBox and doubt the project will ever come to fruition now that I've found out my particular XBox fan does not use the standard plug. I need a 3 prong fan and I don't know if i can even get one anywhere. This blows. I'm thinking I may just buy an arcade version and say fuck it since nothing seems to be working as I hoped it would. At least all my save files will be there.

2D Game Notes

XNA 2D game creation notes:

• Create method for handling multiple tilesets per map of differing sizes
• Allow map file to specify tile set, tile size, layer depth, collision and occlusion properties
• Allow also to set parallax scrolling variables
• Create method for automatically loading relevant tilesets and objects into memory on map load