February 29, 2004
Obligatory Monthly Posting
Haven't posted much in here lately! Been kinda busy, plus nothing too exciting has happened lately. I've been trying to learn C mostly, I'm about halfway through Petzold's Programming Windows book. It's an old book but it's good for learning the Windows API, I guess. He does go on about Unicode a lot though, I wish he would have just stuck all that in an appendix rather than rave about it every second sentence.
I'm also trying to write a program, it's a DOS program right now, that reads info from MP3 files, stores it, displays it and shit. I know there's tons of programs out there already that do this sort of thing, but I'm just doing it as a programming excercise. It was going well 'til I got to the part where it actually reads the info from the file! That's when I started getting crashes every time I tested it. Unfortunately, I hadn't saved any early, working versions, so I was forced to muck about the code, ripping things out, trying to find the problem. Yuck. Now I'm making a new version every time I alter the code significantly. I did find the problem. I had a piece of code that opened a file, read the information, closed the file and moved on to the next file in the directory. The problem was, I put the fclose() function on the wrong side of the braces! Doh! The program would try to open the next file before closing the last one. Not good.
February 24, 2004
Cricket Run
Had to get some crickets for my tarantulas today. It's been over two months since I've fed them! While I was in there, the pet shop, they mentioned that they had some tarantulas, so I had to check them out. There was a Gramastola pulcra, I think, that they wanted $250 for. A bit expensive methinks. They also had a giant pinktoe sub-adult for $110 and a regular pinktoe for $30. A Haplopelma minax for $30. A bunch of rosies for $30 each. And last, but not least, they had an immature male Goliath for $175. Guess it would be worth that much to somebody with a mature female. Wow, was it huge though. It was in one of those pet pals and its leg span covered the whole bottom, way bigger than any of the other spiders. Pretty cool.
I might pick up the Haplopelma on the weekend. When I came home, my Cobalt Blue was out at the mouth of her lair, the first time I've seen her in a couple months. It's like she knew I was picking up some crickets for her. :) She looked fine, a bit bigger [she must have molted] but her abdomen was still plump so no worries. I just wonder if she's ever going to renovate her lair. She dug that thing like a year ago when she was much smaller and it doesn't look like she's expanded it very much.
February 19, 2004
Eat the Rich
It's too bad they don't have a larger version of his X-ray. In the newspaper picture, you could see all these needles he had eaten as well. But what I want to know is, did the doctors get to keep the coins?
You're a wee li'l puppet man!
Today, Disney bought the muppet characters from the Hensons. Coincidentally, tonight's episode of Angel, Smile Time, is about...
A very good episode, I couldn't stop laughing at how preposterous the premise was, and yet they pulled it off. I think the best Buffy/Angel episodes are the ones where they go out on a limb and try something different. The Space Channel [Canada] replays new episodes on Mondays if you missed it. I can't believe they're cancelling Angel after this season, it's the only show I actually make an effort to watch every week. :(
February 18, 2004
I can make my computer crash real good!
Aren't you proud of me, Bill? I was messing around, writing a DOS program in C, to read ID3 tags in mp3 files, and everything was going well. My little program could read the TAG element, artist, title, but when I tried to read the album entry, not only would my program crash, but it locked up Windows totally, requiring a hard reset! Impressive. After screwing around with the source code [and rebooting Windows once or ten times], it finally dawned on me that it might be a memory problem. Doh! Sure enough, I do the malloc(), free() thing and everything works fine. I guess the whole memory allocation thing is kinda important.
February 17, 2004
My Long Weekend
It snowed on Saturday. Hopefully it will all be gone by the time I go to work tomorrow. Tried to fixed my bike this weekend. The rear brake is still seized, I oiled it, didn't help. Front brakes only again tomorrow. :( Finished reading C by Example, now I have to use that knowledge before it all seeps out of my brain again. Good beginner's book if you've never done programming before, explains things very, very simply, no long, extended, complex examples. Learned about malloc() and free(), pointers, structures, reading and writing structures to files, all that good stuff. Watched a couple movies this weekend, Daredevil [ok, Jennifer Garner makes it worthwile] and May [very weird, poking your eye's out weird]. Played around with the Perl module ImageMagick, pretty cool once you figure out how to make it work. I'm just using it to make thumbnails, but it looks like you can do all kinds of image manipulations with it.
February 16, 2004
February 12, 2004
Male Emilia molted
My male Brachypelma emilia molted yesterday while I was at work. He came through fine, which is the most important thing I guess. But I was a little disappointed that he still hasn't matured. No tibial hooks, no little boxing gloves. I'm sure he's a male, the coloration is very different from my female and he matches pictures I've seen of male emilias. Guess I'll just have to wait until next year, I don't think he'll molt again for another full year. He came through with nice bright colours though.
February 11, 2004
The Daily Grind
This week has really sucked for me, so what's new. I got a flat tire yesterday, and then again today! Just fixed it, checked out my disc brake while I had the wheel off, it's all corroded and seized up. I put some oil on it, hopefully loosen it up. I left the brake pads off because even the littlest bit of oil will ruin the disc pads. So I'll only have front brakes to use tomorrow. I'm going to have to get to work early tomorrow as well because everybody loaded me up with deliveries at the end of the day today. Groan. And I'm sure they'll all expect me to get theirs done first, but I can't do them all first, somebody has to be last! My job can be somewhat stressful at times. At least the weather's nice.
February 10, 2004
Prince of Persia
I finished Prince of Persia tonight! Yea for me. Wicked game, it was a lot of fun. The fighting, the puzzles, the story, everything was top notch. I really liked the music, the drummer [?] from the Tea Party did it. The voice acting was well done as well. Heck, everything about it was great. I only got stuck once, at around 55% there's this part where you have to throw a timer switch which raises a gate, then climb a ladder, cross a bunch of balance beams and run across the raised gate before it goes back down. I had to redo this damn thing about a hundred times over before I finally managed to pull it off. Other than that, the gameplay was well balanced, challenging in spots but never too hard.
February 07, 2004
Phone Booth
I've hated, hated every movie Joel Schumacher has ever made, but I've just finished watching Phone Booth, which he directed, and it was pretty damn good. A lot of dark humour combined with a suspensful plot, I guess even Schumacher couldn't screw up this script. Colin Farrell, whom I'm not crazy about either, was very good as the slimey publicist, and Kiefer Sutherland was perfect as the demented sniper. Some stuff was a little farfetched, [spoiler below]
like how the sniper walked through the crime scene afterwards with a large suitcase, I mean come on, give me a break, that was a bit much. Very good movie, check it out if you passed it by because it was directed by such a hack. It was good despite him.
Cable screwing up now...
My internet connection was out for most of the day, and then when I get back online, Google News is all in French! Sacrebleu!
Computer Problems
Holy crap, I was offline for three days because my CPU died and my ISP never changed my IP. Cool, I don't have to mess around changing my zone file and shit. My old cpu was a 1.7 gig AMD chip that I baught last May, but it was on special so there was only a 30 day warranty! Bogus. So I replaced it with a 2.4 gig version, this one coming with a one year warranty. It better last longer than the old one, dammit.
February 03, 2004
Julia Google
Google looks funny again today, in honour of Gaston Maurice Julia's birthday. [Feb. 3, 1893 - March 19, 1978] He's a famous mathematician who wrote a paper concerning the iteration of a rational function. I'm not sure how this is connected to fractals, but the Julia Set fractal is named after him. He lost his nose in the first World War and had to wear a leather mask over his face for the rest of his life.
Prince of Persia
After the aforementioned Zelda bogdown, I decided to take a break from that exercise in frustration and check out this Prince of Persia thing. Wow, what a cool game, I'm totally wired on the thing. I'm around 35% done. It has this 'sands of time' thing where you can go back a few seconds in time when things aren't going your way [ie. you die] and replay the scene, hopefully with a better outcome. Very cool, basically a super quick reload of a saved game when you die. You only have four [or five?] of these things, but you get many chances to reload with more sand, like when you kill an enemy, you basically suck the sand out of him. In fact, you have to, otherwise he just comes back and kills you. Or tries to. There's also a slo-mo trick like in Max Payne ala Matrix. Very cool. Another cool feature is when you freeze an enemy in place and get to slash him to death unresisted. Jumping over your enemy and slashing him from behind is loads of fun as well. The game is divided into sections, each section requiring you to solve a series of puzzles, at the end of each section you get to save your game and usually replenish your life, if not also your sands of time. So you can play a short bit, save your game and pick up exactly where you left off the next time. Avoids the problem I'm having with Ocarina of Time very nicely. This game alone has justified my purchase of the Gamecube.
Zelda bogdown
I was playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Gamecube and I made it to the part where you get sucked into the big fish. At this point, things got a little bogged down. I know what I have to do, pick up the little girl and use her to trip a couple switches to get through doors. The problem is, killing those jellyfish is major pain in the ass. When you use your sword, they electrocute you. So you can use the little bomb thingies, but you only have 30 of those. You can use sticks, but they break off when you hit the jellyfish, so that's another weapon that has limited uses. There's also the magic fire thingy, but you only have so much magic. As if that's not bad enough, after saving your game, when you reload, you don't find yourself back in the big fish, you start way back in your house in the forest! So you have to make the journey all the way back to the big fish before you can even begin to pick up where you left off. This is one thing that I really hate about some console games. Reminds me of the time I played Resident Evil on the Playstation. I made it all the way to the end of the game, but if you die while fighting the big boss creature, the game kicks you way back to an earlier section and you have to spend the next 10-15 minutes working your way back to the big boss. I got sick of doing this and never finished the game. It's not that I thought the big boss was too hard, I just hated going through that useless bullshit just to finish the damn game!
Boobygate
I saw Janet Jackson's booby, I saw Janet Jackson's booby! Woohoo!
Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest. Ha. It's funny how the CBC showed the 'wardrobe malfunction' uncensored, and you can really see how insignificant and silly this whole thing is, whereas the American news clips have her breast blurred out or pixellated, and it seems so much more enticing, like 'what am I missing' type of thing. FTC chairman Michael Powell called it "classless, crass and deplorable". Yes, that booby was deplorable. Deplorable I tell you! Oh brother, whatever. So if JJ hadn't flashed her boob, then the halftime show would have been A-OK? The cheerleaders ripping off their miniskirts, Nelly grabbing his crotch, Kid Rock still existing, all of this would have been just hunkydorey as long as Janet kept that evil nipple covered, dammit.