Everyone's Got A Blog Now

Okay, I have a lot of things to blog about, but I couldn't blog them over the weekend because my DSL was down. I called the DSL people, and they said they would send someone on Wednesday, and then my DSL was working again so I called them and told them not to come but they said my upstream rate was not so good so they were still gonna come, so I went out and bought some short pieces of modular cable because the modem and the answering machine were currently attached to industrial-sized spindles of it, but when I was doing that, I broke the DSL again but I fixed it this morning but they are still coming on Wednesday.

Someone besides this guy has mentioned Cavalcade of Assholes, says Google. Unfortunately, my new friend seems to be slightly on the hysterical side.

Mer and I went games-shopping yesterday at GameStop. We'd gone in to reserve a copy of Final Fantasy X-2, but it turned out it was already out, so we bought it. We also got Super Bust-A-Move 2, Tetris Worlds, and a second PS2 controller. Unfortunately, X-2 seems to be pretty much a dancing simulation with serious Barbie's dream-house undertones. I guess that's not a problem -- Mer really likes it. For my part, I'm getting pretty into Super-BAM, but it comes with this Story Mode which is pretty fucking awful. This is what the venerable GameSpot has to say about it:

While each character theoretically has his or her own story, you'll notice they share many of the same story elements, often recycling the same video clips. The clips themselves are almost embarrassing to watch. While the PS2 could render these sequences in real time with ease, all the cutscenes are prerendered, and bad MPEG compression is constantly visible. The script itself seems like it was translated from Japanese in a bit of a hurry, with lines like "I am scared! I should be brave!" delivered by voice actors who apparently had no previous voice-acting experience.

FYI, that "I am scared" line is delivered right before Puzzle-Master Weepy transforms into Puzzle-Master Smiley. Tetris Worlds is shit.

Over the weekend we rented Raising Victor Vargas and Owning Mahowny. Quite a pair of gerunds. We haven't watched "Owning" yet, but "Raising" was pretty wonderful. I thought I had a good story to write about meeting girls in the city, but it looks like they've got it covered.

Fuck, I had this link to peep to Tom, but now I can't remember what it was.

So I'm pretty sure the Right thing to do with OpenRPG is to make it validate XML config and game files using an XML Schema to specify types, ranges, and defaults for values, but libxml2 doesn't currently support Schemas, only DTDs, and it's currently the most sophisticated XML-parsing library for C. So I'm currently a little cheesed-off on that front. I'm thinking of using libdbi for database independence, but it's really only for doing SQL abstraction. I'm pretty sure I still want to provide a flat-file option, so I might have to write a second abstraction layer. Also, users should be able to log in to the administrative console over the Internet; and maybe there should be a chat area, too? That sounds like it might be feature-creep.

On Sunday I went to go see Master and Commander with Emma and Mags. It's pretty good; very accurate boat sounds. Some guy almost invents the theory of evolution before Darwin, but is thwarted by some tricksy French privateers. There is a part where this albatross starts flying around the ship and the sailors are using it for target practice. Maggie and I were like, "No!" They didn't hit the albatross, but they did get the ship's doctor by accident.

I finished reading Red Mars this morning. Hermione Chalmers dies -- sorry, kids. I have not done one shitting thing at work today.