Friday, May 13, 2005

I Am Fucking Awesome

Well, hello there! I'm in a pretty great mood this morning, and I'll tell you why: First off, last night I got off the train at around 7:45 and it was still pretty light out, so I resolved to go for a run. I hadn't run last weekend -- I literally plain forgot to do it -- and I'd been feeling sheepish about that. Plus, I was feeling pretty full of energy despite having been stuck at my desk for the past 10 hours. So not only did I go for a run, but it was my best run ever! I only had to stop once, for only a few minutes, because my chest was getting pretty tight. But I ran up that last fucking hill like nobody's business. 3.4 miles, baby!

Also, just now, I finally got the CSS automatic table layout algorithm working in this rendering library I'm writing. Long story short, I'd gotten my renderer working passably a few months ago (jesus, 6 months ago?!), but there were some layout indiosyncrasies (like two elements only being able to get a few units away from each other before getting squished) that made me realize that I'd have to rewrite the whole thing to do layout according to the CSS algorithms. And that. took. a. long. time. The spec is worded in a pretty vague way, and a lot of times I had to spend a few days figuring out what it meant or even subject myself to the ridicule of people on IRC to get some help grokking it. At any rate, I fixed a trivial SIGSEGV just now and ran my test program, and what should I see but my three little test buttons layed out horizontally next to each other. Totally unexpected. I said, "Fuck yeah!" out loud as I used the TAB key to cycle the focus through each one, even though there's no one here to hear me except Kitty, and she's sick.

I got some books out of the Epiphany branch of the NYPL last week: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is really quite good, though it's got a completely different tone and focus from Blade Runner. The Darkest Part of the Woods I picked up on a whim while I was looking for a different book -- it's not bad; "pleasantly dull," might be the best way to describe it. Right now I'm reading The Road to San Giovanni by Italo Calvino.

Got into Jade Empire a whole bunch more. I still have the same complaint with it, though, which I also had with the Bioware Star Wars games, which is that the "choices" you get to make aren't terribly nuanced. That is, I don't really feel like I'm deciding between Way of the Closed Fist and Way of the Open Palm (or Dark vs. Light Side, as the case may be) as between rude and polite. I may subscribe to a Randian worldview (in the game, in the game), but I know how to say please, people.

UPDATE: It's Sunday now. As it happened, I had a kick-ass day at work on Friday, too, but I woke up at 2:00 AM Saturday with the shits and all this thick, unhorkable mucus in my chest. The worst part was, I was having a computer dream before I woke up and spent like 15 minutes half asleep trying to clear my throat by loading an Assembly in a custom AppDomain. Jesus. Tom dragged me out for a run, which did not go quite as well as the one on Thursday. Then I went to Ted's birthday party; I was the only attendee who didn't barf, apparently. This morning, Mer and I went to Cafe Steinhof; a fly died in my coffee, but the spaetzle was good. The humidity is making me irritable.

No comments: