Tuesday, December 8, 1998

Well. Goodness. Lots to talk about.

First off, I’m now officially installed at Litton/PRC, as an “Associate Engineer” (a.k.a. Junior Programmer). It’s going well; I’m getting familiar with the environment and my duties quickly enough. Our target is a Unix C environment.

I’ve done some fiddling with the Real-Time Strategy game (I’ve got a few webpages up), and hopefully will have the map interface (scrolling, placed units, etc.) done by the weekend, though I’m hoping to complete the unit movement by then, too. Looks to be a very interesting project.

In other news….We now have two artificial Christmas trees (they look very nice, though), one in the living room and one in the foyer. If my digital camera order ever comes through, I’ll snap some shots of them and upload them. I’ve been in the baking mood lately, probably brought on by the Christmas season. I’m steadily gaining more friends on Furcadia, though it’s a bit frustrating when there’s not much to *do* there (other than chat, which is the main reason for being there I suppose). No more work on the keyglove, though I am determined to do more work on it this week.

Over on Ain’t It Cool News (a website for “geeky” film news, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, indie films, etc.), they’re reporting on an attempt to make a big-budget version of Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein wrote the novels which inspired Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters, both successes commercially and flops with the fans. Should be interesting to see what they do with Moon, as the story is comparatively free of action — there are a few action scenes, and no doubt they’ll occupy much more of the film than they do in the novel, but still. I’ll keep an eye on it.

Has anyone else seen less spam of late? I seem to have half as many unsolicited e-mails in my box over the past few months. Maybe that Washington State law against unsolicited e-mail actually scared away a few people. Huzzah!

Seriously, I don’t really think of spam as any more of a nuisance than regular junk mail–granted I don’t have to pay to download them as many in Europe do. But in any event, it’s nice to see the flow abate somewhat (unless this is the calm before the storm; I can see stores really getting into the spirit as Christmas comes up).