Wednesday, October 15, 2003
Corporate Ethics This term seems like an oxymoron, especially these days. Enron, WorldCom, and the rest have simply shown us something we’ve really known for a long time: the corporate world suffers from a lack of ethics. Some believe that corporations don’t need ethics. Business is impersonal, as it should be. Businesses are all about work, which produces a product or a service, and why do we need […]
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
Wow. Where to begin? I spent Saturday at a horse race, and I wish I could upload the pictures. I’m still sorting through them, actually; I took about a hundred, and most are practically identical. I had a good time at the race, though, with my parents. We didn’t bet on any of the horses, though my Mom revealed her ability to pick ’em. Out of the five she picked, three won and another other came in second. The storyboard for the short […]
Friday, October 10, 2003
Okay. I know, I know. I haven’t posted anything in days. It’s just that…well, I got a call on my wristphone Tuesday about another deadly attack by the Hammerheads on planet Cardonia, so I had to blast off in my starfighter and patrol the area for a couple of days. And the nearest space station only had dial-up. I have been working nights on a possible Otherspace Productions animation: a short anime parody in which lain of serial experiments lain goes up against […]
Tuesday, October 7, 2003
I have a mini-article ready, but I think I’d better explain my short absence from this journal. I forgot to update on Friday, then seasonal allergies flared up on Monday, which kept me in bed until noon and home all day. Today, I’m operating at about 70%. I’m continuing to chug through my weekly list-of-stuff-to-do. I need another couple of weeks to be able to accurately gauge its effectiveness, but it’s going […]
Thursday, October 2, 2003
I’m continuing to have reasonable success with my evening schedules; Tuesday night was a good example. I came home ready to make a special dinner: steak and potatos. I cracked open the cookbook to discover that the recipe calls for marinating the steak for an hour. Blast. Well, I’d planned on making cookies anyway. I oiled and peppered the steak and set it aside, then proceeded to mix up the M&M cookie batter. I’d done this over […]
Wednesday, October 1, 2003
Fall has arrived. This morning, the sky was paved with slate, and the air was almost vindictively cold; even a long-sleeved shirt and a leather jacket didn’t quite keep out the chill. When I hopped into my truck, I turned on the heater for the first time this season. But I’m not complaining. Until today, the days have been nearly cloudless, and the air warms up by mid-morning. It’s still chilly by noon, but […]
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
So. I watched Fight Club Saturday night. I think it’s one of the best films ever made. A classic. And not because I agree with it, though agreeing with it isn’t really the point, I think. One of the things I appreciated about it was that it’s a black comedy. It’s not a serious moral fable. It has its serious side, of course, as all good comedy does. But, first and foremost, […]
Monday, September 29, 2003
Not much to write about this week. Had a good weekend; the major event was that I watched Fight Club for the first time, which I’m not willing to write about just yet. On a completely different subject, Lee Sheldon writes on the MUD-DEV mailing list, about using lots of explicit numbers (like a “+3 sword”) in online games: It always amazes me that when we provide the explicit numbers, […]
Friday, September 26, 2003
Well, my life finally seems to be settling down. Every morning this week, I arrived at work closer to my regular time of 9:00, and this morning I arrived two minutes before nine. Hooray! I can sleep eight hours now. My evenings are becoming more productive, too. I’ve begun scheduling my off-hours, which works wonders for my productivity. You’d think this turn my off-hours into drudgery, but the opposite is true: […]
Thursday, September 25, 2003
Test-Driven Programming So. Let’s say you want to write a program. First, let’s assume you know what you want to write, and you’ve broken the intended program down into small pieces of functionality. Index cards work well for this; you can write a description of each bit of functionality on an index card. So. You have a specific bit of code to write. The natural urge is to dive right in and begin coding […]