I’m not sure how we got to this point in the semester, but here we are.
Let’s see… I won’t try to recap the minutiae of my life. It’s worth mentioning that I finally finished the hellish task of porting SLIDE to Mac OS X. Just for “fun” I also ported it to Linux. So hopefully that’ll stop being a draw on my time now if I can help it.
Last night I saw a really good movie from Hong Kong–no kung-fu involved. It was called Infernal Affairs. Well, actually it’s called “Wu jian do” in a roman transliteration. It was just a standard-issue action-thriller-crime drama, but it was done really well. Like Hollywood might make if they didn’t have to follow the same damned formula every time they make one of those movies.
I’ve also been playing the open beta test of World of Warcraft, an online RPG set in the Warcraft world. Now, you have to understand that I played Diablo and Diablo II a lot. These are some of the most pointless games ever made, from an absolute perspective. You literally spend hour after hour clicking repeatedly on randomly created little monsters in randomly created little dungeons, hoping to obtain the Truculent Mace of the Cursed Cow or something. Somehow, I found this entertaining. WoW is like Diablo, except instead of there being 15 or so people playing in your world at any given time, there might 15,000. They’ve also replaced the 2D sprites with chunky, lowest-common-denominator 3D stuff. Not compelling to a normal person, just to me. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to cough up the $50 + $10/mo to play it once the beta is over in a week.
I finished my NSF application for the third and last year yesterday. At this point, it’s just obstinance. But the fact that I’m now at Berkeley is sort of proof that obstinance can work. So off went the application.
I’m looking forward to the next few months. Doug shows up to take my old job at Apple in a couple of weeks, and it will be great to have him in town (not that Houston wasn’t great, I’m sure). Sometime in mid Dec we’ll be heading down to Texas for some holiday fun with the Halls–should be a blast. Then, the day after Christmas, we’re heading out to Breckenridge via Denver for some snowplay with my family. We land back in Cali on 1 Jan. There’s also talk of a potential trip to Hueco Tanks in early Jan with some old friends from Texas. I wonder how much tickets would run…