al.rtfo

Seriously. Ghosts came out how many days ago?

I’m not saying Reznor (or King) is bad, but they seem to have a lot in common: prolific, eager to embrace new platforms (remember Riding the Bullet? No? Well, they’re not always popular new platforms).

Anyway, The Slip is a pretty good album, and it’s got an amazing price.

I’m going to go through the alphabet, doing some activity for each letter. Like for A, I’ll be Awesome. That’s done. For B, I’ll maybe go bowling. So on in order. It’s a totally original idea I had and if you use it you have to pay me $5. Thanks.

Who would have thought it was possible to both improve on System Shock 2 and accomplish said improvement by adding Ayn Rand and art deco? Seriously, Bioshock rocks my socks.

I didn’t pay attention to too much of the hype, but I’ve been impressed by a lot that’s happened. The enemies wander the level and often run away if you start messing them up (except the big daddies – you try and mess them up they just mess you up). The combat feels very different from other FPS games.

Also the plot is great. There’s a lot of genuinely unsettling stuff that happens (little girls stabbing corpses to take their Adam is just the beginning). It’s nice to see a scary game that doesn’t rely on surprise zombie closets.

I’m not too far in, but so far the game is amazing. It’s very immersive – they use the Half-Life style continual first person view, although occasionally the game hijacks the view to have you glance at certain things.

So I haven’t updated since at least 100 years ago (link to ED withheld). I thought I’d make a post about what I’ve read so far this year, because I like to keep track of these things. July is about the halfway point, so here’s the list.

• A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. I realized when I was reading this that I don’t really read a lot of sci-fi. This book was awesome though, so I’ve decided I should read more.


• Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson. I was worried this book would be preaching to the choir, and for the most part it was, but there were a few nice insights.


• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. OK, I’ll admit I only got this originally because I heard it was the origin of the term “meme”, but the biology was really interesting. There’s some cool game theory in the book, and a lot of things about evolution I had never really thought of before.


• The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. Dawkins kind of got me in a science-y mood, so I thought I’d finally get around to reading this book which has been on my bookshelf for a year and a half now. It’s an interesting introduction to String Theory. I watched the NOVA special online after, and even though it mainly covered the same ground as the book, some of the visuals were still cool.


• The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan. I watched Cosmos earlier this year via Netflix and was reminded of how awesome Sagan is. While there’s plenty of other great Sagan books out there, I glanced at this one in a bookstore (shh, don’t tell Amazon) and had to buy it after reading the Vonnegut quote on the back lamenting Sagan’s passing. This was only a week or so after Vonnegut himself had passed away, so for some reason I felt like I had to hurry. That also lead me to…


• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to finally get around to reading this book. This is actually the second time I bought it, but this time I read it before giving it away. A good move.


• The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. I kind of wanted more of the Selfish Gene, after how much of that book had been new to me. I was a bit disappointed to find this book a little less technical and more of a general overview of evolution, but I still think I learned something. Well I’m going to pretend like I’m smarter anyway.


• Foundation and Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov. I’ve read these before, but I let someone borrow the book (I had the trilogy in a single hardcover) before I finished Second Foundation and they never gave it back. So I had to start again because that was a long time ago.
  
• The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. This was even better than The Elegant Universe. I’ve never been so excited about a science book but I just couldn’t put this down. While the ending was almost disappointing (spoiler: the great mysteries of the universe remain unsolved), I thought this book was excellent.

I don’t know what I’ll read next. I never really do. Second Foundation, Pale Blue Dot, maybe I’ll even finish The Brothers Karamazov (unlikely).

Apparently it rains a bit in Seattle. It was beautiful all summer long, but now I can’t remember the last time I saw Mt. Rainier.

My mom and sister came out a couple weeks ago. We did the grand walking tour of Seattle, visited the underground, pike place, space needle, all that touristy stuff. It managed to not rain most of the time they were here, but I think it’s been raining since they left.

Things are getting all shook up at work. My manager’s leaving, our team is moving to a different floor. Will have a hell of a view- 11th floor looking straight at downtown Seattle with nothing taller in between, but also I’m going to be sharing an office. My first time out of a cubicle, aww.

I also played D&D last weekend, something I hadn’t done in years, and it just sort of reminded me how terribly boring D&D is. Speaking of games though, a friend pointed me to games.asobrain.com, where you can play Settlers of Catan and Carcasonne online with other people or with computers. Graphics are a little clunky at times but it’s still a lot of fun. Of course, the version of Settlers is no substitute for the real deal; without the face to face interaction I have a hard time extorting acquiring the resources I need from other players.

Guess I kind of forgot about writing/updating. I’ve just been hanging out. Things at Amazon are going well, feels like I’m doing something much more useful. In my year at Yantra, not a single line of my code ended up in a production environment before I left due to the lengthy development cycles and the other general bs that went on there, but I’m happy to say that the service I work on here is already live with changes I’ve made.

As for what I’ve been up to, it hasn’t been a whole lot. Hanging out and playing games online with some friends, most recently Starcraft and Defcon. I bought World of Warcraft and played it for about a week before I decided I had never been so bored in my life. I’ve also been eStalking some friends from high school and college via facebook and myspace.

The weather continues to be beautiful here in Seattle. It is cooling off a bit, but the days remain sunny and long despite being further north than Boston. I like to walk/ride the bus whenever I can, and it’s been working pretty good. I’ve only put about 150 miles on my car since I moved out here.

This coming week I start some evening classes in Japanese. I’ve also been working on my French a bit and might take some classes after refreshing my memory on all that crap from high school. It’d be nice to be able to speak a language other than English.

By the way, I have a new cell phone number now, with a Seattle 206 area code. My old number will still work for a bit, but it will probably go to voicemail if you call it. If you want my new number, you can either call my old cell number and listen to the voicemail message, or you can just email/im me.

Got some more photos, this time from the going away party and stuff in MA. A little bit of NY in there too.

http://rtfo.org/~al/photos/v/2006GoingAway/

Anyway enjoy.

To avoid spamming up my blog, I put them in a gallery, complete with comments and crap. I do have more photos, but for now just photos of the area, the office, my apartment, and stuff.

http://rtfo.org/~al/photos/v/seattle/

Feel free to leave comments on the photos if you feel so inclined.

I moved in to the new place today. All my stuff came in ok, and I bought plenty of kitchen stuff in the morning and then the movers came in the afternoon. I had them just drop the boxes off to unpack later, seeing as how I have only a couple of pieces of furniture to put all my junk on.

I’m almost excited about the new dishes. In my previous set of hand me down hand me down dishes that made a couple of trips to college and back, I had 12 spoons, 2 of which looked the same. The other 10 were each their own unique style. Now I have 8 spoons which, amazingly enough, all look the same, in addition to other matching dishes. I’ve never been so excited about anything that’s happened in the cupboard.

The cable company is coming to hook up internet tomorrow, and I just called them yesterday. I think that’s some kind of new record (well, they haven’t shown up yet). Right now I’m back at the corporate apartment leeching off the free internet in the lounge one last time while I wait for the last load of laundry to finish. Then I’ll be off to my apartment to sleep in my own bed for the first time in almost a month.

Anyway, maybe I’ll have something more interesting than spoons to report on soon. Of course that also means I’ll have photos tomorrow (provided I find the box my camera stuff is in).