It's been nearly two weeks. I guess I can splurge for your guys' sakes and post a little early this time. What good is a wall if it's not regularly built, right?

I'm thinking of doing this one in no particular order again. If you have a problem with that, feel free to shove it up your leave a comment.

The first thing that comes to mind, is Fringe, a new show on Fox that conveniently conflicts with Eureka. Eureka is ending next week, though, so that won't be an issue. It's basically a newer version of the X Files only with more "science" and less aliens. I don't have any issue suspending my disbelief, but I cannot abide plot holes. Way back when, these scientists set out to make genetic alterations to the pituitary gland in the brain so that they could generate babies that would grow up to be biologically 21 years of age in three years. They succeeded, but they couldn't find a way to slow the growth down afterward, and the subjects would die of "natural causes" very quickly. The show starts out with a guy and a hooker, and the hooker starts screaming when she sees a lump moving around her belly and getting larger by the second. The guy drops her off at the hospital, and by then she looks 10 months pregnant. She dies. They make an incision to do a c-section, and out pops something and cut for commercials. When they come back to the scene, an old man, naked and covered in blood with the umbilical cord still attached is lying on the floor, dead from old age. It turns out that the guy who dropped her off at the hospital was one of the babies born in the science experiments, whose "father" had figured out a way to use the chemicals generated from other people's pituitary glands to slow the aging, and he had lured the hooker in order to get her gland from her. But first, why not sleep with her, you know? The condom failed, she was impregnated and the rest makes sense. Except the part where the baby was supposed to be 21 in 3 years, not three minutes. And shouldn't he have died of starvation much quicker than old age, having never eaten but still trying to grow an adult's body (this one I find more excusable in that for this to work, they'd have to get around this in the science experiment in the first place)? Oh, and that a single cell doesn't have a pituitary gland, and so until the brain was formed, the genetics shouldn't have any growth effect on the baby. It's just bad writing. But other than that, it's a decent show. I mean, hookers, crazy old scientists, and cynical remarks -- who could ask for more?

I can't say I'm surprised, but I am annoyed, at the number of people making a stink about the Facebook layout. I'll admit I was disappointed when they opened it up to people outside of college, and when they got rid of their algorithm for finding the shortest chain of friends between you and someone else. I was also disappointed a bit after they introduced applications, mostly because as t approaches infinity, facebook(t) approaches myspace. The layout, however, I like a little bit more. As far as I can tell there's very little information in the old layout that isn't in the new layout. The only thing, really, is that apps are on a separate tab called "Boxes" rather than on your main page, forcing your scroll bar to two pixels' height. The ads are better placed and less obtrusive. The pictures tab is mostly nice -- I've noticed a couple bugs with pressing the back button, after clicking on a picture a few "pages" in. In general, it just feels cleaner to me. I think people just dislike change, for the better or the worse, unless they're getting something significant out of it, like health care or tax cuts.

I was watching an Authors@Google video on youtube the other day, at the recommendation of my pastor. The book is called The Reason for God by Timothy Keller, and apparently the presentation had the highest turnout that any of the people there had seen (tied with a woman who did a sex-talk). You really should watch the video, but his argument is that, logically, it takes more faith to think that God doesn't exist, than that God does. There are still personal issues to deal with after that, but that no one has an intellectual excuse on the premise of faithlessness. Of course, that very thing was pointed out in Romans 1:20, but people tend to discredit the Bible, and I'll admit that Romans 1:20 made casual mention of it, a high-level view with glossed-over details. I don't know if I'll get the book, I probably will -- I'm sure my pastor would loan it to me, but I am the worst at getting borrowed books back to people -- but the talk was certainly worth watching. The thing is, I don't really need intellectual convincing. That's my reason for maybe not getting the book.

I have the Facebook app on my iPhone, and was perusing the status updates tonight. There was one that said, "[Name] says maybe if Microsoft spent more time making their products better and less time trying to sell them they'd sell better..." I've only worked at Microsoft for two months, but I'm already sick of comments like these. Everyone knows they're the big name in software, and so it's easy to hate them. In the two months I've been working, I've read a decent amount of source code, and I have to say, the vast majority of it is written extremely well. The programmers there use best practices, use clarity, keep things as simple as possible, and yet keep the uses of the software as open-ended as can be expected. Every now and then I wish such-and-such feature in a program (OS X included) would be more extendable, would offer more options visible, and so on. Then I realize that what I want is a programming language. We want a program to do it all for us, and in my case, I want to control how it does it with plenty of options. But that's what programming languages do. They let us express exactly what we want to have happen. Unfortunately, the average user doesn't program. I don't really know where I'm going with this. I just take it personally when someone says that MS software is bad when a lot of the best minds in the world put so much work into making a program. , I started to respond to his status update on his wall to point out how common it is for developers to quit developing a feature in the middle of a project in order to shift their career into the marketing side of Microsoft. Then I thought better of it.

The Microsoft Company meeting was today. I think it had higher attendance than do Mariners games these days (which is relevant because the meeting is held in Safeco Field). It was certainly an experience. Different people got on stage and talked for a while, all excited about their products and such, giving demos. Any time a product was mentioned, the group developing it cheered. I always thought it was silly when I saw them do it on TV, then found myself doing it when SQL Server was mentioned. We really do write amazing software. They say that a lot of people join Microsoft because they realize that our software is shipped world-wide, and that they can make a difference in the world by working there. That's not why I joined Microsoft at all. I don't find my identity in work. I don't see my mark on the world through software. It's not personal enough for me. I find my identity in Jesus and my relationship to him. I see my mark on the world being the people I know on a personal level, or really, even more basic than that, the things I do because I know they're right and they're what God wants me to do. I don't even feel like I need to mark the world. So, with that in mind, I really don't care if people use my software. I very much care if they use our software, but if what I write isn't ever used, I enjoyed writing it all the same. If someone (my manager, a customer, a professor, whoever) asks me to write something and I succeed, that's where the high is. I aspire to be a computer scientist, not a programmer. I enjoy the thought and the journey, and if results result, that's awesome. Of course, that said, I care very much what the customer thinks about the end user experience, about the project as a whole, and would gladly take comments into consideration and give them to the people who can make a difference. I just don't care if the relatively small number of features I write changes the world. I get the feeling that I'm not capable of writing clearly enough to get out my feelings. I'll put it this way: Feeling.ToString() was never implemented.

Obviously, we want people to start using Live Search over Google, and Google has the majority market share for search. I was thinking about an xkcd comic today, one that's always resonated with me.

The Difference

I google'd scientist xkcd.com. Two results came up, the first being the one above. The second was this:

Beliefs

The first one was the one I was searching for. The second one I hadn't clicked until writing this, and I assumed it was a different one, which Live.com put up first:

Scientists

The point of this all, is that live came up with a comic called "Scientists" first, and the one I was looking for second. It came up with the logical, and in many ways the "right" answer first. Google came up with the one I wanted, and one that has little to do with my query, little more than the rest of the xkcd comics do, and didn't come up with the one titled "Scientists." Which search is better? Which search is right? (Ironically, neither search engine came up with google's number two comic for senator xkcd.com.) Do we want a feature that gives us what we want, or do we want a feature that gives us expected results?

Right about now I'm going to mention Alexander so that while he's doing his pre-read scan, he'll stop to see what his name is all about. I think I'll save the rest of this post to be written tomorrow, because being a young, single man in the prime of his life, I have nothing to do on Friday evenings.

It's Sunday, not Friday. Friday was unbearably long, so I lacked the energy to do anything, especially sit in front of a computer for a couple more hours. Saturday I went to Swood's birthday shindig, got back, and watched StarWars Ep 4. My weekend can definitely be reduced to those couple sentences, so allow me to add unnecessary details.

I bought Spore on Tuesday evening, and played until about midnight. I didn't know it was so simple, so I was really cautious about doing things right, and attempting to make wise decisions, which is why I only made it to the beginning of the tribal stage before going to bed. It turns out wisdom isn't a prerequisite for Spore, especially on easy mode. I didn't much like my species on Wednesday, so I started over and made some pretty fine dragons, if I do say so myself. The creature stage (second stage) is definitely my favorite. You get to fly around and eat people, or convince them to share their evolutionary secrets. I ended up getting all but four possible body parts, and had high ratings in everything but the spit combat ability. I feel bad for the poor sap who has to play against them, assuming the game doesn't nerf them. I still haven't figured out if it's possible to beat an epic monster. I'm guessing you can't before the space stage, and I haven't seen one since I began it, though I haven't played past the first tutorials. It's not a bad game, for sure, but it certainly could have been better. Right before evolving to the tribal stage, I shouldn't have been able to design a completely different creature.

On a similar note, I've been waiting for more than a year for The Force Unleashed to come out. I've not bought it yet, because I have enough entertainment for now, and not enough money in my checking account to say I'm comfortable -- that'll change in nine days. I've heard bad things, though, that it set the bar pretty high but is only a mediocre game. I guess I'm not too surprised, but I am disappointed.

The third thing I've been waiting for that came out this month was Brisingr, the third book in the Inheritance series. It was released yesterday, but Amazon doesn't do any orders on the weekend, so it'll ship on Monday, getting to my apartment on Thursday. I might take a personal day on Friday. I kid you not.

Speaking of kids, I just got back from my aunt's house. They tease me a lot about not liking kids much, and they're right for the most part. I say things, purposely, that I know they won't get, but I say them in the vicinity of their parents so that they'll laugh. For example, we were watching the Hawks game, and William was talking about how he always does Hail Mary's in his Madden '08 game, even when there's no reason to. I asked, "Does she respond?" My uncle laughed a bit; William looked confused. I just hope I don't come off as rude. Tonight Lucy was complaining about having to play another game of Sequence before playing Pictionary, and the teams were uneven with her playing, so logically -- it seemed logical -- she might consider sitting out for the ten minutes it would take Ashley's boyfriend and me to lose, if and only if she wanted not to play. The words were out of my mouth before I thought logic might not be the best thing here.

If you didn't catch that, Ashley is dating this guy now. He's not a Christian. That bothers me a lot.

I guess I don't keep track of the dates my relationships start and end anymore. I don't know if that's an improvement or not, but it's a change. I thought Fey and I broke up about a year ago Wednesday. Turns out I broke up with her on September 11th. I miss her a lot. I know she's not right for me. Our age difference, though smaller now than a year ago (and still too big, but in a few years it wouldn't be), would still divide us. There's too much you learn between your senior year of high school and graduation day of college. She doesn't see consumerism the same way I do. It's not a bad thing, just a difference, and one I couldn't live with. Who knows, maybe in college she will change her views, the same way I did, though I never bought a seventeenth purse. I'm trying, but I can't liken that purchase to anything I've bought. I suppose you could say video games, but the way I see video games, each individual game functions differently from others; further, I enjoy the programming behind the games, trying to figure out how they did it. Maybe she sees purses functioning differently -- different purses with different outfits. I don't know. Also, I'm not sure our moral compasses are pointing to true north, neither of ours, but I'm pointing some degrees to the left, and she's pointing some degrees to the right. (Right and left here have nothing to do with conservative verses liberal.) I still miss her though. I miss tickling her, and trying to hold in the laughter (usually succeeding) when she'd fight back. Telling stories at night with her head on my shoulder -- those were perhaps my favorite times ever, with the exception of times feeling filled by the Holy Spirit. It was romantic in its own right, but it didn't need to be. It was telling my best friend different pieces of who I am and what made me and how I saw the world, and she enjoyed it, understood as best she could, and appreciated me. She was nerdy, and appreciated puns, witty banter, good writing, alternate realities, and imagination. And my was she beautiful.

The last time I wore shorts, I was helping her parents with garden work or filling the pool or something. So, aside from swimming or sleeping or working out, it's been more than a year since I've worn shorts. So that's something to be proud of.

Work is going. It's still up and down, but I wouldn't say the general trend is going in either direction. Some days are stressful, others are boring, waiting for your turn to make a little progress. I have a bug I basically have to fix by tomorrow. I don't know the repercussions of not fixing it by then, but I just assume I'll be on campus until it's done. I know where it is, and generally how to fix it. In fact, I remember starting to fix it before. I don't know why I couldn't finish it though. My peer mentor, whom I'm finally aliasing Sydney, has been incredibly helpful to me. I had a couple changesets to submit on Friday night, but we were having issues getting a clean build all day. (It happens.) He let me go home and checked in my changes at 10:30pm. My day had been long enough without staying four hours longer than I already had. I do hope my changes didn't break anything. For some reason I'm not getting emails on build status.

Yesterday, as I said earlier, was Swood's birthday get together. He had invited several people, but it turned out to be him, Bra, Neo, and me. Gaul almost made it. He drove down from Bellingham, apparently passed the exit on 405 and ended up on I-5 again. He called about twenty or thirty minutes later saying he was in Seattle because he really had to go to the bathroom. We didn't hear from him after that. At the party, we watched the new Die Hard movie, then played some Nintendo, and a 2d fighter that Swood had, with the anime characters from this impossible plane game. I forget what that genre is called, where you're flying in a plane and shooting at things as the screen scrolls under you.

I really needed to get laundry done and my apartment cleaned, but I guess that will have to wait for tomorrow. Again.

I woke up this morning with a tune stuck in my head. It was just a few measures. I was trying to place it, while I lied there in bed, something about pleasures. Oooh look! I rhymed! Too bad it had nothing to do with pleasures. At first I thought it was a tune from Fable, but then I placed it at the climax of a movie. Now I can't remember which movie, so that bothers me a bit. I wanted to confirm the placement.

I've not slept well in a while, including last night. For the past many years, I've dreamt virtually every night. These past couple weeks, though, every night has brought bad dreams. They weren't scary, but they were always stressful, and I've woken up well before I've wanted to. The first three nights it was at 5am, then 6am. This morning I woke up at 7am, but I think that had more to do with the kids playing outside my window. They wake up around 7:30, I'm guessing, every weekday morning, and now that it's Saturday, their day off, it's a good idea to sleep in until 7. Yeah, that makes sense.

My cat just ruined my train of thought. Stupid bugger got on the table again, so I got up and he ran under my bed. I pulled him out and coldly soaked him with the squirt bottle. I wish they'd just learn not to get on the table. They've gotten better about it. They don't get up there innocently anymore. They know they're not supposed to. They seem to take turns being the good cat. Calloh has been good for about a week now, though they both still scratch up the inside of the couch. I wish we hadn't torn that lining off the bottom. I think that was done because a cat or ferret had started tearing at it.

This past week, and really well back into half of the week before, I got no work done. Between sickness (no more strawberry cream cheese), the day I couldn't motivate myself no matter how many games of Minesweeper I played, and being blocked the rest of the time, there was just nothing I could really do. There were things I thought I could do. I'm an expert now on upgrading the backend bits, but each time I've tried (and it takes a few hours if it works -- a wasted few hours if it doesn't, and you have to restart), I've found another bug relating to my task, and have to wait another three days for the fix to be made, approved, and tested. It certainly could be worse, as my peer mentor pointed out. In some projects it used to take a month for a bug in one area to be propagated to areas where the bug fix was needed. All of this to say I made progress yesterday -- significant progress. In fact, after this latest bug is fixed (hopefully Monday), approved (hopefully Monday afternoon, though likely Tuesday), tested (Tuesday night -- hopefully without causing a failure), and downloaded to my machine, I'm confident that, if my part won't work already, I will finish it by end-of-day (eod) Wednesday. Hopefully that makes up for 10 days of progresslessness. Yes, I know it's not a word, but look at how many esses there are in it!

Two weekends ago my church had a barbeque right after it. That was pretty fun. The community and fellowship there is great. One thing I'm starting to consider, though, is the worship. It's kind of selfish really, and Harper's former worship pastor had to deal with this issue a lot, but I'm not sure I like the style of worship. We don't play anything old. No hymns unless they've been remade (though even that is rare), no All In All, it seems like we learn a new song every week. Maybe it's just because I'm new that I don't know them, but I've seen people only mouthing the words, so I'm guessing they don't know them either. It's hard to get into worship if you don't really know the words you're singing. Also, though I'm sure it's just my old age catching up with me, I don't much care for the actual musical value of most songs produced today. There are certainly exceptions, but most of the song-value anymore is in lyrics, not in the music, and not in the poetic form. Suddenly worship is reduced to words on a page. What's weird is that wasn't my original impression of the church. Maybe I was just new and wanting to find a place quickly (which was the case), or maybe I've just been more critical these past couple weeks, or maybe the music just hasn't been my style these past couple weeks, and that's just how it was, temporary. Anyway, if it's not temporary, I'm deciding whether it's a big enough issue to change churches over. I feel so at home with the people, and while church is about the people, it's also about connecting with God on a deeper level than you can alone, in your daily life, and if that's not happening, then I'm not at the right church. Oh, but the barbeque was awesome. We played volleyball. I'm considering joining a rec league if I ever find the time. Maybe if things get patched up between my dad and me, he and I might join the same team.

This past weekend, Labor Day weekend, I had a vet appointment for the cats' rabies shots. Kotenok might be having a reaction to them, because there's a pretty big knot where I'm guessing the needle went in. That night, Ashley and her friend came over for dinner, and so I could meet her new kitten, Tomtom. It was hard to believe my cats were his size when I got them. He was the scrawniest little thing, with more fur than my cats put together.

I convinced them to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, though they were skeptical. I always thought my sister's sense of humor and my own were pretty similar. I guess I was wrong. She laughed a couple times, but I was dying the first time I saw it.

On Monday, I went back to Port Orchard. I'd told my mom I was going, and she asked if I was serious about getting an iPhone, which I had been, but I was waiting for May to come around, so I could keep my phone number without it costing ridiculous amounts of money. She, however, has lost her phone, so on the way down, I bought my iPhone, and gave her my old KRZR.

The primary reason I was going to Port Orchard, though, was to see Eowyn, and her new apartment. After the grand tour, neither of us had much to do, and we were hungry, so we got food at a local grill. It honestly wasn't great, and it wasn't cheap either. I guess when I said "medium rare," they thought I meant half medium, and half rare. I paid. Then she suggested we watch a movie together. She's not seen Stranger than Fiction, so we went and rented that. She and I have always been a little relaxed about physical touch when sitting next to each other, from orchestra concerts, to movies it turns out, and so we were comfortably squished together on the couch, just shy of cuddling. About 75 minutes into the movie, she fell asleep on my shoulder. It's weird, but I'm not at all romantically attracted to her anymore; that's something I never expected to go away, and am now glad has. Even so, having a girl fall asleep on your shoulder watching a movie is a nice experience. It means she feels safe next to you, and that is a pleasant thought. Tuesday was the day I played so much minesweeper and couldn't be motivated. I suspect Monday night had something to do with it.

I've begun reading Lord of Chaos, book six in the series. I'm a little less than halfway through it, if the progress bar at the bottom of my screen can be trusted. It says about 700 pages in, but a page is about two thirds, maybe five sevenths, of a real paper page in the book. (For those who care where I am, Nynaeve just asked Birgitte to ready some horses and not talk to Uno about it. Rand was just bonded.) So far I'm enjoying it, even the female chapters. It's shaping up to be a good book, and while I've heard it's the pinnacle of the series, I hope my sources are wrong.

I started testing out Google Chrome. It's in beta, of course, so I can't expect it to do everything, but so far I'm not all that impressed. It does seem faster, but I don't really like the color scheme, or what it does to about half the webpages. The rendering is a little off. Also, they don't have it ported to Mac yet, which I don't really understand, but oh well.

Lolbot might be moving in with me in a couple months. He likes his job at Adobe for the most part -- he likes the people and the atmosphere -- but he's rather bored, so he sent me his resume, which I gave to one of the leads on my project. If all goes according to plan, we'll have more job openings in a month or two, and he'll be interviewed then. I'm pretty confident he'll be hired after he's interviewed. That kid is crazy good at programming and at working with others.

I was thinking in the shower today. That half hour each morning is probably the most productive time of the day. Anyway, I'm watching The West Wing again, and that always gets me thinking politically, and with politics comes religion, whether it should or not. (I tend to believe it should. If the basis of your government is freedom of religious beliefs, it's a little hard not to govern regarding those beliefs in order to keep those freedoms.) I started considering whether the world is getting better or worse, more specifically whether America and its society are. (And 'society' doesn't follow the grammar rule. Let's all welcome 'society' to the Weird League, along with our other new member, 'caffeine.') I think it's getting both. I think it feels like it's getting worse because our standards are going up, and rightfully so, and I think those standards will slowly have a positive impact on society. People are slowly starting to realize that killing is bad. Revenge is bad. Poverty and hunger are bad. Inequality and favoritism are bad. In the few cases where I think society is getting worse, it's attempting to masquerade as better, and I sincerely hope people start to realize what is wrong before there is so much more hurt in the world. I don't think the world needs more hurt.

Anyway, that's enough for now. As I told Alexander earlier today, I have a lot to do. I have to shower (already have), do laundry, and go grocery shopping. I'm a thinker though, and have realized that if I attempt to do all of these tasks in one day, I will have nothing for tomorrow. Always have to think ahead. Oh, also I'm angry about the deaths in Serenity.