I got moved to a new cube today (the team is moving to a different area of the building), and I can see out a window!
It’s not much of a view, but I can see that sitting at my desk, which far beats my previous location where the window was a distant sliver while standing up. At my new cube I can see the mountains when I stand up. Unfortunately my keyboard tray didn’t make the trip, but that shouldn’t be hard to get corrected.
In other news, I finally posted to my twitter feed the other day, so I added a widget to the right side of this page to display my recent tweets.
Android 2.2 is supposed to be released for the Droid Incredible tomorrow. The 270 degree screen rotation will be nice for when I’m trying to use it in landscape mode while charging it, and 720 video recording could possibly make my videos look nicer. The ability to store apps to the sd card may prompt me to actually buy a larger capacity sd card than came with the phone when I got it (which I probably should do anyways). I may comment further on the new features of froyo after I’ve played with it a bit.
Talore persists in waking me up well before I’m ready to get up. Usually she just runs around and meows, but she occasionally gets creative. Last weekend she purred in my face, but during the week one day she licked one of my eyelids open. That sure woke me up, and felt rather odd. Last night I figured I’d just go to bed early and be ready to get up when she got up. Unfortunately, Talore also went to bed early and woke me up before there was enough light to read my watch. If only she was so eager to play at night instead of in the morning.
Note the cat hair on the top edge of the hole in the side. I’ve cleaned it at least once and I almost never see Talore actually go through the side, but there’s still a good bit built up there.
Talore is now relaxed enough about the cat carrier that she will let me put her in it without struggling, but I haven’t figured out a way to get her to walk into it for a treat though. I was planning to mention that she no longer feels the need to follow me from room to room whenever I leave her sight when I’m at home, but then I noticed that she moved to the bedroom doorway when I was in the bedroom hanging up my clean clothes. I guess it’s just that she either doesn’t wake up or isn’t inclined to get up when I’m moving around while she’s asleep.
I finally moved the cat food/water bowls off the dining room table. I eat at my desk so I wasn’t bothered by Talore eating at the table, but I could see that being a problem if I had company. They’re now on the brick in front of the fireplace, which is behind a chair from where I sit at my desk. It took me a while to figure out what the slight sound of water was the first time I heard her drinking with the bowl there, since I didn’t recognize the sound from when the bowl was at the table and Talore was hidden behind the chair when I first heard it.
Talore still knocks things off my desk, but now she has more to choose from. The plastic cup that I had holding all my pens and stuff (that Talore split down both sides a while back) got killed by the lamp that I knocked over, so now everything is in a pile. Only one thing has been found first by the roomba so far, but if I don’t find a replacement cup (or something) I suspect it’ll be eating more.
I’m guessing Talore has allergies. My apartment is as dust free as it’s been since I moved in (thanks to the tireless work of the roomba), but Talore sneezes occasionally. That both started well after I got her and started cleaning the apartment and my allergies have been noticeable lately, so I’m figuring that’s all it is. If Talore gets worse or starts acting differently I’ll take her to the vet, but the internet tells me that cats can have the same allergies as people do.
I finally got my 2x2x2 rubik’s cube and stickers this week (eastsheen brand cube, used pink instead of orange so I had to get stickers). It is indeed a much better cube for speedcubing than the rubik’s brand one. The core of it is basically a 3x3x3 cube, but instead of the centers and edges being visible the corners have caps that snap on them and hide the internals. Nearly the first thing I did was break the tab that holds one of the caps on, but the reason I broke it was that the piece had so much friction holding it on that I couldn’t tell when the tab was pushed back far enough, so it’s not likely to be a problem. It’s rather loose, and the springs allow it to turn even when not completely aligned, so it’s a really fast cube. Since I’m not at all used to it yet, I occasionally have trouble with turning it too far, but I’ve still managed a 16 second solve (5s inspection time), and an average in the mid 20s.
When I put the stickers on the 2x2x2 cube I did it at my table instead of at my desk. The light is a bit better there, and I figured it would be easier to keep cat hair off the stickers since Talore was asleep on my desk. As soon as I sat down at the table Talore came over to see what I was doing, and she insisted on jumping up into my lap (which she never does). She was persistent enough that I was getting bits of cat hair on the new stickers as I peeled them off the backing. She did leave after I started sticking the old stickers to her, and it was quite impressive watching her flick her paw hard enough to unstick a sticker that I’d put square in the middle of her paw.
Brandon and I finally finished our game of Sword of the Stars on Monday. It’s a turn based 4x game, so we don’t both have to be active the entire time, which works nicely for doing it while doing other things. Considering the game took us about two weeks (playing about half those nights) for about 250 turns in a 3 team, 6 player (the two of us on one team, and 4 ai making the other two teams) game with 201 stars, it’s not exactly a game that is easy to put together with people you don’t know and at least partially share a schedule with.
We came across a couple bugs that prompted research, so I might as well repeat what we found here:
First off, we were playing with the Argos Naval Yard expansion. I got the game from Steam, but Brandon got his copy from GamersGate, but we figured the games should be identical despite different distribution mechanisms. Steam didn’t have the latest patch (1.8) pushed out, but the patch from somewhere else happily applied. We ran into trouble with that on the second turn of the game. Apparently the Steam version didn’t behave the same way with the patch, so after completing the first turn we got a “Synch error detected” message, and upon completing the second turn the person not hosting the game would get disconnected. We worked around that by both uninstalling and reinstalling to base ANY, after which our games were willing to cooperate. That shouldn’t be an issue anymore since Steam finally pushed out patch 1.8 before Sunday (when I downloaded it) and we were able to both update and finish the game using 1.8.
The other problem we’ve been having is that combat loads very slowly in windowed mode, and it seemed like the more ships the longer the load time. The load bar gets part way across the screen, then the window freezes (according to win7), and eventually it starts going again and is loaded. The longest load time I had was when I was assaulting with a massive fleet (I wasn’t bothering with repairing damaged ships, so my fleet designed to last to the end of the game had far more ships than are reasonable) and waited over 15 minutes for combat to load. We both have multiple monitors, and at least for me full screen doesn’t play nicely with WoW running on the other screen, so we play in windowed mode. I don’t usually pay attention to the load times since I alt-tab to whatever is on my other monitor when they come up, but it was driving Brandon crazy. He found out that not only does that not happen in full-screen mode, but switching to full-screen and back would prevent the freeze and keep load times reasonable.
In other news, I just saw what appeared to be gameplay footage of Portal 2, which is the game I’m most looking forward to currently.
Actually, alot of that footage appears to be from here on the official site, but I hadn’t seen any of it before today.
Portal was an awesome puzzle game that revolved around a gun that allows you to shoot two portals onto the walls (or floor, ceiling, wherever you could find the right type of surface), which you could then step through to move around, bridge gaps, or fling yourself. The main drawback of the game was how short it was. The entire storyline could be finished in a matter of hours, and after that the challenge maps are the only thing left to do. Not only have I played through the story multiple times, but I’ve gotten the gold metal on all but one of the challenges (use few/no portals, take very few steps, be fast, each applied to 6 different maps).
Portal 2 is promising a longer story and co-op, as well as a bunch of other things to push through portals to achieve survival. The “Thermal Discouragement Beam” looks like fun, and from the videos the combination of the “Excursion Funnel” and different gels should be decidedly interesting.
