09/07/04 07:08:59 AM CDT
Forwarding address |
Well, I fought the tide for a while, but I had to finally give in. I now have a LiveJournal. So many of my friends use it that I could no longer deny the convenience. Anyway, future online journal entries that I make can be found at http://www.livejournal.com/~ethicsgradient.
Hope to see you there.
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07/07/04 04:27:26 PM CDT
Apartment! |
Jess and I have found the place we'll live when we return to Boston! It's very exciting. It's a nice two bedroom apartment in Quincy (a bit to the south of the city). A very nice older couple lives upstairs and owns the building. They're very friendly and seemed to like us a lot: the woman hugged me and Jess on the way out. It's very reasonably priced and on a nice quiet street near the Wollaston T stop. I've put a bunch of pictures up in my 'Pictures' section (see links at left). Once you get to the photo album click on the 'Apartment' link at the top.
The apartment has nice hardwood floors in the living and dining areas with a lot of open space and long lines of sight. There are two bedrooms (carpeted) and a nice kitchen with a decent amount of pantry and shelf space. There's no refrigerator, which is a little odd, but since we got off lightly on the up front costs we're not too worried about having to buy one.
Anyway, go on over to my album and take a look at our new dwelling as of late August: 104 Marlboro St!
Ok, in case my instructions above are too much for you, here's the link to the apartment photo album.
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06/23/04 02:34:07 PM CDT (modified on 06/23/04 02:40:36 PM CDT)
2004: Odyssey Again |
Back in 1984 The Learning Company released "Robot Odyssey" for the Apple II. We never had an Apple II, but we did have a Tandy (ah, Tandy) and TLC released a Tandy version as well. It was more or less my first computer game. The year that I first encountered it is lost in the fuzzy uncertainties of my younger memories, but I think it was the mid to late 80's.
The perfect game for the budding computer scientist, Robot Odyssey is a puzzle game where you are provided with three robots with various sensors, grabbers, thrusters, and antennae. Your task is to use various logic gates to wire them up and escape from the strange land into which you have fallen. I loved it, and on a whim I decided to look it up on Google the other day. Turns out I'm not the only one, and there are now numerous ways to relive the glory of this excellent game. There are Apple II emulators and the Robot Odyssey disks are out there. Supposedly there's also a Tandy emulator, and there is a complete reimplimentation of the game in Java, which is the route I took.
Anyone who played this game back in the day, or anyone to whom it sounds interesting should head over to www.droidquest.com. There's not really any manual to speak of, but that's ok, because another thing that sets this game apart from others is the very complete in game tutorial system.
Robot Odyssey's 20 year journey has brought it to this island's shores a second time, and I can't wait to dive back in and explore it all over again.
Ah, video game nostalgia!
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06/21/04 07:37:05 AM CDT
Kittens! |
After our ordeal in January with Generic Stray Cat (check Jess's back journal entries) we decided that we had the capacity to host cats waiting for adoption for short periods of time. We arranged with the Brazos Feral Cat Allies, the same people who helped us out with Genny, to be a foster home. I finally got a call yesterday, and:
Cats! Kittens really. Five of them. They are extremely cute, and extremely small. Only about 5 weeks old. They sort of drag themselves around the bathroom with their front feet and let the back legs flail. They're not very skilled at eating yet, and haven't really figured out the litter box thing, but that's ok, because small cats don't make much of a mess it seems...or not yet.
We're going to be holding on to them for a week or two. In the mean time our own cats are a little flipped out because we're spending time locked away in a bathroom with strange smells coming out. They'll get over it.
Finally, because that picture above isn't great (but it's the only one I got with all 5 cats at once) here are a couple more cat pictures:
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06/18/04 11:54:49 PM CDT
Opposite day |
Because I'm a total dork, and because I have a lot of work to do, I spent the evening learning about Ant. For those of you not familiar with Ant, Ant is like make, but designed for Java and all modern and stuff. For those of you who don't know what make is, Ant is a system to help you compile code into a working program.
Ant is actually pretty cool. One of the neat things it does for you (make does this too) is to save time by only recompiling your source code if it has changed since the last compile. For a large project this can actually save a lot of time in the writing process. Sadly, I'm a bit new to Ant and I was having a hard time getting this feature to work. For some reason, Ant kept reprocessing all of my code when none of it had changed. This is because I was foolish and using a directory inside my package tree as my source directory for the build...Ant tries to save extra time by not looking inside the source files to find out what package a file belongs to, which means it uses the directory tree to divine that informaton. As a result, if you start inside the package directory things don't work correctly.
Now that I know that, I can make use of this wonderful feature of Ant. The ironic part is that I just spent the last half an hour trying to get my code to not compile...
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