Early Monday morning Jolayne and I made our way out of the snowy barrens of Ohio and had a good (if rather long) trip back to KC. I can’t imagine making a drive that long without Jolayne along for company; I think I’d go crazy. KC hadn’t gotten any snow at all, and was well above freezing when we got back, which was a very nice change. Then when I finally got to check my email at home for the first time, I found this 
waiting for me.
Good times.
On Tuesday, Jolayne and I went to Columbus to pick out the tuxedos for the wedding. Fortunately, tuxedo options are pretty limited so it wasn’t too tricky. I was a little disappointed that they didn’t even show us anything in a powder blue with a ruffled shirt, tails, and a hot pink top hat but its probably for the best. I got fitted then also, as did most of the groomsmen too just to get it out of the way early. Afterward, I went to hang out with my old roommates Matt and Ben, and I was supposed to stay with them for a night before heading back to my parent’s in Dayton. And that’s how it would have happened, if not for the massive, ridiculous snowstorm that unloaded on central Ohio over the course of the next day.
After making the trip to Ohio and driving through a good bit of snow and road salt, its come to my attention that I need some new wiper blades for my car. The only thing is, I’m not sure what size wiper blades I need (I know, I know. I’m a total car maintenance idiot). I checked the manual and didn’t see it, so I decided to look online. From the main Suzuki web site, I found a link to Suzuki Pit Stop, their official site for maintenance related info and manuals. Of course, I didn’t find anything useful there either, but what I did see was a healthy dose of lame. Not only do they charge you for access to the online version of the owner’s manual (for only 30 days of access no less), they charge you to look at technical bulletins about the car! I’m assuming that the technical bulletins detail causes and fixes of common problems with a particular make and model, judging from titles like “Squeaking Noise from Steering Gear” and “Incorrect Fuel Gauge Reading”. To me it seems like that would be as if Microsoft decided to charge for access to security updates, and also charged just to read any details about a particular security hole. So yeah, that seems pretty ridiculous to me. I wonder if that’s a common practice in the auto industry?
Tomorrow morning Jolayne and I are going to hit the road and head back to Ohio for the holidays. We’ll be there for just a little over a week, which will be nice since its the first real vacation time I’ve taken this year. I’ve got about 3 weeks saved up now, but I can’t really afford to use any more since I’ll need to have a bunch of time off for the wedding next year. Fortunately, my vacation time rolls over from year to year. By the time the wedding rolls around next April, I should be back up to 3 weeks by then which should work out nicely. Anyway, both Jolayne and I are really looking forward to seeing everyone back in Ohio (and also to getting the 11 hours of driving behind us). As per the usual procedure when we go anywhere, I’ll be lugging around my laptop, PDA, digital camera, and MP3 player which gives me just about everything I need to maintain my technophile standard of living short of a broadband connection. The downside? Keeping track of 5 separate chargers and power adapters. Fuel cells for portable electronics need to get here right now.
There’s an interesting Penny Arcade, which is far and away my favorite web comic. The article gives some some neat backstory about the creation of this comic who’s brilliance I’ve pretty much taken for granted for the past couple of years. However, seeing it featured in the Times is just about as bizarre as it is cool.
Ok, here’s an interesting little game that I stole from Brett. It goes as follows:
step 1: get your playlist together, put it on random, and play
step 2: pick your favorite lines from the first 25 songs that play
step 3: post and let everyone you know guess what song the lines come from
step 4: cross out the songs when someone guesses correctly
The playlist comes from a little list of my top 3800 or so favorite songs, so there’s quite a bit of variety in there. I’m thinking that given my low readership and the relative obscurity of a lot of these songs that there won’t be many answers but by all means go ahead and surprise me. Oh yeah, and no cheating. To clarify, Google is totally cheating. So let’s get to it.
Well, it’s finally happened. Blizzard released World of Warcraft on November 23rd, and with it went the rest of my free time. The quality of this game is rivaled only by its addictiveness (for me anyway). Ever since the days back in high school when I would play text-based MUDs I knew that it was just a matter of time until an online RPG came out that would be completely irresistible. This would seem to be it. None of the other multiplayer RPGs I’ve played before (Asheron’s Call, Dark Age of Camelot, Shadowbane, and City of Heroes) ever managed to hold my interest for long. All of those games seemed to assume that you wouldn’t mind playing the game more than a full time job if you ever wanted to make any progress in them. Long repetitive hours of play would leave you only marginally better off than when you had started, and that’s assuming you could find a decent group of people to play with. World of Warcraft takes a more humane approach and assumes that you’ve got other things you’d like to do with your time when you’re not logged in. I can log in for just an hour or two in the evenings, meet up with friends or go solo and still feel like I’ve actually made progress (to the extent that you can actually accomplish anything in a completely made up world that is) Amazingly, it actually manages to keep a fairly coherent storyline as you progress (something almost completely lacking in other games) which helps to smooth out some of the inherent repetition of the genre. Ironically, it’s that “hey, you don’t need to play me every waking moment” attitude that makes the game so hard to put down. I suppose it’s a good thing this game didn’t come out while I was in college or, well, I’d probably still be in college.
Programming Pearls (2nd Edition) (ACM Press) by Jon Bentley
Elsewhere