It is a gloomy, grey day in New Jersey. I love it. Not too cold but dark. I could live like this every day.
I ran a quick and dirty word count on the site two days ago. Very rough but SGL is up to approximately 1.1 million words! That is a lot of words.
Before leaving for work this morning I took the time to install the King’s Quest collection onto Dominica’s computer. It is amazing that the entire collection of seven games can fit onto just two CDs! You heard me right kids, CDs not DVDs. And just two of them. Pretty cool. It shows how far compression has come since the games first came out. I am really looking forward to playing KQIV-VII that I have never managed to complete. (I have never played KQ IV or KQ VIII except to check out the look and feel, KQ V and KQ VI never ran correctly on the Windows 95 box that I had at the time and I couldn’t get through them without them crashing so I am looking forward to finally completing them.)
I thought that these were going to be ports of the King’s Quest series to Windows XP but they are, in fact, just the original DOS versions of the games running on the DOSBox emulator. So really I got nothing here that I didn’t have before. KQ IV even still requires that I print out the manual so that I can enter in the copy protection code. Lame. Although the upside of this method is that it should be super simple to make all of these classics run great under Linux. Maybe I will give that a shot. That would be awesome. I am sure that lots of people have done this before and no one cares anymore but I CARE dammit!
This morning was massively uneventful. I was up late last night so I didn’t get up until half past eight this morning. I worked from home until eleven and then drove into the office where all was quiet.
I have been putting my time into ready “Joel on Software” by Joel Spolsky – much of which I have read previously online but I thought that I would read the book just the same. It is considered one of the really important books on software design and management. Joel runs the Manhattan software house Fog Creek Software from whom Andy has recently begun to use the product FogBugz for bug tracking.
Back before moving to the WordPress content management system for SGL, we used to have a lot of extra, non-daily, content that has been inaccessible. I decided to go through today and begin making some of that stuff show up in WordPress. You can once again laugh along with School Excuses, Children’s Proverbs, Product Labels, Out of the Mouth of Babes and Something to Think About: Part 1. More will be coming now that I am on a mission to get these all converted.
Dominica and I finally have something of a schedule for the holidays. The current plan is that we will drive to Geneseo on Friday night. We will be in Geneseo for the weekend. On Saturday night is my cousin Sara’s birthday party. Then Sunday night, which is Christmas Eve, is when my family celebrates Christmas. Then very late on Christmas Eve Dominica and I will drive out to Frankfort and we will be there on Christmas day. That is Monday. On Tuesday and Wednesday we will be staying in Frankfort and I will be working from “home”. On Wednesday evening I will be taking the train back to Newark and i will be working from the office on Thursday and Friday. Then on Friday night I will hop the train back to Rochester or Utica. Not sure yet, but I expect Rochester. Then on Sunday we will return to Frankfort and Dominica and I will drive back to Newark together on Monday, January 1st so that we can both return to work as normal on Tuesday.
Dominica discovered a Walmart over in Harrison and there is some last minute shopping that we need to do so our plan is to head over to Harrison (between East Newark and the Ironbound) to shop and then to go our for some Spanish or Portuguese for dinner.
The Walt Disney Company decided today that older, heavyset males with white flowing beards are not welcome in their parks. One such man was asked to leave Walt Disney World after telling some children who were asking him if he was Santa Claus that he was. Now I can understand the Disney officials not wanting him telling kids that he is Santa Claus but to tell him that he would not be allowed into the park looking the way that he does is 1) racist 2) sexist 3) ageist and 4) discriminated based on religion not to mention weight. You would think that the Disney company, for all their supposed political correct posturing, would think about venturing into this territory a little more closely. (If you are wondering how telling people that they cannot resemble what people think Santa Claus would look like – Disney is a partner of Coca-Cola who designed Santa, by the way – violates all these things just think about the fact that he has to loose weight, become a woman, become younger, shave (some religions prohibit this) or be anything but of European descent!!)
I left work a little after six. I got home and Dominica met me downstairs and we immediately drove out to Walmart on Harrison to the east of town. It was very easy to get to and is actually not too bad of a Walmart. They didn’t have what we were looking for but we did pick up some DVDs while we were there. We got the 1985 made for television move Alice in Wonderland which Dominica has been looking for for years. We also got the first two seasons of Diff’rent Strokes which truly was an awful show but it is an important part of our childhoods so we got it anyway. Disney does not appear to be releasing Pirates of the Caribbean 2 on anything but DVD so we went ahead and got that along with Elf which I have heard is one of the best holiday movies in recent years. Everyone has raved about it and it was not expensive so we decided to splurge.
After shopping we went to the Ironbound and ate at Mompou. I have now made it for almost two entire weeks eating only once per day. I am pretty sure that this is causing me to only eat about fifty to sixty percent as many calories as I was eating previously. By eating breakfast it makes me hungry all day long and all of those studies about how eating first thing in the morning increases your metabolism never take into account MY metabolism which is different than any generic study ever says that it should be so I have given up on listening to so called experts. This also saves a ton of money as I buy many fewer meals.
We came home and I did a little tiny bit of work and Dominica studied for her A+ for about twenty minutes and then we watched two episodes of Diff’rent Strokes before going to bed around eleven.