Brace yourselves... (an announcement from WelchCorp)

As mentioned in my previous post, it's been quite a while since we updated you on new goings-on here at WelchCorp. It should come as no surprise, then, that Big Things^tm have been afoot!

Hot on the heels of our unprecedented success with the launch of our maiden project, the Eleanor, our boys in the lab have been hard at work for the past several months on a new product - codenamed Clover¹, during the internal development phases - that we think you'll be very interested in.


The lead developer from the Eleanor is back on board, and while we believe that his past work speaks for itself, he's promised that his current project will be just as unique, just as perfect, and just as awesome as his first endeavor with us. He's working long hours, designing and then building every single part of Clover with exacting detail and purpose. We can't wait to see the final product!

During the development phase, Clover must remain in the restricted lab fashioned for its creation, but we have been allowed limited peeks inside. The only photographs we've managed to sneak out have been fairly grainy, blurry, and low-res², but we have been able to identify an external antenna, making Clover truly a revolutionary product for us!

It's important to note that Clover is not designed as a replacement for the existing Eleanor installation you may be familiar with. While it is possible to place each of the two components in its own sandbox environment, the two are designed to be installed concurrently, as their coexistence improves resource sharing and allows access to the existing development framework.

The Clover is expected to launch mid-November this year under its official product designation. Availability will be limited at first, but we expect to be able to put a Clover in the hands of anyone who wants to hold one by the first quarter of 2014.




¹ - Also referred to as 'Squid', in some markets.

² - Seriously, it's like we hired Mr Blurrycam to take our pre-release photos. We'll get pre-production images out soon, but not until we know what we're looking at!

Dear Mother...

Hi, it's your favorite she-beast, Bean Sidhe. That noisy pink kitten you brought home several months ago is off having fun with Dad, so I decided to take my opportunity to present a rather disturbing report.

You see, this morning, my surveillance cameras captured this image. The pink kitten, codenamed Gal El can be clearly seen cavorting with the enemy. We may have to face the fact that she may not truly be one of us.

I know that, for me, finding out that Dad was... it's still hard to say it... a "Dog Person" came as quite a shock. I can only imagine what seeing this picture does to you. Be strong, and know that our cause is just.

I've got to go. I think I hear the start of nap time, which means that I might get to enjoy a few minutes of uninterrupted sleep, myself. I look forward to your return.

-B.S.

Hi mom... It's Puca. I think Grey Cat forgot to hit Send just so I could send you a message myself. I love her - she's so thoughtful.

You are far away, and that means you must be feeling very worried about me. I know I'm always worried about you when you're not around. Don't worry, though. Dad's taking good care of all of us. He even left a bowl of potatoes out on the coffee table for me! I love that guy - always thinking ahead.

He's in the kitchen right now, cleaning dishes, and counting them so he knows they're all there. He just got up to "10 dishes rinsed, ah ah ah." He sure does love to clean.

I sure do look forward to you coming home tomorrow. I'm sure you'll have lots of treats and snuggles for me, plus all the smells. It'll be great.

I hear that smelling pretty flowers can help when you're stressed, so here's a picture of a pretty flower from the back yard. It smells awesome. I know, because I sniffed it before I peed on it this morning.

Love!

-Puca

My New Year's Resolutions

It's a long list this year...

1600 x 1200 (x2) - Desktop
1366 x 768 + 1024 x 768 - Recording Laptop
1280 x 720 - Galaxy Nexus
1280 x 800 - Nexus 7
1600 x 1200 (x 3) - Work (Desktop)
1600 x 1200 - Work (Test Server)
1440 x 900 - Work (Laptop)
1280 x 768 - Work (BlackBerry Z10)
1024 x 600 - Work (BlackBerry PlayBook)
640 x 480 - Work (BlackBerry Bold 9900)

... no, that's not the entire post, it was just the obligatory geek joke with regards to resolution.¹

So I've never been much for New Year's Resolutions. I'm bad at keeping to things for an entire month, so the concept of keeping to something for an entire year is ... boggling. It just seems like setting myself up for failure, so I tend not to do it.

This year, though, I think I'll give it a go.

Happy birthday to me...

It's weird to me that so many of my good friends have birthdays within such a tight window. So happy birthday as well to The Mighty B, Kammah, !(bagels), The Joj, and - I'm sure - many more that I'm forgetting/missing. Capriquaricorns (and permutations thereof) unite!

This year, I gain a new 10's digit. Like most birthdays, that means that I don't feel any older today, but unlike most other birthdays, for some reason, 30 seems to indicate a passage of some sort. "He's in his twenties..." is used to excuse any number of childhood fallacies still lingering about one who has reached his majority, if not his adulthood.

My darling Bean is fond of asking a series of questions on one's birthday, and for many years, I've done my best to dodge answering them, but for the special occasion of my turning 0b11110 (yes, I did that) - not to mention the fact that I now have this cool bloggy thing - I am of a mind to share.

The kind of story I tell my daughter...

A while back, I was trying to convince a certain child of mine that she really ought to sleep, no matter how much she wanted to stay awake. When I tried shushing her, she just screamed louder. But when I talked to her, she'd shut up, so she could hear what I was saying.

I should tell her a story, thinks I to myself.

Yeah? That'd be awesome, thinks my brain back to me. Only... I seem to have misplaced every children's story you've ever heard.

No worries, I'll just come up with a new one - she's not going to know the difference at this age, anyway, I think right back. I'll just tell her about something that would put most folks to sleep.

And this is what happened (with illustrations)...

The Footnote tag

I wrote this post an age ago, but never posted it for some reason. Updated the math, and I'm just going to throw it out there now, lest it langour longer in the land of the lost.

The astute reader may have noticed that one of the most-commonly used tags on this blog so far is the footnote tag. There's an amusing story behind this - well, amusing to me, anyway.

So the wife has a blog. A fantastic, funny, witty, interesting blog. After she'd been blogging for a while, she made a comment to me that she felt like she was putting footnotes on every post. So I suggested that she make a 'footnote' tag, and tag every post that had a footnote in it, so that she could quickly see what percentage of her posts were afflicted with footy-notey goodness.

She then spent the better part of an evening going back through all of her posts and adding 'footnote' to the list of tags for all of her annotated posts. At the end of the day, that tag outstripped every other tag on her blog by a large margin. And by large, I mean "nearly double the next-most-oft-used tag". Even today, my quick napkin math shows that she has footnotes on 22.99% of her blog posts¹. I give her occasional bouts of heck about it.

Well, then along comes this here bloggy-space. And in my first real post (the baby announcements had already been drafted for emails to friends/family/coworkers), I find myself all up on the footnotes like Axe body spray on desperate teen boys.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, so I've taken a dose of my own medicine and mixed metaphors like a metaphor-mixing fool who graduated from Metaphor University with a degree in MetaMixology.

So yeah, probably not as interesting if you're not - y'know - me, but there you have it.

¹ - (63 / (64 + 150 + 60)) * 100, for anyone who wants to check me.

Attention Splitting

I was talking with a friend in IMs today who said that he needed a way to split his attention six ways at once. That led to, well, silliness...

Try the new Attention Splitter!

Using patented prismatic technology, you can feed up to 10 data feeds into your eyesockets, for minimum enjoyment of more distractions than ever before!

That's amazing! How does it do that?!

How does it work? I'm glad you asked!

Simply replace an eyeball with one of our Attention Hub Occular Implants, and position a Transmission Hub Attention Receiver in front of your desired time-waster. Once you're set up, let the AHOI-THAR refract, reflect, and retransmit your attention from THAR to here!

(Set includes two AHOI-THAR interfaces, extra THAR sold separately)

But how do I know that there won't be any signal degredation!?

Signal degradation? What's that? We're beaming you the full monty, my friend. Your AHOI-THAR unit sends, uncompressed, the full feed of whatever you place in front of it! If you do encounter issues, however, we have a separate unit, the Optional Hub Attention Input, which can be used to boost the signal from a THAR by up to 100%. Your AHOI will then connect to the new OHAI-THAR link, providing you full access to distraction, no matter where you are!

Dislaimer: The product described above is in no way a good idea, supported by scientific or medical research, or available for purchase on any plane of existence. People wishing to pre-order the Attention Splitter device should take a step back and seriously re-evaluate their priorities, then have their sarcasm detectors recalibrated at their earliest convenience. Not responsible for damage to items left in vehicle caused by fire, theft, or giant Monty Python foot. 

From beyond the grave...

On Sunday last, during a rehearsal with my sister and her husband for our upcoming Celtic Christmas show, my brother-in-law let me know that cell phone numbers had been rearranged to make the best use of the plans and devices that were available, and that he now had my dad's old phone number. I noted this, but - as we were getting set up to rehearse - did nothing with this information.

Fast-forward to the next day, and I get a text from L saying that her battery has died, but that my sister is on her way to rescue her. God bless family. I chatted with her some while she waited on my sister to arrive, and

About 30 minutes or so later, I receive the text you see here. (Complete with the 'FUAutoCorrect'-style typo, but minus the mustache. That just seemed very much like a cooler option than a plain bar across the phone number...)

Yup. That's right. Nothing to see here, only my father texting me from beyond the grave!

Old Habits Die Hard

The photo in question

The other night, the wife took a photo of me and the bebbeh that I thought was freaking adorable, so I asked her to send it my way.

This post is not about the photo, but I'm a fan of backstory, and this backstory is nothing more than an opportunity to post a shamelessly adorable photo of myself and my precious.

When the wife went to send the email, her phone locked up. No major problem, it's been happening off and on for a while.

"It's been doing this again. I keep having to hard reset my phone."

Now, first, she wins major points for using the term hard reset to describe the specific act of pulling the battery from a mobile device to reset it. What happens next, though, made me laugh uncontrollably.

She pulled the battery cover off her phone, removed the battery, then proceeds to blow on the contacts, as though trying to clean a malfunctioning NES cartridge.

I told her right then and there, "I'm so blogging this."

Then I blinked, and forgot to do so.

That evening, right after climbing into bed, I remembered, so I rolled over and used the note-to-self voice command on my phone¹.

What I said: blowing on phone battery like an NES cartridge
What it heard: blowing iphone battery like any ass cartridge

And that, my friends, is the reason for all the buildup so far. An understandable, but hilarious, mistranscription of a note-to-self prompted by an unexpected trip down memory lane.

---

¹- If you have an Android phone and haven't tried this feature yet, I highly recommend giving it a try. I've found it to be an indispensable tool for coping with ADHD symptoms, and even if I didn't have that to contend with, I'd still probably rate it as one of my favorite and most useful features of the Android OS.

How: Hold down the search button to get to your voice search interface and say "Note to self", then whatever message you want to remember.

What it does: It will transcribe your spoken words to the best of its ability - sometimes with hilarious result - and compose an email to your own self, to which you can add more detail, add further recipients, etc. When that email is sent, the audio recording of your voice that was used in the initial transcription is attached to the message, so even if the transcription is wrong, you can hear yourself reminding yourself to do something.

I love my company

I was just told about this blog posting on our Inside BlackBerry Developer Blog, due to this tidbit:

Do you know what the output of this statement is?

Array(16).join("bacon" – 1337) + " Batman!";

I love working for a company with a sense of humor.

They do post the answer to that question, btw (I don't know Java, so I had to look for it). I put it under a Read More link, but that doesn't help if you were sent straight here, so scroll down for it.

Diablo 3

A few weeks back (okay, a month back, but I started writing this two weeks ago and just got distracted...), this thing happened. This Diablo III thing.

I remember the excitement of playing the original Diablo "back in the day." Long hours spent navigating the catacombs of Tristram, slaying monsters and earning fat loots for my trouble. I remember dark corridors, weakly illuminated by flickering lights (and my own torch). I remember the soundtrack - music that very effectively added to the intensity of the game's artistic design - overlaid with occasional distant screams and the sound of gibbering hellions waiting for their opportunity to strike. I remember the pain of the Hellfire expansion, but playing it nonetheless, because - p'sh! - moar Diablo!

I played through Diablo II several times, and I remember enjoying the Druid and Amazon classes most. I remember the thrill of seeing the Secret Cow Level, and the agony of being slain by hordes of polearm-wielding bovines. I even remember the names of some of the bows I found (Magewrath and Windforce come to mind), and how excited I was to be able to use them in my quest to end Baal and Mephisto.

In short, this game series has provided a wealth of memories and hours upon hours upon even further hours of gameplay that kept me glued to my seat through multiple replays. The reason has always been the beautiful combination present within the game of single- and multiplayer potential.

I enjoy being able to sit down and relax playing video games (as you've no doubt gathered already), but there's more to me enjoying a game than just a good story or good gameplay. I can get those from a book or angry birds. What keeps me coming back to a game for years (see also: WoW subscriber from launch until earlier this year) is a solid system for encouraging and rewarding group play, while also allowing a rewarding single-player aspect, for times when I'm either not feeling up to socializing or when I can't find a group to run with.

This, to me, is what Blizzard got right with Diablo III. There are a ton of people complaining on the greater interspheres¹ about all the things that are lacking, but what will keep me interested in this game for ages is that I can play all by myself and make progress, but when I want to play with others and have the opportunity, the game gets out of the way and makes it simple to do so.

Anymore, that's my criteria for a successful game. Single player-only games can be amazing, but I will quickly lose interest and move on to something that I can share with other people, not as an amusing anecdote after-the-fact, but as a shared experience.

It's my little slice of social interaction that allows me to remain a cave-dwelling hermit the whole time.


¹ - Said complaints run the gamut from "the story is two-dimensional", "the real-money auction house is a moneygrab/sanctioned cheating/the end of the franchise (take your pick)", "always-connected DRM sucks" all the way to "I can't kill things the way I want to, so make the game easier" -

Learning a new language

... nope, not Spanish. Not even Irish, though the Rosetta Stone that the Wife lovingly purchased for me last year for Christmas would surely love to be dusted off and used.

Python

I'm a big ol' geek. I'm learning a new coding language (mostly for work projects, but at least 33% for fun). I've been going through the exercises at Learn Python The Hard Way, and so far, it's like C and QBASIC had a baby raised by COBOL.

My goal is to add Python to my list of coding/scripting languages in which I am barely literate within a few months. The current list stands at (in rough order of learning):

• DOS
• QBASIC
• Windows Command Shell
• C/C++
• HTML¹
• T-SQL
• Windows PowerShell
• AutoHotKey
• *sh (currently cygwin/bash, with a side of ksh - which is funny if you're familiar with ksh)

My favorite part of the classes so far? The exercise that has this as extra credit:

Find out what Zork and Adventure were. Try to find a copy and play it. 

And now, back to the books. I have code that I broke that needs un-breaking!

¹ - I know, it's not technically a programming or scripting language, but it is a digital language that's come in handy on regular occasions, so I'm leaving it on the list. Programming purists, forgive me.

Are you going?

By the way, for anyone stumbling across this space that doesn't already know, I perform weekends at the Scarborough Renaissance Festival in Waxahachie, TX. If you're in the neighborhood and stop on by, look up my group, Traveller Song, in the program and stop by to say hi - I'd love to see you!

Ridiculous excitement

Okay, so many many years ago, when I was just a wee geekling sprog, I played a game. A game which sparked my imagination and kept me laughing for days on end. That game, my friends, was Space Quest.

I was pointed this direction as a result of my love for Sierra's (remember them?) other Quest titles*, and loved the quirky sense of humor, the concept of a space janitor (the existence thereof - such a one being the savior of the universe was just icing), and the challenge of navigating such a compelling game world and solving such brilliantly-crafted puzzles. I can't recall specifically which adventure of Roger Wilco's was my first in the series, but I can remember many a delighted hour spent in the world created by the Two Guys from Andromeda.

I've just read that they've gotten back together, and are planning a new game! I'm all sorts of eager to see what they'll come up with. Sadly, I doubt it'll be the same kind of adventure game that made the series a huge hit from 1986 to 1995 - there doesn't seem to be as much of a market for that style of gameplay anymore.

So long as they don't release it for Facebook, I think I'll play it, though. These guys have invested - in the form of chuckles, memories, and fun - in my interest in their products.


* - King's Quest and Quest for Glory, specifically. I played Police Quest, but just didn't get as into it.