In sync

  Some times my wife and I are weirdly in sync. I got ready to write a blog post about our new hamster and how I had a temporary moment of insanity or over exuberance. I quickly checked my wife's blog and she has already written about it. Both of us set out to do something and it turned out to be exactly the same thing.

  I could expand on the blog my wife did by summarising hers as the fact that yesterday I ordered a heck of a lot of hamster habitat stuff from amazon. Enough to make our hamster Andy several places to live and a veritable mansion if it is all connected together.

  The extra point I was going to make and will now do so is that I sometimes get these urges. I will see something that suddenly piques my interest and I go slightly overboard in investing in it. If I do something I generally try to do it right and well. If I'm not interested in something I'll do it but not always as good as it should be, just enough to get it done and finished with.

  Another part of it is I want the animals that live with us, are out companions, to have happy comfortable lives. We do our best to look after our pets. I remember the things we did to try and keep Boots' brother TipTup alive and well. We lost him when he was only 5 months old and spent well over $2000 on vets in the last week of his life. When we do something we devote ourselves to it, especially something as dear to us as our pets.

  I'm going to go now before I get too emotional and teary about TipTup. It may have been almost 12 years now but it still hurts.

Wheeeee

  We did our snow tubing last night, not on snow per se but more of an icy slope. This is the picture I took from the top of it to give you an idea of what it was like:-

  Lots of fun sliding down and we both had a good time, me more than my wife I would suspect. She got annoyed when the pusher (there were a bunch of helpers at the top to get you in to the tube and push you down) sent her down backwards without asking which scared her. Not a good move at all on his part and he kind of ruined the mood for a bit.

  A small boast here, the guy at the bottom was challenging people to hit the hay bale wall at the far end since the run off at the bottom was a carpeted area to slow you down once you got there. After a few attempts I managed to hit it a total of 5 times, more than anyone else :) . Each time you hit it you get this little badge so at the end of the night I had a small collection of them.

  As for the rest of the night we had a nice hay ride through the Christmas lights afterwards all on our lonesome. A huge trailer of hay bales with just us two on it. It was a nice way to wind down after the previous activity which left both of us a little sore, especially my wife with her bad shoulders.

  And with that I think I'll carry on working. You would think that now we got our big release out we would get some respite coming up to Christmas but no. Onward we push.

Fast bargains

  My wife just pulled off a black Friday miracle. She spent quite a bit of today waiting for a videogame to go on special offer on amazon a moment ago. It is a game I've wanted for Christmas and she managed to get it. To understand how hard this was you need to also understand that by the time she had checked out and ordered it, a process which took all of 30 seconds, all copies of the game at this special price had been claimed. That is fast shopping, a skill my wife is particularly adept at.

  In other news we now also have another pet, a very small robo dwarf hamster named Andy. She (yes a she called Andy not a he) is getting used to her new environment and judging by the squeaking coming from the other room is using her running wheel a lot. Apparently they run for up to 9 hours a night, which for something that is barely 2 inches long, is a hell of a lot.

Laziness

  I feel a bout of laziness coming on. Working from home today and then four days off of work. Sounds like a perfect time to come down with extreme not doing bugger all.

  I try my best to be lazy most of the year but usually utterly fail :| . I think I have a new goal in life, to be as lazy as possible while still doing as much as I can with my wife. Going to be a careful balancing act I think.

  On other unrelated news had an unexpected date night dinner out last night at the Indian restaurant in town. Food was pretty damn delicious and I think my wife has found a new favourite Indian dish in butter chicken. I'm drooling thinking about it although I did eat a hell of a lot last night. *burp*

  My wife was also at her most gorgeous at dinner giving me a reason to stare continuously at her, something that annoys her slightly but I can't help myself.

  Work finally seems to have died down for a fraction and we got the release out (well there are 2 bugs to fix but that is being done by other people today) and we can ship this and make money off of it. Now we just need the sales guys to sell lots of the new box and make lots of money so I can retire a millionaire off of the unexpected huge rise in stock price :| .

  Speaking of my original topic of laziness I'm feeling lazy now so I'm going to stop the strenuous activity of writing a blog post and get one with the easier task of doing nothing.

From OMG to Meh

  It seems my tastes change some times. 10 years ago the prospect of a new Zelda game on a Nintendo console would have had me drooling at the bit in excitement. Yet consider now, a new Zelda game is out for the Wii and I couldn't be more meh about it. How Nintendo handled the Wii and let it become the shovelware bucket of crap that it became is a tragedy. They had a huge lead and a chance to push gaming in new and fun directions but they let it stagnate and sat there pulling in the money which they are now burning through at a frightening rate.

  The Wii is dead and even though the new Zelda game shows what could have been done with that console nobody cares anymore. There are so many other games worth playing on the PS3 let alone including the few others you can only get the the 360 or PC that it just isn't worth paying attention anymore. There was a time, when I was growing up and even a decade ago, where you could play most of the games that were worth playing. Now I have to decide what I want to spend my time playing since I literally can't play everything that is worth playing due to not enough time and/or money. I think even with the Wii U Nintendo is just becoming a me too console and that is a game they will lose. It can play everything the PS3/360 can, big whoop. Then the controller will allow other games but publishers can't afford to make games for just one console anymore, there isn't enough money in it so Wii U specific games will not exist beyond what Nintendo themselves produce.

  Its a shame really, I have spent a lot of time playing Nintendo games and now I don't see me buying another Nintendo console ever. I'll probably just stick to whatever playstation branded console Sony put out in a couple of years (best guess of most people is late 2013 at the earliest) and even then I may not jump on board if there is nothing worth playing.

  I think that really sums it up, there has to be something worth playing now for me to be interested. I'm not going to waste my time on stuff just to pass the time due to the glut of stuff that I am actually interested in.

Sleep

  I had a strange sleeping cycle this weekend. Normally, what with getting up at 4:30, I go to bed at 9 and sleep ok. The weekends however I stay up a little bit later and lay in a little bit longer. Friday night that is what I did, went to be at something like 10:30 after staying up playing games and woke up at 7:30 or so Saturday morning. That day however I was in bed by 8:30 and slept through until almost 8 Sunday. I must have been really tired for some reason but can't think of any logical reason why.

  Yeah I'm a little stressed with work but nothing I haven't dealt with before. I'm not even doing too many strenuous chores gardening wise around the house that often leave me quite worn out. I can't put my finger on it. Then there was last night where I went to bed at 9, woke up at 2:30 and then had weird semi-awake dreams about towing the caravan over obstacle course like obstructions in a huge car park trying to get to some caravan service place. Not to mention part way through the dream I could see outside the car/caravan and the caravan had turned in to a slightly battered cat, that although bore a resemblance to Fudge and what was what I was calling it, looked nothing like Fudge in reality. Pretty damn weird to say the least. I'm also already tired here at work and really don't want to do much considering how much work we have done recently and that we only get a brief break before the next smaller release needs to go out the door.

  Anyway, my sleep cycle seems all sorts of weirded out at the moment and I'm sure I had some other form of strange dream the other night as well that involved Fudge. No idea what it was but I'm sure it will come to me.

So beautiful

  We went and got new passport photos last night. My wife and I need them for our citizenship test coming up and we'll need them to get US passports as well. Looking at the photos mine turned out ok (bit of a slap head in my old age) but my wifes ones turned out really well. She has never looked so beautiful.

  Even though, when I first met her, my wife didn't think she was beautiful I could see it. I always have but she has felt so downtrodden by other people that she could never believe it. I think finally she now knows it to be true and believes it. So this is just one more confirmation of the truth, she is a beautiful woman.

Game logic

  I drive a couple of hours every day with going to work and back. While doing that I listen to videogame podcasts since it helps pass the time rather than listening to shitty radio or the same old music I've had for years. As part of those a lot of new games are talked about. I try to avoid any particularly spoiler parts of games I want to play but generally the people on them talk without spoiling things too much. More often they talk about how a game plays or various interesting things that happen while playing the game.

  One game a lot of people are talking about right now is Skyrim. It seems it has turned out to be really good and the game logic and systems work together really well. Sometimes though the game logic can be a bit too logical. In this game you can steal owned objects. If you get seen while doing it people get annoyed and will chase you and call you a thief. If however their line of sight is broken they won't see you and you can steal with no problems. Totally logical and it works.

  If you then consider how this reacts with another system in the game it can get silly. You can fight pretty much anything and anyone in the game. There are people out there that are trying to play through the game and kill every single living person in the towns leaving the whole place a wasteland. To do this there are obviously game systems of attacking but you can't attack with everything. Hitting someone with a normal object, say a pot, won't get them to react, they will just comment on it and carry on as per normal.

  So consider these two systems then, stealing and object interaction. What would happen if you put a large pot on someones head? They wouldn't be able to see but wouldn't mind since you are not interacting with them with a weapon. What happens if you put a pot on the head of everyone in the room and then tried to steal objects. People have tried this and it actually works. It follows the exact game logic of stealing and people/object interaction. Yet despite this it is totally illogical if you think about it. Try watching this video to see it in action.

  It is this kind of game logic interaction that makes games so interesting sometimes. In the effort to make things act like they should the cross interactions between those systems ends up being totally crazy and silly. Some of these are intentional (like what happens when the giants hit things dead on as in this video) and others are just downright strange. They never fail to surprise though with so much happening getting the logic to be consistent and perfect is extremely hard.

Foooood

  Pretty damn hungry right now for some reason. Maybe it is the fact that I eat breakfast so early but also could be that I'm aware my wife is making a start on delicious food for Christmas. We have home made sausage rolls and some cranberry sauce. Chocolate fudge was made a week or two ago. Then there is the absolutely yummylicious stuffing coming up very soon and the big pile of sweets and chocolates sitting in the spare bedroom.

  My wife is a pretty damn good cook. She was pretty much forced to learn how to cook properly by her mother, who after my wifes father left, gave up cooking and forced her daughters to do it (who were 11 and 7 at the time). Not a great place for a young child to be. Also coming from my mothers cooking, which although not terrible was limited, my wifes cooking is stunning. It is exceedingly rare that I don't love something my wife cooks, even then it is because it is simply something I don't like not the fact that my wife made it.

  Anyway my point is that we get for ourselves a lot of different delicious foods for Christmas. It is one of the few times of year where we simply eat nice things rather than worry about being healthy. That along with the loot and (for me) not working makes it a great time of year.

  Now I'm even more famished than before and pretty much drooling. Damn it.

This is getting silly

  As I've mentioned very recently we are down to the wire with this latest software release at work. However we don't seem to be able to get past the last few bugs. Every time a bug is fixed in a problem area it seems to break something else. 90% of the time it is in one particular system in the software and it is driving me crazy. It is not like the two guys that work in that area are idiots (although one of them is not brilliant he is competent) but it is just so fragile. If we can get that last bit done we are done and the company can make money.

  We have orders waiting for this release ready to be booked as revenue for this quarter, historically our worst since people don't really buy voice equipment in the run up to Christmas. The more frustrating thing is we only realistically have until next week to be done with the lag in final check out testing, pushing through the change order and finally processing the sales orders.

  Anyway, that is my world at the moment. Looking at issues and trying to at least get an understanding of them so the right people can fix them. Very frustrating since I can't fix all this stuff myself and I shouldn't have to.

Bunch of stuff

  A few different things going on at the moment in my world. Work is the usual mad rush to get stuff finished and we are now officially late although it is nothing I'm directly involved with I'm having to help out as much as I can since we need to get this out so we can make money and I can keep getting paid.

  The weekend away was fairly eventless. Middle small town America is as boring as it sounds. Shame the caravan site we stayed at was the best kept one we've been to since if it was somewhere interesting it would have been a good weekend. Not that spending time with my wife is bad but when there isn't much to do it is disappointing.

  In other big news, we now have our date for the citizenship test. It also seems they want to test our ability to understand English since you can't skip that part unless you've been here for 20 years. Seriously guys? You think it takes 20 years to get an understanding of a language that actually came from the country I was fecking born in? You would think we would get a pass on that but no..... Anyway 4 weeks until that happens and then we might be a citizen of this country by the end of the year.

  On other news, I found a webcam of polar bears in Churchill Manitoba today and immediately sent it to my wife. They have live streaming of the bears up there as they congregate at this time of year. We really want to go again to see them since despite the lack of snow when we went it was incredibly cool to see wild polar bears in the flesh.

  Let me see, what else? Watching all the videogame reviews come out of games I'm looking forward to is daunting. Skyrim is being touted as taking 50 to 60 hours to do a half decent run through let alone see everything. Uncharted 3 seems to be more of the same which is a very good thing. The next assassins creed game comes out tomorrow and actually looks to be wrapping up Ezios story as they promised so they can finish Desmonds story next year since the game is supposed to be set in 2012. Saints Row 3 is being seen as insane as it looks which is a very good thing since number 2 was kind of nuts. I could go on but this time of year is always a good time to enjoy this hobby.

  I could go on about more stuff, like the fact that our cats, despite only not having seen us for 2 days, couldn't leave us alone yesterday. They really do miss us a lot when we are not there, it makes it hard not to be there for them all the time. Or the fact that driving home on Sunday we saw a large snow slope being built on a local farm that does all sorts of stuff so now in 2 weeks we are going snow tubing.

  Anyway, back to work so I can earn more money so we can live our lives. Until next time (probably tomorrow but you never now).

So damn close

  Getting very close to pushing out a new major release of software at work at the moment, not to mention the cheaper smaller version of our hardware (if you consider $2000 to $5000 cheap that is). This means lots of last minute bug fixing, people trying things they really shouldn't and giving everyone a heart attack as they think something fundamental is broken. All the usual fun. The most frustrating part is the amount of work it takes just to get through all the misinformation (not usually deliberate), misunderstanding (stupid people normally) and out of date ideas. If people just did what they were meant to we could get through this in time and I could get out of here on time to take my wife to her new endocrinologist today and our weekend away tomorrow. These are way more important than dealing with idiots.

More time

  I need more time I've decided. Well, more time to do what I want to do rather than what I have to do. With the really miserly amount of holiday days I get from work I really don't get as much time off doing what I want to as I should. This does cause friction in my life since as my wife doesn't work she ends up a lot of the time being on her own which is not the way I want her or my life to go.

  Can anyone out there donate me a large chunk of money. Any money will do as long as it is enough for me and my wife to enjoy ourselves for the rest of our lives. I'm not asking for much here :| .

  In other news I really think our older cats are really showing their age now. Boots and Fudge both are really nowhere as nimble as they used to be and in contrast to the girls, Daisy especially, they look like the slow old pokes I feel like. I'm hoping they both feel ok though since it is hard to tell, especially with Boots and his whining when he wants something. Despite his slowing down though he still does seem to be able to race around the house in pure joy after doing any particularly smelly dump in the litter.

Growing up geek

  I'm a geek, a nerd, a spod, a whatever name you want to call it. Every now and then I come across something I saw in my childhood, today it was a post about The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, a completely crazy insane sci fi movie, from a time when sci fi movies were pretty nutty or totally mainstream. It was stuff like this that I really enjoyed for some reason. Just watch the end credits, with its typical 80s synth pop music and parade of characters to see the kind of cheesy film it is. If anyone ever wonders why I am like I am films and things like this can play a large part in forming my mind.

I love my wife

  Not much more to say beyond that opening title. In all my days I've never felt about anybody else like I feel about her. The way I feel safe and secure when I'm with her, heck even when I'm not physically with her and just talking via a bunch of text sent over the internet. The way I know I want her to feel the same way about me. The fact that I don't care what anyone else in the world thinks about me other than her. The fact that other people in the world get in the way of me spending our lives together without all the other crap stuff that gets in the way.

  All I can say is I see no point in life if you can't find someone like that for yourself. I though I would be a sad lonely geek for my whole life and then my wife came in to my life. Do yourself a favour and find someone like that, it brings so much happiness and contentment to you, it can't be missed.

Fed up

  Busy time at work still here and I'm fed up with the idiots around here. We have testers raising bugs that something doesn't work when nobody in their right mind would actually do that so why should it work in the first place. We have better things that don't work that should that we need to be working on and you need to be testing to make sure those things are working not farting around with random stupid shit just because it is easier to do and makes you look good because you raise lots of bugs. Gah.

  I know I get paid for this crap but I would much rather be spending my time at home with my wife, someone who I actually enjoy being with unlike the vast majority of people. Yet day after day I have to come to this place just so we can afford to live and eat (not to mention look after our lovely cats who we love).

  And now it is pointless meeting time that we have to attend and that just repeats every day with the same information. "We need to fix bugs faster, make sure we test what is fixed and get it done". What a waste of 50 engineers time for 30 minutes or more every freaking day.

Zzzzzz

  Long day yesterday, so long that I didn't even get a chance to blog, something I try to do most week days. Here at work we are very close to pushing out the next release of software to go with the new hardware we are also releasing. Which also means stupid stuff is breaking at the last minute. None of it my stuff, all the new stuff is not quite there but close enough to release and then fix in a patch release.

  Also driving all the way over to hell pit place to visit a doctor my wife is giving up on due to his extreme tardiness took a fair while. All that just so we could get her records to take to the new doctor we see next week. Why this isn't something other than a stack of paper in an office in this day and age I don't know. Your health information shouldn't be scattered over half a dozen offices on various scraps of paper that then has to be pulled together to get a complete picture of your health.

  Still, just popping in here to let everyone whomever you are that I am still here and regular blogging was interrupted yesterday :|

Skills

  Being an annoying crap day so far with idiots here at work so I though I would post something a little happier. Like this pilot who has serious skills in landing a plan with no landing gear. Yeah. Now to go continue telling someone they are an idiot because they want code as it is, despite the fact that it could cause bugs, since they think changing it will look "nasty". Again, yeah.