This weekend started early after Bazaarvoice’s traditional All-Hands at the Alamo Drafthouse (we’re currently at the South Lamar location because I think that’s the only one that will fit us at this point). Some of the crew headed over to Matt and Tara’s to chill by/in the pool, then we headed to Trudy’s so Heather could get her complimentary birthday martini.

Speaking of the All-Hands, it was kicked off this quarter by an air band competition:

After that, a few peeps came to chill at my place including Ochs and Weishan, which meant that Sam came along too since he apparently has a thing for Weishan and her “innocent friends.” I don’t know, that’s what I heard, just saying.

On Saturday, I headed to Hula-Hut to chill with some BV folk including Lisias who visits us for the first time from the UK. I got some shrimp tacos which I thought were adequately tasty. =) On the way home, Ryan tried to persuade me to play some Zelda games, but was not successful. =p

The night ended with some WoW and DotA, where Viraj decided to not plug in and use his known flakey wireless network resulting in two incomplete games. At least I got to kill and laugh at him a lot in the last game. Some notable moments in the last game included:

• Getting Viraj’s health down to red to see him run away. I figured he went back to his base to heal, only to see the announcement that he died to neutral creeps moments later. He claims it was faster.


• Accidentally killing Viraj in the collateral damage of killing Mark as Zeus.


• Viraj dying to cleave attacks by Justin while invisible. Justin: “I didn’t even know Viraj was there.”


• Mark (who was on the same team as Viraj) having a near 4-5x higher creep kill count than VIraj

On Sunday, I woke up way later than intended and just bummed around for a while. Started going through the Django tutorial again, then chilled with some of the gang and watched The Fly. Thaaaaat’s all folks.

Why is it that ketchup packages are so small, particularly relative to, say, mayonnaise ones? How often to people actually use one package? I just don’t understand…

Now that I’ve complained about ketchup, I have realized I don’t have anything else to talk about, which makes this blog post just a bit pointless. Enjoy.

This weekend started off poorly with my A/C not turning on. It ended up being because the drain pipe was clogged so the system automatically shut off to prevent my house from flooding. At least it was a relatively easy fix. Weekend was rather uneventful other than that… I played around with AppleScript/iTunes/iChat, went to get some dim sum with some of the BV gang, and did some misc errands and cleaned the house a little.

I have a headache right now that I think is due to me needing a new contact prescription (I believe they have gotten worse again - so I am even more blind than before). I’m gonna have to make an appointment tomorrow and take care of that…

I ran across this nifty little blog post that lets you control a remote Mac’s iTunes via iChat. I decided to customize the script a bit and added a way to search for songs. Here’s my addition to the stock AppleScript:

else if (theMessage begins with "song " and theMessage is not "song ")
     or (theMessage begins with "s " and theMessage is not "s ") then

    set cLength to (count (first word of theMessage)) + 1
    set query to texts cLength thru -1 of theMessage

    tell application "iTunes"
        set theSongs to (search playlist "Library" for query)
        try
            set songID to persistent ID of (item 1 in theSongs)
            play (first track of (get some playlist whose special kind is Music)
                 whose persistent ID = songID)
            set theResponse to "Playing song request. "
        on error
            set theResponse to "Did not find any songs. "
        end try

    end tell

    set theResponse to theResponse & getCurrentiTunesTrack()

I also added “aliases” to the previous and next commands (“p” and “n” respectively), but that was pretty trivial, so I won’t include it here. This is the first AppleScript I’ve written, so I’m probably making some noobish mistakes, but it was pretty cool. Now I can chat with my Mac Mini and tell it what to play!

Anyone have any experience with any wifi webcams? Thinking of setting one up in my game room. Or maybe I’ll get a regular webcam, but then I’d have to leave my (probably) Mac Mini on the whole time just for it so that seems like overkill.

We went to the new BV office to preview it on Monday. It seems quite a bit larger! I forgot to bring my camera though and the ones I took on my iPhone are at such a disappointing resolution, I don’t even want to bother with them.

I mentioned this earlier, but I went to the monster shoot at Carolee and Christopher’s. Then, I went to Home Depot and got a ceiling fan for my living room that Mark and Andrew helped install, which turned out to be quite an effort since we had to rewrite some switches. Later, we played a bit of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. That game is so crazy, but oh so awesome.

We had a discussion about comics and super-hero movies. I haven’t been into the comic world much, but apparently both Marvel and DC have severely messed up universes now. DC just loves their ridiculous “multiverses” where they have huge story-arcs that aren’t entertaining at all due to confusing “timelines” just to explain away inconsistencies. I stopped reading when they had their stupid “Infinite Crisis” and came out with characters such as Superboy-Prime. Whose bright idea was it to dilute the Superman character by creating a whole ton of other versions of him and make some of them bad? Superboy-Prime just sounds really lame, too. How in the world is a kid or comic new-comer supposed to get into these plots when you have to have a huge diagram just to know what’s going on?

Marvel, apparently, decided to throw away a bunch of plot as well by just saying “oh, these super heroes? they were actually aliens for the past few years.” Sigh. Oh yeah, and reviving “dead” characters isn’t uncommon in comics, but the recent Captain America one is just ridiculous. That bullet that apparently killed him? Oh yeah, no nevermind, that was actually a special bullet that transported him to another time and place. Oh really, Marvel? That makes a lot of sense. That’s what I see here… yeah, it’s Captain America being transported to another place and time.

Let me treat you to this beauty of story-writing (from Wikipedia):

“Darkseid’s essence attempts to claim the Miracle Machine in a last ditch effort to defeat Superman. However, Superman sang a note at a frequency that countered Darkseid’s own vibrational frequency, shattering his essence.”

Yay! That’s just what everyone wanted Superman to have. Super-song. Here’s another character that had this power (well, kinda):

Sigh. Someone get these comic writers out of their bubble. They need some fresh air to get back to good story-telling rather than coming up with convoluted garbage.

On a WoW-related note, I logged in to finally do my Paladin quest to get Redemption. I checked my /played time and it’s at about 14 hours. Not bad for almost level 44. =)

I woke up super early (7AM, gasp!) to go to Carolee and Christopher’s place to participate in a monster shoot. I took some video with my 5D MII, which I hope will be useful (still getting used to video on it), but I also took a few still shots beforehand:

See Flickr for more Monster Shoot photos.

I made a new Paladin in WoW to level with Brook’s hunter. I did the refer a friend thing so we got 3x the experience when leveling together. I created it on Monday and tonight I’m level 43 with not much effort at all (well, help from the friends). It’s pretty sweet how fast that went. Oh yeah, and his name is Hunkuspocus!

This weekend I went to Houston with coworkers and company. I carpooled there with Ryan, Tiff, and two of Tiff’s friends. Overall, it was a nice weekend adventure, which I would have probably enjoyed more if i had played any Final Fantasy games. Luckily, there was not a lot of terrible cosplay to make me want to run away, so we were good there. A few shots from the event…

Ryan doing a little dance at the gas station:

Yay, tickets!

Blizzard Q&A:

Loitering:

On the way back, Ryan took the Heather-prescribed route and made a wrong turn somewhere so we winded up at a place called Gay Hill that had a creepy one-lane underpass. We thought we were going to get attacked by trolls, among other… creatures.

On Sunday, I finally watched the first Bring It On which was playing on TV (I have seen the other three). I also just found out on the Bring It On Wikipedia entry that there’s going to be a fifth one!

“Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world
She took the midnight train going anywhere
Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit
He took the midnight train going anywhere

A singer in a smokey room
A smell of wine and cheap perfume
For a smile they can share the night
It goes on and on and on and on” - Journey

Man, do you guys remember when fruit roll-ups used to have strawberry seeds in them? Those were the days.

Oh, and finished flooring pics:

Now I’m watching Glee on Hulu, because my little sister sent me this: