Been a while, for which I can blame being busy with work, having some computer downtime, and find other more recreational things to do.
Work for the last couple of weeks has mainly been dealing with the pending software release. That’s really it in a nutshell, but as they say the devil’s in the details. Over the last two weeks I’ve ended up writing a lot of documentation, thinking about software installation details, writing and running regression tests, and finally today setting up some cgi-bin scripts to control who really gets to download the software. Hopefully we can get this damn thing out the door tomorrow.
Computer downtime was started about two weeks ago, when I finally concluded the mysterious crashes of my Win2K box was due to CPU overheating. While addressing that problem I decided I’d better upgrade some hardware and operating systems - hence the downtime last weekend, in case anyone noticed.
As far as recreation goes, on Wednesday I finally found myself a climbing partner via Ironwork’s online message board, and so on Friday, I went climbing for real for the first time. Kristin and I got along well enough, and despite some initial concern about my being an utter novice, it turns out we have nearly commensurate ability. So it looks like I’ll have a climbing partner for the next while, or at least until we both “get off the ground” (her words). Tonight I spent another hour climbing, got my permanent belay card, and finally managed to complete one 5.7 route. I was quite pleased with that, although relative to the other routes, this isn’t much - the Ironworks is a pretty spartan place for a newbie climber. Besides a couple of kiddie routes (mislabeled 5.10 as pointed out by Kristin, much to my chagrin on the first day when I charged up them gleefully), there is one 5.3, one 5.5, and maybe three or four 5.7 routes at the place. (No idea what these numbers are referring to? Check out the Yosemite Decimal System.)
Haven’t really been to TKD practice - turned my left ankle badly couple of weeks ago, but that really has been just a lame excuse since unlike my other ankle twisting, I was mostly fine by the next day.
The other recreation aspect is that I’ve been spending too much time on my current video game addiction. I’m glad my only PS2 game purchase so far has been Gran Turismo 3, because it’s just way cool - and this is coming from someone who generally thinks that cars and car-related games suck. The driving engine is both hard enough to be challenging, yet not completely impossible for driving challenged folks like me. The car collecting and upgrading aspect is pretty mindnumbing - just think Pokémon: “Mazda Miata, I choose you!” or “Mitsubishi Lancer has evolved to Turbo Level 4!”. And the brain dead AI and non-existent collision damage leads to some fun tricks - ie scraping up against another car on the outside lane in order to make a corner faster.