monkeyplus1

I think teh intArwebz must have groaned under the strain of millions of Grand Theft Auto fiends (like myself), to see the short game trailer released yesterday, offering the very first peek at what is to come this October. This is the first completely NEW version to come out in 6 years, as the last few have only been incremental improvements and over GTA3.

I have been teased by co-workers for using up vacation time each time a new version of Grand Theft Auto is released, and I have no shame in admitting that I’ve played almost 300 hours of San Andreas. That’s a lot of value for $50 worth of entertainment. Sure, I beat the game not long after it came out, but I’ve spent over half of those hours doing what I love to do best (virtually speaking) - being airborne. Whether provoking air-to-air combat with the National Guard, or landing an airliner safely atop a skyscraper, flying the pattern for some touch-and-go, or just cruising along fat dumb and happy, I could never quite get bored.

I’ve also done some pretty dumb things to amuse myself, like seeing how many tow-trucks I could chain together (5). Creating sprawling traffic pile-ups on the freeway. Getting into trouble is still fun, but I wait until my kids are asleep before I start shooting and blowing stuff up. Just putting around, minding my own business, not running over anyone, not shooting, is a nice, relaxing way to unwind. Stress-free “sandbox” style of play.

It’s a little vacation from the real world, but a real enough vacation for me to enjoy. So, like many fiends out there, I’ve already had the October 2007 release date marked on my calendar since last fall, but now I’m delighted to have just a little taste of what is to come.

I’m sure there will be plenty of nay-sayers, people LOVE to hate on the game, but like a junkie and his junk, nothing is going to come between me and my fix.

Come October, I’ll be happier than horse-guts lying out in the prarie sun.

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This Saturday will mark a week of daily trips to the steam room. It’s nice because it is seldom crowded, the 110-115F and 100% humidity are likely too much for most people. The jacuzzi is nice, the saline swimming pool is lightyears better than chlorine, and the sauna is so-so (it smells too much of carnivore sweat), but for me, the steam is where it’s at.This coming weekend, I’m hoping to finish up the monthly mix-tapes I’m semi-committed to, but I’m waiting for another big wave of inspiration. Right now, I’m paddling around in the water, looking at horizon, and waiting. You can’t force inspiration, and trying to work on something creative without it might have value as practice, but it’s likely to be crap.

The muses have a strange way with me, seemingly absent for weeks or months at a time, but when they come, they come like a hurricane. It can be almost overwhelming, but if I ride the wave, it is incomparably satisfying.

Friday night, Def and I are going to go see Earth, a drone metal band that’s been around a while. Should be good, will report.

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I apologize in advance, but I feel the need to bitch. They say it’s therapeutic to get it off your chest, right?

I’m consulting at a company whose world headquarters have stood in the same spot for the last 100 years. The office, which has stood on the site for that time, is stinky, dismal and has decor which looks like it was last remodeled about the time I would have been in diapers and the war in Vietnam was winding down. Dark brown wood paneling, stained yellow ceiling panels, and don’t get me started on what they call a bathroom - it’s revolting - a capital offense to the eyes and the nose.

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revisions

20070327 mp1

I just cut a huge chunk of text out of this post. I’m not so sure it’s a great idea to write too much about the occasionally less-than-ideal situations in which we work.

The last part is so general, it seems ok to hang out.

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A computer couldn’t give a shit how you format source code, so long as it is syntactically correct. It all gets transformed to zeroes and ones sooner or later. However, a smart programmer (yes, there are stupid programmers) will make the source code easy to read, with plenty of white space, adding explanatory comments (which the computer ignores), indenting blocks of code, using lower-case and upper-case consistently and with purpose (so you can easily tell which words belong to the language, and which are things created by the programmer).

The reason for doing this is to make it EASY FOR A HUMAN TO UNDERSTAND.

It has no effect on how fast the program runs, and the space required to store the program is insignificant as the stuff under your fingernails.

It is so that if 6 months or 6 years go by, and they or someone else has to look at it, the visual form of the code helps the programmer see what’s going on and get to the heart of the problem without going cross-eyed in the process.

Writers do the same thing.
Imagine a book with no punctuation except a period. No paragraphs, no commas.

This code is worse.

The First Letter Of Every Word Is Capitalized (It’s !Cute!),Sometimes,AND OTHER TIMES IT IS ALL CAPS AND Other times THERE Is (NO (rhyme(OR Reason))).

That’s what I’m dealing with. Imagine that, each program to darken twenty printed pages.

Aesthetically, it is the ugliest programming I have ever seen. It makes me violently unhappy to open each new file of source code I’ve dug out of their dungeon. I want to vomit. I start weighing potential career moves, cutting losses.

That aside, it is also among the most convoluted jumble of sTUFf I’ve seen, too.

There is a world-wide competition every year to see who can write the “most obfuscated code”, meaning that the code, while being completely functional, is so cryptic that it is nearly impossible for a human to figure out. Maybe by taking it apart bit by bit, but most people who could do that would prefer a trip to the dentist.

That’s what this code is like. Like I said, a computer doesn’t care, doesn’t have a sense of taste. It’s a machine, so I wonder if the reason the programming was done in that style is some form of eye and brain torture. Pure masochism.

There once was a dude who was formerly a COBOL programmer, and wrangled databases in the 90s, and retired after leaving behind stuff that had been running for the last decade. Ten years go by, the system is getting upgraded, this stuff needs to be upgraded, too.

Here comes a young and successful dude, just the man they need to straighten this spaghetti bowl out and get it done. They tell him it might be bad. He’s heard it before. Plus, he remembers “Dookie”. It can’t be that bad, he thinks. He signs on, then rolls up his sleeves and gets dirty.

Perhaps evil COBOL language thoroughly twisted this guy’s mind, as I have never seen someone tackle programming tasks from such a strange, clumsy, and dangerous way. It’s not sloppy, per se, but it is the antithesis of elegance. COBOL fried his tofu mambo-dogface-in-your-banana-patch style.

I would like to yell at this guy, but he’s retired, and I’d hope programming is the last thing on his mind. Otherwise I WOULD YELL IN ALL CAPS THAT IT DOESN’T COST A BLOODY THING TO USE A LINE BREAK ONCE IN A FREAKIN WHILE! JEEZEUS, HIT THE GAWDDAM RETURN KEY JACKNUTS!

Everything is crammed together as if his pay depended on how tight he could mash his shit together. Even worse, he’s got the same screwy chunks of code repeated in two hundred different places. Even worse, rampant hard-coding of shit that is meaningless in their new system, where I have to go back and unravel these stupid fucking myopic shortcuts this guy took.

I think that when this guy was at his prime, computer memory was at such a premium that every single letter or digit of source code was a huge tax on the the system resources. An extra space or letter might be the straw the broke the camel’s back. When every instruction of a computer program was a hole punched in a paper card, I’m sure they to make every little bit count. Well, that evidently became this guy’s style, even though such limitations haven’t been such a huge concern for… say the last 20 years.

It’s greedy for the ittybitty tiniest space, but at the same time, for what it’s trying to do is extremely bloated and inefficient code.

That’s really not the half of it. The more technical frustrations are almost too much to bear, and I won’t pain you any further.

Consultants are often called in for their expertise, other times, to do “the shit work”. The trade-off is that we are paid well, and that there is always an end in sight.

I’m gonna hang in there and tough it out. Shitty experiences build character, right? ??

I know, I know…disgusting… a crabby pity party if there ever was one.WWAAAAAHHHHH!!!!

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On one of the first nice days of the year, where the sun was shining and warm, and the streets dry enough to skate, I walked and jogged my way uphill exactly 0.8 miles with my skateboard strapped to my backpack. Ok, I walked more than jogged; I’ve had a long, lazy winter, so I’ve been feeling a little paunchy and somewhat out of shape.

But the weather was so nice, the tail end of a typically Portland winter of cold, damp, and unceasing overcast, that I couldn’t resist overdoing it. I’m going to blaze downhill on my skateboard, rolling on my soft, fat 72-hardness wheels that can roll over gravel with ease.

After catching my breath, drinking water and letting myself cool down, I unstrapped the skateboard, and hopped on it, making long, gallant pushes to get to speed so I could coast downhill all the way home, standing tall with the glorious wind rushing through my hair. On about the third push, my rear foot ever-so-slightly kicked across the tail of the board, suddenly creating a small, but problematic, difference between the direction I was traveling and the new direction the skateboard was pointing in.

Was I already a little spaghetti-legged from the run uphill? Most definitely. Had I stretched beforehand? No.

There is an art to bailing out, whether off a bike or skateboard, when you realize that a crash is imminent. A good practitioner of this art is quick to make this realization, and in the calm interval of a second, weighs the probable outcomes of a few courses of action, and gracefully departs his vehicle, landing with a minimum of impact and abrasion to the body, and if necessary, with a loose roll to bleed momentum, careful to protect the head, elbows, knees and hipbones.

However, my departure from controlled flight, attributed solely to pilot error, happened so quick, and as such a surprise, that instead of gracefully bailing, I had barely a moment to have one thought flash across my mind. “FUCK!”

I was moving too fast to land in a run, though I tried. My knee hit the ground, and the palms of my hands took the brunt of the fall, which my face would otherwise have taken.

The pavement and the beautiful blue sky swirled around, tumbling over each other. After what seemed an eternity, I found myself face-down in the middle of a street. I looked up in time to see my drink bottle spinning violently down the street, about 100 feet downhill from me, the lid busted off and my precious cold drink spraying everywhere.

I staggered to my feet, and disoriented, my first thought was rescuing what little might remain in the bottle. I stumbled over to it, and picking it up, discovered blood running from both my hands. Just fucking great.

Still a little dizzy, I start looking around for my skateboard. It’s nowhere in sight. As I’m looking around, I see two bystanders, about 100 feet behind me, just watching. Not laughing, not helping, just standing there watching me.

It takes me a couple minutes, but I find my skateboard and figure it rolled under a car, hit a curb, and flipped over onto the sidewalk. I pick it up, walk back to the middle of the street, slap it down, and push myself up to a modest speed.

At least it’s all downhill to my house, I think, looking at the gravel and dirt embedded in my bloody palms, thinking how much it’s going to hurt to scrub that out and disinfect it.

First warm day of the year, at least to my liking, and here I am, rolling downhill to my house, sore all over, and dripping blood on the street.

A little while later that day, I’m bandaged up, and looking forward to 5pm to crack open a drink to ease my hurt. There’s a knock on the door, and it’s a 9 year old boy from across the street, who I’d given some basic skateboarding tips last summer when he saw me skating around in front of my house. So now, he’s got his own skateboard, a $5 piece of shit if I ever saw one (the wheels barely turn), and wants me to show him how to ollie.

You’ve got to be kidding me, I think. Not only is the extent of my skating ability being able to stay upright on level ground, which I hadn’t done a good job of that day, I can ollie maybe one inch off the ground.

Sorry kid, but good luck with that!

That was a week ago, and today the dark brown scabs are finally gone altogether, leaving some bright pink scars in their place. Hooray for spring!

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I want to take a minute, or two or three, to extol the fine virtues of my favorite liquor, Hennessy.

This is a brand of cognac, the name of a liquor distilled from the white wine of certain grapes grown only in the Cognac region of France. If it comes from somewhere else, it’s not cognac. Although it is technically a type of brandy, being distilled from white wine, but where brandy is diluted with 50% water after it is distilled, to bring down the alcohol content, cognac is set in wood barrels where the alcohol content is similarly lowered, but by slow evaporation through the wood over the course of 2 years, minimum.

I first tried it, not because of the countless references to it in 90s rap (sometimes called “Hen”, or “Yak”), but because I remember my grandfather was quite fond of it (as I raided his secret stockpiles on more than a few occasions).

When a certain Texan girl asked what my drink of choice was, I said naturally it was Hennessy, to which she shockingly replied “Eww! that’s a n-gger drink!”  Actually, several people have made the ignorant exclamation, but more often substituting “Black” for “the n-word”.

After delicately stuffing my eyeballs back into their sockets, closing my gaping mouth and pulling myself together, I explained that cognac is a gem from the Old World, a top-shelf liquor, and a finer thing in life, regardless who imbibes.

Courvoisier, another cognac, suffers from similar indignity. I admit, I first heard of it in the song “Pass the Courvoisier” with Busta Rhymes, P-Diddy and Pharrell (where the chorus is “tell that n-gger, pass the Courvoisier!”). Personally, it’s a little too fragrant for me, I stick to “Hen”.

Obviously in that particular Texan girl’s mind, since rappers like it, it must fall in the same league as malt-liquor and phillies blunts. I felt compelled to ask if she held Cadillacs and fried chicken in similar disdain, but thought better of it.

Hennessy, I think, goes down smoother than any liquor I’ve tasted. I like an ice-cube or two in there, but will happily drink it straight up as long as I’ve got a litle water on the side. Mixing it with another beverage is a disrespect I refuse to administer to it. I’ve found that if I only drink Hennessy throughout an evening with friends, even up to a half-pint (!!) and the requisite amount of water before bed, I will wake up without the slightest tinge of hangover. I have scientifically tested this hypothesis, and repeatedly found it to be true.

They say the proper way to drink Hennessy is in a nice, wide snifter, which you are to let warm up in the palm of your hand. The snifter gathers up the aroma, as you are to inhale deeply through the nose more often than you take small sips of the liquid. THEY also say, it is best enjoyed at the fireside among friends, but I’ve found it just as enjoyable while holed up in my room making obnoxious mixtapes to later torture those same friends.

Usually, bars will charge between $5 and $9 for a Hennessy, so it’s not cheap. If you develop a taste for it, hit the bars with a flask. A pint runs $15 and a fifth runs $30. There are some more expensive varieties that are aged 4 years or longer, and one day I’ll pony up the money to try out one of the $50 or $100 bottles.

Try it out, if you haven’t, and report back.

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