Finished Half-Life 2 tonight, it was quite a fun game…  That game pretty much pre-empted any other game I was playing, so I will probably return to the PS2 games I was playing before that game came along.

Today was an awfully frustrating day at work…  I got in, and as soon as I got into my cube the Imaging Science guy working on my project told me that he wanted me to merge in some performance improvements I wrote early last week…  At the time we decided to hold off on any changes because we have a demo next week and didn’t want to introduce regressions.  Well, I guess last night/this morning he decided that we really needed those speed improvements so he asked me to do some merging.  I spent the first few hours of the day kicking it Vsplit style in Vim doing the merging by hand.  Apparently my “team” decided without consulting me to change a bunch of shit for no reason, like removing braces around one-line condiitonals, and frustrating things like this.  Refusing to let my beautiful code be gang-raped, I took the merge time to “fix things up again”.  Surprisingly, other than two missing semicolons, the code worked!  I had thought of a few more ways to improve speed, so I took this opportunity to implement them (which also terribly simplified a few parts of the code).  We tested it, and it showed an order of magnitude improvement in most cases, and cut the time of one particularly intensive function in half.  Pretty significant, but apparently not enough for him…  He felt that the speed up wasn’t significant enough to risk regresssions in our shipping product, and he was looking for ANOTHER order of magnitude.  So really, my work was rushed and mostly for naught.