The friends page that I integrated into my personal web page won’t show me entries done by friends who only allow their journal to be seen by friends only (because I can’t be ’logged in’ and yank the page from the LJ servers, AFAIK).

I finished laying out the playlist plugin for SoundPlay last night, I even have the playlist placed and colored in the proper place, but I still need to make all the buttons, bells, and whistles work. One really annoying thing about the way WinAmp does playlist skins is that the buttons are all one sprite, so I have to divide the one sprite into several in code as opposed to having different sprites for each button. What a dumb thing. I also have to code a replacement for BScrollBar and BScrollView, so I can integrate the skinned scrollbar into the playlist window (it looks mighty lame with the default Be scrollbar in this mega-skinned window. :P

Ok, I really haven’t worked on any code since the last time I worked on AliveJournal (which I need to work on again). Today, I got fed up with that and started hacking again. This time, it is something which I consider substantial. I don’t use Winamp skins with SoundPlay, mostly because I like the way the BeOS native interface looks. But every time I have toyed with the idea, it really bothered me that the playlist skins were not supported. So that is what I am doing, and it is fun and I am learning and relearning alot about BeOS programming again.

Meeting my mother and grandparents for lunch tomorrow, which should be interesting..

I was reading this BBC article on the growing use of more advanced Artificial Intelligence in gaming. Most of the article focuses on the game Black & White, which is going to hit store shelves in about a week.

A part of the article really got on my nerves, however:

Game makers are turning to AI to make titles stand out in the highly competitive world of computer games. They like it because, if it is done well, it is a very cheap way of adding playability. Instead of spending huge sums on sumptuous graphics, long cinematic sequences, endless levels, characters and plots, a game can be made much more challenging with a bit of nifty programming.

The implication that advanced AI coding is somehow easier or cheaper than “sumptuous graphics”, etc… really bothers me. We have reached the point where programming is important to everyday life, yet it is still somehow regarded as some redheaded stepchild. Being that the team behind Black & White is comprised of some of the most talented artists, developers (who are artists as well, IMHO), designers, and managers, I can’t imagine that they picked up a copy of “AI for Dummies” and snarfed/barfed code to make their NPC’s smart. They instead put hours and hours into perfecting the level of AI that they desired. The article itself quotes Molyneux speaking about how hard it is to get AI right. Grumble.

I made another pilgrimage to Cafe Soundz with James last night, and I picked up one of the 3 missing Skinny Puppy CDs ( Remission), and also a good-ol’ random CD based on the recommendation of the store owner, Bobby. It is a pretty good cd, by Alder & Elius, and it is out on Skam Records. Skam is usually fairly reliable, and this disc hasn’t disappointed me yet. It is experimental electronic music, and the first few tracks seem like they were experimenting with microtuning and such, while the later tracks seem a bit more straightforward… I will have to see if it grows closer to me or farther away…

Later, we ended up hanging out at the Budd Lake diner with Chuck and Amy. We were out for a long time, but I met a few new people, which never hurts. Later tonight those three are coming over to watch Sgt. Kabukiman, N.Y.P.D. with me and my father (who bought the movie). Should be fun!

I failed to return a movie to the video store last night, so I guess I have to do it some time today.

Greeting from BeOS. Ever since I came home I have been without network access on my personal PC, instead using my father’s machine (and its cable modem) when I needed to “get out”. A few people know that I have had a free shell account with a certain ISP from back when I worked at Sears. One of the reps of the ISP came in asking me to push their service, and in return I would get free PPP access. I said yes (even though it was probably against story policy), and they hooked me up with a free account.

Now, that was 6 years ago. :) They never took the account away, and so I have been using that account when I don’t want my real email address to get into the hands of spam harvesters. I had kinda forgotten that I had PPP access, and had assumed that they disabled my PPP access long ago. When I got home, I started thinking about it, and remembered that the PPP accounts for this ISP were seperate from the shell accounts, with different usernames and passwords. But I couldn’t remember my PPP password, and I wasn’t about to call their support asking to have it reset, so I just wrote it off.

I got an email from my father today…. I had apparently given him my username/password at some point when he was having trouble with the ISP he was using, and I figured he might want an alternative. My dad still had a copy of my password, so now I am dialed in.. Not that big of a deal, but it is useful in some respects, most importantly of all, I can sync to the Perforce repository at CSH again, which means I can start working on some of the projects again.

I am gonna go jump in the shower now… :)

Because I’m somewhere in between,

My love and my agony

You see I’m somewhere in between,

My life is falling to pieces,

Somebody put me together

Well, it turns out that I actually did already own all of the Skinny Puppy singles, but there are 3 full-lengths that I still need to purchase. I have added " Remission", " 12 Inch Anthology", and " Back and Forth: Series Two" to my Amazon wishlist, hopefully I will remember to pick them up the next time I order something from them.

I am also, of course, missing the original “Back and Forth” (of which 35 were released on cassette tape), and the vaporware “Love in Vein” single, which was created but never released. And I am also skipping “Bites & Remission” because it is simply a concatenation of the albums “Bites” and “Remission”, as well as the aforementioned Single and B-Side collections.

I finally have a decent interview prospect, but it won’t happen until April…. Not that I have anything against the prospect of not having anything serious to do between now and then, but I think I would seriously prefer having a clue of where my life is going.. :)

I am going to bed real soon… I am trying to figure out which Skinny Puppy CDs I need to complete my collection (in order to celebrate their entire catalog!). I am only a few singles off, so I might as well staple things up once I get some money… The discs are becoming more and more rare, as Nettwerk decided to discontinue the individual singles in favor of two CDs, one for the singles themselves, the other for the various b-sides. Since I already have most of the singles, I might as well get the 2 or 3 I am missing.

I have been trying to teach myself various meditation techniques lately, something I told myself I was going to learn before I left for RIT (yet never did). I am also going to plan some exercise into my day… it would be nice to at least achieve the moderate level of out-of-shape that I was in before I left for school. :)

neat!

I ran new Cable TV cable through the house today to eliminate the noise that plagued the bedroom sets. Everything is better now, even if running the cable through the house sucked alot. :)

The cable modem was acting flaky all day, which I thought was my fault for awhile, but it seems that CableVision is just having difficulty keeping their network alive.