I feel pretty sick.  I woke up with a sore throat, but dragged my ass to work anyway knowing that I’d be sitting in meetings a good part of the day (as opposed to, y’know, working).  I held out the whole day, but the drive home I was feeling pretty severely crappy.  I crawled into bed as soon as I got home and crashed for awhile.  I am going to throw myself into a Nyquil coma tonight and hopefully I will be done with this tomorrow.  Just the other day I noticed I hadn’t been sick in a few months, guess I jinxed myself.

The filling I got at the dentist on Monday isn’t right, I think it needs to be shaved off a bit, it seems to be sitting high.  I have an appointment tomorrow at 1pm to get that taken care of before it destroys my tooth. :)

So I’m winding down for the night, watching some episodes of my new favorite show, Airline.  I’m watching the episode “Shaken and Stirred”, and one of the segments features a few passengers, shall we say, frustrated that their flight to Las Vegas is cancelled.  While he doesn’t speak, a poker legend (facing the camera wearing the bright blue shirt) is hanging out at the desk listening to the lady bitch at the attendant.  I did a double-take, and did some trick play with the TiVo, but given the destination of the cancelled flight, and the appearance of this passenger, I’m pretty sure it’s Howard Lederer.  I’ve linked the image as well as the video below.

Garrett found this article that talked about when my company dropped the “BF” from it’s name and analyzes the branding.  Interesting Trivia:  Most people probably don’t know that BF stood for Benjamin Franklin.

I think I’ve hit on why I like Darwinia so much.  It is totally an homage to the old school Bullfrog/Peter Molyneux god games like Populous.  If you liked those games, check out the demo, it is totally in that vein…  It’s like the Cyberpunk Populous.

I just finished the demo of Darwinia, from Introversion Software (who’s first game, Uplink was freaking awesome).  I downloaded the demo a few days ago, but couldn’t figure out what the hell I was supposed to do.  Amazingly, the team thought the game was so self-evident that they didn’t include any real help or a tutorial.  Fortunately, after getting what I’m sure was some pretty frustrated feedback, they published a tutorial on their site (and are going to release a new version of the demo with some more assistance).

Now that I understand what is going on in the game it is really neat.  It’s like a tactical, squad-based, real-time strategy, but without many of the shitty aspects of RTSes.  When Uplink came out I thought these guys might be a one-trick pony, but this game is wholly different but still really fun.  It’s good to know that it’s still possible for an indie software house to turn out the good games.

Last night and I took a trip to the Fenway 13 to see Million Dollar Baby, which was okay.  I really dislike Hilary Swank, but she did a good job in this film.  The movie had it’s high points, but it definitely had it’s low points…  Entire characters (Danger and the Priest come to mind) could have been trimmed while making the film a little less condescending to the viewer.  The first “plot twist” that I had managed to avoid in reviews and such was pretty apparent to me early on in the film (well, not the specifics of the twist, but that something like it was going to happen).  It wasn’t bad, though, but it definitely wasn’t as great as some are making it out to be.

After the film I casually reminded Corinna that we had met exactly two years earlier (but we didn’t start dating for a few months), and I took her to a lovely dinner at India Quality, the best Indian restaurant I’ve ever been to.  I ordered the Butter Chicken (which, Rovia peeps,  is back OFF the menu and I had to special-order it) and Corinna got a Veggie appetizer.  Afterwards we went to Cornwalls for some drinks before heading back to the apartment.  It would have been awesome if Casa Mexico hadn’t closed, as that was the restaurant we hit up the day we first met (not to mention I could go for some good Tamales right now).

Hacks like this just warm the cockles of my heart.

Here’s an article about (my former employer) Rovia from the end of July 2002 (only months before I was laid off). It talks about the implications of our ShareSafe product (Codename: MM27 [Monkey Metroid 27]). I hadn’t ever seen this one before, a co-worker here stumbled across it and it made me laugh.

Hacked on a perl script that will allow me to update the SNFC Website, the community, and the SNFC Mailing List with one email (thanks procmail).  Automated posting to Craigslist will be a bit trickier, and to be honest, I think I can settle for a two-part process every week as opposed to the 5-part process I use to have to deal with.

Stayed home on Tuesday, threw out my back (shoveling, I guess).  said I ruined Boston for him, but he might be happy to know that on Monday, after all that bitching, I not only found a parking space as soon as I returned to Boston, I got the very same space I shoveled out on Sunday/Monday.  I didn’t even “save the space” with a cone or a sawhorse (something I found out today is LEGAL, which sounds like total bullshit to me).

The commute in today took 2.5 hours, which is pretty out of hand.  I was pretty cool with it though, I couldn’t really do anything about it, and so I just listened to the radio/iPod and engaged autopilot.  Almost had like 3 cars hit me, but my stunt man background paid off and I avoided crashes.  Just as I was getting off of Soldier’s Field Road this Porsche SUV and a Minivan got into a bit of a tussle, I actually think they tapped fenders…  The uber-yuppie in the Porsche decided to try and sneak around the left of the minivan, when it clearly didn’t have enough space.  The minivan boxed the guy out, and the Porsche lost his shit and they started jockeying for position, etc.  It was fun to watch, but all they were really doing was slowing down my commute further and making it dangerous, so I intervened, pulling along side the minivan at an opportune point and blocking the Porsche behind us.  The minivan was quite pleased with this arrangement.  I left work early today so I could have a better chance of getting parking…  I hope it warms up just a little bit so some of this snow starts to melt.