Yeah, it's a midday post from me, on milestone day no less. This time around Alan Kalter returns with his thoughts on the political situation in the US.
It began to snow again in the late afternoon and it was the kind that began sticking. There were many people in the Lower Mainland who decided to leave work early, hoping either to get home sooner or to give themselves more time to commute home.
Since it's milestone week for my team, we had some serious work to get done and even if it were blazing sunshine outside, we'd have to stay late tonight. A few of us ventured outside around 6pm on our dinner break. It was a bit of mess outside, wet snow was being blown sideways so it was constantly in your face. Snow had accumulated in earnest on the ground again.
At 9pm, I looked outside the windows from my vantage point on the 12th floor. I was looking east along Pender. I could tell there was a lot of snow on the ground. There were very few pedestrians walking about and even fewer vehicles. It seemed if you were smart, you had long gone inside or home. Then, I turned around and saw all the people still at work.
The whole situation seemed really familiar to me but it took me a few minutes to grasp it. You know the part in The Empire Strikes Back where Imperial troops have landed on Hoth? The part where the last few Rebels are still inside their base even as snowtroopers are breaching the walls? Yeah, well, we were the crazy ass Rebels tonight. Even as the temperature was falling, snow was piling up, and transit was being delayed or cancelled we continued to pound away at our keyboards for some reason.
At 9:30pm, I caught the last transport off of Hoth and returned to the Outer Rim territories. We'd didn't have to run any Imperial blockades but I did have a kickass bus driver who was passing cars left and right. I think he may have done the Kessel run in record time.
Wow, that was a post heavily steeped in Star Wars terminology.
Thanks to a very generous co-worker, I was able to borrow a PSP and take it home. This allowed me to play Sonic Rivals for the first time since the end of July. I will admit I looked at the credits as the first order of business. Man, what an ego I have!
Next was the actual game play. They did a ton of work on the game after I left. It's been polished and improved in many places that needed it. One set of tracks got a fantastic makeover. I looked for several in game objects that I was responsible for programming the behaviour. Though the game is a race essentially, I stopped several times to examine those objects in detail. Oh there was spike horizontal log, which exhibited the damped harmonic motion I so happily wrote in. Then there was the catapult which caused me so much consternation but thanks to Rich, it finally worked. Who could forget frozen air geyser, which froze characters just like I remembered it.
I'm still working through the game but I can see they cut a few things. For example, I had this jack-in-the-box that sprung open when you jumped on it. It's still there but nothing happens when you touch it. Why that is, I'm not sure. I'm still eagerly awaiting the appearance of the black holes which were a pain to get working. They were still kinda wonky when I left so maybe that got cut too. I'm most looking forward to the monkey boss. What a ton of work that was. Imagine a huge mechanical monkey that shoots missiles that embed into the ground that also has a detachable flying head that does a beam attack. I left it in a somewhat shaky state so I feel sorry for who had to clean it up after me. I wonder how it'll look.
Rivals now has an overall score of 72 over on metacritic. That ain't bad but it's slightly under good.
It was chaos for some in the Lower Mainland today with all the snow that had been dumped on our fair city. UBC was without power all day and poor SJCers had to sit in the dark and read papers. Transit was behind schedule on a few routes and school was cancelled for most post-secondary students.
I, on the other hand, really enjoyed the day. First, my bus wasn't even a minute late in the morning. When I boarded, I found it to be refreshingly empty and I got a seat all to myself. All the cranky old people that usually fill my bus were no where to be seen. There were either at home or on the sidewalk somewhere with broken hips.
We flew into downtown Vancouver at a very respectable clip, arriving early enough for me to grab a breakfast sandwich from the A&W in Sinclair Centre. Then when I got to the office, I found out the boil water advisory had been lifted, allowing me to have a cup of fresh hot water right from the magical machine.
Though I had to stay a bit later at work this evening, I found an excellent Japanese restaurant to grab my dinner from. It's only a block away from work as well. As I was preparing to go home, my Mom phoned me and nearly demanded that I get a hotel room downtown for the night. When I asked her why, she said it was too cold be outside this evening and that I would not survive the walk from the office to the bus stop and from the bus stop to my home. Now that might have been true if I was dressed only in my underwear and shoes but I had a fairly warm coat on and also a beanie on my large, bulbous head.
Given that it was probably only around -1 degrees and it only takes me five minutes to walk on either end of my trip, I decided to ignore my mother's advice and save myself $100. The bus ride was uneventful as expected, as was my walk home. Oh mommy, you care about me so much.
In last night's episode of The Simpsons, Homer gets fired from his job at the power plant. After he kills an elderly ice cream man, he decides to take over his job.
In the clip above, you can see Homer getting dressed as an ice cream man. The sequence might seem familiar to some of you. The first person with the right answer gets 1000 et.com points which can be redeemed at our online store!
