So long, and thanks for all the fish

Saturday, December 30, 2006

What has Jordan been up to these past two weeks you ask, Somebody-I-Don't-Know? Taking a trip to Ft. Lauderdale for Christmas vacation. It's been quite a while since I've done a cross-Florida drive, but I turned out to be up to the challenge. Downloaded some documentaries from Google Video to help pass the time. The one about early video games got me all misty eyed. As sick as I am of Twilight Princess, hearing how the original Zelda was created gets me every time.

So I made it down there just fine. Stepped out of the car and into a soup - I had forgotten about the incredible humidity in south Florida. I got to see my mother, thinner than ever, and all my friends, looking like I had barely left. The house was in various states of disrepair... I feel I can utter this cliche because of the size of the place. I was a good boy and cleaned up the computer desk.

Speaking of large things, I was once again in awe of our Mitsubishi 60" television and all of its poor color rendering. You can tell the CRT guns in the back of this thing were completely shot. They took several minutes just to get the height of the screen right, and that's not counting the Psychonauts-style graphical filter it put over everything. I set the Wii on that poor device and my PS2 on its infant brother (a 19" elsewhere in the house).

As a gamer it was my duty to bring the Wii down for Christmas to see if "the family" would take to it. Given that my mother has shunned all electronic entertainment since Tetris I was not hopeful. Thus, I was not disappointed when she gave a noncommittal, "oh, that's nice" judgment to the universally loved Wii Bowling game and moved on. My great success would be with other people: Carline, mom's boyfriend David, Gloria's friend Jose, and just about any other human being. But it wasn't a complete defeat. I was able to get mom to stop using the phrase "morally reprehensible" when it comes to video games. It was getting a little grating to have her utterly demean my most favorite activity in the whole world.

Those of you looking for commentary on my mom's activity will have to ask me personally. As much as I'd love to discuss this sort of thing on my blog, I'll only get myself into trouble. So let's just say it was nice to meet everyone and the food was delicious.

This was also the first time I ever smoked anything that wasn't a sausage. My buddy Sujith took me to a hookah bar and I got to try "grape" flavored, um, hookah. Turns out hookah is just tobacco and flavored water, heated up and inhaled through this bendy tube. It tasted only faintly like grape flavored soda, but mostly like nothing. Sujith was impressed that I didn't cough it up, but maybe I just didn't inhale very far. After half an hour I got all jittery - excess energy from the hookah, I'm told.

Now, going there and inhaling it was fine. But it was really later that I paid the price (and resolved never to do that again). I didn't have trouble breathing, but it felt like my nostrils were lined with metal. The next day I felt like a smokestack. Smelling was unpleasant, and this affected me for my entire drive back to Tallahassee. No offense, Sujith my friend, but I won't be going back there without a gas mask.

When I returned to Tallahassee I found some extra resolve I must have been hiding somewhere. Now am I filled with a burning crusade (ah ha, not funny) to make my space game, USS. I picked up a book on mathematics and physics for game programmers and have been beating my head against it since I got back. I feel like I understand vectors and 3D space, but when I sit down at the compiler I'm lost for code. I want to generate a planet and be able to go from orbit down to the surface and have the terrain expand in front of me. Is that so hard? Yes, apparently it is.

Oh! I also gave up television. I wondered how I would find time to program this thing, and I have found it by calling Comcast and telling them I'd like to disconnect my basic TV service. The TV itself is going nowhere, but my TiVo has been put in the closet. I wonder what kind of training the TiVo reps are getting: when I called to cancel my service, the lady responded to all my statements with a long, sad, "oh nooooo." After the fifth time she finally let me go.

This also means I can get rid of that long snake of coaxial cable making its way around my living room. And, four hours of cabling later, everything was back in place. I could then sit down and play Final Fantasy XII again.

... Goodness, that was a rambling entry, wasn't it? I've still got quaternions on the brain, so I'm no good for thinking or speaking. Or writing, as it turns out. If you can help me comprehend quadtrees, I'll be eternally grateful.