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Saturday, February 17th, 2007
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10:04 pm - this shit is so fucking gay
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| Wednesday, March 1st, 2006
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[ current mood: nodding ] [ current music: MF Doom ]
8:25 pm - What is this shit
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I lied, I'm not even listening to MF Doom, but the iPod is charging next to me so I figures I'll throw that in there... yeah. So what's going on with you? Nothing? Yeah, your life is boring; I moved to a new apartment.
The divorce between myself and DJ Datasquid was complete on some time around middle of November of LAST YEAR. Last year? Yeah, I don't update nearly as often as I told myself I would. Back to the point, new apartment. It's on the 20th floor of a grand brand new building in the CityPlace complex, which I think is becoming a small independent city within Toronto. It was so freaking new, it wasn't actually fully built when I moved in, and in fact, I still see surly Polish / Latin construction workers here and there, patching up, painting, and breaking things in the building. The "pad" itself is pretty nice though. It features such amenities as:
- Being on the 20th, but really it's the 17th floor because Chinese people are afraid of the number "4"
- Spots of paint touched up later by aforementioned construction guys
- Walls of Windows overlooking the 427 and also parts of the lake
- Great view of the purple glow on the Rogers Centre
- NEW! A working ceiling lamp for the living room that I bought from IKEA
It's actually a very nice place and the landlady is a kind german woman who doesn't mind me putting holes in the cupboard to put in a 3.99 lid rack from IKEA which will totally organize my kitchen to the max. Here's another cool thing - a gas stove! I know, it's so awesome and it's true that food does indeed taste better when cooked on a gas stove. In conclusion, apartment.
Living by myself is OK too. I mean, sure I cried the first few nights and slept with the lights on after checking for monsters under the bed and in the toilet, but now I'm pretty good. I can do whatever I want and I don't get stupid Nazi complaints like "hey Roman I have friends coming over would you mind not making chicken curry while naked". What-the-fuck-EVER, DAN, I don't attempt to subjugate your culture. This is exactly what Saddam did when he came to power, look it up in Wikipedia. And you know, have the kitchen to myself, though it is kinda small, but after some creative Tetris-like rearrangment, things fall (haha...) into place.
Next up on the list of bonus perks included in my generous rental payment is the SuperClub. The SuperClub unfortunately is not where SuperFriends that protect CityPlace live. It's more of a grey box like building that crams inside gym-like facilities and all the superfluous amenities that 10 people in total will use. I mean, I'm sure as shit booking that Golf Simulator as soon as I can, because that really needed to be there. Also, don't put any actual bars or benches in the weight room because when people go to the weight room, they actually want to run on treadmills while watching TSN or maybe slowly wack on the treadmill - I mean, the choices are endless. The good parts of the complex include the basketball court, which is full size and also the opening party that was thrown a month ago, during which I ate a lot of tostitos and had a beer and also I think a chicken skewer with "mango sauce". Also, they have pool and a pool so that's pretty sweet.
Item number 5 - look out! Work. Work's alright, I'm doing more research now as opposed to being random-tasks-guy and also working on alternate shifts like everyone else. The whole evening shift thing can seriously screw with your sleeping patterns but it does give me the opportunity to wake up late and go to the doctor or dentist or get a discount on a plane grater because I fixed the store owner's Firefox on his computer. Plus have you looked and FreeBSD source code? It's probably my fault, I haven't looked at C/C++ for a while but it's annoying me. But other than that, things are being kept interesting by a steady stream of fuckups by other developers, on which reports get written. And let me tell you something - the WORST possible code comes out of "Enterprise" applications. Who the fuck hires these people? Put oracle.exe under a debugger and start it up. Exception! Exception! Exception! That's of course normal operation, barring any horrible buffer overflows or SQL injections. IBM's crap blazenly allocates 0-length buffers and then tries to copy user-supplied data into them. I'm sure Billy Bob's Homemade FTP server is worse, but at least Billy Bob will put out a patch after he discovers something wrong with his software - "Enterprise" applications have to go through 4 levels of management and 2 weeks of regression testing just so they can put an extra if statement in a parser. In conclusion, if you're buying software claiming to be for Enterprise Organizations Such As Yourself, you're probably an idiot.
Speaking of doctors... I'm going to die. So first I had this irregular heartbeat thing after being stressed out about work for some time, coupled with some palpitations, so that's always fun. A couple days after that, I started getting slight chest pain in my left side and lastly today I felt dizzy after working out so what the fuck is going on here. I played basketball twice, and almost no palpitations but still. I am getting a heart monitor that I am sure will tell me nothing. Anyway, I probably won't die and I hope this thing goes away on its own magically.
Lastly, photography has been somewhat lacking in my life. I say it's because it's cold, another part of me says I'm just being lazy. A third part says it's both, but what can ya do. I took some night shots of the Skydome and the tower, but they turned out craptacular. On the other hand, my printing setup is working quite nicely, and I am pleasantly surprised by the quality of prints made on Epson's relatively cheap Matte Heavyweight paper, as opposed to the expensive prints made on Ilford Galerie, which turn out darker and with messed up colours sometimes. Yeah yeah, I have all the ICC profiles, and I don't have 300$ to calibrate my monitor with the paper. The paper does look and feel very nice though - it's a shame that some prints turn out shitty. Well, these prints will be made into a nice gift for my mom's 51st birthday but it's a SECRET so don't tell her even though she asked me for them first. I am a bad son.
Until next time,
-roman
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1 thread | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Saturday, November 5th, 2005
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[ current mood: yoink ] [ current music: The Simpsons ]
11:31 pm - I'm Archie Bell and I'm also the Drells
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This is an update hand-written in two parts, so it seems disjointed and also boring. That's your problem.
[Nov. 1st]
Well, balls.
That's how I would describe my first day of vacation/training (something I like to call "tracation") here in the Bay Area. First of all, this so-called training was more like a 4 hour powerpoint presentation interrupted by a 1-hour lunch of decent Indian food. I thought, awesome - now I have all this time to explore the area and only after I started "exploring" I remembered exactly what I disliked about it when I lived there. The Bay Area is a sprawling land of strip malls and high tech lowrises punctuated by an occasional (delicious) restaurant. So I drove around a bit and only then I found out that my favourite lens (50mm/1.8f Nikon) got fucked up in the transport somehow and the little metal ring that lets you thread on a filter/cap is half broken! Not only is that a problem with me trying to put on lens caps or filters and possibly cutting myself on the jagged edges, there is the fact that eventually dust and various crap will get into the actual element and things will get craptacular. That depressed me for a bit, and after getting lost 3 or 4 times driving around in my rock star rented Neon, I found a Vietnamese place to eat dinner by myself with, like a big fat loser. Currently, I am missing out on the free Internet in the hotel by scribbling this down on a client-provided pad with a hotel-provided pen. And I have to do it all while shitty anime about a 10 year old with "alchemy powers" is playing on the Cartoon Network. I kept waiting for someone to get it on with a 12-penised plant or daemon, but nothing materialized. It's still better than Wolf Blitzer telling me I'm going to die from the Avian Flu or than Letterman fellating Martha Stewart.
Because of all this free time, I finished "Magnum: 50 years of the agency" with a certain sense of disappointment. The basic theme is that every single photographer who worked at Magnum was/is a huge drama queen and that for all of Magnum's time, the agency was permanently on the brink of bankruptcy while various Byzantine alliances and arguments formed and dissipated. It also includes interviews with the photographers, their "war stories" (not a joke with some people). Another theme is that photographers are supposed to run the organization (it's a cooperative), but photographers do not know anything about business. Looking at the Magnum site right now, it seems they are not bankrupt, and the debates about whether to digitize their archive (the book was written in 1997) have been settled. Hooray. What is amazing to me is that people that are supposed to have such insight into the human condition are such immature people themselves, to the point of throwing tantrums by lying on the ground and kicking their legs. My brother stopped doing that when he was THREE because my mom scared him into behaving! At the same time, it appears that to be considered a real photojournalist, you have to be shot at most of the time while you're photographing. Great.
...
[Nov. 4th]
"It's a business" - that was the parting shot, the last sentence thrown at me by the Air Canada ticket agent as I walked away after unsuccessfully trying to get on a standby flight before 11:30. Earlier in the day, I managed to get on 2 standby flight, one from SFO to Minneapolis and the last seat on the Minneapolis - Toronto flight. Now, I was told that letting me take an empty seat on a plane to Ottawa earlier would be "unfair" to the people who paid 300$ for the privelege of being able to go on standby. So as you can see, I was entirely convinced, especially by the revelation that Air Canada is actually a business. Mistakenly, I thought Air Canada is a charity, where for a large ont-time donation I may get access to a plane ride! The poor employees work very hard, so hard in fact, that some ungrateful fuckers need to be reminded that getting on a slightly earlier plane with empty seats will cause major turmoil and unrest in the free market of airplane tickets. To sum up, I hope Air Canada is bankrupt soon, or that at least that smarmy horse-faced bitch is run over by one of those golf-cart-with-sirens they have driving around Pearson. After all, it'll be business. See what I did? I totally brought the beginning to the end of the paragraph, just like a REAL writer. Suck it, Orhan Pamuk.
Speaking of bad writing, having 5 hours to do nothing in Pearson led me to finishing "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by John Perkins. An EHM is someone who who convinces a country with exploitable resources to become beholden to US interests by accepting loans to finance large engineering and construction projects; loans that cannot be repaid. The main thesis is that implicit collusion between certain consulting firms, financial institutions and the US government creates a situation whereby countries that accept these "development" projects become poorer and lose most of their precious environment. While this is not a completely startling revelation (see United Fruit in Guatemala, overthrow of Allende and Mossadegh by the CIA, etc), he does provide some interesting details about current EHM target countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Venezuela. But, the book ignores many other variables, which are unrelated to foreign intervention, variables that contribute to problems in 3rd world countries. For instance, local corruption, suppression by the local government of the opposition, and so on, are not mentioned or are mentioned briefly. All conversations the author has with local people that "change his life" are overly simplistic and stated in black and white terms. I do not believe that someone who is supposed to have a inside view of the politics of the development world would change his mind after someone told him that US meddling is the new imperialism. Not that it's not a problem, but I have a feeling the book was simplified significantly for the target audience. There are also many unsupported assertions, and for a book that is written by an economist who has published scientific papers and many reports, the references are mostly to recent newspaper articles and websites. Some links to documents obtained by the FOIA would be nice, or ANY official documents at all. Furthermore, I did not give two shits about the author's personal magical journey and conscience, but I suppose that is because I was mostly interested in the political aspect of it. The positive aspect of the book is that it does force you reevaluate about what you are personally are doing and how it affects other people. Not a bad thing to consider.
[Nov. 5th]
And now I'm in Ottawa, being bored after trading in my broken lens for a manual focus Nikkor 50mm/1.8f and after buying a shutter release cable that actually works. I was seriously considering getting a 200$ light meter but then realized that I don't take enough studio pictures to justify that crap.
Well, this has turned out to be more boring than even I anticipated. Bye!
-roman
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1 thread | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Wednesday, October 5th, 2005
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10:05 pm - Fuck the new Food Network
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Man, what the fuck. Pretty much 60% of why we have cable is so's I can get my Food Network on after work or whatever. You know, watch some shows that have some interesting recipes, educate myself a little bit. So what's been happening since the introduction of the New! Food Network? Nothing but shit in a bucket on my (not technically my) TV. Let's see, first we have 1 to 2 hours of basically advertisement disguised as "Top 5!" or "Best Of!" or "Buy this shit!", narrated by the same exact person, an overly cheerful everyone-friendly black man who cannot keep his enthusiasm down about how Pink Licorice is made. Wow, you say it's made in a factory on a conveyer belt just like ALL OTHER CANDY? That changes everything! It's no longer a sugary piece of crap that I don't care about! After the product placement we have the "reality" series of shows. Those are divided into
1) those that appeal to fat housewives, such as the show on how to reorganize your DINNER time to make it FAMILY time by... magically making your kids cook dinner.
2) those that appeal to gay men, such as "Restaurant Makeover!", which is basically an HGTV show, complete with the overly flaming designer who fucks up the restaurant and 5 minutes of a chef sighing, embarassed that he's on the show. By the way, I'm sure there are interior designers who don't have the urge to say "girlfriend" every 5 minutes. But they're not on TV
3) those that attempt to appeal to anyone who enjoys watching a shitty "elimination" show, with dickhead Ramsey as the chef that swears at people when they don't make turkey tacos in under 30 minutes. Complete with suspenseful dramatic music and lots of zoom shots of contestants' faces.
Then there's Rachel Ray's "watch me eat and giggle" show, and other idiotic claptrap. Final result? NO SHOWS WITH ACTUAL COOKING. That's right, probably only 20% of the shows on the Food Network have any sort of attempt at teaching the viewer something about cooking. It's turned itself into a shitty version of HGTV. Even if Michael Smith's tone was annoying as all fuck, at least he cooked something on his show and you could reasonably do the same thing. But I think he's relegated to judging Canada's National Under-12 Bake-Off these days. The only shows left worth watching are Alton Brown and the original Iron Chef. In conclusion, fuck you, Food Network. Right in your candy-covered ear.
Oh yeah, new pictures up at the site.
Ramadan Mubarak,
Shana Tova,
Happy Turkey Day,
-roman
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3 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Wednesday, April 27th, 2005
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10:39 pm - I believe I will take the Gold Plan
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It’s been a long time, I shouldn’t have left you
Without a strong rhyme to step to
Think of how many weak shows you slept through
Time’s up, I’m sorry I kept you
Thinking of this, you keep repeating you miss
The rhymes from the microphone soloist
And you sit by the radio, hand on the dial, soon
As you hear it, pump up the volume
Let's start with the basics. If you've been living under a rock in Roman's Universe, you wouldn't know that I quit my fantastic workplace of KVS with its delightful toilet regulations, exciting work and other things that I am too nice to say. It was fun! My announcement was taken with a mix of shock and passive aggressiveness. The highlight was when I was told that whatever I thought of KVS, wherever I will start working it will be exactly the same, since I will just be eternally dissatisfied. If I'm not happy writing a C# GUI for a database in a desolate monochrome office in Markham, when I will be happy? NEVER.
So I was glad to know that the above statement was not true. I've been checking monster and workopolis fairly regularly, and I have gotten pretty bold (i.e. indiscriminate) with my resume sending, when I got two awesome interviews in the span of one week. The first one was a result of an ad I answered on monster at around 1 am. It had a piece of code and asked me what I think the problems with the code are, guaranteeing me an interview if my answers were right. I admit I was feeling pretty cocky and I was all like "Bitch, I'll show you things that are wrong with the code that you didn't even know!". The day after I sent the email, I got a call, while I was at work, about an interview slot that they had in 2 days, at some time in the afternoon, or basically the most inconvenient time for me.
Me: "Can I reschedule? I mean I have a job and if I can just come in after 4 or..."
Bitchy girl on the phone: "Um, no, if you don't come in, we're just going to hire someone else. So, are you going to come in or what?"
Me: [dejected voice] "I guess so"
Strike 1! Treating me like human garbage before I even came in! That's ok, maybe they're really busy. I looked at the website, and didn't understand what they do. The ad had a bunch of C code in it, but the company had "Internet" in its name and talked about securing e-Business and other buzzwords that made my eyes glaze over. I immediately fell in love with the fact that they were located downtown on Yonge street, and I was willing to take a lot of crap just for that. On the day of the interview, I showed up at the place, or at least, where I thought the place was. I couldn't find it. So I call the receptionist to take to the same girl.
Me: "So... I'm kind of lost here, I'm on the corner of Yonge and Dundas and I just don't know where you guys are, I tried searching and.."
Her: "I TOLD you to get off at the Queen stop and walk north. Ok, just keep walking. Do you see the jewelery stores?"
Me: "Yeah, I know Yonge street, I was just wondering maybe I got the address wr.."
Her: "KEEP WALKING, now when you get to the American Outfitters, you'll see a door that says FSC on it. That's where we are, OK?"
Me: [dejected voice] "Ok..."
So, I get there. The secretary that was talking to me moments earlier is a highly made up young Asian girl who was now somewhat smiling at me (I think).
"Find the place Okay?"
"Yeah, thanks for the directions, I was going to just take off my clothes and run around in circles in panic, but I'm glad you told me where to go, since I obviously can't read street numbers. Fuck."
Guess which parts I didn't say. Anyway, now I'm informed that I have to write a test. AND not only that, if I get less than 30 points on it, nobody will even talk to me. Well, fuck this, I say to myself. I have a special hatred in my heart for companies that screen out people with standardized testing (hello Business Objects, I guess I'm not good enough to hack together MFC and whatever shitty databases you use), and I have an even specialer place for companies that announce that you're not good enough for them if you can't remember some obscure terminology or command that would take me quicker to look up on Google. So with that in mind, I proceed to write as much as I know for this awesome test, filling in "joke" answers for questions to which I don't know the answers. To my surprise, I am invited to talk to actual person who works in the company. Well, ho-lee shit, my answers must've been so good, they want to look at me before telling me that interview testing is not a laughing matter and Hitler used to write joke answers on his tests and so on. But no! This is where things get turned around and I end up falling in love with the rough and tumble world of Vulnerability Research.
I had two interviews that day, one bullshit non-technical "so tell me what you did before coming here" and one actual technical interview with the Dude that would eventually become my direct boss. I say Dude because literally, that's the first thing that jumped into my head. Dude! How's it going? Do you work out? How much do you bench, bra? Well, in between all that we went over my answers to the test and "worked out" (I was told) the right answers, and I was strongly hinted that FSC would like to have me over to work Researching Vulnerabilities. Another bonus point for the company was the office itself. Hardwood floors, glass and stainless steel lightly decorated with rows of desks with computers on them. Fashionable, and after living cubi-land for around 5 years, this was fantastic.
Now came the negotiations. They really really needed people RIGHT NOW, and I was sweating bullets over how much notice I could give to KVS before bailing. Conventional wisdom said that I shouldn't burn any bridges, even if those bridges were anal retentive and covered in grey cubicle fabric that depressed me every time I looked at it. So after many phone calls and a thorough reading of the Ontario Employment Act (which, by the way, is fantastically ambigious on how much notice an employee is required to give his employer), I emailed my "I quit LOL" email to my bosses. The next day when I actually talked to one of them, I offered the same generic and wishy-washy crap about the work not being exciting enough, etc. I don't know, maybe I should've just screamed "I fucking hate this place, everyone is 20 years older than me at least, and the ones who aren't are socially retarded nerds who I cannot talk to at lunch, much less connect on any other level! The official colour of the company is black! Who the fuck has an official software company colour? I can't even use a keyboard that is white, because then things wouldn't be anal or depressing enough!" But I didn't. Better be civil then make some idiotic point which is going to go to any use. I saw them showing around some tall white nerd my age in a suit before I left, so I'm sure they had replacements eager to take my place.
So that was that. Oh, and I also had an interview with a "Games Studio". Quotes are required because the studio consisted of two guys who looked younger than me, housed in a decrepit office in Don Mills with a table, a couch, and a room with some sketches in it. I had to take another test (whee!) about C#, which I apparently didn't pass. Even if I did, I'm pretty sure I continuously insulted them during the interview by asking "So... you want to write a game... in C#. Why?" and also "And this is going to be a MMORPG? In C#, right?" and finally "You have money, right? I mean, I can rent this office too for a couple of months". Oh, and they couldn't tell me what the game was, except that they are aiming for a Beta in August, having written 0 lines of code. No management experience + fantastically ridiculous deadlines + self-assured code jockeys => sleeping on that raggedy couch in the office for at least 12 months.
What is Vulnerability Research? What do I do at work? For one thing, I don't code anymore. The main team covers a vulnerability, that is, a hole in software to be penetrated by swarthy hackers, and writes a report on it. I write a section of that report, and also write kind of like an anti-virus signature to determine if a given computer is in danger or not. Lately, my role has been slightly expanded to cover remote detection and other interesting stuff. It definitely requires thinking and knowing about how programs work (including at the assembly level), but not much actual programming itself (unless you need to write an exploit, which we do). It's also been very very slightly hinted that I would be getting some people to lord over. Imagine that, me having people to boss around and do my bidding. I would totally go mad with power (even though my salary and official title would probably stay the same) and become the manager I always hated. Time to get a nice shirt and a coffee mug!
In conclusion,
Handsome Boy Modeling School concert mini-review (format stolen from Pete):
Dan The Automator: 3/5 - lisps, no mic skills, but awesome scratching
Prince Paul: 4.5/5 - looks nice in a wifebeater, scratching, has mic skills
Dres: 5/5 - fantastic version of "The Choice Is Yours" done live, wicked
Random black guy who I thought was Del the Funky Homosapien but wasn't: 3/5 - I got one good shot of him
Josh Haden, white nerdy pimp: 2/5 - disturbingly gross, picking a chick out of the audience and then going backstage with her.
Overall: 4/5, would do the white boy head bop again. Needs more Del though.
Until next time,
-roman
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5 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Sunday, January 16th, 2005
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[ current music: DJ Shadow - Essential Mix 2003-03-30 ]
12:40 am - Frontier Psychiatrist
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You've got my body now you want my soul
Don't even think about it, say no go
Hey, it's my dad's birthday. Happy 52nd! I got him a NEC 17" LCD monitor that's shiny and flat and shiny. It's really nothing, since I got compensated SO much by relatives such that I think I actually profitted from this gift. I also wore an apron and helped out around the kitchen - my latest creations included pie, rice, and a feta-garlic mixture used to cover tomatoes. Yes, apparently puff pastry is really easy to work with, but I ended up almost screwing it up anyway by heaving the pie filling (salmon and mushrooms) leak out. Enough about pies - topic change!
Let's be honest and blunt here, dear reader(s). I don't like where my life is right now, professionally. In fact, I don't even like using the word "professionally" to describe what I'm doing. If I were to give a high-level picture of my job, it would be something along the lines of "a guy that for 8 hours a day, sits in front of a computer and tries to cajole a programming framework meant for web programmers into creating a really boring computer program that will (possibly) help roughly 100 bored engineers around the world set up television and radio stations." If I were to go down to more exciting details, it would be something like "the program will be mostly a shell of an interface between a large database and some text files." It's like being a slightly higher-tech plumber. Now, I've possibly given away some dangerous trade secrets, but it's also true that around 10 people in the world care about them. I'm also pretty sure they're discovering this newfangled "world-wide-web" thing as we speak.
It would seem that my problems have easy remedies. Find another lucrative and high-paying computer job, Roman. Lots of people in the world don't have the same opportunity to live in fancy apartments with an IKEA birch motif and a (sort of) view of the CN tower (you have to lean right while on the balcony.) The problem is that I think while the highly glamorous world of computer cajoling is well paid, it's ultimately very unsatisfactory in the long or even the medium-short run. God fucking damn it, I feel better when looking at a single crappy photo of mine than the thousands lines of code that I've written so far. Should I grow a beard (long hippy hair is out of the question), move into a loft shared with a guy who makes sculptures out of pigeon poo, and pester The Man for a grant to do... something with photography? Pack my gear, move to South America for a year and document the life of some village, hoping that Phaidon will give me a book deal immediately upon arrival in Canada? Here's another blunt and honest truth - I am a big fat wuss. I like my comfortable bed, my view of west Toronto and my high-speed elevator. I like going to a warm working bathroom well stocked with toilet paper and other necessities. So, er, how do I make the two work together?
I guess I first have to figure out what I want to after I leave my current mode of money-earning. When friends used to ask what I'd be doing in a year, I'd say that I'd be a travelling photographer chef who makes video games. But in reality, I have to focus and I don't know what to focus on. I have a vague idea of what, but I have no idea how anyone will pay me money for it. So for now, I will whine, bitch and moan, and the only thing I've decided is that I can't lose the things that I actually like doing - doing photography stuff on weekends, editing pictures after work, trying to figure out how to mix music together, and oh shit, writing more often that once in 6 months. If that sounds like something out of "Chicken Soup for the Tech Drone Soul", then I guess positive affirmations without drastic lifestyle changes really ARE that important.
Okay, now on to humour. We all like laughing when absurd and stupid things happen to people we know. In this case, the "people we know" is me. The absurd and stupid things is the shit I went through in the first 3 or so months at work. Now, I'm used to the bullshit, but when I started, it was more of a sudden shock of entry into the world run by someone else's arbitrary rules. First things - bathrooms. There are 4 individual bathrooms, all unisex. First or second day, I was approached by one of my coworkers. "Uh.. yeah.. Roman... I don't know if anyone told you, but we have kind of a rule here... is that.. after you go to the bathroom, the toilet seat has to be down and the door has to be closed... it's just kind of a rule we have.. yeah". Now I'm pretty sure I closed the door or whatever - I don't think that was the point. I think the point was to remind me ALL THE TIME that there is a bathroom rule and that I must obey the bathroom rule. Because, you see, I was going to piss all over my cubicle otherwise. Not having a bathroom rule and all. In any case, I was approached 3 or 4 times during that day with different people telling me the same thing, though at this point I think I stopped using the bathroom. Here's another fun thing - I was writing my first document describing some shitty pointless feature I was going to implement. I had to write it, so I wrote whatever and gave it to the guy across from me to check. After 3 drafts going back and forth, he comes over, sighs and says "Roman... (disappointed sigh)... I have a feeling you wrote this document because someone told you to write it, not because you want to describe this feature." My first reaction was just "WHAT". Am I on a bad reality show? Is Ashton fucking Kutcher going to pop out with a camera crew from behind the supplies cabinet and tell me that I've been punk'd? I didn't know that one of the requirements for this job, wholly unmentioned during the interview process, was the ability to be in zen-like oneness with the document I'm writing. Oh, I'm sure that when the document was glanced over by the customer, they immediately shook their heads and said "Now sure, I know what the feature is. But... it didn't feel to me like the writer really wanted to describe this feature with a passion that a Windows programmer should have. Jeeves, cancel our contract with . We're hiring Chinese political prisoners to do our programming from now on!" There's other stuff that will get me fired, not funny but sad and absurd to mention, so I won't mention it unless you MSN me and if you're reading this, then you most likely have me on your friends list and you are already bored with this entry. As am I!
So in conclusion, I've added a Finland section to my pictures. Good night.
-roman
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3 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004
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4:49 pm - Yo, bro, got another rock for your hiking boots
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It is finished. Or more accurately, it's been finished for a while and I just didn't feel like writing about it. I signed the contract that makes my ass property of this place. As you can see, their webpage describes in great detail many things about the company, and it also has free movie downloads of the upcoming "Lord of the Rings: When Frodo Met Sammy" that was smuggled from Hollywood by a donkey.
I had to come down for a second round of interviews, which greatly annoyed me, especially since I was coming off a weekend of little sleep in Kirkland Lake, where I was present as a non-invited guest to a wedding of people I don't know. That was my first exposure to small-town Northern Ontario, a town located 6km east of another town called "Swastika". So I did what I usually do in a new town, and that's take pictures of things. Kirkland Lake was and still is a gold-mining town, except that instead of saloons and prospectors there are small houses and poor people. As I was taking pictures of an abandoned mine, a kid rode up on a dirt bike and gave me an extended lecture about the mine, the workings of the mine, why it's abandoned and falling apart, and also how much crack the local teenagers smoke inside the decaying buildings. That was pretty cool, so I went over to meet his dad, who was apparently the caretaker of the mine, and he basically repeated what his son said, except in greater detail and using the word "fuck" a lot. There were also two other people present, who turned out to be real-life gold prospectors from the TO, thinking of buying property on the dude's land.
As we gots to talking about various things (I talked to a gold prospector in Kirkland Lake about Linux, for fuck's sake), the owner showed us the giant wooden building he inherited when he bought the property from the mining company. Inside was a decaying 1950s Jeep, an enormous compressor to pump air in and out of the mine, ore samples, various garbage, and spiders. His son proceeded to jump on the compressor belt while the two Toronto guys talked to the owner about gold percentages and famous mining disasters in Kirkland Lake - rocks collapsing, explosions, etc.
Choice conversation from the evening:
Son (pointing to two abandoned cars): "Dad, can me and my friend have a demolition derby?"
Dad: "Are you going to wear seatbelts and helmets and take out all the glass?"
Son: "YEAAAH!!!"
Dad: "Sure, why the fuck not. I used to do it when I was a kid."
So I took lots of pictures of everyone, and I am in the process of scanning them to be eventually placed on the interweb. The dude also gave me his address, written on the back of a cigarette carton so I can send him the pictures when I have them. I will definitely do that, as he was a friendly guy and invited me to go to The Pub to see an AC/DC cover band. Thankfully, I wimped out.
So now I'm looking for a place to live in Toronto, and I found a number of good appartment buildings on Don Mills and Sheppard that I want to look at some time soon. As I'm doing this with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) datasquid, we need to co-ordinate things and then sign things and eventually move things from one place to another, then live in a... thing.
Holy ass, this was boring. I'm not going to write another LJ post unless I am abducted by giant garden gnomes and forced to be their sex slave in their subterranean lair. Or something equally exciting.
-roman
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2 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Friday, July 23rd, 2004
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7:25 pm - Shabbat Shalom, motherfuckers
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It seems I have two or more offers from various companies in the GTA region. One of them happens to be a company that runs the various "dateline" or "chatline" scams legitimate businesses, where you get to "talk LIVE to HOT SINGLES in YOUR AREA". I guess that's one step above phone sex, plus I would get to tell people that I work for Male2Male. As a programmer! Regretfully, I will probably have to decline their generous offer of a jar of roasted peanuts and a ball of twine, though they are located right downtown, meaning I'd always be within 2 steps of a sushi/korean restaurant.
The other offer is from a much more legitimate company that does embedded equipment for large broadcasting places like NBC and DirecTV. It's staffed entirely by mega nerds and is located somewhere in Markham which is closer to Sudbury than Toronto. Their offer is much more arousing financially and technically-wise.
As "luck" would have it, at about the same time I am still unclear re: my status with two other companies I actually WANT to work for - Alias Wavefront, which makes shiny 3D things, like hobbits and Gandalf, and Immersion Studios, which makes games for museums that have to do with sharks eating people. In 3D. The problem is that these companies are moving slower than a developmentally-challenged turtle at a calculus exam, and I will need to be giving my answer soon. Someone at Alias promised to call me soon, while the shark HR lady told me to fuck off until they call me again for an interview. Cockmonkeys, that's not exactly what I was looking for. Hopefully Alias will come through.
-roman
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8 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Tuesday, July 6th, 2004
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6:22 pm - Now I'm in the limelight cause I rhyme tight
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Look upon my works, ye mortals, and despair!
Anyhoo, I've been lately unemployed and reading "A Peace to End all Peace", by David Fromkin. Quite an engaging book that is, filled with Intrigue! Diplomacy! Petty Squabbles! and so on. It's about the creation of the modern Middle East following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. As always, it is frightening to read that most of the history of the 20th century could be altered by a single cabinet meeting or the actions of some British bureaucrat, but that's basically how it happened. Even though we think of history as a slow, steady process lurching in some predefined direction, between 1914 and 1922, that direction was jerking around wildly like a deranged baboon in heat.
Also, I just got my computer back "online", as the crappy carpeted floors in our upstairs bedrooms were systematically ripped out and replaced with high-quality laminate by my parents and myself. I can say I'm quite the handyman now, and I've been having recurring daydream fantasies of helping more people with manly construction/renovation projects. In any case, I can at least replace someone's carpet with laminate now, or possibly an empty, dust filled floor. Now I don't have to keep breathing whatever crap collected itself in the recesses of the 15 year old carpet that was covering my room, as I get to breath whatever crap will get collected on the shiny laminate floor.
Finally, as you may have or have not noticed, I am working on getting a fancy-ass photo gallery of my "works" online. I'm using JAlbum and making my own skin for it, thus I have full control over all the variables of the album generation. Jalbum is quite the program for the aspiring nerdmaster, as it lets you stick Java code inside an html template and access its API so you can customize the crap out of your album, which is what I'm doing. For an ultra-secret sneak preview, you can look at this page and tell me if you like it. Nothing works, except the left/right scroll buttons on the thumbnails and also the little "i" in the bottom right corner.
That's about it. Oh yeah, election, blah blah, minority government, yabba dabba doo, we're all doomed, go see Fahrenheit 9/11 and Supersize Me but think with your own head and don't suck Michael Moore's dick just because he doesn't like G-dub Bush.
-roman
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8 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Tuesday, May 18th, 2004
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12:11 am - Roman's adventures in the job market, Part 1
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Hello,
So for the last couple of weeks, I have been frantically mailing out resumes to various companies in Toronto, hoping one of them will come running to me with money and free toys. Finally, all of my dreams have come true when a company who will from now on will be called "SpeechArabicWishGranter", or SAWG for short, called me while I was watching "Kill Bill, Vol. 2" to invite me for a prestigious interview.
Oh, but wait! It was not an interview. An interview would mean that they would act like a normal company and thus would follow the normal procedure of reading my resume, then talking to me, then deciding on hiring me. No, what I was invited for was a "test", which, I was assured, in no way meant that it was an interview. So, on Sunday afternoon I drove to Toronto with my mom, who also coincidentally had a little talk about obtaining a Kumon franchise and drilling some sense into little idiots of Ottawa. On Monday morning, I woke up nice and early and promptly got stuck in traffic on Dufferin. How the fuck do people commute to work in Toronto without killing themselves or other drivers?
Anyway, the point is that I showed up at an office building that was standing lonely in a field of strip malls and a maze-like parking lot. I was met by a tall Indian guy, who wore more friendship bracelets that I did - it is only later that I found out that he's a 2nd year student from Waterloo whose job in the company is "general bitch", thus he was performing HR duty that week. So we walked in and found out that the "test room" has no "furniture". Thus, I was put in a meeting room with swiveling soft chairs and a window view of two huge semi-cylindrical structures, one black and one white. I wish I had my camera, but instead I realized I had to write a midterm for retards for an hour and a half. The first questions were something like "You have 40 blue socks and 40 black socks in a drawer. If I take out a pair of socks without looking and masturbate to gay midget porn into one of them, how many ejaculations will it take for me to end up with a pair of like-coloured socks?" (The correct answer is 3). Later questions were C coding, like converting a hex string to an integer, bubble sort disguised as not bubble sort, basically stupid stuff. Last question was the classic "I have a goat, a cannibal and a missionary trying to cross the river in a bridge. The cannibal and missionary cannot be together because the cannibal will eat the missionary. The goat and the cannibal cannot be together because the goat will gore the canibal. Finally, the missionary and goat cannot be together because the missionary will make tender love to the goat. Find a way for all 3 of them to cross the river without an international incident". Actually, it was the "how long does it take to cross a bridge if everyone in the party walks at a different speed?" question, but it was the same type. So I handed in my test to the appropriate authorities and went on my way.
On the way back to Ottawa, I got a phone call about an even greater honour - I was being invited to talk to a real person! OMFG! LOL! ISDN! That was so amazing, I even forgot to not make a sarcastic remark about the pointlessness of me driving to Ottawa when I will have to be in Toronto soon anyway! So I was told that one of interviewers' names will be Uma. Now that's pretty sweet - I'll be interviewed by a woman, which will be a novelty. Well, as most things in this world, that turned out to be a huge lie. Uma is not a hot blonde chick in a yellow tracksuit, as per my fantasy. Uma is instead a South Indian middle-aged guy. But he was the second person interviewing me. The first was the VP of something (technology? engineering? carpets?), and he was very nice. I brought in a secret demo of UltraHeartMorpher, and it was so secret it wouldn't run on any of their machines. I stupidly assumed that being a Windows development company, they would have some MSVC libraries installed on their computers, but apparently they started developing on .NET right away, so me and my VC6-developed demo were royally boned. I did show some screenshots and make myself sound important while remembering to make jokes and being enthusiastic.
So after that actually pleasant interview, I went in for 45 minutes of pain with Uma. I'm sure he's a nice guy and all, but he spent all of the interview at a 90 degree angle to me, staring into my resume. The awkward silence was interrupted once every 5 minutes by him mumbling "So... you say you know... [mumble] multithreaded programming. Then... what type of memory [mumble] is not... shared between threads?" (the answer is "stack").
After that, there was the last person, a Chinese dude who was also very nice. His questions were not technical, but mostly about software development practices. I strained to remember what I could from the sleepless horror of 4th year design, but I'm not sure if I came up with the right answers to his questions. I mean, who knows what the most and least important steps in the formal design process are? I think maybe the parts where you hand in your 150-page document (5 pages information, 145 pages filler) to Barby and he screams at you because you're 30 seconds late and tries to rip the document in half but fails and then just sort of growls in an impotent rage - I don't think that's really important. I don't know how they do things at SAWG though.
And with that, I exchanged handshakes and left. We walked around Queen St. and I got new funky sunglasses, but then we did something really retarded and tried to get out of Toronto at 4:30 on a Friday. After 2.5 hours of sitting in various traffic jams, we were finally on the 401 past Pickering. I fell asleep, and that's the end of my story.
-roman
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4 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Thursday, April 29th, 2004
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2:17 am - Turn-turn-turn it up! Bring the noise!
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Actually, don't bring the noise. You can keep it.
Today, you enjoy two (2) reviews of stuff for the price of one! How can you beat this amazing offer? You can't, you smarmy asshole, so take that attitude and cram it wherever you traditionally cram things.
Review the 1st: Isaac's
Isaac's is a fairly new restaurant in Kanata, where I was dragged kicking and screaming, after being woken up WAY too early (around noon). Let me start the whole review by saying that I was irritable and annoyed at everything, so I was not at all biased. Plus, it was in Kanata, and as well know, there's only trophy wives and Nortel nerds in Kanata, plus their associated asshole offspring, therefore nothing good can exist there. Anyway, the restaurant - it definitely bills itself as a Mediterranean place, with an Italian focus, but! with some other interesting influences thrown in. This probably comes from the fact that one of the owners is Arab, but it makes the dishes a lot less boring than a regular Italian place.
The decor and set-up is also in the 2-star range, with everything being very classy, starting from the waiter putting napkins on our laps for us (or maybe he didn't think we knew what to do with them). The decor is nice and modern, and half the kitchen is in the dining area, so you can see the food being made (there is even a bar to sit around the kitchen). The menu was very large for a lunch menu (separate from the dinner menu, which I didn't see), with appetizers, chicken, veal, beef, seafood and pasta sections. Speaking of the Arab influences I mentioned earlier, there are Arab-like appetizers on the menu, but they looked too ordinary - hummus, baba ganoush, tabbouleh. I expected to see something like kibbeh or stuffed eggplant, but I decided to order the fatoush salad, because I haven't had one before. Basically, I got a garden salad with toasted pita pieces (good) with WAY too much lemon juice and some oil as a dressing (bad). Definitely a miss, but maybe that was the incompetence of the cook that day, who knows. On the other hand, the complimentary bread basket included 4 warm bread rolls, each different - toasted sesame, whole wheat, poppy seed and white. Very nice.
Next up, the dishes. I expected something lunch-sized, especially from a restaurant with such fancy decor, but instead we got big portions. I ordered cheese canneloni (lame, but they were out of seafood canneloni), and F. ordered smoked-salmon wrapped scallops. My canelloni were tasty, very large and filled with cheese and chopped spinach in a tomato sauce. F. got a much better deal though, because her scallops in a dijon sauce came with 8 or 9 individual grilled or steamed vegetables, including grilled asparagus, tomato with breadcrumbs, brussel sprout and peppers. Also, what was really impressive (and this is pretentious food-snob Roman talking now) was that the scallops-wrapped-smoked salmon tasted remarkably like the classic scallops-wrapped-bacon dish - great because they can't use delicious pork in their dishes.
Overall, I give it 3.5 / 5 forks.
Interlude:
Your momma is so fat!
How fat is she?
Your momma is so big and fat that she can get busy
With 42 burritos when times are rough
I've seen her in the back of Taco Bell with handcuffs
It's a sad fact
Your momma smokes crack
She's got a burning yearning and there's no turning back
Guess the name of the band without googling and win a shiny nickel. Clements, you're exempt from this, seeing how I stole the album from YOUR server.
Review the 2nd: The Seduction of Dr. Lewis / La Grande séduction
After the Barbarian Invasions, it seems everyone and their 3rd cousin's grandmother wanted to see more of Quebec moviemaking, or maybe it was just me. The Seduction is more or less a fairy tale of a small Quebec fishing village on an island needing to convince a city-slicker doctor from Montreal to permanently live there so they can all get jobs at a plastic factory and pork their middle-aged wives (that is the central point of the movie). The movie revolves around the planned "seduction" of the doctor by the townspeople who are organized by Germain, the mayor, and the usual consequences of lying. The village inhabitants, while shown as being lazy and alcoholic (and I mean alcoholic, there are rare scenes without beer being involved somehow), are good-natured and easy-going. Everyone is willing to participate in the farce, for example, making cricket uniforms and pretending to run around and play cricket, or engage in other comical deceptions that the smart-ass doctor doesn't see. Of course, I can't really understand how a bunch of drunk fishermen manage to fool an educated doctor for a month into thinking that their village is quaint and cultured, but there you go - it's a fairy tale. At the end, the good Dr. finds out he's been lied to and gets upset for roughly 5 seconds, after which he's OK with the fact that he'll be living with a bunch of alcoholic plastic factory workers for 5 years. Oh yes, and we find out his girlfriend in Montreal is conveniently cheating on him, severing his ties to the mainland, and allowing him to pursue the boning opportunities of Lucie Laurier. But overall, the movie is full of geniunely funny moments that rarely work when directors (who've never been to a small town) make fun of small-town people, and I daresay it is cute.
4 / 5 pretentious nerd snorts.
-roman
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8 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Monday, April 26th, 2004
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2:27 am - 'Popular' Science? No such thing, man. More like Nerdular... Nerdence.
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Badger badger badger badger badger badger mushroom MUSHROOM!
In spirit of past updates, where I would inform my loyal audience of every significant waste of my money, I am here to inform my loyal audience, blah blah blah:
I got a new Bad-Ass(tm) printer! The fabulous and shiny printer, as seen here, is obviously awesome and makes me 3.45x times more professional just by having it.
Now, you may ask me: "Hey, Roman, if it's so awesome, how do the prints look?", to which I will reply: "Hey, shut up, Mr. Jerkface" because the printer is still in the box. It seems someone didn't read the packaging and now needs to buy a new USB cable. So far, I've been admiring the printer from afar, reading the manual, and lovingly caressing the CD/DVD attachment that is separate from it. I assume the prints will come out lovely. Also, the printer was somewhat cheaper than the retail, because of my secret shopping technique known as "having a friend that works at a photo store who bought the printer with an employee discount". Said friend also got me tickets to an imaging show with seminars that is going down this weekend - I'm as excited as a virgin who just got to second base!
In other, sadder, news, ye Olde Camera Exchange on Bank St. has closed down. It was a cool place where you could come in and talk with the elderly salesman for hours on end, because he didn't really care about selling you anything and just wanted to show exactly why the Nikon F series with interchangeable split-focus screens was clearly superior to the newer models. Or you could come in (like I did) and describe your misadventures with dropping your 1000$ lens on the rocks because you were really dumb and forgot to close the bag, and they would sympathize, tell their own horror stories, unscrew the jammed filter and not charge you anything. Finally, I got my excellent Manfrotto tripod there at a good price just before leaving for Finland, and I always stopped by just to gawk at stuff I couldn't afford and to chat. Hopefully they will reincarnate somewhere else in Ottawa so I'm not deprived of my old-camera-guy banter and good deals on used photo equipment.
Come see lions... only in Kenya,
-roman
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3 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Saturday, April 17th, 2004
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2:47 am - Golden Axe 2 : The Revenge of Death Adder
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1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
"Combine the flour, ground hazelnuts, granulated sugar, spices, and baking powder in the work bowl of a food processor and pulse to mix."
-roman
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4 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Tuesday, April 13th, 2004
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1:03 am - It's Monopoly Time
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Like all good speakers, I'll start off with a joke. F. didn't think it was funny, but what do girls know?
So what's the deal with people going on group dates and then, if they like each other, going on individual dates? You don't see that hapenning with sex, right? When you ask a couple how they met, they don't say "Oh, well, we met at an orgy, but then we kinda liked each other so we decided to have sex on our own."
That's my first "stand-up" joke. Imagine Jerry saying it, I'm sure it'll sound hilarious. Ok, so what's going on with me, you ask? Also, who are you, you ask? So, I'm resting up before finishing the rest of my various projects for which I am owed lots of money, and I'm using my resting time to work on this little puppy. I think I've come a long way from pasting crudely-edited video game graphics on purple backgrounds and calling it "my webpage". Well, not really. I think the design above still has quite a long way to go before it becomes decent. The main point of Mr. Butlertron, dot com, will be to serve as a vanity site for my photography, which, as we all know, is better than anything Ansel Adams ever made.
Well, that's it for now. Check back in a couple of weeks/days/months, when I make another update to butlertron.
-roman
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if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Wednesday, March 10th, 2004
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[ current mood: retarded ] [ current music: De La Soul - Rap De Rap Show ]
4:38 pm - Everybody's got something to hide except me and my monkey
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Hello,
Finally, finally, finally I am done the stupid program which has been sucking the freaking life out of me for the last month. I mean, it was interesting in some aspects - I got to implement a nifty voice detection algorithm, play with some DirectX stuff and that's about it. The rest of it was extremely painful constant change of the program to accomodate the wishes of Carleton psych lab people. As usual, I am forgetting the most important thing - the moneys. I think it was the first time a university gave ME money, and I deposited my cheques with much rejoicing. The clerks at TD-Canada Trust didn't much like my "Victory Over Carleton" dance, but if the artistic requirements dictate that I perform The Worm after every deposit, then they just have to wait.
Now, of course, I daydream about what I should do with the money. Pay off my student loan (most likely). Buy the now out-of-stock Epson R800 about which I've been whining for about 3 months now (also likely). Solid gold underwear (maybe). Buying the While You Were Out DVD set with special carpenter's commentary (not that likely). And so on.
I highly recommend pirating buying Total Training For Photoshop, which was recommended to me by the monkeys of wilderness, i.e. wildmonkeys. It features a goateed Deke McLeland teaching you Photoshop skills that enable you to impress all your artisty friends who use Macs (I have none, but if I did, they'd be very impressed).
I used to be really annoyed by "A Cook's Tour" on the Food Network, which had this asshole chef called Anthony Bourdain going to various countries and insulting their food and culture. I mean, I didn't really understand the point, until I read his book "Kitchen Confidential", in which he describes the clear schism between what he calls "celebrity chefs" and "real chefs". As he sees it, the celebrity chefs get to posture and make catchphrases on the Food Network, while having little cooking skill compared to the "real chefs" who toil away for 12 hours/day in high-scale restaurants, inventing new dishes and remaining in obscurity to the general public. According to him, anyone can make dishes that will put "that fuzzy little Emeril bitch" to shame. The "real chefs" cannot appear on the Food Network, because they are horrible, controlling, angry, insane people. And he also explains WHY most of them are like that - because without being a mini-Stalin in the kitchen, nothing would get done (apparently). There is a caveat in that he says that not all high-profile chefs are like that, but most are. Anyway, the writing is pretty funny, and is a great contrast to the polished FoodTV shows and chefs you usually watch (ok, shows that I usually watch). It's casts an even darker/intense light on cooking than "The Soul of a Chef" does, which was intense.
In any case, I'm off to do things. Things that involve being lazy.
-roman
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6 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Wednesday, February 4th, 2004
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11:04 pm - Live! Nude! Hobbits!
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Greetings and whatever, my friends.
As you know, I've been under a lot of stress lately, and by stress I mean 'laziness'. I've been mostly idling, slowly "working" on all my "projects" but really "not doing anything productive". Then a miracle came along in the form of an email. It promised to safely and naturally grow my penis to such proportions that women will be attracted to it simply by its gravitational pull. Then another miracle came along, this one from someone close and dear to me, and that email promised me that I will make 5000$ in a month or less. Also, to grow my penis. As you now realize, the second email actually delivered on its promise (except the second part), and I am now working on a top-secret contract with Carleton University to develop artificial hyper-intelligent octo-parrots that will one day hold the world hostage. Actually, I'm writing a program, because that's what I'm good for - that and pointing out why Family Guy episodes would never work in real life, as well as having discussions as to exactly when the Simpsons started sucking. So, in conclusion, finally some sweet, sweet cash is going to appear in ye olde bank account. Cash that I will use to buy MORE DRUGS. I mean, pay off my student loan and possibly buy an Epson R800 printer.
On the other side of things, I've done two things that will help me get off my lazy ass and get in some shape - I've joined a basketball league, and a gym. The basketball league is a mixed competitive and recreational, which of course means that our team has so far dominated everyone else To The Max, especially because we have to secret weapons - girls who are actually good at basketball. The awesome affirmative-action league rules stipulate that there must be a girl on the floor at all times, and for us it's more like "one of our star players has to be on the floor at all times", so we end up beating quite a lot of ass. In the first game, my brother got yelled at because he accidentally scratched some girl and she stopped playing and started bitching at him in the middle of the court. It was pretty funny. Oh yeah, and WE WON. The gym is at the Algonquin College (motto: When You're Too Cool for That Impossible 65% Average Required for University), and it's brand new, which is great. The problem is that I'm incredibly weak, since I haven't worked out in like forever. So right now I can't lift my arms, which I'm sure will do wonders for the game tomorrow.
Well, I should go and program things such as that I gets paid. Toodles!
-roman
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4 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Monday, January 19th, 2004
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1:12 am - Eat The Falafel and Shut The Fuck Up
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Warning: This diary contains a title which may be unsuitable for people who are offended by the word 'fuck'.
Yeah, it's been a while since I wrote anything, but there hasn't been any events which deserved my precious writing time lately.
First of all, I got over a cold/flu/SARS thing right after New Year's. It was quite crappy, with me lying in bed and crying for mommy every 10 to 15 minutes, but now I'm all better, except for an annoying cough which is slowly going away. As soon as I got over that, I started my uphill battle with Ginn Photographic of Ottawa, because I decided it was time I got some high quality prints from my photos. The battle consisted of me giving them files to print and them not printing them like I wanted, me bitching and the cycle restarting anew. Actually, that's not true. See, when I crop my pictures during the editing process, the result usually does not fit the 1:1.25 width/height ratio that is required for a borderless 8x10 print (because, 8 * 1.25 = 10, you idiot). When I gave Ginn a first "test" picture, they printed a borderless 8x10, which I was happy with. I then gave them 9 pictures which they printed embedded inside an 8x12 paper at much smaller dimensions. Needless to say, I was pissed that I just dropped close to 100$ for something that I can't frame in a standard 11x14 mat. Even though the pictures looked good, this was an opportunity to whine and bitch until I got free reprints for all the pictures! Roman : 1, Annoyed and Tired People at Ginn : 0. Now I have 17 pictures altogether which I will frame after paying a lot of money to the good people at MatShop, and then proudly hang them in my house. Oh, and I also recommend STOIK PictureMan for photo editing. It's a bit clunkier than Photoshop, and it's made by Russians, so it'll probably install a child porn server on your computer and send your credit card number to Osama Bin Laden, but it can edit in 48-bit colour and you can apply filters with a brush, which, as far as I can tell, you can't do in Photoshop. For example, it's like bumping up the saturation or brightness/contrast or smoothness in any area of the image without using the magic wand or any of that crap. Ok, enough boring photography talk. Let's get to making fun of video games!
I recently finished both Neverwinter Nights and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. When I started playing NwN, I expected this to be a "real" RPG, instead of a glorified Diablo 3 with more dialog options. Alright, the puzzles are a BIT more complex and of course there is a greater variety in your character customization, but it all seems just way too linear to me. Whenever you talk to an NPC, you always have 3 choices which are always the same. Let's say a woman wants you to rescue her brother that fell down the well after playing with the Teapot of Rectitude or something. Here are your dialog options:
1. Yes, ma'am, I will rescue your brother. I won't sleep, eat, or poop until he is safely drinking tea with you.
2. [Persuade] Yeah, I'll do it, but I need money. Give me money and I'll think about it. Actually, just give me money.
3. I'll kill you, you stupid bitch! Then I'll find your brother and kill him! Then I'll kill your cat! Now give me all your money so I can kill you faster!
At this point you're supposed to guess which one of these choices will label your character as 'good', 'neutral' or 'evil'. On the other hand, I hear this game is good in multiplayer, plus there is the ability to make your own storylines, not unlike when you're playing AD&D in the basement with your fat sexless nerd friends.
Next on the list we have Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The original Prince of Persia, which came out in 1989, I believe, was such a good game that even today I can flawlessly pass levels 1-7 or maybe 8. The premise is awesome: an evil old vizier, named Jaffar, wants to marry a hot princess that tells him to go fuck himself in no uncertain terms. Pissed, Jaffar pulls out an ENORMOUS hourglass and puts it into the princess' bedroom, to let her know that in one hour she better be ready to marry him or be rescued by her boyfriend, The Prince of Persia (that's you). As an aside, the prince of persia looks remarkably white. In less than 60 minutes, you're supposed to pass 12 levels of spikes, chopping metal things, fat guards with swords skillz, door puzzles and magic potions that make the screen green and make you float off tall buildings. For its time, the game graphics were pants-peeingly amazing - 16 colours with incredibly fluid motion animation that was unseen before. And you know why? Because games were better when I was a kid, and you kids should get off my front lawn before I shake my cane at you! Anyway, the Prince of Persia franchise suffered some dignity loss after the release of Prince of Persia 2 and the abortion that was Prince of Persia 3D, so now we have The Sands of Time.
The premise is similar to the original, as there is a hot Princess, an evil vizier and a Prince, but that's about it. The deal is that you are at the head of a Persian army invading a Maharaja's palace in India. The vizier (who is Maharaja's) betrays his ruler and lets your forces in, letting you steal the Dagger of Time. At the same time, the Princess (the Maharaja's daughter) is captured and brought to some sultan's palace. Anyway, this is getting needlessly complicated and let's just say that the vizier does something bad and all hell breaks loose and you have to make your way through the castle whose ruins have convenient switches and doors for you to go through. The first strike against the PC version is the fact that it's a console port. We all know the problems with console ports - idiotic camera control, clunky character control (because we are limited to the original 8 or 9 console buttons) and the most retarded thing of all - "save points". The cool factor in the game is the Prince's abilities to perform physics-defying gymnastics that still end up looking realistic. For example, he can run along a vertical wall for a limited amount of time, or jump from column to column like a hairless monkey. The fighting has two levels to it - first you must beat the bad guys into submission with your sword, then stab them in the ass with your Dagger of Time as they're lying down to finish them off. There is also the Dagger of Time itself, which really has only one purpose - to re-do a jump or a trick that you screw up. The story component is the fact that you and the Princess go through the puzzles together (she helps to solve some puzzles by screaming out annoying hints), eventually fall in love, blah blah blah. For the perverts, there is a semi-naked sequence of her bathing in some pool.
The puzzles themselves aren't very hard, they're mostly jumping puzzles that utilize the prince's ability to run on walls or hang on ledges, that sort of stuff. The most annoying part of the game is the (lack of) camera control. Even though in some parts of the game you can rotate the camera with a mouse, in others it's stuck or it's so limited that it looks like the Prince is having a seizure of some sort. Even better, sometimes the game decides to flip the camera as you're in the middle of doing something, thus reversing your orientation and all the direction buttons. When you're fighting, the game has some sort of random algorithm that I assume the programmers thought would make the battle more cinematic and exciting, but instead accomplishes in pissing me off. Let's say you're fighting some evil Sand Creature and you're about to kick him in the face, slash him with your sword, then do a somersault and stab him in the groin as he's lying down, pretty standard stuff. Now all of a sudden the camera goes for an XtREEM Close-UP! Shot and you're oblivious to the fact that there are 3 more Sand Creatures behind you, ready to bash your Persian yet White-Looking ass into the ground. Oh yes, and the ending sucks too. Not to give everything away, but in the original PoP, when you rescue the princess, you run into her bedroom and kiss her with a deep passion that only a computer programmer can convey. We all know what happens after that - Boioioioing! Gross. Anyway, in Sands of Time, you don't even get THAT far, you just stay honourable and stuff. So that's another point off - no (imaginary) sex with the Princess after all that hard work.
I was going to write more things, things that exploted all the persian/arab/indian stereotypes that were crammed into the game or that I imagined, but decided not to. Instead, I'm going to sleep.
-roman
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4 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Wednesday, December 31st, 2003
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3:30 pm - The Year In Review
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Usually, this is the time where I'd post the retarded Happy New Year message, wishing us all a swift and merciful death when the rat-people come out of the sewers to enslave us. I'd like to do something completely different this year and look at the past Year in Review:
January: I return from California, bitter and disillusioned, ready to give up my deadly computer engineering skills after seeing the effects it has on civilians at Nvidia.
February: I wake up and realize that 4B has started. "Not another 4 months of this shit", I whine, even though it's more like 3 months. I bitch about walking for 25 min to school every day in the winter.
March: I stay high for most of the month, trying to score with Kim (unsuccessfully) and stop going to most of my lectures. Iron Ring Day!! WHOO!! YEAH!!! RIIIIIIING!!!
April: Or maybe Iron Ring Day was in April? I'm not sure. Anyway, school is over, it's warm outside, I don't want to see my classmates ever again.
May: I'm at home! I take up cooking and photography with a new passion, realizing that going to school is retarded and pointless. I ride a bike daily for the first time in 3 years and play basketball with the juvenile delinquents at Sir Guy Carleton HS.
June: Hey, Ottawa is not that bad! I continue badgering CIMO until they let me into Finland and work the T-shirt booth at the beer festival, getting the benefits of wearing a "Staff" tag and a couple of the crappy T-shirts.
July: Holy crap on a stick, I'm living in a different country! I'm buying lettuce... in FINLAND!! OMG OMG OMG OMG. WTF.
August: I thought this is an arctic wasteland, why is it 30 degrees outside? My girlfriend is hot but insane, we break up. I hone my survival instincts by hunting down mushrooms in Nuuksio forest.
September: Still hot. What the hell? Oh, I guess I should start working on this thing that they're paying me for and all that. But... I think I'll go to Amsterdam instead.
October: Now it's getting colder and all of a sudden starts to snow. Håkan keeps making homosexual advances towards me, but I ignore it in good fun, chalking things up to Cultural Differences. I should really continue working on this program but instead go to Sweden, Denmark, England and finally Amsterdam, again.
November: It's actually good to be home and not pay per-second telephone charges again! Cooking, laziness, and basketball with Brad ensue. I make a vow to finish my 3 projects by the end of the year (website, UltraHeartMorpher, Jivaana), and I find myself the technical lead of a hot new young startup. I fall in Love, again, this time for Real.
December Still in Love. Ups and downs continue to rock my boat but the future looks cloudy-optimistic. Sort of. Give up on all jobs except Cedara, who tell me to wait until the middle of January. Going to Brayden's to celebrate in... 2 hours.
And that's the year! I hope yours was as fun as mine, or maybe this upcoming one will be. Without sarcasm, happy new year and/or happy whatever crazy holiday you celebrate (I'm looking at YOU, "Eid" people).
-roman
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6 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Saturday, December 27th, 2003
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11:46 pm - Merry Hannukwanzaasmas!
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Season's greetings,
Thanks to dpixel8 for sending me the only annual holiday present via the mail, all the way from Wisconsin, USA. The rest of youse get nothing.
Here is my annual gift to you, a dish I made myself by stealing it from Giovanni's Restaurant and Emeril's Chicken Marsala recipe:
Roman's Chicken or Veal in Cognac or Marsala:
4 chicken breasts
1 cup flour
3-4 cups mushrooms, thinly sliced (shiitake, white, portabella, whatever)
1 cup cognac or brandy or marsala wine
2 cups chicken stock
5 tsp butter
2-3 tsp dry herbs like oregano, thyme, parsley
olive oil, salt, cracked black pepper
cream (optional)
1. Cut the chicken breasts in half, put each piece into a plastic bag and flatten them out with a mallet or something flat and heavy like your head. You want them to have uniform thickness.
2. Mix the flour with 1/2 tsp of salt, lots of black pepper and dried herbs. Coat the flattened chicken pieces in the flour mixture and set aside.
3. Heat 1 tbsp of olive oil in a large pan. When the oil is hot, add 1 tsp of butter, watch it melt, then add the chicken pieces. Make sure that each piece has enough room in the pan - if not, you can do this in batches. Fry the pieces until golden on each side. Take out and set aside.
4. If necessary, add more butter (I didn't need to). Add the sliced mushrooms to the pan and cook until they start to release their mushroomy liquid. At this point, add the cognac/marsala and reduce by half (turn down the heat a little bit at this point so you don't boil away everything).
5. Now, add the chicken stock and the remaining chicken pieces. Cook until the chicken is done and the sauce is thickened, probably another 5 minutes or so. Swirl in the remaining butter (2-3 tsp).
(you don't have to do this part, but the sauce will taste better in my opinion)
6. If the sauce still looks a little bit runny, take out the chicken then take out as much liquid as you can and put it into a cup. Add a little bit of flour and whisk together until all the flour pieces are dissolved. Add the thickened liquid back into the pan and mix together. If you want, add a little bit of cream also.
Serve the chicken with the sauce spooned over and mushrooms sprinkled around.
Side dish suggestions: Tiny baked potatoes. I don't know what they're called, but they're really, really good. They're the size of cherry tomatoes and they're delicious.
Wine suggestions: I have no idea. Ask a wine person.
Bon Apetit,
-roman
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4 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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| Thursday, November 27th, 2003
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1:06 am - Job Hunting Update
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Hello, fellow nerds,
Since my arrival in Canada, I've been really busy, mostly trying to find some sort of work. As such, I've been to 3 interviews already, because I'm that much of a superstar. Let me tell you how they all went down, injecting a special brand of Roman Style Hilarity (TM) along the way.
Interview the First - shady Russians
My mom decided that I can't find a job on my own (even though I told her that I had an interview already), so the first thing she did was hand my resume to everyone in town that she knew. As a result, I was invited to talk to some guy who is apparently rich because he's had a company already or something, and I should be just like him. The first thing that was interesting was the fact that he sent me an e-mail from one company address, while giving me directions to a completely different company in Ottawa. So that confused the hell out of me - the first company was an embedded software maker, the second one a recruitment firm. So I show at this place in the morning to find a semi-looted office with one chick sitting out front behind a computer.
Me: "I have an interview with [name of second company]"
Her: "They... don't exist anymore. Are you sure you have an interview with them?"
Me: "Huh.. interesting. Well, do you know where I can find [shady Russian guy]?"
Her: "Oh yeah. He's in that corner."
So right away I knew I was on my way to a classy business that spares no expenses. We all know the key to a successful business is to not have an office and occupy an abandoned building. Nevertheless, the guy, who looked a lot like the fat guy on Sliders (beard and all), conducted the interview along with a moustache-wearing programmer. The interview was somewhat hard for me, mostly because I had to speak in Russian the whole time, and it's hard to talk about computers that way, since I don't know any of the terms properly. But I think it went fairly well, he asked me to call him back after I finish my interview in Montreal.
Interview the second - Montreal without french people
My second interview was with a company that was founded by people that can't spell - Cimmetry. I interacted with them through a stereotypical Italian recruiter from Simon-Tech, who wouldn't shut up about how much he wanted me to work there. Eventually, I decided on an interview date and I drove to Montreal with fine directions from Yahoo Maps. Getting to Montreal was really easy, since it's a straight highway drive from Ottawa. Immediately upon getting to the general area where the building was, I got lost. The problem was the fact that the building was off the highway, in true Quebec style, with no way to reverse or find a way to approach it. Eventually, I circled it about 6 times before finding a way to get in there. That's not important. The interview itself was hilarious. The first person to interview me was the completely stereotypical nerd guru - fat, bad hair, bad teeth, giant glasses, sloppy clothes, beard, nerdy laugh. Of course, he was the Software Architect.
The best part of not being in school anymore is the fact that I don't have to write stupid tests all the time. As such, it was highly appropriate that Nerdmaster gave me a 40 min written math, C/Java and Unix test to write, although apparently they just wanted to "gauge my areas of expertise" and "correct answers weren't that important". So after the test, we had a brief chat about my experience and he left. The second person was a really shy Indian/Arab guy whose interviewing me consisted of mumbling a company name on my resume, then proceeding to listen to me as I talked about what I did. The best part - none of the interviewers talked to each other, meaning I had to repeat EVERYTHING for everyone. The third interviewer was a jolly fat Indian dude, who was kind of fun to talk to - a couple of technical questions, some general crap. Lastly, I think they liked me so much, they asked an extra bonus interviewer to come in, totally at random. And it was none other than my former classmate Edmund Tam, or his exact copy. He kept saying "yes", "ok" and "uh-huh" after every single word that I said, in case I had doubts he was listening to me. By the time I left it was pretty late, so I got lost again on my way out of Montreal and ended up stopping in some island town between the Montreal Island and the mainland. I really fit in, buying gas at the Petro Canada where every other car was a truck, and me with my Corolla and interview clothes. I fully expected "Are you some kind of fag, eh?" from one of the locals, but I guess that was a wrong assumption to make - they would never speak English to me in Quebec.
Interview the Third - Going over to the other side
My friend sent me a link about ATI having an info session / hiring fair in Ottawa, so naturally I was amused by the fact that I can work for Nvidia's direct competitor and stick it to them in style. So I threw in my resume for fun, and I was surprised when I got an email telling me I've been invited to a "VIP Session" at some pub to have an intimate chat with ATI's managers. Of course, I figured "VIP Session" means free alcohol, free food, and me and ATI's president K.Y. Ho (I wonder if he says "Just call me KY"?) discussing the details of my signing bonus. In fact, it was 300 people standing in line for 2 fucking hours to have an interview. What a fantastic system they organized - instead of scheduling people for interview slots like normal people, they decided to operate on the same basis as a fast-food restaurant - first come, first serve. What else was great was the fact that they selected my resume for a position in ASIC testing - basically the same position I ran away from at Nvidia. So, to summarize, I stood in line for 2 hours for a chance to interview for my old job. I felt pretty bad, though, because my interviewer was interested and I wasn't at all.
Chinese Interviewer: "So, why did you leave Nvidia?"
Me: "Well, I didn't like working with hardware that much. I'd really rather prefer software, as I dislike working in hardware testing."
C.I.: "Ah see. So, would you be interested in working for my group, in hardware testing?"
Me: "Fuck you"
Then he called me today, as well, basically asking the same thing. I feel like a bastard telling him to leave me alone, when I know there are people that can't find a job right now. In any case, he asked for references at Nvidia, which my friend Aman found for me (he works there full-time now), so hopefully they will tell him how much of a shitty worker I was and he won't bother me again.
I guess that's about it. My reasons for not updating lately have been my laziness and the fact that I don't have a free moment right now - busy, busy, busy. I want to finish UltraHeartMorpher, but there's all this other crap going on. Oh yeah, my face was on TV tonight, so I'm a celebrity. It was part of a NewRO report on the Carleton Foundry program, since they were having some sort of event which we went to, and they made us look like retards by cutting out all the intelligent things that were said, and leaving in only the dumb, small-word stuff. I think it's because the viewers of the NewRO don't comprehend multi-syllable words well. It was pretty cool because we were on right after Bush and his secret visit to Iraq, though I wish we'd pre-empt him. Now, sleep.
-roman
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9 threads | if you want to destroy my sweater...
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