Notes

Vsevolod Ustinov wrote an interesting post about keeping a professional blog.

I’m not sure the format matters much, whether it’s a blog, an article, or a presentation for colleagues. But I completely agree with one of the main points: if you learn something but don’t write it down and chew it over a few more times, it’ll soon get washed away by your morning coffee.

A couple more useful links on the same subject:

• Why Keep a Blog (Despite Everything)
• A Programmer Doesn’t Have to Become an Influencer

Something occurred to me: long, hard, complicated things, studying, workouts, diets, all that misery, get a lot easier once you realize you really want what’s at the end of them.

So there you are, comfortable doing nothing, when you finally decide to lose some weight, or study for an MBA, whatever. Your blisters hurt, it all sucks, maybe you don’t need that MBA after all, and wouldn’t a lie-in beat a morning walk? But after the first go, a bit of studying, a jog, kefir instead of a pastry, you catch this quiet but ridiculously strong endorphin rush. Hey, look at me! I’m doing the right thing. I’m getting somewhere!

And when you slip up, playing a shooter instead of reading, eating cookies instead of cottage cheese, somehow never having time for the gym, you miss that kick. You eat cookies today and can’t stand looking at them for a week. Not because you don’t fancy them, but because you’re back to going nowhere, like a lump.

Getting somewhere really is a drug, as long as you know where you’re going and know you want to get there.

A brilliant horror game that scares the hell out of you without relying on jump scares. The Alien’s animation and the way it hunts are just fantastic: playing cat and mouse with the monster, trying to guess or hear where it is, the motion tracker’s frantic beeping, saliva dripping from vents, someone’s dying screams nearby, the desperate search for a hiding place. All of it keeps you on edge the whole way through.

Even when Ripley gets a way to drive the monster off, it doesn’t help much. It might flee (if you manage to fire in time and hit it), but it’ll be back very soon, twice as angry, poking its nose into every corner.

As for the downsides, there’s the characters’ wooden facial animation and minor stealth issues the Tab and Escape keys, which pause the game and let you soothe your shattered nerves :-)

My daughter asks: Dad, what does “pray” mean?

I explain: well, some people believe in a powerful being who lives in the sky and controls absolutely everything. From time to time, people ask this being for things, and that’s called prayer.

The little one thinks for a moment:

“Dad, are those people just really lazy?”

Like most fat guys, I’m not big on running, and just forcing myself doesn’t work. I get two or three days out of sheer willpower, then I’m back to being lazy and dreading the next run.

So I had to find something that would actually make me want to run. Eventually, I came across the phone game Zombies, Run!. Basically, it’s a music player: load a playlist and go for a walk. But familiar tracks alternate with a simple story about surviving in a typical zombie land. Your helicopter has crashed, and you’re trying to reach other survivors. You search for supplies and medicine… And zombies surround you, so if you want to live, move your ass.

Je-e-esus Christ! It’s fantastic. I don’t know whether the game or my imagination deserves the credit, but hundreds of thousands of kills in Left 4 Dead didn’t help me at all: growling behind your back makes running incredibly easy! The game calmly tells you how far away each undead pursuer is. When one of them suddenly gained forty meters on me, I probably ran the best sprint of my life.

(Toward the end of the second walk, Runner Five also hurt his leg and started limping very convincingly. Really added to the drama and made the whole thing feel real.)

I’ve updated my summer wardrobe a little. Minus the extra kilos I’d got so used to, I felt like an MMORPG character in the fitting room. I’d leveled up, and now I could wear better gear.

The problems are much the same, including the eternal question: “Should I buy this light armor set if I’m going to level up again soon?”

My daughter is scratching her leg intently. I tell her: hey, don’t scratch, it’ll hurt. She looks at me very seriously and replies: Dad, it’s my choice whether to scratch or not.

I couldn’t think of a reply.

Reading my own code from last year has a distinct flavor of masochism. Ah, here I put an implicit query inside a loop, and here I retrieved a balance table and grouped it for some reason. Well done, buddy!

Still, at least it means I’m getting better. Say what you like about games, but sometimes I really wish real life had a pillar of light from the heavens whenever you leveled up.

We were covering kitchens in English class: utensils, furniture, food, that sort of thing. I read out the cake recipe from Portal as an example of a dish with lots of ingredients. It went down rather well :-)

By the way, this is one of those rare cases where the localization really nails it: in the Russian version, this monologue, along with all of GLaDOS’s other lines, sounds much more expressive.

I wonder what percentage of pedestrians crossing wherever they please really struggle to reach a crosswalk, and what percentage simply don’t care about the consequences. I recently read Confessions of a Bowling Pin, Anton Buslov’s excellent post about crosswalks from the perspective of someone who is ill. But I still struggle to believe that all these well-fed people, who are hardly old, are too worn out to make it to the crossing.

It’s not so bad for me: on a bike, I can swerve easily and stop quickly. But I hate to think what it’s like for drivers and motorcyclists.

Berezovsky is incredibly quiet at night. Big cities can’t sleep this deeply: there’s always someone wandering the streets, cars driving past, music playing, some dogs howling.

Here, not a soul. Just endless streetlights and sleepy traffic signals. And dead silence. Not a single sound, apart from the echo of my own footsteps.

The feeling is… Strange. As though I’d ended up in, I don’t know, Silent Hill or Pripyat, rather than a small mining town.

I’m off to Yekaterinburg for a conference on bus terminal software. I told Kat to listen to our daughter and our daughter to listen to Kat. I suspect they’re in for a fun week.

I’ll be back on Saturday. Miss me.

Kat’s handwriting makes experienced doctors choke with envy. Today, if her note is to be believed, she asked me to pick up four screw buckets and twelve telepathic eagles on my way home.

Never mind the screws, but where am I supposed to find eagles? Telepathic ones, at that?

I’m lost. My life has been wasted.

Looking around inside the ticket offices at Belovo bus terminal took me straight back to that ancient DOS hospital sim, Theme Hospital.

At least, when I played it, I set up my GP offices in exactly the same way: identical square rooms, bin always in one corner, plant always in the other, radiator always under the window, and so on :-)