Useless Blogging

A remote access error forced me into the office today. True to form, traffic sucked (was a relative crawl for 8 miles or so). I call up the helpdesk to find that my handy-dandy securid card wasn’t attched to my account, hence the login failures. It was certainly attached to the account well enough yesterday. Computers boggle me. Corporations boggle more more.

So I’m here, at my work desk. Today is the last day for a number of people, as they have been laid off, so the mood is less jubilant that usual, if you can imagine that possible in a cubicle farm. Days like today make that second job stocking shelves at the Target two minutes from my house look better and better.

Sara’s always been big on singing songs. However, recently she started singing the music to songs (“We Are The Dinosaurs” from Noggin’s Move To The Music is the one that’s in my head right now).

What I mean by this is that instead of just saying the words, she sings to the instrumental pieces: “Dun DUN! Dun dun! da daahdahhdahhdahdun!” Stuff like that. It’s terribly cute, and really kind of neat.

Given that I’ve found that karma has delivered a thorough universal beatdown on Julz, I probably have no room to be ranting. But here it goes anyway.

My hard drive is dying. This is nothing new, save for the fact that the past 48 hours have seen it much much closer to death than ever before, to the point where I haven’t gotten it to boot off the hard drive at all in that time. It’s even broken Knoppix (which is how I’m posting now) when it tried to autodetect the fixed disks on the system. So, I’ve offloaded as much as possible to DVD and Gmail in the preparation for the demise.

To that end, I also purchased two hard drives at a DISGUSTINGLY LOW price after rebate. Getting two identical drives and having money in my budget left over, I purchased a cheap RAID controller, thinking that I could run RAID 1 and have the mirroring be a constant backup in case hard drive failure struck again.

However, I did not count on vendor failure.
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So Ben and I had big plans to go golfing. And then it rained a lot. And Ben got ill.

If one or the other had occurred, I probbaly would’ve still gone. I could’ve been miserable in the rain with a good friend, or I could’ve been golfing with strangers in the sunshine. But the combination of the two led to a cancellation. Fudgenuggets.

Wrapped up another plugin for the TacticalGamer Battlefield 2 server. This one is pretty vicious: if you’re not on a squad when you die, it boots you from the server. So those squadless rambos can still go ahead and be squadless rambos… provided that they never find themselves on the wrong end of a bullet.

I also tricked out the autobalance plugin again, this time to make the size differential dynamic (the more players on the server, the bigger the difference in teams is permitted to be).

Battlefield 2 is my bitch.

Here’s some new-age math:
1 beautiful day + 1 hammock + 1 wireless internet connection = 1 happy Sean

Here’s some thoughts ambling about my mind.

Am I cut out for the competitive Natural Selection scene? Do I have the time to put into it?

Why doesn’t rcon_invoke() for battlefield 2 scripting work the way I think it should? I’ll probably need to find a different path to the end I’m seeking on that one.

There are three books on my nightstand: Atlas Shrugged, Neuromancer, and Cat’s Cradle. I don’t know what the common theme is, but I’m certain that there has to be one.

Julie wants to have movie night. I can’t say as I blame her; it doesn’t seem like we do a whole lot as a family. The coffee wears off by dinnertime.

Today I did eight minutes on the bike-like exercise thing we have. +30 seconds each day. It doesn’t sound like much, but it makes me happy that I can do it longer each day, if only by a little bit. My goal is to keep up the +30, or at the very least, not have LESS one day than I did the day before.

• Reading Atlas Shrugged
• Looking over the BF2 Python code for interesting ideas
• Playing BF2 and NS
• Reading up on eBay businesses
• Reading a book on Locks and Locksmithing
• Contemplating taking a tae kwan do class

I have BF2 in my hands. Delivered moments ago.

I win.

If anyone out there cares, here’s my attempted fix at keeping CO’s and SL’s from being autobalanced off their teams in Battlefield 2. It is not yet tested, but there may be people who care googling out there.

The following is how the end of onPlayerDeath() should look from autobalance.py:

team2 = team2 * bf2.serverSettings.getTeamRatioPercent() / 100.0
if g_debug: print 'team1 %f team2 %f' % (team1,team2)
if not(p.isSquadLeader()) and not(p.isCommander()):
	if (p.getTeam() == 1):
		if (team2+1) < team1:
			p.setTeam(2)
	elif (p.getTeam() == 2):
		if (team1+1) < team2:
			p.setTeam(1)