Thrills and Chills

So I tried my hand for the first time in a while at riding in the snow. After Denver got a couple of inches, I rode to work in the snow for the first time. I was quite pleased to see that the wonderful Parks and Rec people had plowed most of the trails, making for a fairly easy ride. It was slushy in most places, which lead to a little fishtailing, and the ramp from Lincoln still is icy and treacherous, but otherwise it was a nice ride in. I'm finally dressing to meet the weather with pants, a sweater, and a jacket over that. It was 16 degrees this morning. 16!

And that, along with 16 tons of work has been my week so far.

Know Your World Leaders

Today's leader (brought to my attention by the BBC) is the president of Gabon: Omar Bongo. Seriously. That is one of the best names for a world leader EV-AR, right up there with Boutros Boutros-Ghali, U Thant, and Megawati Sukarnoputri. To his credit, when he came to power, Bongo (hee) was the youngest president in the world. He is now the fourth longest serving ruler in the world. He is the longest serving for Africa. Aaaaaaaand if you change an o in his name to an a, you can anagram his name to be the name of the country he rules. See? Fantastic!

25 Degrees

Brrrrrrrrrr. I finally put on some pants for my morning ride in. I think I will augment them with some sweats underneath them.

I saw Beowulf and No Country for Old Men this weekend. Both movies were quite good, but lacked endings. A great movie without an ending is like a beautiful woman missing a limb. She's still beautiful, but she's got no fricking arm. Both movies were also bleak; quite bleak in the case of No Country. Good movies for brooding in the darkness of winter, I guess.

Brian vs. Alton Brown. Fight!

So, I had heard the name Alton Brown before, but I had never seen him before last night. I was struck by his resemblance to my friend Brian. Is Alton Brown Brian's real father or is he a future version of Brian, who has escaped the apocalyptic destruction of the future in a time machine to come back and be a culinary celebrity? You decide.

In other culinary news, I spent all day cooking Thanksgiving dinner yesterday and Jason and Chris came over for a couple hours and ate a little bit. The turkey came out well, though it was sort of scary when I first started carving it and it was oozing all over. I guess I hadn't let it set long enough. My pies came out a bit underdone. Not sure what happened there, but my vinegar pie developed a thick top crust on the filling, but beneath that it was gooey. The crust was really good though. Jason brought a good apple and sweet potato mix and some kicking cranberry relish/chutney. The rest of the day was about cleaning and Puzzle Quest. I did finally buy Naruto and I've started playing that today as a way to take a break from Puzzle Quest which is getting a lot harder now. But I must learn the Death Gaze spell!

Why Does Flex Hate Media?

Well, I'll take a quick break here from work and list out the lameness that is Flex. So let's say you want to play an MP3 file and have a playhead control that allows people to scrub through the song. In Flash with ActionScript 2, you could slap down a MediaPlayback control, or some such component, point it to your MP3, and wham! You'd be done.

Now in Flex and AS3, I've already created a player for M4A files using the NetStream object, so I figured creating a player for MP3s would be as simple as pointing that code at a different file. Well, actually you can't play MP3 files through a NetStream unless they're coming from a pricey Flash Media Server. Well, okay, that sort of stinks and is counterintuitive, but I can just load the MP3 into a Sound object and play it from there. It will play, but we still have to put on that playhead control.

For the playhead control, we need to have a playhead update event to track so we can tell our playhead control to change. Well, not only is there no playhead update event on Sound, SoundChannel, SoundTransform, SoundAsset, or SoundMixer, but there is no pause method either. Heaven forefend! Why would you ever want to pause media? So you have to hack together your own pause method using Sound.play(), SoundChannel.position, and SoundChannel.stop().

Now, that position variable looks promising for our playhead control. It tells us the position of the playhead in the media. Unfortunately, it is not bindable through normal means or the ChangeWatcher class, so we can't just bind the playhead's position to that. However, we can extend the SoundChannel class and make the property bindable. Okay, actually, you can't because the SoundChannel is final and cannot be extended, and position is read-only so you couldn't bind to it anyway.

So the only way I can see to create the control is to:

1. Load the MP3 with the Sound class
2. Get the length from the SoundChannel class
3. Set up an onEnterFrame listener to check the SoundChannel's position property every frame
4. Update the playhead control with that value
   
5. Whenever the playhead is moved by the user, stop the channel, calculate the new start time, and then start playing the file from the new start time.

This is so dumb. Flex was supposed to be about providing a framework of components to make development easier and faster, yet they left out some of the most basic features for working with media. There is no component for playing audio, and no component with playback controls for media. What on earth were they thinking?! Not only did they not provide components, but they crafted their framework classes in such a way to hamper development of players with the single most popular media file format out there. What the heck, Adobe?!

Between a Rock and Warm Body

Laura and I made a trip down to Colorado Springs this weekend. The main purpose was to go to the Phantom Canyon Brewing Company and eat their good food, especially their incredible soup. Since we were going down there anyway, we decided to go over to the Garden of the Gods and meander amongst the monoliths. The light wasn't super, but I still managed to get some pretty sweet pictures. As always, you can find them in my gallery.

Then today we baked a pear ginger pie together and took it over to her co-worker's house for a pre-Thanksgiving meal. Think of it as a dress(ing) rehearsal for the stomach. It was fun and we played Scruples, a game I have not played for many, many years. I'm looking for people who need a place to go for the real Thanksgiving. Jason and his friend Chris are gonna come over, but I can't quite get a 12 pound turkey for the three of us. Anyone need a place to go?

Reader Advisory!

Oh, and by the way, my phone is kaput. I dunno why, but it is. You can reach me by email or my work phone. Supposedly I'll get my new phone on Monday.

Music to Abuse By

Last night I heard a wonderful song on KBCO. Sort of jazzy, James Bond-esque, mo-town thumping with a strong female vocalist and unlike anything I've heard in a while. I was pretty sure I knew the artist and quick peek at the KBCO website confirmed that the artist was Amy Winehouse. Now the problem unfolds.

See, I would very much like to buy this album. I really like the song and I listened to some samples online that showed that the rest of the album was just as good. I also had heard on the news that Amy Winehouse's father urged her fans to boycott her until she cleans up her drug habit. Hrrm. Now I really like the music, but I don't want to be supporting a drug user's self destruction. If I have qualms about giving panhandlers money because it might be spent on booze and drugs and further their problems, why should I be giving money to a woman who I also suspect of being a drug abuser? Even though substance abuse is prevalent amongst the homeless, not every one is a druggy. In this case, I have a fair amount of evidence that the singer is an addict. Of course, her dad could be a lying sociopath, but the likelihood is greater that she is a druggy. C'mon. Drugs and musicians go together like poo and stink.

But is it really my problem what a person does with the money they earn from me? Why should it matter? Well, principle, I guess. I'm not going to patronize a musician who makes sausages from the blood of Christian babies, so why should I patronize one who abuses drugs? But then again, can I realistically buy music and pretend that I'm not supporting someone's habit? The Fountains of Wayne guitarist was certainly bombed out of his mind during the concert I went to. And really, there probably aren't too many popular secular musicians out there who aren't lighting up a joint or binge drinking on some evening. But that's all quite judgmental of me. If I'm going to start boycotting musicians I suspect or know are abusers, how far should I take this? A purchase at Starbucks is probably funding some barista's pot habit and a tank of gas will probably help a oil executive snort cocaine off the empty stomach of a Ukrainian child prostitute. If you track the money far enough, my money probably is help funding the abuse of Bolivian orphans or something. But you can't control how your money is spent down the chain. How can you know? How would avoid your hard-earned cash going to diabolical purposes? Well, at least without developing your own personal Walden.

So is it just a matter of how far removed I am from the evil use of money? If I give a panhandler a twenty that he then uses to grab a bag of crack, that's pretty direct, but if I pay a theater to see a movie, and that money winds its way to one of the movie's producers getting jacked up on jaguar hormones or something, that's pretty oblique. Then what is the threshold? When should I boycott and when should I buy?

Most of these cases are pretty fringe, but what about the case of Amy Winehouse? Here I can be more confident than usual that my money would help fund drug abuse. It also would help pay the wages of employees of the store where I buy the CD, the record company, and the back up musicians, none of whom I have reason to suspect of nefarious deeds. Is it my place to even worry about how the money is spent? If I buy the CD, should I then give generously to the man on the street corner?

And you know the kicker? The title of the song is "You Know I'm No Good."

Light and Dark

Believe it or not, my recent lack of posts has not been due to Puzzle Quest. Instead I've just been super busy with work. Monday and yesterday were just late nights and Tuesday I stayed to present on CoCoMo at the RMAUG meeting at Forest Room 5. The project push is definitely in full swing, and I'm doing pretty well in keeping up and getting what I need to done. Today I finished up a custom history manager, though the unit testing is continuing to plague me with its schizophrenic behavior. Even now I'm hopping between laptops, writing here while I'm waiting for the test runner to complete there.

Even without the late nights, I'm riding home in the dark now. Ever since the Daylight Savings Time switch back, it's been a nocturnal ride for yours truly. The charm of night riding has worn off and now I'm mainly concerned about not hitting people or getting hit. I also am missing my friend the night heron. He has been nowhere to be seen. I hope that just means he's a migratory bird now enjoying the warmth of Mexico or some such southern locale.

I did get a little unexpected light on my ride home last night. I was on a dark part of the Platte trail when a light popped on behind me. I figured that someone's motion sensor finally started working. Then the light got quite a bit brighter and I glanced back to see the helicopter with its spotlight on me. Evidently I wasn't what they were looking for, and the light swiveled away and the helo flew on.

The same change that plunged me into afternoon darkness also brought my workouts back to the bright side of dawn. This means my view from the gym is a lot prettier, and again I can see the windows of west Denver light up like fires in the city as they catch the morning sun. As the angle of the sun changes, some fires die down and others blaze into existence. This week I've seen even glints from the summit of Mount Evans. Some enterprising, lucky motorist is enjoying a spectacular dawn from the summit. I don't want to think about what hour they rose at to get up there, but I like the idea.

On Wednesday, we had a new person start at work. Michelle lives down in the Springs, so I don't want to think about how early she has to get up to drive up here to work. She joins Jun and myself down in our area, so now there are three of us there. It'll be good to have someone more graphically inclined than me to work on the skins. I like to design, but I'm not the best at it.

And thinking about visuals, I was wondering today, what if you had hallucinations, but they were so boring you didn't notice? Rather than seeing bugs crawling out of your fingernails, you hallucinated squirrels climbing trees and pigeons flying under overpasses? You'd never even know you were hallucinating unless you pointed out these very banal things. You could be hallucinating and never know it, which leads me to thoughts of the unreliability of sight as a testament to reality. If we could be hallucinating without realizing it, what does that say about the things we see? But you know what? It's too late at night to be thinking about that. These stupid unit tests are driving me crazy, and not the kind of crazy that causes hallucination.

F*ing Monkey Rodeo

John wins the Phrase of the Day award for the above. It's a pretty apt description of what has been my experience with unit testing. In no time I can get my code and POCs working, but then I have to create unit tests to monitor the functionality of units of code. They have been taking about triple the amount of time of what they are testing, and they mysteriously malfunction. Supposedly, they are time savers. Ha! They are becoming my new bane of my existence. Flex will be so sad. Of course, the root of the problem could be Flex after all. That would just be like my cunning archenemy.

And, uh, so this is what I see whenever I close my eyes:

That's, uh, that's probably not good, right? The good thing is that I am now riding a level 7 wolf, learned the Call the Horde spell, and forged a crystal of poison. Oh right. Signs of addiction. Uhm. The good news is they finally, after several months, fixed the door knob for the bike room. That's not video game related, by the way. That'd be a weird game ... as opposed to the one where I fight giant wasps by matching shiny colorful circles together.

Oh! I did also buy my plane tickets for Christmas. It's Phoenix this year, so I'll get to visit with my aunt and her family. The tickets were super cheap and the flights weren't horrible red eyes like last year. Now I just need it not to snow the airport closed again.

Bringing Down the House

On Friday we went over to a meeting at a client's office. It was part of a bigger meeting that they had with all their employees. We were all stuffed in a small conference room, with barely enough room for everyone to stand. We were at the back of the room where there was a low cabinet. Some people were sitting on top of it, and so I joined them. When I started doing the mental calculation of having 4 people sitting and one person leaning on this cabinet, I thought it might be a good idea if I was sitting on it too. So I got off and leaned on it as well. About 15 minutes later, the cabinet, which had no legs, came off the wall and dumped everyone off, including a lot of glasses and plates stored in the cabinet. I went to the floor and a lot of broken glass got scattered everywhere. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Now that's how you impress a client.

Later that day, some of the guys from the client came over and I brought my XBox into the office and we played games on the two XBoxes until around midnight. Fortunately, no one broke any of our furniture. However, when I got home, my cell phone would not turn on. Only the keypad would turn on and it wouldn't turn off after I closed the phone. I removed and replaced the battery and plugged in the phone, but the next day it wouldn't turn on at all. Then when Laura came over, it would turn on, but it had not charged at all. It's been acting funky ever since. It's not completely defunct, but unpredictable in its ability to function. If you have a hard time calling me, that's probably the reason why. If it would be consistently dead, I could make an insurance claim, but until then I'm afraid to send it in and have it function normally and have them deny my claim. :P

Yesterday, Laura and I did a bookshop tour finding all sorts of good used books. I even found some books I had been meaning to buy and picked them up. We also went to Flossy McGrew's. I had driven past this bizarre looking shop for many a day, but this was the first time I went in. It's very Halloweeny, but has lots of costumes and odd things. We grabbed some Pasquini's and later went to the Wynkoop Brewing Company for a company function of Laura's. I was so beat from the day of browsing that I'm afraid I wasn't very sociable or entertaining. It was an early night, more or less. So much activity, so little energy.

PTL

Hey, a big shout out to my main man, JC! Hollah in the highest! Kidding aside, God did come through for me big time today. After just an hour of fiddling around this morning I found a way around the diabolical crap Flex was pitching my way. It had hosed the workspace I had all my projects in, so I created a new workspace and I was actually able to get some work done. That is quite an answer to prayer. Also good about today was lunch. We got cheesesteaks from Taste of Philly, and they were delish as always.

Down the Tubes

Die, Flex! Die! Oh wait, you already won't even compile my code, so you're pretty much dead already, leaving me dead in the water. You just sit there and stare blankly at me when I tell you to compile. You're a zombie piece of crap.

The idea is that Flex is supposed to make development easier and quicker because it has this framework of code so you don't have to write your own data grid or combo box. However, you then spend all this time trying to figure out why Flex is broken, and let me tell you, debugging software is much, much more difficult than just debugging your own code. It seems like it would just be faster to write all the components myself in a program that actually works. To be fair though, the problem before this one was actually caused by either a corrupted version of Flash Player or some other funkiness in that application rather than Flex. Other people had the same version of Flash Player as I did, but it worked for them. But as soon as I changed it to another version of Flash Player it worked. Pretty much the past day and a half have been utterly wasted just trying to get Flex to work. Even better, it causes other people's productivity to suffer because I ask them to help me, because I don't understand all the black voodoo that goes into making Flex functional. I'm used to programs that work, and where if there's a problem it's my code. This whole thing of having to guess whether it is my code or the software IDE that is causing the problem is new and unwelcome.

So Maybe It's a Teensy Bit of an Obsession

The Bad: I stayed up until 12:30 again last night and now have the Puzzle Quest score stuck in my head.

The Good: I now am riding a level 2 giant rat, have a skeleton and ogre in my dungeon, learned a spell from them, and am hanging with a half-elf, a princess, and a long-winded dwarf with a Scottish accent. When did dwarves become Scottish? When did this happen?

Acrobatics

Tonight I performed the rarely seen (thankfully) one-legged, triple hop dismount. I'm sure it was quite a site to see. As I was riding home, I was crossing a street and had a line of cars waiting to turn on the opposite side. I had to make a right angle turn once I got onto the sidewalk, and in my hurry to get past the cars, I took the turn a bit to fast and was headed towards the rock strewn landscaping. I turned a bit too sharply and my front wheel went sideways. In a show of grace and poise usually only seen in inebriated walruses, I kept myself from falling down through the aforementioned maneuver. It didn't help that it was dark, though that may have spared my pride a bit, so I installed the new headlamp on my bike I bought way back when. Unfortunately, it is much dimmer than my current light, really only serving as a warning light rather than a headlamp. Well, I can be the very conspicuous consumer by having them both on my bike.

In Flex news, I have been having further fun with Flex by trying to get FlexUnit unit testing to work in my version of Flex. The code works on everyone else's computers, but even after removing the project entirely and reinstalling it, it won't let me have more than one event handler for an Error event. Also, it seems to be picky about method names. testIncorrectPath won't work, but testIncorrectNils will. The testForceFault method won't work, but testForcePotato will. Further Flex Fun can be abbreviated FFF and F is the 6th letter of the alphabet, leading to 666. Coincidence? I think not.

Anger Pie Challenge Results

So a fine group of folks gathered at my place on Saturday for the Anger Pie Challenge. Laura, Isaac, Elsa, and Jason brought over their interpretations of Anger Pie and we dug in and played games. Jason made a savory, spicy pie that had a blue cornmeal top like a cobbler, and it was quite good, probably my favorite of the night. Isaac made some frighteningly red pies by melting down Hot Tamales, Red Hots, and Atomic Fireballs and gelatinizing them. Elsa took the name "Anger Pie Challenge" and anagramed it into a description of a pie and made it to match. It was a good strawberry pear pie. Laura decided the best way for a pie to make someone angry was if you ate it all yourself and gloated about how good it was to others, so she brought a mostly consumed pie. She also brought along some chai apple crumble that was exceptionally tasty.
I contributed a pie that was apple-based, but had lots of cinnamon, ginger, cayenne pepper, and tapioca. Also, there was some good red food coloring in there so the vents in the pie looked like open wounds. To complete the pie, I carved the source of much of my anger into the pie crust. We followed up the pie with Settlers, which Laura won handily. A good time was had by all. You can see the pictures in my gallery.

Yesterday, Laura and I went and helped Dean and Jill move out of their house. They're embarking on a grand adventure of buying a new home. Tirzah has now embarked on the engagement adventure, so congratulations to her.

Today I went back to work and found that now it gets dark before 5:30, so my ride home is all in the dark. This was made a little more nerve-wracking by my having to ride on the streets most of the way home so I could drop my ballot off downtown. I had forgotten that the government building where I drop this off has a security checkpoint. I dreaded having to put my panniers and backpack through, especially when carrying a laptop. Fortunately a nice guard at the checkpoint took my ballot to the drop off point so I didn't have to unpack to get through. I found a nice route home from downtown along Bannock and made it home without incident, but I need to get my new headlamp on before the batteries in my current light die. Batteries are going to be a good Christmas present for me this year.

Discipline

So I made it through last night without breaking down and playing XBox. I kept on the straight and narrow and worked on projects while waiting for the trick-or-treaters who never came. I didn't really expect any, since I live in an access controlled building with apparently no children in residence. Still, I had my bag of M&M bags at the ready. Speaking of discipline, I still haven't opened it.

A challenge to my resolve is Naruto: Rise of a Ninja, which came out today for the XBox 360. By the reviews I read, it's a pretty darn good game. It's a open world adventure type game that also has a fighting game built in. And I'm a pretty good fan of Naruto, too. Sigh. I may have to buy it so I can play it with people at the Anger Pie Challenge. Yes, the Challenge! It is this weekend, so you'd better have a good recipe ready! I bought my ingredients today, and I'm glad I did, because one of them has to soak overnight. I would have been very sad if I read that Saturday morning.