Return to Snowy Denver

Well, I'm back in the snow of the Mile High City. The trip to Phoenix was good, but I am quite glad to be back. I helped Jill and Dean move into their new home today along with Mike and Tirzah (they helped move, they didn't move in with Jill and Dean). I came home and victoriously cleaned the bathroom and did laundry. I then proceeded to sit on my duff for the rest of the evening, taking a bath and finishing up the Naruto video game. Now I feel good about going and getting Mass Effect. I've got a gift card burning a hole in my pocket.

In other buying news, a Dunny I ordered from eBay arrived to me headless and crushed, as if it had been run over by a truck. Also, I received a mysterious packet today. I couldn't guess what it was, but it was the Christmas present I had gotten for my brother a couple weeks before Christmas. They had just shipped it on the 27th, and they shipped it to me, because they lost the flipping mailing address. Nice. I'm not having too good of luck with that. I just hope my expansion packs for Settlers get here. I used my Amazon gift cards to order the Cities and Knights of Catan expansion pack and its 5-6 player expansion. Now we can have a game of Settlers with 6 players, and all three sets. BWAHAHHAHA!

And, I apologize for the lackluster quality of this post, but it is almost midnight. Perhaps I should stop?

Rotundus Americanus

Phew. I've finally digested enough food to allow my arms to reach the keyboard. It has taken a few days, but I think my daily caloric intake is now under 50,000 for the first time in a week. There have been pies and fudge and lefsa and roast and Yorkshire pudding and appetizers and Thai food and brats and clementines and corn beef hash and apple butter and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts and egg nog and, oh my I'm gaining weight just talking about it. Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze into my seat on the airplane.

I'm currently reading the Guiness World Records book for 2007, so I'm sure I'll have some great factoids for you. For instance, these people in British Columbia made a cherry pie that weighed more than 2 tons, slightly less than I weigh right now. Other swag I got included CDs and DVDs and gift cards. I hope your swag is good and plenty, but not Good n' Plenties, because that'd just be lame.

You Want a Letter? I'll Give You a Letter

So, if you read this blog, you're probably already pretty up to date with what's going on in my life. But if you must have more Nils (you MUST, you MUST!), I do happen to have a Christmas letter up on my website. It has pictures!

Merry Christmas, ya'll.

Flex Sucks

I cannot wait for a long hiatus from working with Flex. Flex is one of those programs that can make even just adding two strings of text together a challenge. I was already frothing at the mouth from trying to get a data binding to acknowledge that I'm changing it, and then I tried to switch over to a simpler task to calm down. I needed to write a function that would check to see if a string of text was the last in a series. If it was, it would do nothing. If it wasn't, it would add a comma to the string. Super simple. However, it would return a blank string instead. It would not even run a trace statement in the second half of the function. After I screamed for a while, I determined that Flex was choking on a line of code getting the length of an array in the function. It didn't throw an error or do anything else. It just broke the function and failed silently. So. INCREDIBLY. LAME!!!!

Flex is supposed to make development easier, but in my experience, it makes development much more problematic and infuriating. I think I've easily spent 5 hours just trying to get it to acknowledge the change to a data source, and I still can't get it. I'm going to have to stop now. Seriously, I was seconds from hurling my laptop across the room. Flex sucks.

Saturdalia

Why is it that you get sick when you have the most stuff to do? Yesterday I got up, wrapped a present, shuttled it to the post office, went to the Tattered Cover to finish up some shopping and grab myself a calendar, drank a cheg latte while waiting for the Plastic Chapel to open, grabbed some vinyl figurines for myself including the new Cactus Pups, ate some of the worst fried chicken I've had at a KFC, returned some oversized sweats to Target, drove down to Littleton to watch I Am Legend with Gavin and Sarah, came back and wrapped more presents, ate some dinner, talked with Laura for a while, and then worked for a couple hours on the project for work. Phew. The bathroom, unfortunately did not get cleaned and I didn't get the haircut I desperately need.

Of course, I had planned on working on a new part of the project, but ended up spending the entire time just fixing things that had broken overnight. Grrr. I'm going to just stop updating my code with what other people have done and just work on my own code in isolation. *Pouts* Hopefully I can finish up this last part of the project in 2 days. I'm taking today off, trying to recoup against this cold. I hope to be done with it before I leave for Phoenix. No need to bring my parents the virus as a present.

Conspicuous Consumption

Okay, so you've got some money. Here are three things you can spend your money on:

1. Gold Pills
2. Ultra-high tennis court
3. Jetpack

By the way, you need to click on those links. These things need to be seen to be believed. You need to watch the videos. Number 3 was filmed right here in Colorado.

Okay, you saw them all? Okay. So now, there are two objects here that are pretty darn cool. And there is one, that if you buy, I will beat you up, take your money, and leave you destitute, because that is what you deserve.

If you were confused, item number 1 is the item that will cause me to destroy you. If you spend more than $400 on making your poop sparkly, you deserved to be institutionalized and your money given to teachers and nurses. It is conspicuous consumption in one of its most literal and disgusting forms. Now, the other two are also incredibly wasteful examples of conspicuous consumption. Heck, the entire city of Dubai is an example of conspicuous consumption. But here is the difference between item 1 and items 2 and 3: items 2 and 3 are cool. Item 1 is completely retarded. You will literally be flushing money down the toilet. If you're considering buying these, please, save yourself a beating and just give me all your money. I'll find a nice home for the mentally challenged for you and I'll take good care of your excess of greenbacks.

EDIT: Oh, here's another item: A book for $4 million dollars. Exquisite. The pictures in the article are like book porn.

The Lost Weekend.

So, the week did finally end, but really just melded into the next one. On Friday night I worked for a couple hours, on Saturday I worked for around 11, and Sunday I worked for 3 more. We got everything finished up, but man, I am soooooooooo ready for a vacation. Over the weekend, I did get a chance to bake some cookies with Laura, make an eggnog chiffon pie (which turned out all right), and go to a post-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner. John and David had been out of the country inadvertently during Thanksgiving, so they had a make up dinner and invited other people along. John made this incredible turkey roulade; turkey wrapped around spinach and carmelized onions. Oh my gosh it was so good.

Since I was rather lacking in weekend time, I took last night off and just played video games and did Christmas shopping. I'm almost halfway done. Remind me to tell you about the super cool gift card generator I found after Christmas. I want to share the link, but someone who might read this blog is getting it, and I don't want to spoil the surprise. Anyway, it allows you to put your own pictures on the gift card and customize it and a whole bunch of other stuff. Pretty slick! So anyway, remind me, and I'll share the link later.

Gah.

This is the week that will never end. This week is like bad steak. The more you chew on it, the bigger it gets and the worse it tastes. I just now finished up the task I thought I'd have done this morning. This morning was filled with fixing the problem I thought I'd fix last night (and I spent all night on it without success). I still have more to do tomorrow. I cannot wait for my vacation and/or this sprint to end.

Oh, and if you were wondering, if you add event metadata to an MXML file, you have to put it in a Metadata element, not in the ActionScript like you do with an ActionScript class. Once you do that, the event will still not show up for your component. First you will have to compile the project, close Flex, and reopen it for it to appear. Repeat if necessary (and sometimes it is). If Flex were a person, I would have garroted him by now.

Oh, and happy 200th post, happy birthday to Andy, and happy Pearl Harbor Day. :P

Stress Ball Can Also Mean a Ball of Stress

I took my free time yesterday and turned it to good use: a bath. It's not so much that I've been stinking more than usual, but I have been so stressed recently and XBox does not relieve stress. I came home from Renovation and just soaked in the tub with my latest issue of Wired. Today was so much better. There's still stress, but I felt much more capable of dealing with it and feeling like I can meet all my goals for this sprint. Regardless, I still cannot wait for my trip down to Phoenix for Christmas. Some quality time with the folks and some wandering about in the desert sound right up my alley about now.

Mmm. And we had burnt ends from Brickyard Barbecue today for lunch. So very tasty.

Tailwind

I was very grateful for the wind today. Not only was it warmer than it has been for a while on my ride home (53 degrees F!), but I had that rare and unusual tailwind from the southwest. It was quite a boon to me, especially considering how exhausted I was coming home. My hands hurt and work has been less than fun due to volume and endless revisions. But despite the weather here, I sort of wish I was back in the Northwest today. Why? Because they are getting a tremendous storm today. It's a really bad storm, complete with evacuations and power outages and record rainfall. I sorta miss that. Really. I'm nostalgic for winter storms. Sigh.

Emperor of Catan

It's been a busy week all around, with work being ... mixed up and intense. Every weeknight except for Thursday was already parceled out to some function or chore long before it came around, reserved for meetings, chores, and socializing. Of course, the socializing was enjoyable. On Friday, Jill and Dean had Tirzah, Mike, Laura, and I over for some dinner and games. Laura won Balderdash, but barely. Barely, I tell you! On Saturday Laura and I went over to Isaac and Elsa's for a Japanese meal, complete with miso soup, sushi, sake, and red bean (azuki) ice cream. We then played some Settlers, only we played an intense game that combined the base set, Seafarers of Catan, and Knights and Cities of Catan. We even played a scenario that called for two base sets and had an 18 victory point goal. I emerged victorious and crowned myself Emperor of Catan. :)

In other news, I really, really wish I had more energy. I've got a lot I should do and zero motivation to do it. I think I had a parking map project some time ago, maybe? Sigh. Well, time to go some more chores.