kaolin fire presents :: livejournal
http://kaolinfire.livejournal.com/
A game I play... sad to admit.
2013-04-04 13:07:00
A game I play... sad to admit. It's like Diplomacy or Risk mixed with Farmville or something. "Crazy Tribes". Anywho, I was curious as to the various efficacies of the various troops. I'd been meaning to put this into a spreadsheet for months, and I finally...did. Crazy Tribes Troop Efficacy.
This breakdown ignores the rock/paper/scissors nature of artillery/infantry/cavalry, and also ignores the fact that you can only support so many troops in a base (so once you hit your limit, it's worth buying less cost-efficient troops that are more food-efficient).
In the short game, though, I was a little surprised given the caveats above how stand-out the choices were. If you want to build offense quickly, bikers are the way to go. If you want to build defense quickly, gunners or knockers are equivalent (with gunners being half-again more costly).
If you're strapped for resources, then your best offense is scouts, while your best defense is knockers.
This is a pretty superficial inspection of the data. What would you get out of it? Any thoughts on how to best divide the separate "artillery", "infantry", "cavalry" overlap for both offense and defense?
the things you don't appreciate until you have to do them
2013-03-15 10:50:00
So...your experience may have varied (greatly, or otherwise). But just to jot down a "day in the life" that's really only...maybe it was 45 minutes. The rest is easier to fill in, but the last 45 minutes is reasonably typical.
I got home from work (day 2 of being back at work). I'd already been back for lunch (I work close to home, it's awesome), but we'll skip over that.
Amy Fire's sister, Julie, and Julie's Husband, Josh, are bringing us pizza, because they happen to be in town (also awesome). I pick up Fenris from Amy, who he's been napping on her for the previous 45-60 minutes (odds are if we try to actually put him down, he'll wake up and need comforting/constant attention). Amy gets in the shower.
He wakes up when I take him, and is squirming around a little, so I go to change his diaper. As expected, there's something to change (if it's been ten to fifteen minutes, there's a good chance there's something to change, but I try not to unless he's squirming or it's been closer to an hour). And by the time I've put him down on his back, the squirming has changed to crying with the occasional shrieking.
That said, he's got diaper rash (his second round—the first was probably due to us not being so conscientious for his butt as we should be...the second, and much worse, because we tried switching to some "natural" baby wipes, versus nice-paper-towels-and-water), so we're trying to change him frequently. And pat him dry and put ointment on every time, of course.
I'm changing him, and he starts to let out a stream of pee, which I (miraculously, for me) mostly catch in his current diaper, still. I pause for a moment, holding his legs in one hand, then start to actually take the diaper off (and wipe him a little with it as I do in that way you're supposed to), and he lets out another stream. I curse in amazement, and get some paper towels in place after putting the diaper down. I blot that up, and throw both out. He then lets out another stream, which I stare at, dumbly.
He's still crying/shrieking, of course, and I've turned on a hair dryer we keep near the changing station so as to try to give him some soothing white noise. It really doesn't seem to help, this time.
I clean him up, pat him dry, apply diaper ointment, get the diaper on, and he's almost a little calm, but uncertain about it.
* bounce baby and sing (hoarse, have been doing this forever)
* throw out diapers, holding fenris, singing
* throw out paper recycling, holding fenris, singing
* he starts crying and I have to sit down on the bouncy ball and sing more/louder/different
* throw out compost, holding fenris, singing
* amy gets out of shower and takes fenris
45 minutes, my throat is raw and cracking, and I'm exhausted already, and it goes on and on and on....
I wrote this last night, and then didn't really get a chance to finish it, so I'm leaving the end with bullet points. At work, now....
Stay-at-home whatness
2013-03-14 15:31:00
So...stay-at-home-moms...
How do you do it?! Now that I'm going back to work, Amy Fire doesn't get a break! I mean, even with me doing breakfast, lunch, dinner, assorted snacks and cleaning and bathing, and trying to pitch in around feeding, she doesn't get a breather.
It was insane for the two of us doing it the first two weeks, with me doing all the diaper changes and swaddling and crooning and bouncing, and now she has to pick up my slack.
Is the answer just to "power through" the next few weeks, and then the next couple months?
First day back at work....
2013-03-13 11:25:00
Walking to work. Somewhat trepidatious. Amy Fire was selfless in her care of Fenris last night to help get me rested for it.
Walking to work. This means walking in a straight line for further than three feet, not swinging anything back and forth or singing.
Walking to work, leaving my baby boy behind. It's an odd feeling. But then there's the stress of things to do and things I want to do and it's all a tangled mess. :)
Now I've been here an hour. Computer has calmed down. (it sometimes freaks out being plugged into two monitors instead of just one; and it hadn't done its time machine backup in AGES, AGES IT SAYS!). I might be getting ready to get started with something. Hopefully not lunch. ;)
Best job in the world....
2013-03-02 13:54:00
Rolling back a few weeks, or months, or something—
My dayjob is awesome. It's a super-small company, the upper echelon is super-supportive, and we're making things that make the world better for the blind and/or visually-impaired. The company survived on grants for a long time (15-ish years), and decided they wanted to take all this research/prototyping and turn them into products. So they hired one of my best friends, and very shortly after, me.
It's primarily been iOS development, with a splash of python/html/css/js as needed, and now migrating over to android.... And there's been no lack for interesting challenges that I, when I have a handle on my other things, get to participate in to a greater or lesser degree.
I'd love to participate in the researchy end of things even more, but there's only so much time/people/etc. I did take a probabilistic graphical models class online through coursera, and started taking (but...baby...and stuff...) am opencl class, to help with work and to expand my skills and such. If nothing else, I understand the terms a bit better.
The only things I could really wish for are a couple more developers, a product manager, an art director/UX person specializing in mobile (esp iOS + android, versus HTML5 or something), and more computer vision people.
Well, we started running out of money a few months ago. And it got scarier and scarier, until I finally updated my linkedin and started accepting recruiter contacts. And it was a madhouse. I lost a week or two to just answering recruiter questionnaires, basically. And I did a few phone interviews. And two in-person interviews, in this span.
One was Syntellia, the Fleksy folks, and they seemed to have a lot of the things going for them that my current job does, only a much more solid trajectory. Downsides: I wouldn't be able to walk to work (30 minute commute, with BART, versus 15-20 minute commute just walking), and working hours would be a little less flexible. And I was about to have a baby boy, and everything was too crazy, and my dayjob-with-less-money-and-more-risk made me a counter-offer, and...I just couldn't leave, after much much MUCH angsting.
The other was apportable. They have some cool tech that lets them compile iOS apps for android... with some massaging. For my interview, I got to try to port one of my iOS games (I went with Disasteroids, even though it's not released yet, just because it had far fewer crazy libraries in it than Tumbledots). I spent about 8 hours trying to port it, and got it pretty far—the folks I interacted with were cool and all, but I think I would lose myself there, and I found the work extremely...frustrating. If I wasn't in a relationship, didn't have other ties, and could get a handle on the anger/frustration, it would probably be a cool place to work. Also, about a 45 minute commute. But without ties that wouldn't matter so much, right?
So...sticking with Blindsight, because they're awesome, and I'm hopeful—ever-hopeful. But. Stuff. Okay, laundry done. I need to get home.
New release: Fenris Asher Fire
2013-02-27 22:26:00
Dear Diary,
I really owe you more writeups. There's been a lot going on, a lot I want to remember. But the biggest news is Fenris Asher Fire.
- 2013-02-22 00:10
- 6lbs 6oz. / 19.25in.
- Nice head of hair.
Some things learned over the last few days:
This entry took six hours to write, even though it was largely collated from other sources (facebook, twitter, email), and I'm giving up on even a brief proofreading....
- nothing like an umbilical cord falling off to get you started down the road of impermanence.
- naked baby sunlight time is *dangerous*
- songs appear out of nowhere: "lists of lists and nested lists, and lists of nested lists; nested lists of nested lists, and nested lists of lists." #thingsprogrammerssing
- it's amazing we've survived birth, as a species, and the months after it....
- sleep cycles randomly selected between 20 minutes and 4 hours are extremely disorienting. not to mention the sleep cycles aborted preemptively....
A year of poetry and fiction....
2012-12-30 16:12:00
It doesn't feel like much (I haven't been writing, mostly), and I've not been submitting like I need to, but somehow I managed to succeed with a few pieces this year. :)
poetry publications
The Truth of Television Show Cancellations — Every Day Poets, 2012-09-24
Illuminating the Core Text — Every Day Poets, 2012-05-07
deconstructing the mind's eye — Every Day Poets, 2012-04-24
Age Walks Behind — Every Day Poets, 2012-03-06
fiction publications
Sad Pandas mdash; Eschatology - 2012-12-26
* dotcom geek spy thriller &mdash Skive Magazine June 2012
server failure, server upgrade
2012-10-19 05:20:00
server failure, server upgrade, round and round it goes...
I think that one lasted almost exactly two years. Maybe two and change...no, wait, because it was migrated a while back, ... no, I don't know if the hardware changed.
Going from FreeBSD (32bit!?) to Ubuntu x64.
The hard drive didn't actually fail, but the power supply did, and then who knows what else...it wouldn't stay up for more than a few minutes.
I've had to jump through some hoops to get things going. Installing kmod-ufs to mount it on a _third_ server, rsyncing things over (and checking out my backup process in the...process...and seeing that it's lacking somewhat, though still miles better than it was!)
Today's biggest hurdle so far has been postgresql.
This Ubuntu comes with Postgresql 9.1. I was on 9.0. Postgresql is practically ANTI-compatible with any semi-major version. So I install 9.0 side-by-side from the source...no go. Oh, hey, I must have been running 32bit FreeBSD. 32bit postgresql! So I cross-compile postgresql 9.0 (win!) (except!) The magic upgrade still doesn't work. So I do a dump and restore...and still failure, because a very misguided youthful me did plpgsql functions in there, and the dump hardcoded the path to the associated .so... so I have to go through the dump and replace all those.
Okay, I think it might be good now. And I could go on. But it's 5am, and I'm feeling pretty good, and that's a danger sign with these things.... ;)
Yeah, it's 5am. And my server is now on eastern time. Okay. It probably was before. Or was supposed to be. Don't care. It can stay there.
Oh, hey, and more magic was necessary. Problems with blob ownership in postgresql. of course.
do $$
declare r record;
begin
for r in select loid from pg_catalog.pg_largeobject loop
execute 'ALTER LARGE OBJECT ' || r.loid || ' OWNER TO owners_username';
end loop;
end$$;
via http://doginpool.blogspot.com/2011/10/today-upgraded-to-new-ubuntu-11.html!
It's (going to be) a boy!
2012-10-08 11:54:00
Feels weird to say "It's a boy!" because it's not out yet.... But the uncertainties are negligible, outside of the world (or my world) ending.
Ultrasound. Waited 45 minutes for our appointment. Walking to the room, they apologized for the wait...apparently hadn't had a single normal baby all day!
Thankfully, we broke their streak. All indicators are "perfectly healthy" so far.
It's going to be a boy. =)
silly red car
2012-10-05 10:23:00
My nightmare last night involved driving a classic red sports car.... but apparently I could only drive it in stops and stutters (at high velocity), wrecking everything in my way (on the freeway and on city streets). Everything was fine except for the fact that I couldn't stop doing it, and I was doomed to get a pile of tickets and lawsuits....
If it were your dream...?
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