Meerkats, with captions.

The gun show was interesting. Tons of people selling tons of things, mostly but not always related to firearms. It was really crowded, too. I saw some things that would be nice to have, but cost far too much money. I saw some other things that were completely ridiculous, like the metal replica of the “keyblade” from Kingdom Hearts, and an otherwise nice knife with a handle that was impractical because it was really uncomfortable to hold. And some more interesting things, like the 19th-century 4-barrel and 6-barrel pepperbox pistols. These are not particularly accurate weapons, but they’re kind of neat. I didn’t buy anything, just looked and hung out with Zach and Zach’s father-in-law.

Later on that day, we all got together for dinner at a pizza bistro. Then we all went over to Kelli’s house, where we gave her something she’d wanted for a while: A PS2, “Guitar Hero”, “Guitar Hero 2″, and the guitar controller. She had played this before and thought it was a fun game, so we all chipped in some money and bought these things used. Then, of course, we all had to play a few songs. I totally mangled “Thunder Kiss ’65″ because I had never played the game or used the controller before. I kept the meter in the green for about half of the song on “Shout At The Devil” the second time around, though. Nathan was probably the best of all of us at the game. It’s a fun game. However, to play it, I’d need to get a TV, a PS2, a guitar controller, and the game–far too much money to blow on frivolous things right now. “Pw0nage Hero” is one of the open-source projects that’s trying to emulate Guitar Hero, but there is no clear winner among those projects yet that I can see. Ah well, who needs games when you have a compiler and GTK+?

Then played a round of “Killer Bunnies”, a card game that has an unusually large number of strange rules.

One of the mountains in the fjords near Ketchikan, Alaska. The area is wild, inhospitable, beautiful, and cold. One of the women who was on the tour here dropped an expensive digital camera into this remote Alaskan lake. Oops.

I saw something that I thought looked like a memory leak in my program. (If it runs for 2 hours and leaks 128K, it’s a pretty slow leak, but it’s the principle of the thing.) So I built the program with ElectricFence and tried to run it. Imagine my surprise when the new build immediately barfed, complaining about errors within GTK+, mostly on GError and the semi-strange way in which you have to deal with GErrors. All right, I can’t debug my own code and GTK+ at the same time. I wonder whether valgrind might work better or whether it might barf on the same problems.

The Plan(tm) today is to go with Zach and Zach’s father-in-law to the Phoenix Gun Show in the morning. That should be interesting. Later on, we might be going to Kelly’s for dinner and bad movie night. We might be going to a restaurant instead. Things were a little up in the air when I last talked to everyone, but we’ll figure something out.

There is a tradition of silly pictures involving owls on the Net. This silly owl picture is here because I don’t have any original pictures right now.

Good news: I have an interview Monday with a company in Scottsdale. Bad news: If they accept me, it’s 23 miles away. Good news: Most of that 23 miles would be a reverse commute. Well, it’s all academic unless they accept me. However, if they do, I will at least get paid time and a half if there’s any overtime. That’s one of the few benefits of working an hourly-rate job.

Fuzzball with PAWS OUT. She does this all the time when she sits on my lap. Sometimes with both paws, so she seems to be imitating a fuzzy Superman. Any oddness in the colors here is probably due to the flash being on at such close range.

One of my neighbors now has a “realtor lock” on his condo. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone living in that condo, though. It’s not the same condo that had a foreclosure notice on it a couple of weeks ago.

gtk_text_buffer_serialize() isn’t as well-documented as it should be, since it produces invalid results unless you write a custom function for gtk_text_buffer_register_serialize_format(), or you pass NULL for the second arg of gtk_text_buffer_register_serialize_tagset(). Passing something other than NULL to that last function gives you a serialized text buffer of 0 length when you try to write one. As far as I can tell, the serialize functions are not used that much in applications, though I’m not sure why. Ah well, it’s not important, just something odd I noticed yesterday.

Everybody knows you can’t beat m4d ski11z. Whoever took this picture probably had a lot of patience.

Trivia: We were trailing at the half, then somehow pulled ahead and won. John and Kelly and Trevor had a grand plan to create a sitcom set in a dentist’s office that sounded like a bizarre hybrid of “WKRP in Cincinnatti” and “Will and Grace” with subplots involving workplace shootings and some guy wearing a kilt. While it didn’t sound quite as good as “Buckaroo Banzai vs. the World Crime League”, it’d probably be a lot better than “Survivor: Detroit” or “CSI: Sacramento”.

Not a whole lot else to report.

This is what I had last night when it came to graphics on the program. The images of the monsters are not 100% yet, of course–the yellow thing is just a placeholder and was created in 3 minutes using Gimp. What took the most time was actually getting the rounded rectangles working properly. GTK+ and GDK don’t include functions for drawing a rounded rectangle, so I had to roll my own using the functions for drawing arcs and ordinary rectangles.

Graphics are going to be the difficult part of this game. I am not as good at drawing things as I used to be. I have things that might work for rats, centipedes, mice, slimes, and kobolds. More complex things like lizard men and dragons may be beyond me right now. I’ve been copying Creative Commons-licensed images from PickyWeedia and tracing them, and altering public domain images from the same source for the monsters that can be partially related to realistic images. For other things, I’m trying hard to make it so that the images involved were created by me. When it comes time to distribute this, I don’t want any hassles with licensing.

Trivia tonight. We won the last 2 nights, so it probably means we won’t win this night. At least our dinners will be about half price tonight thanks to the gift card we won last week.

Professor Ashfield just doesn’t get enough recognition these days.

After some fiddling and finding a really annoying bug, I have something roughly equivalent to the SDL demo program I put together earlier. The demo program draws a series of images, lines, rectangles, and text on top of each other using an alpha channel, and moves those components around in a pseudo random way. However, this program uses GTK+ and only GTK+, so it’ll be easy to integrate it with the GTK+ graphics-less skeleton code I already have. This really means all I have left to do is draw a whole bunch of graphics for all the various monsters, heroes, weapons, cut scenes, and bosses in the game. So, 90% of the work has been completed, and it’s time to start on the remaining 90%.

Everybody needs a penguin catapult.

Almost nothing to report. I’ve been reading Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers, first published in 1942, which criticizes the social institutions and people found in the USA at that time. 66 years later, lots of his criticisms still ring true. People are still anti- intellectual, TV is more of a vast wasteland than radio ever was, and political discourse is, if anything, less civil and more stupid now than it was then. I wonder if that book is less a study of the times it was written in than a general critique of humanity.

I also wonder how the author managed to avoid getting pilloried in the press. He spent one chapter postulating a personal, idiosyncratic, and highly controversial interpretation of what real Christianity is and what Jesus was really saying. His interpretation is . . . orthogonal to what most churches teach, but interesting nontheless. Well, a lot of the time, people don’t pay attention to what you say, they just pay attention to how loudly you say it. You can see this by looking at the fundamentalist response to Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass book (essentially none) and their response to “The Golden Compass” movie (protests, angry letters to the editor, boycotts). Ideas in books aren’t dangerous, because hardly anybody reads books. Ideas in movies or TV are really dangerous, because everybody watches TV or movies.

This probably means that the revolution will not be televised. It’ll be on YouTube.

Some of the houses over water in Ketchikan, Alaska. The town is essentially built into the side of a mountain, and part of the town is close to/over a river. The sidewalks that are sitting on pilings here must be a total pain to maintain.

Yesterday, right before going to my interview, I got a call from John. He said that some guy at Chrysler did something less than smart (posting the CEO’s personal e-mail address on a blog.) As a result, everyone who they could prove had read that blog was either fired or was going to be fired. John had read that blog. Therefore, John is now looking for another job.

To reiterate: A number of people were fired because they read something that some manager did not approve of. That should scare you. This is a classic management blunder, and it’s going to bite Chrysler in the arse. I know now that I’ll never buy a Chrysler car, because there’s no way incompetence and malice like that should be rewarded.

The interview went well. They had me fill out a bunch of paper forms and take a couple of multiple-choice tests. I rocked the tests, and found there were a couple of errors in the Linux test they gave me. It’s been possible to have a swap file or swap partition larger than 512M since roughly 2000, and you don’t use ipchains to set up a firewall on modern systems. You use iptables. Oh well, write a test and keep using it for 5 years, it’s cheaper that way. They didn’t seem interested in fixing the test. I should mail them and give them specifics on where that test is wrong and precisely what to do to fix it.

This picture illustrates the government’s attitude towards your money.

Tried to do my taxes yesterday. It was an interesting exercise in Bad Software Design and the apparent inability of some state governments to get their acts together. I have N federal exemptions according to my W-2. So on the Michigan tax form that the tax preparer provides, there’s a box for the number of federal exemptions you claim. I enter N into this box. “Error: You have to claim the same number of exemptions on state and federal.” Except that there was no box to fill in anywhere for the number of federal exemptions you were claiming. I guess they filled that in automagically. And the form conveniently neglected to tell me how many federal exemptions they thought I had.

So, I tried every integer from 0 to 5 in the box on the Michigan form. I got the same error message for all numbers except 0 and 1. 0 and 1 gave me “Michigan does not support EWT”, whatever that means. This spectacularly craptastic set of design errors and bad code meant that I couldn’t file my Michigan tax return electronically.

And since I only lived in Arizona for 5 months in 2007, I had to file a partial-year return as a first-time AZ income tax payer. It is apparently impossible to file one of these electronically. No errors, no bad code that I could see, just the state government having a hole in its procedures. Paper filing is just so much less convenient (and costs the government more) that I don’t know why they haven’t switched to requiring everyone to E-file (or telephone file).

The only partially positive thing is that I should get a small refund this year. After the expense of tax preparation and printing things out, it comes to about $20. Usually, I owe about $200. Oh well.

A recruiter called me yesterday and I should have an interview this morning. Problem: It’s not with an actual client, but with a recruiting firm. This “looking for a job” thing is getting really old.