Idleness has set in. I haven’t ventured into central London for a few days now. It was a long weekend, but that has little meaning when you’re not working. There was the Notting Hill Carnival but I forgot about it until it was over. There were the Olympic festivities and the outdoor parties celebrating the hand-off for the London 2012 games, but I didn’t bother. There wasn’t any reason to go down there. The weather was constantly dreary. My weekly pass on the Oyster card had expired and I wasn’t feeling the urge to spend another twenty-four pounds on it. It was best to stay indoors, stay local, do a little bit of running and not a whole lot else. It was nice.
That’s not to say that I did nothing but sit and twiddle my thumbs. I breezed through a book — “The Bug” — faster than I have done since my school days. I enjoyed it a lot. It’s geek fiction in the sense that it’s about a very geeky subject — a bug in a database front-end at a software company in the early 80s — but it isn’t technical. It’s just a good book that takes place in a setting that you don’t see good books take place in. The compulsiveness and break-down of the main character fascinated me, even if it was rather bleak. It made me want to do some coding of my own, so I did. So far: no life-destroying bugs have been discovered.
I played a lot of Space Invaders Extreme on the PSP. I wrote a review for it (more on that later) where I glossed over the game’s difficulty, but it has to be said: that game’s hard. It has a branching structure to its stages and I beat it on the easier route, but the harder ones are kicking my ass now. I almost have it. There are some nuances with some of the waves of invaders on these difficulties that require a more strategic approach. Firing haphazardly at them, at these levels, will get you killed quick. I was lukewarm on the game at first but seeing these subtle higher-level designs in action, deeper in the game, has really endeared it to me. Mini-review: recommended!
It has made me yearn for Galaga Legions.
I have written a lot more. My journal, not counting my hand-scrawled one (and “scrawled” is right as my handwriting is horrible,) is approaching 20,000 words. It’s excessive. I’ve been using MacJournal 5 (5.1 just came out) and I like it, despite the few issues I have with the way it formats and exports text, and some other organizational issues. This was the first piece of OSX software I paid for. Lightroom 2 was the second. (it’s worth saying: everything else on the MacBook is legit, just free, though I remain unsure what to do with Adobe Flash CS3. My paid-for PC serial doesn’t work on OSX so I’ve had an unused trial version sitting here. I haven’t needed it yet but when/if I do, I don’t know what to do. Why pay for something twice? If you see a kvetch like this on Dear Adobe, it’s probably mine.)
Perhaps a lot can be said about productivity and lack of internet access.
