Journals

I'm well aware that you guys have been laughing at me behind my back due to my woefully underpowered system, so I've decided to finally do something about it.
You may remember my previous upgrade - the Nvidia GTX 780 Ti which did extremelyexciting things to my 3D Mark score. As you can see, the overall score was let down considerably by the lacklustre first-generation i7 CPU.

I have remedied the situation with a new motherboard and CPU combo, bringing my score up to a blistering 9898 on Fire Strike - an achievement-unlocking score that is apparently higher than 93% of all worldwide Fire Strike results. Nailed it.So what has powered this ridiculous score?
The main upgrade is of course the CPU - I went for a Haswell Intel Core i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz. It's apparently an overclocker's dream, but the base clock of 4GHz has already blown me away.

Supporting it, I went for the Asus MAXIMUS VI FORMULA Z87 motherboard. It's a real beauty and the upgrade from my previous two USB3 slots to seventeen million (I counted) is invaluable to me as someone who works with video.

I had some teething problems after reinstalling Windows, but thankfully everything has been ironed out and this beast of a machine is ready to splatter games all over the walls.Footnote:
I had planned this purchase for months and saved up significantly and specifically for it, waiting for a drop in the price of these components after meticulously researching them. Don't impulse buy components, you'll miss out on great deals!

So I've set myself a challenge:

From now until mid summer 2015, I'm going to create my own ePOS system.

What is ePOS? It's these piles of shit that every shop and their dog owns:Working in a hotel last year, we were stuck with a shittly little till from the early 00's, maybe even 90's. Looking into the cost of how much one of these ePos systems would be, it's fucking ridiculous what they charge. The cheapest they provide for a glorified touchscreen? £500. I spent less money on my bloody beast of a computer.

I've been learning Java as part of my uni course, and being fairly OK with it, i thought i'd learn a bit of SQL and fuck about with that. From my very, very recent proper retail experience I noticed that their system runs on something called retailJ, a java based system that's in fairly wide use - so writing this in Java isn't a far out idea.
I've made similar POS systems on GMOD and made mockups of the UI and systems using Love2d - obviously as Love2D is a game engine and not something that should be run in an actual place of work it'd be useless.

I've got some idea of what I'm doing, and as well as working in retail I know exactly what sort of stuff needs to be kept in databases and retrieved.

My initial plan is to write up the code, get a very basic version working on my computer. Once that's all done, I'll double check whether my previous employer would be interested in the software ( because even if they don't want it, writing a POS system from scratch is pretty good practice ). If they are, I'll grab a raspberry PI, a shitty touchscreen off ebay, polish the thing up and trial it.

If all goes well, hopefully I can earn myself a bit of pocket money.

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.

Saint Augustine

I might visit Stockholm next summer.

I've always wanted to visit Sweden, and now I'll take my whole family there.

Oh wow look I still have my christmas icon from last year. Time to switch it to my regular one. It's about time don't ya think?

It's finally arrived after literally three months. Took me eight hours to assemble.

Now to get it running and make some prints.

So I discovered something really cool in the kitchen. Was cleaning the stove of dried cooking oil and what not, and took out the stove grate and burner parts. I thought: "Hmm, I wonder how the flame would burn without those parts...". It's a fucking rocket! Instant bunsen burner.
This is so fun, must try one more ti

I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light

Helen Keller

This is Jessie with her annual word of caution during Steam sales.*word of caution may not actually be annual
*may just be that wacky EA

I was thinking the other day about how Super Sleuths was pretty fun, so I decided to have my own go at it. I have taken one of the Golden Rufees out of my profile, and hidden it somewhere. If you can find it, you can have it for your own, because as we all know imaginary currencies are actually incredibly valuable irl.

This will probably be fairly short because of reasons.

I'm not a professional voice actor, so I do it in the car on the way to my real job to amuse myself: Look here.

I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

I'm getting really frustrated in my uni program. We've got teams of 5-6 people, and we have to make a game prototype in a semester then finish the game in the next. We have to do this from scratch. On top of a standard university course load.
As happened last year, I'm getting shafted by our limited scope. I'm expected to do my job as a level designer with, not only no neat toys, but no gameplay tools whatsoever. I have a school-provided copy of Maya (Which I am not fond of, though god help me I'm starting to be able to manage with it) and notepad with which to organize the map props and the gameplay entities. Nobody else is writing tools to use with the engine, because we have no time to do so with and it's not a priority for anybody else. I'm not writing a toolset because I'm not an engineer and I don't have the skill or knowledge needed to even get started with it. Also we don't have any finalized formats so I can't even write a parser to read or write map files. I have to hardcode everything character by character, and I don't even have a full format.

If you want a level designer to do neat things, you need to give them toys to work with. Spending all my time buried in a text editor with barebones gameplay code will not lead to a stellar product by any standards.

So you know what? I am going to, right now, with all my authority of a nobody, declare Laurie Cheers the programming patron saint of level designers. Because he took a look at us, and he said "You know what? These guys could use some new features to play with." AND THEN HE MADE IT HAPPEN. Spirit of Half-Life is still used by nearly every Half-Life mod in development now, because it was that damn good, and it gave us that much flexibility and ease with which to do our jobs.

Would that we had more people like him. My headache would disappear.
Bless you, Mr. Cheers. You knew what we needed, and you provided.

I loose a lot of time commuting and walking in the city nowadays, and I am a bit frustrated by that lost time. Yeah the first times when you go on new routes you admire the landscape and buildings but then it's routine.
I'd like to start listening to some podcasts while on the road, but I don't know where to start. I have my phone and an MP3 player.

Do you have any podcast and podcast apps recommendation in the technical domain? For example tech news, stuff about coding... hardware etc. There was once a cute podcast from "techstuff" or something like that, it was nice in that it explained how different devices work.
Or any podcast that you find sufficiently interesting... I just want to start somewhere and see if listening to podcasts is a thing I could do :).

EDIT Just to be clear, I'm talking about walking in the city and going by bus, which at rush hours can take up 40 minutes between point A and B. When I commute by train there is wi-fi so I can watch stuff on youtube.

I have an old phone. It's not very old, just old enough for updates to mess with it. On its own, it's a very good phone. It's robust and well-built, and it does what it has to do just fine. But throw software updates into the mix, and everything gets screwed up. Software updates are made for newer phones with much greater processing power, but they are too much for an oldish phone like this to keep up with. As a result, it can't do the number of things the apps expect it to do in a reasonable time and it freezes, hangs, or generally slows down so much that I want to throw it against the wall. Which I do, and I find it highly therapeutic when I've spent five minutes trying to text someone while seeing little more than a blank screen.

It's not that I use a lot of apps either, I'd say the only app I ever use is WhatsApp. But lately they've been making every update mandatory or else WhatsApp won't run, and with that update I also receive non-optional OS updates that take up a lot of space and a lot of processor time.

Today I wasn't feeling particularly patient so I threw it against the wall. This time, though, I watched it fall apart in pieces. It felt good for a minute until OH SHIT I STILL NEED TO TALK TO CLASSMATES AND I DON'T HAVE THEIR NUMBERS ELSEWHERE. So I had to pick up the phone, battery, back cover from the floor, take it apart and remove the broken pieces of its metal frame and then put it back together. It still works. All it has is a small scrape on the side.

I do feel it's a bit of a shame to mistreat it like that. It's a good, sturdy, robust, well-built phone, victim of inconsiderate software updates. If it weren't for apps and software updates, it could live for a lot longer than it will. It doesn't deserve this destiny, but this destiny has been forced upon it by the app devs.

Sorry, I just had to rant.

TL;DR: Software updates make smartass phone slow. I get frustrated and throw it against wall. Still works.