Off to San Francisco

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I’m taking off today for San Francisco. I’m going to be at GDC 2005 for the whole week with the company, then we’re going on a ski trip somewhere. I don’t even know where. I sort of don’t care.

Saying I sort of don’t care is a little more than an understatement. I’m so disinterested in the skiing part of this trip. I wish I could just take an earlier flight than the rest of them and come back home a few days sooner. I’ve never been skiing, and I just have no interest in it right now. Even more than that is that I’d rather just be back home either practicing or hanging out with my friends. Or renting a car and driving down to Santa Barbara to hang out with Lesley. Or going up to New York to hang visit Carolyn. Or something. But no.. I’m going skiing.

Actually, I’m not. I’m sitting in my hotel room, probably reading the new GPU Gems 2 book, while everyone else goes skiing.

I also found out Sunday that I need a ski jacket, ski pants, some sort of really heavy extra-long ski socks, and who knows what else. How much does this stuff cost? A couple hundred dollars. Am I going to spend that kind of money for a damn ski trip that I don’t even want to go on? Hell no! If you’ve seen how I dress, you know that I desperately need to go out and buy new clothes that I’ll actually wear more than once. I think I have exactly one piece of clothing right now that I got within the past three years, and that’s a t-shirt that Hiroshi Iizuka gave me when I was visiting him one time. Spending any amount of money at all on some clothes I’ll wear once? I’m too cheap to do that, even if I wanted to go skiing.

Gnome 2.8

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I installed Gnome 2.8 yesterday, using the RPMs in the test directory of Fedora‘s download server. To be perfectly honest, I can’t feel much of a difference between this and Gnome 2.6. Then again, I think that’s a good thing. I’ve read the changes for this version, and they’re great. But they’re also not at all in-your-face, which is a big plus.

The biggest improvement for me is the release of Evolution 2.0. I’ve been a big fan of Evolution for a long time now, and I always use it for mail. But in the past few years I’ve started receiving a lot of SPAM mail, and I had to set up my own SPAM filters for Evolution 1.x. It worked, but it was not very convenient. It was also a big hassle to train my SPAM software. Now Evolution 2.0 has this stuff integrated into it, so that if a piece of SPAM is missed by the SPAM filter you can click the “Junk” button to train the filtering software. Other than the junk mail stuff, Evolution 2.0 feels quite a bit faster to me. The startup time is insignificant now, which is great.

Engine hacking

hacking No Comments

Support for OpenGL Shading Language went into cvs several days ago, and it’s working perfectly. I’m happy that’s done. I started working on a command-line utility for working with chunk files and needed a nice way of doing argument parsing, so I started working on a template-based method of handling them yesterday. There are still a couple things in the design that need to be worked out, but it’s mostly very good now I think. It fits very well with the existing application framework too.

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