Cody Russell

A Feast for Crows

I’m a big fan of George R R Martin’s fantasy book series, A Song of Ice and Fire. I’ve read the first three books in the series and I’ve been looking forward to the fourth book since like 2001 or something. Well, it’s finally finished!! I’m so excited.

If you’re into fantasy style books, this is it. Obviously, it’s unfair to try to compare it to Tolkien or anything. But I’ve read some other series and nothing else compares to this. I tried reading Robert Jordan’s stupid-ass Wheel of Time series. What a sleeper! It started out very promising, but the thing has dragged on for like 11 books and for the past three books it feels like nothing much has happened. In fact, after reading the last book I can say most assertively that nothing happened during that book. The plot did not advance.

While Martin’s series is becoming long, I trust him. He originally said that there will be six books in the series, I think, but he recently extended that to seven. Okay, I’ll give him that. But it means something to me, as a reader, that he actually has an end in mind and that he’s not just writing some damned soap opera book series that can go on indefinitely. His plots are actually interesting, and I find myself being surprised by what he writes; this is something that nobody does anymore!! Seriously, nobody actually writes plots that really surprise you. Sometimes, in books or movies or whatever, you don’t necessarily know what’s going to come next but you’re still not surprised when it happens. Martin actually manages to surprise you. You’re sitting there calmly reading your book and drinking some tea when, bam! he goes and does something crazy like killing off the person who appeared to be an essential protagonist.

How many people has Jordan killed off in his series? I don’t know exactly, but I know that they were all “bad guys”. Yippee.

Anyway, seriously.. I’m very excited about FEAST being finished finally. I’ve been waiting for this so long. For awhile, I remember Martin would post stuff on his website about some nasty people bitching at him about taking so long. I wrote to him and told him, “Take as long as you need to. Just make sure it’s as good as the previous books.” I want consistency. I remember reading The Death Gate Cycle by those people who wrote that shitty Dragonlance stuff years ago when I was in middle school. Death Gate was so awesome…. until the end, when it was completely and utterly ruined. Then again, I was in middle school.. maybe if I went back and read that now I’d find that the whole thing sucked.

Okay, I’m done talking about this today. It’s probably hard to tell by reading this, since I’m ranting about other series more than talking about Martin’s series, but I’m really, truly very excited.

GDC

Well, I’m back. I went to GDC in San Francisco, and it was pretty cool. I went to a couple of the sessions, walked many miles around the downtown San Francisco area, heard the San Francisco Symphony do Mahler 7, and met shaver, vlad, pavlov, and another Mozilla guy named Brendan. I also managed to get a moment to meet Mark Healy from Lionhead Studios and I saw his demo of Ragdoll Kung-fu in the “experimental gameplay” session. That was really cool. I had been talking with him in email last summer about the possibility of porting that over to Linux and MacOS for him. I’d still like to do that after it’s released, if I can.

Then my company went out to Mammoth ski resort. Fortunately it was only for a couple days. I did try to go skiing, but I didn’t really enjoy it. From there we drove down to Los Angeles and flew out of LAX.

Off to San Francisco

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.

Viola bow

Yes, I did finally get a new viola bow. It’s by Stéphane Thomachot, from Paris. I really like this bow. I took it to my old teacher, Vicki Chiang, a couple weeks ago and she really loved it. She even sounded like she was thinking of buying one now. Later today I’m taking it to my old quartet teacher, Maria Lambros. She already has a Thomachot bow, but she’s already ordered a second one.

So finally i have a really good bow to go along with VLA THE IMPALER, my beautiful viola by Hiroshi Iizuka. This Thomachot is the new Weapon of Choice.

Keeping my hands warm with C++ code

I always feel really cold at my office. Even now during the winter while it’s snowing outside, our air conditioners come on. I guess the office would get sort of warm with all the computers here or something, but when air conditioning comes on during the winter, I get cold. Especially my fingers and my hands. What do I do to warm them up?

Another thing we have at my company is a plugin for Visual Studio called IncrediBuild. It distributes builds across the network so that all the computers in the office will compile your code. It’s like distcc, but for Visual C++.

This really comes in handy to help my cold fingers. Whenever I get too cold, I do an often extremely unnecessary clean and rebuild of the entire project. This kicks the laptop on the left side of my desk into action, and with the extra workload its fans come on and start pumping out lots of heat through the vent on its right side. I just put my fingers up next to the vent. It’s wonderful.

Blimpie

Cameron and I decided to go to Blimpie last Saturday for dinner. There’s a Blimpie over close to his house near Hopkins campus, so I decided to walk from the monument to there. It’s about a 2 mile walk, but I was cool with that. The store closed at 9pm, so we arrived by 8pm. My mobile phone said 7:58p, actually. Anyway, the store was closed when we got there; most of the lights were out, the door was locked, and the girl inside was packing up all the stuff behind the counter.

Almost as soon as we get there, the girl starts yelling at us. “I’m closed!!” We look at the posted hours.. it says closing time is 9pm. I look at my telephone’s clock, and it says 7:58pm. The girl sees our hesitation, or at least notices the fact that we don’t immediately leave, and keeps yelling at us that she’s closed. We try pointing out that closing time is posted at 9pm, and she starts getting pissed!! She’s yelling like, “If the lights are out and the door is locked, then that means I AM CLOSED!!” So then we’re trying to ask if the hours have changed, or if this is just something on this day.. but she keeps yelling that she is CLOSED. So I ask something like, “If you’re not going by the posted hours today and you won’t tell us whether this is normal, how do we know when to show up in the future?” Then she gets freaking crazy mad and yells that if we don’t leave right now she’s calling security on us! I was so pissed. So yeah, we left and told her we’d never come back.

I went onto Blimpie’s website and reported the store, but I don’t know if it will do any good. I didn’t find this particular store in the little “store finder” feature. But if you’re in Baltimore near Hopkins, then avoid the Blimpie at Hopkins Square if this evil chick is working behind the counter. I suspect anyone who has so little concern for their job as to scream at and threaten customers is also not likely to do other aspects of their job well. Who knows what she might be baking into the bread.

Updates

I haven’t been very good about making updates to my blog anymore. I have started a new blog at my homepage, but haven’t been all that great about keeping it up to date either.

I’m moving back up to Baltimore pretty soon, because I got a good job there. That’s always exciting.

Anyway, I’ll post more information on the homepage blog soon.

Gnome 2.8

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

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.

Ben’s new CD

Ben Loeb’s new CD with Joseph Lin was just released on Naxos label recently. It’s a recording of the complete works of Erich Korngold for violin and piano. It was reviewed and chosen as CD of the month at MusicWeb UK. Since it’s a Naxos recording, it’ll be reasonably priced. Ben graduated from Peabody after my first year there, and is an absolutely fantastic pianist. I like what little I’ve heard of Korngold so far — mostly just his violin concerto and the Much Ado About Nothing suite (which is on this CD) — and I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of the disc.