I’ll get pictures of his progress later. We need to pull them from the camera.

The afternoon after I ordered my laptop, Arnold’s eye started weeping. He apparently developed glaucoma in his right eye, the feline iris melanoma finally progressing to the point where, during our vet trip on Thursday afternoon, Dr. Wrycha recommended enucleation. I dropped Arnold off at the vet for surgery this morning: he gets the last of the tax refund money and all of the pet savings account for his medical care. Arnold spent the weekend feeling no pain as I’ve kept him doped up on Torbugesic syrup, 1.0 cc’s every twelve hours.

Brody and Rose are getting alone. While Becky and I played online games, Rose babysat Brody.

Brody is a very sweet, cuddly dog. He’s going to be a total nightmare when he gets to be a “teen” in three months or so.

Both Rose and Brody share a father, Jojo. But they come from different mothers who are sisters. They’re from litters approximately seven months apart (May 26 and December 22).

We tell Rose that she has to watch her baby brother, which she interprets as an excuse to chew on his face.

I’ve been pretty tired lately: work has taken a lot out of me, and when I get home, I get to puppysit through the evening.

As you can imagine, I don’t get a lot of playtime unless you count sitting on the floor and interacting with dogs. I haven’t played any MMOs in over a month (except to yank mail in WoW), so I told Becky that I was considering canceling WoW and CoH. Her reaction was something along the lines of, “You need to make the time if you want to play those games, but don’t you cut into the time I spend with you in the evening.” But that’s why I set up the Ventrillo server, so we could game in different parts of the house but still talk to each other. I think the luster wore off that solution.

In other updates: we got our tax refund. I’ve been withholding as if I had an Ohio mortgage, not a Seattle mortgage, which meant I’d been letting the government borrow around 8% of my net income for the past year. Becky got a Macbook Air and Brody, and the rest is being used to smooth out bills and big expenses for the rest of the year. I’d love to take the tax rebate in May and turn that into a Macbook Pro (or more realistically, half of a Macbook Pro), although I should wait until at least June to do so. Alternatively, I might be able to pick up a Lenovo T61p, which is a lot less sexy but more cost-effective. I’m sure the feds didn’t intend for the tax rebate to make the country’s balance of trade even worse.

Today, Becky’s trying out EverQuest’s Escape to Norrath free trial. She missed her Iksar Beastie.

This is unfortunate as it’s happening over Labor Day. We probably wouldn’t go there this weekend because of GWEN, but it’s still disappointing.

In the meantime, I got the iPod headphones from her Nano and used them with her 20 GB iPod that I would occasionally take to work. They served me well until one night, I left them sitting out (I had been using them to listen to videos on the laptop and not disturb her TV sound) and they were also eaten by ravenous cats. Since Apple charges an arm and a leg for replacements (and they already had a buzz in the right ear sometimes), I ordered a pair of Sennheiser bud earphones. We’ll see how they work out when they arrive this week.

And the ravenous cats? Somehow, they aren’t to blame.

My first interview with the Red Snapper went pretty well. It was mostly a tech interview about enterprise Java development. I did well enough that I had a second interview last night, covering some enterprise Java topics, algorithms, work experience, etc. I may get a call asking me to fly out to Large Northwestern U.S. City to interview with Red Snapper in person–so I can flub it in front of a live audience.

Good luck Fugu fish! I wish you all the best this week. And I haven’t forgotten about my project, but I just haven’t had a lot of time to work on it. Just in case we move, my wife and I spent a lot of the weekend cleaning (read: throwing out things we haven’t used since we bought our house), and when we weren’t cleaning she was talking to me about dogs. That said, once I got my library issues settled, there’s still something tricky going on when I’m trying initialize Python in Visual C++ that causes a segfault. I might have time to look into it Friday. I’m that busy this week, and C++ is probably my slowest coding language (aside from Pascal, Assembly, Cobol, or Prolog).

The Tuna wants me to come visit tomorrow afternoon. It’ll be nice: leave work early, drive almost but not quite all the way home, and meet four people for interviews. Ironically, the Tuna is a competitor to the Red Snapper.

Canned tuna is still here. My contract with Kroger will end, um, sometime. I think I’ll have things wrapped up before then.

I’m actively trying to help a co-worker on my project get his next position. When his contract ends, he goes without pay (no bench to back him up), so we’d both like to see him move on to something new immediately. He might have a good nibble at Giant Consumer Product Company in town for a short contract which is better than nothing.

The worst part of this is that it consumes my free thoughts such that I’m constantly thinking about:

• moving to Home Of The PC Revolution, or
• maybe moving to Large Northwestern U.S. City, or
• maybe moving just a couple miles away, and
• getting a new job and pushing my career, or
• starting a new career, and
• moving the pets,
• having to place Morticia and Pugsley with new homes,
• debt, current and that imposed by a move, etc.

I’ll be happy when this is finally settled. I can see why Becky eventually began to think in terms of, “We’re not moving to Home Of The PC Revolution after all, so I’m going to get on with life.” When I can’t stop thinking about it, I end up paralyzed with indecision: “I shouldn’t buy the large size ketchup bottle because I might move in a month or two and it won’t be used up!” It’s enough to drive you to watch TV. Or play WoW.

In the plus side, it puts me in the mood to sell books and throw things away.

In the meantime . . .
Electra went to the vet last week and cost me $275 in blood tests, only to discover she’s healthy, fully recovered from her FUS, but still with an impressive heart murmur. We have no explanation as to her belly fur loss or inability to put on weight. The (new? fill-in?) vet gave us some homeopathic stuff in brandy (yum!) that she gets with her food. I’m expecting her to gain a little weight, but maybe not much condition.

I’ve got Morticia’s first obedience class tonight, the one where we don’t take her. Becky will be coming so that she can get her new lap dog registered as well.

Tomorrow night, I’m driving to Columbus, Ohio, to pick up her new lap dog at the airport at 11pm. I’m unthrilled, but the breeder is being adamant about the airline and flight time. Whatever. I should be home by 2:00 AM, which gives me three and a half hours before I have to get up Thursday for work.

Pugsley and Morticia love their new fenced yard. I mowed it for the first time last night, and it did save me quite a bit of time versus the old fenced area.

Ozzie, one of our two new kittens (the second will be with the breeder until late July) is an absolute terror, but he’s so cute you can’t help but forgive him. He’s learning about kitchen counters and spray bottles.

The problem at work turned out to be all my fault. I put code in the setters for the Address class so that no fields could be larger than the database fields. Two of those, for latitude and longitude, were one character too short: the database stored the fields in DECIMAL(9,7) and DECIMAL(10,7), and appended zeroes to the ends of each field, while the class stored those values as Strings. The audit interceptor saw that the values were different and caused a loop (without going into too much detail).

I, erm, filled the production database with over 2.2 million duplicate rows before we managed to get the workflow scheduler process killed.

It took a couple days to find the problem, although I knew exactly what was wrong from the beginning because the audit entries in the database told me. I just didn’t understand why until I traced the whole process.

The hardware installation was a breeze. The first snafu was a problem WinXP which required a repair installation so that the machines would boot into Windows. I performed this on mine, using my aging CD-RW which doesn’t like to eject disks if they’re in it when the machine reboots. I regularly have to use a paper-clip to force the CD to eject, and never had a serious problem until yesterday. My only original WinXP OEM SP1 disc now has the outer quarter inch of the disk surface scratched and unreadable. Buffing hasn’t helped very much and I can’t get a new ISO or CDR image from it yet. My other install of WinXP was based on an original XP CD which would only install onto Dell hardware.

I need to go out and by new DVD drives for our PCs, and I’m afraid I’ll also be in the market for a new copy of WinXP. I’ll need to restart the repair installation and hope that my wife’s machine isn’t too trashed.

Speaking of buying new things, Bilbo the wierd little rabbit my wife keeps in her knitting room lived up to his species’ reputation by slicing through one of the wires to my wife’s Sennheiser headphones. I’m in the market for bluetooth, IR, or RF wireless headphones for use with an iPod.

I’ll write more on game design or implementation later. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about message oriented middleware, how it works in web, mobile, GUI, and remote client applications and considering how to make it work in a game. I’ve also been considering how to prototype some of the systems designed for a cyberpunk MMO. Some simulations can be run as scripts or small apps, but some systems need to be playtested and evaluated with real user feedback. What would work best? A web app? A text MUD/MOO? A partial game implementation with a custom client? A serverless networked (peer-to-peer) client?