Posted on December 8, 2009
Cars, Work, Blogs, and such
Well, my wonderful Subaru WRX with a gadzillion (162k) miles on it blew a head gasket just before Halloween, and I JUST got it back. It’s much happier now, several thousand dollars later. In the mean time I bought a backup Subaru for dirt cheap that lasted exactly as long as my more-favoriter Subaru was in the shop and then started overheating and spewing forth steam. They told me today that it might be a head gasket. Irony.
Anyway, I have at least one very happy car, so I’m ok, hopefully for a few more years.
In other news, I now have THREE Blogs going. Yes, I’ve been cheating on chiplynch.com. I know that you, my vast readership, are very sad because it means I might be posting here less. But, there is hope! You can read at least one of my other Blogs whenever you want at ChipMonkey’s Coding Corner. I’m trying to write a few small pieces of software — get back on the wagon so to speak — and thought that would be motivation.
The OTHER Blog I’m starting is for work. I don’t think there’s a public URL, but if I find one I’ll let you know. Deloitte (the new big print on the business card, dwarfing my name just next to it) puts some emphasis on sharing knowledge, but, in counterpoint to the previous intranet, actually makes it possible to do that. They even have a wiki — can you imagine how excited I am about that?!?!
So, three blogs. Wish me luck. Work has subsided for December (the project starts back up in January), so I have some free time to pursue these things, so hopefully we’ll set some good habits and generate something useful.
On a related note, in terms of my personal writing endeavors, I think I’m giving up on NanoWrimo… this year was another epic-fail for Chip, but, I’m taking that in stride and just interpreting it to mean that I wasn’t meant to be a speed-writer. I’m still hoping to write a book one of these days, but I’m going to have to take a bit more time to do it.
Posted on November 15, 2009
More GPS Fun
Well, I managed to get back out on the bike trails again this weekend due to the awesome weather. I’m not saying there won’t be another good weekend this year, but I’m certainly not counting on it. Since I FINALLY downloaded the tracks from my GPS, I thought I’d post a few trails. I got out a few times without the GPS, but the long rides are all here. Notice that huge gap between July and November? Lots of that is laziness, but a lot is actually running and swimming for the triathlon I never attended. Oh well. The bike runs range from about 5 miles to about 35, and hit mostly the wonderful bike trails around Dayton and Xenia. Kudos again to the people at GPS Visualizer and of course the Google Maps API folks who make publishing these so easy.
Posted on October 31, 2009
Winter Projects: No Moving Required
Halloween is just about over, for all useful purposes. I had two visitors… the were twins and they live next door. I managed to make it out Thursday night to the Miamisburg bar hop, which would have been point-and-shoot heaven except that my camera had fallen under a chair earlier in the week and the three days I spent looking for it beforehand didn’t pan out, while the five minutes I spent the next morning did. Oh well.
Summer went well — I biked a lot, swam a lot, and ran a lot — all that outdoor stuff that one wants to do when it’s warm. Cold is now imminent. It descends upon the Chip like Christians on prime-time nudity.
I’m not much for the cold.
So, it’s time to find things to keep busy indoors. November is, again, National Novel Writing Month, and with any luck I’ll do better this year than prior years. Hopefully I’ll draw some encouragement from everyone else doing it — my cousin Jennifer is in; hopefully Aerin will try it. A few of you others are considering it — I could use the additional motivation.
On top of that I’m working on a pseudo work/personal programming project, for which I’ve started another blog here (because, you know, I have all this free time). Thought I’d try out blogspot, get back into some real coding (Project Euler hasn’t been keeping me entertained any more), and, like I said, all of this can be done half-clothed and indoors.
The cold can just bring-it, cause I am prepared.
Posted on October 23, 2009
Lots of pictures are finally up
I’m about 5000 photos behind in terms of updating my photo gallery, but in the mean time here’s a few interesting tidbits:
Laura and Dallas got married, Congratulations guys! Mommalynch took some eight gadzillion pictures, and they’re up here:
I headed up to the very cold Wisonsin/Illinois border in South Beloit to watch Mike Green go racing. Plenty of pics from that are up here(but I took the videos down for bandwidth… if you need them, lemme know):
And I headed up to Michigan a few weeks back with Greg for Stephanie’s birthday, not to mention the three or four other birthdays we celebrated that weekend. Thanks for having me, guys! I even got to see George, Maureen, and family. Quite the weekend! Pics are here:
Posted on October 6, 2009
17 year old Llamas are still going strong
Wired recently ran this short article about Gridrunner Revolution, a new acid-trip game from Jeff Mitner.
Who?
Yeah, that’s what I said. But then I actually READ the article, instead of looking at the tripped out picture. Mintner is the Wil-E-Coyote level Super Genius behind Llamasoft.
Wait, Who?
RIGHT AGAIN! Llamasoft is the company that created Llamatron! I can’t even find an informative link to Llamatron except for this wikipedia link, even on the Llamasoft website, but, dangit, Llamatron was one of the games that defined my early gaming addiction and I’m just super-pumped to see that the company and the dude behind it are still spewing forth trippy games.
You can actually download the 1992 game from Llamasoft on various platforms. I can’t quite get the PC version to run on Vista, but I haven’t yet spent as long trying as I have writing this blog post.
If you get a chance, though, go read the Llamasoft history. It’s a great read about their experiences in early gaming development, and it has a lot of memories that make me remember the era fondly… hopefully you’ll have the same experience.
Viva La Llama.
—Chip