Blasts from the past, PIU, and wacky work
Oct. 31st, 2001 02:06 amLJ was down for most of the day. How odd.
I was mostly trying to figure out if![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shoebox_bird got to actually see thost pictures I posted. I guess there's always tomorrow.
So we're doing more of these "classes" at work. They are going well, I guess - since I have very little else going on at work outside them, I can spend a lot of time figuring stuff out. Today, for example, we had to run a web spider over some cached pages, and write an extra little thingy to find PDF files from the pages we crawled. For me, this involved regrabbing and rebuilding my code tree since I had an old one, and then figuring out how to do all the stuff. Fortunately, we have enough other spidering gadgets sitting around that I was able to figure out what to do by looking at those and making up some stuff. It was interesting, the most time for me was spent trying to figure out why some weird-ass exceptions were being thrown, and it turned out to entirely have to do with me using an ObjectStreamWriter instead of something sane, so I used a FileWriter to write stuff to file, and then poof! everything worked just fine. (Note that the poof! happened somewhere around 11pm, and the rest of it happened in the early/mid afternoon...)
...because I went for all-you-can-eat sushi at Sushi Too with people. I blame Kevin (W), he wanted to go, so I said I'd go.. and then Anu decided he wanted to go, and was going to bring our friend Roger who is in town. (Roger was a good friend of mine at CMU, and in the summer of '99 he went on a roadtrip across the USA with two of our other friends, and they got in a nasty nasty nasty car accident in Wisconsin. One friend had some nasty internal bleeding and crap, but after a few hours of surgery was awake and returned home a few days later and was even working at a tech company again like two months after the accident. Another friend had major damage to her head, as in parts of her skull got broken, and she had to have a lot of surgery, but she also returned home shortly afterwards and since she was already sort of weird and out-of-it before the accident, 2-3 months later she was also somewhat functional. Roger, on the other hand, was in a coma for a really long time. We weren't sure he was going to make it. After a year and a half of therapy and treatment and stuff, I guess it's amazing how far he has come, but it is depressing at the same time. He used to smile and laugh and talk quickly with me and everything, and now he speaks really slowly and with a slight slur, and he has a lot of trouble moving the right side of his body, so things like using chopsticks, or getting in and out of the car, etc, are sort of tough for him. I was trying my honest best to act like he was perfectly normal (since that's what everyone else was doing) but sometimes I kept catching myself going "Are you okay? Do you need help?" etc.) Anyway, so Anu and Roger came, so they brought Aiton, who brought Dana and Jill, who then called Mike and Jer... and so on and so forth. Ugh. So we had a table of 7 and four more people sitting at a table nearby. Aiton is such a weirdo. I mean, I've known him since 9th grade or so, and he's always been a weirdo. Ugh... this has no point. I dunno, I ate a lot of sushi and caught up on gossip with people, although it's so weird to hang out with a group of people I don't really hang out with any more, because I don't entirely know what to say or what's been going on with them all, etc. On the other hand, it's good to see people and find out what they're up to. I guess.
Anyway, we went to Dave and Buster's afterwards (the reason i agreed to sushi was so Kevin would take me to D&B). We being me, Kevin, Anu, Roger, and Aiton. Why did I want to go to D&B? Because D&B got a Pump It Up machine (the DDR knockoff by Andamiro). I wanted to check it out, and check it out I did.
My basic review of PIU: It's not bad, but for a real DDR player, the mechanics are sort of different and it's frustrating to be back at the point where you're not sure where to stand and where you don't know all the appropriate beats/combos. There's a whole lot of wacky songs though, some of which are quite cool ("Tell Me Tell Me" by S#ARP, which is a good DDR song, and "Take On Me" by A-ha, and "Mambo No. 5", which is the song I started figuring out how to do spins and stuff in PIU to). Oh, and lots of K-pop, yay! The main thing is just, the balance is so weird because one of the buttons is in the middle of the pad, so finding balance places to stand is odd. Plus, there's more of this awkwardness if you try to make your left foot devoted to the left arrows and your right food devoted to the right arrows, because it's not as easy to move between left front and left back, or right front and right back, as it is to dedicate your feet to arrows in DDR.
However, it is better than nothing. Although I was kinda confused by this conversation with one of the D&B guys when I went to buy a new PowerCard:
me: "So, when are you getting Dance Dance Revolution?"
him: "We have it!"
me: "No you don't, you have Pump It Up."
him: "There's a difference?"
me: "Yeah, a big difference.. the arrows are different, the interface is different, the songs are different... are you ever getting DDR?"
He seemed to think that PIU is DDR and there's no reason for them to get DDR at all.
Anyway... we played bunches of random games and then I went back to work and finished my work. Then I came home and put on DDR and did 500 calories worth of songs. That's like an hour and a half, since songs average around 15 calories (trick/maniac... basic are even less). My max calories in one song was 25, for Follow the Sun (Trick)... I think some others were pretty up there too, like Orion.78 civ mix, and Ninzaburo, and... I'm forgetting. Oh, I also managed to full combo Young Forever again, and pass it on S4R. (Wow! I can do S4R! Sorta...)
But you know, 500 calories a day of DDR would be great, but it's just too time-consuming.
Anyway, it's laaaaaaaaate. I'm going to sleep now.
I was mostly trying to figure out if
shoebox_bird got to actually see thost pictures I posted. I guess there's always tomorrow.So we're doing more of these "classes" at work. They are going well, I guess - since I have very little else going on at work outside them, I can spend a lot of time figuring stuff out. Today, for example, we had to run a web spider over some cached pages, and write an extra little thingy to find PDF files from the pages we crawled. For me, this involved regrabbing and rebuilding my code tree since I had an old one, and then figuring out how to do all the stuff. Fortunately, we have enough other spidering gadgets sitting around that I was able to figure out what to do by looking at those and making up some stuff. It was interesting, the most time for me was spent trying to figure out why some weird-ass exceptions were being thrown, and it turned out to entirely have to do with me using an ObjectStreamWriter instead of something sane, so I used a FileWriter to write stuff to file, and then poof! everything worked just fine. (Note that the poof! happened somewhere around 11pm, and the rest of it happened in the early/mid afternoon...)
...because I went for all-you-can-eat sushi at Sushi Too with people. I blame Kevin (W), he wanted to go, so I said I'd go.. and then Anu decided he wanted to go, and was going to bring our friend Roger who is in town. (Roger was a good friend of mine at CMU, and in the summer of '99 he went on a roadtrip across the USA with two of our other friends, and they got in a nasty nasty nasty car accident in Wisconsin. One friend had some nasty internal bleeding and crap, but after a few hours of surgery was awake and returned home a few days later and was even working at a tech company again like two months after the accident. Another friend had major damage to her head, as in parts of her skull got broken, and she had to have a lot of surgery, but she also returned home shortly afterwards and since she was already sort of weird and out-of-it before the accident, 2-3 months later she was also somewhat functional. Roger, on the other hand, was in a coma for a really long time. We weren't sure he was going to make it. After a year and a half of therapy and treatment and stuff, I guess it's amazing how far he has come, but it is depressing at the same time. He used to smile and laugh and talk quickly with me and everything, and now he speaks really slowly and with a slight slur, and he has a lot of trouble moving the right side of his body, so things like using chopsticks, or getting in and out of the car, etc, are sort of tough for him. I was trying my honest best to act like he was perfectly normal (since that's what everyone else was doing) but sometimes I kept catching myself going "Are you okay? Do you need help?" etc.) Anyway, so Anu and Roger came, so they brought Aiton, who brought Dana and Jill, who then called Mike and Jer... and so on and so forth. Ugh. So we had a table of 7 and four more people sitting at a table nearby. Aiton is such a weirdo. I mean, I've known him since 9th grade or so, and he's always been a weirdo. Ugh... this has no point. I dunno, I ate a lot of sushi and caught up on gossip with people, although it's so weird to hang out with a group of people I don't really hang out with any more, because I don't entirely know what to say or what's been going on with them all, etc. On the other hand, it's good to see people and find out what they're up to. I guess.
Anyway, we went to Dave and Buster's afterwards (the reason i agreed to sushi was so Kevin would take me to D&B). We being me, Kevin, Anu, Roger, and Aiton. Why did I want to go to D&B? Because D&B got a Pump It Up machine (the DDR knockoff by Andamiro). I wanted to check it out, and check it out I did.
My basic review of PIU: It's not bad, but for a real DDR player, the mechanics are sort of different and it's frustrating to be back at the point where you're not sure where to stand and where you don't know all the appropriate beats/combos. There's a whole lot of wacky songs though, some of which are quite cool ("Tell Me Tell Me" by S#ARP, which is a good DDR song, and "Take On Me" by A-ha, and "Mambo No. 5", which is the song I started figuring out how to do spins and stuff in PIU to). Oh, and lots of K-pop, yay! The main thing is just, the balance is so weird because one of the buttons is in the middle of the pad, so finding balance places to stand is odd. Plus, there's more of this awkwardness if you try to make your left foot devoted to the left arrows and your right food devoted to the right arrows, because it's not as easy to move between left front and left back, or right front and right back, as it is to dedicate your feet to arrows in DDR.
However, it is better than nothing. Although I was kinda confused by this conversation with one of the D&B guys when I went to buy a new PowerCard:
me: "So, when are you getting Dance Dance Revolution?"
him: "We have it!"
me: "No you don't, you have Pump It Up."
him: "There's a difference?"
me: "Yeah, a big difference.. the arrows are different, the interface is different, the songs are different... are you ever getting DDR?"
He seemed to think that PIU is DDR and there's no reason for them to get DDR at all.
Anyway... we played bunches of random games and then I went back to work and finished my work. Then I came home and put on DDR and did 500 calories worth of songs. That's like an hour and a half, since songs average around 15 calories (trick/maniac... basic are even less). My max calories in one song was 25, for Follow the Sun (Trick)... I think some others were pretty up there too, like Orion.78 civ mix, and Ninzaburo, and... I'm forgetting. Oh, I also managed to full combo Young Forever again, and pass it on S4R. (Wow! I can do S4R! Sorta...)
But you know, 500 calories a day of DDR would be great, but it's just too time-consuming.
Anyway, it's laaaaaaaaate. I'm going to sleep now.
