Parveen Kaler

I just got out of the gym and I’m completely wired, so this entry is going to be a complete mish-mash of miscellany. I wanted to keep my entries more on the well-thought out side (a la Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky) rather than the rest of the crap you see on the Internets these days (a la Kevin Smith). It was either this or listen to a Sarah McLachlan album to wind down.

Apologies to French readers. I don’t know where the accent grave key is.

Back to the topic of the gym. I just finished up a 60 minute session on the cross trainer. I’m trying to get into shape to get into adventure racing this summer, but I’m hesitant. First of all, brown folk don’t camp. My forefathers did it for the last two millenia, I’m not quite sure we as a people want to go back to that. Second of all, I’m afraid it would be a lot like running around in World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. Two great games in their own right, but two games that I just can’t play. Somebody should make an orienteering game. I think it would kick ass. It would be easy to hit the mass market and the female gamer. It would work as an MMORPG. It would also work on the PSP. With bluetooth connectivity, you could connect with others playing at the same time and add geocaching elements.

I have three Emacs buffers open with half-finished reviews of God of War, Out of Exhile by Audioslave, and C++ Template Metaprogramming by Abrahams and Gurtovoy. Executive summary: it is great, it is great, it is great.

Website update: I’m contemplating switching from Blogger to Blosxom since I type up all my entries in Emacs anyway and then paste them into the Blogger textbox. Blogger suffers from what people in the robotics field call Uncanny Valley (Look it up in Wikipedia. I can’t bother to paste a link). The Blogger interface is more feature full than other blogging tools but not quite as good as a general-purpose word processor so it just ends up being annoying. When the word processing capability of Blogger and the file storage capability of GMail improve, Google will have a real MS Office killer.

I’m working on redesigning this place too. The layout is pretty much done, but I can’t put together a good stylesheet. I can’t quite get CSS to do what I want it to. I wish CSS was as powerful as shading languages like GLSL, HLSL, and Renderman. Basically, the inspiration for the background is the side of a Mac G5 case. Brushed chrome, with an anisotropic looking specular reflection. A navigation bar that works like the menu bar in OS X. Lens mouse-over effect and all. The content would be down the center in columnar fashion similar to a newspaper. The edges of this column would be raised giving it a virtual displacement mapping kind of look.

Yes. Me geek.

I don’t understand why it is chic to be punk, or hip hop, or geek these days. Ask the next poser that you see on the street what they think about the Ramones, London Calling, Straight Outta Compton, Fear of a Black Planet, or Lisp and they will look at you like you’re stoned. I was watching MuchMusic the other day. I’m not sure why they call it MuchMusic anymore, since they don’t really play music all that often. But I digress. Rick the Temp was reviewing Star Wars and called himself a geek. Dude, you’re not a geek. Quit being a poser.

I have a fourth buffer open in Emacs full of my thoughts on electoral reform. My last two postings about STV were half-baked and I apologize for that. However, the gist of the posts is dead on. Increasing the size of electoral districts is a non-starter.

I need a deeper understanding of the Canadian Constitution and the West Minister parliamentary system to completely flesh out my proposal. That is an enormous undertaking.

E3 was excellent for Relic this year. I’m personally very satisfied with the reception Company of Heroes received. Gamespot went as far as naming us PC Game of Show. IGN named us as a runner up in their Technological Excellence category. Being a programmer, that was very satisfying.

The entire team squeezed out bucket-loads of blood, sweat, and tears and injected them directly into this game. Ditto for the Dawn of War: Winter Assault team and The Outfit team.

If you use Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks, or some other syndication client you may now get updates through syndication. I’ll publish a blogroll one of these days.