In our increasingly secular society, it is good to know that a pagan god of thunder still has representation once a week on our calendar.

It's challenging to produce a fully functional query API for a complicated database. That's the lesson at work this week.

The weather has broken momentarily and it is relatively cool. It's not going to last, though. Surprisingly, this may be the first time there is no mention of rain in the weeklong forecast. It'll be hot on the fourth, though. Right when everyone will be outside barbecuing. Well played, atmosphere.

A few more quests down in Chrono Trigger DS and also another hour or so of progression into Final Fantasy XII. That's the way of it in gaming land. Nothing really major has happened there, which is kind of sad, because it leaves me without any exciting stories to tell. I suppose an off day once in a while isn't a bad thing. Look at Tiger Woods. The best golfer in the world and even he has bad days where... oh, ooops. I guess not having exciting video game stories is a little better than what big T has gotten himself into.

Now, how many table joins should be permitted before an Exception is thrown?

Holy crap, it has been powerful hot lately, consistently. Hot, humid weather is usually dotted with relieving thunder showers, but except for the sprinkling (tee hee) we got yesterday, it has been pretty unrelenting the past few weeks. Make it stop! The rest of the week is supposed to be a heat lamp. The forecast is calling for storms later today, but those have failed in the past so I won't be surprised if it's all a ruse.

How about that oil mess in the gulf? It is going to be a long time before that is straightened out. Everyone seems to think that once the leak is cut off that it will just be a matter of mopping off a few pelicans and getting back to life as normal. Let's be honest: it's going to be years before any cleanup effort makes any progress, and those can't go anywhere until the leaking is fixed permanently. Alaska is still recovering from the Exxon Valdez spill, and that was a small one compared to this. The industries based out of the gulf are SOL for the forseeable future. Worse yet, if the well is compromised upstream from the BOP and the relief wells don't work, stopping the leak altogether might be impossible. In that case... game over, man, game over. We'll be telling our kids what oysters tasted like.

Video games! After about 12 game hours of power levelling in Final Fantasy XII I had enough firepower to level that optional boss and cleaned some serious clock. Now I'm a few areas later in the game, after being in that one dungeon for a long time. I did breeze through quite a bit of those areas, seeing as I was about ten levels ahead of the curve, and armed with the bonus weapon I got for hustling that boss.

Portably, I'm at the end of Chrono Trigger DS, or what I can assume is the end. I'm banging out side quests to buff my dudes up so the last boss doesn't bend me over and have a friendly rape. My long history of having not played the game will be over soon.

E3 is behind us now, and I have to say, I'm not enthralled but I'm not entirely disappointed. I'm partially disappointed by things like the new Zelda. Ok, great, I get it, having a controller that you swing around the room gets the people that have never played video games before to feel included and gets them to play games like Dance Your Ass Off and Wii Bowling, but for Christ's sake, if you're going to make a REAL game (like Zelda), give those of us who are competent with a gamepad the ability to play with a real controller as an option. I was hoping futilely for a blurb about Demon's Souls 2 (if it even exists, which it may not) or Gradius VI, which of course was a pipedream. It does bother me that "Gradius Arc" seems to be something that exists that no one knows about. That alone is awesome, but the bothering part is that "Arc" was apparently at one time a nickname for what became the Playstation Move, leading to speculation that there is some kind of a tie-in. I swear to God and all that is holy: if a new Gradius game comes out but it has motion control, I will smash things.

After a fun string of good market choices, the past two weeks has seen the stock market toy with my emotions. Several long-standing sell orders were getting within a dollar of closing before everyone panicked and blamed BP for destroying the economy and the thing tanked and now my portfolio is as it was a month ago. Oh well. I am nothing if not patient.

That's enough for now.

So, I have some awesome news. My DSLR lens surgery was successful and my 18-55mm lens is back in action. If you're curious how a DSLR lens looks on the inside or how some of it works, check out the pictures I took of the repair process.

I will confess the fix is not perfect. I think I slightly overcorrected the problem and might have the aperture opened a bit too far by default, but as long as I can keep using the lens and not have it jam up, I am happy with it. Hurray!

Holy crap, June is here! What up? We had a pretty busy May, including a packed trip home two weeks ago (Memorial Day weekend) and a pair of parties just this weekend.

Vidya games, you say? Well, I'm still working on both Chrono Trigger DS and Final Fantasy XII. I'm actually stuck--voluntarily--in the latter. There is a particular tough optional boss battle in my current dungeon, and I am being a little punk about it and refusing to proceed until I beat him, which means spending tons of time building my team's strength and abilities to make them strong enough to administer the requisite beatdown. The funny thing will be once I finish him off and my guys are suddenly about 15 levels ahead of where they should be and I breeze through the rest of the game, having earned 90% of the licenses right here. As for the former game, I have also made significant progress and gone through a serious plot turn that I never saw coming and had never even heard about in the past 15 years. I haven't had as much time as I'd like for progress in either game lately, but I do what I can. We all do what we can.

I installed a third ceiling fan last week. This one was on an especially high ceiling, so I got to enjoy some fun top-of-ladder balancing and high-over-my-head reaching, much to my shoulders' chagrin. The most annoying part is the wiring. I admire the builders for using some decent heavy gauge wire in the ceiling of my house, but that stuff is a pain in the butt to manipulate once it's been nutted (giggity) to the fan wires. But it's all good. I'm still batting 1.000 on these things: they always work the first time I throw the switch and no breakers have been tripped. The next one will probably go in the basement, perhaps before the end of the summer. One of these days I'll probably document it.

One of my exciting projects this week will be to take apart my busted camera lens in an attempt to see if I can rescue it. I don't like the incorrectly exposed photos it takes, and in true me fashion I am going to attempt to fix it myself before forking over unnecessary cash to replace it. It will be an interesting little gambit... Lens, aperture=busted: Repair. Any Final Fantasy XII fans appreciate that one? Is this thing even on?

At work, I have been fighting with the SOAP beast. I call him Soapor, and I am conquering him by shoehorning some custom marshalling logic between the incoming request and the backend logic, and the backend logic and the outgoing response. You see, if the marshaller you're using at your server end doesn't like to properly handle "any" types, fixes like this become very useful. Although I am very interested in using interesting APIs and idioms in my little home and personal projects, SOAP has never been one of them.

I think I have successfully touched on a number of completely random topics, so I will leave you now with a promise to update when the lens surgery is completed (regardless of the disposition), and also a request that you keep it real.

I hit the driving range not once, but twice yesterday. For kicks, the little lady came along the first time and had so much fun we went back later at night when it had cooled off. After a few tweaks, I actually straightened out most of my drives and they were going very well. My irons game is still ugly, though. Which is bad, since, well, let's be honest, that's most of the game. I'll work on it.

In games of the video variety, I've kept plodding a little bit at a time of Final Fantasy XII. Call me a crazy oldtimer but I'm eating up the ability to run around for long periods of time and kill monsters and collect loot that can be sold later. I'm one of those people that will stop in every new area to buy all the best new equipment.

Surprisingly, while trying to get to sleep on Saturday night, I pulled the NDS off of the endtable where it had been gathering dust and fired up Chrono Trigger for the first time in... months? Embarrassingly, it actually took me a minute or two of fumbling in the blackness to remember how to turn the DS on. The last time I played, I was getting destroyed by the latest boss, but hopefully I can fix that next time I play.

All in all, a pretty cool weekend. This week is almost over and another weekend on the way, right?

We took a little trip to Georgetown yesterday. Guess what I took? Pictures.

This is a short post, but more likely to come.

An old skit on MadTV and also a good subtitle for many Final Fantasy games, Final Fantasy XII included.

I played for about two hours on Tuesday, and formed some initial opinions. The new combat system is going to take some getting used to. It reminds me vaguely of Secret of Mana, a spectacular game, with the combat. I haven't explored the "gambit" system for "programming" my teammates just yet. Curiously, Secret of Mana had a very, very basic way to control the behavior of allies, forming another weak connection. Regardless of how tenuous that link is, I am enjoying Final Fantasy XII so far. I'm still at that typical point in Final Fantasy games where the plot hasn't started itself and I'm spending more time being taught game mechanics than I am crushing evil empires.

Yesterday, contractors stopped by our house to address the issues we had reported on our warranty/service request. This was the second of two service visits, and the warranty is coming to a close, so it's time to start the structural modifications! Woohoo, bring on the escalator and the fire pole!

On that note, I've realized that my projects backlog has become like my finally under control game backlog. I have projects that are in limbo because they were preempted by other projects. I need to go back and finish some of the smaller ones before I continue with the newer ones. I also need to stop doing things like throwing a project aside because I accidentally lost a 2-3kB JSP file that took about an hour to write. It would be trivial to recreate, but hey, it's even more trivial to throw a temper tantrum.

Is it time to retire yet?

After a weekend push, I completed Valkyria Chronicles last night. Woohoo.

I very much enjoyed the game.

My next conquest will be Final Fantasy XII, which has been sitting in plastic wrap on the shelf for almost three-and-a-half years now. This is what serializing video games and having a backlog does. The good news is I am getting near the end of the queue. However, being a Final Fantasy game, I expect this one to take several months to complete.

I also did some golf practice over the weekend. I actually made some improvements to my swing that decreased the degree of slice. I'm having an issue with balls flying off center now--not slicing and curving in the air, just leaving the ground crooked--but I can compensate for that a little bit. It would be nice to fix it altogether. Let's see how that goes.

There's no football this week, which is disappointing. I'm flying solo this weekend (well, red dog will be with me, but he's not much company and he snores and farts when he sleeps) so I'll have to be sure not the burn the house down or do anything too drastic.

I might as well just come out and admit I'm disappointed that the Washington Capitals completely cocked up their playoff bid. They let the momentum shift and didn't address it properly. Additionally, the Canadiens' goalie was just unfazable. Oh well, there's always next year. There's always, always next year.

I managed to get my hands on a StarCraft II beta key. I haven't played the actual game yet, but I did check out the main menu. It's the mainest! I can't believe I'm not entirely foaming at the mouth about it, considering that this is... come on. It's StarCraft II. Maybe I'll get my clock cleaned this weekend.

The weekend will probably involve a combination of all of the following: work around the house, video games, development projects, TV, sleep, golf practice. I'll let you know which ones worked out at the debriefing in a few days.

What an odd weekend.

It began last Thursday, interestingly enough. On Thursday I had two migraine headaches within a few hours of one another, and this frustrated me very much. I hadn't had a migraine in months, so two in a row meant something was amiss. Although I used to get migraines all the time in high school, I had a prescription back in the day to prevent them and that worked. After college, I stopped taking the medication but the migraines did not return so I was convinced I had beaten them, and that whatever was to blame, be it dietary, behavioral, or random, was in the past. This was true for years, with only one or two in that time. And then last Thursday rolls around and I get knocked on my ass by two big ones in a row. I've had alot of migraines in my time, but the double migraine is always a day ruiner. So, I was not happy.

On Friday morning, I was still feeling pretty lousy, but I was glad they were over. However, I felt like another one could start at any second. There are little "tells" that I notice before one starts, and it seemed on Friday like these tells were teasing me. This was really lame, because I had a very important thing to do on Friday afternoon, and I didn't want a crappy paralytic episode keeping me out of it. Disappointed, I reached for my water bottle and started to twist the top off. At this point, I noticed that there were bits floating in the water. I immediately identified this as the drink mix (Propel) falling out of solution, so I shook the bottle to mix it back up and went to continue drinking. But at this very second, I had a House, MD-style epiphany and took a closer look at the bottle that had been with me every step of the way for the past three days.

At home, we have a number of reusable water bottles, and I usually carry one with me at all times, because I dehydrate pretty quickly and having water handy is very useful. I add the Propel to the water to make the plain tap water more palatable (trust me, of all the quirks I have, my aversion to unflavored water is a tame one.) and just go from there. Well, last week I bought a box of a flavor of Propel I did not intend to: lemon with added calcium. As soon as I mixed it up and tried it, I felt myself gagging. "This has an awful aftertaste!" I thought to myself--because it did. It tasted lemony and fresh but then suddenly kicked in with a rank chaser. I blamed the calcium additive and swore to avoid the added-calcium flavors in future purchases.

Compounding the situation was the fact that two of the water bottles that I frequently use are physically identical. I generally switch off every two or three days and stop refilling one bottle, put it in the dishwasher, and get a fresh bottle. It is my belief that at some point in the past week, I put my water bottle down next to the one that was identical. I intended to wash the one I had been using and refill the clean one. Instead, I believe I put the clean one in the sink and refilled the used one.

I say this because as I saw the water swirling in front of me in the bottle, I noticed the bits and flakes did not dissolve back into solution, and for the first time I noticed the tiny dots on the interior surface of the bottle. All the pieces of the puzzle came together in a slow motion mental moment. For three days, I had been upset that my water was tasting nasty because of the new Propel flavor, and I wasn't sure what had caused my migraines. Now I had the truth behind both mysteries sitting right in front of me: by using the same water bottle for a week straight, I had inadvertently been drinking water out a bottle that now had things growing in it. The little things had been making the water take absolutely nasty, not the new mix flavor, and in all likelihood it was the little toxic bastards that screwed my head up the preceding day.

And I had solved the mystery just in time to prevent it from ruining my very important Friday meeting. What was this most important of social events, in which I was angry I might not be able to fully participate? Well, it was the return of the Friday tradition of lore: Friday Fair Lakes football. Hurray! If I had to miss the return to the field because of a headache, I would have been emo all week long. But luckily, at nearly the last possible minute, I discovered that my own foolishness was to blame for this neurological flareup, and addressed the issue.

So how did the game go? Pretty well. There were about eight guys there, so they were decent sized teams, though the middle of the field, as always, got a little crowded during pass plays. I didn't have any touchdowns this week, nor many yards after my catches (due both to the crowded field and my own sluggishness to change directions at full "speed"), but it was just as much fun as I remembered it and with luck, the beginning of a new season. It was a crew of familiar-faced Friday football veterans, which made it all the more enjoyable. I'll ease off the alliteration for now. Shit is like a drug. (snort) Needless to say, I was sore on Friday night and Saturday morning.

When we weren't doing weekly weekend chores, I also slipped some Valkyria Chronicles in. I'm still enjoying it a whole lot, especially now that I have a second tank in my squad, as well as new advanced weapons because my soldiers' levels are getting higher. It helps that I am playing skirmish missions over and over again to build up experience points and money, basically playing to my love of "the grind." Yesterday I played for about two hours, and I played the same mission three times. I will play it another three times the next time I play. Believe me, it is a small price to pay to have the more advanced weapons and make the later missions more reasonable.

By the way, I bought a brand new water bottle lately to replace the nasty old one that I threw away. I mixed a fresh batch of that lemon with calcium Propel and took a drink. In reality, it is delicious.

Finally, after a disappointing game on Friday, let's finish this series tonight, Capitals.

Another week is almost behind us, but as usual the next one is stretching ahead like some kind of crazy temporal highway.

I'm leading up a development effort at work recently, and it's not the largest nor the most exciting project (as projects go) but it is at least some experience in the lead saddle. I dislike dealing with flawed abstractions and outside insistence on following previously applied (but broken) design patterns, but I think the design right now is looking pretty plausible. In my experience, the scale of development efforts, as expressed in terms of the amount of time they take to complete, can be sorted into three categories: one day, two weeks, and more than two weeks. This one falls into the final category.

Hey, let's go, Capitals! There have been some good games. Last night, they issued a complete old-fashioned beatdown, and one more win puts them into the second round. Can they go all the way this year? It would be cool. Actually, it would just be nice if that tart Sidney Crosby didn't win it again. If the Caps are the actual winners, that would be nice at a higher level.

Surprisingly, there's not a video game story in this headline yet. Well, here we go. After three tries, I finished that supertank level in Valkyria Chronicles and moved onto the next level, which wasn't too difficult, and now I'm on the level after that. I haven't played in a few days, but maybe this weekend I'll get a chance. Or maybe tonight. Or maybe I brought my Playstation 3 to work today and I'll whip it out (giggity) and play right here. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe go f%#$ yourself.

Alright, I gotta go work some of this work.

I stopped playing Valkyria Chronicles temporarily to play God of War III, and when I finished the latter, I was concerned I wouldn't find the inspiration to go back to the former. To give myself a chance to buy back in, I sat down with the tactical game a few days ago and reloaded my save that was about halfway through my latest mission--game chapter 6, if you're keeping score at home.

I was a bit worried that it wouldn't hold my interest, but then the stars aligned or something. A big tactical gamble on my part worked amazingly well: I had a lucky shot with an anti-tank lance and broke a hole in the enemy's defensive line. In one turn I swept my entire squad through a tiny opening in that flank, and found myself within meters of the enemy basecamp. In Valkyria Chronicles, you win if you reach the enemy basecamp. So, if I could get a pair of my boots to that flagpole before the enemy brought the hole in his line under control, I was in like nobody's business. I ended my turn (since I was out of actions) and watched as the enemy reinforced his basecamp with additional soldiers armed with machine guns and anti-tank lances, and slowly started bringing his tanks to address my incursion. Then, it was my turn. I moved one of my scouts up near the basecamp, so that he could spot all of the assembled troopers. There were about four or five of them there, waiting for one of my men to try to take that flag. Normally it would take a few turns of concentrated fire to clear that many enemies, but in this instance, I had an advantage. The enemy soldiers guarding the flag were necessarily close together in a defensive posture. This made it an ideal target for a mortar strike. So I ordered my tank to shell the area. The blasts killed half of the enemy infantry and threw the others clear of the flag. With none of them capable of defending anymore, my waiting scout rushed in and captured the base, granting an instant victory to my team. Awesome. One small twist of luck--that first lance hitting an enemy tank's radiator and opening the flank--had quickly repurchased my interest in the game. I am excited about this game again!

Of course, that meant I moved from chapter 6 to chapter 7, which is notoriously challenging. I learned why, last night. So far I've faced enemy tanks that might be something like the IT-2 PANTHER or the IT-4 COUGAR. Well, the primary target on chapter 7 is a tank the size of a locomotive that is probably designated in technical documents as the IT-99 FUCKYOU. Backing up that unstoppable armor is the titular Imperial Valkyria warrior, Selvaria Bles, left, and her "gatling beam spiral lance" which fires glowing blue beams of flaming infantry death and makes short work of any attempt to strike the tank. It is a tough mission, but I came really close to finishing it last night, and the next time I play, I hope to put it down. Hard.

Yeah, so that's how that is. The playoffs start tonight. Well, they started last night, but the important (AKA the Capitals) series starts tonight. I admit I probably won't see too much of the early games, but that won't stop me from being interested in the results.

It was spring cleaning weekend at home this past weekend and that mission continues this weekend. The house is looking brand new again, hurray! I have to get back out to the greens soon and work on my godawful swing. (Many people play golf. I play an identical game rulewise, but it should be called godawful when I play, because of how ugly it is.) Also, an old tradition might be coming back for this weekend! Let's check that out!

In other news, apparently someone is finally using the X-COM franchise to make another game, but it looks like it will be terrible. I'll follow the development to make sure. But for right now, I'm off to continue my own development tasks.

First of all, week 4 has been kicking my butt but I think I will finish it this week after one repeat.

Last night, I finished God of War III. I'm going to summarize what I think of the game here, and I think some of it will be controversial (in that what I say will disagree with what the two or three people that read this website that may or may not have played the game think of it).

This paragraph is heavy on end-game spoilers and I haven't yet implemented a spoiler-protection mechanism on this site (emphasis yet) so skip it if you just want the lowdown. Ok, so, in the end, Kratos, the inimitable, uncontrollable, irreverent bad boy of the beat 'em up genre finally achieves his ultimate revenge and kills Zeus, the king of the gods. However, Athena then tries to coerce Kratos into granting her effective power over the remaining world, and the ghost of Sparta finally gets fed up by being used by the gods of Olympus and tired of being bullied by people bigger than himself, takes his own life, not unlike an emo high schooler upset that the football team shoots spitballs at him in the cafeteria. I've read that some people look at this as a fitting end for the character, but is it really? Is this whimper of a finale, lying in a pool of his own blood on the ground, really the way it should have ended? I say, no. (It should be noted that the post-credit scene shows that Kratos had moved from his position, either by his own power or by being dragged, implying that he is not quite dead and will be making another appearance in the future. I personally think that makes it even lamer an ending as an attempt to set up either DLC or another game, when I believe the series has run its course and should have stepped out of the ring gracefully. More on this later.) Although I did expect the game might end with Kratos' demise, I expected it to happen in a Kratesque(tm) fashion, probably dying gloriously in battle or at least finally granting him his reprieve after three solid games of vengeance, frustration and guilt, reuniting him with his family in Elysium (perhaps the one district of Greek mythology he did not upend). At least a small part of me hoped that, given the cameo of Ares' lifeless body at the beginning of the game (as much of an inconsistency it presents), that the finale would include a rematch with the deposed Olympian god of war.

Spoilers complete, read away.

Here's what I think. The producers, as many others in the situation of having their hands on a wildly popular franchise do, got so wrapped up in the game and wanting to make it as epic as possible, that they ended up losing the feel of the game. In the original game, Kratos is on a mission and you learn about the depth of his character through revelations of his past and his motivations. The first game stands masterfully on its own and tells an engrossing story with a triumphant Kratos emerging at the end. The second game, although awesome and fun, starts by mooting the ending of the first game when it becomes clear that the Olympians are the new enemy. As much fun as it is destroying legions of monsters with whirling, flaming blades, God of War II felt much more shallow than the first game. Having heard almost all of the protagonist's story in the first game, the second game is spent learning a little bit about supporting characters (including the now apparently corrupt Pantheon) but mostly just breaking shit up. It then ends with a cliffhanger, the crutch of the media artist. A few years later, we receive God of War III, which picks up exactly where God of War II concludes, and Kratos is right back in the business of destruction. But by this point, all of the main characters are fleshed out as far as they're going to go and we're left with a shallow brawling game. Not to mention that the producers pulled just about every other well known Greek mythological personality into this one to beef up the cast. However, once the initial "wow look how epic this is!" shock/awe from the first couple hours of the game wears off--considering the second game did the same thing--God of War III becomes a soup of running around beating shit up. By this point it's old news. I am all for keeping solid gameplay as-is, but the plot of the third game seems so phoned in compared to the first game. Spoiler: whereas the first game had an interesting plot that intertwined through well known myths, the third game is pretty much a shopping list of killing every remaining character in a loosely connected story.

It pains me to say it but God of War III falls into the same trap as the Star Wars prequels: in an attempt to keep the energy of the franchise as high as possible, the game lost the feel of the original, and the series ended up collapsing under its own weight.

And there you have it. In conclusion, I believe that God of War III is the weakest of the series. Was it fun? Yes. But was it a fitting end to the series? Well, because profitable sequels trump mythos integrity in this day and age, it probably isn't even an end of the series. As I said earlier, it definitely should have been the finale, since few game universes possess the legs to go gracefully beyond three installments, but few (if any) producers are willing anymore to call it a day and close franchise doors for good. In the end, the dignity of the series as a whole suffers, and that's just sad, because the original God of War was a game that renewed my interest in mainstream gaming, and I don't like to see it fall into the same traps that made me lose interest in the mainstream in the first place.

So, it's back to Valkyria Chronicles for me.

In other news, now that I've possibly broken my previous record for the longest headline body ever, and shat all over one of the most highly reviewed games in recent memory: Spring is springing at long last! The cold weather is staging one last rush this week, but its chances of victory are nil. By the time the warm weather rolls in this weekend, I will be so ready to exploit it. I want to redo the ceiling pegboard in the garage to add capacity and increase stability (NERD), which will be a fun little project. Mowing the little backyard starts up again soon, as does practicing my ugly golf swing back there. I got a new laptop recently, after waiting over a month for it to ship, which is great because my old one was getting a little long in the tooth for even some commonplace tasks. It will be especially helpful now that I have a pile of development tasks at home (yes, at home) that I want to complete, ranging from the banal to the terrifying.

Ok, I have rambled on enough. There might be a rather vicious deadlock that I will have to look into in the lab over here, so I should probably go have a peek.

Good things are coming!

Oh, yeah, also, I picked up God of War III the other day and have been dishing out Spartan justice pretty consistently. It is a solid game, like the previous installations in the series, but has an unsettling number of quirks and bugs. However, the high degree of asskickery makes up for it, for the most part.