Small Victories

I’m on the bus again, and for the first time since I’ve been home, it’s thundering out. I love being in the city during thunderstorms. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s the thunder in combination with the huge, imposing buildings that gives me a feeling that I am surrounded by powerful forces. Sort of like being in the mountains, perhaps. Anyway, I’m rather wet right now because I don’t have an umbrella, largely because I’m heartbroken over the loss of my old umbrella. It had this awesome, snappy deploying action that made me feel like a superhero or something. Rest in peace, umbrella.
So this afternoon I went to the vending machine and bought a bag of chips, as I often do. However, this time the bag felt abnormal in some way. I checked the date on the bag and found out that the chips were 22 days past the expiration date. Now, if I had just eaten them and then found out about this, I would not have been too upset, but I couldn’t go into a bag knowing it was old like that. So I read the back of the bag and found the customer service phone number. I called this nice lady from Dallas, who sounded inordinately concerned about the freshness of my Fritos. She asked me a few questions (some about my information, some about the bag) and then promised that I would receive a coupon for a “replacement” in a week or so. It it’ll be at least 2.5 OZ of chips coming my way. But the fun didn’t stop there.
I went back to the vending machine, and read a phone number that went to the people who run the vending at the Travelers Home Office. I called the number, and this woman was totally uninterested in my plight, but she did give me instructions on how to get money back. She said, “Throw out the chips and go down to the express cafeteria and tell them you need a refund.”. So, not only am I not presenting the chips to the people down there, but she also didn’t ask me what my problem with the vending machine was. When I told her, she didn’t care, which is a bit unsettling because I was hoping to get some assurance that fresher food would be on my floor in the future. So I went downstairs and got a bag of chips (which expire Jul 15, so I had plenty of time to savor the flavor). Boris, one of my coworkers, offered to eat the expired chips. Thus we got three bags of chips for $.75. Heck, that’s almost production cost
The funny thing is, the woman from the vending company cut me off before I stated any problem, so I could have been calling her to complement the fine quality of products offered, and she would have offered me a refund! Well, now I know where to go if I need some spare change… (kidding)
At the end of last week, I finally got mconsole (one of my projects.. I’d link to my project page but my site is down) working fully. My dad used it last night, and it’s a really good setup right now. The controls aren’t exactly obvious, but it’s possible to figure everything out, which is one of the goals of the interface. It’s up to Tim to decide where the project goes from here, as my needs have been satisfied.
The wheels of GSG (the Good Space Game) are beginning to turn. GSG was a 3d space shooter game that Tim, Matt K and I worked on freshman year. The code has a lot of good parts, but was not strong enough to sustain prolonged development. We were using a lot of technologies with which we were not familiar, which made it difficult. The current plan is to implement a second version (first release) of GSG during our senior year. Implementation, however, is one of the easier parts of the project, if done correctly. We plan on spending the next year in a planning and research phase of the project, which is fitting for our busy schedules and the huge scale of the project. I’m in the process of completing an exhaustive overview document for the project, outlining my ideas for its functionality and methods for development. I’ll throw these up on my site once it’s done I’m pushing pretty hard to make sure that this iteration of the project is done in a well-planned, methodical way, unlike most of our projects. That’s not to say that this method is necessary on the others, it’s just that this one is so big that coding in an ad-hoc, hackish manner will cause the project to fail in my opinion.

Wow…
there are like 1.5 feet of water on the road I’m on right now.. I’m not exaggerating.. this is wild. It’s like driving through the ocean.. a ‘wave’ just went over this guy’s hood and now he’s stuck in the water on the side of the road. That’s really rough. I sure am glad I don’t have to wait for a ride at the bus stop in this weather. As the bus drives in the puddles on the side of the road, the plume of water reaches higher than the top of the bus. It’s like I’m in India or something. I wonder what would happen to my laptop if the bus were hit by lightening. Ooh, hail Awesome.

I love storms.