Posts in the Me category

There was a big debate on a videogame industry board I inhabit recently about night-owl vs. lark types (also known as chronotypes). This is a debate I’ve had with many people over the years, over and over again, and it typically takes this shape:

Why can’t you get to work at 10am? I:

• Have no problem waking up at 4am every morning, fit as a fiddle… or…
• Am a night-owl myself, and have trained myself to get up every morning – deal with it

… or many variations of the above.

So I did some research (and others did some research), and the upshot is that – as I expected – quite a large number of people in the video game industry are night owls if you do the right rigorous questionnaire and answer truthfully. Larger than the normal population by about 10%, in fact. And if you include the mostly night-owlish people with the extreme night-owls, that number goes up even higher.

(more...)

Talk delivered to a full room of producery types, and I feel really good It went down surprisingly well.

Producers! You are my people! (That’s why I married the best one I could find )

This is a little bit of a love letter to Darci. I hope you’ll indulge me for a second for doing this in public, but there were no Mother’s Day cards in the store that quite fit the “you’re so awesome and your quick thinking and instincts saved our daughter’s life” vein. Not even the ones that play music.

Darci,
You’re freaking awesome, momma bear (to steal one of Nichole’s phrases).

I’m truly blessed to have such an amazing woman in my life. Not only smart enough to rip my arguments to shreds in areas you’ve never even studied (like theoretical physics), but strong enough to handle two days of wondering whether or not your baby daughter was going to survive without turning into a gibbering wreck.

You truly are fantastic, and amazing, and the best mother I could imagine for my child. You are awesome.

I love you sweetie.

… and Alexandra owes her life to your quick thinking.

One of the largest drivers of people to my blog is my infrequent posts on my experiments with hangover cures. I get a thousand people a month who come here to look for a way to stop their head throbbing.

So I've got an idea. I'm going to put together a site dedicated to the topic. I bought the domain yesterday - it's http://hangovercentral.com and I'm aiming to have something up soon.

The idea is to have:

• Advice on how to fix your head or stomach hangover
• Advice on how to not get so drunk in the first place (ever wanted to sit down for vodka shots with a Russian General? Now you'll know how)
• Supplements/Foods/Etc that help - and exactly what's in them that help you
• Possibly some information on how to cure hangovers not caused by alcohol... (we're talking nicotine here... but possibly also other substances. Theoretically 1st Amendment law protects me here, but it's still a somewhat illegal topic. I've not tried any of these other substances, but I do have friends who have - and I know that my "after party mix" certainly helps them)
• A Bulletin Board where people can discuss drinking, hangovers, hangover cures etcetera

Thoughts?

So a while back, I invented a datastructure I call the Bip-Buffer. It's a rather neat little thing that if you pump data through it fast enough works pretty much as fast as a true circular buffer. It has a nice data-access pattern too, based around a reserve/commit transaction to push data in one side, and to pull data out of the other side.

It works. Lots of people use it. Some people claim they did it first back in the 90s on the Amiga, but they didn't publish. (Which means, sadly for them, they don't count. No point inventing something if you don't share the knowledge). The price you pay for fame and fortune is letting other people know what you did ;-)

The moral of the story? Give your algorithms unique names. You'll be able to see where they proliferate to. As a result, I can stake a claim on my own tiny little corner of computer science.

Anyway, this is all beside the point. Why am I posting this?

Because Age of Empires Online uses my BipBuffer code & algorithm. A friend of mine is working on the source right now, and he sent me a quick email to let me know it was in there. It's great to know that it's being used :)

(And because he sent me an email, he's actually meeting terms of the licensing agreement :-) )