My mind is running in top gear again. I'm thinking of some last minute ideas for my role at the Call of Heroes roleplaying weekend that starts this evening. Sunday afternoon we will have the first Maerquin plot and storyline discussion with the new team.
While I usually have the Monday off, I've switched that for the Fridays in these last weeks before moving house, so there's no sleeping late and relaxing on Monday this time. And if working the day right after an intensive weekend was not enough, silly me also proposed having a first chat about the possibilities of founding our own consultancy-like-small-business-thingy with Martijn, one of my colleagues. I wouldn't be me if I wouldn't already have some mind gears dedicatedly spinning for that subject...
On the good side, only two weeks on full throttle left, and then the easy and relaxing part of making our new house ready for living in starts. Cough.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
T minus three weeks
Today my broker called me with a confirmation. Three weeks to go, then a new period in my life will start ... we'll finally have our new home. There will be a lot to do, and most things will fall together in the last two weeks of December. I'm getting more and more anxious. It's a large and stressful step, but one I'm really looking forward to.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Night of the Proms 2008
Last night my girlfriend and I went to the Night of the Proms in Ahoy' (Rotterdam). I can only say that it was definitely worth it, with mixtures of classical music, golden pop songs and some hilarious acts. Seeing fireworks seer by right in front of us during the Ouverture 1812 was especially impressive and actually brought tears to my eyes. Looking forward to next year's edition :)
Monday, November 17, 2008
The good type of lead
Back home from my first Maerquin roleplay weekend as a gamemaster. Early last week I heard that one of our crew members had broken her leg. Hence, neither she as one of the plot writers or her husband as one of the gamemasters, could be at the event. So I was asked if I could help out instead of being "just" an NPC...
So... Friday. Early train, shopping, gathering props, driving to the terrain, and before you know the afternoon is over and the first players arrive. I think I've been sitting down for about 2 or 3 hours between Friday 8 PM and Sunday 2 PM. The rest was walking or standing. Add about 12 hours of sleep over three days, and the result is that my legs still feel as lead.
But it's a good type of lead. I've seen brilliant plays, overheard many interesting discussions, and had great fun with the rest of the crew. It goes too far to write down a "short" summary of what happened, but basically, the players' task was to reinstate the balance between the gods and bring them back in the pantheon after the tenth god appeared and cleared the pantheon from all but one other. And for some gods, that went significantly better than for others...
Nevertheless, there is a new balance now, and only time can tell what happens next. I'm already excited and nervous about twisting time in my favour though :)
So... Friday. Early train, shopping, gathering props, driving to the terrain, and before you know the afternoon is over and the first players arrive. I think I've been sitting down for about 2 or 3 hours between Friday 8 PM and Sunday 2 PM. The rest was walking or standing. Add about 12 hours of sleep over three days, and the result is that my legs still feel as lead.
But it's a good type of lead. I've seen brilliant plays, overheard many interesting discussions, and had great fun with the rest of the crew. It goes too far to write down a "short" summary of what happened, but basically, the players' task was to reinstate the balance between the gods and bring them back in the pantheon after the tenth god appeared and cleared the pantheon from all but one other. And for some gods, that went significantly better than for others...
Nevertheless, there is a new balance now, and only time can tell what happens next. I'm already excited and nervous about twisting time in my favour though :)
Monday, November 10, 2008
Inspiration
<Pink> Zoals lucumo ooit zei: 02:17:13 <lucumo> Ik snap het echt niet. Ik heb 5 minuten gecode. Maar 5 minuten geleden was het 2345h!
(A quote on IRC, as registered by Pink, the channel bot: "As lucumo once said: 02:17:13 <lucumo> I really don't get it. I've coded for 5 minutes. But 5 minutes ago it was 2345h!")
At a slightly smaller scale, I had the same today, and I'm not too unhappy about it. Not while coding, but while writing other stuff. I got an idea this evening and after about half an hour of twisting and turning, suddenly the lock clicked and my mind started to unravel. Fifteen minutes later, two hours had passed. And the start of a new D&D campaign is the result. Now only to convert the ideas into actual adventures, and find players and time to play... Guess that the former will be easier than the latter. Or will it?
Saturday, November 8, 2008
When sed and awk come together
I prefer the filenames of my MP3 collection to be a bit useful, and consistent at that. Hence, instead of Track 01.mp3 I would much rather see 01 - Title of the Song.mp3, and the same holds for 01_title_of_the_song.mp3. Please give me a nice title-cased name, it's so much friendlier to my eyes.
For the latter, replacing the underscores by spaces is trivial with sed, but uppercasing the first letter proved to be a bit harder. Using sed's y command is not an option, since it transforms all characters in its input. Would there have been the option to only transform the first occurrence, I would have been happy. But alas, no such luck.
At first I thought I had found the solution here, but unfortunately, using the proposed \U and \E turned out to be a no-op. But the solution was nearby, and so my command line became
for a in *.mp3; do mv "$a" "`echo $a | sed -e 's/_/ /g' | awk '{print toupper(substr($0,1,3)substr($0,4,1))substr($0,5)}'`"; done
Now I only need to capitalise a few additional letters. Much better!
Edit: It turned out that I was fooled by my own "knowledge" of regular expressions. Using \d does not really work in sed. It's now for a in *.mp3; do mv "$a" "`echo $a | sed -e 's/_/ /g' -e 's/\([a-z]\)/- \U\1\E/'`"; done :)
For the latter, replacing the underscores by spaces is trivial with sed, but uppercasing the first letter proved to be a bit harder. Using sed's y command is not an option, since it transforms all characters in its input. Would there have been the option to only transform the first occurrence, I would have been happy. But alas, no such luck.
At first I thought I had found the solution here, but unfortunately, using the proposed \U and \E turned out to be a no-op. But the solution was nearby, and so my command line became
for a in *.mp3; do mv "$a" "`echo $a | sed -e 's/_/ /g' | awk '{print toupper(substr($0,1,3)substr($0,4,1))substr($0,5)}'`"; done
Now I only need to capitalise a few additional letters. Much better!
Edit: It turned out that I was fooled by my own "knowledge" of regular expressions. Using \d does not really work in sed. It's now for a in *.mp3; do mv "$a" "`echo $a | sed -e 's/_/ /g' -e 's/\([a-z]\)/- \U\1\E/'`"; done :)
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Wine rocks
When reinstalling my desktop, I left my Windows setup alone so that I could still play some games. Yet, rebooting only to play a game is not really ideal. I knew that Wine supported a number of Windows games quite well already, but I did not expect so much change since the last time I checked. So, when hearing that even World of Warcraft is quite nicely supported in Wine version 1.1.7, I could not resist checking if that was really the case.
And indeed it is. It took me some time to get it all running, but that was mainly due to one hurdle, being my graphics card. Eventually I found out that I had to compile a new kernel module for it (yay, NVidia) in order to get proper OpenGL support. On the other hand, it now runs just as if it were under native Windows: smooth enough as long as you don't enter Shattrath ;)
On the left screen: WoW... On the right screen: Nothing, but just enough to show that it runs :)
And indeed it is. It took me some time to get it all running, but that was mainly due to one hurdle, being my graphics card. Eventually I found out that I had to compile a new kernel module for it (yay, NVidia) in order to get proper OpenGL support. On the other hand, it now runs just as if it were under native Windows: smooth enough as long as you don't enter Shattrath ;)
On the left screen: WoW... On the right screen: Nothing, but just enough to show that it runs :)
Monday, November 3, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Sign here, please
Oh, and there, and there, and there ...
Last week I had the pleasure to sign both my mortage request (and all the added insurances that apply) and the buying contract. The former comprised much more documents, but the latter one had to be signed on each page.
But the good news is that we are one step closer to moving. Yay!
Last week I had the pleasure to sign both my mortage request (and all the added insurances that apply) and the buying contract. The former comprised much more documents, but the latter one had to be signed on each page.
But the good news is that we are one step closer to moving. Yay!
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