It's easy to make the old new again. My little nephews are all about Majora's Mask 3D right now. Put a new coat of paint on the classics and no one will know the difference.

As of 4:30 PM this afternoon I officially have a position as full time security at Walt Disney World! It's not that I am super excited to be working for Disney like most, but I am just really happy to finally be out of Walgreens. Five of the eight years were wasted at that dead end job. After a while you seize to really learn anything knew or helpful as a clerk.

I still don't know where I am going to be placed within the massive land but training starts Monday. Yay for getting paid to take classes that I have already taken!

PG 134 wrote:As of 4:30 PM this afternoon I officially have a position as full time security at Walt Disney World! It's not that I am super excited to be working for Disney like most, but I am just really happy to finally be out of Walgreens. Five of the eight years were wasted at that dead end job. After a while you seize to really learn anything knew or helpful as a clerk.

Where are you going to be stationed at? I work at the Ticket and Transportation center right outside Magic Kingdom.

I have not been informed yet. Monday will be business casual and the rest of the week will be going to training in uniforms. I'm assuming The Hub information will be set up and assigned locations will be given at some point. My friends are hoping I am Magic Kingdom as they work there but I'm stuck wherever they choose to put me for at least 6 months. 2nd and 3rd week just refer me to the hub.

There were about 32 people in our traditions group for Security and we appeared to be the only group of staff with little to no information given before Saturday. hahaha

PG 134 wrote:I have not been informed yet. Monday will be business casual and the rest of the week will be going to training in uniforms. I'm assuming The Hub information will be set up and assigned locations will be given at some point. My friends are hoping I am Magic Kingdom as they work there but I'm stuck wherever they choose to put me for at least 6 months. 2nd and 3rd week just refer me to the hub.

There were about 32 people in our traditions group for Security and we appeared to be the only group of staff with little to no information given before Saturday. hahaha

The schedule on The Hub isn't very specific half the time, then again I don't know what it will say for security since I'm merchandise. I'm pretty sure you can still see abbreviations (MK, EC, AK, HS, DS). Even if you want to be at Magic Kingdom, I suggest Disney Springs if you ever get bored of where you're at. I worked at Disney Springs for over a year before transferring and the security there told me there was always something for them to do every night there.

Planning a road trip this weekend/next week to visit a few law schools, the highlight of which will be attending a speaking engagement by Justice Sotomayor! Should be interesting stuff, especially given the recent death of Scalia.

Have fun, NemZ! She ought to have a lot of interesting things to say.

My grandson in Germany has been recommended to move on to Gymnasium when he changes school; I gather this is a good thing.

I've managed to work out for the past few weeks more consistently than I have for the previous 30 years. Every day on which circumstances permit (which has been 5-6 days per week), I work out a few muscles enough that I'm sore the next day, which I understand to mean I successfully induced the body's muscular improvement process.

How did I get here?

I'll start with how I didn't: Last year, I made a new year's resolution. It didn't work. When the one-year mark came and went, I'm not sure I even noticed, because self-flagellation over insufficient motivation is such an obvious death spiral. For whatever reason, I just wasn't ready to make a habit of working out.

Now here I've already done it and it just kinda happened. What changed, when nothing worked before?

I started doing it every day.

There's more to it than that, of course. The keys that made it work for me are my own. One of these is that I hate to sweat but love to shower and especially love to shower after getting sweaty. Of course, this was true even before I developed this recent habit; what made this time different is that I began to do it every day.

Even doing it every other day just didn't work; even that was too complex an algorithm for my habit-brain to understand. I've known myself long enough to know that any habit I have that's not tied directly to some external trigger, I will do either every day (circumstances permitting) or sporadically at best.

With working out, this was hard to work out because one piece of advice I got early in my weightlifting "career" was to "never go three days straight working out, never go three days straight without working out". I even knew back then that I would be more likely to stick with it as a real habit if I did it every day, but I really didn't want to risk hurting or even just impeding myself by violating that rule.

But one day recently, I just stopped giving a fuck about that concern, and after that third day in a row I figured I might as well keep it up. I've kept it up ever since, missing days only when it becomes difficult to find part of me that's not sore to work out or when I have company over occupying my workout space.

Monk Ed wrote:With working out, this was hard to work out because one piece of advice I got early in my weightlifting "career" was to "never go three days straight working out, never go three days straight without working out".

If you do different muscle groups on different days, then that has the same effect of giving them time to recover . Alternatively, you could aim for this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu5iNUMuc8

Not sure if FML or RML, so I'm going to try to keep it positive.

Today I worked 10.5 hours with no break. My other opener was two hours late, and I was by myself to put away the food order and prep food. On top of that, my midshift called off sick, and so when my opener finally got in, it was just us two until 2pm while we were trying to catch up on food prep while simultaneously making orders and keeping the lobby clean. Was a challenging day, yet also quite fulfilling at the same time since everything worked out as it needed to. Kept up a positive attitude and just kept moving. Worked hard, and now it's time to go home and rest hard.


One cool thing about the day is the people from the coffee shop next door brought some over to us in exchange for burgers. Coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee.

I've taken a two-month hiatus from my meager job as a dishwasher at a local sushi/ramen restaurant to explore 3D modelling, and I've become quite comfortable with the results:



It's mostly been weapons for Research & Destroy, a first person shooter in development by the Nanoyagi Development Team in Unreal Engine 4 with heavy science fiction, RPG, and roguelike elements, but most of this is applicable towards my other projects. The only snag I've hit is texturing, as these models aren't exactly low detail - the first one alone has something along the lines of 10k faces, and I'm looking to produce current-gen/next-gen level graphics, so they can't be low-resolution. Still, this does give me something worth building a proper CV with...

Somebody likes the AR-18.

BobBQ wrote:Somebody likes the AR-18.

Yes, yes I do. It's actually a weapon modified from the basic AR-18 design, the idea being that it is a stamped-steel weapon that makes a cheap yet reliable counter to contemporaneous weaponry (the bullpup MARS B and the M-16-derivative Kaiserli 61) using 6.66x48mm cartridges (an as-yet-fictitious intermediate cartridge intended to bridge/replace the 5.56 and 7.62 NATO cartridges). Whereas the MARS B is an advanced (and mechanically complex) weapon and the Kaiserli 61 requires the same manufacturing processes as the AR-15, this rifle basically requires little more machinery to fabricate than a Kalashnikov (barring the polycarbonate stock, pistol grip, and handguard) while possessing similar range and accuracy (6.66mm bullets are, until RL testing is a possibility, given an effective range of 800-1000m, similar to the EM-2/.280 British).

I have to work on other models at some point; armor, gadgets, drones, eventually people...and aliens.

All right, spent half a day with telephone techs installing the fiber-optic line, which I was told to be 30Mbps without caps. Had to because almost everyone has a wireless-enabled gadget and they all eat up bandwidth. Also got my hands dirty trying to reconfigure the two routers so that they can be used to spread out the signal.

And here, grabbing a copy of The Witcher from Steam.

From the looks of it, I think we're the first on the block to have 30Mbps. A bit mite expensive, but fucking bandwidth flowing like free water.

I took my first real look at system administrator jobs recently and was happy to see that I might actually be qualified, or on the path to it.

System administration isn't my dream job, but neither is doing game programming at an established company. The real dream is to make the games I want to make, to which even getting a game programming job is just a means to an end. I don't especially even like programming, not for its own sake; I'd rather spend all day dreaming up game mechanics and then tell someone else to make it happen. I want to be Kojima, not Carmack.

What I'm thinking now is that getting a sysadmin job or some work-from-home programming job might be another viable path to that same end goal. I figure, with a job that lets me work from home, I'll have more time and energy to work on games on the side (because I won't have to commute) until it takes off as something I can do full-time. And if it does, I won't be in the awkward position of looking like I've abandoned an employer as soon as I was done using them as free training to get into a position to compete with them.

The big downside of that approach is that I'd lose out on the chance to get experience as an insider before I go indie, and from what I know, that's the path to success in the indies (is to first get experience, not to mention connections, at a major company).

...But I really, really like going to bed at sunrise and spending warm afternoons outside on my laptop, so I'm torn.

So, while I am happy about the decision I made today, it is slightly FML. Last April I graduated with a Masters degree in political science, and my thought process was " I am done with school, hopefully forever." 11 months later, I am still unemployed, not even an interview, and no prospects for such. That's the FML part. The good news is today I accepted an offer to study for a Masters in Public Policy and Public Administration and I will be returning to Ottawa this fall. So, while I have to return to school , I'll get a much more marketable degree which is designed to get employment, rather than abstract nonsense like " what would Aristotle think about the Cosmopolitan Theory as it relates to international trade in a post-Cold War Neo-liberalized pre-colonialism post-colonialism Drumpf North America."....... That's obviously an exaggeration but it felt like it sometimes.

Anyways, while the kind of feels like a step backwards in some aspects, I know a lot of people in the city and made a good impression at the school, for the most part, and most importantly it's going to give me a chance at a Co-op position with the government which will give a much-needed practical experience. I just hope 3.0+1.0 comes out before I accumulate a total of 3 degrees between films!

For the past six or so weeks I have been working on one bug report at work, details not terribly germane, but having to do with how when replicating virtual machines, they don't always completely acquire their own separate identities, this one having to to with arcana of IPv6. My first attempt was limited, general purpose, and precisely targeted to update the identity at the earliest point where we knew what it was; and the change seemed to work just fine -- except in some environments (ones which were not affected by the original problem) the machine would lose some of its networking.

So, back to the drawing board, and trying to work out where the sticky information was coming from, and how exactly to suppress it; a process which took the bulk of those weeks, during which I learned more about grubby bits of low-level Windows than I ever wanted, managed to raise a number of bugs against other bits of our code which I was working against, and found yet another bug in the .net framework that I needed to work around.

But tonight I got a series of successful test runs for the last and most recalcitrant corner case, and the code is now out for review.

Next up, there is another bug report where, when replicating virtual machines, they don't always completely acquire their own separate identities...

Tomorrow will be my last day at work ever - think of that!

pwhodges wrote:Tomorrow will be my last day at work ever - think of that!

And then we get you back! That's RML for everyone!