J-Space.dk

It’s late, I’m heading to bed and I just finished a final heart-shaking revision of my short story for Blizzard’s 2010 Writer’s Contest.

The more I delve into re-reading it and correcting spelling errors, improving wording and generally trying to make a better story, the less I like it. I hope this is just a sign of high self-criticism and not a genuine understanding of the crappy quality.

We shall see. It has been submitted and I eagerly await judgement for the short story based in Sanctuary, called “On Earth”.

Well, good news on the fronts of bureaucracy. After a week of tugging back and forth I finally seemed to have convinced them that they did not need to request the dispensation. At least, indirectly. They wrote me Friday the 6th, delighted to announce that they had chosen to dispose of the rulings that required dispensations for my cases and, apparently, two other cases with the same situation.

Funky.

Well, I’m in and starting up this September. Everyone’s been quite constructive, like a wonderful upwards rollercoaster ride. Goody.

Also, I found this image while churning through my drives, cleaning up. I’d call it half-artsy, if it wasn’t because I know it was just a result of a crappy Windows 6.1 Mobile cellphone and bad exposure:

Enjoy…

I’ve put an application through to get into university. I’ve been getting the desire to learn again, the yearning to spend my days with my true peers, delving into nerdiness and IT goodness every day. A few years ago I’d made the attempt with Computer Sciences, failing miserably. Too much math. Too much “ooo, why do we program, man? HOW do we program, man? What’s important when we design the way we, as designers, interact with, and develop, systems with no real purpose? Ooooo.”, too philosophical. Dropped out, mostly because of the math, but in retrospect the core principles weren’t my greatest interests. But now I want back in, and after doing some serious research, I’ve fallen for Informatics, a parallel to Computer Sciences, but only in nature – ‘puters. And the institute they belong to. True, a Master of Informatics sounds like a stupid 60′s B-movie protagonist, but the principles in the studies are more interesting to me. More human interaction, more relevant app development, less fidgeting with assembly and compiler design. So, I want that. I need that.

Sent in the submission form electronically on the fifth of July (nothing symbolic there, I assure you) and patiently waited for a response while I prepared to get my affairs in order (warned the boss that he might get a rainbow-coloured “I QUIT!” mail, looked into money making while studying, that sort of thing). On the 30th, less than one minute past midnight, the results were out – the precision of the site says wonders about the nerds behind it; great job, guys. Oh, and I was admitted. Great cheer, happy mindset. I wrote the closest people in the social circle and gave them the news, they congratulated me, and I went to bed, content and excited like a kid on Christmas Eve. The day after I told the boss and started to untangle from whatever hellish projects I’ve put myself through there.

Strange, though, as I came home, a letter was in the mailbox. Surprisingly, it told me I had not been admitted. I was required to request dispensation from a university paragraph, colloquially called the “two year rule”. In short, it means that for you to continue your studies at the university, you must have completed all exams from your first year by the end of your second year. I’ll allow myself a gratuitous “WTF?!” here. I’ve asked to be admitted to a completely new line of studies, the only commonalities between the two being a single “don’t get mad at each other” two-hour course on the first year and the fact that they are both within the Computer Science department – basically. So why on Earth, why in the name of Picard’s beard, for the love of Deckard Cain, why am I required to seek permission to finish the first year of Computer Sciences?

To give you a quick run-down of what the rest of the blog post will be about, just look to the quote, “Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible”. This is Hell.

After reading the letter I promptly wrote the person who had graciously offered to answer any questions I may have about the situation. I asked her why they thought a six year old university statute, pertinent to a completely different scenario, was suddenly applied to me. Within a working hour (a weekend and 8 hours of breakfast for bureaucrats), she answered that due to my previous stint with Computer Sciences, and the (apparent) fact that they shared the same set of statutes required me to seek exemption from the two-year rule. For some reason, she chose to completely dodge my very direct question, instead rephrasing the now derelict point. I wrote her back, a longer wall of text giving her specific arguments against her point (the two strongest points being “I’m not trying to continue Computer Sciences” and “They haven’t shared statutes since 2007, so why that argument?”), asking directly who made the decision and where I should go to challenge it. The answer came a bit later this time, but again was as vague and useless as the previous. “Someone” (implicitly, from her writing, a proof reader and myself agreed that she was referring to her own department) had already made the decision, based on the same fucking statute she seemed all too fond of, and again argued about the shared rules between the two studies.

Couldn’t take it any more. I raged, I whined by myself, and sent mails out to other bodies she had reference in her communiqués, trying to seek an answer. Ironically, the chairperson of the group, that was to accept or refuse my request for exemption, had no idea what the hell I was talking about. Genius! The one person who is supposed to determine the course of the next five years of my life has no idea what to base that decision on. She was, however, quite a lot more helpful than Ms. Bureaucracy and offered to task her secretary with finding out exactly what was going on. I accepted, pleased that someone would rather spend a few resources on a good, final answer instead of throwing random garbage back at me in the hopes that I’d just give up by sheer hopelessness.

As of writing, I’m still waiting for that reply. The chairperson invited me to write her if I got impatient. I’ll give it another day, for now. I’ve written the exemption request and posted it to the secretary (a belated reply from Ms. Answerless finally confirmed that it was, apparently, the chairperson’s department that had made the decision – fuck, could have said that to start with and avoided the trouble), noting in the request that I’d like to get into Informatics, not Computer Sciences as everything they’ve sent me seems to point towards.

Fingers crossed. I’ve burned my bridges at work, and now the university likes to run around corners with me. Fucking thanks, God of Bureacrazy.

Alright, a Twittery status.

Red Dead Redemption. Status: 100% singleplayer completion, awaiting remaining trophies and online accomplishments.

Time for bed.

Okay, so I’m not updating much lately. Apologies. Nothing noteworthy going on right now

But I was just playing Red Dead Redemption, and managed to shoot my horse through the head whilst killing foxes in full gallop.
Question: great game realism or annoyingly bad design choice?

For a diversion, I’ve been rekindling myself with C, through it’s fucking distant cousin (though I should like to call it mother-in-law), C#.

For the first time in quite a while I’ve been forced to take care of proper type conversions to avoid type exceptions at every second corner. At once a wonderfully reassuring thing while also quite troubling. I’ve lost so much from the coddling of VBA and Python.

With a beta key in hand, I’ve gone to work dissecting and screwing around with the Galaxy Editor for Starcraft II (guess my shrinks right, I’m good to start, bad to finish).

The tool is extremely powerful, but is difficult to approach for programmers, I think. The scripting language itself is poorly documented as it is, and the only other way to create game logic is via triggers.

In Blizzard’s defence, that graphical approach is immensely powerful. Intelligently, you are only allowed to work with combinations in function calls and variables et al that actually makes sense (you cannot call the substring function when applying values to an integer, for example), essentially saving you typical type-restricting caveats normally encountered.

I’m trying to get a few more people I know in on the idea of an SC2 map or three – someone to keep me to it while I fiddle away.

On that note, anyone have a relatively straight-forward way to attach models or actors to other models or actors? … is that even the terms I’m supposed to be using?

In a way. Yes.

Why the HELL does a simple database connection have to encompass anywhere between 3 and 7 different object instances simply to be READY to work?

We have to make CodeSpeak a new de facto version of 133T5P34K, I am not kidding.

More to come.