General Ramblings comments edit

This weekend was pretty eventful, and full of lots of fun stuff (and a few not-so-fun things).

Saturday, Jenn, Stu, Tif, and I all went to the first birthday party for the son of one of my coworkers, Vishwa. He’s Indian, so the party was all done up Indian style, and it was amazing. I mean, the guy went all out, and it totally showed. Folks were dressed up in traditional garb, there was more wonderful food than you’ve ever seen in one place, and people all over were having fun. I met some of the crazy uncles Vishwa has and had a total blast. Vishwa’s son was running around dancing and was totally cute in his little suit, bouncing up and down to the music. Great fun, plus it really shows me how little culture the US offers with respect to parties and the like - this was worlds better than any little kid’s birthday party I’ve ever been to. If that’s what they do for a first birthday, I’m curious to see the 18th or 21st!

Unfortunately, we had to leave a little early because my sister, Tori, and her fiancee, Brandon, changed their plans at the last minute and decided to come down this weekend instead of some time next month. I hadn’t met Brandon yet, so this was my opportunity. In fact, it was everyone’s opportunity, including Stu and Tiff, so we all carted down to West Linn to visit the parental units and meet Brandon. A bit of talking, some eating, and a little Donkey Konga later, and we were on our way home. Mission successful.

Sunday Stu came over and we did a little gaming. We finished up Super Mario Sunshine and, needing more Mario-based torture, headed out to the game store where Stu picked up Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. We made quite a run at that (it’s pretty cool) and called it a night around 7:00p. Looking forward to this weekend and maybe running a little more Paper Mario. Gaming like that actually is way more enjoyable, even on a one-player game: if one person can’t beat the bad guy, the other person can, so you never get stuck and always feel like you’re winning. We’ve got that down to quite the system now. After that: 24: The Game.

Monday… ugh. Besides some gaming (We Love Katamari), there were a couple of irritants. Nothing to get too worked up about, but annoying at best.

First, my router. I decided to update the firmware on my router to have the latest security updates and so forth. Ever have a three-minute task turn into an hour-long nightmare? Yeah, me too. Turns out there’s this interesting and entirely undocumented feature that appears in the latest version of the router firmware called “SecureEasySetup.” Supposedly it’s one-click security setup for the router. In reality, it’s one-click destruction of your wireless network. Lesson learned: don’t click the “SecureEasySetup” link. Just configure the router the usual way. A reset button push and reconfiguration of all of my router settings, and I’m back in business.

Second… our master bathroom mirror was pretty dirty, so I decided to clean it. Got out the Windex and some paper towels, sprayed the mirror, started wiping. Turns out Jenn had this precariously perched Dixie cup full of Listerine with her toothbrush soaking in it. I ended up knocking that over, so there’s four ounces of Listerine all over the counter and running over the edge.

I’m not sure if you know how much four ounces is. You know how you rinse with, like, a capful of Listerine? Four ounces, when spilled on the counter, is roughly 227.6 capfuls. Yeah, it’s a lot of Listerine.

I started mopping that up, fast as I could, but it had already soaked down Jenn’s necklace that was laying on the counter, and her prescription bottle, and some apricot body wash… So I picked up the necklace to rinse it off, but couldn’t rinse it in that sink because Jenn had something soaking in fucking Woolite in that sink.

Moved the Woolite-soaking clothing to a different bathroom. Came back and rinsed off the necklace, pill bottle, body wash. Noticed that the Listerine has gotten into some candle holders that sit on the edge of the bathtub below the counter (where the Listerine overflowed off the counter) and is also on the damn iron because, for some reason, the iron is also on the edge of the bathtub.

Did you know that Listerine doesn’t just wipe up? I didn’t. You actually need to scrub with soap because just water leaves a sticky Listerine mess.

Went and got the bathroom cleaner, cleaned the entire counter (which involved moving countless hair maintenance articles - brush, clips, rubber bands, etc.), got everything back where it goes.

That’s when I saw that I didn’t get the mirror cleaned up to begin with and the Windex has dried on there so I had to start that whole process over.

Needless to say, there was a short conversation about precariously perched cups full of Listerine and the sheer quantity of shit on the bathroom counter that has a home and needs to go back to its home when it’s done being used and what the fuck is the iron doing by the bathtub anyway. All straightened out, at least for another two or three days. Back to your regularly scheduled program.

General Ramblings comments edit

Been playing Soul Calibur III for several weeks now trying to beat Chronicle 20 in the “Chronicles of the Sword” mode. The last guy is Strife, a level 50-something knight who kills you in about three hits.

I entered that stage as a level 45 character. By the time I beat Strife, I was a level 89. Stu and I had fought this guy so many times, we were calling 10 runs through the level “a unit,” and we had put in several “units.”

The ironic thing is that it wasn’t my level 89 character that beat Strife, but a level 40 character that I had just created. Here’s what you do:

Create either a Sword Master or a Sage character. Play enough battles to unlock the Soul Calibur weapon for the Chinese Blade discipline and equip your character with that. When you fight Strife, just mash on the A button (horizontal attack). Don’t hit anything else. If he gets a shot in, just stand up and keep mashing A. The trick is that the Chinese Blade Soul Calibur is fast enough to hit Strife and not let him get a strike in. Even if he blocks, eventually he’ll let down his guard and try to hit you, but you’ll be too busy smacking him with Soul Calibur.

It’s a sort of slow process since each strike only takes a little sliver of his health away, but that’s the way to go. (Interestingly enough, this strategy works against most of the AI characters. You can get a level 1 guy to beat a level 60 Astaroth just with this technique.)

vs comments edit

I’m working on some funky embedded resource stuff where I’m embedding all nature of files into an assembly so I can extract and use them on the fly later. In doing that, I’ve come across an interesting behavior in Visual Studio.

Say I embed two .resx files. One will be called “Strings.resx” and one will be called “Strings.en.resx” - the former is the default set of resources, the latter is the English-specific resources. I set the Build Action on these to “Embedded Resource” to tell Visual Studio to embed them. That looks like this:

Solution Explorer and Properties Window with an embedded resource in Visual Studio

I build my solution and behind the scenes Visual Studio realizes the .resx file is actually resources, does a little resgen action on it for me, and links the generated resources into my assembly. In the build output, I’ll see that I have my primary assembly and a subfolder called “en” that contains an assembly with the English-specific resources I embedded. This is all as expected.

Now rename those files because you don’t want the behind-the-scenes-resgen thing to happen. In fact, let’s call them .js files, just to change things up. Leave them embedded, though.

Solution Explorer and Properties Window with an embedded resource in Visual Studio

I expect that when I build my solution, my final assembly will have two files embedded - Strings.en.js and Strings.js. You know what happens?

You still get two assemblies. The primary assembly has Strings.js embedded in it, and the satellite assembly in the “en” subfolder of your build output has the Strings.en.js file embedded in it, renamed to Strings.js. Not at all what I was expecting.

I suppose you might have thought you could infer that, maybe, from the .NET Framework Developer’s Guide on Creating Satellite Assemblies, but they only talk about the creation of .resources files and how that all gets linked into satellites. No one mentioned anything about a pseudo intelligence splitting things up for me.

I’m not sure I like it. For the project I’m working on, it’s really throwing a wrench in the works, I’ll tell you that.