Hopelessly decadent

What is it a sign of when you start to keep a bottle of fortified wine in your filing cabinet at work? But honestly, it makes sense, because often I want to go to someone's house in the evening, and then I can reliably bring a bottle without having to go home, or to a shop, if I don't want to.

Source control for temporary projects

It really is ridiculous how much more stuff I get done when I'm on a roll. I admit I haven't always been good at putting everything in source control, especially little bits that somehow don't feel like planned projects. But I'm here to assure you that it is always worth it.

I finally set up a subversion repository on my home machine for the flash game (and anything else). Installing subversion and tortoise_svn (graphical client #1) took literally less than five minutes, and paid for itself in productivity in the *next* five minutes, which I swear would have taken an hour otherwise. Do it. Put the text documents in there as well.

Flash's action-script is not 100% the most convenient language. But you *can* rip it out of the flash file and nestedly #include it, allowing simple flicking back and forth between dev vesion and release version, orthogonal development of game logic and level design, etc. Rock on.

Dude, Where's My Car

Dude, Where's My Car is a lot funnier the third time than it was the second. Somehow all the peurile Bill-and-Ted-esque humour just clicked. A definite stoner classic, aka "good bad film".

I promise not to make you watch it, though :)

Tired, happy but surreal

I think I mentioned this year is going well? But last week, particularly Tuesday evening, I was tired and happy, but everything just seemed a touch surreal:

* I found myself describing sleep in phrases like "falling contentedly into the arms of Morpheus"
* I spilt Ribina from the jug as I was pouring it. "Quick, arms, stop pouring," cried my brain. However, it all went onto a large plastic bag, and got poured away without ever touching the table.
* I couldn't find the binbags. Which is very weird when you're preparing for a party. I'm sure I *had* some. I never put them anywhere *other* than the cupboard under the sink. But no.
* I rescued the free Kind Hearts and Coronets DVD from the Daily Mail it came in and threw it out, but all afternoon spent wondering "Why is there a Daily Mail there? Whose is it? Oh yes, it's mine."
* After my party, the toilet paper disappeared. I'm sure there was most of a roll beforehand. Was someone ill? Sympathy, I didn't *notice*. Did someone steal it? No, there were the right number of tubes. It doesn't matter at all, it just makes me feel like there are gremlins, and I very much like being in control of my environment :)

FAQ

The concept of FAQ has grown too large. How do you distinguish between a FAQ for: "What is this damn thing anyway?" and "OK, I've got it. What do I do now?"; and a FAQ for "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if [it did this implausible idea]" and "I was wondering. You write software. Will you go on a date with me?"?

I think the second is more *really* a FAQ, as in a section which wouldn't have a name if FAQ didn't exist. The first could be called a tutorial, or introduction, or manual. But the FAQ has made the first it's own, in a useful way. Should they have different names?

(Of course, some people extrapolate this trend to questions that *ought* to be asked, or they wish they would ask. But that's still morally the user guide. They're generally funny too.)