Geek With A Life

Anonymous asked: During your first year as an ID Tech Camp instructor, how long did it take you to hear back after applying?

I actually don’t remember too clearly, but I think I heard back sometime in mid January. Maybe a bit earlier than that. It partly depends on when you applied, and what you applied for. I applied the first day applications were available, so I heard back pretty quickly. When I first applied, I was the only person who wanted to teach HL2 Modding at Northwestern University, and only a few returners applied for that location that year. I know that sometimes replies can happen as late as March. It sometimes happens even later if there’s an emergency and a replacement is needed. This year I heard back almost instantly, but this will be my third year with iD. Priority tends to go to returners, but there are lots of new instructors every year.

Hope that helps!

Criticism of Embedded Media Players

I’ve been streaming a lot of videos (anime) and music recently. For videos, I use those streaming sites that have multiple embedded players to ensure at least one version works.

Here’s my beef with it. They each have custom media players, and all of them have different, blaringly obvious flaws. They’re all presumably based on flash, but they all seem to have very different internal workings. Most of them have a poorly designed UI, and almost all of them have terrible buffering problems. By problems, I mean they LIE TO YOU. Allow me to explain.

If I see something that intuitively states that the video is buffered up to a certain point, I fucking expect it to be buffered up to that point EXACTLY.

Figure 1

The above picture depicts a player that really hates seeking. I should be able to drag to where it is buffered. Heck, I should be able to drag anywhere without it exploding, which is what most of the players end up doing. I don’t expect it to work immediately, but it certainly shouldn’t go “Wait, you mean you want me to start somewhere that isn’t buffered yet by sending you data from that point forward? Kill yourself.” Because that’s basically what most of them do.

It doesn’t even do a good job seeking within the BUFFERED AREA. If you try to seek backwards, it may even decide to stop working, and God forbid it work outside of the buffered area. In fact, if you try to seek past it, it will even pretend like it’s working by saying it’s starting at the new place, but instead continuing to play/buffer from where you originally were. Moreover, that buffered area isn’t even real. It’s lying to me. It will do the whole “hold your horses I’m fuckin’ buffering” well before it even comes close to the end of the buffered area. If I try to seek forward, it’ll go “LOL NOPE” and sometimes completely cease functioning.

It’s not just this particular player either. It’s a lot of them. Many don’t allow you to skip past what’s buffered, forcing you to buffer suffer from the beginning if you want to skip to a future position.

Some of them don’t even do the shitty parts right. For instance, the following image depicts a different player that has some weird graphical bugs in the buffering notification.

Figure 2

These strange black boxes seem to arbitrarily appear while the buffering animation plays. Not only that, but it lingers at 100% for a good few seconds. That’s annoying in any loader. You know it’s lying to you when it says 100% for more than half a second. If it’s not ready, leave it at 99%, or maybe even 98% to make it more believable. I think it’s bad practice in general to show a percentage. Especially since they can be very misleading to an average user. Is it percentage of a packet being downloaded, or is it how ready it is to play. Clearly, it’s not the latter for the two.

Even Google isn’t exempt from these flaws. Remember how YouTube was being really janky for a while (still kinda is). On many videos it would crap out about 3/4 of the way through and skip to the end. What’s up with that? Not to mention Google’s music app showing buffering animations and progress only to tell you that the stream you requested is unavailable. That really rubs me the wrong way.

Last but not least, something that literally every player seems to have problems with. If you leave it alone for too long, it explodes. Have you ever left a video alone to buffer for a while. Like, as long as 5 or 10 minutes? Have you ever left a video open in your browser after already having played it and then tried again hours later? What about leave a video open and then having your computer sleep? All of these cases tend to break embedded media players. I still don’t know why this is.

Since a media player is clientside and exists in memory, it should have all that buffered data ready to play at any time. Why do they get cranky when you leave them alone? I honestly can’t think of a good reason.

Doesn’t all of this make you wonder why these issues are being left alone? I don’t know exactly what goes into making a media player, but I’d like to make my own just to see how awful it is. The only reason I can imagine is that the backends to media players are difficult to make, and must be janky as hell to write.

Okay, that’s out of my system. Back to watching anime.

Does Appreciation Help?

I’m currently sitting in my paternal grandparents’ house. They’re pretty old. Like, in-their-90’s old. Seeing them with poor hearing, restricted movement, and borderline dementia isn’t new to me, but it got me thinking about how I’m living my own life. Actually, they weren’t what got me thinking, but they were the trigger.

I’ve found myself looking in the mirror and being completely startled at how youthful I look. Perhaps startled is the wrong word. More like, amazed and shocked at myself. Not that I’m narcissistic, but I don’t look half bad. I’ve got a pretty face, I’m charming, smart, talented, funny by some definition of the word, and terrifyingly single. I’m not going to whine about that, though. That’s not what this is about. More to the point: I’m modest enough to know that all of these characteristics are being wasted on me. I hardly make use of them on a daily basis. Most days I can be found playing a computer game, learning a new programming language, or just lazing around. It’s killing me because I feel like I’ll look back at that wasted time thinking I should have done more interesting things while I still had it in me.

As I looked at my reflection a moment ago, which by the way was a bathroom break between episodes of various anime series, I wondered how I could appreciate this more. Would just the conscious effort of appreciating my current state be enough to ward off regrets? Would actions be better? Will the amount of regret depend on how hard I appreciate my time as a young buck, or will it depend on the stories I’m left with? Both?

For reference, I’m only 21. I’ve got time, but I realize that if I keep telling myself that, it’ll be gone before I know it. It’ll start small, like minor back problems. The knee that I injured in early high school will probably make itself apparent in my early 40’s (if I’m lucky enough to feel it that late). Little by little, I’ll be limited in what I can physically accomplish. Then I’ll start to lose mental acuity, but that’s quite a ways off.

I can’t help but wonder, though, is there something I can do to make myself look back and think, “Man, I had a pretty good life. I might not have made the most of it, but it’s certainly within a reasonable margin of error.” That’s all I really want in the end. To be able to say I led an acceptable life. Would it be best to make that happen, or would it be better to learn to live without regret? I could spout ideological crap like “life is what you make of it,” which although true, isn’t actually a helpful sentiment if I don’t know what I’m making.

Here’s the part where I speculate really hard. In all probability, I will have regrets. But maybe that’s okay. As long as I can appreciate one thing to the end, it’s not all bad. Just one thing to hold onto. Even if I die in a ditch, I’ll probably have at least one thing that I appreciated in life. I doubt it will ever come to that. I’ll probably have plenty of things I appreciate and just a few things that bug me a lot. Hopefully I’ll have learned to see past those by then. Then again, this could be a completely incorrect line of reasoning for future me. It probably is incorrect. How could a youngster like me know? No really, I couldn’t possibly know.

I suppose the final question is: Is it even possible to avoid regret? It seems like the fundamental question behind the common idiom of “youth is wasted on the young.” Is it even possible to beat that? It’s possible that humans are just hypercritical enough to judge their young selves no matter who they are.

Perhaps some old fart has words of wisdom for me.

Gamemode Coding Contest

garrysmodcom:

The Gamemode Coding Contest is back! The latest instalment is starting over on the forums. The contest theme this time around is Rhythm (which I can’t spell).

Grea$eMonkey says there’s no real prizes this time.. but I’ll try to talk him out of it. He’s also set up a website for the contest here - so get coding!

Hehe, yeah, that was was me.

(Source: garrysmodcom)

Ice Cream Dilemma

We had cake left over from my sister’s grad party, and yesterday someone bought some Neapolitan ice cream. I open it up and saw that someone was eating a disproportionate amount of the strawberry flavor in it.

This always frustrates me, because now I have to even it out by taking a disproportionate amount of the chocolate and vanilla so that next time I can have a generally even amount of each. It’s not OCD, it’s just me trying to do myself and everyone else a favor.

Even more frustrating is the nerve of whoever is doing it. It’s just rude is all. You know other people might want some strawberry with their chocolate and vanilla. Yeah we all know that strawberry is the odd one out so it’s more desirable, but if you wanted strawberry ice cream so fucking bad, fucking buy some straight-up strawberry ice cream. Don’t get Neapolitan and just eat one flavor.

Okay, I’m done.