there will be cake when you're done

it's the holiday (Winter Solstice, Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, etc), so that means you are either
a) feeling marvelous because you get to spend time with your loved ones having snowball fights, eating many animals and tearing gift wrap paper with a ferocity not seen since the Gauls ransacked Northeastern Europe;
b) feeling depressed because it's cold and you don't have anyone special to wrap you up in a fuzzy blanket and drink hot chocolate with you under the stars;
c) feeling bored because you have nothing to do.

if you are a), make sure those loved ones know that they are loved.
if you are b), don't sweat it -- there are others who are equally desperate.
if you are c), play this game: Portal: the flash version.

this game is based on Valve's Portal, a revolutionary puzzle/adventure game. carl showed this to me a few weeks ago and i was immediately hooked. you are given a portal gun that can shoot a single yellow and a single blue portal. entering one portal will allow you to exit through the other, with your angular momentum intact. in other words: "speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out". aiding your quest are moveable, stackable blocks. impeding your progress are walls that cannot hold portals, deathtraps and line-of-sight machine gun turrets.



the flash version has all these things, but in two-dimensions, rather than three.

updates: by category

professional: halfway there! the biggest conference in terms of professional development is coming up this week. it will be all about the logistics and non-teaching related items of interest, such as getting hired, getting registered with governing bodies (college, federations, boards, etc), and getting a taste for the variety of opportunities available (private, remote areas, abroad, religious, language immersion). it's going to be a lot to absorb and i am already coasting through all this with about 45% of the usable portion of my brain.

physical: i finally bit the winter sickness bug a week or two ago, with minor symptoms of phlegm and snot and cough. it put a real damper on my winter ice cream eating. however, compared to the last time i got sick in May, this one was easy, breezy because it didn't really slow me down -- except to blow my nose. played floor hockey for the first time in so very many years this past friday and i discovered a great deal: a) my muscles getting creaky from lack of use; b) i need to learn to stretch more effectively; c) i'm not the bad passer that i thought i was; d) if i actually train seriously, i could be really good.

mental: due to lack of practice, sudokus and crosswords are taking far longer and i'm making far more errors than before. i do not despair, however, as i know my mind is being applied elsewhere (try thinking cosmological astrophysics and the finer points of grammar at the same time). connection building is still fairly sharp, but memory is hitting a ceiling.

spiritual: i am having difficulty motivating myself to read the Bible. is it because i feel like i've already read it all before? i think it's because too much is in my head and not enough is in my heart (where it counts). it is so hard to develop and refine habits when you are in a transition period. good habits, diligence, discipline, get you through the dry spells. prayer feels like i'm just talking to myself.

personal: last week, i thought to myself, "wow, i am so emotionally vulnerable right now i would hit on a tree stump if it looked at me." i'm not even attracted to trees stumps (this is not a metaphor). i'm pretty sure i've been very emotionally promiscuous because i feel the need to give that kind of attention, but have no one to give to (properly). in other words, i could be interpreted as being interested when i'm sort of not. i say "sort of not" because there are days when i sort of am -- hence the tree stump statement. BLARGH.

always learning

you know those tasty ring cakes from large grocery stores?
i always thought they were just being cheapskates, cheating me out of more cake.
today, i learned that ring cakes bake more evenly, so that they don't undercook or burn or fail.

Nerd Corner: Command Scripts

a month ago, i decided to stop using Intel's Wireless Utility that was provided with my computer; it required a lot of processes and tended to be wonky when hopping onto different networks. the built-in Windows utility for managing wireless networks is adequate. as a result, i can no longer use any hardware controls for the wireless card (the Z63 has buttons on the side for things like bluetooth, wireless, touchpad, etc). i also cannot use the keyboard shortcut (Fn+F2) to toggle the wireless card on and off. normally, when i run on battery (taking notes in class), i like to have the wireless card turned off to save power and to prevent my attention from wandering to the internets.

without the hardware toggle or the keyboard toggle, the 'simple' way to turn off the card would be to right-click the wireless icon and disable the card. the round-about route would be to open up the Device Manager and disable the card from there. both options suck. once the card is disabled, the icon no longer shows up in the System Tray and you have to drill into Network Connections to enable it from there. i could have written an essay in that time.

what i wanted was a shortcut to the program that controlled the wireless service so that i could just use Launchy to enable/disable the wireless card. unfortunately, no such Windows program, .exe, .dll or .bat file exists.

time for research. so i googled up two sites that each did half of what i wanted.
the first directed me to a neat utility Microsoft has: DevCon, a command line version of the Device Manager. using DevCon, i am now able to execute enable/disable commands to any hardware device on this computer, provided that i know the hardware ID. the site provided details on how to determine the IDs and how to use them in the command line.

ex. typing in "devcon disable *DEV_4220*" into the command prompt will turn off my wireless card. replacing "disable" with "enable" will turn it back on. this is still a handful to type each time.

as it turns out, command-line commands can be written as a .cmd file, essentially a pice of programming script that runs as if you typed the commands into the prompt. so the second site gave an example of just such a script. i modified it for my computer.

;Disable Wireless.cmd
;
@echo off
echo Disabling wireless card...
devcon disable *DEV_4220*
echo Done.

echo " " is just asking the command-line interface for feedback, indicating where in the program it currently is. ; " " are comments and not read by the compiler.

i saved this file (and the enable version) as .cmd files, placed them somewhere safe and created shortcut in my shortcuts folder for Launchy to index.

after some time of gloating and feeling proud of myself, i wondered what else i could script to make life easier...

sometimes, the wireless connection is spotty due to the router being unable to establish an IP address or somesuch wireless networking mumbo-jumbo. i normally fix that by going into the command prompt and typing:

ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew

this does exactly the same thing that clicking Repair on your wireless connection does. armed with new knowledge, i decided it was time i stopped typing it all out by hand like a sucker.

;Repair Wireless Connection.cmd
;
@echo off
echo Releasing IP Address...
ipconfig /release
echo Renewing IP Address...
ipconfig /renew
echo Done.

i saved this script, shortcutted it as well.

i feel like a winner.

the Mystery of Women: Episode 1

women are a mystery. this is by design; everything is on the inside. men, who have (almost) everything on the outside, cannot even begin to comprehend the mysteries locked away in the opposite sex. in this new series, exclusive to pocketfish, i will explore the uncharted and give men everywhere (that read this blog) a fighting chance.

in this first installment of The Mystery of Women (MOW), i will reveal the answer to the question that has been burning on the minds of men since the Pyramids were first conceived: how do women make those towel turbans?

the towel turban has baffled men for many generations. a towel is a large rectangle of cloth; how can it possibly be tranformed into something so elegant as a turban for wet hair? why have we been scrubbing our heads like idiots when we could be letting them dry by turban? it must be magic.

my brothers, the towel turban is not magic. to make a towel turban, you will need the following:

• 1 towel
• 1 head

step-by-step:

1. hold ends of towel so that its length is perpendicular to you
2. bend your body so that you are facing the ground
3. drape the centre of the towel over the back of your head so that the two ends dangle on either side
4. twist the two lengths of towel together as if making a unicorn horn until there is no more slack
5. holding the two entwined ends tightly, stand upright and drape the 'horn' over the top of your head
6. tuck the ends under the portion of the towel covering the back of your head
7. show your wife, girlfriend, sister and/or mother and gloat

so there you have it, an age-old mystery solved. how impressed will your lady friend be when you offer to wash her hair and then wrap her lucious locks in a towel turban for drying?