The other day I was with a group of friends and was introduced to a new person. As part of the usual formalities, we started talking about where we worked. She said she worked for ABC, and I replied, “Woah, you work on BitTorrent client software?!”, only to have a mutual friend laugh and say, “No, she meant ABC, the broadcasting company.” Hello, my name is stevec, and I am a geek.

Combine two of my favorite ways to waste time, and you get a winner. I’ve stumbled accross these Google puzzles from 2003, which I find more fun and challenging than the rather plebian (though still entertaining) “The Da Vinci Code Quest” puzzles Google published recently. It took me about one hour to solve the three puzzles from 2003. I spent most of the time on the last one, which is one of those things you could either get right away in a few seconds, or first waste half an hour of useless pondering on before seeing the answer in a sudden epiphany.

PHP sure has some weird conditional matches. I thought it was a general rule that “if ($foo = $bar)” always evaluated TRUE unless $bar was NULL. But apparently that’s not the case in PHP: (Read on …)

And the gaming posts keep on coming. Maybe it’s the “Friday effect.” Anyway, the official Final Fantasy XII site is finally up, although at the moment it mainly just contains a high resolution trailer for FFXIII, which was shown at E3. This game is being developed for the PS3, and from what I saw, the lighting effects and graphics are amazing. You can download the live showing of the E3 video here (12 MB). Or, if you prefer the clean version, go to the official site, or download the SWF file (17 MB) from my server.

Here’s the new Final Fantasy XII trailer (19 MB) shown at E3. It looks quite impressive– and it’d better be, considering how long they’ve been working on it. I have a FFXII preview DVD that includes additional footage in super high quality, but it’s a bit too big to put online.

Here’s a video from E3 (66 MB) showing live gameplay of Super Mario Galaxy on the Nintendo Revolution. The graphics don’t look that stunning, but I guess the focus is more on the gameplay and the use of the new controller. And just so we get it out of the way– yes, the girl in the video is playing with a wii.

Sometimes I scare myself. They say you dream about what’s in your heart (or rather, that mass of gray matter in your head people like to call the “heart”), but last night was a clear counterexample of that adage. In my dream, I was explaining to a student how changes in ion affinity due to mutations in one amino acid of a protein doesn’t necessarily mean that particular amino acid is directly involved, either mechanically or electrostatically, with the binding site for the ion due to the possibility of allosteric interactions involving that amino acid and the binding site effecting the observed change in affinity. (Read on …)

It’s like those injury reports I used to dread seeing on my fantasy NBA players roster. My right fourth finger knuckle was sticking out to the left more than it should, even after all the initial bruising from last week went away, so I got nervous and decided to see a doctor, who told me to get an X-ray to make sure there was no fracture. There was none, so the diagnosis is just a bad sprain that might take up to four to five weeks to heal. Now I have a basketball injury to tell stories about– not as cool as my dislocated shoulder from rollerblading during the summer of my junior year, but definitely less painful.