So last month my daughter died. My grandfather has been in the hospital for a week but his condition has deteriorated and now he’s not expected to live longer than a day or two. :(
2009 started off so nice but it’s ending up a horribly rotten year for me. Of course my thoughts now are with my family, especially my Grandma. I’m glad that my Grandpa was at least able to hold Emma this year.
I now hate side-post car batteries. My wife’s car battery died today and since she has appointments to take Ian to and I have work to go to I needed it fixed today. Since it’s just a car battery I opted to do it myself.
Anyways, it’s all fixed now. The estimate was 30 minutes for the trained car shop repairman who has replaced a million of these. It took me 45 minutes (and with crappy tools to boot) so I feel OK about it. I just wish my fingers would quit feeling sore…
So, I’ve been trying to keep working and moving and generally being productive. It helps me feel a bit better and besides, it’s easier doing something than to do nothing.
Since the most distracting type of “doing something” for me is coding, I set myself the task of changing the system tray icon implementation for JuK to the newly-added KNotificationItem. This was involved enough in JuK’s case to be worth doing without being so involved that I’d get fed up. It was a nice distraction for a day.
I noticed that the KDE 4.3.1 release was dedicated to the memory of Emma, which is something Mary and I appreciated.
I went back to work last week, but it was too early as it turned out. I tried again yesterday and it seemed to go better so I think I’m on track to resume my qualification process for instructor duty. Obviously the support provided to me by my command has been invaluable in helping Mary and I get through the grieving process.
I had (finally) informed our bank/insurance company of Emma’s passing last week. I received a package in the mail from them yesterday, but with no forms or anything to fill out, just a short letter and a short pamphlet. Kind of a nice touch, I thought. The pamphlet mentions that the grieving process begins after the shock, numbness, and disbelief subside. In my case I know I’ve been grieving and I know that Emma is gone and yet depending on what I’m thinking it still doesn’t “register” sometimes that she is dead. It’s gotten to where it feels more eerie than painful but it is still disconcerting to simultaneously know that your baby is gone and feel that she is right there.
I also finally got around to moving some of our broken-down cardboard boxes to a recycling facility. I had thought it required showing up during business hours, which is difficult when those hours coincide with my working hours. And I didn’t feel like doing it when I was on emergency leave somehow. But it turned out there are collection facilities where you can just drop it off at your leisure, so now our garage has much less crap in it.
I am in graduate school now so although I will be trying to increase my programming-related activity if only for my own peace of mind, I’m not sure how much of that time I’ll be able to contribute to maintenance of my current KDE projects (as few as those already are). kdesvn-build will probably be my priority due to the shift (someday) to the Git source control system and because few KDE coders are familiar with Perl. (Even if kdesvn-build gets obsoleted I hear there is another possibility being worked on by a different Michael…)
I’ll probably try to blog more often as well. I usually feel better and I used to post entries quite frequently (when I was in college and had tons of time at least!)
Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition; but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express. ~Joseph Addison
I am perhaps lucky to have been quickly disadvantaged of any ambition with regards to my son. But this quote rings very true to me all the same, especially regarding a father’s love for his daughter.
It has been almost a week since Emma died. Everything has been so hard since. How does a little girl just forget to keep breathing?? It just breaks my heart so much when I think about it.
Our family has been lucky to have a lot of support in the past week however:
I just wanted to say thanks for all of the support. I’ve been spending my time trying to celebrate and remember my daughter as best I know how. It’s hard when the simplest routines become the hardest, or when things that ordinarily wouldn’t merit a passing glance become potent reminders of the daughter I once held in my arms. Tasks once performed without a second thought seem so unimportant now, and other things are thrice as important as before.
This is only going to be a short note but I just wanted to announce that our baby girl born almost 5 months ago passed away yesterday, Aug 25.
There aren’t really words to describe how gut wrenching this experience is, I’ll surely be away from KDE and other activities for a bit as my family tries to cope and go through the grieving process. :-(
I mentioned last entry that I would come back with photos. I also mentioned I had suffered a flat tire. I converted 9 photos that didn’t disclose tons of personally identifiable information and put them up, and in case you’re not in the mood for looking at photos I even added a “Read More” thingy for what I think is the first time ever…
So I’m on the way to my family reunion in west Pennsylvania. And while traveling through North Carolina my front right tire goes from properly inflated to almost completely flat in about 2 seconds from what I can tell. Luckily I was passing an offramp when it happened so I was able to exit the highway immediately. Unfortunately it was at night when it happened so I get to find a tire place at some point tomorrow.
I was going to be stopping for a hotel room anyways but I guess this made the decision for me. Once I got the spare tire installed (thankfully we remember to check its air pressure) we drove across the street where there was lodging available. No sign of what caused the loss of pressure in the tire, there’s no obvious holes, rips, or tears anywhere. We even had the car run through a safety inspection prior to leaving. :-/
Anyways I’ll probably be back by Monday, I’ll try to post some pictures of the farmland my family lives on as well, as it’s fairly beautiful at times.
Update:I had a second tire go flat on me in West Virginia too, still on the way up. wtf.
When I wasn’t working on coding or checking out what’s been going on at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit this past two weeks, I’ve been spending my free time keeping track of this year’s Wimbledon tennis championship in London.
I just got done watching the Men’s singles final about an hour ago and I have to say it was one of the most impressive matches I’ve seen. Andy Roddick has often played a distant second fiddle to Roger Federer in grass court matches but today Andy was playing at an absolutely incredible level.
He forced a decisive fifth set, which in Wimbledon (among other tournaments) cannot end on a tiebreak. Federer served first and both players held their own serve for 29 games in a row. From after the third game Andy Roddick won, if he dropped serve at any point from there the match would have been effectively over, and after his fifth game his service games really were sudden death. He managed to hang on for 14 games before finally being broken by Roger Federer, who won Wimbledon 5-7 7-6(6) 7-6(2) 3-6 16-14.
That was the only time he broke Andy Roddick’s serve the entire game. Andy Roddick broke Roger Federer twice, in the first and fourth sets but was not able to win the tiebreakers in the second or third sets. In the second set Andy Roddick was up 6-2 in the tiebreak but lost 6 points in a row to lose the set.
I know Roddick is probably devastated right now thinking about how close he came to finally grabbing the Wimbledon title (he lost to Federer in 2004 and 2005) but this tennis fan at least has noticed how improved his game is this year. Hopefully there will be more top-10 players from the American men’s side soon because although Roddick is doing well he can’t keep it up forever.
If I’m incommunicado over the next few days, it is because I’m in the process of moving to my next duty station, which will take place over the next couple of days. Everything is getting packed up tomorrow and shipped out Tuesday. Hopefully I will receive it Thursday at the new place.
I’ll try to check my email and such in the interim but if you can’t reach me, that’s why. Next stop: South Carolina!
So I guess that some upcoming Nintendo games will have the ability to go on auto-pilot if you’re facing difficult parts of levels, and have the game essentially play itself.
Needless to say it’s a controversial move. To be honest I’ll admit that 10 years ago I would have been of a much different opinion.
But nowadays, I think this is a great move. I’m not worried about actually having to use it for the game in question (New Super Mario Bros. Wii). But over the years, something has been happening to me. Games which I would previously play again, and again, and again, in order to finally play through I found that I couldn’t muster the will to now.
I’ve had a GameFly subscription for awhile now and I’ve not bought one game based on playing a rental. I’ve come close on a few, such as Geometry Wars for the Wii. But for the most part the game would either be immediately annoying, and get immediately returned, or I’d play it for a couple of hours and realize that it wasn’t really that fun.
This was most disappointing for me on the latest Prince of Persia game. I played through the game, had to sleep on it overnight to figure out what wall I had to run up to reach the first boss, and the reward was that I had to choose my own path to retrieve energy balls or something. It was around this point when I realized that so far, it was still just like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for me, only less fun. And I already owned Sands of Time.
Even simpler games I’ve had a patience issue with. I’ve already mentioned my displeasure with Mario Kart Wii for instance. I was having fun with a DS game called The World Ends with You until it abruptly became no fun today. I was a passenger on a car ride playing the game, realized I had a hojillion more “pins” that I would have to master and use, and shut the game off. I actually preferred at that point just sitting and watching the signs go by than playing the game. I’m not sure at this point when (or if) I will pick it back up. :-/
So, if this actually allows me to bypass areas of the game which are no fun, so that I can actually get into the meat of a game, then I think this would be a wonderful idea to adopt (in some form) across the industry.
People complain about how it takes skill out of the equation, but that has been happening in large degree for years already. We didn’t use to have easy access to sites like GameFAQs, it used to be toll-call phone numbers, and then later “game guides”. The difficulty in games has in general gone down over the years, and that’s not even counting games with multiple difficulty levels.
I think I’ve seen this handled best in Super Smash Bros. Melee. For the most part the unlockable levels and features and such were achievable by mere mortals (since I managed to do it). Harder achievements stopped unlocking levels and were noted simply as messages or trophies, items which signified that a significant amount of skill was required, but without changing the game. Some levels which could be unlocked merely by playing the game for long enough could be unlocked much faster by demonstrating ability. It was overall a good system I thought.
Some have mentioned about how people won’t get the exhilarating feeling of having surpassed some extremely difficult task. I know this would be a concern for a friend of mine, who prefers games like this. But in my case I completely lost that particular trait in around 1996 or so. It’s not like I’d like to be held up at knifepoint just so I can experience the incredible joy that would come of making it out of that situation alive and unscathed, for instance. The ends just do not justify the means for me.
Others complained that it would make people feel entitled to be able to beat any game they want and thereby increase cheating. But people already feel this entitlement — online games are already flooded with cheaters (one reason why I don’t play online games).
Personally, I don’t see why people would pay $60 (or €60 – ouch!) to play a game which is basically the equivalent of getting punched in the solar plexus over and over. And not only that, but in a lot of games you don’t even get all the rewards without subjecting yourself to tons of punishment (which is what I consider it). Poor controls (any modern console FPS), cheating AI (such as in Mario Strikers Charged), I’ve dealt with it all, and it’s always annoying, and even moreso now because there is simply no excuse.
Anyways, this is growing into a rant. I just want to say that although I don’t think this is going to impact my opinion of the game they’re putting it on, I think the idea could be wonderful if it’s more widely adopted in the industry. It’s already getting to the point where most of my Wii collection belongs to WiiWare and Virtual Console games.