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That didn’t leave me many options, but I had the Something Awful emoticon pack for Adium, and the Adium emoticon pack for Colloquy, too much free time, and a minimal amount of skill with perl. I’ll cut to the chase and just toss a link in here if you’re in a hurry.

There’s a file, grep.pl, in that archive, that should be useful if you want to see how it works, but this post is mostly to lay out any issues, and put the link out there for download (It should be on the Colloquy extras site soon, unless they reject it because some of the icons aren’t work safe, and the official SA emoticons site, unless the maintainer there doesn’t feel like posting it). I was going to do a post about the inner workings and process, but it’s fairly boring, basically poking around the Adium Colloquy emoticon file layout and XML structure, and very light XML parsing. All told I spent around 2 hours on the whole thing, including testing.

By way of caveat, this still has some weirdness.

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I was a huge fan of the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R., so when the second, Clear Sky, came out, I was expecting more or less what they originally promised in the first. But, and I think this is largely because they had to shove a second game out of the door just a year after the first, it was buggy, the maps were mostly uninspired rehashes of things from the first game, and it just wasn’t as interesting because it didn’t feel like something new.

If Fallout is a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mod for Oblivion, Clear Sky was a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I lost interest after maybe a week, when the first patch broke all my saved games. Which brings us to Fallout 3. I loved the original Fallout, never played most of the second, and after the failure that was Clear Sky, I needed a new post-nuclear-armageddon FPS/RPG. Fallout 3 came out around the time I was giving up on Clear Sky, so I was set.

A quick diversion: For some reason, Fallout fans are among the most noxious on the internet. I’m not sure why, other than the fact that a game that, among other things, lets you get hooked on drugs and fire rocket launchers at children is probably going to attract a somewhat more deranged fanbase than say, The Sims. So I started reading the no-rules Games forum on Something Awful, “Your Console Sucks”, in an effort to get away from Serious Business Fallout fans. The down side is that now I can’t talk about the game without wondering what the most pro weapon is, or just how many sub-optimal character choices separate a scrub from a scrublord. It’s colored my impressions of the game, to say the least, in that I went in not expecting too terribly much beyond a fun distraction for a week or two.

What I got, in short, was goddamned amazing. The Fallout series made the jump to 3D in largely the same way that Grand Theft Auto did - it’s not exactly the same, but it is unquestionably better. Details after the jump.

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My birthday present from Becki finally showed up today, two weeks after we thought someone stole the package. I think it owns, the cat would disagree.

Living in New York may be more expensive than ever, but let’s face it, it’s always been hard. That, oddly, is part of its appeal. You test yourself against the stresses of the city. If it’s not the expense, it’s the overcrowding. If not the overcrowding, then the crime. If not the crime, then the tension, or the roaches, or the smells, or the guy screaming obscenities at you for no reason on the stifling subway platform while you wait for a train that’s jam-packed and twenty minutes late.

…

But the problem is, you can’t simply leave New York—you have to quit New York. You have to admit to yourself and the world that you’re packing it in, calling it a day, turning out the lights.

And that, really, sums up what New York is to me. Every time I think about the 45-minute train ride to work, the amazing apartments in beautiful neighborhoods that I’ll never be able to afford, the loud neighbors setting off fireworks, the dirt and the crowds and the derelicts, I wonder why I moved up here.

I moved to New York for kind of same reason I started working at OmniTI - I don’t want to things that are easy, I want things that are awesome. It’s a cliche at this point, but I think it’s still kind of true that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. The unspoken flipside of that is that this place can eat you alive. I mean, I think I’m a pretty smart guy, and it took me a solid week of fucking it up just to reliably get to work and back on the subway here.

There’s a grit to New York. I have to admit I love that the entire city is apparently trying to kill me all the time, because every day that it doesn’t means that I win. You give up a lot to be here - personal space, money, quiet, a degree of safety, and to top if off, for me, as a transplant, most of my friends are 200 miles away now. But in return for putting up with it, you get to live in New York and, maybe I put too much emphasis on this, you get to call yourself a New Yorker.

For all the crap the place throws at you, I love it here, I really do.

Unrelated: Becki and I went to see Avenue Q yesterday, and it owned.

Get Smart was entertaining, but not great. I liked it largely because I like Steve Carell and I used to watch reruns of Get Smart on Nick at Nite growing up. It didn’t seem like it could make up it’s mind whether it wanted to be a summer blockbuster spy movie or a parody of them.

The TV series had Maxwell Smart as a terrible screwup who only succeeded and survived by dumb luck and the help of Agent 99 . The movie has him as a bit of a clumsy doofus, but actually not a bad secret agent.

Carell sells it pretty well, and I particularly enjoyed that halfway through the movie, Alan Arkin (the chief) gets unchained from his desk. He’s a hilariously grumpy old man, and I genuinely thought he was one of the better parts of the movie. I thought The Rock was really good, too, but then I like pretty much anything he does. I even liked Doom, largely because it was awesome, and if you disagree you probably suck.

If that last statement didn’t turn you off on reading the rest of this post, Wall-E and Wanted are after the jump. I saw them more recently, so they’ll be a little less vague.

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It’s left me scrambling for things to listen to, or to read. So I’ve done two things. One, I started downloading and listening to podcasts - they require too much of my attention to listen to during work, and generally don’t hold up against the myriad distractions of home, but episodes of This American Life and Scientific American’s Science Talk podcasts are perfect for the train.

The other thing, which I’ll go into an absurd level of detail about in a minute here, has been to dust off of the old Sony eReader that I thought was going to be so important and ended up sitting on my desk for months on end unless I was going to be on an plane.

The trouble with the Reader, and I don’t think I’m overstating things to say that this is the problem with all portable media devices, is that it lives and dies by the content that you can get on it. The iPod thrives off of the iTunes store and people’s MP3 libraries. Amazon is trying to do the same with the Kindle, though I honestly think it’s a losing plan, for a number of reasons.

The Sony reader, then, by that standard, failed horribly, at least out of the box. The store it connected to had a small selection of overpriced books, and RSS support, which was pretty much why I wanted the thing, sucked. Hard. Through a combination of programs that other people wrote, I managed to get RSS feeds converted to PDFs that were readable on the umm, reader.

This time, I decided to do things differently. Becki’s got me reading New York Magazine, and it occurred to me that what I really wanted wasn’t 30 snarky Gawker line-items to read on the train, but one or two longer, in-depth pieces.

So what I did was throw together a perl script (get_them_ducats.pl, because I should never be allowed to name anything, ever) to make this a little easier.

I’ll warn you now, this is long and exceptionally dry, so I’m hiding it behind the jump.

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I have no problem whatsoever with this, either. GTA4 is just that good.

As in previous installments, the game takes place in fake New York, only this time around, it’s actually recognizable as New York. No, the translation isn’t perfect - Bensonhurst, Gravesend, and Bay Ridge are reduced to a narrow slum above Coney Island, Times Square is about a block from Central Park, and, rather delightfully, Staten Island is missing entirely - but neighborhoods feel like their real-life counterparts, and the attention to detail is staggering.

The cop cars look like NYPD cars. The farecard machines in the subway look like the real ones, down to the graphics on the screen. Sometimes I find my way around by thinking of how I’d get there in real life, and I wonder how much of this people who don’t live in New York really grasp. It’s insane.

Beyond the setting, there’s a lot to like here. They took out that RPG bullshit that was in San Andreas, where you had to eat food and go to the gym and grind stats before you could run around with a shotgun blasting holes in things. The driving has been made a bit more realistic, which is to say that you can still drift all over the road and flip cars over, but pulling the handbrake and jerking the wheel is no longer the best way to turn, and, to my great amusement, crashing head-first into a wall will throw your guy out through the windshield. I’ve died more doing that than in gunfights.

This is getting long, so the rest is going after the jump. No major spoilers this time.

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It’s entertaining, and doesn’t suffer from that lull in the middle of a lot of action movies, between the set up and the climax, where people keep talking and having feelings and shit - it keeps moving the whole time. I wish the fights had gone on longer and had more punching dudes through buses and whatnot. The jokes work, the writing is solid, the characters are not unlikable, and casting Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark is pretty much the best casting decision anyone could ever make.

The only real complaint I have is that apparently Ghostface Killah (of the Wu-Tang Clan) had a brief cameo, which was cut for some stupid reason like “plot” or “pacing”. The reason this matters, beyond the simple fact that it is Ghostface from Wu-Tang, is that he’s been using “Tony Starks [sic] and “Iron Man” as his rap aliases for years. He needed to be in this movie, and I’m glad it was good enough for me to justify buying it on DVD when it comes out, solely for the possibility that his scene may be restored.

Spoilers and pedagogery after the jump.

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It’s actually nice to be back working back at the mothership again. The team I work with is all down here, and while we keep in touch over IM, phone, and email, it just can’t compare to being there in person. I don’t have my Aeron, though, which sucks, because I’ve been spoiled rotten by that thing.

On the plus side, they’re putting me up in the corporate apartment, which is swank, and I’ve got the keys to the company car, which, because this place is awesome, is a Dodge Charger. I could get used to that car - after driving a tiny, refined, very practical Volkswagen hatchback for the last 8 years, I like driving a big old V6 sedan that makes no excuses about being obnoxious. I’m sure the charm will wear off before I leave, when I have to put gas in it.

Also, courtesy of the irrepressible Jon Tan, who is apparently some form of harbinger for Twitter , the half of the office that didn’t already use it is using it now, myself included. I’m still not sure I “get” Twitter, but it’s fun to screw around with. It’s an insanely simple but dead effective community of sorts - they’ve pared discussion down to the absolute minimum, and it works very well. I know I’m late to the party on this one, but damnit, I think it’s cool.

Twitter pretty much proved it’s worth to me earlier tonight, when I posted this, and fifteen minutes later I had a private message from Wez with the WEP key in it.

Though, to be honest, it didn’t go down exactly the way I described it in the tweet - I actually did print out a page with the key, but I left it at work (along with my laptop charger - I’m running low on battery, and Twitter can’t really help with that problem) and since it was in a Word doc, I couldn’t just open it on my phone. I took some self-deprecating liberties with that one, because it made the story funnier.

This one, though, was 100% true. It took me half an hour to find the damn thing.