Jason Hancock

Lots of good stuff happening lately. First, I reached level 65 in CoD:W@W. Yes, for the first time ever, I’ve reached a level-cap in a video game! I normally don’t have the attention span to make such an achievement, but I’m a big fan of the CoD franchise and am anxiously awaiting Modern Warfare 2. Now I just need to earn prestige… Next up, how about an update on the house?

I was writing some code to parse an XML input file and noticed that XML::Simple was sometimes returning a data structure that had a single instance of a particular sub-element, and other times it would return an array of sub elements. For example, if I had: <root><sometag>foo</sometag></root> I would get a root that points at a single scalar of sometag. But if I have this: <root><sometag>foo</sometag><sometag>bar</sometag></root> Then, I would get back a root that points at an array of sometags.

We’re moving forward on the house. We received the revised contract tonight and will submit it tomorrow morning! I’m not sure when we can resume the inspections and such, but I hope it’s soon!

I learned two cool new tricks from the senior guys today. They are moving everyone’s office today, so that means I have to have my computers packed up by 2PM. The problem is that I have a long-running job that I need to have run over the weekend. Since my machines will be in storage until Monday, I couldn’t just run it on my workstation and lock the machine up. The guys here recommended using the screen command.

Wizards of the Coast released Magic: 2010, the latest core set, on Friday. I picked up a starter deck and five booster packs on Saturday. Overall, the cards are very familiar. My Llanowar Elves are there, as are Lightning Bolt, Fireball, and a bunch of other old cards from back in my day. Also included in this set were some new and unfamiliar cards. I built a green/blue creature/counter deck. I had 9 islands, 15 forests, 25 green cards and 11 blue cards.

The home inspection has been postponed until next week 🙁

I’m anxious today. Tomorrow we meet our real estate agent and a home inspector at the house we are hoping to buy. The place was built in the late 80’s and the HOA is on the hook for any structural damage, so it can’t be that bad, but I keep getting this feeling like we’re going to find something that’s a complete deal breaker. We have a machine at work that is probably close to 6 years old that is on its last legs that I’ve been tasked with migrating to a new machine.

Someday I’m going to get better about regularly updating this blog. Anyhow, Laura and I are in escrow on a townhouse in San Dimas. It’s a ~1700 sq. ft, 3 bed/2.5 bath, 2 car attached garage type of house. It was build in 1989 and has a few recent updates. We’re hoping to close in the beginning part of August. I’ve been building some tools at work recently. I was developing by myself and management decided to add another deveoper to the mix.

I read a post over on strobist.com on water droplet photos, so I decided that I needed to try taking some. For my first attempt, I think they turned out pretty good. I used a pyrex 13”x9” pan filled almost to the top with water, a ziplock bag with a small hole in it, some pvc I had lying around to hang the bag from, my light stand, a Nikon SB-600 strobe, my radio triggers, a piece of white posterboard to bounce the flash off of, my homemade grid snoot, and my roscoe gel samples.

We went to the Huntington Library today. It was our second trip to the library. It started off very overcast and cool, which was nice because our last trip was during the middle of a July afternoon! I snapped pictures in the gardens. I only used my 50mm lens thinking that I really wanted to get a nice shallow depth of field. Reviewing my photos, I did get the shallow depth of field, but often it was too shallow!