Going long on my education

If I have to decide between an ideal looking resume and actual skills, I choose skills. It has worked for me in the past, when I spent time actually learning how to program games and graphics instead of doing decently in college (The owner of a computer repair company told me to my face that "I make the other half of the class look good" when he asked my GPA and I told him "2.0". Brutal. (Never forget that a letter grade is only a proxy for understanding! Grades can be optimized for by cramming for tests, only studying things likely to be on a test, etc., but actual understanding is deeper and more important. If you insist on being with someone with a higher GPA than you, reconsider so you don't let a gem get away!) Carrying this attitude ultimately made me competent enough to do good work at Blizzard. (It's shocking that the distance between this and working on WoW could only be 5 years.)

Super depressing thought of the day

Living organisms are throwaway survival machines for their genes.

-- from Nick Lane's excellent Power, Sex, Suicide

Life is Weird

It's good to remember that we're all flying around a freaking ball of fire right now. Hat tip to Richard Feynman for reminding me.

The eternal (infernal!) question

When somebody asks what I do, it's much easier to say that I'm a game programmer, or I'm building a website than be honest and say: 90% of my day is reading and walking.

Tourists can only be other people. When I go to a new place I'm (of course!) perfectly in the right to be there.

When driving around Orange County, you can actually start to think that having a nice car is an important achievement in a human life.

To guard against this thinking, I pledge to maintain a healthy layer of dirt and avian feces on my ride.

Steps for getting along with others

1) Actually understand that others may think you have a douchebag personality.
2) Accept that there may be no possible action you can take to fix this.

Bam, you're done.