More dreary rain. This time i'm up in the city (SF, for anyone reading outside the bay area). Greg and Erin's friend Andy is visiting after traveling around various parts of Asia, and so probably annoyed that most of the food in this neighborhood is some form of Asian cuisine. Breakfast was a comfort food of grilled corn scramble at Q, then a huddled march to Green Apple Books where we must've spent at least an hour. I picked up a copy of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (yes, i'm a mass-marketed sucker, but it looked good) and a relatively small tome on Roman history.

The say2 webpage has been updated finally, with links to snapshots of the current perl (curses) client and the sephiroth server. Greg has finally checked in his prototype java gui client, which is looking pretty cool so far -- maybe a snapshot will be posted soon. Also i went to a little effort to describe the protocol better, now that clients are being written. Josh has started work on a Windows VB client, too, i think.

Work has been fairly annoying. The install stuff is shaping up pretty well, but it's all starting to be tested, and everyone thinks their bug has higher priority than anyone else's, and they're all "blockers" (bugs that block other people from working), which becomes a zero-sum game where i stop caring. Everyone in my group except me is going to Guadec in Copenhagen this April, and i can't pay my own way (i'll be lucky to get my taxes covered this year) so it's kinda depressing. I try not think about it. Also it's been hard to concentrate when i'm at my desk because our building has gotten so crowded now that there's a constant stream of people wandering through our cube and chatting.

Oops, let's talk about cheery things again. Greg got me the Final Fantasy anthology (games 5 and 6) as a late Christmas present, so i've been playing 5 a lot to unwind. Even with the crappy Nintendo graphics, it's a really engaging game, and i keep getting caught up in it.