Warcraft

I started playing again, though so far my adventures in wonderland have been brief. As far as I can tell thats a good thing, its just been for fun and thats the way I like it. I like it much better as a happy little hobby rather than an obligation.

The Burning Crusade

I went and bought the expansion pack for World of Warcraft today. The consideration of doing which likely played a fairly significant part in my contemplations of addiction early this morning.

Hopefully this time I can keep it under control so I don't have to abandon the game so completely again.

The Moral Animal

I finished this book a couple of weeks ago and it was probably the most thought provoking thing I've read in years.

Its a book by Robert Wright about evolutionary psychology. The general gist of it was that all of the emotions and a large number of our moral feelings are just as much the cause of evolution as they are the effect of our society and its norms.

There was more I wanted to say about this book but unfortunately I've waited to long to write this and so do not remember what else it was I wanted to say.

Addiction

Recently, probably because of this show called Huff I've been watching with my brother, I've been thinking a lot about addiction. Actually, maybe its not so much the show as it is the behavior of my brother and myself... Regardless, addiction... It seemed strange to me the body can become so dependent on some substance that it can not function normally without it. Then strangely enough I got to think about how much the body needs other things. Now I realize these other things are pretty necessary to, well you know, living but it seems as though its largely the same principle. Sleep, nutrients, water all of these things are things we as human beings require in order for our bodies to function normally. So I suppose in some twisted way human beings are addicted to sleep.

I suppose its odd to think about things in these terms, but I can't help but think the phrase 'addictive personality' is a complete misnomer because we all have it in us to quickly and easily become addicted to all sorts of things. Games, television, computers, anything it seems can be addictive at least psychologically. I suppose addiction is really just habit taken to an extreme.

Stupid IE

For the last two weeks or so I've been wildly busy creating some HTML pages which need to match nearly exactly the designs set by our creative team. On the surface this hasn't been too much of a problem given the good practices I learned with my last job. I started by creating the structure of the page and then applying style sheets as needed to lay the page out the way it was supposed to be laid out. I did all of my initial page testing in Firefox 2.0 as it is my browser of choice.

Once I had the pages working in Firefox I would move on to the next page. This strategy came back to bite my ass once I learned the HTML needed to be compliant and look correct not just in Firefox but in IE 5.5 and up as well as in Safari. Now from what I've seen Safari isn't a big problem, it renders things more or less correctly. Internet Explorer on the other hand is a nightmare. Each version (IE5.5, IE6, IE7) renders the page quite dissimilarly from each other version.

As a result I've had some extremely long nights over the past two weeks. Fortunately though, the deadline for the HTML pages has now passed and I've got the whole weekend to relax.

Learning

Let me preface this by saying, I really enjoy learning new things. In fact its a rather large part of the reason I took the job I did, I knew I'd be exposed to a number of new things.

So far I was right, I have been looking at a number of new things. However, I've become increasingly aware of how much easier it is to learn something when I have a specific reason to do so. Barring a reason to learn it, being able to actually involve myself in it is a fantastic thing. For the last couple of days I've been looking at .NET, JavaScript, Flash, and various other online tutorials in order to attempt to learn something about them.

I think I've learned a decent bit about the technologies, but as far as being able to apply them and do something functional with them I'm considerably less sure. Its really an interesting thing.

Strange Times

It has been kind of odd since I've been at the office; possibly a little more so since last Friday.

Since I started my new job I've been waiting for something 'down my alley,' as it were, to come along but it just hasn't happened. However, looking at what is going on at the office I'm not to terribly surprised. Most of what is going on right now is either wrapping up existing work or working on pitches for new work which leaves remarkably few technical tasks requiring attention, at least from my perspective.

Adding to this is my illusion that while drinking this past Friday night one of the (remarkably attractive) women from my office was interested in me. Judging from behavior the past two days I'm pretty sure it was the alcohol making me think so. Se la vie.