so i finally made my appointment for my allergy test. i'll go visit them on monday at 16.00. it was actually relatively easy making the appointment. no idea why i always have such fear doing that. then i have to go see my lung doctor again on wednesday. guess that means i should be taking the medicine regularly :\ i've gotten so used to just taking it when i need it.

i finished something yesterday, at least i think it's finished, but it's a secret as to what it is for the moment. some people may think i've forgotten about it. it turned out being quite a bit different and larger than i expected. i'll talk about that more a bit next week.

last night i fixed a few bugs in my emulator. there is still a big problem with parallax scrolling and some odd behaviour in some games. R-Type2 among others now work properly. still a ways to go, but i'd guess now i can play roughly half the games with no real problems. i've got a little running list at home, but i haven't updated it in about 2 weeks as it really takes an entire day to go through 300 games. there are still some odd crashing cases where there are stack overflows, but i think it's now limited to about 5 or 6 games. it has something to do with interrupts occuring while still in an interrupt handler. in the case of After Burner II, it's because of the timer. in Bonk2 i think it was the video interrupt. no idea why.

i kinda promised to maybe see a movie today with B, but i'm not really in the mood for it today. i dunno what's wrong with me. i guess part of me feels that so long as i'm inspired with the emulator i should do that. but that's hardly fair to people i call friends :) i also didn't get to work until 9.40 this morning so i won't get out until about 6, which kinda sucks. i couldn't got there maybe 20 minutes earlier, but i decided to make that appointment before i went and clean the litter box. white cat's been doing her strange growling sound she does when she has to pee but doesn't wanna use hte litter box.

i've been chatting a bit more with German Philipp recently. it's a bit strange we always have something to talk about. i think this is partially because he loves to talk, and we read the same websites and such. i showed him the On The Matter Of Gay Space Frogs from Penny Arcade, thanks to grahams. it's a nice play on starfox along with a very old joke, still funny though. anyway, he liked it and apparently reads Penny Arcade quite a bit, as well as Something Awful. so whereas most people here don't have any clue what i'm talking about, he gets it perfectly. which is just awesome. we still have at least an hour long discussion on ICO to do. which reminds me, i need to take the PS2 apart again and clean it so i can play and finally beat some of these games.

he tells me about watching porn with his roommates and sometimes the sneaky lesbian neighbors, who also love playing videogames, and i tell him about porn nights at CSH and that horrendous Chess porn movie we watched that time in our room. ah, how i wish we could go out and talk about this over something to drink or something as that'd be fun. then again, i doubt even the promise of that could get me out of the house right now ;)

i was chatting with this other guy i've been chatting a lot with recently. i think his name is also Philip but i'd have to check the chat logs. i just know his alias name. anyway, the one studying to be an architect. he was showing me some of his school designs last night and some of the things he really likes. it's all freakin retro. he thinks it's genius that there was furniture and stuff designed in the 40s-60s that is still "cool" today. i think it's all shit and looks like 5$ stuff from Ikea. (i have no problems with Ikea but there is some stuff there that's way too cheap ;) ) i'm so not into retro stuff in the least. i just don't find it appealing and i think it doesn't fit the needs of the masses today, it's not ergonomically designed (not that much of what we buy today is), and is just ugly. i think it belongs in it's time and it wasn't "ahead of it's time".

i was just writing this post about how i think music companies need to do digital CD-Cases. hmmm sounds similar to this project Philips, Sony, and some others were trying to do. where you can download pictures, sing-along-lyrics, videos, interviews, and live performances, and such to put into special folders on the computer along with the music downloads. stuff that could be printed. the problem of course being the copy-protection, but hey when you can download unprotected mp3s from services now, is it really such an issue?

if you cut out all the normal distribution channels and just digitally edit some videos, you can offer a ton of shit and make a fair amount of money from the real fans. even allow fans to exchange bootlegs and such to put in their special folders. like those stupid kid playing cards. wonder if that'd work.

ok. i've been updating and building cvs for long enough and now i need to get to work.

yesterday on the way home i ran into B, a few hours after he'd called me. i didn't answer because i usually don't answer my phone at work. he wanted to go see Sideways or something. i'm not really up for going until i know my allegies will be behaved. anyway, he was coming to the Billa next to where i work because according to him, it's the closest to his house. odd i never saw him before. then on the train, this guy from one of the Aidshilfehaus courses that i used to talk with occasionally got on the train. i think he tried just as much to avoid me as i tried to avoid him. i dunno why. i didn't know what to say. i can't remember the last time we chatted. i dunno it's just weird. so i just zoned out per usual on the u-bahn. i hate feeling umcomfortable like that because i don't know what to say to people.

last night i completely pigged out. i had some scrambled eggs with green peppers, onions, potatoes, and bacon. then i had some oreos and chocolate milk. yummy. i wanted something with chicken but they only had this family jumbo pack of like 10 chicken breasts, and there was no way i could eat all that in 3 or 4 days. lame. yay cholesterol! i don't eat much of that anyway as i don't eat meat or meat products often, but i got a double take from the eggs and the bacon! woohoo!

i need to do my work permit renewal again in the next two weeks and i need to go to the doctor today and get another referal form. they're only good for 14 days or some shit and i had to go at least 10 days without the antihistamines. i thought they were good for a month. lame.

today most of my allergy symptoms have just disappeared. it's strange, while at home, i often fare much better than at work. granted i've done some major cleaning, but i can't imagine there's cat hair at work or on the U-Bahn to really set me off. i'm guessing it's not the cat hair but the dust, and the time of day. the more awake i am, the less susceptible to these problems.

i fixed some more tiny bugs in the emulator and implemented a few things i hadn't implemented before, but mostly i just cooked and chatted. everyone was very chatty with me last night. dunno what the occasion was.

( Cell, Trimedia, geekiness )

James brought in some Divxs of this British show "Derren Brown - Trick of the Mind". i didn't think it sounded anything interesting and today while doing some boring work i popped some on and watched it in the corner of my screen. it's actually very very cool. he does all these "magic" tricks. they're usually bits of psychology, but it's rather fascinating to watch him do some of this stuff. some of the things he does is just pretty fucking cool. like in this one episode he plays chess against 9 chess masters. some grandmasters. anyway, his trick for 8 of them was to play them against each other by remembering the moves of 4 of them and playing them against the other 4. this, in itself, wasn't so amazing. what was amazing is that he'd given one of them an envelope at the beginning. in the envelope, was a number that happened to be the number of the opponents pieces left standing on all the boards. he got the first number wrong, but all other 8 boards were correct.

he jumped in a taxi, and made the taxi driver forget where the London Eye was. pretty cool shit.

Klaus sent me this. it's a star wars "What If" movie. the "What If" being if one of the fighter pilots was a Valley Girl. i didn't find it so funny, but there was this one section where the "fat guy" dies. i thought that little secion was funny.

so everyday i read the astrony picture of the day, and recently i've started reading through all the archives and as we speak i'm up to june 6th, 1997. there are several repeats within these archives and way too many pictures of fucking comets. comets are boring. as are pictures of astronauts in space. thanks to all our telescopes we should have more than enough pictures of distant objects to not have to display stupid pictures of people doing a spacewalk or famous landscapes with the comet in the background. i'd rather see and read about a full sky scan in x-rays for the 15th time rather than that. ok. that's my APOD rant for the day.

i was reading in my Time magazine last night about sleep and new sleep research, and as such i've decided it's probably a good idea to finally start going to bed at the same time everynight and trying to get 8 hours of sleep everynight. they were going on about how studies have shown that people are much quicker to solve problems and such after being well rested. also sleeping on problems seems to have pretty big effects on solving them as well. i dunno, i always seem to solve my problems in weirdass places like the shower or in a club. when i'm alone and just thinking about something because i have nothing better to do. either way, that's my goal.

Patrick had to put one of his cats down last night. the thing had apparently gotten several tumors and liver problems. then through dehydration his bowels and such become completely backed up, and then he couldn't flush any bile out of his system. does that even make sense? maybe it was more the dehydration part, but how does bile leave your system. i seem to recall having learned this at one point but not being able to make the appropriate connection. oh well. not important. thte cat's dead.

Houman came over last nigth to pick up his luggage. he asked about some red backpack and we talked rather shortly until grey cat decided she wanted to run up the steps. then i closed the door to go chase her up as he left to go fix dinner. i told him there wasn't a red backpack down there. he then called sometime later and asked if if i was sure, so i went down and looked, and even went through all the boxes but it wasn't there. as i told him, i have no recollection of ever having seen such a bag. either through desperation, or simple scepticism, he didn't seem to believe me. he called back sometime later and asked if maybe it was in my house. however, there was no reason it would've been in my house but i checked anyway. it wasn't there. no idea where it is. i'd let him borrow mine, but i often need it for transporting things like my laptop and crap.

Klaus told me yesterday that he'll probably leave work here. he finds it boring and the dead atomsphere kills him. he's gonna go back to what was philips and try to work in the audio division there. i wish him luck, because i don't think they have much of a chance to do so well there. i mean they've got some good software engineers there still, but it's gonna take them shaving down the management to like 5 or 6 people at the most to be able to be competitive i think. mostly, it'll be the people who were working on the portable cd and mp3 players though, i think. who knows. time will tell. i just know i have no desire to return there. yeah it'd be nice to have that kind of environment here as this one really is dead. but the stark contrast between the dead atomsphere here and the lack of interesting things, only makes me want to actualy do other things outside of work. like the emulator, reading, and playing games. speaking of which, i need ot call and talk to B or go see some movie with him. i haven't seen him in forever. it sucks we only ever go to see movies, but i have no idea what else to do with him and that's a safe bet. i suppose a concert wouldn't be bad but we dont' have many areas of similar interest in tastes of music i believe. i think he's more along the lines of the trendy independant people. the stripes, the strokes, etc. yeah, i'm not so into that. the lead singer from cursive was here with some other band of his, and Cormack asked if i was interested in going. he's getting a bit more talkative with me now. i guess that's a good thing as he seems like a cool guy. it's the, i'm too cool, attitude that turns me off though. perhaps my perception is just wrong.

oh well.

Matthias hasn't messaged me anymore since i insulted nintendo for not being capable of doing any good innovation anymore ;) we had this 2 hour long argument one night over the weekend, and i said their time was up. they're only capable of rehashing the same games from 10 years ago, and now they rarely even do that, but rather let other companies do it for them, like Namco, Sega, and Hudson. some are still fun, which i admitted, but they'd be more fun if they weren't rehashes. guess he's pissed at me. not that it matters.

i've still got my fingers crossed for Julia, that she gets a positive call back this week, and also for Martin. joking or not, yesterday he made the comment thta working at McDonalds was no better than prostitution. now i'm not attempting to put either forms down, but i think the level of safety at a McDonalds makes it a bit better. i just keep getting this impression he thinks it's too good for him. that wouldn't surprise me too much as you will very very rarely find an Austrian working at a McDonalds here. they're all Asians. just as all the newspapaer people are Indians. anyway, he wants to move out from his parents, but he also wants to be choosy about his part-time job. i told him to look for a call center job or something. similar to what Michael does.

Prepare to be invaded by the Zogg.

strange my allergies are bothering me more here at work than the last two days at home. i mean the last two days at home i had to blow my nose more, but my eyes feel so dry here. this is really really odd considering i'm not taking the antihistamines. they're just all itchy and it's the same with my nose. suck. i do have some horrible headaches today. though not as bad as the ones from saturday. i think this has something to do with my lack of sleep. thank you grey cat for wanting to make all the noise in the world last night.

i started thinking today about this way of thinking among people when they say things like "you should never regret anything", etc. trying to put positive spins on things they did in their childhood. as if they've evolved to some higher form of being and never think to themselves they made a mistake. i also started thinking about it's ties to society. is it connected to this "i can't admit failure or mistakes" attitude? why do people do this?

i wonder if it, in some capacity, has something to do with personal comparisons. people thinking they've learned so much from life, that they're able to move beyond certain human emotions. therefore, they think that they're better than someway than other people. of course, few would admit to ever thinking like this as that would never fit with their "evolved" way of thinking.

or perhaps, it's more of a reactionary thing. it's driven more by stimulants like the media always looking for failure in someone's life. so they refuse to have it spun in a negative sounding way, and simply write it off as not being a failure.

anyway, to summarize and reflect on myself. i do this. it's dumb. i need to work on not doing it. i make the same mistakes as everyone else, and there are mistakes that i'm certainly not proud of. yes, if any of those mistakes had been changed, i might never be where i am today. Regret, however, is much simpler. it's an emotion of disappointment about something we've done. in a case where change was desired, it's still nothing more than a wish. an empty wish that we all know can never come true, so to attempt to rationalize it away by saying we might not be where we are today, so we shouldn't regret it, seems a bit ... hmmm it seems maybe a bit overcompensating. na that's not the way i want to describe this idea, but words have failed me as usual.

i'm not sure why i started thinking about this today. i think it had something to do with some strange mix of Houman (why would i associate regret with him?), this post from someone else today about people with SUVs complaining about the cost of gas, and this thread i've been following for a while. not a message board thread, but rather this thread in my mind. it's one of how i have tried to nullify the effects of emotions on my life. to not feel them anymore. the words of my therapist come back to haunt me, yet i've known this even before her.

when i thought of the computer as a friend, i should've realized something was up. however, at the time, that was more a self-expression of attempting to be different. of realizing, something within me, was different from everyone else. so i always made this difference appear larger than it was. i attempted to deprive myself of feeling certain things, and as such a rather large chunk of the human experience. strange because the most common notion of regret is for not having done something, yet isn't it a bit odd that to miss part of the human experience isn't worth regretting? it is for me.

god i can't do this shit at work. my boss got me all nervous that what i was doing was going to be harder than what it should be, so i'm looking at these other code sources and created like 30+ test cases to test this one tiny little feature, which doesn't even need to be implemented. yet i can't just close the bug and say it's not worth implementing. it's so hard to do this too because it's totally uninteresting.

maybe i'll magically have my package from US Amazon when i get home. unlikely it'll be here before next week, but i want it. i need this new music. i'm dying here.

so i partially solved my problem from yesterday with the new code i put in, however it doesn't solve the problem with several games like afterburner, because afterburner is doing something strange. it sets the timer interrupt to such a low number that it ends up occurring before the thing can leave the interrupt. so even with my hack, a new timer is generated in the last few instructions.

today i fixed one major bug. this fixed probably 30-50 games. it had to do with roms that were 384K in size. i was debugging through "Alice in Wonderland" and noticed that it was trying to grab stuff from a strange place. something that would be mirrored. this isn't so uncommon but it got me thinking that perhaps i didn't do my mirroring properly. Charles McDonald's document only mentioned in passing that it was mirrored someway throughout the system. i looked on the internet and could find nothing definitive, and then i turned to the other emulators. it turns out that it mirrors the first 256K twice to fill up the first 512K. then it loads for the first time the remaining 128K at the 512K location, and then mirrors the first 384K up until the 1MB mark. weird. this solved the problem with Alice in Wonderland, Batman, Neutopia 1, WorldMoto, and probably many other games.

i also solved a small opcode problem where it wouldn't grab the a new value for one of the few CMP versions. this doesn't seem to have any impact on any game i've tried so far though. i also changed the default rom fill pattern to 0xFF like some other emulators do. this doesn't yet seem to have an effect. soon i need to implement VRAM->VRAM DMA as that's needed by a few games.

i think my dad thinks you're supposed to use instant messaging like email. i got this today (all one message):

dad: mellisa had back surgery Friday, she is good and home
love ya
dad

he then immediately logged off. didn't say hi. just that and left.

so i know the game AD&D; worked much earlier in my development process so last night i stepped through the entire thing trying to find out why it caused a stack overflow. it seems that of the games that "crashed" on me, they do something like this in their interrupt handling routines:

• save registers
  
• do stuff
  
• enable the interrupt
  
• acknowledge the interrupt
  
• return
  

if the processor takes interrupts after every instruction which the IRQ line is flagged and the enable flags are all set, then this will go into an infinite loop of starting the IRQ every single time within itself and never finishing one. beautiful code. i can see no reason to do code like this.the only reason i can think of is some performance issue where you need the irqs working a few cycles earlier, but if the interrupt request occurs again it's the same problem.

i've found 2 versions of this so far. the first was in AD&D; where they enabled interrupts using a CLI just before acknowldging it. i fixed this with a hack of checking if the instruction was a CLI, and then i found another case that occured in AfterBurner 2. here they disable and later reenable it through the interrupt controller. this one is much harder to check as are a few opcodes to do this and the registers have to be checked as well.

so i think the easiest solution is to first check if interrupts should occur before executating the operation, and set a flag. after execution of the opcode, then check the flag first, if it's true, then check the new status of the irq pending registers and such.

hmm just implemented it this new way and it doesn't work for AD&D.; not sure what i did wrong but i'm too sleepy to check.

so today James was kind enough to bring lots of chocolates for everyone. i ate several of the marzipan things, and tried this special treat from Italy which i think is called a "Bacio". these come with little sayings or quotes in them and mine was an Oscar Wilde quote:

"When you really want love, you find what is waiting for you."

that's interesting. because it appears the real quote is this:

"When you really want love you will find it waiting for you.

and strangely enough i've seen at least one other version on google.
did they translate this into italian and back, and then back into English? (it's in 5 different languages here) the German version appears correctly translated:

"Wenn du die Liebe wirklich willst, so wirst du sie auf dich warten finden"

ok, didn't mean to jump into the translation mistake or whatever, but i found the quote interesting to say the least. if there were any truth to that, i'll probably never find it ;)


photoshop friday was good today. i especially enjoyed the side view picture of a boat with the furry on it ;) the picture of bush as jesus (i think it was jesus) was also quite good.

this was tough, but i think i did it ;)

Describe yourself using one band and song titles from that band
Created by naw5689 and taken 15351 times on bzoink!
Choose a band/artist and answer only in song TITLES by that band:	Tori Amos
Are you male or female:	Northern Lad
Describe yourself:	The Wrong Band
How do some people feel about you:	Strange
How do you feel about yourself:	Ribbons Undone
Describe your ex girlfriend/boyfriend:	Cornflake Girl
Describe your current girlfriend/boyfriend:	Not the red baron (yeah, non-existant ;) )
Describe where you want to be:	Here, In My Head
Describe what you want to be:	Professional Widow
Describe how you live:	Upside Down
Describe how you love:	Putting the Damage On
Share a few words of wisdom	Take to the Sky
Create a Survey | Search Surveys | Go to bzoink!

yesterday i saw Ray with Patrick. it was a lot better than i expected it to be. it was actually pretty funny at times, and pretty sad at times as well. Jamie Foxx did an amazing job in the film. at times, i kept wondering if Ray Charles actually was playing parts of it. especially the piano parts, which Foxx apparently played himself. quite amazing. it was just a bit longer than i would've liked it to be and i kept getting the feeling that he was being hyped up to be a bit more important tan he really was. like creditting him with being a huge influence in the civil rights movement. granted, i honestly haven't researched much of that so maybe it was true, but it seemed a bit exaggerated.

i've been addicted to peanut butter recently. specifically taking bits of chocolate and dipping them in peanut butter and eating it. yummmm. also peanut butter sandwiches. does this mean i'm not getting enough protein? my mom always used to tell me that when you develop cravings for certain things it's a sign you're not eating properly. wonder how true that is.

i'm on day 2 now of no medicine. it's not as hard as yesterday was and i don't feel as strange by the inside of my nose itches so much. i'm surprised i'm doing so well. every other time i've tried to stop, i would get sick. perhaps it was psychosomatic? perhaps now that i'm not depressed or really worried it'll go away? hmmm unlikely, but let's just see what happens.

man i'm so impatient for my new music to arrive.

if anyone out there is bored and wants to vote for my little Austrian company's software for some awards, please feel free:
click here and vote for Altova Mapforce in the “Development Utility of the Year” (that's what i work on :)and XMLSpy in the “.NET Tool/Add-in of the Year category.” all other categories you can just vote for whatever. yeah my product is up against firefox so it'll more than likely lose, but hey, it's only if you're bored as it won't mean much except a new logo on our website ;)