My Life and Code

My earliest preconception of VR was that it was  Doom  while wearing a headset. That's what I thought it was. I was way off. A few years ago at Christmas, my brother-in-law said "Try this", put his PlayStation VR headset on my head, and I was blown away. He had me a try a game where you ride a mine cart through a haunted carnival of sorts (I forget the name), and I was surprised that I could lean forward and peer around a corner. I couldn't believe it.  But I was hooked. Days later, I had acquired my own PlayStation VR, and given more time with it, could more easily notice the downsides: being tethered to the game console with the headset's wire, the need for an external camera, and a mild "screen door effect" due to the somewhat low resolution of the headset. From there, I progressed to the original Oculus Quest. Wireless, fully-contained, inside out camera tracking, with higher resolution than PlayStation VR. The downside here  was the mobile processor...

If you’ve used VS Code’s “Format Document” right-click option to format an Angular HTML template, you may have noticed that it doesn’t indent things the way you’d expect. Example:   In the code above, the option tag should be indented within the @for loop. There’s been a fix for this. 😊 If you edit the settings.json file in the .vscode folder, and add this, it will work:   After adding this to settings.json and using the “Format Document” option, it formats correctly.

One of the things I was writing about here a few weeks ago was music, and how certain songs can trigger memories. And I've had this project for the past few years to assemble a playlist of songs which are, in essence, the soundtrack to my life.  Currently, it exists as a Google Doc, with a list of songs broken down by the period of my life which I associate them with. I'll eventually compile it into a playlist and listen to it, but for now, it's a document I update whenever an additional song or two comes to mind. For this project, I have a couple of ground rules. The songs included should all evoke mild to strong time and/or place associative memories when I hear them. The songs should evoke good memories, or bittersweet memories, but not bad  memories. It hasn't been something I could just sit down and complete all at once. There were songs that immediately came to mind when I started, and then others which have come to mind later. I also don't own  all of the son...

I’ve been fortunate in my life to have known a lot of good people, but sadly, more than a few have passed away too soon. Some I knew well, some were casual friendships, some were coworker friends. Some were in my life a long time, some just a short while. But all of them left an impact. I often reflect on the people I was lucky to cross paths with. Our lives can be influenced by the people around us and the time they are with us. The trajectory of the path we take can be guided by those who are there at the right time. Below are the names of people I still think of, appreciate, and am thankful for. I’m a better person for having known them. Alice Hughes / Bill Hottenstein / Br. Mark McBride / Bruce Grimmer / Dave Tyson / Drew Rusin / Jay Winslow / Jen (Skahan) Brock / Jen Monti / Matt Grom / Richie Peto / Rob Daninger

I'm a huge fan of most things 1970s, and I recently heard of this movie via a post on Reddit. It's about a sniper who has his sights set on the crowd at a football championship game (they're careful to never refer to it as a Super Bowl). It's sort of in the vein of those 1970s disaster films, except it's not really about a disaster. But it has that same vibe. While I liked the film, here's the problem with it: editing. Or, more specifically, the lack thereof. I have no problem with character building. I have no problem with a movie taking it's time to establish a plot, or characters, or whatever. But by the time this film actually got along with the plot, I paused it to see how much time had passed, and it was halfway through the film.  In fact, at the time of this writing, if you look the film up on Wikipedia, the summary of the film written there starts at the midway point of the film . The opening credits sequence was an early red flag. A long....long.......

In 1982's Blade Runner , Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is tasked with hunting down four renegade replicants , humanoid robots which are virtually indistinguishable from real people. And fans of the film often debate whether or not Deckard himself is a replicant. The debate originates with director Ridley Scott, who has gone on the record by  saying as much , years after the film's original release. But here's the thing: one of the screenwriters, Hampton Fancher, says that Deckard is not a replicant (though he likes the ambiguity), and Harrison Ford, until recently, has been adamant that Deckard is human (a recent change of opinion on his part seems... paid for , so to speak, in my opinion, and it's well known that he and Scott disagreed vehemently on it). The filming of a scene, post-production, with a unicorn that ties into a scene at the end of the film is meant to imply Deckard is a replicant, and to be fair, there is a line which was cut from the film where the chara...