"The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton

Last week I left a note on Laura's desk
It said I love you signed anonymous friend
Turns out she's smarter than I thought she was
She knows I wrote it, now the whole class does too

And I'm alone during couple skate
When she skates by with some guy on her arm
But I know that I'll forget the look of pity in her face
When I'm living in my solar dome on a platform in space

Cause it's gonna be the future soon
And I won't always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away
It's gonna be the future soon
I've never seen it quite so clear
And when my heart is breaking I can close my eyes and it's already here

I'll probably be some kind of scientist
Building inventions in my space lab in space
I'll end world hunger I'll make dolphins speak
Work in the daytime, spend my nights and weekends

Perfecting my warrior robot race
Building them one laser gun at a time
I will do my best to teach them
About life and what it's worth
I just hope that I can keep them from destroying the Earth

Cause it's gonna be the future soon
And I won't always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away
It's gonna be the future soon
I've never seen it quite so clear
And when my heart is breaking I can close my eyes and it's already

Here on Earth they'll wonder
As I piece by piece replace myself
And the steel and circuits will make me whole
But I'll still feel so alone
Until Laura calls me home

I'll see her standing by the monorail
She'll look the same except for bionic eyes
She lost the real ones in the robot wars
I'll say "I'm sorry", she'll say, "It's not your fault...
Or is it?"
 
And she'll eye me suspiciously
Hearing the whir of the servos inside
She will scream and try to run
But there's nowhere she can hide
When a crazy cyborg wants to make you his robot bride

Well it's gonna be the future soon
And I won't always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away
It's gonna be the future soon
I've never seen it quite so clear
And when my heart is breaking I can close my eyes and it's already here

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More Mad Men

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Update?

Yeah, so I've been slacking. I think last week really drained me and I haven't been able to/haven't felt like updating. It's kinda crazy, really.

• Braid is a pretty cool puzzler if you have an Xbox 360 and patience with platforming puzzles.
• Empire Builder is a pretty cool board game, and if you're interested in a not-quite computer adaptation you can find someone's homebrew game Rails.

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Pixeljunk

Pixeljunk Eden is both frustrating and fun. It's also taking a nice chunk of my time.

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The Soul Still Burns

That's right - Soul Caliber IV came out last week.

I got my first taste of playing it last night. I can't say that it has the same problem that Soul Caliber 2 had (namely that is was practically the same game as the original Soul Caliber, just on a different system). It's still fun, at least against un-awesome opponents.

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Another Busy Week

Yeah, so if I'm not posting a lot, here's why:

• Monday - FSDNUG
• Tuesday - "TV Night"; We're watching Freaks and Geeks
• Wednesday - Intern "Goodbye Gala"
• Thursday - D&D
• Friday - Pool Party

What's amazing to me is that I'm doing all this stuff during the week, not the weekend.

And that I still generally manage to feel like an outsider. But that's just me.

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Sharepoint?

I can't find a reference to the earlier versions in the usual source (wikipedia), but I can tell you this: earlier versions of Microsoft Sharepoint were not well received by the community. Apparently the latest version is more friendly (but still not as friendly as it could be) and is a lot more than what I remember Sharepoint being advertised as (a long time ago, admittedly).

Last night was the monthly FSDNUG meeting. We started out with a brief tool presentation from David Mohundro about Lutz Roeder's Reflector. It's a great tool for analyzing the libraries you're using or figuring out how the IL the .NET compiler generates looks like when disassembled and uncompiled. I was talking to David after the meeting, and he mentioned a feature that sounded useful, if a little out of the way: you can bind Reflector such that special hyperlinks can open it to specific assemblies. That would be handy for sharing assembly locations.

The main presentation was from Steve Walker (he hasn't posted in a while), of Microsoft Consulting Services, about Microsoft Sharepoint. I'll admit I was a little biased coming in, remembering what was probably the first version of the servers being marketed around my Dad's office, thinking, "How could this be useful to us?" Sharepoint, though, looks like a great resource for enterprise situations that can really use a combination web-development framework and deployment solution. The biggest problem I can see with using it is that if you don't deploy your applications the "right way", the incredible scalability possible, where you can just bring a new Sharepoint server online and make it add itself into your farm of Sharepoint servers, disappears.

Mostly, though, I see it as a way to handle deployment of web applications across server farms in an easily repeatable way (QA and operational departments should love this). It also provides a framework to work within as well, especially through the use of what's called Delegate Controls. These are basically controls that you can setup that say, "Hold a place me, I'm going to put something else here - maybe more than one - but I also want some functionality in case I don't replace you." The most visible of these on Sharepoint sites is usually the search box in the upper right. There's a default version and appearance of the control, but if you want to roll your own you can set up your search box in the place of the delegate control.

But I'm not really qualified to talk about it. Best to give you a link, in this case one that Steve pointed us too after the meeting: FanU. I won't get any use out of it, but that whole site is setup using Sharepoint.

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