It lives!

Finally some news in the S.T.E.A.L. front! First of all one of the artists I asked confirmed his commitment (he’s first busy with higher-priority company commissions), and a second one just gave me a preliminary sketch here: steal/yumiko.jpg I’m way happy to see that finally the characters are taking life from words to drawings!

February 6, 2006

Woes of a scientist

Not everything can be fun in the life of a scientist. For example, my work in the bioinformatics field of our laboratory makes me see a lot of annoying problems related to files, to be precise file formats. A lot of sofware in the biological sciences uses plain text files to export data to other programs (sometimes binary data, but that’s another matter). The problem comes when you have to use the output into another program.

February 5, 2006

All-in-one entry

First of all, the strangest oddity ever. On Friday once at the laboratory I was contacted by an Affymetrix representative regarding [this entry ]({{ site.url }}/2006/01/26/badly-written-software-or-policy/). She wanted to know why I wrote it and that it seemed that I “didn’t contact Affymetrix to see if the problem could be solved”. She wasn’t offended or anything (she will even get me in touch with someone from the software department), but nevertheless this is my blog and I’m entitled to my personal opinions.

February 1, 2006

Knightly Earring

Finally I got my hands on something I’ve been wanting to get for a long time! Thanks to some of the folks in Heaven’s Inferno, I managed to assemble a party and get to Riverne - Site B#01, where the notorious monster Imdugud was. Assembling took a bit, but since no one is ever there (probably due to the level 50 cap?) it soon appeared after some hyppogriph kills. Things got a little rough during the fight (no referesher) but in the end we won.

January 30, 2006

Clarissa's birthday

That was the only noteworthy event of today’s work. I arrived late (took 1 hour and 30 just to get there) and then during lunch break we moved again to the LITA to celebrate. We got a sort of necklace for her which she liked quite a lot, and we got time to have a toast and eat some cake. It took way more than I expected - I was back at the CISI at around 15.

January 29, 2006

More about S.T.E.A.L.

Work is progressing, although at slow rate. I’ve asked the person I wanted to commission the illustration work a sketch of one of the characters and at the same time I forwarded the descriptions of the various scenes. Estimated time frame is a month - which is reasonable for me. He said the sketch will be done by the end of the week: I’m waiting so I can see what kind of style he decided to suse and if I have some corrections to make.

January 26, 2006

Badly written software, or policy?

Today while working I got stuck in what probably is an intentional flaw of the software we’re using. When we scan Affymetrix’s GeneChips there are a number of files produced by the GeneChip Operating Software (GCOS in short) including raw acquisition images and various analyses. Now, a certain number of people need to use those data to work (including myself), but I don’t want people to fiddle on the scanner workstation unless they know what they’re doing.

January 25, 2006

Of life and pets

Well, it mostly seems that my cat has reached the end of its life. It’s being slowly consumed (apparently it’s not absorbing much of the food it eats) and it’s way too weak to keep on. Rather than seeing it dying of starvation, we asked the vet to end its life (on Friday, probably). It’s odd… I’ve seen a lot of animals die, many by my own hands (due to my past work - I’ve sworn never to do that again), but when it comes to my pet I can’t help being sad about it.

January 25, 2006

The end of Wild ARMs 4

I finished it two days ago. It’s got to be the shortest RPG I’ve ever played: a week is definitely too little (and I played only in the evenings for a couple hours). The game system is good indeed, but the story sucks completely. I’ve rarely seen characters that are so badly developed, or not developed at all. It’s a shame because the game system is good. Wild ARMs 3 had much better character development and was also longer.

January 22, 2006

Wild ARMs 4

I got this one last week. Now that I’ve been 20+ hours into it, I guess I’ll write down some impressions. First of all, I’m pleasantly surprised by the quality of the translation. XSeed has done a much better job than Agetec (who did Wild ARMs - Alter Code: F), and they preserved the voices and the opening song (even if redubbed). I like the game system, it’s fst enough and there are platform-like parts that help in breaking up the monotony of dungeon crawling and fighting.