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These last few weeks have been pretty intense at work.  I’ve found my role in the office has drifted almost exclusively to development tasks (which I like), and I have been lately working on a suite of web applications to take care administrivia tasks and provide self-service to users in our department.

This has been an interesting blessing.  With the first major task of writing an authentication plugin for TurboGears that uses our ActiveDirectory for authenication/user and group management, I’ve found that I’ve been “forced” to learn more in the last few weeks than I’ve needed to learn on the job in a long time.  It’s been a pleasure, but at times it feels almost like I’m studying for a final eight hours a day.

A good portion of this learning process was expected, part of the reason that I selected these projects and designed them the way I did was because of the opportunities for expanding my skillset.  However, as layer after layer of abstraction peeled away I found myself learning lots about areas I wasn’t expecting (yet) to attack.  From function decorators to disttools, from all of this learning I’m really starting to feel like I’m establishing a strong skillset in Python.  And it feels good.  I see my code improving constantly, and in very signifcant ways.

Previously expensive algorithms are being replaced with list comprehensions, duplicated logic is becoming completely unduplicated.  I don’t know how to describe things concretely, but I’m really having a good time.

But on top of this already hectic learning schedule with Python, I’ve also found myself busy with other concerns at work.  I’ve found myself playing the role of “senior systems administrator” a lot lately, and problems both major and minor have needed guidance.  Our new systems team guru, Jesse Printz, rocks; I’ve been spending time working with him to assist on whatever’s at the moment with varying degrees of importance.   His work on the new support wiki has quintupled the speed of progress on that project to the point that now it’s just waiting on my code!

All things considered, I’ve been working very hard lately.  Cranking a solid 40 hours a week  and really making those hours count.  I suppose that’s quite good for the department, all things considered.  And not only could I use the money, I really value the experience developing in Python that I’ve been having.

A while back I was helping Lindsay figure out how much some more RAM was going to cost for her computer (that I ended up rebuilding, yet again) and I stumbled onto the price for some new RAM on my laptop.  I’ve been putting off buying any RAM for my PowerBook just out of fear of the price.

Turns out, it was only like sixty bucks to add 512 megs! So as soon as I could I put in an order at Crucial for a little DIMM.  The results have been amazing.  My laptop feels like a completely new computer.  Besides unimportant things that this has done for my laptop experience (like I can now run WoW on my laptop), it has revitalized my use of the laptop almost one hundred fold.  It surprises me how much that nagging slowness was bothering me.

As such, I’ve been integrating my laptop back into my daily routine with fantastic results.  An auxillary audio cable turns my laptop into the jukebox at work.  The additional RAM avoids chunky audio over the network at parties.  Synergy has brought keyboard and mouse sharing to my workspace environments with a level of simplicity I didn’t know was possible.

The RAM brought so much life back into my laptop, I’m in love all over again.  It’s like a brand new laptop.

Today an “Action Alert” came to my inbox from the American Cancer Society. The American Cancer Society is my premier charity organization and (typically) without fail receives every bit of support I can give. But then this email was sent to my mailbox and I was torn:

The U.S. Senate is about to eliminate guaranteed insurance coverage for mammograms and other vital cancer screenings.

As an active American Cancer Society Relay For Life volunteer, we’re asking you to help stop them. Imagine you or a loved one getting your mammogram or other cancer screening and then being told the insurance company refuses to cover it.

If passed, insurance companies would no longer have to cover mammograms and other life-saving cancer screenings. Pap smears, colonoscopies, prostate cancer screenings, clinical trials, and off-label drug use are all at risk of no longer being covered by insurance companies! Email your U.S. Senators right now. Tell them to oppose S.1955.

So why the confusion? Mammograms and cancer screenings are absolutely critical prevention methods, right? Well, definitely. Each time a mammogram, pap smear, colonoscopy, or prostate screening catches cancer early, it is almost certainly a saved life.

But “mandated coverage” is one of the government interventions to the medical care system that is screwing things up so much. Mandated coverages are exactly why insurance is so damned expensive that fewer and fewer Americans can afford it (especially without the help of their employers, which is a rediculous pairing to start with). It’s simple supply side pressure economics: having mandated coverages force costs up on all insurance companies causing an industry wide supply shift to more expensive/less coverage.

While it is certainly fantastic that everyone that has insurance currently has cancer screening included in that coverage, it’s not fantastic that millions of Americans have no insurance at all as a result. I find the trade off very difficult to support. While those who face cancer with insurance might be tested and hopefully saved, those with no insurance what-so-ever will most certainly find out too late and perish. I can’t support an action that will have the government forcing more people into the latter category. Just because it’s easier to see those that are saved, doesn’t make those that are lost any less important. At least not to me.

I think I’ll just let this particular “Action Alert” slide by.

We had a very strange anomaly happen Wednesday night when we hosted an afterparty for the Copus/Placate show. Someone really tried to trash our house. After the night was over someone had sprayed shaving cream all over a bathroom, stole food from the kitchen and strewn it about, and generally behaved as a petty vandal.

What made this particularly stunning was that just this last Saturday we hosted the Jager Olympics with around 800 people making an appearance at The Bunker. There was no major damage of any kind. The place was a little trashed from the gelatin, but it was cleaned up and everything was proportionally in good shape.

But here on a Wednesday night, where we know just about everyone that showed up in a group of maybe 45, some asshole(s) try to tear up the place. It’s just disappointing.

Update: Strangely, this blog entry was written before the “Partial Set List for Guitar Hero 2″, but it didn’t get published.  Hmph.

Continuing in a long surge of excitement over the potential of Guitar Hero 2, the tides of gaming news brought a partial set list from Red Octane.  Here’s what they have so far:

• “War Pigs” - Black Sabbath
• “Who was in my room last night?” - Butthole Surfers
• “Strutter” - KISS
• “YYZ” - Rush
• “Psychobilly Freakout” - Reverend Horton Heat
• “You Really Got Me” - Van Halen

Can I get a “holy crap”?  With only 6 songs announced of an expected 50+ songs, I already love where they are going with this.  The absence of Van Halen and Black Sabbath from the first game is a very common “complaint” lodged against the game, an unfortunate necessity without the success and budget to get rights for songs with that level of stature.  The Butthole Surfers track is a dive directly into the 90’s alternative rock scene, a challenging era to crack for a guitar game (most 90’s rock was about front men more-so than guitarists).  Rush fills a similar void to the Boston track in the first game, and KISS has to be in a game like this… they are on absolutely everything else that can hold a name on it.

I guess what I’m saying is that this tiny preview of the set list confirms what I already confident in, this Guitar Hero development team really have their heads wrapped around the potential of this game.  The setlist in the first game was well crafted within the limitations that a relatively unknown unknown property can do.  Now that Guitar Hero is a monumental success, the team is rising up to a new level of content, but without losing a single bit of the polished consideration that made the first game so freaking awesome.

I’m pumped.  Can you tell I’m pumped?

Now that the week is over I’ve finally had some time to look back and try to soak it all in. And with it over, I can say that it was too much.

The annual Jager Olympic party at The Bunker was this last weekend and it was truely epic. But, of course, in order to get that epic scale it was necessary to do an unprecidented amount of work. That work began last week with the eBay purchase of a new direct draw beer dispenser. It spiraled out of control from there.

The new draft system is a TDD-3 from True Food Service USA, and looks a little something like this:

In fact, it looks very similar, except that our draft system actually has two taps per tower rather than one tap per tower as shown in the photo. Of critical interest to the story is the following two facts: the system is 70″ x 28″ x 37″ in size (without towers) and has a crated weight of 335 pounds. Not really affordable to ship and not easy to move.

The shipping problem was “solved” by Dave and I leaving at 6:00am on Tuesday morning for the distant town of Springdale, Arkansas to pick up the draft system ourselves. We made a solid trip there and just ended up shoving the draft system into the back of his Explorer with a forklift and then heading back to Manhattan (all in one day/night.)

But this was not before making a couple stops in Olathe, KS. With the initial goal of getting some tips from our good friend “Tard” who is a “Beer Man” in Olathe, we also needed to stop by JD Hillen’s parent’s place in order to use their table saw for a few choice cuts. This is because the arrival of the new draft system brought another major project into the fold: the bar was to be expanded.

Another 3 feet of bar was added to the inside edge of the Bunker Bar, no minor feat. In the course of one week, we built a new subfloor, bar support, and bar surface for the Bunker Bar. This included a dismanteling of the existing bar in order to fit the beer draft system in and relocate the mixed drink station’s ice basin and soda gun manifold.

While that would have been more than enough to fill an entire week of labor, there was still vinyl to be made and cut for the Beer Pong and Beer Bong tournaments along with 90 gallons of gelatin to cook for the Jello Wrestling event.

We ran it right up to the wire when the Jager Olympics finally kicked into gear. We were ran absolutely ragged when the event started and continued to do well and scrape by until it was over. The popular consensus is that this year’s Jager Olympics was the most amazing party anyone had ever seen. Which is awesome, that’s what we were going for.

The events were great. The crowd was massive. We managed to down the pallete of Keystone kegs that were purchased (a pallete is 5) and much of the stock of mixed drinks. The bar was ran in part by residents and in part by a crack team of professional bartenders that came in from Aggieville (including the amazing Kate Collins and followed later by Cheri Freund). But when it was all over, we were mostly just tired. Estimations collected by door guards were aggregated and initial numbers suggest that over 800 people crossed the threshhold to the Jager Olympics with a peak of about 275 at any one time. Over 30 rounds of Jello Wrestling took place with every possible combination of male and female contestants in groups of two or three.

As a house, we were a little bit less estatic. The party was great, the numbers speak for themselves, but there were a few things lacking for us. We did way too much work in the week leading up to the party, and as a result the fatigue crept in now and then. The Jello Wrestling was a little ‘out of hand’ as all of the floor surfaces of the house were completely covered. An emergency scrubbing session started at 5:00am and went for a couple hours after we managed to get everyone out of the house.

But most of all, while we had over 800 people at the house, it was surprising to us how many of those people were complete strangers. I worked the front door for about two and a half hours that fell around the time that Aggieville closed. In that entire time one friend from the CS curriculum showed up that I chatted with. Besides that everyone was a blank.

It’s not that we regret having the party, that’s not it at all. It was truely a legendary event. But we are certainly looking forward to limiting the size of future events in some fashion. I long for relatively tame after-parties from Copus concerts and a return of the Beer Pong League that provided great times every single weekend for months without getting a thousand people we don’t know attending.

Of course, during this week there were still work and classes to be handled by all of the residents, so this is just kind of the bulk of the iceburg. I know I’m really happy that it’s over, and I look forward to many more gatherings–of a more controlled nature–at The Bunker.

Now I just want to rest…