Looks like one of my hard drives crashed today. I turned my computer on this morning and went in and took a shower before going to school, and when I got back it was doing scandisk and got stuck and my hard disk was making crashing sounds (motor trying to spin up then hitting something). It was the one with about half of my applications on it (some programs refuse to install anywhere but in c:program files), *all* of the source code I’ve ever written, including poker saver, fryblast, all the archives of imagic/igaming/mtgonline/etc and stuff from school, my trillian with all of the contacts renamed, logs from irc channels I’ve been in for 5+ years, all the games I had installed, including the “source” of all the fry_ maps, and my entire mp3 collection. Yes, I know that was a run-on sentence and it’s just used to emphasise my anguish. Luckily I just turned in my pawn stop program tuesday or else I would’ve had to do it again. Also that I happened to use SVN for Poker Saver and had the repository on another hard drive, so I’ll only have lost the stuff I’ve done between now and the last version. Also that my picture collection was on the c: drive too, because those are harder to replace. The source code I would’ve mainly used for reference and most of that knowledge is in my head now, and most of the other stuff is replacable except for the maps, although I don’t think anything was going to happen to them any time soon. Most of the other stuff can be reinstalled. The thing that sucks is I just got a hard drive and was going to swap this drive out for it. If I hadn’t been so lazy I would still have all my files. Murphy’s law would’ve made the other drive fail though, so I guess it wasn’t my fault.

Thankfully the books I ordered myself for my birthday from Amazon got here yesterday, so I’ll have something to do while my new drive formats and all my programs get installed.

I saw this neat puzzle on google’s blog. I mistakenly read the problem as the first 10 consecutive digits of e which are prime, which the answer is of course 1838606261 after a quickie c# program to determine that (I thought the number would be much deeper honestly). Grr.. I’ll have to go into work on the harder problem now to figure it out. Thanks google for keeping me up so late working on interesting things!

Of course, I love google. Don’t let the title of this entry fool you. I’d work there in a heartbeat if I lived in the Bay Area, I was finished with College, and they would hire me. Hopefully in another few years that will be a possibility.

I’ve been working on poker saver throughout the day. Just wanted to post another screenshot.

View Poker Saver Alpha Screenshot

As you can see, I’ve got the money and icon columns working to display the proper kind of information for their column. There is still a bit of work to do on this screen though. Currently the data is still from the SQLite database imported from the php script. I should be working on the C# importer tomorrow if I get the chance.

It’s about time for me to add a favicon for this site. I lost the original .psd of the burntpopcorn logo that a friend made for me (thanks Scopes), and he lost it too, so I decided I would attempt remaking the image in the copy of Fireworks that I won. I couldn’t figure out what font he used though, so I scrapped the entire thing and decided to just use the .gif and clean it up a little bit and resize it. It turned out ok so I’m not complaining.

After that, I decided to throw up a quick page and logo for Poker Saver. Also, I’ve added a quick screenshot of pokersaver for you to gawk at. Well, not much to look at yet, but it’s going to own. What you see is loading the SQLite database using the ADO.NET provider for SQLite, imported using the PHP scripts I wrote for the original website version. I’m still not sure if I’m going to release it as open-source or not though. If I do, it would be under a BSD or Apache-style license, or maybe even a source-viewable license.

Thanks to Ross Hironaka, I now have some videos of the Gilroy Bot Gauntlet. Click the Robot Videos link on the right side to go there. If anyone else has any other videos from the event, let me know and I can put them up on my web site, or link them from here.