\nSomehow, I got conned into joining an indoor soccer tournament at work. Practises are about once a week at a place called SportsTown, in Richmond. I didn’t know what I was getting into; these guys are good… really good. I used to play soccer, but that was ages ago, and I was never that good! I feel totally out of my league, but my team is in pretty desperate need of players, so there I remain. We played with some other soccer team at Slocan park over the weekend, and it was really fun. My main concern is disappointing my team mates. \ud83d\ude41 We got a tournament game, this weekend. We (they) are defending champions, so there’s a lot of pressure. But I’m just gonna play my best and have fun – can’t do much more than that. I’ve suffered a ridiculous number of injuries due to my jumping into this, but I am glad I joined.<\/p>\n
Southpark Me<\/strong> New Computer<\/strong> Getting all the hardware was the first step. I actually built this computer, which is a first, for me: I figured, if I’m supposed to get a degree in Computer Science, then I owe it to myself and that piece of paper in my distant future. There were a few kinks, and I had to complete a quest for thermal paste, at one point, but everything seems to be working now. I must go out of my way, however, to say that mother board manuals are completely useless pieces of shit. I respect a good piece of documentation, but motherboard manuals get no love from me. None.<\/p>\n I’ve installed the latest Ubuntu on my new desktop. It’s zippy and I like it. I had gotten so used to my laptop having to page-swap all the time, I thought it was normal. I’ve been really impressed with Ubuntu, despite having a few problems, but I will write about those later (and possibly somewhere else). With my new found space, I’ve also started migrating all my personal data to one location (to rule them all<\/em> -sorry). This is an extremely long and boring task, but it simply must<\/em> get done.<\/p>\n Some quick software I recommend checking out: <\/p>\n Learning New Things<\/strong> I also reviewed Java, but didn’t use it that much. I’ve been working a lot with web-related stuff at work, I encountered the need to write scripts, hence, the Perl. As someone who likes clean, and well structured things, it is my duty to loath all that is Perl. I have always hated that vile language. There is a well known (among the Perl community, at least) acronym that sums up the language quite accurately: TIMTOWTDI<\/em> (pronounced TimToady<\/em>). It stands for: There is more than one way to do it<\/em>. And with Perl, there really is; for absolutely anything, there’s a thousand ways it could be done. And I don’t mean algorithmically, I mean syntactically. To me, this is a huge problem.<\/p>\n A simple example: OOP example: That being said, it has been extremely useful. \ud83d\ude42 Especially regular expressions (a whole other language in itself!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been a while since I’ve actually blogged anything. Like Jon observed, you get used to a routine, and if blogging isn’t part of it, it’s just not gonna happen. I’m less likely to spend time on the computer when I get home from working with a computer all day. Been spending more time with… Continue reading During the last month…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,1,6],"tags":[5,4],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-general","category-recreation","tag-games","tag-linux","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4jEMb-soccer","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nInspired by Shirley’s photo-realistic South Park personality<\/a>, I created my own. Unfortunately, he looks nothing like me… but It’s as close as I could get without making him naked… and trust me, you don’t want that.<\/p>\n![obey my .. er... coffee!](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/files\/SouthparkSteve.png?w=750&ssl=1\")
\n<\/div>\n
\nAfter my first (or maybe it was second) paycheck, I bought a cheap desktop computer. Pretty much a bare minimum at $600 after tax, sans monitor. I’ve since bought a nice 19″ LCD flat panel monitor (cost almost as much as the desktop), a friend’s old graphics card (so I got 3D acceleration now! – thanks, Haseeb!) and a wireless PCI card. Oh, and a 10′ DVI cable. Did you know 10′ DVI cables are cheaper than 6′ DVI cables? Crazy, I know.<\/p>\n\n
\nRecently, I’ve been spending time with a few interesting things, including:<\/p>\n\n
\n
\n1. print \"hello\";
\n2. print (\"hello\"); # parentheses are optional
\n3. print 'hello'; # single quotes are significant, but not in this instance
\n4. print qw(hello); # just like single quotes
\n5. print qq(hello); # just like double quotes
\n6. print qq.hello.; # here you need something, but who said anything about parentheses?
\n<\/code><\/p>\n
\n
\n1. door->open(\"a little\");
\n2. open door \"a little\";
\n<\/code><\/p>\n