Author Archives: bozasm

Love is like finding something special in something that’s already great

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Listened to “Such Great Heights” by Postal Service today. Noticed some piano in the first verse I’ve never heard before and it was beautiful. I’ve listened to this song hundreds and hundreds of times – at one point noticing the whispering violin in the second verse and appreciating that. But never heard this piano. I found myself rewinding the song over and over and hearing parts I never heard, and loving parts that I’ve always loved: the drip-drop of the opening whatever-that-is, the approaching bass, the winding up of the opening verse with claps.

How sappy he gets, saying those lines about her: “I have to speculate that God himself did make us into corresponding shapes like puzzle pieces from the clay.”

He even admits that it’s a bit of exaggeration, but it’s what he thinks about to get him through those times he’s missing her.

I digress (as I do at times – take my wondering mind and cultivate with the exactness of software, and this stuff happens).

I think love is like me noticing that piano. I’ll always love my wife and there are parts of her I love experiencing over and over and over. Then there is some day where something simple happens, and it’s like falling in love all over again. It’s not something that was missing and it comes back – the piano was ALWAYS in that first verse. It was just some twinkle or sparkle that caught my attention, and here I am thinking about the 10 years I’ve known her. And here I am, like I was when I first discovered this song, listening to it over and over.

And writing about it in this blog.

I love my wife – it was her who convinced me to pick this song as my slideshow song. She’s really something special: “I’m thinking it’s a sign that the freckles in our eyes are mirror images, and when we kiss they’re perfectly aligned.”

2009 Gaming in Review – Part 1

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Closin the books on 2009 and my list of completed games for 2009 looks pretty decent – revisited an oldie but goodie, finished at least 3 games that were games I’ve played more than 50% at one point only to have to restart them this year and finally finish them. I’ve completed more than 10 games this year, and I’m going to post about each game and what I loved about them – SPOILER alert for all of these games, but since only two of them are 2009 releases, I’m sure not many people will care.

2008 ended with my birthday and Kate giving me the acclaimed Gears of War for my birthday. I was very excited to play the sequel one of the most exciting visceral shooters ever and I wasn’t disappointed.

Gears of War 2 (completed Febrauary 2009)

The gritty intensity returns. This game provides more of the same – over-the-top manly action killing and chainsawing grubs along with a ho-hum story. Some great intense gunfights and revelations and an online system that was just as fun.

Favorite moments: Lab with the AI security system. Unleashing something and chainsawing my way out of the lab. Intense gunfight through the razorhail. Horde mode till 4 in the morning.

Sly Cooper 3: Honor Among Thieves (completed March 2009)

With Gears of War 2 complete, I set my sights on an old favorite that slipped by. Kate and I loved Sly Cooper 1 – one of the few games we played together and beat in less than 15 hours or so. Sly 2 was excellent as well, but never completed it (on the backburner for now).

Sly 3 continued the open world character specific questing that Sly 2 did, but introduced more characters with each chapter. This adjusted the approach to missions as new characters had new abilities – for example, the Guru cannot attack, but can mount bad guys and make them run into each other.

The story was well told as well, opening with the final heist (and Sly seconds before death) and the rest of the game explaining that Sly needed to recruit a gang of specific skills to pull off the heist.

Favorite moments: Finding out the last boss was part of Sly Cooper’s dad’s gang and seeing how gang camaraderie is different between them. Also, the scenes with Panda King fighting himself, as well as the epic battle against Tsao on the bamboo shoots. Great ending and I hope there are more Sly Cooper games.

7 Years of Bozasm.com

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Tomorrow marks the 7th year of Bozasm.com.

When this started, a blog was a lot of fun and a nice outlet for writing about randomness and sharing thoughts. Since then, facebook, twitter, and texting have become the most accessible sources for brief blah blah stuff.

Of course, this still works wonders when it comes to making larger updates, but then they automatically get transformed into facebook notes anyways, so I’m theoretically reaching viewers (none), rss readers (1-2) and facebook people who read notes (5% of people who read status updates).

Regardless, the writing isn’t for anyone else’s sake; just my own I suppose and it never really mattered to me “how many people were reading this”

The content this year has been few and far between, but bozasm.com lives on through it’s current bits and pieces.

In the last 100 months…

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In the last 100 months, I’ve graduated from high school, college, got my first car, got my first full-time job, moved to Las Vegas, bought a new house and proposed to my girlfriend.

But in the last 100 months, I have not asked a girl to go out with me. Happy 101 months with Kate.

What a Month!

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My game informer came in the mail and LittleBigPlanet is ranked as the game of the month – and honestly – what a month it is!

In the very same issue came reviews of Gears of War 2, Fallout 3, Fable 2, and Mirrors Edge. Also reviewed is Chrono Trigger and Wii Music. A hell of a month and plenty to salivate over.

I didn’t even see a review for Call of Duty, which is most likely going to be another amazing title. Next month has Left 4 Dead and probably some other amazing games I’m omitting.

PS3 has a lot of catching up to do, but I feel like Xbox 360 is going to beat it by a landslide this holiday season. Of course, Big N tops all charts with the Wii selling 800k and DS selling 400k, easily demolishing MS’s 300k and PS3’s 190k. Of course Sony headlines it as the “Playstation brand” hitting 370k, but that is a combination of all of their PS systems (PS2/P/3).

Major Steps

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I watched Psycho when I was a lot younger – in the Theater for Joseph Guzman’s birthday. I remember going to AMC Theaters after Driver’s Education, so this puts me around 15-16 years old – pretty much in the middle of puberty and my manliness had been developing at an unprecedented level.

It was the remake of Psycho, starring Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates. I didn’t know Vince Vaughn would soon be the excellent talker Trent Walker from Swingers – a personality I would eventually adore and emulate to some degree.

Anyways, the movie scared the crap out of me. The music, the tension, the suspense. Of course, the iconic shower stabbing scene was burned in my memory, effectivly scaring me from showering with shower curtains (luckily my bathroom at the time had a door, which I felt was more secure for some odd reason).

Since then I have been terrified of scary movies, and have adamantly put my foot down in refusal to watch them. Sometime later I would go see End of Days, which is, by comparison a really horrible movie, but I would leave the theater prematurely and sit outside until it was done – something I have never done prior or since.

My imagination runs wild in scary movies, and it paralyzes me at night, surrounded by silence. I try to stay strong, but it was difficult to be strong against what my mind imagined.

I told myself that I would beat this thing, and I have told Kate in the past that I wouldn’t mind watching Scream and various horror movies with her – in an attempt to stay strong and be a real man. She never called me on it or pushed me to do it – something I really adored about her. She must have known that it was something that really was not something I wanted to do.

Fast forward to now – I’m approaching my 26th birthday, which makes it roughly 10 years since my first viewing of Psycho. I told Kate that I felt like facing my fear and had agreed to watch scary movies with her, in fact, suggesting some movies I wouldn’t mind watching.

Yesterday, I watched the Hitchcock original of Psycho on AMC, and while the murder scenes were scary, I expected them all and was able to watch it and appreciate it from beginning to end. That was followed by watching the Descent, another horror-type movie. I had my jumpy moments but i survived.

I played Resident Evil 2 in high school and loved it. It was highly regarded as an A+ title and I beat it from beginning to end. However, I did beat it using a strategy guide, while I played it during the day, with the sound off and the radio on. I hope to play great games like Bioshock, Dead Space, and Resident Evil 4 without resorting to those mechanisms and enjoy those A+ titles the way it was intended – dark, frighteningly gripping edge-of-your-seat exciting titles.

ROWNUM and its nature

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The application I work on selects members from a database. Sometimes we want to select a specific subset of the the rows, and we use the database variable called ROWNUM to accomplish this.

For example, if we want the top 100 members we ask the database:

SELECT MEMBERDATA FROM DATABASE
WHERE ROWNUM BETWEEN 1 and 100

This properly returns 100 people.

However, some clients want the next 100 members, so our application asks this:
SELECT MEMBERDATA FROM DATABASE
WHERE ROWNUM BETWEEN 101 and 200

However, this second query returns 0 members. Apparently the ROWNUM value doesn’t represent what I think it represents. A quick google search returns the following explanation:


rownum is a pseudo column. It numbers the records in a result set. The first record that meets the where criteria in a select statement is given rownum=1, and every subsequent record meeting that same criteria increases rownum.

Found at http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/ora/sql/rownum.html

This means that asking for ROWNUM BETWEEN 100 and 200 will not give me *anyone*. The first row in the result will be ROWNUM = 1, which is not between 100 and 200, and therefore NO results return. We adjust the query as so:

SELECT MEMBERDATA
FROM
(
SELECT MEMBERDATA AND ROWNUM AS ROWNUMBER
FROM DATABASE
)
WHERE ROWNUMBER BETWEEN 101 and 200.

The inner query returns all of the data and their associated rownumber (assigned the variable ROWNUMBER). Now that the number is generated, all the outer query sees is two real values – MEMBERDATA and ROWNUMBER. It is able to limit the results by that real data column, and does not fall prey to the rule associated with the psuedo-column. Now we can get the MEMBERDATA of exactly the 100 people we want to target.

Twitter Account and Bozasm.com

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I started getting unknown followers on Twitter and decided to set my account to protected so that only those who are following me can receive my updates.

As a result, my twitter feed on bozasm.com was then locked, and prompted users (at least while I was using Google Chrome) to enter a username and password to see them. Obviously this is not a user-friendly experience, as the twitter feed is for all bozasm.com readers to see, but only I have my own password.

Anyways, hopefully nobody got any hiccups from reading my posts due to that issue.