“OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE SMALLER THAN THEY APPEAR”

Hand-wringing and angst. Worry and anxiety. Fear and trepidation. That explains how I entered bedtime on Friday night, following the events of the previous two days with Julia. I knew there was an epic battle brewing. Knew it in the fabric of my soul. I spent the evening first removing the front rail of her crib, instantaneously rendering an infant’s protective cocoon into a toddler’s accessible day bed, then installing the newly purchased gate keeping her from utilizing her new found freedom to plummet down the stairs in the middle of the night. We tried to make it into a Big Deal, something special to be cherished and enjoyed because it is. She seemed to enjoy the novelty of hopping up onto the bed and hopping out of the bed which, to my mind, showed a preview of the events of the night.

We finally reached the fated hour, bedtime ministrations complete and a totally open bed from which to escape. We gently laid her down, covered her in her blanket, administered the usual kisses and words. Then we turned around, walked out the door and pulled it to its usual, cracked position. And waited. Waited for the expected and inevitable outburst. Or simply an escape. We stood outside the door, resolute in our goal of enforcing the sacrosanct bedtime.

She never budged. We never heard a single peep from her until the following morning. I woke up before her on Saturday, unable to sleep any longer. At about 8:45 she appeared in the hall — carrying the hallowed Piglet, naturally — and looked over at me sitting in the bonus room. I waved and she ran up to me so I plopped her on my lap and we watched some SportsCenter before I caved to the whims and put on something more to her taste.

I figured Saturday’s nap time would be the new battlefield, so we (well, I did, anyway… Cat is Zen calm) approached it with not a small amount of worry. Turns out I needn’t have worried, she went and plopped herself down and didn’t move until we got her that evening. We’re limiting her naps to 2 hours now so that she gets more of her sleep at night, so two hours later I went to fetch her and she was comfortably sleeping. Saturday night’s bedtime came and went in the same fashion, as did last night’s.

I’m not naive enough to think we’ll never have an issue with her escaping her bed and doing things. She’ll test it someday, perhaps when she’s feeling her oats particularly acutely or simply isn’t as tired one day. But so far it’s been completely unbelievable. After we put her down we kind of look at each other and shake our heads, freshly amazed at her all over again.

Thanks again to those of you with advice — or simple commiseration — in the previous thread!

Primarily as an FYI to frequent commenters, I’ve enabled Spam Karma 2 on the ol’ blog again. The blacklist simply wasn’t able to keep up with the slow-witted, imbecilic vermin that post comment spam. In the past 24 hours I scraped somewhere north of 50 comment spams out of the moderation folder. No, of course they never made it to the site but I still had to sift through them. SK2 is designed such that I shouldn’t have to do anything by hand any more, so we’ll see. I know I had issues with the original SK back in the day such that it would incorrectly filter my friends but the plugin has come a significant way since then.

That’s one aspect of blogging I don’t miss. At all. If you have any problems, well, I’ll know about it because I comb my logs quite often. Trust me, your legitimate comments will show up because I do value them.

Did you know that the Xbox 360 gets released in just 39 days? 39 days is a weird time, both interminably long and incredibly short. I have mine preordered, of course, because I am a consumer whore at least for Xbox thingies. As of right now I’m only purchasing one game for the thing when I pick it up, Project Gotham Racing 3 because I totally love the series, but I have since signed up for Gamerang — I mentioned them recently in an aside here and decided to give it a whirl… yes, I’ll review once I get a handle on the service — and have a queue completely filled with Xbox 360 games.

Unfinished Business

Before that thing drops I have only one thing I meant to do and have yet to complete: finish Halo 2 on Legendary difficulty. I already beat the thing on Heroic back when it was released almost a year ago, but never had the grit and determination necessary to beat it on Legendary. Legendary difficulty in Bungie’s games are for special people. People that enjoy pain and humiliating challenges. Strange people that will retry things a hundred different ways to get through a particularly confounding section and come out the other side with a certain set of weapons. Frickin’ weirdos, really.

I’m not a person that usually even finishes games, to be honest. I can count on one hand the number of games I’ve ever actually completed. I never completed any of Bungie’s earlier creations like Marathon or Myth. But somehow beating the original Halo on Legendary was an accomplishment that drew me in. I did it on Heroic and knew in my heart that I wasn’t man or geek enough to do it on Legendary. And indeed the very first level on Legendary introduced me to a new level of intensity that completely surprised me. But I fought through checkpoint after checkpoint, working through the glory that was “Assault on the Control Room”, the pain that was “Truth and Reconciliation” and the horror that was “The Library.” I remember finally reaching the very end in the Warthog on the final level. At Legendary. I remember savoring the infamous hug easter egg for those of us silly enough to put ourselves through it. It was both accomplishment and letdown in almost equal parts.

A lot of people didn’t like Halo 2. I’m not one of those people as I’ve mentioned before. I really enjoyed it. Going through a second time on Legendary I appreciate it just as much, though there are some rather cheap design decisions that made me curse more than a few times last night, the most egregious of which is the insta-kill Covenant snipers. I beat the game on Heroic 10 months ago and pretty much started on Legendary soon thereafter. I reached a point in a level called “Regret” about midway through the game that apparently caused me to throw the game back in the box and give up for half a year. Goddamned snipers! Every time I poke my head out it gets taken off by one of those little bastards. Last night I finally got past that part — in satisfying fashion, actually, taking out all three of the remaining snipers that had been plaguing me in a particularly callous, cold-blooded, and more importantly accurate burst of fire — and made it a few checkpoints further so I at least get a little more progress under my belt. I know there are some ugly challenges ahead, but I’ve got 39 days to get there.

The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades

I’ve already sung the praises of PGR3 which I think will be a complete addictive hoot. I spent almost 100 hours on PGR2, beating that one on gold and coming within 2 medals of platinum. From the looks of it PGR3 should be even better, with an in-car view that simply has me salivating almost uncontrollably.

Even beyond that game, though, there are many interesting titles that I eagerly await including some surprises. I think Kameo looks like a blast, Perfect Dark Zero might actually turn out to be enjoyable, and Oblivion might make me an RPG fan once again. I’m a complete pansy when it comes to scary games — there was a PC demo for Silent Hill 4, a survival horror game, that I downloaded and I literally couldn’t bring myself to leave the initial room — but Condemned has me very intrigued with it’s combination of gorgeous visuals and storyline. I itch to play Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2006 in high def from my couch, and Gears of War can’t be released soon enough. To make a long story shorter I have roughly 15 titles in my rental queue and I can see keeping each of them for a long time.

Hopefully they’ll tide me over until Halo 3 comes out sometime next year — smart money being on the typical Xbox BIG release date of November 15th next year, just in time for the holiday season to trump the PS3’s holiday offerings — so I can start my quest for the Legendary trifecta.

Finally cleared “Regret” last night, so 6 more levels to go. The Prophet of Regret himself was pretty simple, but getting to him was sometimes painful. I had a particularly evil checkpoint hit on the gondola ride to the temple with me having an almost empty rocket launcher and a battle rifle in need of a reload against 3 banshees, 2 flying elites and 3 grunts one of which loved tossing brute shots. I cussed a couple of times. Here’s a diagram I whipped up to celebrate the occasion, to be updated when I clear each successive level. I know, it’s pretty.

Google Reader is Google’s pretty snazzy AJAX aggregator. You knew they had to do something, this is it. For the most part it’s not bad. I prefer the aforementioned Gregarius — I like scanning more than one item at a time, I like the ease with which I can clear read items — but not everyone can host their own aggregator.

There’s one truly annoying thing about Google Reader, though. Any time there’s an error somewhere it AJAXes an error bubble near the top of the screen. Like this side-by-side comparison shows (yes, it’s small and no, there’s no “full-size” version because I got lazy).

The left part of the image shows the red-ish error bubble. It pops up whenever you, for instance, click on a link and something “goes wrong” back at Google HQ, then soon thereafter it disappears and it magically goes back to the way it is on the right. That’s great, they’ve let us know that something went wrong.

Only problem is whenever that error bubble happens to pop up, it moves everything else down to make it fit. That might not seem too terrible until you realize that if, for instance, you were clicking on the “down” link in the interface you would suddenly be clicking on the “Your Subscriptions” link instead. And it’s ephemeral, it comes and goes at its own whim, so you could be happily skimming along when an error occurs and suddenly you’re staring at your subscriptions or some other non-intuitive action.

That, friends, is what we call “piss-poor UI design.” AJAX may be wonderous but it doesn’t necessarily protect you from incorrect design decisions.