Easter’s come and gone in a massive storm of nonevent. Not that I was really expecting much to happen, so I suppose my expectations were entirely valid.

Stu’s last day at Corillian was Friday, so a small group of us went to Newport Bay for happy hour where we got cheap food and crappy service for an hour or so to celebrate Stu’s liberation. Jenn and Tif got together for a girls’ movie night, so Stu and I played some Paper Mario.

Saturday was a clean-up-around-the-house day where Jenn and I finally got to a lot of the errands and things we’d been putting on “the list” for the last couple of weeks. Random stuff - shopping, cleaning things, putting things away, etc. Nothing too exciting there, but it was good closure on things that needed to be done. After we finished with the chores, Jenn and I spent some time playing Project Gotham Racing 3, where I thoroughly determined that I’m pretty much no good at it but still have fun playing.

Sunday was a pretty lazy day, and I suppose that’s how it should be on Easter. Jenn and I went to breakfast at Biscuits Cafe, which is really good. I had sweet potato pancakes, heavy on the “cake,” light on the “pan.” So tasty, yet heavy - like eating a gold brick baked in spice. Also had some eggs, hashbrowns, and bacon. Just doesn’t get better than that. Fell into a food coma about 10 minutes after leaving.

I spent a couple of hours reading comic books that I’d purchased but never quite got around to reading, then Stu came over and we finally finished Paper Mario (clocking in at about 40 full hours of play). Jenn whipped up some Indian food - chicken in a spicy ginger sauce - and we all sat and watched SNL: The Best of Phil Hartman, where Stu was given a lot of US pop culture reference in one big dose.

Now it’s Monday, and frankly, I’m bored. Stu’s no longer over the cube wall from me, and while it’s not a showstopper or anything, he did sort of keep me sane around here.

The new version has some pretty major restructuring and does lots of stuff better to allow for a more peaceful coexistence with other scripts:

Converted to “object oriented” JavaScript to avoid name clashes.

Fixed minor bug with positioning in newer browsers.

Safely attaching to all events (thanks to Phil Haack for this).

Updated so script is placed in HEAD of document.

Go get it!

Went to Target at lunch yesterday and saw they had, not one, but three of the Xbox 360 premium boxes in stock. Decided to wait until the next Tomb Raider came out before I picked it up.

Promptly returned after work and purchased it. Also got a second controller and Project Gotham Racing 3.

Hooked that bad boy up to the ol’ LCD TV when I got home and fired it up.

It’s awesome.

Jenn and I raced for quite some time and determined that it’s hella fun, but neither of us are really any good at that game. It doesn’t make it less fun, we’re just used to games like Burnout where the driving is vastly more arcade-oriented. It’ll just take a bit of practice, is all. The cool thing is that the two player [on the same screen] is so clear - it’s not like the other times we’re playing where you struggle to see where you’re going. The benefits of higher resolution, eh?

I didn’t join Xbox Live yet because I need to get the wireless network adapter (no network drop in that room), but once that happens, I’ll be in business.

I’m also looking forward to checking out some of the media capabilities. I’ve heard a lot about it; time to try it out firsthand.

Now I need to convince Stu and my dad to get one and we can all play together.

A minor follow-up to my JavaScript and Unicode Character Validation entry (and sort of a reminder to myself):

Sometimes when working with characters in regular expressions it’s nice to be able to dump one or more characters as a line of Unicode hex escape sequences. For example, abc becomes \u0061\u0062\u0063.

Here’s a quick snippet for a console app that will let you input a series of characters and will dump out the list of characters entered as Unicode hex:

using System;
public class DumpHexChars{
  public static void Main(){
    Console.Write("Enter chars to convert to Unicode hex: ");
    string chars = Console.ReadLine();
    string output = "";
    for(int i = 0; i < chars.Length; i++){
      output += String.Format("\\u{0:x4}", Convert.ToInt16(chars[i]));
    }
    Console.WriteLine(output);
    Console.ReadLine();
  }
}

Got the cable phone hooked up on Saturday. Decided that we were tired of shelling out to Verizon for what has thus been sub-par service and that we’d go with the ol’ Comcast phone because we’ve always had good luck with their service and it’s actually cheaper for what we end up getting, all told.

While the guy was there he put in three new cable outlets (because not all of the rooms in the house had them… still not all of them have one, but I think there’s only one room that doesn’t that really might need one). That was cool. Plus, due to the new outlets, I can now put the cable modem right down next to the computer and connect directly to the network. Previously I was having to connect through wireless because, well, no cable drop was in the office. I’m movin’ up in the world, people!

Sunday I spent the day playing Paper Mario with Stu, which was hella fun since it’d been a couple of weeks since last we played. Made some good progress there and also tried the Papa John’s “Kong-Sized Pizza,” which was pretty ridiculously giant and filled us up nicely.

I would probably be remiss in not saying that there are a couple of friends of mine that are going through some hard times right now, so time was spent with them during the weekend as well. I won’t say more than that, since it’s not my place, but I hope they’re doing well and will continue to support them as needed.

Less serious: just found the Red Dwarf 8 DVD is coming out soon, and there’s a limited edition with a motorized scutter toy on it. Preordered!