Balafon

It’s a little wierd now that I’ve been working on actual published software for a few years, as opposed to research, to see actual products I’ve worked on in the wild, and to read reviewers’ comments where I know exactly what the software in question does, because I wrote it.

Andrea & I have just put our place on the market, and are looking for a new place, and we’ve been getting lots of real estate listings from our agent.

What makes this relevant is that a couple of years ago, during a lacuna in employment between computational linguistics research and game development, I worked for a company whose software is used by half the realtors in North America. And indeed it turns out that the printouts we’ve been getting were made by that software.

Now I’d like to say that I know exactly what the software that made those printouts does, but the software in question is a vast and terrible jungle of recursive and self-modifying spaghetti code without end. I must confess I quit that job partly out of fear of ever being asked to work with it.

I much prefer physics and artificial intelligence.

OK, I finally played through Portal yesterday. All I can say is the hype is well-deserved.

A perfect gem of a game. And I’ve got “Still Alive” on repeat on my iTunes.

But the cake is a lie!