Fugu Talk

It’s often said that managing programmers is like herding cats. Setting aside why anyone would want to do that, that analogy came to mind while I was sitting in my cat’s vet’s waiting room reading an article in Cat Fancy or something similar listing tips on managing multiple cats in the household.

Some of the advice clearly didn’t apply, e.g. dealing with cat pheremones. Or if there is an analogy there, I don’t want to delve into it. But some of the others sounded spot on. For example, introduce new cats slowly to avoid territorial reactions. Don’t give more treats to one cat than the others. Provide an outlet for excess physical and mental energy. Don’t allow bullying. And provide an area for basking in the sun.

I’ve been unable to google the source of the recent upturn in Fugu Maze sales on the App Store – the most I can tell from my AppViz report is that it might be taking place in Great Britain. And since it has taken place since the most recent app update, I’m going to guess that part of the popularity is due to the photo picker feature (if that’s true, then the Unity iPhone Enhancement Pack has already paid for itself!)

Customizing a maze with your own “wall photo” may be more fun to some than actually solving the maze. Here are some screenshots of my tests, using an old college photo, a picture of my cat, and a baby picture of my nephew.

This isn’t a view of HyperBowl that you can normally see in-game, but my cat stomped all over my keyboard and trackpad, resulting in this scene from the Unity Editor. I thought it was pretty.

The good folks at the Westminster Veterinary Group have taken to my cat Jiggs, so much so that they tend to call me “Mister Jiggs” on the phone. I’ve considered changing my name to save trouble, but I settled instead for registering the domain name, http://www.misterjiggs.com/ Not much there except a few cat photos sure to bore anyone who’s not into cats, or my cat in particular.

I remember in one of my previous jobs another cat owner and I would start talking loudly about our cats whenever our coworkers started going on about their kids. I don’t know what you’d do in that situation if you aren’t a pet-owner or parent – find some World of Warcraft players I suppose and go on about that.

In any case, I’ll close by inflicting a cat video of Mister Jiggs (actually, she should be called Miss Jiggs):

I decided my YouTube channel looked silly with just one video, so I scoured my hard drive for more videos and found just two more.

This one is a montage of the modelling demos built into Nendo 1.5, which I helped release a few years ago. I guess I put this together with the idea of having a “demo reel”, and also learning iMovie and trying out the video capture program SnapZ ProX.

And this is your typical cat-at-play video, one of the few times I’ve used the video feature on my Canon Powershot: