Okay, so, last night I took a picture of my servers for a few friends to look at. This is what you would call the heart of the darquecathedral.org domain.

The black machine on the bottom with the blue lights is Tyrande, my main server. Although, after watching the Doctor Who episode “The Age of Steel” last night, it does make me wonder… take a look at a picture of one of the characters from the episode below:

Maybe I should consider renaming Tyrande into “Cyber Controller”. :-)

Well, I ended up taking my Powerbook to the Apple Store up in the Woodlands Mall. (I swear, that Apple Store is bigger than the one in the Galleria.) Sure enough, the preliminary analysis was that it was a fault in the logic board (read: motherboard), so they’re likely going to have to send it off to the repair depot. That’s fine… I was expecting something like that. I’ll just have to make sure to prep a spare laptop at the office for my use on Monday.

Afterwards, I went over to the Cheesecake Factory with Mom and Dad for a late Mother’s Day dinner. I overate, as usual. *sigh* One of these days I’m going to learn to temper my eating habits there. Mom enjoyed it, though, which is really what counts in the end. After that we just came home after a brief browse around Barnes & Noble.

As for right now, though, I’m just going to sit back and relax… possibly after grabbing a Shiner from the fridge downstairs. It’s been a semi-long and boring day, so I’ll probably finish it off with some pinball or maybe loading up DOOM 3 on this machine and giving it a whirl. Oh, well…

Bleh. Let me start off by saying that I’m not looking forward to going into the Apple Store later today. I’m not going because I WANT to, mind you. For a few weeks now my Microsoft USB notebook mouse had been giving me issues, and I had resolved to pick up a Logitech cordless laser notebook mouse to replace it. Well, yesterday I found out the mouse wasn’t the problem. I had intended on installing some software onto a coworker’s laptop so he could use his Bluetooth mouse, and the quickest way for me to do it would have been to copy the software onto the USB Flash drive I keep on my keychain and use that to install. Unfortunately, when I inserted the USB drive, the Powerbook wouldn’t indicate it had mounted it. A quick check of the system logs revealed the truth: a hardware failure was being reported on the USB controller. So, I’ll need to take the Powerbook in to have them service it. I’ll be without the Powerbook for a couple of weeks while they fix it; in the meantime, I’ll have to use one of the spare laptops at the office as my work machine. On the other hand, I’m glad this problem didn’t pop up during E3, as my Powerbook was one of the prime media import/render machines.

I was home late almost every day this week. I was supposed to have dinner with my boss and another IT coworker (who was in town from Houma for training classes) on Tuesday evening; unbeknownst to me and Brent, Adam (the boss) had taken some Tylenol PM in response to some headaches and it ended up knocking him out until 10:30 PM. So, Brent and I, along with Anderson (who had been invited to join us), waited in a sportsbar in the Galleria for him, until such time as we gave up and ended up hitting a club. On Wednesday evening, Adam, Brent, and I ended up eating at the Cheesecake Factory in the Galleria for dinner. Thursday night, the three of us hit Houston’s at US 59 and Kirby for dinner. Houston’s is like the anti-Cheesecake Factory in that while Cheesecake Factory’s menu is like a novel, Houston’s fits on one side of a single page menu that’s about the size of a legal sheet of paper. Still, the food is quite good; their rack of pork ribs is among the best I’ve ever had. Then, last night, I met Louie for drinks after work. I had hoped to get some sleep last night to make up for it, but wouldn’t you know it, I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep…

As for today, I’m working on getting my music library and a few data files on the Powerbook synched back to the main PC (just in case Apple decides they want to wipe the hard drive on the machine while they work), and then sometime this afternoon I’ll go up to the Woodlands Mall to take it in to the Apple Store for service. After that, I’ll need to hit J.C. Penney to get some new jeans (I ripped mine yesterday, and then I’m taking Mom to Cheesecake Factory for her late Mother’s Day dinner. I also had to re-rip a couple of CDs to my iTunes this morning (specifically, Relics of the Chozo and Led Zeppelin’s Early Days: The Best of Led Zeppelin Vol. 1) because something about the encoding didn’t allow the whole files to be copied over to the iPod. Supposedly (from Adam’s experience) ripping them using iTunes 6 fixes the issue. We’ll see, though.

As for now, though, I’m going to go refill my coffee mug and continue working on these data transfers. Fun fun…

Well, another E3 is over and done with. As always, E3 tends to be an extremely hectic time for me and I always come back from the show feeling that I need a vacation to recuperate from my vacation. In any event, before I get started, here are a couple of links for you so you can get an idea firsthand of what I was up to this past week.

• Mortal Kombat Online’s E3 2006 Coverage
• My E3 2006 Gallery

Anyway, I got into town on Tuesday morning, to find the hotel wasn’t quite ready yet. I had lunch at a nearby Denny’s, and came back in time to claim my hotel room (AND arrange for a connected one for the other MK Online guys). Joe got in at around 6:30 PM, and Justin came in a couple of hours after that. After we made our plans for the following day and got ourselves prepared, we ended up calling it a night. I do admit that I tried to introduce Justin to Doctor Who, but he fell asleep partway through the second episode of “Tomb of the Cybermen”…

The next morning, we got up, and got ready for the show. Aaron showed up on time, and we all piled in to make our way to E3. Once we got there, obviously our first stop was the Midway booth, where we got to work playing Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, and taking pictures and recording video. I don’t think I need to say that I really enjoyed playing the game and look forward to seeing how the final game turns out. We also got to meet up with the usual crowd from Midway (Ed Boon, Steve Beran, Brian Lebaron, John Podlasek, and others) and play a bit of catchup. Late that afternoon, though, I got a bit of a rare opportunity to geek out, as it were. There are two MK development team members I had wanted to meet for the longest time, and one of them decided to make an appearance at E3 this year. This particular person is Dan Forden, who had done the music for MK1 through MK4 and now supervises the music/sound effects department at Midway. So, needless to say, I was quite happy. :-) I also got the chance to meet two other MK fansite webmasters: Dave Rosteck of Dave’s Mortal Kombat and Luke Cunningham of Total Mortal Kombat. I wasn’t sure what to expect from Dave, but he was a very nice guy, if a bit quiet. :-) On the other hand, it’s no secret that Luke and I have had our (sometimes serious) disagreements in the past. Fortunately we got along well at the show, and some of the rifts got healed. While at the show, SPOOn showed up and hung around with us. After the show, we all headed back to the hotel and got to work on the evening’s updates, ordered room service, and generally got work done.

The next morning, we made our way over to the show, just in time for our scheduled appointment to get direct feed footage from MK Armageddon… only to find that we couldn’t get the console to cooperate with my camcorder. Gah. We played more of the game (after rescheduling a time to come back and get footage plus interview Ed), then we went our separate ways to browse through the separate halls. I didn’t bother with trying to see the Nintendo Wii (waiting in line for three hours isn’t my thing), and the Playstation 3 had no appeal to me. I wandered through both South and West Halls, with a quick look in Kentia. At the end of the day, we headed back to the hotel to do some more work, breaking off only so that we could get a bite to eat at this Italian restaurant down the street from our hotel. After that, we returned to the hotel and worked late.

The next morning we got to the show again just in time for our appointment with Ed. While Justin interviewed him and I filmed it, Aaron and Joe worked in vain to try and get direct feed. We’ll have to try and figure out a way to get it in the future, as this is apparently a new incompatibility that just popped up within the past several months. After that, we got some time in talking to Ed et al, and then we headed down to lunch in Kentia Hall with Luke in tow. Afterwards, I browsed Kentia a little, to see what arcade machines they had in the Videogame Museum this year. Then I wandered back through South and West Halls, to take stock of what I missed before. Then I met the others back at the Midway booth, and we headed back to the hotel. We got back in plenty of time for me to get the Fan Interview converted into Quicktime files and uploaded, and then we went out to dinner and went to see Poseidon in IMAX. After that, SPOOn returned home, and the rest of us returned to the hotel. The following morning, Aaron and Joe left early; Justin and I tried to hit Denny’s only to find it was a 25 minute wait. After eating at the hotel, we went to the airport and made our way home.

So, in the end, what did I like most? Hellgate: London and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars certainly drew the most interest from me. I also found Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar to be an interesting MMORPG. Namco Mobile Arcade was interesting as well, though it did disappoint me that there was no word of PocketPC ports. All in all, though, it was an interesting show and I’m looking forward to next year’s.

On the other hand, I’m definitely not looking forward to the pile of work that’ll be waiting for me at the office tomorrow morning. Ah, well… I knew that was going to happen beforehand. Still, it was a productive trip, and was worth all the headache et al.

Well, it’s Sunday night, and I’m just sitting at my computer desk listening to music from my iPod being played through the home theater and having the last of my Shiner Lights. Not that I’ve done that much productive today, for the most part. About the most productive thing I’ve done today has been to figure out a problem with how I’d configured the MySQL install on the main MK Online server. Apparently I didn’t realize that all of these huge files in the base of the MySQL data directory were in fact what are called “binary logs”, which act as transaction logs showing what changes have been made to the filesystem. The problem was that I never quite took into account that they needed special attention in regards to cleanup, so I actually had something like close to 4 GB worth of logfiles going back to 2003 or thereabouts. :-/ I only need a week’s worth of these logfiles, so I’m probably going to come up with a solution in the next couple of days that will allow us to keep these files cleaned up. Heh, it’s amusing sometimes how I’m still learning stuff about these things…

Yesterday was fun, though; Dave and Louie came by the house and we hung out for most of the day. Dave had brought his father’s laptop around to see if there was anything I could do to salvage it, but unfortunately it only has 128 MB of RAM, and it was thoroughly infested with spyware and viruses. At this point, about all I can recommend to Dave is that a wipe and reload might be in order. *sigh* Other than working on the laptop, though, we had lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings, played some Midway Arcade Treasures and Midway Arcade Treasures 2, and had dinner and drinks out. We had fun, all things told. It certainly beat sitting at home doing nothing. :-)

I must say, though, I’m looking forward to the short week this week. We get Good Friday off, which is certainly welcome to me; I could use the time off. However, it’s not as if it’ll be a quiet week for me, as tomorrow I have to rush around and get packed to move into my new offices on Tuesday. This will have to be done in addition to whatever other work I need to do; chances are I’ll end up working late tomorrow to get everything finished. Oh, well… as long as I’m not there all night I won’t complain. In addition, the new office is a bit more out of the way, so it’ll be harder for users to come seek me out instead of submitting support tickets like they’re supposed to. :-)

As for now, though, I’m just going to sit back and relax. I got my hands on the Doctor Who – The Beginning DVD box set, which has the first three Doctor Who serials from late 1963 and early 1964. I watched the first one, “An Unearthly Child”, tonight. I’ll probably watch the other two (“The Daleks” and “The Edge of Destruction”) later this week. I’ll probably finish up the night by playing some Cyberball 2072 or Mortal Kombat II by way of Midway Arcade Treasures 2. Oh, well… might as well before the storm of work hits tomorrow. :-)