Okay, so I haven’t posted in here in a while. So sue me. I’ve been kept pretty busy over the past week or so, and haven’t really had time to come in here and do a post. I’ve got a half an hour or so now, so I can elaborate on how my week’s been.

As I’ve said before, I went on a business trip to Rock Springs, WY this past week. I left on Monday, arriving in Salt Lake City at around noon local time. From there, I rented a car and made my way to Rock Springs. I must say that driving to Rock Springs from Salt Lake City is a hell of a lot more pleasant than driving to Dallas, Lafayette, or Corpus Christi from Houston. It’s about the same amount of driving time, but it’s a lot more scenic (with mountains and the like), so it doesn’t seem as boring. Of course, it helped that I brought my iPod and FM transmitter/car charger with me. I arrived in Rock Springs at around 4 PM local time, and met up with coworkers at the location so I could get an idea of what was going on. Then, I went to my hotel (the local Hampton Inn, which was as nice as always), and got settled in. I then went for dinner at the local Applebee’s, which was in the parking lot of Rock Springs’s mall. (For those of you familiar with the north Houston area as it was in the 70’s and 80’s… the closest comparison I can make is that the mall reminded me of North Oaks Mall. :-) ) It had been twenty years since I’ve been at an Applebee’s. It’ll be another twenty years before I go back. The food just wasn’t that good. :-/

I got to the factory early Tuesday morning after having a very nice breakfast at the hotel (they even had my preferred brands of syrup and coffee creamer!), and got straight to work setting the time clocks up. I managed to get all of the timeclocks operational, other than missing a fiber-optic port module for the switch. I must say, though, that re-running a bunch of ethernet cable in the shop was not my idea of a fun time. :-/ After the day was done, I headed back to the hotel, and pretty much hung out there the rest of the night (other than a brief run over to Burger King to get some dinner).

I checked out of the hotel Wednesday morning, and went over to the factory to work; I ended up setting up a small networked laser printer and installing the second fiber-optic port on the switch (which didn’t arrive until that morning). From there, I had lunch with two coworkers at this neat little Italian place called Rocky Mountain Noodle. After lunch, I said goodbye to Lance and Ralph, and began the drive back to Salt Lake City. I was understandably nervous about doing so, as SLC had been getting some rotten weather (aka, rain and snow showers) and that it was travelling east towards Rock Springs. It didn’t help that Ralph, Lance, and Kelly (the general manager at the Rock Springs location) had been giving me shit about it. Fortunately for me, though, it turned out that most of the weather was actually 40-50 miles south of I-80. Other than a rainshower outside of Little America, it was nice and sunny until I got within 30 miles of Salt Lake City. At that point I hit some serious snow showers. I was nervous, but it turned out to be nowhere near as bad as I had feared. I finally reached my hotel (the Comfort Inn at SLC International Airport) after a wrong turn or two, got settled in, and worked from the hotel room that night (excluding dinner in the hotel restaurant). I likely won’t stay there again; two of the lamps lacked bulbs, the bathroom’s fan was too damn loud, and I kept getting disconnected from my home server and the work VPN.

The next morning I did some more work from the hotel room. At about 10:30 AM, I checked out, went to the airport, returned my rental car, and went to the gate to work from there. Unfortunately, despite all the ads they had at the airport for wireless network access, my laptop was unable to get onto the airport’s wifi system. So, I just watched the CNN monitors and took calls on my Blackberry while waiting for my flight. I got on the flight, arrived back in Houston at 5:30 PM, and Dad picked me up. All in all, an uneventful end to the trip…

… or so I thought, until we got into a wreck on the way home.

We were on Greens Road heading westbound; we had just crossed Aldine-Westfield when I noticed a white Buick Regal preparing to pull out of Chevron. I had hoped she wouldn’t pull out as we were approaching. She did. Next thing I know, she’s T-boning Dad’s car on the passenger side right in front of me. *sigh* I looked over at her, and she had a perfect “Oh SHIT” expression on her face. Fortunately no one was hurt; Dad’s car was dented and scratched, but the Buick’s front bumper was torn off. We waited a while for a policeman to show up to file a police report, but none came, so we decided to file one the next morning and get home. (It was after dark at that point and that area of town isn’t a very nice one.) I got home, unpacked, and caught up on some stuff… and that was my day.

Friday was rather uneventful, other than the fact that I got a new cell phone. This new phone is supposed to be one of the “Blackberry killers”; it’s a Cingular 8125, which runs Windows Mobile 5.0. I already have it linked to my office email account, and it’s been working rather well. In fact, the only reason I carried both it and my Blackberry around is because they won’t have my number ported to the 8125 until tomorrow morning. After that, I’ll be rid of the Blackberry and using the 8125 full-time. It really is a nice device, though I imagine people like Agilo and kryptondog will be scandalized that I’m using a Windows device as my cell phone. Heh.

As for this weekend… about the most productive thing done was to fix the satellite dish. We first noticed a problem yesterday evening when I tried to watch Cops and found my satellite receiver wasn’t getting anything from the dish. After a bunch of troubleshooting (involving re-running coaxial cable and moving receivers between locations), I finally went to Best Buy to purchase a new dual-LNB for the dish, as Dad found the old one had somehow been damaged. The receiver’s working fine now, thankfully… no complaints from me or anything. :-)

And now, I should consider going to bed. It’s been a long day, and it’ll be a longer one tomorrow. Fun fun…

Well, I suppose I can think of worse ways to spend a Saturday. I’m sitting at home, keeping an eye on IRC, having a beer, and listening to my iPod (which is hooked up to my home theater). I had come up with the idea earlier of challenging people on #mortalkombat to Mortal Kombat: Deception, and giving them five Dragon Points (used for rank upgrades on MK Online) if they could beat me without using cheats or infinites. Unfortunately, the one time I actually tried playing against someone, I kept getting an error saying, “Connection quality is inadequate.” Gah, so much for THAT idea… So, now I’m just relaxing and not doing too much.

Tomorrow would normally not be too busy either, except for the fact that I need to head over to my office to pick up asset tags. I’ll need them for my business trip next week, and I won’t have time to get them before I leave on Monday. I wish I didn’t have to go to the office, but it’s my own damn fault for forgetting the damn tags in the first place. I’ll also need to pack for the trip tomorrow evening as well, but that shouldn’t take too long. Otherwise, like I said, it’ll be a quiet day.

My real busy day this weekend was last night. I needed to go over to Louie’s apartment after work to finish up getting his machine into some semblance of stability; as I believe I said in a previous post, his machine is so advanced that I’m having to be creative about driver installation. For example, the motherboard drivers were only available in the 64-bit of Windows XP, so we ended up putting Windows XP Professional X64 Edition on it. Then we found said motherboard drivers didn’t include audio drivers, so I had to install the audio portion only from standard nForce 4 drivers. About the most embarrassing part was trying to get the network card working; it took me an hour before I realized that the ethernet controller Device Manager wasn’t recognizing was the onboard NIC, and that XP had recognized the Realtek PCI card I had installed. When I left, the machine was up and running and all of the important hardware had been detected. Only time will tell whether it’ll stay stable or not, though.

Oh, well, that’s my weekend in a nutshell. Now to find something to occupy my time… fun fun.

This is really turning out to be a slow weekend.

So far I really haven’t done anything of note. About the most important thing I’ve done has been to install OpenVPN on my mom’s laptop so that she can access the home network whenever she takes it out of the house. Then again, I could have done that a LONG time ago, except for the fact that as far as I know, yesterday was the first time she’s left the house with it. It’s a monster HP laptop with a 17″ screen; the damn thing is so big that the laptop keyboard actually has a numpad on it. She mainly got it as a desktop replacement, and has been using it as such. Oh, well… personally, if I want a laptop as a desktop replacement, I’ll get one with a 15″ or so screen and just get a docking station for it. :-)

Tonight probably isn’t going to be much better, either. I think the most I have planned is hitting the mall to do a little bit of clothes shopping (I need some more shirts for work) and then have dinner somewhere. I’ll probably do a bit of gaming as well; I keep meaning to finish Half-Life 2, and tonight should be a good night for that. Otherwise… meh. It’ll be a quiet night. That’s fine by me, really… after a week of having gone to Los Angeles followed by Buffalo (TX), I could use some quiet time.

Speaking of trips and whatnot, I’ve already gotten clearance to get time off for E3. This should be a very interesting show, with both Mortal Kombat: Armageddon coming out this year and Nintendo hopefully showing off the Revolution. Of course, I’ll likely be spending so much time working on MK: Armageddon coverage that I won’t get to see everything else that I’ll want to. Oh, well… such is the curse of coming in during an “on-year” for MK. (An “on-year” is what we call a year when Midway releases an MK tournament fighter. While last year was important because of Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, it wasn’t a tournament fighter and as a result didn’t get as much interest as other MK games.)

In any event, I suppose I should go off now and do something constructive. Fun fun…

Now that Apple has started shipping MacBook Pros and iMacs that use Intel architectures, the call to release Mac OS X for generic Intel boxes has intensified, and sites have sprung up trying to work out how to do so. Of course, Apple has been very much against this idea, and have hit such sites with legal threats. On one hand, Apple is trying to make a complete computing experience and they subsidize the development of Mac OS X with their hardware sales. On the other hand, the people wanting to run Mac OS X on generic hardware believes there is a market out there for it and that Apple won’t lose anything in sales. Where do I stand, you may or may not wonder?

I actually side with Apple on this. They do have the right to set out terms for the use of their software via the license (though I believe software vendors should make the license available for viewing BEFORE they sell the software, but that’s another argument entirely), and I do believe that making Mac OS X available for generic hardware will badly affect hardware sales. It’s actually already happened; back in the 90’s, Apple licensed Mac OS out to other vendors so they could make offbrand Macs. The clone Macs’ sales so badly cut into Apple’s that Apple was nearly destroyed.

As for there being a market… heh. It actually reminds me of arguments I get into about Mortal Kombat games being ported to PC. Up until Mortal Kombat 4, MK games were regularly ported to PC. I actually have Mortal Kombat & Mortal Kombat II (the first two games on one disc; this edition is popularly referred to as “Mortal Kombat Duo”), Mortal Kombat 3, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and Mortal Kombat 4 for PC. However, afterwards, Midway stopped developing MK games for PC. When Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance was announced, a common question was if a PC version was going to be made. Even to this day, we get that question. The answer is always an unequivocal “no”. I actually asked a couple of people from Midway about it back at E3 2002, and the answer they gave was a logical one: they never made money from the PC sales, so it didn’t make sense for them to keep porting it. Even at Gamers Day in Las Vegas last year, Ed Boon stated it wouldn’t be happening, as he didn’t see a market for it. Yet the fans keep insisting that there is a market. Unfortunately, like I keep telling them, their beliefs do not correspond to Midway’s reality.

As a corollary, my friend Justin (better known to some of you all as ]{0MBAT) had a conversation with someone on #mortalkombat back in 2002 that illustrated another point in the argument beautifully:

(Gah, I can’t find the convo right now. I’ll post it if and when Justin can send it to me. In short, it was someone who came into the channel asking if MK:DA would be coming out for PC, and Justin said no, because Midway didn’t make any money off it. The guy griped that they would, but then sighed and said he’d go play some WarCraft III. When Justin asked if it was pirated, the guy replied, “Of course.” Justin then pointed out that the only reason the guy would want MK:DA for PC, then, was to pirate it… which the guy tried to deny. No one believed him, though.)

I can just see Mac OS X get hugely pirated in the event it’s made to work on generic x86 hardware. At least right now those people who have it already paid for it and helped subsidize it by buying Apple hardware.

In any event, while I wouldn’t MIND having Mac OS X as the OS for my main PC, I would certainly buy an Apple system to run it on. Not only do you KNOW it’s going to work with the hardware, it’ll help subsidize the cost of the OS (considering it would cost much more WITHOUT the hardware sales offsetting the price of OS development). In the meantime, I’ll stick with my self-built machine running Windows XP Professional as my main desktop PC, and my Powerbook running Mac OS X 10.4 as my work laptop.