I’m sitting here at my computer at home. I should be relaxing, or enjoying the time off. Instead, I have my work laptop online and sitting next to my main PC’s monitor, and am using it to communicate with people at our Canada location regarding system issues.

This has been par for the course for this entire weekend, pretty much.

It didn’t help that last week was plagued by long days due to power issues at our main facility, and the need to replace network switches at another facility. (Network switches have to be replaced after-hours because we can’t afford entire sections of the network to go dark during business hours.) I had hoped for some time to relax this weekend and catch up on sleep. Of course, I knew that plan was partially doomed when I learned that the power would be out at our main office for part of the day Saturday. That meant I would need to go down there to make sure everything would come back up after power was restored.

Saturday got to an even earlier start than I had anticipated. At around 6:45 AM I was contacted due to a problem with the security system at a facility. I got that taken care of, but by the time I was done there was no sense in going back to bed. I eventually left for the office, made sure all the systems were back up, and then headed to our datacenter to swap out backup tapes. Once that was done I made my way to Louie’s; he had gotten a Playstation 3, and had picked up the full Rock Band set. We played that and Guitar Hero: Rock the 80’s for a while, went and got dinner, and then went back and played a bit more. It was fun, but we did come to a realization: Dave’s going to be our drummer. ;-)

(I also had to get gas before I left for the office. My request of the oil/gas companies? Knock it off already. Seriously.)

On Sunday, I got woken up AGAIN to another support call. It turned out that there was a power issue at the building where our datacenter is located, so I ended up needing to make a drive down there to get our servers operational. It was a severe annoyance, especially when I found the problem wasn’t with our equipment but with the datacenter-provided equipment. That was two hours I could have done without having to waste… heh.

As far as today goes, I was once again woken to people from work contacting me. It’s kind of understandable, considering the Canada branch doesn’t have today off, but still… meh. I’ve gotten everything taken care of for now, but I’m going to end up keeping my laptop on the corporate VPN just in case I need to do any more support work.

In any event, I’m just glad it’s a four day work week this week. I’m hoping that it’ll be a little quieter than last week, but if what I’ve seen so far is any indication, I’m not expecting it to be. Ah, well. I’ll just finish out this day relaxing the best I can, and do my best to deal with the rest of the week. :-)

Last night, I had my Xbox 360 up and running and was looking for something to play. I had just finished a single-player tournament on Texas Hold Em and didn’t feel like playing another round of Battlezone (which is another game I’ve been playing recently). I looked on my list of games, and noticed that I still had the demo of Chessmaster Live installed. On a whim, I decided to load it and give a single-player game a try. I hadn’t played chess in ages, and figured I would end up being wiped out by the CPU in relatively short time. To my surprise, I managed to checkmate the CPU in 27 moves.

I’m still trying to decide if that means I should start taking chess up again.

It’s funny, in a way. Back in the old days of IRC, before my real name became more or less common knowledge out there, one of the two common theories of what my nick meant was that it referred to the chess piece. (The other was that it had a religious meaning.) I thought it was amusing, really, especially considering how much I used to play chess in the past. Of course, even back then I didn’t play anymore, except for a brief stint when I had Chessmaster 5500 and I would play the occasional game online against silver. In a way, the reason I gave it up was rather silly, but to this day it still annoys me.

I was actually taught to play chess around fifth or sixth grade by my father. He had a nice chess board with pieces, and one evening he brought it out and showed me how to play. I took to it quickly; I was hardly a Kasparov or Fischer, but I enjoyed playing. It got to the point where when we would have our Saturday outings to Bennigan’s for lunch, we would take a small travel chess board with us and Dad and I would play. I’d also routinely play against Sean and Kourt.

So, what happened to completely kill my desire to play?

Like I said, some may consider it silly. Sean’s father (who at the time was the 8th grade honors science teacher at Strack) was the head of intramurals. He arranged for a chess tournament, and I took part in it. I won the first round against Sean. In the second round, though, I was playing against some younger student, and at one point I accidentally moved my king into check. He moved his piece (either queen or bishop) and “took” my king, saying he won. I told him no, it was an illegal move and I needed to take it back; you cannot move your king into check. He claimed that if a player moves his king into check the other player wins.

Unfortunately, Mr. McCormick was out that day and the teacher who was overseeing things did not know how to play chess. The teacher ended up siding with the other student and declared that I had lost. I was PISSED. I don’t mind losing, but I was incensed that this kid basically cheated (or was going by incorrect rules) and the teacher’s ignorance let him get away with it. I called Mr. McCormick later that evening to gripe and complain, but there was little he could do. The damage had been done, however. I had been screwed over, and at that point in my life I was not really able to handle such a thing well. Every time I saw a chess board after that I was reminded of how I had been cheated and had no desire to play.

It would be over ten years before I would play again.

That’s not to say I didn’t regret giving it up. I’d see chess puzzles in a newspaper or chess boards or PC games and wonder if I could get back into it. However, inertia and my knowledge that I don’t always have the most strategic or tactical mind kept me from actively pursuing it. However, I may end up playing it again on a more casual basis. It’s not as if there aren’t chess programs out there, and who knows… it could be that playing chess more might help me when playing other strategy games. (Sinc’s been pushing me to get Command & Conquer 3, and Jeff and Malinda have said before they’d like me to try Twilight Imperium.) At the very least, it’d be good mental exercise.

Either way, we’ll see.

I mentioned a few days ago that I was picked to be on a jury earlier this week. I have to admit, it was rather inconvenient as I had a lot of stuff at work that needed doing. As it stood, I ended up taking phone calls and responding to emails whenever I was on break, and when I got home I spent a couple of hours working on support tickets from there.

The case was something of an annoyance, too. If it had been a criminal case it might have been a bit interesting. This was a civil case, however. The case was Amprop Inc. vs. Harris County Appraisal District and Waller County Appraisal District. Amprop, a fully owned subsidiary of British Petroleum, was contesting the appraised value of BP’s American headquarters as of 1 January 2005. As you might imagine, it wasn’t exactly the most exciting trial out there. About one of the few perks of the whole experience was the fact that I didn’t have to drive downtown at all. I’d just park my car at the Kuykendahl Park & Ride, and ride the bus for free to and from downtown. In a way I wish I did work downtown so I could do just that.

We thought we were going to have yesterday off from court, so I could spend the day catching up on work that needed to be done where my physical presence was actually required. No such luck. We had wrapped up the testimony/evidence part of the case by end-of-day Thursday, so the judge wanted us back at 2:30 PM to hear closing arguments and begin deliberation. We came to a decision as to how much the property was worth by nearly 5 PM, and from there, that was that. That is, other than the judge coming to talk to us and indulge his curiosity as to how we arrived at the figure we did. :-)

As for the trial itself… I admit to annoyance. Actually, most of us in the jury were annoyed. Not so much with the plaintiffs, mind, but with the defense. The plaintiffs had an expert witness named Paula Thoreen who appraised the property, complete with plenty of evidence and research. The defense had… nothing. They had no witnesses, nor any actual appraisal data of their own. All they did was cross-examine Mrs. Thoreen as to her methodology. In closing arguments, the defense requested we find for a rather high figure that they pulled out of their asses. In the end, we had to use solely Mrs. Thoreen’s data, and used her base value and added back in some deductions we felt were unwarranted. If I had been given a chance to speak to the defense attorneys, I would have likely said, “I would not hire you as my counsel. Next time, if you want us to find a certain way, give us evidence to do so.”

In any event, it’s all over and done with. I’ll be returning back to work on Monday. I’ll just miss being able to take the bus to work, is all… :-)

I’m in jury duty. Fun fun.

I’ll go into the nitty-gritty details when I’m actually out of jury duty and the case is decided. In the meantime, I figured you all might be interested in something I saw in the jury deliberation room today. There’s a typical display of police patches from around the area and around the country, with a 9/11-related one in the center. However, one in particular stuck out to me, and I was highly amused by it. I’ll let you guys figure out which one it was. :-)

This is nice. It’s been a quiet and restful morning, which is great considering I spent most of the week at the Offshore Technology Conference working at my employers’ booth. About all I have planned for today is to take Mom to dinner at Cheesecake Factory tonight to celebrate Mother’s Day. I’ll probably do a bit of shopping at Barnes & Noble as well, but I haven’t quite decided if I will or not.

I reached a milestone yesterday, though. As usual for a Friday morning I weighed myself, and I found I had lost two pounds this past week. That puts me right at the 25 pound mark; when I started I weighed 258 pounds, and now I’m down to 233. Now I just have another 30-35 pounds to go, and I’ll be happy. :-)

The main other thing of note that happened this week was that I had an MRI done of my heart. After the ultrasound was done on my heart last week, the doctor found something he found a little concerning, and wanted a complete scan done to see if he could figure out what was going on. About an hour and a half after I arrived at OTC after having the MRI done, the doctor called me and let me know that it turned out to be nothing serious after all, and he didn’t think it was related to my atrial fibrillation last week. In fact, he said unless I suffered another issue, that I didn’t need to follow up. I’m off caffeine entirely and have gone past the withdrawal symptoms, and I’ve cut down even more on my alcohol intake. I think I should be fine from here on out.

The trade show itself was busy, but not really much to speak of if you’re not in the oil and gas industry. :-) What annoyed me more than anything else was the parking when I arrived at the show later than 7:30 AM. At one point I was parked close to the old Astroworld bridge. Tuesday and Wednesday were hectic as hell in the show; the aisles were literally packed with people to the point where it was difficult to get around. Still, it made for a nice break from work. The only thing that annoyed me was the fact that for all the free coffee around, I still had to go to the Starbucks in Reliant Center to get decaffeinated coffee. Well, that, and Reliant was much more anal about drinks this year. We ran out of bottled water at our booth so quickly that more than once I had to get a $3.50 bottle from a concession area. Good thing I’ll be expensing those…

Ah, well. Like I said, I’m going to use this weekend to unwind and get ready to get back into the swing of things Monday. Hopefully it won’t take long to get back into my normal routine…

I saw this over at lolfail.com, and I have to admit I was rather amused. I almost want to ask Kerri if anything similar had happened that her husband happened to see… :-)

Well, I saw the cardiologist this morning.

It went better than I expected. He doesn’t think there’s anything truly wrong with me, but he wants me in the office tomorrow morning so he can do an ultrasound of my heart, just to make sure it’s not abnormal. Otherwise, he just recommends that I give up caffeine entirely and cut my alcohol intake as much as possible. In addition, I need to start taking aspirin just to make sure that if this DOES happen again, the chances of a blood clot forming are much smaller. He also wants to see me in a month just to follow up.

In other words, I’m more or less fine. I’ll have to make some more changes to my diet, but otherwise everything seems to be kosher. I’ve already arranged to get my hands on decaf coffee for the office and for home, and will work to cut my alcohol intake (which was pretty small to begin with). We’ll see how it goes. :-)

Now I just need to get over this damn caffeine withdrawal and I’ll be back to 100%.

You know it’s going to be a bad day when you end up being taken from the office to the hospital in an ambulance.

When I got into the office, I could feel my heart racing and beating irregularly. I figured I would wait and see if it calmed down. It didn’t, so I went down to the HR office, where they proceeded to call an ambulance for me. The ambulance arrived, and the paramedics confirmed what I had noticed. They took me down to the emergency room at St. Luke’s, and after a while the doctor came by with a diagnosis.

I have an atrial fibrillation. So, I need to follow up with both a cardiologist in the next day or two, and also make an appointment with my regular physician. That’s something I haven’t been doing for a long while, and need to be much better at. Still, it was not fun sitting in an emergency room with an IV in my arm and wearinng an oxygen mask and EKG probes. Fortunately, the problem went away and they were willing to release me.

I’m back at the office now, but will have to start making appointments… blah. I already know I’m going to have to start cutting out caffeine and possibly alcohol. We’ll see what the cardiologist says, but in the meantime… this was one scare I didn’t want to have.

It’s been an interesting four day weekend. I went to Midway Gamers Day in Las Vegas, and also helped Louie yesterday with some furniture shopping. I’ll put most of what I did behind a cut, but for those who are interested and don’t want to read the full post, here’s an interview I did with Ed Boon about Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe.

Read more “So, the weekend in review…”

The following post was originally posted on Mortal Kombat Online’s Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe forum. I’m just reposting it here for those not part of the MK community who’d like to read it.

Well. The day has come and gone: Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe has been announced. Not unexpectedly, the community rioted.

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t known about MKvDC for a while now. I had been hearing too many whispers from credible sources for it not to be true. Of course, like many here, my primary reaction when I heard was it was consisted of, “You CANNOT be serious…” It didn’t seem like it would work. It seemed gimmicky. It seemed like Midway had a completely skewed view of what the fans were wanting and ran with it.

I’ll be blunt. I had even considered leaving Mortal Kombat Online while I was pondering over what was happening. In the end, I was convinced to hear Midway out and see what they had to say.

Of course, I got to see the presentation at Gamers Day. I got to talk to Ed and others at Midway. I’ve also spent a couple of days thinking about it and getting my thoughts in order.

I’m going to wait and see what happens. In retrospect, it’s not really as crazy an idea as people are making it out to be.

The first thing to keep in mind is that whether you realize it or not, Mortal Kombat had a bit of a comic book background. Before he worked for Midway, John Tobias was a comic book artist. Among his work was the comic version of The Real Ghostbusters. In addition, if anyone remembers the comics Midway sold when the first two arcade games came out, those were drawn by Tobias himself.

Another thing to look closely at is Mortal Kombat 3. In particular, look at the character designs that John Tobias came up with. Has anyone else noticed that the character designs seem to be more comic/superhero costumes than anything else? I’d wager that if you showed the drawings of Sub-Zero, Kung Lao, and Shang Tsung to someone who did not know Mortal Kombat, he/she would think they were from some superhero comic instead of a fighting game like Mortal Kombat.

Now, let’s look at what MK is crossing over with: the DC Universe. Ed actually made a very good point when he said, “This is not Super Friends. This is Batman Begins.” The DC comic universe is not all bright colors and happy people. It is brutal and has all sorts of horrors. People deride Superman, for example, yet don’t look at some of his enemies. The Cyborg Superman annihilated an entire city, murdering its entire population. The Toyman, in one incarnation, was a child killer.

Other crimefighters have similar backstories. Kyle Rayner, shortly after becoming Green Lantern, came home to find his girlfriend’s body stuffed in his refrigerator. The Elongated Man’s wife was brutally murdered, and it came out she had been raped in the past by Dr. Light. The second Blue Beetle’s career came to an abrupt end when Maxwell Lord (a former friend) shot him point-blank through the head. Maxwell Lord’s end came when Wonder Woman found out the only way to break his control over Superman was if he was dead.

And let’s not even get into the Joker’s body count, which supposedly is in the four figure range…

The DC Universe is not a nice place. If it was, there wouldn’t be a need for their superheroes. It’s dark, gritty, and while the forces of evil and good might wear costumes and have superpowers… you still have a place where people die horribly, and wrongs are being fought.

Actually, on that note, that brings up a thought I had earlier. People are griping that a universe with characters in costumes who possess superpowers are being crossed over with a universe with characters in costumes who possess superpowers. Huh? I’ve certainly seen much stranger crossovers in my time. (Ten years on I’m still scratching my head over the X-Men/Star Trek crossovers, and don’t get me started on Archie Meets The Punisher…)

The other common complaint I’ve seen is the fact that they’re aiming for a T rating with this game. People have been worried that there will not be fatalities in this game, but Ed has said they will be putting in finishing moves. They may not be lethal ones (he didn’t say either way), but they will be there. The thing is… in a way, it does kind of make sense. Outside of the games, there hasn’t been much gore in Mortal Kombat. In fact, the series has been made somewhat kid-friendly outside of the games, including Saturday morning cartoon series, lunchboxes, and the like. Even the live-action takes on Mortal Kombat have been relatively gore-free; the only counter-example that comes to mind is the monk in the first movie who was flash-frozen by Sub-Zero and shattered; later Kano makes mention of how disgusted he was by it. The game will have blood, as has been seen in the trailer. There will be finishers, according to Ed. We just shouldn’t expect to see all sorts of blood and gore. Besides, one doesn’t need gore to creep someone out. Just look at the typical victim of the Joker: no marks on the body and nothing to show the cause of death, except for their mouths forced into a huge smile…

Like everyone here, I was concerned. I even went into the event expecting Midway to be extremely upbeat and claim this is what the fans had been asking for. Quite the opposite happened, in fact; everyone I spoke to about it acknowledged they expected a huge backlash. However, they believe in it, and it did not seem like lip service at all to me. They believe it will work and they want to prove it to us. My initial complete disagreement has since faded away, and now I’m awaiting it with a bit of a raised eyebrow and a general feeling of, “All right… convince me.” I’ve seen worse ideas in the past, and Midway knows they’re not working with an entirely accepting community with this idea.

We’ll see how it goes.