Category: Rantings from the Pulpit

Another post in a sea of inactivity…

D'Arque Bishop

Okay, so… it’s Good Friday, I’ve had the day off, and I’ve managed to accomplish very little today. That’s fine by me, mind you; after this past week I could very well do with a day of doing absolutely nothing. I had to move offices on Tuesday, and I have yet to even completely unpack, as I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off. It’ll get worse next week, as my employers’ corporate office will be moving to my office’s location next weekend and I’ll be working to finalize preparations for THAT move all week. This will be in addition to my normal tech support work and any other issues that might creep up in the meantime. *sigh* I’ll be glad when all that will be taken care of.

I’ve been immersing myself in Mortal Kombat II and Cyberball 2072 recently. I was never all that great at Cyberball 2072, but practice is helping to make perfect. Or at least, I try… my main issue nowadays is telling the quarterback to pass to the right receiver. I’ve been handed more interceptions that way… gah. For those who are not familiar, Cyberball 2072 is an arcade game from about 15 years ago which involved a version of football played by robots. Not that I’m THAT big into football, but it often makes an interesting strategic exercise. Now if I could just do something about getting my passes intercepted relatively often…

As for my weekend plans, they’ll probably consist of sleep and more sleep. I’ll also likely be helping Dad move his office. He’s got it partially moved now, but some of the stuff is here at the house… including his Vonage adapter and phone, which means he can take business calls here in the meantime. Fun fun. Otherwise, I’m just going to treat this as the calm before the storm, and not worry too much. We’ll see how things go…

Catching up on the week’s events…

D'Arque Bishop

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. :-)

An end of week (and end of weekend) post…

D'Arque Bishop

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…

Saturday night and all’s well…

D'Arque Bishop

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.

One of those weeks…

D'Arque Bishop

Hrm. I think I’m going to have to post the answers to my music quiz tomorrow night. I was kinda hoping there’d be more of a response to it, but only having one answered by now is kinda disappointing. (Though, Jenn DOES get half-credit for one of them…)

Oh, and I saw the season premiere of South Park tonight. All I’ll say about it is… Hayes and Scientology: 0. Parker and Stone: 2.

Anyway, it turns out that I will be going to Rock Springs next week. I’ll be flying out to Salt Lake City on Monday, and from there renting a car and driving over to Rock Springs. On Wednesday afternoon I’ll drive back to Salt Lake City, and then on Thursday morning I’ll be flying back to Houston. I had hoped to meet Missy for dinner Wednesday night, but due to circumstances beyond her control that won’t be possible. Oh, well… granted, the work I’m going over there to do should only take me a day at the most, but I wanted to have extra time in case something went catastrophically wrong. At the very least it gets me out of town for a bit.

Otherwise, it’s been relatively quiet around these parts outside of work, where I’m being hit by support requests right and left. I’m getting by, though. For now, though… I just need to go to bed early. I had more I wanted to say, but it can wait until tomorrow. Until then…

At weekend’s end… we have a terrified cat.

D'Arque Bishop

Gah. I was about to start this entry with a discussion of everything that I did this weekend, but then I heard Star give one of her combination roars and growls, and then I heard the sound of something hitting the wooden gate at the bottom of the steps with full force. My guess was that one of the cats had gone halfway down the stairs (they’re at a 90 degree angle and a closed off staircase, so someone coming downstairs would have to be halfway down and at the corner before anyone in the living room could see them), and gotten chased back upstairs when Star noticed their presence. I went downstairs to double check, and the truth was a bit more of a close call. Apparently Gus had managed to go downstairs unnoticed and was hiding under the bench in the living room. Unfortunately for him, Star finally noticed him there, and charged. Gus barely got through the gate in time. I finally found him in the room that doubles as a guest bedroom and Mom’s office. Gus was hiding under the bed, terrified as all hell. I do wish Star was cat friendly, but in the meantime… I hope this cures Gus of any curiosity regarding the downstairs in the meantime.

This weekend was a relatively uneventful one, for the most part. I met Robin for dinner at Cheesecake Factory on Friday evening. She had never been, and it was rather amusing watching her be overwhelmed by the book they have for menus there. Afterwards, we went over to Barnes and Noble to browse around. One thing they had there that was interesting was a book called Star Wars: Outbound Flight by Timothy Zahn, who is probably the best of the Star Wars novelists out there. In fact, one could easily argue that Zahn was the one who brought about the long series of Star Wars novels beginning in 1991, with the novel Heir to the Empire. I digress, however… once we got finished at B&N, it was time for her to head home as she had to be up at 6 AM. From there I headed home, and actually went to bed early.

The next morning, I got up at a decent hour for a Saturday (9 AM), had breakfast and my requisite two cups of coffee, and then went to Louie’s to see if I could straighten out the mess that his Windows XP install had become. I ended up electing to copy his My Documents, MAME, and Idents (station identifications he had gotten from all over the world) folders over to the 500 GB external drive hooked up to his Powerbook, and then wiped the machine… only to find that I had left the XP license key back at my house. (He’s using an extra legal copy I have.) So, that necessitated a return trip, which I’ll discuss later. Anyway, while the file copy was going on, Dave came around with his laptop, and seeing as he FINALLY got himself net access, I went ahead and did him a favor by patching his laptop up to SP2 and the latest updates. Then, we all went to the Richmond Arms (a British pub local to Louie’s apartment) for dinner and drinks (and some good old-fashioned football between Birmingham and Tottingham). After the Richmond Arms, we went to the Slick Willies at Westheimer and Fountainview for some pool. After playing that (and with me actually winning a game for once!), we headed back to the apartment, and from there Dave and I headed home (after I finished as much as I could on Dave’s laptop and Louie’s PC).

I woke up at the usual Sunday time (9:30 AM) this morning, had breakfast and my requisite two cups of coffee, and then left the house at about noon to get to Louie’s with the XP license key (which I ended up leaving there). I finished installing Windows, installed the necessary drivers and apps, and began copying the files back from the Powerbook over to the PC. Of course, neither he nor I wanted me to be there all afternoon, so after the file copy began, I showed him what he needed to do to copy all of the other files back over, and headed back home. I’ve spent most of the rest of the day here relaxing.

Oh, well… this week is looking to be a relatively mild week, though next week I’ll have to go out to Rock Springs to finalize some work to get the new company location there completely onto our network. I’ll just need to figure out how I want to get there: take a flight to Denver and from there to Rock Springs and back, or fly out to Salt Lake City and drive to Rock Springs. I’ll likely do the latter. Either way, it should be a quiet few days other than the work that needs doing. Rock Springs is a relatively small town, so it should be a quiet few days doing work. Oh, well…

In any event, I have stuff here that needs looking at right now, so I better get that taken care of. Fun fun…

Discussion of the Day…

D'Arque Bishop2 Comments

DArqueBishop: [17:06] (@Scott-Howell) Heya
[17:06] (@Scott-Howell) I updated my Myspace layout :-D
[17:07] (@Scott-Howell) http://www.myspace.com/scotters83
[17:07] (@Scott-Howell) Check it.
[17:07] (@DArqueBishop) Is it like other MySpace sites and causes one’s eyeballs to melt out of their sockets?
CCShadow: looks that way
CCShadow: yeesh
CCShadow: only two things do that
CCShadow: MySpace pages and the ark of the covenent
CCShadow: since the ark is from God, we can deduce who sent MySpace

Car troubles, and the more things change…

D'Arque Bishop1 Comment

Well, this should be interesting… I upgraded the main darquecathedral.org site from WordPress 1.5.2pl2 to WordPress 2.0.2. I’m not sold on the backend changes quite yet, but overall it seems to be working all right. Hopefully those of you viewing from home won’t be seeing anything majorly different about the site, though.

I do admit to some annoyance on another subject. I finally got ahold of the service department at the Saturn dealership this afternoon, and they told me that the valve body on my transmission had developed several internal pressure leaks causing the solenoids to warp, and that as a result it needed to be replaced. That’s going to set me back $1100. *sigh* Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. Also as a result, the car won’t be ready until 3 PM tomorrow, which will be a bit of a pain in the ass. I have stuff that needs doing at both my office and at the datacenter, and I’d just as soon get them fixed sooner rather than later. Oh, well… in the meantime I can still work from home.

On a different subject… I’ve been having a bit of difficulty with something my parents and friends have been telling me. Back when I was going to high school (something like 15 years ago), I passed the intersection of FM 2920 and Kuykendahl, and there was literally nothing there. Each corner was an empty field. Even when I was last at that intersection (something like 6-7 years ago), all that was there was a Shell at one corner. Now apparently one corner has a full Kroger center, another corner has a full Wal-Mart center, and there’s a Chili’s, a Philly Cheesesteak, and a Buffalo Wild Wings there. I’m going to have to go up there to try and reconcile this, because my brain is refusing to accept such a radical change. It’s not that I don’t believe it’s happened; Mom brought me wings from Buffalo Wild Wings for lunch today. It’s just that… I need to see it to accept it. I can’t decide whether it makes me feel outdated, nostalgic, or just plain old. (Also, it should be amusing seeing Merrie express shock that I didn’t know about any of this… when she recovers from her surgery, that is. Speaking of which, get well soon!)

Oh, well… I’m just going to go get a drink and then ponder going to bed. I’ve got a real fun day ahead of me tomorrow… heh.

This is not how I expected to spend my Tuesday.

D'Arque Bishop

Well, on one hand, I am working and have been somewhat productive this morning. On the other hand… I’m at home right now, working from the kitchen. As I was leaving work last night, my car’s transmission started seriously acting up, so rather than take the risk that it MIGHT get me home okay, I called AAA and had them tow it to the Saturn dealership. So, right now, I’m in the kitchen, logged into the corporate VPN, and have my office phone unconditionally forwarded to my cell phone. I’ve already taken care of a couple of support calls, but for the most part I would have rather been at the office.

I went and saw Delirium on Saturday, as I stated before. I rather enjoyed it, but my parents did a little less so. I think the problem was that Delirium was much more of a concert performance, with the dancers and acrobats being a bit less involved. I love the music in Cirque du Soleil shows, but for my parents it’s more about the on-stage performers. The opening act was a woman named Nitza, whose performance I really liked. Too bad she doesn’t appear to have any CDs for sale on Amazon or the iTunes Music Store… I also looked at getting the double CD set for Solarium and Delirium at the event, but they wanted $45 for it. I can get it for about $26 off Amazon. I’ll just have to remember to order it at some point.

I went out to dinner with Robin again on Sunday night… just dinner at Chili’s, but it was still nice to get out of the house and see her. We’re already making plans for doing something on Friday, but it really depends on whether there’s a movie she’s wanting to watch and whether we can get a table at the Cheesecake Factory in decent time to catch a movie. I’d rather go to Cheesecake Factory than see a movie if I’m forced into a choice, but that’s just me. At least at dinner we can talk. :-) Though, granted, while I’m partial to V for Vendetta and wouldn’t mind any other movie… I’m tempted to avoid Failure to Launch as I’ve already gotten shit from coworkers about it being similar to my living situation…

Oh, well. In the meantime, I should call Saturn and find out how my car is doing. Fun fun…

Another fine Saturday and all that…

D'Arque Bishop

Well, today has been slightly productive so far. Then again, I haven’t really been motivated to do much. About the biggest thing I’ve done this afternoon has been to migrate my gallery from Gallery 1 to Gallery 2. The main reason I hadn’t migrated before now was because I couldn’t find a theme that matched the color scheme of the main site, like Gallery 1 did. It never occurred to me that what I needed wasn’t a theme per se, but a color pack. Once I installed the color pack module, I found that it did indeed have a black color pack similar to what the black theme in Gallery 1 looked like. So, like I said, I migrated it over, and all should be good now.

Tonight should be an interesting night. My parents and I have tickets to see Cirque du Soleil’s Delirium down at the Toyota Center at 8 PM. This isn’t like previous Cirque du Soleil performances we’ve been to; this is much more of a concert performance. I’m quite looking forward to it, as I really enjoy the music at Cirque du Soleil shows. I have the soundtracks to O, Varekai, and Kà, and will very likely get the soundtrack to this show when it’s done. (I don’t have the soundtrack to Zumanity, but then I never did care for that show.) It’ll make a nice addition to my iTunes library… heh.

Actually, I do have a bit of an amusing story to tell relating to the site, though I will admit Dad will probably not find it so funny. :-) When I got home from meeting my friend Robin for drinks and dinner last night, I got online and found my father had left a comment on a previous entry asking when I had met Cirque du Soleil people. I had to explain to him this morning that what I was doing was reposting a Houston Chronicle story, and the fact that I had linked to the original story and italicized the stuff I was quoting from it should have clued him in. He also asked me when I got home last night if I had gone clothes shopping. I looked at him and said no… then asked him why he thought I was. His response? “You posted you were going to on your site.” I just looked at him strangely and said, “Uh, Dad, that post was from a week ago…”

Anyway, it’s time I got into some semblance of readiness for tonight, as we’ll be having dinner early. Granted, it’ll be fish and chips at home, but I probably won’t have much time afterwards for getting ready. I’ll post later tonight on what I thought of it. :-)