Whenever I hear the sentence in the subject line, I always think of that scene in the pilot to Knight Rider, where the dying millionaire Wilton Knight is telling Michael Knight that “one man can make a difference”, in an effort to convince him to go out and be this one-man crimefighter and all. Yes, I know… invoking Knight Rider is once again branding me as an ubergeek. Bear with me… there’s a point to all this.

I had a fairly interesting conversation with my mom and aunt yesterday that invoked that.

We were discussing this one friend of mine from way back in grade school (who I am keeping anonymous for the time being), and Mom brought up this one time between our sophomore and junior years of high school, when this friend’s mom came over to our house for some reason or another. While she was here, this friend’s mom thanked my mom for letting me be her son’s friend.

You see, during this time, said friend had friends who had… well, less than stellar reputations. Some of them did drugs, and some probably did even worse things. Anyway, while I was hanging around my friend, for the most part I didn’t want to take part in such activities. So, when they would call and ask my friend if he wanted to do stuff… I’d be around, and my friend knew I wouldn’t go for such things. So, my friend would beg off. His mom credits that to keeping him on the straight and narrow.

Where are some of those people now? I wouldn’t know… some of the worst ones fell by the wayside and I never heard of them after high school. Where is my friend? He’s graduated college, and has a very good job, plus good aspirations for his future.

Did I truly keep him on the straight and narrow? I don’t know, myself. The only person who could tell you for certain is my friend himself. But his mother seemed to think so, and really, who am I to argue? She’d know better than I.

So, that’s one thing I can say, even in days like we all have where we wonder what the point of it all is. I’m not like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. I don’t think life would have been better without me. From what I have been told, I guess what Wilton Knight said was true: one man can (and did) make a difference.

*yawn*

So, another holiday weekend is over and done with. To say that it’s been a productive one would be something of a lie, unless you count the work I’ve done towards this site… namely, the blog and gallery portions of it. (No, the gallery isn’t linked on the main page. I’ll take care of that at some point.) I’ve spent most of my weekend laying about and sleeping, really. Well, I did go out to eat with Mom, Dad, and Aunt Norma Saturday night after the latter two were picked up from the airport, but that’s about it. Hell, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to sleep well tonight, as I’ve spent so much time napping this afternoon.

Oh, well. This week is going to be fun at work, though. I still have to plan out my trip to Louisiana later this week… probably will leave Thursday morning early, and then just stay in Houma overnight. Then I’ll hopefully be back in Houston Friday night. I also need to arrange a rental car, as I don’t want to take my car to Louisiana. It means less mileage put on my car, and also saves the company money. Still, once this trip is over and done with, I probably won’t have to bother with any more Louisiana trips for the foreseeable future. Then again, I still have a Canada trip I need to plan for at some point… *sigh*

In any event, I think that at this point, I’m just going to have a Shiner and then head to bed at a sane point tonight. Fun fun…

Well, it finally happened.

My website, the D’Arque Cathedral, has been offline “for renovation” for the past seven or eight years. It’s actually become something of a running joke, really… even my friend Louie would make jokes about it being down for so long. No more.

The D’Arque Cathedral is finally online, and now exists as my personal weblog. :-) I’ll still keep my LiveJournal for my LJ friends to comment on, but all posts will originate on the D’Arque Cathedral and be replicated over to the LiveJournal. For reference, I also imported the last month’s worth of LJ entries into the site.

Why have I done this? Well, I’d been considering it for a while, but didn’t feel like writing a completely new site on my own. Then, I got back in touch with my friend Sean MC, and found that he and a couple of others were using this software called WordPress. I looked it over, liked what I saw, and went with it. :-) I found the site template while doing a bit of searching, and went from there.

And now that the site is online, I’m going to go to bed. Before I do, I want to thank Missy for finding the image used in my header, and a BIG thank you to Scott Howell for making a heck of a nice header out of it. It truly is greatly appreciated. :-)

Oh! I forgot the URL. It’s http://www.darquecathedral.org.

Thanks for everyone’s patience, and I’ll see you all around…

While doing some rearranging of the files and directories on my webserver, I came across this image. I scanned it a year or two ago.

The story behind it is that it's from a flyer I got at E3 2002. There are three main halls at E3, you see. The main action takes place at the South and West Halls, where the "big" companies have their booths. For example, Sony and Nintendo are side-by side in West Hall, while Microsoft is in South Hall, along with manufacturers like Blizzard, Activision, Capcom, Namco, Komani, etc. (Midway was in a separate smaller hall.) However, in my opinion, the most interesting hall is Kentia Hall, which is where all the smaller and/or foreign (read: not American, British, or Japanese) manufacturers have their booths set up. You get to get a different feel for what the smaller companies are up to.

Anyway, during E3 2002, Justin and I were wandering Kentia Hall, when we passed by this Korean game manufacturer's booth. A booth babe handed me a flyer, and I just put it in my bag without looking at it. When I got home, I was looking through the stuff I had gotten from the show, and I happened upon the flyer from that Korean game company. I just stared at it for a while, thinking, "What the FUCK?!"

I swear, this has to be one of the more disturbing images I've come across.

<a href="http://drkbish.darquecathedral.org/images/tomak-head.jpg"><img src="http://drkbish.darquecathedral.org/images/tn_tomak-head.jpg"></a>

Now, years later, I still get a bit of a chuckle out of this image. I wonder if it ever made it outside Korea (or even made it big INSIDE Korea)?

Well, so much for my attempt to go to bed early last night. I was up until my normal bed time with <lj user=missyanthrope> and <lj user=scotters83> helping me with a side project I decided to undertake yesterday. Then, as I was about to go to bed, a … situation… developed on #mortalkombat that irritated me and needed to be dealt with. *sigh* More and more I wonder why I bother. The stuff like E3 and Gamers Day is nice, but I end up stressing over some of the stuff that I have to deal with. It's really not all that fun sometimes.

Oh, well. At least it's a holiday weekend this weekend. I've got three days of nothing to worry about, and hopefully I can catch up on my sleep then. I'm hoping I can finish implementing my side project at that point, too. Mom and Aunt Norma will be coming back from Vegas tomorrow morning, too, and we'll be going to dinner straight from the airport. Dad and I just have to decide where we're going to eat tonight and tomorrow. I also need to get it set up where Aunt Norma can watch the Doctor Who episodes she missed.

Anyway, time for me to get my expense report filled out and turned in…. fun fun…

There is a poker game tonight, but I've just sent an email to the other guys involved that I wasn't feeling well and am going to have to bow out for tonight. This is mostly true; I just want to be able to get to bed early tonight, because I'm running on less sleep than usual and I'm feeling tired and out of it as a result. If I go to poker night I won't be in bed earlier than midnight. I'd just as soon try and get a full eight hours or more tonight.

Fortunately for me, my Jennings/Houma trip has been delayed for a couple of days. There's going to be a board meeting here on Wednesday, and the CIO wants me here that day just in case I'm going to be needed for network connectivity and the like. Fun… now I can plan my trip for Thursday and Friday instead. At least I won't have another long weekend where the first day back is spent traveling.

Oh, well… back to the grind…

With apologies to <lj user=jenndolari>…

… I've just found that there's nothing quite so stressing as doing phone support for a panicked corporate attorney who has people screaming at him (with his job being on the line as a result) and a daughter who's in the hospital.

I just hope for somewhere good for lunch so I can calm down a little.

Things are as the subject line says… or as near as, with the exception of the president of one of our operating units complaining that the new phone system is a "piece of shit" and the "worst phone system [he's] ever had to deal with". It all stems from one piece of functionality the old system had that the new one is currently lacking, and it's only his OU that wants/needs it. Otherwise, his opinion is definitely a minority opinion; personally, I love the new phone system, and a lot of us think the OLD system was the worst phone system we've ever had to deal with.

Other than having to fight with the POP3 mail server on the engineering fileserver yesterday, the upgrade from Red Hat Linux 8 to CentOS Enterprise Linux 4 went pretty smoothly. Now I just need to arrange my trip next week to Jennings and Houma to get the two RH8 boxes at those locations moved to CentOS EL 4. The main issue I'll have with those compared to the Cypress server is the fact that on the Cypress server, the data that needs to be kept was on a separate hard drive. In other words, I'll have to back up the data onto something else before I can do a wipe and reload. Bleh. Hopefully I can convince one of my coworkers to let me put a second hard drive in at least one of these machines.

Tonight will most likely be a poker night, as Anderson emailed the usual gang late yesterday afternoon to try and get a game together. As usual, I've got nothing planned for tonight, so I'm most likely in. Hopefully I can do better this week than I did at the last poker game. (I lost $42.50 at the last poker game.) Oh, well… as long as there are no stretches of Balls (three-card Guts, which I've stopped playing because of how brutal it gets) or 7-27 (which I absolutely hate), I should be fine.

Anyway, gotta run and fix a mysterious printer problem… fun…