What’s the point in being grown up if you can’t act childish sometimes?

D'Arque Bishop

Well, I have to say it’s been a very interesting week. From dealing with my own birthday last Sunday to going to Jinny’s birthday party yesterday, I must say that I’ve had plenty of things to do this week. It all started with my birthday last Sunday. All in all, it was a quiet day. When I got up, I found that Mom and Dad had bought me Tom Clancy’s EndWar and LEGO Batman for my Xbox 360. Mom had also bought me seasons 1-3 of Doctor Who, but Amazon had yet to send them. That evening, the folks took me to PF Chang’s for dinner, which was excellent as always. Otherwise, I had a nice and quiet birthday.

Tuesday was the big day, because that was the day we did the Fight Night event for Mortal Kombat Online. I arrived in Chicago close to noon, and quickly made my way to the L station at O’Hare so that I could meet up with Crow. Once Crow and I got on the L, we made our way to the hotel, with a couple of wrong turns along the way. We also stopped for lunch; we ended up eating at Cheesecake Factory, which he had never been to before. Once done there, we made our way to the hotel, where we started to work on picking questions for the event. When 5 PM rolled around, we got a taxi and made our way to Midway.

The event itself was fun. Fortunately I had planned ahead of time and set up portable versions of X-Chat onto a USB drive customized for each attendee, and simply needed to copy the folders to the desktops of the attendees’ machines. While I coordinated the questions and answers, Crow sat with Jeff with Midway and picked questions. I was also happy in that I finally got to meet one MK team “bigwig” who I had never met before, and that was Carlos Pesina (an artist, who actually played Raiden in Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II. and Mortal Kombat Trilogy). If you’d like to see how the event turned out, well, a transcript is available here. I personally thought it went well, even though this was the first Fight Night we had done where the event took place before the game’s release. Once the event was done, we caught a cab back to our hotel, where we put our stuff away, and then walked a few blocks away to find a bar and have a couple of drinks to wind down. That done, we went back to the hotel and turned in for the night.

The next day, after grabbing some breakfast and checking the channel for the post-chat reaction, we ended up making our way to O’Hare. After going through security (and Crow realizing his normal pants had too many studs, causing him to be wanded down), we found a Chili’s to have lunch at. Once we ate at Chili’s, we went to Crow’s gate, and waited for his flight. And waited. And waited. His flight ended up leaving an hour late, but I ended up utilizing the time to upload videos to YouTube for MK Online news stories. After Crow had left, I went to my gate and waited for my flight. From there things were uneventful, other than the overhead bin not having room for my backpack, leaving me stuck with little legroom and making me very uncomfortable.

Otherwise, the big event for us was Jinny’s birthday party. Jinny decided that she wanted to feel more like 5 or 15 than 35, so we planned appropriately. We all met at the McDonald’s at Kuykendahl and Louetta for dinner. Once we were done there, we went to Dean’s (Sean’s father) house for drinks and cake. Once we all had a drink and some cake, it was time to go to the roller skating rink.

Yes, you read that right. We went to the local roller skating rink.

The manager didn’t know quite to make of our group of ten people in our mid-30’s who had come to skate, but we just told him we were reliving our childhoods. :-) Oh, man, it was a BLAST. Some of us took a while to get the hang of it, but after a few unsteady minutes I was back into the swing of things. Granted, I also had more wipeouts than anyone else. But still, we had a LOT of fun, even if some of us were complaining about how out of shape we were and how much it was causing legs and hips to hurt. We stayed until the place closed down, at which point most of us went back to Dean’s for more drinks. We stayed there, sat around, and BSed and had drinks for a couple of hours, until one point where Jinny said, “You know what? I want hash browns.”

So, it was off to Denny’s we went.

We were there for about an hour and a half, still talking, having coffee, and eating. We ended up breaking up around 3 AM, which was fortunate for me because I was nearing a crash point. I drove home, quickly brushed my teeth, and fell into bed without even bothering to change my IM status or check messages.

As for today, it’s been relatively quiet. This week probably won’t be eventful; I have an optometrist appointment on Tuesday, and I THINK Jesse is coming into town this week, but at the rate things are going I doubt I’ll get to see her or Rob. Ah, well. I also need to pick up a copy of Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe and get cracking on that. For now, though, I’m just going to go to bed and catch up on rest. I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow.

Announcing the MK vs DC Universe Fight Night Chat Event!

D'Arque Bishop

(This was originally posted over at Mortal Kombat Online.)

It’s that time again! With the release of Midway’s latest entry in the series of Mortal Kombat titles, Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, almost upon us, Mortal Kombat Online is proud to announce the return of its celebrity chat event, FIGHT NIGHT! The return of Fight Night will feature an informal and fun chat with the development team of Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, including creative director and co-creator, Ed Boon! This event will bring together fans and developers together in one place, where the developers will answer the fans’ questions!

The chat event itself will take place on Tuesday, November 11th at 9 PM EST/6 PM PST. The event will last for about an hour, and it will take place at the #MortalKombat Online IRC Network!

The event can be reached via a java chat at the link above or by using the following settings in your IRC client of choice:

Server: irc.webmaster.com -or- irc.webchat.org
Port: 6667
Channel: #mortalkombat

Because of the anticipated high attendance, question submission for Fight Night will be done before the event. From now until Sunday, November 9th at 11:59 PM EST, we will be pre-accepting questions for the chat via the Fight Night Submission Form available at this link. We will be accepting approximately ten to fifteen questions related to Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe (development questions, storyline questions, and the like) from the pre-submitted queue, time permitting. Then, attendees will be able to submit questions at the actual event itself. The remainder of the questions for the evening will be picked from the questions asked at the event. It will be at this time that we might take a few questions pertaining to the development of future Mortal Kombat titles.

Don’t forget to mark your calendars! Again, the event will be taking place Tuesday, November 11th at 9 PM EST/6 PM PST! We look forward to seeing you all at Fight Night!

Another week gone by…

D'Arque Bishop

I realize I haven’t posted in a while. Really, it’s because I really haven’t had much to talk about on this front. Things have been more or less the same old same old, so there hasn’t been much to post about. Still, it’s been more or less an interesting week for me… not always in a good way, though.

This past weekend, for example, would have been rather uneventful except for one slight problem: the hard drive in Mom’s laptop decided to die on her. Fortunately there was very little actual data loss outside of programs and bookmarks; her documents and mail were actually stored on the server. It was also fortunate that getting access to the actual hard drive in the laptop was pretty simple. We ordered a new drive from Newegg, and once it came in, I got to work reinstalling from the restore CDs and downloading the essentials for her laptop. The only questionable part was MS Office; all she had were Word 97 and Excel 97. She wanted something more up to date, but didn’t want to actually PAY for MS Office. I went ahead and downloaded OpenOffice.org for her, and if she doesn’t like I’ll switch her to something else a bit later down the road. Otherwise, her machine is pretty much up and running now.

I also got put on the spot, so to speak, on Wednesday evening. I needed to deliver a laptop to one of my coworkers who was in town from Houma. She and another coworker told me they were eating at the Cheesecake Factory for dinner and that I was welcome to join them so that I could drop off the laptop. So, I joined them and ended up talking shop for a while. For a change, I had the seared tuna tataki salad, which was damn good. Tiff and Tashia got salads as well, and were understandably shocked by the size of them. A woman at the table next to us asked Tiff what her salad was, and she replied, “The luau salad. Want half of it?” At the end of the meal, when the waitress asked us if we wanted to see the dessert menu, I said I was going to have the low carb cheesecake. Tiff piped up with, “It’s his birthday. He can have whatever he wants.” In retrospect I should have seen it coming, but a few minutes later the waitress came back with another one, and had my cheesecake slice… with a candle on it. They, Tiff, and Tashia then proceeded to sing “Happy Birthday” to me. I swear I’ll get Tiff for that one…

As for this weekend, well… in a couple of hours I’ll be going out to meet Dave and Louie for lunch, gaming, dinner, drinks, and the usual types of fun. As for tomorrow, I’ve got work stuff to do during the day, and then during the evening Mom and Dad are taking me to PF Chang’s for my birthday dinner. I hadn’t planned on doing anything yesterday, but late last night Sean and Jinny invited me out for coffee, and I joined them over at Denny’s. (In retrospect, I should have stuck with the coffee. The food’s not agreeing too much with my stomach.)

Ah, well… it should be a good weekend, all told. :-)

A friend of mine tied the knot…

D'Arque Bishop3 Comments

Well, I apologize for not posting sooner. I haven’t really been in much of a posting mood, you see. However, I figure it’s about time I posted about my past weekend, which is something I had been meaning to talk about for a while.

You see, this past weekend, I went out to Columbus, OH. For those who don’t know, Scott Howell is a good friend of mine, and is also the one who hired me on at Mortal Kombat Online. Well, for a couple of years he had been dating this girl named Lindsey Bailey, and this past weekend was when they were getting married. Scott invited me and Joe (aka CCShadow, the other admin) to the wedding, and we were happy and honored to attend. Joe and I even arranged our flights where they would arrive and leave within minutes of one another, so that we could share transportation.

It was a great idea in theory. In practice, it didn’t work out QUITE so well. My flight arrived early on Friday, and Joe’s arrived late. Once he arrived, though (after I had been waiting an hour), we went and picked up the rental car, and made our way to the hotel. Once there, we got checked in and settled into our separate rooms, and then made our way to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. After a rather filling meal, it would have been nice to go to Barnes & Noble… had it been open yet. So, we went back to the hotel to our separate rooms, and basically did not much of anything.

I got up relatively early Saturday morning, and after having breakfast in the hotel restaurant, I decided to walk across the street to Worthington Square Mall to see if there was anything interesting there. Those who have lived in the Spring area for more than 20 years will likely remember North Oaks Mall. That’s what Worthington felt like. I was through the mall in less than five minutes without having a single thing that interested me. After going to lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings, I went back to the hotel, changed into my suit, met up with Joe (who had slept the entire morning), and we made our way to the church where the service was taking place.

When we got there, we signed a photo of Scott and Lindsey, and were shown seats. We pretty much kept to ourselves until the service started, as we quite literally didn’t know ANYONE other than Scott. Scott came past us once when seating his grandmother, and quickly said hi. Pretty soon the service itself started; it was a very nice service, with the standard pastor talking about marriage as a covenant from God and Lindsy and Scott giving their vows, plus lighting the candle together. As Scott and Lindsey walked out, he winked at us acknowledging our presence again.

As we were shown out, we were all given the opportunity to greet the wedding party. We didn’t say anything to the first bridesmaid, but we did take the opportunity to say hi to the second, as it was Scott’s older sister Carrie. We greeted her and complimented her on her singing (she sang the Lord’s Prayer during the service). Then, Joe said, “Well, my name’s Joe Schorr and this is Scott Bishop. We work with Scott on the website.” Carrie smiled wide and said, “Oh, so you’re CCShadow and D’Arque Bishop?”

At that, the entire rest of the wedding party swung around to look at us, and someone said, “Those are the Mortal Kombat guys?” We ended up meeting and greeting everyone, including Scott’s parents. :-) From there, we went outside and did the obligatory rice shower for Scott and Lindsey. Once that was done, we piled into the car and made our way back to the hotel. Amusingly enough, I exited the freeway too early, and using my phone’s Google Maps we took the scenic route back. :-)

Once at the hotel, we got ourselves comfortable at a table for the reception, and got to eat some hors d’oeuvres while waiting for the reception to start. We also got to meet a few of Lindsey’s coworkers as well. Pretty soon, the reception started, and we went out to get food… only to find that Joe could only eat the salad. I availed myself of the food, and we sat down and talked to Lindsey’s coworkers. Scott and Lindsey did a walkaround to greet their friends and family, and I took a picture of them…

Scott warned us that we would be featured in a slideshow, and he was right; when the slideshow got to the part marked “Our Friends”, several pictures of us at Midway events were shown. We ended up telling Scott’s parents that they should have contacted us first, as we would have given them versions of the pictures WITHOUT the MK Online watermark on them. ;-) After the slideshow ended, the dancing began. I admit that that night, I found out what it takes to get me on the dance floor: a fair amount of alcohol. Granted, Scott’s mom dragged me out there, but I had fun nonetheless. The rest of the night was spent either talking to Scott’s friends and family or out on the dance floor. When the night ended, Joe and I went back to our separate rooms (where Joe ordered a pizza), and eventually went to bed.

Sunday morning saw me having breakfast in the hotel restaurant again, and then packing my clothes in my room. I skipped lunch, and at around 2 PM I met up with Joe in the lobby as we checked out. We made our way to the airport, and ended up sitting down for a late lunch/early dinner twice; Joe had pasta at an Italian place outside security, and I had a burger at a Chili’s Too inside security. Once that was done, we settled at our gates (which were right next to one another) and worked on our computers. The time soon came where Joe had to board his flight, so we said our goodbyes and boarded. Ten minutes later, I boarded my own flight…

… and before we left, we were told a bird had committed hara kiri by flying into the engine as the plane had landed in Columbus, so we were stuck until they could clean the bird out and check the engine. I ended up deplaning, getting some coffee at Starbucks, and relaxing in the terminal until it was time to board again. I spent the flight listening to music on my iPhone for the most part.

All in all, it was a very fun trip. One of these days I might have to go back up to visit Scott and Lindsey and say hello. Otherwise… it was great seeing him and Joe, and I look forward to seeing them again (which, at this rate, will likely be E3).

One computer operational, one… not so much.

D'Arque Bishop

Well, I finally took the time to get my main PC operational this weekend. Unfortunately, I did have a delay in that the Windows XP Professional CD I made was slightly defective. I ended up needing to create a new CD, and only then did the install work properly. I spent most of Saturday reinstalling the operating system, drivers, and applications. That of course excludes games; I figure I’ll install the games on an as-needed basis. About the only program I didn’t install was WindowBlinds, and that was because I mainly used that for putting a black theme on my desktop. Finding the Royal Noir theme made it unnecessary. :-) Of course, now I have Sinc asking me if I want to play Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath. I don’t even HAVE the game yet… heh. Still, all in all, I’m getting more or less back to normal. I’ve even managed to pull my movies off of the iPod.

The funny thing is that I’m not entirely sure the “dead” 320 GB SATA hard drive that I pulled out of the PC is actually dead. I think the two drives may have become desynched, though I don’t know for certain. What I’ll probably end up doing is buying an external enclosure for the drive and use it as an external drive with the main PC. If it doesn’t work, well, I can go buy a new drive easily enough. :-)

On the other hand, I apparently did something foolish with the PowerBook. While the main PC was offline I was using it as my main computer, and had it on almost a week 24/7. I put it in sleep mode while I was at work the last couple of days, but apparently the damage was done. On Friday, I noticed that the video was corrupted. I turned the PowerBook off and let it rest overnight, but it didn’t help. The video chipset is apparently FUBARed, with lots of corruption and artifacting going on. *sigh* It’s a shame, because that laptop has served me extremely well for over five years. Unfortunately, I can’t justify the cost of a new MacBook, as I still use my work laptop for anything work related and take that with me on most trips (as it has the VPN software to connect to the office and has a built-in cellular broadband card). That’s especially annoying as I used the PowerBook for video editing. Then again, I only did video editing when out at events for Mortal Kombat Online. *sigh* I’m sure I’ll think of something, though.

Ah, well. At least my main PC is pretty much operational. I’ll deal with any other problems as they come.

This falls under the category of “more money than sense”.

D'Arque Bishop

http://kotaku.com/5062303/invade-stormwind-you-and-what-arm++-oh-that-one

When you can’t convince 35 other people of your master plan to attack two Alliance capital cities, you really only have one alternative: Do it yourself. “Bradster” does. He owns that rig above — 11 computers that run 36 World of WarCraft account simultaneously. His infrastructure costs (to say nothing of his utility bill) weren’t itemized, but he unashamedly admits he pays $5,711 per year in subscription fees to keep together his one-man raiding party (family photo of that on the jump).

The more I look at that pic, the sadder it seems. For example, the majority of machines shown in the pic are laptops. They’re most likely not low-end laptops, either, because each appears to be running a minimum of two instances of World of WarCraft. In addition, the mice are actually medium-to-higher-end trackballs, and not the kind of mice you’d get by default with PCs. Also, not only is the internet bill going to be insane (due to the needed bandwidth for thirty-six concurrent sessions), the electricity bill has to be pretty nuts too. I’m not talking about just the power needed to run those machines. I’m also talking about the power needed for the A/C to keep that room at a bearable temperature. Speaking as someone who’s been in a room full of computers running off of standard A/C, it tends to get pretty hot pretty damn quickly.

Normally I wouldn’t begrudge someone their hobby, but at this cost, this just screams “overkill” to me. I keep thinking that at this amount of money, it’d be much better spent travelling the REAL world instead of getting yourself lost in a virtual world.

Everything’s bigger in Texas… including the rats?

D'Arque Bishop2 Comments

Normally I wouldn’t post from my desk at work, but I needed to share this one. My coworker Zoom sent me an email just now that, well… I’ll let you see for yourself.

Okay, ya’ll need to take a look at this. I was at the Restaurant Adobe and it was next to a creek. As you can the geese are adult age.. What is that rodent??? That is a huge rat!

As for the rats in question, well…

Apparently they’re called “nutria rats”, according to my coworker Keila. They go up to people in parks here in town… and people actually feed them! WTF?

Then again, I look at rats of this size and immediately start thinking of skaven. Of course, that’s just the fantasy/sci-fi geek in me, but still… those are some damned large rats.

Not too much going on…

D'Arque Bishop

Well, this is fun. I’m currently sitting in my company’s datacenter waiting for this tape autoloader to finish cataloging some tapes. When I get done here, I get to go to our Creekmont facility to work there for the rest of the day. Fun.

All in all, it’s been a pretty slow week. About the only big things I had planned to do were to buy a new suit for a friend’s wedding a week from Saturday and get my main PC working. (I had forgotten to bring the new drives home last Friday.) I’ve already gotten the suit, but the drives will probably wait until this weekend, as when I get home I can’t be bothered with working on it. We’ll see, I suppose. At least I finally made the driver disk so XP’s installer can see my hard drives…

Otherwise, it’s pretty much been the same old same old here. I haven’t posted much because I haven’t had much to say. Ah, well. Hopefully I’ll have something to post about later on, but for now I need to get back onto these tapes.

Back home but not back to 100 percent.

D'Arque Bishop

Well, I know I said in my previous post that I was going to do a post that night. I lied. I’ve been tied up with a bunch of different stuff and haven’t had the chance (or inclination) to do a post. I’m rectifying that now, of course.

All in all, we were without power for a few hours short of two weeks. By the end of that time, we were about at the end of our ropes. Fortunately my friend Josh had a coworker who needed to sell his generator, so my parents got a bit of relief. For me, my relief came when I had to travel to Oklahoma City on business. My trip there was more or less uneventful, though I did get to meet up with Jeff and Malinda. Thursday night we had dinner at Victoria’s, which was a local Italian restaurant on the campus of OU. On Friday night, Malinda cooked dinner at their house, and then the three of us and their friend Karen played a boardgame called Twilight Imperium. Twilight Imperium was fun, and I did a lot better at it than I expected. The game lasted until 2 AM, and the fact that Jeff won at the end was a fluke; we had agreed to end then anyway because we were getting tired. Malinda for one was probably glad we ended at that point, as my space fleet was getting pretty massive and was lining up on her borders for a probable invasion. ;-) The game also got me more interested in the 4X genre of gaming; I may give it a try sometime in the near future.

However, when I got home, I suffered a couple of setbacks. The first setback was relatively minor. Apparently my car’s toll tag will not work for airport parking. When I tried to leave the economy lot, none of the gates would open for my car. What struck me as odd was that the lot let me in without needing to get a ticket, as if the tag reader had read my tag. I ended up paying the tag in cash. However, the really weird thing was that when I called the county toll road authority, they were stumped too. My tag is activated for airport parking, and they confirmed that the standard toll booths are reading my tag. If this keeps up, I may need to get a new tag.

The other setback was more serious. I got home from the airport and switched on my main PC, only to find that the two week long downtime had killed one of my two SATA hard drives. The problem is that I had the drives in RAID 0, which meant the data was striped between the two drives so they appeared as one large drive. In other words, I lost one drive but also lost the data in both. Fortunately, the only data I didn’t have backed up are the movies on my iPod, and I’ve found a way to get the movies off it. Still, it’ll be an annoyance, as once the replacement hard drive arrives, I’ll have to reinstall Windows XP and all of my applications again. Joy. That’ll probably happen this weekend. In the meantime, I’m using my PowerBook as my main workstation at the house.

Ah, well. As far as the rest of this week goes, I’m just going to catch up on work and make sure everything that needs to get done gets done. I’ve also been catching back up on the evening exercise missed thanks to the lack of power for two weeks. Otherwise, it’s back to the same old grind. Fun fun…