I was reading a story over on FARK earlier this evening about school lunches being unhealthy, and how kids would much rather eat burgers and pizza rather than healthy food, and how they’d rather drink soda than water. I just chuckled and shook my head, and it suddenly dawned on me that I wasn’t so different a few months ago.

Typically I would eat burgers and pizza whenever possible. I’d drink soda relatively often. Snacking was extremely common for me. Dessert was almost required. Not only that, the only exercise I would get would be when I carried heavy equipment between locations. It really was no wonder that I ballooned up to 258 pounds.

These days, though? I actively avoid snacking, even when offered. I drink sodas maybe twice during the weekend, and even then it’s Caffeine Free Diet Coke. Other than decaffeinated coffee in the morning, I almost always drink water. My typical lunch is either a salad or a small sandwich from Subway or Quizno’s. My dinners are reasonable. I also exercise regularly.

In fact, the only time I even eat burgers or have dessert now is when I have my once-a-week splurge meal. Even then, I oftentimes do something like have a side salad instead of fries. In fact, the last time I had fast food (other than Subway or Quizno’s) was before I changed my diet and exercise habits. The funny thing is, I don’t feel a desire to have any still.

It’s just funny to me these days. I used to be a big burger/pizza person, but these days I’m more likely to have a salad, a small sandwich, Chinese, or sushi. It’s definitely different for me, but I have to admit, I’m feeling better for it. If what others say is anything to go by, I’m definitely looking better for it. I’m just glad I can’t see myself falling off the wagon now. This isn’t a diet, it’s a lifestyle change, and I think I’m used to that now. :-)

It’s been a decent weekend. Right now I’m sitting down in the kitchen and enjoying a drink while waiting on dinner. I’m also writing this post using my cell phone, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I have to go back and correct some typos…

I did weigh myself on Friday morning. I ended up being down two pounds. So, right now, I’m at 231 pounds. I’ve got the rest of the year to go to lose the other 31 pounds and reach my goal. I’ve already noticed the changes in me, as have others. I’m feeling better for it, too. :-)

As mentioned before, the parents and I went to Matsu for dinner on Friday. We’ve since decided that the place is not what we would consider a “have-again”. Don’t get me wrong; the sushi at Matsu was excellent. Unfortunately, it was also rather high-priced. I had a combo of six California roll pieces and seven pieces of sushi for $19. I could get more for that price from somewhere like Tokyo City. I’ll have to keep that in mind for future reference…

Last night was the fun night. :-) Becky and Brian had another of their movie nights. Seeing as sushi is relatively healthy, I decided last night would be my splurge meal and went to Bennigan’s first for supper. Unfortuntely, they had done away with their “three-for” promotion where you could get an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert for $13. I settled for my usual John Bacon’s burger and a brownie bottom pie. After eating at Bennigan’s, I went over to Barnes & Noble and browsed for a bit. From there, when the time came, I went to movie night.

I hadn’t known until I got there what the theme of the night was going to be. Unsurprisingly, the theme was Indiana Jones. Once everyone that was coming arrived, we started watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. After that movie was over, most people left, leaving only me, Becky and Brian, Sean and Jinny, and Paolo. For that reason (and because Brian was suffering from Indiana Jones burnout), we watched Better Off Dead as the second movie. Believe it or not, I had not seen the movie all the way through before then. When the movie was done, we talked to a bit and then all headed home.

As for today, I haven’t done too much except to do some vacuuming. Today will be a busy week at work, so I’m relaxing as much as I can. I’m enjoying a drink, and dinner will be served soon, so I’m happy for now. We’ll just see how the rest of the week treats me.

I have to admit to a tad bit of annoyance. I had been craving sushi all week, but didn’t go to Tokyo City (the sushi place over by our Creekmont facility) because it’s really no fun going to a place like that all by myself. I’d ask Dave, but he doesn’t work at the Party City by it anymore. He recently got transferred to the one out in Katy. What annoys me is that a group of coworkers went to lunch without inviting me today as part of a post-shareholders’ meeting lunch. What miffed me more than anything else wasn’t the fact that I wasn’t invited, but the fact that they went to Azuma, which according to Louie has damn good sushi. I ended up settling on a sub from Subway for lunch.

On the bright side, for my splurge meal tomorrow, I decided I’d give this place near my home called Matsu a try. It’s been there for several years, and according to a check using Google Maps has plenty of good reviews. If it turns out not to be good, no harm no foul. I can always make up for it at Pei Wei the following night. :-)

Overall, it’s been a bit of a tiring week, but everything is more or less in order and working how it should be, save for a bit of an issue caused by upgrading my IMAP server earlier this week. Then again, the only people it really affected were my parents; I didn’t see the issue on my end and all of my other IMAP users get to it through the webmail. :-) The only other big item of note this week was the fact that I had to go to the aforementioned annual shareholders’ meeting this morning at the Omni Westside Hotel. I swear, it was the first time in over nine years that I had to wear a tie to work. I’m hoping it’ll be another nine years before I have to again, but if I end up going to next year’s meeting I’m sure I’ll have to again. Ah, well. I’m sure people got a kick out of seeing my dad’s Mickey Mouse tie…

In any event, I’ll be glad when this week is over with. Maybe this weekend I’ll actually get to relax (like I didn’t get to do last weekend). We’ll see, but for now, I’m really hoping I will.

This was originally posted on Mortal Kombat Online’s Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe forum. I’m reposting it here for those who don’t go to MK Online and might be interested. For the record, “E3” refers to the Electronic Entertainment Exposition, which is one of the video game industry’s most important media events.

Hey everyone…

While E3 is currently more than a month and a half away, as you might imagine we’ve already been looking towards making plans for attending. However, in the interest of being open with you all, I feel you should be made aware in advance of a decision that I ended up needing to make. It wasn’t an easy decision, but it was one I had to make.

Mortal Kombat Online will not be attending E3 this year.

For the record, Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe will be at the show and will be playable. Moreover, our lack of attendance has nothing to do with our not having an invitation; I was in fact invited and did in fact register to attend. The problem is purely cost-related.

This isn’t exactly common knowledge outside of the chatroom, but about a month ago I suffered from an atrial fibrillation, that caused me to be taken to the emergency room from my office in an ambulance. After that I had to do a followup with a cardiologist, who had me undergo an ultrasound of my heart, and afterwards an MRI. For the record, I’m fine. The cardiologist thinks it was possibly a one-off brought on by my use of caffeine. (My body is extremely sensitive to caffeine and I thought I had built up an immunity. My mistake.) The only treatments he had me go to were to give up caffeine entirely and to start taking an aspirin a day so that if this should ever happen again (and I hope to God not), it will prevent my blood from clotting and causing a stroke.

The upshot of this is that I’m looking at some pretty hefty medical bills. Even with insurance I’ve already had to pay over a thousand dollars, and I’m not sure the bills have stopped coming yet. Unfortunately, the money I would have used to pay for my trip to E3 are now being used to cover medical costs. As you might imagine, even with the Google ads and Flawless accounts the site doesn’t make a profit, so I can’t exactly depend on that to pay for an E3 trip.

Before anyone asks… I would LOVE for someone like ]{0MBAT or Mobster4Christ (two other E3 mainstays) to go in my place. Unfortunately, as you all might have noticed, things changed a year or so ago where only one staff member gets to go to these events. It’s not by our choice, as we would prefer to have some backup. That’s why you all have been seeing only me at these events. :-) The big problem in this instance is that E3 does not allow invitations to be transferred, so no one else from the site CAN go. So, in essence, we’re pretty much screwed.

So, here we are. I’m as disappointed as you all are that we will not be able to report on the show live. We will of course report from what other sites will be reporting, and we will try to make this up to you all. As for me… I am very, very sorry I could not be able to do this for you guys. I feel like I’m letting you all down (and really, I am), and I hope to do better for you all in the future.

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. :-)