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.

It used to be that Bennigans was one of my favorite places to go eat. It comes from eating there for lunch every Saturday when I was growing up. Since then, though, I’ve noticed more and more Bennigans restaurants annoying the hell out of me, and even the ones I thought were decent are going downhill.

The three closest Bennigans restaurants to my house are the one at FM 1960 and I-45, the one at FM 1960 and Veterans Memorial, and the one at Willowbrook Mall. The one at Veterans Memorial has gotten pretty scuzzy over the years, and the last few times we went to the I-45 one, we’ve gotten rotten service. Sean has confirmed recently that the latter one has not been any better as of late. We went to the Willowbrook one on Saturday, and not only did my burger come out wrong, they only had cinnamon ice cream to go with the brownie bottom pie. (Yes, it tastes as bad as it sounds.) However, I had been telling my father recently that the one by my office (located on 610 by Buffalo Speedway) was pretty good to us. That all fell apart today.

I went to lunch there with my coworkers Cherry, Lettye, and Ruth. When we got there, we were told they had a new lunch promotion where certain menu items plus a soft drink were $4.99. We all ordered items off the lunch promotion, which were all standard Bennigans fare. From there, we waited… and waited… and waited…

After a while we started noticing that people who had been seated well before us were getting their food. At one point, Cherry stopped the waitress and asked why our food was taking so long. The waitress replied with a half-hearted, “Well, we do have a new menu…” I looked up at her, and said, “The stuff we ordered wasn’t.” She walked off, and at that point I realized that wasn’t the comeback I should have used. What I SHOULD have pointed out was that the menu was not changed at all. The only thing that had changed was the lunch promotion.

Anyway, a few minutes later, a table behind us got their food, and we had had enough. We stopped their waiter, and asked him to find out where our food was and to get the manager. Very shortly, the manager walked out with our food. The food was lukewarm, and both my meal and Cherry’s was served incorrectly. (I had asked the dressing in my salad to be pre-mixed in, and Cherry wanted mayo instead of honey mustard on her sandwich.) What angered us most, though, was the manager’s reaction to it all. Cherry was livid and demanded to know why the food was so late out and what he was going to do to remedy the problem. The manager gave a dumb smile and nodded; in essence, he acted as if he didn’t understand a word Cherry was saying. I almost did a Chris Tucker impression and asked, “Do you understand the words coming out of her mouth?”

FINALLY, the waitress brought the checks around… and the manager had only taken $1 off the meal for each person. Granted, it was $5 to begin with, but still, it almost seemed like an insult. We were already late, so Cherry and I put $5 in cash in each, and I lent Ruth and Lettye $5 each so they didn’t have to pay by debit/credit card and cause an even longer wait.

We used to go to that Bennigans just about weekly, ever since the corporate office moved into our building… and even then some of us went regularly before. No more. The staff’s unapologetic attitude basically guaranteed we will not be going back there for a good long while. That’s another Bennigans “lost” to us, which is a shame considering they used to be very good and quick. Now all I have left so far that I would go to are the Galleria and the 290 ones.

I hope it doesn’t happen, but in the meantime, we’ll see how long it takes for either of them to piss me off.

Bleh. I could do with another day or two in this weekend.

It’s not as if I’ve been especially busy, per se. I’ve done quite a bit of resting this weekend, but with a potentially very busy week coming up, I could have done with a day or two more to rest. The big thing that comes to mind is the fact that we have a visitor coming to the office tomorrow morning. I have an idea who it is, but I could very easily be wrong. Still, it’s important enough where I need to be at the office all day tomorrow.

The weekend started with a bit of an annoyance, though. On Friday evening, Mom was commenting that she was getting a terrible signal on her satellite receiver. I didn’t notice any problems on mine, so I put it down to her receiver being weird. Then, Saturday morning, my own receiver started having issues while I was trying to watch Transformers: Animated. Dad noticed issues on the receiver downstairs too, which led us to believe that it was either the dish itself or the LNB splitter device we were using to get four outputs out of our dual-LNB dish. Dad thought it was the splitter, while I thought it might have been the dish being out of alignment. Well… it turned out we were both wrong. Dad had gone outside to look at the dish, and noticed that an ash tree’s branch was wafting right in front of the dish. THAT was what was causing the signal interference. Once Dad amputated it, the satellite signal came through loud and clear. I’m just thankful that the interference didn’t manifest while my DVR was recording Battlestar Galactica Friday night…

Saturday afternoon was a bit busy, too, as we all headed to Willowbrook Mall so Dad could get some shirts. I was slightly amused as we went into Macy’s, as we were confronted by an iPod vending machine upon entering. :-) Mom and Dad weren’t quite sure what to make of it. Neither Penney nor Macy’s had what Dad was after, so we wandered down to Sears. Along the way, I noticed to my utter lack of surprise that an Apple Store was on the verge of opening at the mall. On the other hand, I also noticed that the Sharper Image there was having a store closing sale. In retrospect, I should have gone in to see if they had any of those free weights you fill with water when traveling. While Mom and Dad were in Sears, I went ahead and bought a new audio cable for my iPod and car stereo from Radio Shack. After Dad struck out at Sears, he gave up and we went and had my splurge meal at Bennigans. All I have to say about that meal is this: cinnamon ice cream does NOT work with a brownie bottom pie.

As far as today goes, I haven’t done much other than upgrade this site to WordPress 2.5, and also work on getting some more of my movies in iTunes/iPod format for when my new iPod arrives. I even got to spend some time out in the backyard relaxing and watching the dogs play. It’s been a quiet day, for the most part.

In any event, like I said, I do have a busy week ahead of me. I’m thinking I’ll get a refill of my water, check on any remaining issues around, and then head to bed. I want to be at the office nice and early just in case. Ah, well… we’ll see how things go. :-)

Series four of Doctor Who premiered a week ago yesterday. The one thing I was worried about was the fact that the scheduled companion was Donna Noble. Donna Noble was last seen as the title character in “The Runaway Bride”, and to be honest… her character made the episode almost unwatchable. She was shrill, dense, selfish, and almost unlikeable. My friends Jeff and Malinda have since said they can’t even re-watch the episode. So, needless to say, when Donna was announced as a full-time companion, I was rather disappointed and apprehensive.

Or, as Jenn so appropriately put it, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Anyway, we’ve now seen two episodes with Donna, and I have to say… I’m relatively impressed.

I guess Russell T. Davies realized how unpopular she was as she was first portrayed. She’s still a bit shrill sometimes, but it’s obvious that within the story, she’s a lot less clueless and a lot less self-centered. It’s obvious her brief time with the Doctor changed her for the better. However, what impressed me most was a scene at the end of the second story. I realize this is a spoiler, and I do apologize, but when I saw Donna in “The Runaway Bride”, I would NEVER have imagined her in tears, begging the Doctor to save somebody, ANYBODY. She did in this story, and in my mind it redeemed her for her debut episode.

There’s still eleven episodes left in the season, so things can definitely change. In the meantime, though, the season’s off to a much better start than I had anticipated.