Day: May 31, 2005

One man can make a difference.

D'Arque Bishop2 Comments

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.

Another quiet Tuesday…

D'Arque Bishop

*sigh* All’s quiet on the work front.

Well, not really. I actually have a couple of things I’m keeping an eye on right now, but until the people who do our phone/network wiring get here, I’m stuck in a holding pattern. Otherwise, the big thing I have to do computer-wise today isn’t even really something for work. I have to bring home my Ghost disk, and replicate the hard drive on Dad’s work PC onto the new 80 GB drive he bought on Saturday. I tried using a DriveCopy tool the other day, but to say it didn’t work properly would be a bit of an understatement. I’m hoping that a recent version of Ghost will handle the drive replication a bit better. Otherwise, well… gah. I’ll take that as it comes.

Apparently pre-registrations started for the Evolution 2005 tournament today. Evo2K5 is one of the biggest fighting game tournaments out there; MK Online is involved in promoting it as MK: Deception has a chance to make it as one of the competing games. We’ve been working to get the community motivated, as it’s a great opportunity for the Mortal Kombat franchise.

Now, what I’m about to say, I’m saying for myself, and not on behalf of MK Online or any of its staffers.

Evolution might be the big fighting game tournament event… but right now, I have no faith in it or its organizers.

Pre-registrations were supposed to start back in March, to my knowledge. It’s now almost June and they’ve only just opened them, and the event takes place in late August. When MK Online was approached about this, we were told that we would be a sponsor and that MK: Deception was definitely in the tournament. We were then later told that MKD wasn’t definite, and that its participation was dependent on Midway getting involved. Midway declined to get involved. We were then told that MKD would only get in if at least 100 people pre-registered. That’s fine, we understood.

… then yesterday, Scott Howell came to me with a bit of news from the guy organizing the tournament. Apparently things had been changed again that if more than four of the “possible” games got more than 100 preregistrations, then only the top four would get in. Needless to say, I wasn’t too happy about this change. Several minutes ago, Scott came onto IRC and told us in op notice that things had been changed AGAIN: this time, it was only the top two.

… and now Scott’s telling me they didn’t give us complete information as far as the charge to enter the tournament. So, now, we have to tell people it’s $30 for people to enter for MKD and not $20. ($20 cover plus $10 entry fee.)

The sheer number of last minute sudden changes that are happening are not making me feel secure about this event, and the fact that they took so long to announce where exactly the event was going to be held isn’t endearing Evo to its core crowd, either. Personally, I think we (the MK community) are being jacked with, and I don’t like it one bit. Regardless of what happens with this event, I’m almost certainly going to oppose working with Evolution on any further events. If they can’t act professionally about this and treat us like red-headed stepchildren when we’re doing our best to get the community motivated, then I don’t see any benefit to any kind of professional relationship with them.

*sigh* It’s just really frustrating. Like I’ve said before, sometimes I wonder why I even bother.

Oh, well… I’m going to make a call to the sysadmin and see if I can get my Louisiana trip postponed again to next week so I have time to get a rental car arranged and picked up. Fun fun…