Month: July 2005

The social weekend in review…

D'Arque Bishop

Okay, so, I’ve already talked about the geeky things I did this weekend in trying to get Linux fully operational on Samus. That’s not all I did, of course… I did go out and be social. That said…

Once I got off work on Friday, I made my way over to Louie’s apartment. From there, he and I decided to hit the Cheesecake Factory in the Galleria for dinner. As usual, it was excellent; I had the double BBQ burger without the middle bun (though the waiter accidentally misheard me and thought I meant no bun whatsoever), and Louie tentatively decided to try a steak which it turned out was REALLY good. From there, we made our way over to the entertainment complex over at I-10 West and Silber to spend the evening at Drink Houston. The idea was that we had heard there would be salsa dancing in the Rain video room, and Louie was wanting to check it out. It turned out that the salsa there was nonexistent. :-/ On the other hand, we did get to check out Center Stage, which was their new karaoke room. I ended up going on stage and singing “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger. While singing, I happened to look down and see a couple of guys in referee costumes (the Party Patrol) holding up lit cigarette lighters. Then, after I got finished and people were applauding, I came down and Louie went up to sing “After the Lovin'” by Englenert Humperdink. The Party Patrol guys came up to me then and gave me a free drink coupon. They said it was for being a good sport; I hope that meant I was a good singer and not that I really and truly sucked. Heh. Anyhow… once Louie came down (and he did much better than me), we hung out in the karaoke room and 8.0 Retro for a bit, and then hit the road back home.

Saturday afternoon was the big day. I went down to Louie’s apartment to meet him and Dave… and I brought the DVD of the movie Dave and I had made out of the footage we had taken at Louie’s PE party. We sat down as he put it in the DVD player… and then he sat down and hit Play on the remote.

I guess I had halfway expected him to kill us for some of the stuff we did. Instead, there were several times he was dying laughing at what he saw. Apparently he really enjoyed it; I just have to create a new master copy of the DVD when I get Nova back to see if I can do anything about a couple of the audio pauses that had gotten into the final movie.

From there, we decided to go eat at Fox Sports Bar & Grill in the Galleria. When we got there, we were being shown to our tables, when the weirdest event of the evening happened. A waiter passed by me and said, “Hey man, that was a great job singing last night.” I guess he had been at Drink Houston the night before and saw me sing. I was too shocked to do anything but say “Uh, thanks…” as I headed to the table. Once we got done eating, we went outside… and were stuck. We had no idea what to do.

Finally, Louie came up with the idea of going to the SkyBar again to see Scott Gertner and his band perform. So, off we went… and it turned out to be a hell of a show. We watched a full set and a half… but by the time the second set was underway it was just too damn crowded and we were starting to feel a bit claustrophobic. So, we left and headed back home.

The final verdict on both were that they were definitely events we would do again. It really depends on Louie’s schedule, so I guess I’ll have to wait to hear from him and see what he says. Maybe one of the next few times we go I’ll actually take the time to ask a girl to dance with me. Oh, well… we’ll see.

In any event, that’s it on the weekend front… heh. And now, I have a couple of items to do that just arrived. Fun fun…

The technical weekend in review…

D'Arque Bishop

Bleh. This weekend was rather eventful, both in the technical and the social side of things. Not that it was bad, mind you… I just had a long weekend is all, and now I’m sitting at work and wishing I could have gotten a bit more time in bed. In any event, I’ll start with the technical. I’ll get up to speed on the social one in the next post.

My big project this weekend was to get wireless networking operational on Samus (my Presario running Linux; I name my machines after female video game characters). This turned out to be MUCH easier said than done. Now, don’t get me wrong… I love Linux. However, with Linux, hardware support is either feast or famine. In other words, the hardware is either immediately supported with no issues whatsoever, or it’s a complete and utter pain in the ass to get operational (if it’s even possible). I have a Linksys WPC54GS card that I use for wireless networking in Samus. However, there were no Linux drivers available for it. I ended up needing to download and install a program called ndiswrapper. ndiswrapper acts as, well, a wrapper to allow Windows wireless networking drivers to operate under Linux. In addition, my home wireless network and my AirPort Express’s default “travel” configuration use WPA for their encryption and authentication, and apparently the distro of Linux I’m using (Fedora Core 4) doesn’t natively support WPA. So, I had to download a second program called wpa_supplicant in order to get WPA encryption working. Bleh. The end shot of all this is that unless I want to do some serious screwing around with some of the scripts on here, I have to activate wireless networking manually. Of course, that’s not really an issue, considering I only need the wireless network support when I insert the Linksys card into the PCMCIA slot manually…

At least wireless networking isn’t as much as a pain in the ass as power management. Apparently Linux doesn’t like the version of ACPI that’s on this laptop, even when I try to force it to use it. Power management was a big reason why I gave up using Samus as my primary work PC two years ago and switched to Nova (my Powerbook). I was running Red Hat Linux 9 at the time, and was watching the MK movie on a flight to E3… and the battery died after 45 minutes. Needless to say I wasn’t a happy camper at the time. What I wanted was a top of the line laptop running a UNIX variant that had decent power management, and Linux wasn’t cutting it. So, I switched to Mac OS X, and have been extremely happy with it. At least everything WORKS with it.

My next project on Samus will be trying to get IceWM working on it. As much as I like GNOME and KDE as desktop environments, they tend to be a strain on this machine. (Samus only has 128 MB of RAM, and I’ve never felt the need to spend money on a memory upgrade for it.) At least IceWM runs lighter than either of those two environments. The main challenge will be to make it where IceWM is a choice on the list of desktops one can load when you log into the machine. That so far is what’s frustrating me the most; most of the information I’ve been finding as to how to do that relates to Fedora Core 1 or 2, and it’s changed as of 3 or 4. *grumble*

Oh, well… I might keep Samus around after Nova gets back from the shop just so I have a second laptop I can use for different tasks, like checking network ports or doing security audits. We’ll see. The sooner I get Nova back the happier I’ll be… especially seeing as I have a fresh copy of iLife 05 ready to load on it. (iLife 05 = iMovie HD, iDVD 05, GarageBand 05, and iPhoto 05.) There’s some stuff I need to work on as well regarding the movie project Dave and I have been doing, so that’ll be needed. Oh, well…

In any event, that’s enough tech rambling from me. I’ll post later with my social experiences this weekend.

At the end of the week, running on a backup…

D'Arque Bishop

Bleh.

I’m still getting used to using this Compaq Presario laptop again. I’m using it now because my Powerbook is at the Apple Store undergoing repairs. I first noticed the problem on Monday, and it occured again on Wednesday. When the system was under high load, it would crash. I would then have to wait for a few hours before it would come back up without crashing to a blank screen again, and even then I had great difficulty getting it to come up in normal mode. It would come up in safe mode and single-user mode, but only occasionally would it come up in normal mode. I took it in to Apple yesterday, and they’re going to send it in for repairs. So, when I got home last night, I pulled my Compaq Presario 17XL365 out of storage, and loaded Fedora Core 4 on it. I’ve got the laptop operational now, but I’ve had to deal with my share of typos… bah. I can’t wait until my Powerbook’s back and fully working.

I did something new and different last night… well, new and different for me anyway. Louie had been taking salsa lessons, and went to a place called the SkyBar with Dave two weeks ago for salsa dancing. I would have gone then, but I had already committed to a poker game. Well, last night I went with Louie and took the crash course in salsa. Did I dance with anyone afterwards? Unsurprisingly… no. There were a couple of women there I might have been interested in asking to dance, but I was nowhere near confident enough in my abilities; even then, as is typical of me… my brain locked. It’s as if my brain’s wiring is completely incapable of allowing me to ask a woman to dance or some such. I just… could not do it. *shrug*

We’ll see if I get any better tonight. Louie and I are going to hit Drink Houston, and Dave MIGHT be coming with us. (It depends on whether or not he’s up to going.) I might even go up on stage and do karaoke.

We’ll see.

Tuesday ramblings…

D'Arque Bishop

Bleh.

Well, it’s safe to say that I didn’t do much of anything this past weekend. I helped get a web usage reporting tool for MK Online and the Kombat Pavilion online, and also upgraded the D’Arque Cathedral’s blog software, but otherwise I wasn’t very productive. I also watched a couple of videos yesterday, to celebrate the First Quasi-Annual Alien Invasion July 4th. (It’ll become Annual if I decide to do it next year.) After lunch, I watched my DVD of the Doctor Who serial “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”. (To give you an idea of how old this series is… this serial aired in 1964.) Then, after dinner, I got my widescreen VHS tape of Independence Day down and watched that. I’ll have to remember to get the DVD at some point; the quality of the tape seems to be degrading. :-/

I also managed to see Pink Floyd’s performance from Live 8 online. I must say… the only weak spot in the entire thing was the fact that Roger Waters’s voice has seriously gone downhill in quality over the past ten to fifteen years. Still, he managed to get it under control during “Wish You Were Here”. David Gilmour was still in fine form, on the other hand. All in all, a VERY fine performance, and a welcome return to my favorite band. :-)

I don’t seem to have any plans for tonight, so I’m seriously pondering going to see War of the Worlds at the Woodlands Mall. I’ve heard some people say it’s good, and some people say it sucked… so I’m going to go ahead and see it to make up my own mind. It’s not like I have anything better to do… heh.

Oh, well… lunch break is over, so it’s back to the grind. Fun fun…

Media outlet ambushes guest… again.

D'Arque Bishop

http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=5179663&publicUserId=5345401

I’ve never walked off the set of a TV show in disgust before, but this week I did. There’s a first time for everything, I guess. I was in the studio for a live-to-tape session of the Donny Deutsch show on CNBC, “The Big Idea” on Tuesday morning this week. After enduring it for about 10 or 15 minutes it was clear that the whole situation had been a set-up from outset.

I know a few of you saw the show (as you’ve messaged me with your support) but I thought it might be interesting to shed some light on the background and highlight a problem that we all share as gamers; that of total ignorance on the subject of videogames from “big” media. Deutsch comes from the Michael Moore school of “journalism.” He has a point he wants to make, and isn’t particularly interested in anything that might contradict that point. It’s his show, after all. His website points out that the show is “smart, sexy, hip, and irreverent television.” The description also says that the show is “provocative, spontaneous, and real.” We’ll come back to that.

The show’s director originally contacted me on Monday this week. I was told that Deutsch would be talking about videogames, and they wanted someone from the gaming media to talk about a bunch of things. The subjects listed to me ran the gamut from “the future of videogames” to “online clans and community.” I was told that the violence thing might come up, in light of the recent 25-to-Life exposure, to which my response was a dismissive “that’s been done to death, it’s boring.” The director simply asked me if I would “just say that on air.”

When I arrived at the studio, and after being caked in layers of makeup, I sat down in front of the camera and soon learned that the entire show was about violence. It kicked off with Donny holding up a copy of Computer Games magazine declaring that there wasn’t a single game in there that wasn’t violent, and they then immediately cut to scenes of CJ stamping on a girl until she bled over the pavement in San Andreas. I was introduced as pretty much the bad guy who thinks this doesn’t have an effect on kids, and…well…things just deteriorated from there. I tried to discuss the ratings system, I tried to talk about how the majority of games are sold at Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy, and how they all take the ratings system very seriously…but this isn’t what the show was supposed to be about. Donny had an agenda. “All games are violent” was his proclamation, and nothing was going to sway him. We weren’t here to test a hypothesis. While this was happening, the director kept nagging me through the earpiece to “jump in and talk about what you’re here to talk about.” I was pissed. “That’s not what the show appears to be about, darling.”

*sigh* I hate when people do that. Seriously.

I actually know someone who got the same treatment from The Jenny Jones Show. He and his then-gf were invited to be on an episode where they were allegedly going to talk about couples who met over the internet. When they got there, they found to their shock that the episode was actually a hatchet job about older men who prey on underage girls on the net. (It’s a long story; in my acquaintance’s defense, the girl had lied to him about her age and even had a fake ID when they met for the first time.) He should have just walked off the show like John Davison did in my opinion, but then he was afraid that the show wouldn’t pay to send him home, as he didn’t have the money for airfare back. Still, that is extremely dirty and underhanded, and in my opinion completely undermines the message of the person hosting the show once the truth comes out.

What made the whole thing even sadder in Davison’s case was that one of the people they brought on was Brooks Brown, who had attended Columbine High School and was an acquaintance of Klebold and Harris. In fact, he had warned police a YEAR before the shooting that Harris had threatened him and was building pipe bombs. Brown was also arguing that violence in video games wasn’t the huge problem it was made out to be, and he and his parents also got railroaded. (Brown’s comments on the show are in the link above in the comments.)

Like I said, this kind of treatment of guests is dishonorable and counterproductive. Granted, while being the senior editor at MK Online is hardly the best example of professional journalism, I always took the attitude that the primary responsibility of being a journalist is to tell the truth. You’re supposed to be a reliable and accurate source of information, and if you cannot be honest with your sources and your audience, then you have failed in your task. Such dishonesty will only damn you in the long run, and I speak from experience.

Lazy Sunday….

D'Arque Bishop

Bleh.

I’m seriously tempted to just go upstairs and take a nap right now. I’m down in the kitchen right now on my Powerbook, spending some time out of my bedroom. It’s not like I have anything else planned for today. I had considered cleaning out my car (which I really do need to do), but I’ll probably put that off until tomorrow.

It’s sad when the most productive thing I did yesterday (outside of some MK Online server work) was put five CDs I had downloaded into my CD tower. Two of them were ones I got off the iTunes Music Store (Queen’s soundtrack to Flash Gordon and Type O Negative’s The Least Worst Of), and the other two were Overclocked Remix site projects (Hedgehog Heaven and Rise of the Star). The fifth isn’t entirely legal, but I had no idea how to acquire it when it was first released, much less now when it’s not even available to buy. The problem I’m facing now is that I’ll need a new CD tower soon; my third CD tower only has like three spaces in it, and I already have the soundtrack to The Lost Boys on order from Amazon. Another problem will be finding somewhere to put it… heh. I’m running out of space in my bedroom for CD towers.

Oh, well… I guess I should go upstairs and take a nap before it’s time we go out for dinner (whereever we decide to go today). Fun fun…