Month: April 2006

It’s Sunday, and it’s my day off…

D'Arque Bishop

Well, I must say, today’s been a relatively relaxing day off. This is the first day off I’ve had in a couple of weeks or so; I worked both days last weekend helping to get my employer’s corporate office moved to its new location (in the building my office is located in), and I had to work yesterday testing out the three plasma screens at my employer’s booth at OTC in the Reliant Center. I’ll be working at my employer’s booth all four days of OTC, maintaining the laptops showing the presentations and also helping out when I can. It should be a bit easier on me this time around than it was last year, as I believe OTC will have free wifi access this time around. I don’t know if the wifi signal will reach to our booth though; it did on Saturday, but then the show itself hadn’t started and people were still setting up. The main downside will be that I have to be up at 5:15 AM to be at the office by 7 AM so I can meet with a few coworkers before the show.

My parents and I got a bit annoyed with Star yesterday. Well, annoyed isn’t exactly the right word… furious would be more accurate. She had been stalking these squirrels in the backyard, and up until now they’d been able to evade her. Yesterday, she caught one, and started swinging it around while she held it in her mouth. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know how to kill; so, instead of a swift merciful kill by breaking its neck, she was tossing it around while it screamed in terror. Mom and Dad came running out and did what they could to get the squirrel out of her grasp. Dad managed to get it away from her and dropped it over the fence so she wouldn’t catch it. Star was shocked… she was so proud of herself for finally catching it, and Mom and Dad were angry as hell at her. Meanwhile the squirrel hid under my car, and soon died of its injuries. Dad ended up taking the squirrel and burying it in the garden, after saying a few words of farewell. This incident has only served to heighten my anxiety of what might happen should one of the cats get careless and Star get lucky about catching him…

Well, I should be considering bed at this point… heh. The next week should be interesting; I might provide some pics from the OTC show floor. I’ll keep you updated, hopefully.

Gah… finally a bit of downtime…

D'Arque Bishop

Okay, I know I haven’t posted in a while. So sue me.

The truth of the matter is that I’ve been too worn out to even bother. I’ve been running around like a human pinball the past week or so, as my employer’s corporate office moved locations over the weekend and I’ve been working like crazy helping them get moved and set up, and then fighting proverbial fires since Monday. I’m away from my desk most of the day, and then when I get home, I don’t feel like doing anything more involved than listen to some music or play a retro game or two. It’s not eased off quite as much as I like, and things are going to get even more hectic in the next couple of weeks. I’ll be spending much of next week working at my employer’s booth at OTC, and then the week after I’ll be covering E3 for MK Online.

In a way, I envy Dave. He’s decided to take a long vacation, and is going to London next week. I’m not sure what all he’s decided to do, but anything will probably be better for his peace of mind than being cooped up in town for an extended vacation. Heck, one of the main reasons I’m looking forward to OTC is just because it’ll get me out of the chaos at the office for a few days. Then again, once E3 comes around, I’ll be out of the office chaos and into the site coverage chaos…

Anyway, enough out of me for now. Time for me to head out of the office and head home. Fun fun…

A long-kept secret in Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks has been revealed…

D'Arque Bishop

http://www.mortalkombatonline.com/content/News/read.cds?article=743

A new mode was discovered in MK: Shaolin Monks called Survival Mode. This mode lets you fight in the arenas against multiple bosses at once (including a simultaneous fight against the Orochi Hellbeast and Inferno Scorpion!). Level one lets you start out against Baraka, some Nomads, and eventually some Masked Guards.

This was actually a bit of a surprise. Survival Mode was hinted at during the Fight Night chat last October that we held; at the very end, Barclay Smith and Adam Puhl had the following exchange:

(Barclay-Smith) Adam you should reveal Survival Mode
(Adam-Puhl) it’s too much to type :)
(John-Edwards) survival mode??
(Adam-Puhl) but keep looking
(Barclay-Smith) I KNOW ITS IN THERE
(Adam-Puhl) ME TOO!

A few months after the game’s release, I started a stickied topic on MK Online’s MKSM Discussion forum, to help spur interest in locating the elusive Survival Mode. Well, this morning, two of the forum/chat members, sektor_rulz and Goroliath, managed to locate it. :-) Full instructions for locating it are in the news post above. I’ve yet to try it, but it’ll give me something to do on Sunday. In any event, my hearty congratulations to those two for finding it!

Easter postings…

D'Arque Bishop

Well, I wish I could say today was a remarkably eventful day full of interesting things that I did. Unfortunately, I’d be lying if I did.

I got up at around 9:30 AM, and found an Easter basket in the kitchen full of Cadbury Crunchie bars. :-) The sad thing is that I’ve not taken them upstairs yet; I really haven’t had a sweet tooth for them yet. Well, that, and the fact that I’m saving them are keeping them away. Cadbury Crunchies are by far my favorite chocolate bars, so I want to save and savor them. :-) Then, this afternoon, I went and bought myself a couple of albums off of the iTunes Music Store. They were both compilations of music from the various Final Fantasy video games; I had been wanting some FF music in my collection for a while, and today seemed like just as good a day to get them as any. The first album I got was the Black Mages’ self-titled debut album, which is a bunch of FF battle music themes done by a rock-type band (of which FF composer Nobuo Uematsu is a member). The other was called 20020220, and is a bunch of Final Fantasy themes performed by an orchestra. I’ll likely sit down for a bit later and listen to both albums in full. For now, though, I’ll wait for them to come up in my iPod’s random play.

Otherwise, I really haven’t done much of anything today. I’ve tried watching the “The Daleks” disc from my Doctor Who – The Beginning DVD boxset, but I’m agreeing with Jenn at this point: it’s so long and tedious that the best way to watch it will likely be one episode a day. I got through episode four in one sitting this afternoon before getting tired of it, and saw episode five this evening. I’ll wait until tomorrow before watching episode six. Otherwise, for the rest of the night I’m just planning on sitting back, relaxing, and preparing myself to get back into the grind tomorrow at work. I just hope I can get done with everything I need to… plus have enough downtime after work to relax and watch Doctor Who. :-)

Anyway, for now, I’m going to get a drink of water and then check on some stuff here. Fun fun…

Dealing with the bandwidth leechers…

D'Arque Bishop1 Comment

Well, this should be a tad amusing.

For a while now, we’d been dealing with bandwidth leechers on MK Online. I’d been more or less tolerating it, simply because I couldn’t be bothered putting in a remote-hotlinking solution on the site. I’ve had one set up here on the D’Arque Cathedral site for a long while; I got tired of all these sites starting to grab the image from my site whenever I made a post (thanks to the site cross-posting to LiveJournal), so I set it up where only my site and LJ could link to the images without getting a “Forbidden” error. It certainly saved on bandwidth issues.

Well, this afternoon, Murdoink (fellow MK Online staff member and webmaster of Mortal Kombat Warehouse, one of our hosted sites) approached me on the chat channel and asked me if I could disable remote hotlinking for his site and the main MK Online Games section. It turned out he had discovered someone leeching bandwidth off the site, and wanted to do something about it. I finally gave in and went ahead and implemented the same remote-hotlinking solution on the main MK Online server that I did for this site. In addition to the two areas Murdoink requested, I went ahead and added the same restrictions to our media section, as people were hotlinking to that as well… and as images displayed through the media system had to be parsed through our site software, it adds quite a bit of strain on the server’s resources. The main difference is that instead of just throwing out a Forbidden error, the server returns an image with the site’s logo and URL on it. :-)

I’ll probably adopt the same change to this site, as soon as I can get Scott Howell to adapt the banner logo to fit a similar image size and format. In the meantime, I’m just going to sit back and watch the aftermath. It should be amusing to see if people bitch and moan about the restrictions we put in place. On the other hand, I’m hoping it’ll cut down on our bandwidth costs.

We’ll see either way soon.

Plans and whatnot…

D'Arque Bishop

Well, yesterday I booked my flight to Los Angeles for next month. I was rather shocked when I saw how much it cost; I wouldn’t have expected the Houston-Los Angeles round trip flight would cost just under $200. Still, I’m not complaining at all, as it’s one more thing for the trip taken care of. I also should consider getting a 1 GB USB flash drive, a bigger SD memory card for my Cingular 8125 phone, and a few more MiniDV tapes for the camcorder as well. Those of you who know me can pretty much guess what this trip is for; otherwise… I’ll make the official announcement on the 1st sometime.

It’s still looking to be a quiet weekend. Dad hasn’t yet asked for my help moving anything, but I can’t guarantee he’s not going to ask. As it stands, I’ve been spending the day working on the MK Online server, making some tweaks and fixing a couple of issues I came across on the site’s Games section. I’ll probably end up playing more Cyberball 2072 as well, plus trying to avoid spoilers from Doctor Who (as the second season premiere is today). Oh, well… it’s not as if I have anything more pressing to work on at this point.

Oh, and one other thing DID happen today that I’m rather annoyed about. At some point this morning, the doorbell rang. Dad went down and answered it, and Mom mentioned to me that it was our neighbor across the street. She surmised that he was going to ask us to move my car; it was on the street and the guy has difficulty backing his truck out of his driveway when it’s there. Turned out that he wasn’t asking us to move it… he actually HAD hit it. I’ll have to go check the damage, but apparently all it is is paint damage. I’ll probably end up taking it in to be looked at later this next week, if I have time. Still… what the hell is it with me having bad luck with cars nowadays?

Oh, well… might as well go do something semi-productive…

Another post in a sea of inactivity…

D'Arque Bishop

Okay, so… it’s Good Friday, I’ve had the day off, and I’ve managed to accomplish very little today. That’s fine by me, mind you; after this past week I could very well do with a day of doing absolutely nothing. I had to move offices on Tuesday, and I have yet to even completely unpack, as I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off. It’ll get worse next week, as my employers’ corporate office will be moving to my office’s location next weekend and I’ll be working to finalize preparations for THAT move all week. This will be in addition to my normal tech support work and any other issues that might creep up in the meantime. *sigh* I’ll be glad when all that will be taken care of.

I’ve been immersing myself in Mortal Kombat II and Cyberball 2072 recently. I was never all that great at Cyberball 2072, but practice is helping to make perfect. Or at least, I try… my main issue nowadays is telling the quarterback to pass to the right receiver. I’ve been handed more interceptions that way… gah. For those who are not familiar, Cyberball 2072 is an arcade game from about 15 years ago which involved a version of football played by robots. Not that I’m THAT big into football, but it often makes an interesting strategic exercise. Now if I could just do something about getting my passes intercepted relatively often…

As for my weekend plans, they’ll probably consist of sleep and more sleep. I’ll also likely be helping Dad move his office. He’s got it partially moved now, but some of the stuff is here at the house… including his Vonage adapter and phone, which means he can take business calls here in the meantime. Fun fun. Otherwise, I’m just going to treat this as the calm before the storm, and not worry too much. We’ll see how things go…

Catching up on the week’s events…

D'Arque Bishop

Well, it’s Sunday night, and I’m just sitting at my computer desk listening to music from my iPod being played through the home theater and having the last of my Shiner Lights. Not that I’ve done that much productive today, for the most part. About the most productive thing I’ve done today has been to figure out a problem with how I’d configured the MySQL install on the main MK Online server. Apparently I didn’t realize that all of these huge files in the base of the MySQL data directory were in fact what are called “binary logs”, which act as transaction logs showing what changes have been made to the filesystem. The problem was that I never quite took into account that they needed special attention in regards to cleanup, so I actually had something like close to 4 GB worth of logfiles going back to 2003 or thereabouts. :-/ I only need a week’s worth of these logfiles, so I’m probably going to come up with a solution in the next couple of days that will allow us to keep these files cleaned up. Heh, it’s amusing sometimes how I’m still learning stuff about these things…

Yesterday was fun, though; Dave and Louie came by the house and we hung out for most of the day. Dave had brought his father’s laptop around to see if there was anything I could do to salvage it, but unfortunately it only has 128 MB of RAM, and it was thoroughly infested with spyware and viruses. At this point, about all I can recommend to Dave is that a wipe and reload might be in order. *sigh* Other than working on the laptop, though, we had lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings, played some Midway Arcade Treasures and Midway Arcade Treasures 2, and had dinner and drinks out. We had fun, all things told. It certainly beat sitting at home doing nothing. :-)

I must say, though, I’m looking forward to the short week this week. We get Good Friday off, which is certainly welcome to me; I could use the time off. However, it’s not as if it’ll be a quiet week for me, as tomorrow I have to rush around and get packed to move into my new offices on Tuesday. This will have to be done in addition to whatever other work I need to do; chances are I’ll end up working late tomorrow to get everything finished. Oh, well… as long as I’m not there all night I won’t complain. In addition, the new office is a bit more out of the way, so it’ll be harder for users to come seek me out instead of submitting support tickets like they’re supposed to. :-)

As for now, though, I’m just going to sit back and relax. I got my hands on the Doctor Who – The Beginning DVD box set, which has the first three Doctor Who serials from late 1963 and early 1964. I watched the first one, “An Unearthly Child”, tonight. I’ll probably watch the other two (“The Daleks” and “The Edge of Destruction”) later this week. I’ll probably finish up the night by playing some Cyberball 2072 or Mortal Kombat II by way of Midway Arcade Treasures 2. Oh, well… might as well before the storm of work hits tomorrow. :-)

I now have even more incentive to buy an Intel Mac…

D'Arque Bishop

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.

As elegant as it gets
Boot Camp lets you install Windows XP without moving your Mac data, though you will need to bring your own copy to the table, as Apple Computer does not sell or support Microsoft Windows.(1) Boot Camp will burn a CD of all the required drivers for Windows so you don’t have to scrounge around the Internet looking for them.

Damn. One of the things that I really wanted before migrating to an Intel Mac was something like this, so that I could run Windows XP when necessary. Now that it’s available… heh. I’ll still be waiting, though, as I don’t need to upgrade my laptop for a while and my main PC is powerful enough for the time being. Oh, well… at least I know the option is there. :-)

An end of week (and end of weekend) post…

D'Arque Bishop

Okay, so I haven’t posted in here in a while. So sue me. I’ve been kept pretty busy over the past week or so, and haven’t really had time to come in here and do a post. I’ve got a half an hour or so now, so I can elaborate on how my week’s been.

As I’ve said before, I went on a business trip to Rock Springs, WY this past week. I left on Monday, arriving in Salt Lake City at around noon local time. From there, I rented a car and made my way to Rock Springs. I must say that driving to Rock Springs from Salt Lake City is a hell of a lot more pleasant than driving to Dallas, Lafayette, or Corpus Christi from Houston. It’s about the same amount of driving time, but it’s a lot more scenic (with mountains and the like), so it doesn’t seem as boring. Of course, it helped that I brought my iPod and FM transmitter/car charger with me. I arrived in Rock Springs at around 4 PM local time, and met up with coworkers at the location so I could get an idea of what was going on. Then, I went to my hotel (the local Hampton Inn, which was as nice as always), and got settled in. I then went for dinner at the local Applebee’s, which was in the parking lot of Rock Springs’s mall. (For those of you familiar with the north Houston area as it was in the 70’s and 80’s… the closest comparison I can make is that the mall reminded me of North Oaks Mall. :-) ) It had been twenty years since I’ve been at an Applebee’s. It’ll be another twenty years before I go back. The food just wasn’t that good. :-/

I got to the factory early Tuesday morning after having a very nice breakfast at the hotel (they even had my preferred brands of syrup and coffee creamer!), and got straight to work setting the time clocks up. I managed to get all of the timeclocks operational, other than missing a fiber-optic port module for the switch. I must say, though, that re-running a bunch of ethernet cable in the shop was not my idea of a fun time. :-/ After the day was done, I headed back to the hotel, and pretty much hung out there the rest of the night (other than a brief run over to Burger King to get some dinner).

I checked out of the hotel Wednesday morning, and went over to the factory to work; I ended up setting up a small networked laser printer and installing the second fiber-optic port on the switch (which didn’t arrive until that morning). From there, I had lunch with two coworkers at this neat little Italian place called Rocky Mountain Noodle. After lunch, I said goodbye to Lance and Ralph, and began the drive back to Salt Lake City. I was understandably nervous about doing so, as SLC had been getting some rotten weather (aka, rain and snow showers) and that it was travelling east towards Rock Springs. It didn’t help that Ralph, Lance, and Kelly (the general manager at the Rock Springs location) had been giving me shit about it. Fortunately for me, though, it turned out that most of the weather was actually 40-50 miles south of I-80. Other than a rainshower outside of Little America, it was nice and sunny until I got within 30 miles of Salt Lake City. At that point I hit some serious snow showers. I was nervous, but it turned out to be nowhere near as bad as I had feared. I finally reached my hotel (the Comfort Inn at SLC International Airport) after a wrong turn or two, got settled in, and worked from the hotel room that night (excluding dinner in the hotel restaurant). I likely won’t stay there again; two of the lamps lacked bulbs, the bathroom’s fan was too damn loud, and I kept getting disconnected from my home server and the work VPN.

The next morning I did some more work from the hotel room. At about 10:30 AM, I checked out, went to the airport, returned my rental car, and went to the gate to work from there. Unfortunately, despite all the ads they had at the airport for wireless network access, my laptop was unable to get onto the airport’s wifi system. So, I just watched the CNN monitors and took calls on my Blackberry while waiting for my flight. I got on the flight, arrived back in Houston at 5:30 PM, and Dad picked me up. All in all, an uneventful end to the trip…

… or so I thought, until we got into a wreck on the way home.

We were on Greens Road heading westbound; we had just crossed Aldine-Westfield when I noticed a white Buick Regal preparing to pull out of Chevron. I had hoped she wouldn’t pull out as we were approaching. She did. Next thing I know, she’s T-boning Dad’s car on the passenger side right in front of me. *sigh* I looked over at her, and she had a perfect “Oh SHIT” expression on her face. Fortunately no one was hurt; Dad’s car was dented and scratched, but the Buick’s front bumper was torn off. We waited a while for a policeman to show up to file a police report, but none came, so we decided to file one the next morning and get home. (It was after dark at that point and that area of town isn’t a very nice one.) I got home, unpacked, and caught up on some stuff… and that was my day.

Friday was rather uneventful, other than the fact that I got a new cell phone. This new phone is supposed to be one of the “Blackberry killers”; it’s a Cingular 8125, which runs Windows Mobile 5.0. I already have it linked to my office email account, and it’s been working rather well. In fact, the only reason I carried both it and my Blackberry around is because they won’t have my number ported to the 8125 until tomorrow morning. After that, I’ll be rid of the Blackberry and using the 8125 full-time. It really is a nice device, though I imagine people like Agilo and kryptondog will be scandalized that I’m using a Windows device as my cell phone. Heh.

As for this weekend… about the most productive thing done was to fix the satellite dish. We first noticed a problem yesterday evening when I tried to watch Cops and found my satellite receiver wasn’t getting anything from the dish. After a bunch of troubleshooting (involving re-running coaxial cable and moving receivers between locations), I finally went to Best Buy to purchase a new dual-LNB for the dish, as Dad found the old one had somehow been damaged. The receiver’s working fine now, thankfully… no complaints from me or anything. :-)

And now, I should consider going to bed. It’s been a long day, and it’ll be a longer one tomorrow. Fun fun…