Month: September 2008

Back home but not back to 100 percent.

D'Arque Bishop

Well, I know I said in my previous post that I was going to do a post that night. I lied. I’ve been tied up with a bunch of different stuff and haven’t had the chance (or inclination) to do a post. I’m rectifying that now, of course.

All in all, we were without power for a few hours short of two weeks. By the end of that time, we were about at the end of our ropes. Fortunately my friend Josh had a coworker who needed to sell his generator, so my parents got a bit of relief. For me, my relief came when I had to travel to Oklahoma City on business. My trip there was more or less uneventful, though I did get to meet up with Jeff and Malinda. Thursday night we had dinner at Victoria’s, which was a local Italian restaurant on the campus of OU. On Friday night, Malinda cooked dinner at their house, and then the three of us and their friend Karen played a boardgame called Twilight Imperium. Twilight Imperium was fun, and I did a lot better at it than I expected. The game lasted until 2 AM, and the fact that Jeff won at the end was a fluke; we had agreed to end then anyway because we were getting tired. Malinda for one was probably glad we ended at that point, as my space fleet was getting pretty massive and was lining up on her borders for a probable invasion. ;-) The game also got me more interested in the 4X genre of gaming; I may give it a try sometime in the near future.

However, when I got home, I suffered a couple of setbacks. The first setback was relatively minor. Apparently my car’s toll tag will not work for airport parking. When I tried to leave the economy lot, none of the gates would open for my car. What struck me as odd was that the lot let me in without needing to get a ticket, as if the tag reader had read my tag. I ended up paying the tag in cash. However, the really weird thing was that when I called the county toll road authority, they were stumped too. My tag is activated for airport parking, and they confirmed that the standard toll booths are reading my tag. If this keeps up, I may need to get a new tag.

The other setback was more serious. I got home from the airport and switched on my main PC, only to find that the two week long downtime had killed one of my two SATA hard drives. The problem is that I had the drives in RAID 0, which meant the data was striped between the two drives so they appeared as one large drive. In other words, I lost one drive but also lost the data in both. Fortunately, the only data I didn’t have backed up are the movies on my iPod, and I’ve found a way to get the movies off it. Still, it’ll be an annoyance, as once the replacement hard drive arrives, I’ll have to reinstall Windows XP and all of my applications again. Joy. That’ll probably happen this weekend. In the meantime, I’m using my PowerBook as my main workstation at the house.

Ah, well. As far as the rest of this week goes, I’m just going to catch up on work and make sure everything that needs to get done gets done. I’ve also been catching back up on the evening exercise missed thanks to the lack of power for two weeks. Otherwise, it’s back to the same old grind. Fun fun…

Stolen from Jenn…

D'Arque Bishop

I’m not a Babylon 5 fan as I haven’t watched many episodes of the series, but I figured that I would join the meme with one of my favorite “military” quotes…

For B5 fans – when you see this, post a B5 quote in your own journal.

(The setting: Babylon 5 has just broken off from the Earth Alliance and fought off an attack from Earth ships. Almost defenseless, Babylon 5 is faced with fresh reinforcements. At that point, four Minbari ships jump in to protect the station.)
Delenn: This is Ambassador Delenn of the Minbari. Babylon 5 is under our protection. Withdraw or be destroyed.
Captain Drake: Negative. We have authority here. Do not force us to engage your ship.
Delenn: Why not? Only one human captain has survived battle with a Minbari fleet. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, be somewhere else.
(The Earth ships turn tail and jump out.)

(An actual post may come tonight. Stay tuned…)

Still going without power…

D'Arque Bishop

It’s officially day nine without power. According to the maps CenterPoint has drawn up concerning restoration of power, our area is not promised to have power back before tomorrow. As some of you might imagine, I’ve been more or less going insane without power here. I’ve taken a few steps to mitigate the misery, as it were, but it’s all I can do at this point.

For example, as stated before, I’ve moved the darquecathedral.org servers to the office so that I and others wouldn’t lose mail. I think stuff sent Saturday or Sunday may have been lost anyway, but this was the best I could do. Unfortunately, AT&T’s cellular service’s DNS servers have the hostnames for my server cached, so the servers are inaccessible in some ways. The main website is inconsistently available. My mail services, on the other hand, are ALWAYS stuck on the old IP, so I can’t check my mail from my iPhone, nor can Sean check his from his Blackberry. It’s rather frustrating, as you might imagine.

I’ve also been using my iPhone for Internet usage more and more. I had given myself an hour or so of net time on my work laptop a night, seeing as it has a built-in cell broadband card. I’ve already just about exhausted the battery this weekend, so now I’m using the iPhone. Its web browser is very usable, I have AIM installed for instant messaging, and I downloaded and installed TouchTerm last night so that I could have SSH capability. The only disadvantage (other than the soft keyboard) is that I can only use one app at a time. It’s annoying, but not something that I can’t stand. Then again, unlike the laptop, I have access to a car charger for the iPhone.

Ah, well. It also helps when I have all those movies loaded into my iPod. I watched Enter the Dragon last night, and might watch either Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children or Krull tonight, provided power doesn’t come back on. I’ll just have to remember to charge the iPod this afternoon too.

Ah, well. I’m surviving here. I’m just glad that I’ll get a respite from this sooner or later. :-)

I’m still alive.

D'Arque Bishop

Well, despite what some people might have thought or believed, I am still alive. :-)

We actually didn’t fare too badly. Despite losing power relatively early (11:30 PM on Friday night) and the storm being as loud and blustery as you’ve probably heard on the news, it actually caused very minimal damage. The back yard flooded and the front yard was littered with branches and assorted tree debris, but the worst that happened to us was the fact that a thirty foot section of our back fence was knocked down. We didn’t lose water service and the house is intact.

As far as food and water goes, we’ve been good. Our stove is electric, but we do have a propane grill in the back yard we’ve been using to cook on. We also have plenty of water and non-perishable food. It also helps that restaurants in the area have been opening; Monday night we all went to Texas Roadhouse at I-45 and FM 1960 for dinner, and tonight we’re meeting at the Denny’s by my dad’s office for dinner. Also, my preferred Chinese takeout place is open. We’re okay in that respect.

My main gripe right now is about the power situation. If the CenterPoint map is to be believed, my house probably won’t get power back until after Monday. I admit I’ve been going nuts without power; I’ve already been entertaining myself by spending an hour a night on the internet using my work laptop and its cell broadband card, and by watching stuff on my iPod like the Doctor Who serial “Tomb of the Cybermen” and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The thing that’s been worrying me is the fact that I’d start losing email if my servers didn’t get power. The backup mail servers can hold mail for about a week before expiring it, and it’s coming up on a week. So, my boss has been nice enough to let me bring the servers to the office and let me host them here until such time as I get power at home. Hopefully it’ll be back soon… I’m going nuts there, plus without my Playstation 2 my nightly exercise routine is suffering.

Ah, well. That’s where things stand on my end. Life is settling back to normal, and we were pretty damned lucky, all things considered. I’ll just keep trucking along.

There’s nothing to do but wait.

D'Arque Bishop1 Comment

My parents and I have done everything we can to batten down the hatches, so to speak. Now there’s nothing for us to do but wait for Ike to hit. I’ve got my TV set to the local Fox affiliate, and am keeping an eye on it. Things don’t look good. The storm is still several hours from hitting us, yet Galveston and Kemah are already experiencing flooding. This isn’t confirmed, but there’s word that at a 3 PM CDT press conference, the mayor of Galveston will announce that the island will be underwater for twelve hours or so.

What gets me are the people who are still at Galveston who are gawking and sightseeing. This is going to be a dangerous storm; it’s so bad that the National Weather Service has said that anyone remaining in Galveston will face “certain death”. The one that got me was this one woman late last night on Galveston Beach who was there with her three or four young children (one in a stroller). A Channel 2 reporter asked her point blank why she was there when there was a mandatory evacuation order. Her response was, “I don’t believe that the storm is going to hit here. I have faith in God and He is not going to let it hit us.” The reporter mentioned that meteorologists were saying it would hit, and she just shook her head and said it would keep moving east. I’d admire her faith if she wasn’t risking her children as well as herself.

As for me… I’m going to stay here and keep online until it’s time for me to go to bed or until the power goes out, whichever comes first. If you want to chat, you can find me on the Mortal Kombat Online IRC channel, or if you have my IM information I’ll be on there. Once power goes out I’ll be restricting communications to SMS. We’ll see how it goes.

Great. After several near misses, a possible direct hit?

D'Arque Bishop

Apparently someone really has it in for us. After Dolly, Edouard, and Gustav failed to hit us, it looks like Ike is going to give us a more or less direct hit. Actually, considering the size of Ike, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a direct hit; no matter where it makes landfall at this point, we’ll still be affected by it. Wonderful.

Before anyone asks, we have no plans to evacuate. We’ve got five pets, and the cats and dogs hate each other. It doesn’t help that the dogs are big enough where there isn’t enough room for all of us in Mom’s van. The city’s pretty much given out a “shelter in place” order, so it’s probably best if we stay off the roads. We’ll probably end up spending tomorrow getting the house prepared; I know Dad was hoping for a large-scale test of the new water pumping system for the back yard we put in, and he may well end up getting it.

On a communications front, well… seeing as this site (and most of my email) is hosted at the house, I fully expect the site to be down for at least a couple of days due to power issues. Those of you with email hosted here need not worry overmuch; the backup mail server is in Minneapolis and will hold incoming email until we’re back online here. As far as communications with me go, well… once power goes out, the best way to reach me will probably be via SMS, as it uses far less power than voice calls do. I have a pair of cell phones with charged batteries I can use once the iPhone’s battery gives out. (Thank goodness the iPhone’s SIM card can be removed.) I’ll send text messages to certain people during the storm to let you all know how we’re holding up.

Ah, well. We’ll be getting out of work at noon today so we can prepare for the storm. Hopefully things will be all right. I’ll let you all know where things stand as they progress.

Sometimes I weep for our society.

D'Arque Bishop1 Comment

Kerri-Leigh linked to this blog post over on her LiveJournal. I did some checking and found the image is actually relatively old… relatively meaning it was reported on Kotaku and other sites nearly a year ago.

In a way, I’m not really surprised. In the time I’ve worked over at Mortal Kombat Online, I’ve heard plenty of stories about kids who started playing Mortal Kombat games when they were around four years old. Not that I would ever approve, mind… of course, I was 18 when Mortal Kombat first hit arcades. Still, Mortal Kombat (outside of most of the games, Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe excepted) has been aimed at a kid audience, with movies, costumes, a cartoon show, toys, etc. The Grand Theft Auto series has NEVER been aimed at a kid audience, and in its own way this horrifies me more, as Grand Theft Auto is more true-to-life than Mortal Kombat. (I’ve seen far more thugs out there on the streets than undead ninjas or thunder gods.)

I don’t know. All I can say is that I look at a picture like this and hope to God that this isn’t an indication of where our society is headed. Unfortunately, the cynic in me believes it is.

Okay, Jesse, maybe it’s time to give it up?

D'Arque Bishop

All right, I have to admit to amusement.

My friend Jesse (aka Dementia) goes to Dragon*Con every year, and is heavily into costuming. Every year, she enters in Dragon*Con’s Dawn look-alike contest. Don’t ask me who Dawn is; I’m more of a mainstream comics type person. Well, it appears that this year she got a pretty big sign that she may have been at it for too long.

Like I said, I had to laugh. I also got a kick out of the “CHUG OH GOD CHUG” one. :-) Maybe one of these years I’ll go out and see what it’s all about. We’ll see…