A friend of mine tied the knot…

Well, I apologize for not posting sooner. I haven’t really been in much of a posting mood, you see. However, I figure it’s about time I posted about my past weekend, which is something I had been meaning to talk about for a while.

You see, this past weekend, I went out to Columbus, OH. For those who don’t know, Scott Howell is a good friend of mine, and is also the one who hired me on at Mortal Kombat Online. Well, for a couple of years he had been dating this girl named Lindsey Bailey, and this past weekend was when they were getting married. Scott invited me and Joe (aka CCShadow, the other admin) to the wedding, and we were happy and honored to attend. Joe and I even arranged our flights where they would arrive and leave within minutes of one another, so that we could share transportation.

It was a great idea in theory. In practice, it didn’t work out QUITE so well. My flight arrived early on Friday, and Joe’s arrived late. Once he arrived, though (after I had been waiting an hour), we went and picked up the rental car, and made our way to the hotel. Once there, we got checked in and settled into our separate rooms, and then made our way to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. After a rather filling meal, it would have been nice to go to Barnes & Noble… had it been open yet. So, we went back to the hotel to our separate rooms, and basically did not much of anything.

I got up relatively early Saturday morning, and after having breakfast in the hotel restaurant, I decided to walk across the street to Worthington Square Mall to see if there was anything interesting there. Those who have lived in the Spring area for more than 20 years will likely remember North Oaks Mall. That’s what Worthington felt like. I was through the mall in less than five minutes without having a single thing that interested me. After going to lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings, I went back to the hotel, changed into my suit, met up with Joe (who had slept the entire morning), and we made our way to the church where the service was taking place.

When we got there, we signed a photo of Scott and Lindsey, and were shown seats. We pretty much kept to ourselves until the service started, as we quite literally didn’t know ANYONE other than Scott. Scott came past us once when seating his grandmother, and quickly said hi. Pretty soon the service itself started; it was a very nice service, with the standard pastor talking about marriage as a covenant from God and Lindsy and Scott giving their vows, plus lighting the candle together. As Scott and Lindsey walked out, he winked at us acknowledging our presence again.

As we were shown out, we were all given the opportunity to greet the wedding party. We didn’t say anything to the first bridesmaid, but we did take the opportunity to say hi to the second, as it was Scott’s older sister Carrie. We greeted her and complimented her on her singing (she sang the Lord’s Prayer during the service). Then, Joe said, “Well, my name’s Joe Schorr and this is Scott Bishop. We work with Scott on the website.” Carrie smiled wide and said, “Oh, so you’re CCShadow and D’Arque Bishop?”

At that, the entire rest of the wedding party swung around to look at us, and someone said, “Those are the Mortal Kombat guys?” We ended up meeting and greeting everyone, including Scott’s parents. :-) From there, we went outside and did the obligatory rice shower for Scott and Lindsey. Once that was done, we piled into the car and made our way back to the hotel. Amusingly enough, I exited the freeway too early, and using my phone’s Google Maps we took the scenic route back. :-)

Once at the hotel, we got ourselves comfortable at a table for the reception, and got to eat some hors d’oeuvres while waiting for the reception to start. We also got to meet a few of Lindsey’s coworkers as well. Pretty soon, the reception started, and we went out to get food… only to find that Joe could only eat the salad. I availed myself of the food, and we sat down and talked to Lindsey’s coworkers. Scott and Lindsey did a walkaround to greet their friends and family, and I took a picture of them…

Scott warned us that we would be featured in a slideshow, and he was right; when the slideshow got to the part marked “Our Friends”, several pictures of us at Midway events were shown. We ended up telling Scott’s parents that they should have contacted us first, as we would have given them versions of the pictures WITHOUT the MK Online watermark on them. ;-) After the slideshow ended, the dancing began. I admit that that night, I found out what it takes to get me on the dance floor: a fair amount of alcohol. Granted, Scott’s mom dragged me out there, but I had fun nonetheless. The rest of the night was spent either talking to Scott’s friends and family or out on the dance floor. When the night ended, Joe and I went back to our separate rooms (where Joe ordered a pizza), and eventually went to bed.

Sunday morning saw me having breakfast in the hotel restaurant again, and then packing my clothes in my room. I skipped lunch, and at around 2 PM I met up with Joe in the lobby as we checked out. We made our way to the airport, and ended up sitting down for a late lunch/early dinner twice; Joe had pasta at an Italian place outside security, and I had a burger at a Chili’s Too inside security. Once that was done, we settled at our gates (which were right next to one another) and worked on our computers. The time soon came where Joe had to board his flight, so we said our goodbyes and boarded. Ten minutes later, I boarded my own flight…

… and before we left, we were told a bird had committed hara kiri by flying into the engine as the plane had landed in Columbus, so we were stuck until they could clean the bird out and check the engine. I ended up deplaning, getting some coffee at Starbucks, and relaxing in the terminal until it was time to board again. I spent the flight listening to music on my iPhone for the most part.

All in all, it was a very fun trip. One of these days I might have to go back up to visit Scott and Lindsey and say hello. Otherwise… it was great seeing him and Joe, and I look forward to seeing them again (which, at this rate, will likely be E3).

One computer operational, one… not so much.

Well, I finally took the time to get my main PC operational this weekend. Unfortunately, I did have a delay in that the Windows XP Professional CD I made was slightly defective. I ended up needing to create a new CD, and only then did the install work properly. I spent most of Saturday reinstalling the operating system, drivers, and applications. That of course excludes games; I figure I’ll install the games on an as-needed basis. About the only program I didn’t install was WindowBlinds, and that was because I mainly used that for putting a black theme on my desktop. Finding the Royal Noir theme made it unnecessary. :-) Of course, now I have Sinc asking me if I want to play Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath. I don’t even HAVE the game yet… heh. Still, all in all, I’m getting more or less back to normal. I’ve even managed to pull my movies off of the iPod.

The funny thing is that I’m not entirely sure the “dead” 320 GB SATA hard drive that I pulled out of the PC is actually dead. I think the two drives may have become desynched, though I don’t know for certain. What I’ll probably end up doing is buying an external enclosure for the drive and use it as an external drive with the main PC. If it doesn’t work, well, I can go buy a new drive easily enough. :-)

On the other hand, I apparently did something foolish with the PowerBook. While the main PC was offline I was using it as my main computer, and had it on almost a week 24/7. I put it in sleep mode while I was at work the last couple of days, but apparently the damage was done. On Friday, I noticed that the video was corrupted. I turned the PowerBook off and let it rest overnight, but it didn’t help. The video chipset is apparently FUBARed, with lots of corruption and artifacting going on. *sigh* It’s a shame, because that laptop has served me extremely well for over five years. Unfortunately, I can’t justify the cost of a new MacBook, as I still use my work laptop for anything work related and take that with me on most trips (as it has the VPN software to connect to the office and has a built-in cellular broadband card). That’s especially annoying as I used the PowerBook for video editing. Then again, I only did video editing when out at events for Mortal Kombat Online. *sigh* I’m sure I’ll think of something, though.

Ah, well. At least my main PC is pretty much operational. I’ll deal with any other problems as they come.

This falls under the category of “more money than sense”.

http://kotaku.com/5062303/invade-stormwind-you-and-what-arm++-oh-that-one

When you can’t convince 35 other people of your master plan to attack two Alliance capital cities, you really only have one alternative: Do it yourself. “Bradster” does. He owns that rig above — 11 computers that run 36 World of WarCraft account simultaneously. His infrastructure costs (to say nothing of his utility bill) weren’t itemized, but he unashamedly admits he pays $5,711 per year in subscription fees to keep together his one-man raiding party (family photo of that on the jump).

The more I look at that pic, the sadder it seems. For example, the majority of machines shown in the pic are laptops. They’re most likely not low-end laptops, either, because each appears to be running a minimum of two instances of World of WarCraft. In addition, the mice are actually medium-to-higher-end trackballs, and not the kind of mice you’d get by default with PCs. Also, not only is the internet bill going to be insane (due to the needed bandwidth for thirty-six concurrent sessions), the electricity bill has to be pretty nuts too. I’m not talking about just the power needed to run those machines. I’m also talking about the power needed for the A/C to keep that room at a bearable temperature. Speaking as someone who’s been in a room full of computers running off of standard A/C, it tends to get pretty hot pretty damn quickly.

Normally I wouldn’t begrudge someone their hobby, but at this cost, this just screams “overkill” to me. I keep thinking that at this amount of money, it’d be much better spent travelling the REAL world instead of getting yourself lost in a virtual world.

Everything’s bigger in Texas… including the rats?

Normally I wouldn’t post from my desk at work, but I needed to share this one. My coworker Zoom sent me an email just now that, well… I’ll let you see for yourself.

Okay, ya’ll need to take a look at this. I was at the Restaurant Adobe and it was next to a creek. As you can the geese are adult age.. What is that rodent??? That is a huge rat!

As for the rats in question, well…

Apparently they’re called “nutria rats”, according to my coworker Keila. They go up to people in parks here in town… and people actually feed them! WTF?

Then again, I look at rats of this size and immediately start thinking of skaven. Of course, that’s just the fantasy/sci-fi geek in me, but still… those are some damned large rats.

Not too much going on…

Well, this is fun. I’m currently sitting in my company’s datacenter waiting for this tape autoloader to finish cataloging some tapes. When I get done here, I get to go to our Creekmont facility to work there for the rest of the day. Fun.

All in all, it’s been a pretty slow week. About the only big things I had planned to do were to buy a new suit for a friend’s wedding a week from Saturday and get my main PC working. (I had forgotten to bring the new drives home last Friday.) I’ve already gotten the suit, but the drives will probably wait until this weekend, as when I get home I can’t be bothered with working on it. We’ll see, I suppose. At least I finally made the driver disk so XP’s installer can see my hard drives…

Otherwise, it’s pretty much been the same old same old here. I haven’t posted much because I haven’t had much to say. Ah, well. Hopefully I’ll have something to post about later on, but for now I need to get back onto these tapes.