Thought for food…

D'Arque Bishop

Well, today was a good day, lunch-wise. I got a call from my coworkers telling me that we were going to Houston’s for lunch, and that the CFO was picking up the tab. So, we all piled into a vehicle, and made our way to Houston’s (which is located at Kirby and Westpark).

My God, that food was good. It was expensive, but damn good. We started off with smoked salmon and spinach dip as a shared appetizer (yes, they’re separate dishes). Then, for an entree, I got the “Knife and Fork” Barbecue Pork Ribs. They were, to put it bluntly, the most delicious ribs I’ve ever had. Then we all shared a brownie a la mode and key lime pie for dessert. I don’t like key lime pie, but the brownie was wonderful.

My final opinion? It would be a GREAT place to take a date out for dinner. I highly recommend it.

(And yes, I brought a box of rib leftovers back with me. :-) )

As seen on Draugr’s journal…

D'Arque Bishop


You Are The Wayfarer Guide
“I’ll show you the way.”

Your deep insight and quick wisdom never ceases to amaze those around you. You are the guiding light for many of those you know and are not afraid to help anyone else who asks. Not very many acknowledge your tremendous help and effort, but you do not mind that so much. You’ve seen what is in store for them, and will be there should they need your help. You enjoy people in general, but are very selective of who you let see the real you. Others see you as an enigma of sorts, a mystery that is seemingly ever changing.

Which Classic Story Role Do You Play?
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The 20 questions meme, as seen on Dementia’s LJ…

D'Arque Bishop

You can’t look at the questions (or click on the cut) until you write down the twenty names you’re going to use.

1) dementia
2) robio
3) missyanthrope
4) pandorah
5) badm0j0
6) scotters83
7) rivetspoon
8) shinnokxz
9) foxbaby
10) jenndolari
11) draugr
12) jules_
13) shifter_
14) ree779
15) delitescence
16) CCShadow
17) ]{0MBAT
18) Sinc
19) Worff
20) The_Purple_Bunny

(The last five are IRC friends. I only have 15 LJ friends.)

Is #9 a boy or a girl? A girl.
Would #11 and #2 make a cute couple? *snicker* I’m sure Demmie would love that.
How about #18 and #4? Hmmm… possibly.
What grade is #17 in? Saving up for college, I believe.
When was the last time you talked to #12? Outside of LJ? Never. Here? … good question.
What is #6’s favorite band? Not sure, to be honest.
Does #1 have any siblings? Yes.
Would you ever date #3? Been there, done that. Would do it again if given the chance, circumstances permitting.
Would you ever date #7? Maybe.
Is #16 single? Yes.
What’s #15’s last name? Paskus, I think.
What’s #10’s middle name? Er… dunno.
What’s #5’s favorite thing to do? Er… drink? *shrug*
Is #13 hot? Not my type.
Would #14 and #19 make a good couple? *blink* I don’t think so. Totally different and Ree’s not Worff’s type.
What school does #20 go to? The School of Hard Knocks?
Tell me a random fact about #11: He wears a purple jester’s cap.
And #1: She was the webmistress for a popular MTV VJ at one time.
And #3: She once worked as a nanny.
Have you ever had a crush on #15? Yeah.
Where does #9 live? Australia
What’s #4’s favorite color? Black.
Would you make-out with #14? Sure, why not?
Are #5 & #6 best friends? They don’t know each other.
Does #7 like #20? Yeah.
Does #8 like #19? They don’t know each other. They’d probably end up killing each other.
How did you meet #2? I met him when Demmie went to Dallas to meet him et al. It was a dinner thing with us three and Allison.
How did you meet #18? #Vampire on IRC.
Does #10 have any pets? I don’t think so…
Is #12 older than you? No, she’s a year or two younger.
Is # 17 the sexiest person alive or what? Excuse me, but… BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Even reality TV isn’t real, kids.

D'Arque Bishop

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/bizarre/3201666

WASHINGTON – A Prince George’s County, Md., jury would not convict a man accused of stabbing his girlfriend to death because a half-eaten hamburger, recovered from the crime scene and assumed to have been his, was not tested for DNA.

In Washington, a jury deadlocked recently in the trial of a woman accused of stabbing another woman because fingerprints on the weapon did not belong to the suspect.

Prosecutors say jurors are telling them they expect forensic evidence in criminal cases, just like on their favorite television shows, including CSI: Crime Scene Investigators.

In real life, forensic evidence is not collected at every crime scene, either because criminals clean up after themselves or because of a shortage of resources.

Yet, increasingly, jurors are reluctant to convict someone without it, a phenomenon the criminal justice community is calling the “CSI effect.”

“There is an increased and unrealistic expectation that every crime scene will yield plentiful forensic evidence,” said Alexandria, Va., Commonwealth’s Attorney Randolph Sengel.

*sigh*

You know, I really do hope I’m never called on a jury in a case like this. I’d hate to be the one that has to sit there and agree with the prosecutor that, “I know you watch CSI, and it makes for good drama… but real forensics just isn’t like that!” One of my biggest peeves is how some of the stuff they show is outside the realm of possibility; a good example is taking a blurry or low-resolution photograph and turning it into a crystal-clear image. For that matter, I kinda know how the crime lab people feel; I’d end up watching movies or TV shows that feature such feats as using a laptop to hack into anything without a network connection or the like, and thinking, “It’s NOT LIKE THAT!”

It’s called artistic license, folks. The sooner you realize that, the better off we’ll all be.

*going back to my not-so-glamourous job sitting behind a desk, working with a Mac that can’t hack into an alien computer system and give it a virus no matter how much of a genius I might be…*

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…

The end of the three-day weekend…

D'Arque Bishop

*yawn*

So, another holiday weekend is over and done with. To say that it’s been a productive one would be something of a lie, unless you count the work I’ve done towards this site… namely, the blog and gallery portions of it. (No, the gallery isn’t linked on the main page. I’ll take care of that at some point.) I’ve spent most of my weekend laying about and sleeping, really. Well, I did go out to eat with Mom, Dad, and Aunt Norma Saturday night after the latter two were picked up from the airport, but that’s about it. Hell, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to sleep well tonight, as I’ve spent so much time napping this afternoon.

Oh, well. This week is going to be fun at work, though. I still have to plan out my trip to Louisiana later this week… probably will leave Thursday morning early, and then just stay in Houma overnight. Then I’ll hopefully be back in Houston Friday night. I also need to arrange a rental car, as I don’t want to take my car to Louisiana. It means less mileage put on my car, and also saves the company money. Still, once this trip is over and done with, I probably won’t have to bother with any more Louisiana trips for the foreseeable future. Then again, I still have a Canada trip I need to plan for at some point… *sigh*

In any event, I think that at this point, I’m just going to have a Shiner and then head to bed at a sane point tonight. Fun fun…

The return of the D’Arque Cathedral…

D'Arque Bishop1 Comment

Well, it finally happened.

My website, the D’Arque Cathedral, has been offline “for renovation” for the past seven or eight years. It’s actually become something of a running joke, really… even my friend Louie would make jokes about it being down for so long. No more.

The D’Arque Cathedral is finally online, and now exists as my personal weblog. :-) I’ll still keep my LiveJournal for my LJ friends to comment on, but all posts will originate on the D’Arque Cathedral and be replicated over to the LiveJournal. For reference, I also imported the last month’s worth of LJ entries into the site.

Why have I done this? Well, I’d been considering it for a while, but didn’t feel like writing a completely new site on my own. Then, I got back in touch with my friend Sean MC, and found that he and a couple of others were using this software called WordPress. I looked it over, liked what I saw, and went with it. :-) I found the site template while doing a bit of searching, and went from there.

And now that the site is online, I’m going to go to bed. Before I do, I want to thank Missy for finding the image used in my header, and a BIG thank you to Scott Howell for making a heck of a nice header out of it. It truly is greatly appreciated. :-)

Oh! I forgot the URL. It’s http://www.darquecathedral.org.

Thanks for everyone’s patience, and I’ll see you all around…

The concepts some game makers come up with…

D'Arque Bishop

While doing some rearranging of the files and directories on my webserver, I came across this image. I scanned it a year or two ago.

The story behind it is that it's from a flyer I got at E3 2002. There are three main halls at E3, you see. The main action takes place at the South and West Halls, where the "big" companies have their booths. For example, Sony and Nintendo are side-by side in West Hall, while Microsoft is in South Hall, along with manufacturers like Blizzard, Activision, Capcom, Namco, Komani, etc. (Midway was in a separate smaller hall.) However, in my opinion, the most interesting hall is Kentia Hall, which is where all the smaller and/or foreign (read: not American, British, or Japanese) manufacturers have their booths set up. You get to get a different feel for what the smaller companies are up to.

Anyway, during E3 2002, Justin and I were wandering Kentia Hall, when we passed by this Korean game manufacturer's booth. A booth babe handed me a flyer, and I just put it in my bag without looking at it. When I got home, I was looking through the stuff I had gotten from the show, and I happened upon the flyer from that Korean game company. I just stared at it for a while, thinking, "What the FUCK?!"

I swear, this has to be one of the more disturbing images I've come across.

<a href="http://drkbish.darquecathedral.org/images/tomak-head.jpg"><img src="http://drkbish.darquecathedral.org/images/tn_tomak-head.jpg"></a>

Now, years later, I still get a bit of a chuckle out of this image. I wonder if it ever made it outside Korea (or even made it big INSIDE Korea)?

You can't make headlines like this up.

D'Arque Bishop

<em><strong>FDA studying possible Viagra-related blindness</strong>

WASHINGTON — Federal health officials are examining rare reports of blindness among some men using the impotence drugs Viagra and Cialis, a disclosure that comes at a time when the drug industry can ill afford negative publicity about another class of blockbuster medicines.

The Food and Drug Administration still is investigating, but has no evidence yet that the drug is to blame, said spokeswoman Susan Cruzan.</em>

… I'm not thinking the Viagra is directly to blame, either… ;-)