I spent part of my weekend watching the Olympics on TV. I've always loved watching the Olympics. When I was 9 years old they were in L.A., I lived in a rural part of Southeastern Ohio and I got two channels, barely, on a TV that was at least 20 years old. I had a copy of the Sports Illustrated olympics guide and I watched every event that the broadcasters would televise.

I have a better TV now, but perhaps I'm "misremembering" (I love Bushisms!) the past, but it seems to me I had better coverage then than I do now.

NBC Claims they are going to air more Olympic coverage than has ever been aired before in this country. Spanning NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, USA, Bravo, and Telemundo, they plan to air over 2000 hours of coverage.

After this weekend, I have come to the conclusion that what NBC really means is that they plan to air about 400 hours of coverage, 400 hours of backstory on the athletes, 600 hours of crappy announcers who want as much face time as possible, and another 600 hours of commercials.

On top of having more commercials than actual coverage, NBC, not wanting to waste any revenue time, promotes their own shows and whatnot by putting a HUGE FREAKING ad over top of the coverage itself. I was watching the USA womens gymnastics team last night and for no less than 30 seconds half of the balance beam was obscured by NBC's stupid ad.

So here are some things I learned over the weekend:

  - NBC Sucks : As exampled
  - NBC's Announcers Suck : One of my favorite moments was when the guy says during the olympic march, when Mongolia was marching past, "Looks like they left the furs at home."
  - I do not understand the Greek alphabet.
  - I feel really sorry for Greek children learning how to spell their names.
  - Its sad how many empty seats there are at the games.
  - Michael Phelps is massive, yet he wears a swimsuit that probably has 20 square inches to it, total. The "Thorpedo" wears a full body suit and looks just as impressive. Either of whom can swim the 200m breaststroke faster than I can swim 20.
  - Most American Basketball stars are cowards or morons. I already knew this but the Olympics just reinforced it.
  - Carly Patterson is amazing, but I'm more impressed by Mohini Bhardwaj .. she's doing that stuff and she's only 3 years younger than I am. (posted the 7th highest scores overall in the qualifying round btw)

I'm enjoying the olympics, but I really wish there were a "no frills" Olympic service that just broadcast the events, both live and on delay, (since most are held when I'm at work), pay per view, I'd pay quite a bit to get better coverage of the games.

Be sure to support the USA Men's Gymnastics team by watching tonight. The Women get more face time, but I think the Men are going to surprise a lot of people.

They are working on my building, right outside my window.

Every few minutes it sounds like they are using a jackhammer on the window. Then they use the drill, that sounds like a cross between the dentist's drill and a circular saw. These things combine to create one swell headache.

Mind you, I respect the guys doing this, its their job and hell, I couldn't work on a flimsy looking thing strung 12 stories up. But I'll sure be glad when this is all over.

I bet the building will still look like crap though.

A long time ago in a college classroom far far away, I became friends with a fellow named Matt. Little did I know at that time that one day I'd be standing beside him, wearing a tuxedo, in a ditch, watching him make wedding vows.

When he asked me if I would be in his wedding, I was honored. If I had known then what I know now... well I still would have done it, but I might not have been so eager.

Rednecks are interesting creatures with their own way of getting through life. For instance, most people don't think, "Hey, that sewage ditch behind our house would be an excellent place for a weddin!" As sure as /. 503s thats where they had it, mind you, I am exaggerating (slightly), but it was a ditch, and I was told not to park my car anywhere near it because the sewage pipes might sink it.

Being the good friend that I am however, I helped out in any way that I could with the wedding. This included going to the slaughterhouse to pick up the pig. Mind you, that was the first time I'd ever actually been to a slaughterhouse. The smell was something I wish I could forget, and there's just something about carrying your pig out of there wrapped in trash bags that really makes one hungry for meat.

The pig was cut in half, against the groom's wishes, supposedly by accident. I have no idea how you accidentally cut a whole pig in half. This did, however, mean that the pig was slightly easier to carry. At 6:00 in the morning, with rain pouring down, we started the smoker and carried the pig down into the ditch (the reception was in the ditch too, for convenience I guess).

Because the pig was cut in half we had to do something to keep it from falling apart in the smoker, as well as keep the oranges and pineapples inside for added flavor.

I have to admit, I never before thought of 'Chicken Wire' as something you would use for cooking. We wrapped the two halves of pig in the chicken wire and threw it in the smoker. Note: if you ever try to move an entire pig via chicken wire, wear gloves.

So the vows were taken and I finally was able to at least unbutton the top button of my tux, (the little shop where we rented had 3 sizes of tuxedo apparently, XL, XXL, and XXXL.) so I could breathe. After declining some brown colored liquid from an unmarked bottle that was hidden in Uncle Joe's pants, the highlight of the evening was when I was forced to dance with one of the bridesmaids.

Now, firstly, I can't dance. I have never, ever told anyone otherwise. I am not ashamed of this, I simply have no rhythm, nor do I have much coordination. Second, the bridesmaid in question is a 'charming' woman named "Cricket" (and I have no idea if this is her real name or a nickname), who, at least for me, nearly epitomizes the phrase "redneck woman", with the exception that I don't think she actually chews tobacco.

The entire time I am forced to dance with this woman, she thought it would be fun to tell everyone how badly I danced, even though I freely admitted the fact beforehand. She tells me how her husband does some "box" maneuver, I suppose that works with New Country music. ( I refuse to call what they played actual country music, which is something I enjoy, compared to the pop-remix crap they make today) My whole strategy was, "sway back and forth until music ends".

I swear that that was the longest damn song I have ever heard in my entire life. The entire time my cousin is laughing at me. My wife remarked to him, "You couldn't dance any better than that either." To which he responds, "All I know is he's being humiliated and it's hilarious." Time to plot some revenge.

I drew the line at Karaoke. The last thing I wanted to hear was a bunch of drunken rednecks (although how they got drunk on that watered down crap they called "beer" I have no idea) butchering new country songs all night long.

Really, I did have a good time. And I'm glad that Matt finally found someone he wants to spend the rest of his life with. A Redneck wedding is something I think everyone should experience at least once.

The pig did in fact taste good, REALLY good.

Today's my 29th birthday. I wore all black to work, mainly to protest the idea that next year I'll be in my 30s.

Oh well, I suppose it could be worse, in 11 years I'll be 40. In 21 years I'll be 50. In 31 years I'll be 60 and in 41 years ... if I'm still alive... well nevermind. Its all depressing anyway.

We need to hurry up and invent some youth potion.

note: LOTR won't be on this list because they aren't really sequels, I consider that movie ONE BIG STORY.

Godfather 2: I put Godfather 3 as one of the worst sequels. 2 has to be one of the best. Odd that, eh?

Spiderman 2: A recent one, I was amazed at how well done the sequel was. The depth of the relationship between MJ and Pete was great. Doc Ock was great. All around, a fun movie. I hope they can bring Tobey back for 3. (btw, the Spiderman 2 videogame is great too)

X-Men 2: What can I say, I like Superhero films.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: But if he drank the water, shouldn't he be immortal now? But he got OLD!

Star Trek 2: From Hell's Heart, I stab at thee.

Evil Dead 3: AKA: Army Of Darkness. If you've ever seen ED1&2, you would know that ED3 was quite unexpected to be what it was. Bruce Campbell is my hero, btw.

Rocky 2: "There ain't gonna be no rematch." well there was, and it was awesome.

Aliens: Gets extra points for being crafty enough to just add an s. ;)

Recently as my wife and I were browsing a video store we realized that she hadn't gone with me to see the third Matrix movie.

There it sat, on the shelf. Now, to put this in proper context I have to tell you that I've already subscribed to Blockbuster's $25 deal where you can rent all the movies you want with the catch being you can only have 2 out at a time. So actually renting the movie wouldn't have cost us any more than we've already paid.

The third matrix movie remained on the shelf.

It was just bad enough that I didn't even want to watch it a second time, and after describing it to my wife she didn't even want to watch it once.

We loved the first Matrix movie. It was one of the first DVDs I ever owned, I've watched it probably ten times or more. But the sequels let us down.

Here's a list of other sequels that really let me down, ranked in order of which I loathe them:

Blues Brothers 2000: Let me first say that I absolutely love the original Blues Brothers movie. I used to have a poster of it on my wall, and once I changed my "doing" on a BBS to "Briefcase Full of Blues" which made this one girl curious as to what it meant, so she started talking to me and 6 months later we got married. So maybe I put a bit too much of an expectation on the "Sequel" to be somewhat decent. It wasn't anywhere NEAR decent. It made the whole thing seem stupid, to the point where I sincerly wish I had never seen it. Yes, the first Blues Brothers is silly, but its a different brand of silly. To me, Blues Brothes 2000 was nothing more than a cameofest. The first movie had its share of cameos no doubt, but it wasn't to the point of distraction.

Superman IV: I loved Superman, and I have to say that Superman 3 was probably one of my favorite movies as a kid. I thought Richard Pryor's character was great. Then along came Superman 4, I was in junior high at the time. What the heck were they thinking? The only worse thing than this movie sucking is that its the last time that Christopher Reeve got to play him.

Matrix: Already said why.

Godfather 3: To little, too late. Really, if it hadn't been for the first two being SO good, and if it hadn't have been attached to the same franchise, on its own, it might have been a decent movie. But no, they turned the Godfather into a trilogy and made the third movie suck. I often wonder if they would have made more money just giving it a new title and some different backstory.

Rocky V: Really, after beating Mr. T and Dolph Lundgren, what could he do? Retire! Then train his dumb replacement, then beat him up in a streetfight.

Rambo III: While on stallone you can't forget that Rambo 3 was also a stinker. The guy doesn't know when to quit!

Lawnmower Man 2: Wow, what the hell happened to that? The first one I liked a lot. The second one deserved to be released straight to the recycle bin.

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey: The title says it all, Bill and Ted's Excellent adventure was fun, but Bogus Journey took the whole "fun" concept in a whole other direction. Traveling through time is one thing, but traveling through time AND the afterlife? What ever happened to Bill anyway?

Ghostbusters 2: This was a fairly decent movie, but it didn't hold a candle to Ghostbusters 1. Part of the problem I had with it I guess is that they tried to recycle some of the original plot points. First the Ghostbusters had to build people's confidence in them, then the government locks them up, the all hell breaks loose and they let them go to go be the heroes. Oh well, they shouldn't have crossed the streams.

Any Highlander Movie after the first one: WTF?

Just noticed I haven't written in my journal since Oct 31, so I thought I'd update it for those who may care. :)

Oct 31 was my last day. Last time I was unemployed I was off for a year and a month, lost income = over 100k if you consider that I had to spend a lot of my savings to survive during that long drought, possibly higher if you consider that I no longer have a retirement fund. Oh well, life goes on.

This time I was only unemployed for 2.5 months. Lost income is a lot less since I had prepared to be unemployed by working lots of overtime at my last position (a contract job, got time and a half for anything over 40, whee) Was very pleased to rejoin the workforce at my new company.

The commute has increased however, I live in Dayton Ohio and work in downtown Cincinnati ohio. It's a 45 minute drive in the morning and about an hour to an hour and a half at night. I'm losing a lot of time that way, it sucks, but I'll deal with it. Actually its not so terrible as I go to the library and get some books on tape to entertain myself with.

My new job suits me very well, I manage about 25 linux servers and these are growing by leaps and bounds (they've added over 15 servers since I started). This company is in an upswing and I'm hoping it will be very successful.

Interesting days ahead...

Today's my last day at my job, then I get to go back on unemployment for the 3rd time in my life, the second time because someone from India is taking my job. Go me.

The worst part about a last day is wiping my existance off of the computer I've practically lived on for the past year. Yeah, I'm gonna do the HDD sweep thing, overwriting the blank space about 6 or 7 times. I realize that even after all that the data can probably be read by some uber shop that has some super powerful microscope but hey... I figure if they go through all that trouble they can HAVE my slashdot password for whatever its worth.

But its like erasing myself, a part of my identity. The projects I worked on, the programs I built, the little tools I installed to make my day to day job easier, all of them erased. This is no longer my laptop. It'll go back to the people who deal with hardware and it'll probably sit in a stack of laptops somewhere, unloved, unused, waiting for someone to pick it up.

When it does go back out I hope a decent person gets it and not some moron. Am I being overly sentimental about a piece of hardware? Maybe. But I've cared for this thing since the day it was delivered, and much like anything that you care for once its been delivered, you want to see it do well.

Oh well, anyway, much like the laptop, I'm going back to where I came from, to sit in a corner, unused, waiting for someone to find a use for me. Last time it took me 13 months to get another job. Thats 13 months of my life where I was spending money I had saved for my retirement instead of saving money. By my estimation, that set my retirement back 5 years, all because some company wanted to save less than $200 a week by exporting my job to India.

This time, I don't have so much money saved, so likely I'll be losing my house if something doesn't come along soon. Hope the market's better this time.

Usually I'm leary of fan films, but these guys either A) know how to fight, or B) know how to fake it well enough that it looks cool.

Anyway, if you haven't seen this, enjoy:

The Art of the Saber

20 years from now who is gonna remember some weird net phenomenons.

Stuff like "All your base" and "In Soviet Russia" etc.

20 years from now, we probably will, but the kids will look at us like we're crazy.

So I guess... nothing will have changed.

Today slashdot runs a story on the benefits of being unemployed, and I'm informed that as of October 31st my services at this company are no longer needed.

Yay.

Last time I was unemployed, it took me 14 months to get a new job. 14!! I suppose some of that could be my fault because I don't want to move away from my home in Dayton Ohio. But I'm just upset at how casually companies seem to toss me aside.

I'm going to say something here that you probably already know. There are really only two kinds of people in the IT industry. Those who love technology and would do this job even if it didn't pay that much, and those that jumped into it for the money and money alone.

Of the people of the first group, there are pretenders, and then there are the real deal. The pretenders are the ones who really like this stuff but don't have the "gift" of being able to just ... know things. Do you know what I'm talking about? How long does it take you to learn a new system, or new technology? For me, it takes surprisingly little time. Give me a new piece of software that I've never seen before and odds are I'll have it mostly figured out fairly quickly. Give me a new piece of hardware and not only will I know how to make it work, but I'll know how it works and why it works, and whats the best thing to do with it.

I have this talent. Many people who congregate on slashdot seem to. But many of my coworkers here do not. Many of them are what I call "Process Followers". You give them a list, and they will follow the list, and they can do that with great success. Something deviates from the list and they get upset.

They don't, and perhaps, can't, make their own lists. Nor do they know what to do when things don't follow the list.

I'm not saying all of them are, I've met some really brilliant people as well. The guy who sits across from me, for example, is fantastically brilliant and I love to hang out with him because of that. He's smart, but he's not the kind of person who makes you feel inferior just because he's smarter than you.

Thats not to say I am an idiot. But I do have trouble figuring some things out, like, how do I keep a job? I thought to keep a job I had to work hard, do good work, and be productive. I do that. But it doesn't work. It doesn't help that every manager I ever worked for didn't want me to leave when the company was terminating me. "Budget reasons". I always get caught in the middle.

The first time I got layed off from my IT job was a bit more understanding. My company went bankrupt. But they gave me 0 warning. My boss from there fought them to try to keep me for just 6 more weeks while they were shutting things down. He even offered to have them fire himself instead. I know, I saw him say it. But they wouldn't agree.

The second time I got downsized I got selected because of my age group. I am young, and they needed to fire a few young people so they could get away with firing all the old people before they were fully vested for a pension. I know this. They got sued over it anyway. Still, my manager fought to keep me on the team because I was so talented. No good.

This time, my manager wants to keep me but there is no money. Oh well, I guess this makes for good references. Hah.

I can only hope that I will not be unemployed as long as I was last time, for a fear this time, my financial health couldn't survive it.

Oddly enough I wore all black today.

Traveling down an old dusty country road, in my Fathers 1955 Ford Pickup, with an 8 track tape of Johnny Cash in the deck...

This one summer, I was either 10 or 11 years old, my dad got a job salvaging a unused railroad in Southeastern Ohio, we had to cut the railroad into manageable chunks and toss the iron into a beat up old Ford Pickup truck, take it to the salvage yard. We must have played the old Johnny Cash tape 150 times. Oddly enough I never got tired of it.

My favorite song, "Sunday Morning, Coming Down"... and unlike most artists there really isn't a single song he sang that I didn't like, which is interesting considering the spiritual nature of some of the songs and me being an Agnostic.

"May the circle be unbroken"

Goodbye, Johnny, I'll miss you...

I think my kid watches too much TV maybe. He's 4 years old, the other day I was paying for dinner and I put my "Capital One" card on the table... he says, "Wow! Daddy has a free hassle card!"

Been a long time since I wrote in here so I figured I'd break the cone of silence.

Still working on that game I talked about, I've got the schema built and have done a few of the procedures but its been on the back burner and I've only been doing things as I can.

Shortly after I wrote that entry I became the "Cleric Team Lead" for the game Dark Age of Camelot. If you're not familar with MMORPGS, what that means is that there is a class that you can play in this game "Clerics". I am the volounteer player representative to Mythic, the company that makes the game. I basically tell them what I think of the class, and class balance, and how the class relates to other classes.

Its fun, can be trying at times when people forget the scope of what I do. Some people think I actually control the class and can make mythic buff or nerf (make it stronger, or weaker) at my whim, which is certainly not true. All I do is give feedback to Mythic who decides what to do with their game.

As simple as it sounds, it does keep me rather busy in my spare time. But I love doing it and will probably stay in the Team Lead program for a while.

Anyway, apologies to all my friends for being so silent, I'll try to keep it more up to date. :)

This is a long one, so if you've got some time, read on. You've been warned. :)

I've been tossing this idea around for years now but I've finally decided that I'm going to go through with it.

For better or worse, I'm going to write a web based door game, just for the heck of it.

For those of you familiar with "door games" you'll know what I'm talking about. Back in the BBS days of old, we used to have games, called 'em "door games" because the system basically opened a "door" to another program outside the regular BBS software.

Popular Door games of the day were things like "Tradewars 2002", "Legend of the Red Dragon", "Barron Realms Elite" and who could forget "Redneck Rampage" ... lord knows I've tried. ;)

But these door games were meant to be fun, multi-user environments while at the same time limited to the amount of time you could spend on them. Most of them were "turn based" and you got so many turns per day. Consequently, I owe my typing skills to tradewars 2002 since I would play it in the dark since you got new turns at midnight, I'd log in as soon as possible so I could make sure my planets weren't getting attacked. :) Yeah, I was that kind of geek as a kid.

Anyway, I want to make my own version of that using PHP and maybe a little Javascript although I want to keep the important stuff server side for obvious reasons. I also know its been done before, there is a Tradewars 2002 web conversion that I know of, so it is quite doable, I was actually running that a while back before my friends ISP got rid of their NOC and they hosted with a major company. Before that I had my own server sitting on a T1 with no limits as to how much data I could transfer per month. Ah... those were the days.

Anyway, its been done, but Tradewars on the web lacked the feel of the original. Maybe it was because I was used to my 2400 baud modem lag. Or maybe I missed the total interactiveness of it, I don't know.

But of all the quasi-door games I've found for the web, none of them are how I envision a game I'd like to play to be, so ...

I'll keep the journal updated with my status on this project. I figure if I actually publish the status it will further motivate me to actually go through with this. I've got a pretty good idea of how the game is going to be but I'm going to work out most of the balance issues I have on paper before I actually start coding it.

I've decided to loosely base it around a few concepts. Think of this formula: "Black & White" + "Ghengis Khan" + "Shadowrun".

If you know what those are, you've probably got a good picture of what I want to have. "Ghengis Khan" was an old Koei strategy game for the NES that had a very intreguing economy system as well as political management. The "Black & White" part comes in in that I want to try and create artificial life for each and every NPC citizen living in my world. This may sound worse than I think it is, because really they're only going to be making decisions once a day, when the maintenance script runs. The "Shadowrun" part comes in in the form of the setting, which, mainly because I'm bored of medeival or ancient times type games is less worn out for me than futuristic type games.

The players come in as normal citizens. They may get jobs, they may join gangs, or they can go freelance. Jobs can range in the form of anything from Pizza Delivery to Police Officer to Corporate CEO. Gangs will be anything from street thugs to organized mafia.

You can actually have more than one position, but you only have so many turns a day, if you wanted to play the "Pizza Delivery Boy / Vigilante Crime Fighter" role you wouldn't be nearly as good at Pizza Delivery as someone who focused more on it. But then, if you were all "Vigilante Crime Fighter" you wouldn't have any money to buy guns and bullets, and stopping a car-jacker with nothing but your fists may prove tricky .... though not impossible. :)

The game is going to be free, of course. I'm going to try my best to design it with a quick learning curve opening the more advanced options to the player slowly as time goes by. I'm hoping to make it take just about 15 mintues to play your character for a day. This way its sort of like a casual amusement, I don't pretend to think that I alone can code something worthy of more than 15 minutes of attention a day, and that may be stretching it.

So whats it going to be called? I don't know. Haven't gotten that far. Actually this game may turn out to be crap, but I'm gonna try anyway. :)