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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Zach's LiveJournal:
- Lots of hard drive space on a very fast drive- 250GB internal drive is probably what I'd want for now.
- RAM. Just seems good. 1GB?
- CD burning drive
- DVD playback drive (preferably separate from the CD burner)
- Some wiggle/growth room - ability to add a 2nd HD, and lotsa USB ports are nice (the 8 USB ports on the Dell XPS looked tasty)
- Fast-osity.
| Wednesday, March 17th, 2004 | |
| 1:30 am | While I watch a fair number of movies, I don't tend to comment upon them or recommend them to others out of context. I must make an exception for Comic Book: the Movie (a mockumentary directed by and starring Mark Hamill), because a) Gina Gatto is sexalicious; and b) Jess Harnell (the voice of WAKKO WARNER!!!) is simply a delight to watch.
Gina, if you're ever cold at night, you're welcome to share our covers.
The movie is wildly uneven, but overall a fun campy look at the comic book world. Still, Gina gave Heather wood, and Jess... wow. Seeing him wonderfully added to the delight I've always found in The Animaniacs. |
| Saturday, March 6th, 2004 | |
| 3:16 am | It's a sad statement on the state of the world that my very own brother's computer had ~8 different pieces of malware, wasn't up to date on Windows Update, was running Windows Me, had a completely broken (malwared) installed of WMP, and had a partially broken install of Microsoft Office. *sigh*. Oh well. It looks like I've fixed up all the problems now so his computer is good to go for tomorrow's slide show at the wedding. (crosses fingers) UPDATE: The above report was just based off of first impressions. eTrust AntiVirus also removed ten more trojans and the Nimda virus. I had to hand-fix his Microsoft Installer installation because his system renaming service is broken. That's just not good. Oh well. After ~3 hours of work, I'm down to just needing to fix his CD burner (which I might have managed to do already) and then try to figure out why the wininit.ini parser is broken (this is a very very bad thing). There's probably some more to look out for still, but it's 4:30AM and I need to sleep. I love the guy, but he's going on a honeymoon, and I don't think he needs his computer for anything other than the slideshow tomorrow. =) |
| Monday, March 1st, 2004 | |
| 7:01 pm | The Unimportance of a Typical Day I made a mistake earlier. I said that Santa Esmeralda's indulgent ten minute thirty second long Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood song was fantastic. After further contemplation and listening to it a couple hundred some times, I have since realized that it's really fantastic.
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| Sunday, February 29th, 2004 | |
| 8:30 pm | Yay! Found the LiveJournal MFC client (1.4.6) installer and thus finally got a non-web LJ client working on my XPSP2 system. Thank goodness for my installer packrattyness.
I shaved off my beard experiment at long last. I temporarily left on a soul patch and a trimmed-down mustache, and my girlfriend's response was pretty classic - "You'll shave that off immediately if you want me to find you attractive" (or something very similar). I'd gotten mixed (generally positive) reviews on the beard, but in the end decided to shave it off for my brother Dustin's wedding this coming weekend. Speaking of which, we had his bachelor party last night. We had some fiance-suggested limitations, so kept it 'lightly' sinful. We started off with a bunch of us meeting up at Derek's house where we were all going to gather and in turn be entertained by Derek's little puppy, P.T. Love. Our first hitch of the evening was that P.T. Love had had his nails cut that day, and was feeling very sad and depressed. He mostly just sat on the floor looking at this paws woefully. My dad even fished out a piece of ice from the freezer for him to play with, and P.T. still just sat there, now sadly jealous of the ice's mobility. But all the guys had fun talking and getting to know each other better. We then headed over to Buca di Beppo for a nice long dinner, where we enjoyed Italian food, more getting-to-know-each conversation, and the piece de resistance: my brother Derek had hand-baked a cake adorned with two breasts, aptly decorated with "BREAST WISHES, DUSTIN!". [Heather points out: "You didn't tell me about the cake!" and laughs because she likes the creativity and humour there.] We next adjourned over to Jillian's Billiards, where we had an air hockey tournament (I managed to sneak past my evilly puck-topping dad 7-6 in the end), several rounds of basketball pop-a-shot showdowns (Aaron won, and I kept finding new and interesting ways to come in even deader last place each time - my score went from abominable to wretched to "I can't believe you were facing the right way when you played this game you suck so bad" bad), and some race-offs. Fiiiiiiiinnallly we got into our Special Seedy Room - a special back-room behind plate glass where we had four tables to ourselves, leather couches, and a scattering of televisions to better watch the Best of the World Series of Poker on ESPN. Man. Just turn the TV off if the World Series of Poker is on, because that show is dangerous - I'm a little moth batting myself against the TV frame when that show is on. Someday when I'm in my 40s and can't think of anything else to do with $1000, I'm going to join. But: the room was fun. And randomly we ran into maybe ten to fifteen more of Dustin's friends. Oddly, the girls were very into helping him complete his "Bachelor's Last Night Out Tasks" - helping him find girls to buy him drinks, dance with him, and so forth. A particular highlight for me was that Derek had just watched The Hustler again recently (a movie I loved), so we both got to play our first game of "straight pool". The best part is that Derek plays pool fairly often, and I've played perhaps two games in the past three years. Somehow I was simply on fire - one ball bounced off of a side pocket, off the other side pocket and into the corner. To that my brother responded that the pool gods were against him... and then two shots later, I completely muffed a shot - and the hard shot ball bounced back off of the side pocket immediately into the opposite corner pocket. It was that kind of ridiculous night (I won), and I wish I had those shots on tape because it would make me laugh to see those shots go in again so randomly. My brother got a little tipsy as a result of being bought so many drinks, but he's pretty absoluloodely normal when he's tipsy, so he was fine. Eventually I drove him home, we had a nice little talk about the upcoming wedding, and we called it a night. I love the little guy, and I'm really happy for him. |
| Friday, February 13th, 2004 | |
| 3:32 pm | So I'm happily slightly mollified.
After discussion, it looks like the people I was dealing with last night have a lot more say into what's going on in the future than anyone that I had been dealing with previously. So while we may have started off on a bad foot, it seems that for once in a loooooong time I may actually be getting some progress. The use of newsgroups for product support is still fundamentally broken, but it looks like we'll see an implementation of one of my ideas in the near term, and more contemplation of my ideas in the longer term.
Yay. It's required marathon endurance to keep helping out after all these years. While the current state of the world isn't great, it still is SOMETHING positive, and that's a lot better than it's been for almost a decade now. :\ |
| Thursday, February 5th, 2004 | |
| 5:48 pm | I'm trying to run a Regional video gaming tournament for the Pacific Northwest (including Oregon, Canada, and Washington) in March. People are so interested in coming that a bunch of people from California are coming. And now we've got people from the East Coast coming! It looks like we'll have almost all of the top players in the world (including the notorious Justin Wong?!?) coming to the tournament.
My, this thing has gotten out of hand. Now we've got to take it seriously, and I'll have to work harder to make sure everything is perfect. :)
I'm fairly excited. I'm not used to organizing things, and to see a side project get this much attention is really cool. Current Music: Anne Dudley - Habebe |
| Thursday, January 29th, 2004 | |
| 1:18 am | One of the worst problems of being a son of someone who suffers from insomnia is that you can never tell why you can't get to sleep. Are you really consumed by subterranean thoughts? Should you stay awake and try to figure these things out... or sleep? I watched the fantastic The Hustler last night, and it troubled me. Oftentimes when I play games with people, I'm expected to win. Since I hate antagonism, and the belief in a Superior Opponent tends to foster antagonism and a Them Against Me attitude, I find myself playing not to win in these circumstances. I had a relatively traumatic friendship experience in 5th grade where I did win against the combined antagonistic efforts of six of my friends, and in turn that angered them enough that I was on the outs with them thereafter. Ever since, it's almost subconscious for me to take the dive. What is Eddie fighting for? I don't know if I have my own reasons to fight right now. I'm having carpeting put in (yesterday and until possibly Friday). $7000 later (~2100 square feet of carpeting), it looks so much nicer than the stained tired old crap that used to leach away at the souls of my feet. And oddly enough, the contractor I'd hired three months ago to do masonry for me finally showed up (without bothering to let me know). As such, this has been a most eventful home improvement week. Moving almost everything you own is really disturbing and takes too much energy. I'm so deliberate and decided, that when I get into a pattern or layout, I like to stay there. But now that everyone is jumbled up again... it makes me rethink. Library downstairs perhaps? Where would the trampoline go? I'll likely put everything back in its original form, but the adventurous part of me is interested in thinking upon this. There's been a disturbing unfortunate trend whereby I will spend over a thousand dollars on a project (appliances, carpeting, masonry) and someone's comment or response will be: "oh." at best, and oft downright critical. I don't know if I simply don't understand how others work, if I was raised differently, or if I'm just too sensitive, but this sort of thing has really bothered me. I'd like to at least luxuriate in the warm glow of something for a little while before the problems start being pointed out. No sooner had the mason left today then my neighbor Eric stopped by to chat. As we were chatting, he said, "Oh, what about this bit here?" I realize he was just being helpful, but he just fits into a larger trend that sucks away my goodwill and energy. At least point out something positive first and then delve into the shortcomings. I can't seem to recharge lately. I believe that in general I'm a tenacious trooper who can just keep weathering storms, and most importantly can do so happily. But recently I've just been stretched too thin and had too many unrelated minor disappointments forming a dot-to-dot pattern of depression in my life. I just can't get free of this funk, and it bothers me. This isn't like me. Current Music: Dizzy Gillespie - Salt Peanuts |
| Saturday, January 24th, 2004 | |
| 4:36 pm | After struggling through Dell Product Support (motto: "Oh, sorry! You're in the wrong queue. Let me transfer you to another queue!"), reinstalling Windows XP (which finally worked - my non-RAID hard drives were partially corrupt and also listed as RAID drives in the BIOS, which had blocked my attempts to reinstall the OS at first), sweating through my new wireless networking equipment just refusing to work, and my wireless keyboard sulking and not talking to anybody, I have FINALLY gotten everything working all at once now. This is a huge load of stress off of my back. I tried bludgeoning my way through fixing everything last night until 4 or 5AM, but just finally gave up. So today, I just boot the computer... and it all works. I collapsed backwards happily on the floor. Too much badness went on yesterday - I'm glad that by sleeping and advancing to the next day I can leave that badness behind. There was a sour high note to yesterday's badness: beyond everything previously mentioned (+ spending ~8 hours trying to get the computer and wireless devices working...), I ran into the Club Windows Media people at the company store. I saw Scott there, so came up to talk to him about his use of wireless products. Randomly, he was with a couple of the Club Windows Media people. And then I discovered that around us in the store was the rest of Club Windows Media - people I really would have liked to have had the opportunity to meet, but never got the chance thanks to the general immaturity of the community program. It was deathly frustrating to run into them, because it wasn't any kind of good place to talk or get to know each other or ... anything, really. I just got to briefly exchange hellos with all these people that I should have known, and then wander off in extreme frustration. Gah. But my computer works correctly now, and that makes me feel about a thousand times better than I did yesterday. I just needed something to go right, and this counts. :) Current Music: Chicago - What Kind of Man Would I Be? [Single Version] |
| Friday, January 23rd, 2004 | |
| 4:25 pm | :( So after an entire life of not owning a PC (scrounging off of work and girlfriends), I knuckled down and bought a PC a couple weeks ago. I brought it to work and spent idle time over the past week getting everything loaded onto it and configured to my liking. I happily brought it home last night, plugged it into the new monitor, verified everything worked, and then shut it down. Then joined Chris and Heather in watching "'Allo, 'Allo!" (Which is funny if dated BritCom.) Today I was going to verify that the networking works right, so booted it up... into a completely black screen. :( Somehow during the night my computer decided to stop running. I get the Windows XP start screen... then nothing. DAMN. Oh well. I make it a point to be able to trouble-shoot systems, so I'll reinstall the OS and get it back to working order. Still: this is quite very disappointing. And it adds insult to injury, since I missed a company-sponsored ski trip today to work through some critical issues, and figured getting my computer working would be my solace. I pout heartily. To add FURTHER insult to injury, there was the first "Club Windows Media" meeting on campus yesterday, and I wasn't even told about it. They flew in various community champions from around the country, and didn't even bother to let me know. That's pretty amateur given everything I've tried to do to help the community. :\ To add FURTHER FURTHER insult to injury, I got two yellow cards in last night's soccer game. This means that you're ejected from the game. They were both just stupid ticky-tacky calls, and completely out of line with how he called the game otherwise (including non-calls where their players were running over our never-played-the-game-before goalkeeper). I try to live my life as a Participant in the what's going on, but I felt really focused upon by the referee. Their team was thuggish - they would lunge out our players, shove while running with raised arms, and even hugged myself and another player at various times to make absolutely certain that we couldn't move. Sometimes I really don't like soccer. It's supposed to be a finesse-based league, and the refs just get really stupid sometimes in what they allow people to get away with. I don't care about myself here, but ... they're coming close to and in fact hurting my teammates, and that really ticks me off. To add F*3 insult to injury, the stupid Internet Explorer team tried to punt/ignore a bug that they promised to fix for me four years ago, and keep promising to fix every other year/release. But now their code will get my ass hauled back into legal questioning where I'd again have to explain that the IE team just writes random code, and it's nothing about being evil. It's so frustrating to be able to see so clearly what they need to do, yet have them continue to weasel out of making necessary changes. This time, though, I'm not going to settle for them avoiding this, and will pull in VPs if I have to. I'm glad I'm not a punk. :( So at this point, the score is 5-0 in favor of Bad Day-ness. I'm going to go drink root beer and eat chips while trying to fix my computer. Current Mood:  disappointed |
| Monday, January 19th, 2004 | |
| 5:45 pm | Prototyping software in MSPaint is probably never going to be a workable idea, but it sure does make me laugh. Mutter mutter mutter. My brain is locked and I can't figure out how to work on this project. Ack. Oh well.
(pause for meeting) Hm. I've been "demoted" - I'm no longer a manager due to a new Microsoft mandate that you can only be a manager if you have four or more employees, which I don't have. Oh well. I never really got into being a manager anyways. |
| Friday, January 16th, 2004 | |
| 1:20 am | Heather said I had to share ( this e-mail. ) Also, I love playing soccer games where we've already won by forfeit so everybody is just out there playing soccer for the exercise and fun. I really needed a non-too-competitive game, and I really enjoyed myself out there on the field during all of the game for the first time in a while. |
| Tuesday, January 13th, 2004 | |
| 5:15 pm | One of the highlights of my week is when the lady in the office next to mine brings in her children with her. I really like to hear the sound of their gabbering and gurgling through the wall. I'm even okay when they cry, too, because ... that's what little kids do, and that's okay with me. I do sometimes want to go over and comfort them, but : that's not really my place.
Today they were crying for a while and that was followed by pounding against the wall. I'm assuming those two sounds were unrelated. But it did make me think of my favorite Baby Crying Solution - confusion. If you can confuse a kid, they often forget about why they were crying and instead concentrate on trying to figure out why you are so weird. This tactic works to some limited extent with adults, too, although you have to avoid using it too much. The main offshoot of this kiddie strategy in my adult affairs is when I throw in a joke or two to serious discussions in order to relieve the pressure or stress of a situation. I'm beginning to understand (although not to feel) the desire to have children in the classic "Mother to Mother" sense - the interest in continuation of the world and of the slice of it that you know. As time goes on and you get older, you either lose or have blunted those Ehrlichian and Malthusian beliefs that had you whole-heartedly predicting DOOM! DOOM, I tell you! in the next couple weeks. Things still are bad, and maybe we're headed to another depression - but life still putters on for the most part happily. Still, to counter that desire for continuity in the world, I do realize that I am just a step away from looking like a horrid freak with my pale skin and big head. I guess everybody feels that they look funny, but I'm ... prejudiced enough to think that people like me shouldn't breed. Maybe someday I'll change my mind. But - I wouldn't have children without first having a happy committed marriage, and that, as things turn out, is the hardest thing to find.
EDIT: I realize other people aren't in my head, so I'll make sense of that last comment: it seems that a lot of the people I care about or am friends with have been affected by divorce. My parents, for example, are in the most loving best marriage ever, but each had to stumble through a divorce first. So... it gives me pause, as it should. |
| Friday, January 2nd, 2004 | |
| 1:50 pm | Yikes. I had bothered to call up Lowe's to find out when my carpeting would be installed. A dreadfully embarassed woman knew immediately who I was and said she'd been trying to figure out how to call me.... eh? Evidently, they seriously screwed up my carpeting contract. I had signed a contract to have my house carpeted for $4500 (2000 labor, 2500 carpeting). Sadly, they only had put the basement/downstairs carpeting on that bill - the actual total for everything is around $7500. Yikes! I can certainly pay for it... but it is disappointing, and my disappointment at their screw-up kept me from just signing off on the revised bill. Gah. Oh well. The carpeting won't have been ready until Jan 12th anyways, so I can stew stew stew for a while and then get back to them. I feel like a thwarted cartoon villain, and I find myself wanting to shake my little fist at them and shout nonsense words. Because, frankly, it just doesn't matter and I'm not going to let it bother me. Still, $3000 is a nice chunk of money that I'd have preferred to have kept in the bank. (shakes little fist) "Razzle frazzle you frickle frackle!" Current Music: Frou Frou - The Dumbing Down of Love |
| Wednesday, December 31st, 2003 | |
| 2:58 am | Nerd-dom: ignore if necessary... If anyone has suggestions on how best to spend about $2500 on a new computer, I'm all ears. I've got the printer, am likely going to get a nice LCD flat panel monitor via eBay (I'm thinking the Dell 20" 2001FP, which is what I have at work), will get the multimedia keyboard and cool mouse and XP Pro from work... I just need: I'm not extravagant enough that I'd pay the bleeding edge surcharge for the P4 EXTREME Edition, but I'm willing to be on the high end of the bang for the buckness, which is why I'm allotting myself ~$2500. It'd be easy to go over that - but why? :) What more would I want? :\ Current Mood:  confused |
| Friday, December 26th, 2003 | |
| 11:27 pm | What I made Heather for Boxing Day breakfast: .jpg) These, of course, are my signature pancakes of love. :) (These were the leftovers, mind you.) I had secretly picked up the heart shaped molds a while ago and managed to keep Heather from finding them. Sadly, Heather spotted the Z mold in my bag when I picked it up from Cookies in Ballard. Regardless, they made for a nice surprise this morning. Current Music: Saved by the Bell - 1-900-CRUSHED |
| Wednesday, December 24th, 2003 | |
| 8:37 pm | What do you do for the girlfriend who likes Christmas? ( People who will see me on Christmas DON'T LOOK! ) |
| 5:02 am | For the first year in a long time, I managed to send out holiday cards. If you don't get one, that means that I don't have your address. :) Being an atheist, I respect that some enjoy Christmas as a religious holiday. Myself, I enjoy Christmas as a great opportunity to show the people dear to your heart that frankly they're awesome. I was playing DJ for myself a little bit tonight. I quickly found myself regretting that I didn't make everybody mix CDs as a gift. There's so much great music out there. I don't know about others, but music has a very strong positive effect on my moods - even snippets of lyrics as "such a lust for life" (Def Leppard, Animal), "my face is filled with laughter" (Textones, You're the Only One), and so on just ... energize me. Heather was silently laughing at me as I listened to Urbanized's Helpless (I don't know what to do without you), because I just had to dance to that. So... I'm going to finish off the second of two mix CDs for Alison [I got carried away with one mix CD, cut it down to 68 minutes, pouted because she needed to hear much more, and finally just gave in to it needing to be two CDs], and then I'm going to relish making a couple new mix CDs for friends. Mmm. Music. I've finally gotten everything wrapped now, and our tree is delightfully under assault from waves of presents. That doesn't look like much kind of because lots of smaller presents are covered by other presents. I just love the thought that someone is likely going to get a smile out of every little package there, if just temporarily. I am very excited about my secret project, which gets unveiled tomorrow after a month of preparation. I've managed not to blab to anyone but Kate so far, but I think it's tops on my list of uniquely-Zachian acts. Heather and I were talking at dinner at the Triple J about giving. We have a friend who while having a great marriage, doesn't have much/any money. But: she is the nicest person, and gives of her time, and that's worth so much more than all else in the world. I can't compete with that kind of great spirit, but hopefully my quirkiness at least makes my time investments interesting. My parents, for example, are coming over to help out with some final Christmas lights preparation. I think my mom realized to her shock a while ago that I really don't want anything, even though I dearly appreciate everything. She likes to be able to reach out and touch people, so she's been making a concerted effort to give of herself via time and dedication to helping make me life better. It's really heart-warming, and I've got to think that anyone who acts like that is one of the best kind of people. Happy holidays to all. |
| Wednesday, November 26th, 2003 | |
| 11:35 am | Things we do not enjoy as a general rule * Coincidence. It's one thing to be going through relationship turmoils that you're working through. It is quite another to be having a friend going through the exact same type of issue and blogging how she's going to end her relationship because of it. I shut my eyes real tight and ignore her. Soon that will be over and we'll return to our regularly scheduled Going On Three Years of Relationship show. * Nightmares of betrayal. I have really intense dreams in that they seem so perfectly real at the time. I dreamt that I was in bed with a woman who was Not Heather for some reason, and before things got started we went to pee, where I was wondering why I was in this position. After I peed, I looked at the window, and there was a friend of mine who Heather dislikes driving up. THEN I saw the randomly-in-my-bed girl insulting a friend of Heather's who was walking up the driveway as well. And Heather pulling up in her car shortly behind this hurricano of badness. I woke up in a sweating panic trying to figure out what was going on. I'm glad I'm not that kind of guy. I'm going to have to watch Care Bears the Movie before bed tonight or something, though, to make sure I have settled dreams tonight. Current Music: Mae - Soundtrack for Our Movie |
| Monday, November 24th, 2003 | |
| 3:36 pm | Trip to NorCal, Sunday/Monday: Day 3, 4, and 5 Last boring torturous recount of this trip, I promise. I've just been in the habit of not writing down my vacations, and I've wanted to get back in the habit.
After going to sleep at 5-6AM Saturday night, I just knew that I wouldn't be woken up by Tony's techno and cartoons again. How would that be possible? No one is that cruel. And happily enough, I was exactly right. I got woken up instead by ... techno on the radio and rap videos on Black Entertainment Television.
My dad had left a message on my phone about maybe trying some fuel injection cleaner gas additive to help with my car's inability to idle for long without shutting down. I also took the opportunity while people were getting ready to walk to the local auto repair shops by Dirty's house, who all happily offered to help me in my time of need Real Soon! - by Wednesday at the earliest if you're lucky. Oh well. Luckily my brake/gas/brake/gas jerking stop trick was working pretty well, and we (hopefully) didn't need to idle while on the freeway when we headed back to Seattle... but it was still scary driving a car that would die if it wasn't given gas. That sudden slowdown on the freeway might be a sudden stop, which might be a sudden accident. :\ We headed over to Sunnyvale. We all stopped to get gas, and I got some cleaning additive for my car. Then we stopped at McDonald's for breakfast, with my car dying another 3 times as we waited in line. We finally got to Sunnyvale and signed up for the Marvel vs Capcom 2 tournament, which was the purpose of the trip for Jesse, Drew, and myself. It was being run by Randy Lew (nanoboi - 5th best player in the world), who I knew, which was nice. My first match was against some random guy "Doug H". Since almost everybody good has got some sort of nickname, I figured maybe this wouldn't be so tough. We get to the character select screen... and he picks the team (Mag/Cable/Tron) I used to use. I pick my revised team (Storm/Cable/Tron), and we begin. In the first match, he plays really cautious, which is the right way to play against my team, and he barely wins. The second match turns out much the same way - he had two characters left with 1/3 life, and I had one character left with 2/3 life... and his characters had just pixels more than mine, I guess (both of us had thought I had won), so he won. Shoot! So now I was in the loser's bracket. I felt bad about losing to some random guy, but then... Doug took 3rd in the entire tournament, and only placed that low because he had family business to take care of and so couldn't stay to play for the Winner's Finals. Wow. He beat Ricky Ortiz and Harry Potter as well as me, and Ricky and Harry are incredible players, so therefore my losing to Doug was much easier to swallow. My friend Jesse wound up playing the 2nd best player in the world, Ricky Ortiz. He started off swimmingly, just destroying Ricky's team. Then Ricky made an incredible comeback with his last character, and won by pixels over Jesse in the first match. Then I think Jesse lost heart/was intimidated, and lost the second match as well. Oh well - Jesse at least had held his own in his first major tournament, and we were all happy for him. I ended up playing yet another Tron user (Jin/Sakura/Tron), Andy Lee, in my first match in loser's bracket. I'd never play that team, but it's really dangerous - one good hit and your team is destroyed. So I ran away, and managed to beat him pretty soundly in two straight games. Then... I got told I had to play against Dirty, the guy who had generously been hosting me and my friends. I said to him (in front of Randy, since Randy knew me and knew I was trying to do the right thing): "Chris - this is pretty gross, since you're the reason we could be here at all. If you want the win, you can just have it." He turned that offer down. After a bit, he reconsidered and said that maybe if I won the first round, he could win the second round, and we'd play for real for the deciding third game? And proffered to do the same if he won the first round. But then he reconsidered, and said we should just play. Which was probably the right thing to do any ways. Unfortunately for him, one of my local nemeses plays his exact team (Blackheart/Cable/[CapCom or Cyclops]. And while Dirty took 33rd or so at Evo (I took ~250th...), I own his team for free, as they say, since I'm used to playing against it. [Tron Bonne completely and utterly devastates his assist-dependent team.] So I handily won the first match, and felt really bad because I was just kicking the legs out from his team. I softballed it to him in the second match, and he won that. I still softballed it to him in the third and deciding match, but still... my team beats his without even sweating, so won that too, also pretty handily. I felt soooo bad. It was probably the worst match-up he could have had at the entire tournament. Alas. Then I got told by Randy that I was going to play some "Anthony" guy, to which Randy added - "this will probably be your last match - Anthony is really good." Unfortunately, Randy was right, and I couldn't pull it out. So I went 2-2, and wound up in 17th place out of 35 people. Jesse ended up taking 13th, and Drew took 9th (losing to the renowned Harry Potter in a very close match). I'd learned a lot, so Drew, Harry Potter, Dasrik, and some others played for a while longer in casual play. Harry Potter basically invented the team I used to use (Mags/Cable/Tron Bonne), so I was excited to play against him. While he generally dominated me, at one point I was utterly destroying his team - and he said - "Wow. Quit beasting.", which was a high compliment for me, coming from him. I had huge fun playing against everybody. There were all sorts of local and national "legends", and we all had fun showcasing our unique playing styles and quirky tricks we'd use to get wins. Finally, the arcade shut down, and we all headed out TGIFridays for some late night food. My car died on the way to there, too, but was getting better. There's some rivalry between Ricky and everyone else, so it was nice that he was at our table and we got a chance to see him as a real person for once (he doesn't talk much during tournaments). After eating, we bade our good byes, winded our way home, and went to bed. I woke up at the delicious late hour of 11 AM to ... blessed silence, since Tony was gone. I drove Rick (Brood) to the Greyhound bus station so he could get back to Southern California, and then swung back around to pick up the rest of the Seattle road crew. We thanked Dirty for his hospitality, and headed North. Of course, traffic decided to spite us for a little while longer, so there was stop-and-go traffic on our way out to I-5. My car, despite my diligent brake/gas/brake/gas routine, died another two times, and I was still pretty uneasy. It was a 45 minute drive back to I-5, and we ended up stopping for gas and food. I got some more injector cleaning additive at the station and used that, and we chowed down on the road. Happily, that second batch of fuel injector did the trick - after that, the car didn't stall again (and is fine to this day). My theory is that 1000 miles in one day using lowest grade gasoline probably just gunked up the works. The Shasta mountains were again no fun to be driving in. Thankfully it was midday, so there was no fog to help us to our doom. We stopped in Oregon for some gas at some weird Republican-owned general store/gas station housed in an old log cabin. We all wanted to use the bathroom, and Drew came back out saying, "Wow - there's a mannequin in a bathtub in there". After I waited for my turn... sure enough, there she was. So Peachy asked the women at the front counter if he could take a picture of her, and the clerk responded, "Sure you can... everybody has to." A weird thing to say. Peachy goes back in the bathroom ... pause ... and then runs out screaming as we hear "NO DON'T DO THAT DON'T PUT YOUR HANDS THERE!" (or something very similar) coming from the bathroom. Evidently the owners had rigged up the mannequin so that it either spoke on contact or on photo flash or some sort of remote activation. Regardless, we were all very amused. I dropped off Drew in Springfield, and John stayed up talking to me in the front seat while Peachy and Jesse slept in the back. We were up at about Kelso in the middle lane of I-5 Northbound when we noticed a truck about to pass us using the fast line. We both looked at the truck a little baffledly, trying to figure out what was wrong, what we were seeing. Then it clicked in: OMFG, the truck is going SOUTHbound on I-5 NORTHbound. John and I both were freaked out about this for at least 15-25 more minutes, just laughing at how absurd that was, how dangerous it could have been for us (let alone the poor truck driver), and what a bad plan that seemed to be. I still don't know what the story was here, but evidently this happens every once in a while. There wasn't any on-ramps/off-ramps for another ten miles or so, so the trucker had been sticking with this plan for at least a while. We were impressed. Finally I dropped off Jesse in Kent, John at my house (and said a brief hello to my lovely girlfriend who was awake then, at 6AM or so), and Peachy in Everett all safely. But coming back down I-5 South (from Everett to Kirkland) after having driven for 19 hours straight, I hit stop and go traffic. I was trying to stay awake, but almost failing. Finally I was in the left lane next to the concrete median, and a crack in the concrete media appeared to my sleep-deprived brain to be chasing me. That freaked me out and woke me right up. That scare gave me the energy to stay awake all the way home, where I happily fell asleep.
If you're interested, there are tournament pictures here. |
| Sunday, November 23rd, 2003 | |
| 1:01 pm | Trip to NorCal, Saturday: Day 2 I had been so exhausted from driving ~13 hours Friday that when we had stopped at Reboot, I had quietly slept under the tables. So I was really looking forward to sleeping Friday night. We got to bed way too late... ... and got randomly woken up by Dirty's roommate Tony deciding to play techno music and watch cartoons at the same time. Ow. That's not how I like to wake up. But... it was his place, so we put with the eccentricity as it was saving us good money. We all got ready, went out to my car, already a little tight on time,... ... and found a "DO NOT PARK HERE - YOU WILL BE TOWED" 4 inch by 8 inch sticky sticker stuck to my windshield (which was stupid since it was my friend's parking space...). Not anything easily removed, but designed for maximum annoyance and stickiness. So we lost five minutes trying to get as much of it off as possible, ending up leaving a big 3 inch by 5 inch mess on the windshield right in front of my line of vision since we had to get going. Gah! Then I drive up the exit ramp of the parking garage... ...and the car, already idling low, dies as we wait for traffic to pass. That's not a good idea. So I turn the car back on, we proceed to the next stop-light... and again, it dies as we sit there idling. So now I'm tired, potentially going to be late to sign-ups, and in a place I haven't been before with a dying car (key thought running through my head: "what the hell is wrong with my car and how bad is it?") and with partially limited visibility thanks to parking Nazis. And we're following behind Dirty's friend Billy, and he decides to make an extra stop at a Starbuck's. Which means my car dies three more times as it idles trying to get into Starbucks. At this point I'm pretty annoyed and ask that we NOT take any more random detours or stops. We finally arrive at Sunnyvale Golfland (where I take the time to get the last of the towing notice decal off my windshield). Jesse, Drew, and I sign up for the Marvel team tournament. There's at least a hundred people there. But only three have signed up for a game I particularly dislike (SNK vs Capcom), so I jokingly sign up for it. Eight ended up signing up, so I took 7th, I laughingly mentioned that to a friend and he asked me: "How did you do at CvS2?"... and I realized that in my glibness I had completely forgotten to sign up for a game I meant to sign up for. Whoops. They were looking for people to help out running things, so I ended up volunteering to run the Marvel 3-man team tournament. I got busy announcing things, and some annoying guy Steven (CableGuy86) kept wheedling me asking me if he could change who his team played against. And then when I said no, he kept asking me if he could run the tournament. That seemed pretty slimy, so I turned him down. Eventually I had to go play my own games, so... ended up having to let him run things after all. Aaah! :( The worst part was that later on in the day Drew reminded me that Steven was the guy at Evo (international gaming championships) who kept trying to sneak into our room to watch us/play with us, and we kept having to kick out. [The Seattle crew is recognized as being one of the strongest in the country, so everybody wanted to play with our top players.] My team in Marvel ended up losing to Rob Lew's team in the winner's bracket, and then being knocked out of the tournament by Randy Lew's team. All told, we got beat by 5 Lews. Way too many Lews. I'm going to have to talk to their mother about this. Drew was supposed to be our strong player, our anchor, but he didn't win any games. Yikes! Jesse and I at least one won, but... it was a little disappointing because we only went 1-2 as a team. Oh well. After our team got knocked out of the tournament, Drew disappeared for a while. I wandered next door to the auto parts shop. The auto repair shop was shut down for a month randomly, so I was out of luck there at least. The auto parts store said that I probably had a blown idle air intake valve. It was only a $210 part, but of course they didn't have it in stock. Shoot. I left a message on my dad's answering machine just mentioning it to him, since he's intuitively good at automotive issues, but didn't hear back from him Saturday. In the interim, I was using a brake early/give gas/brake/give gas routine that kept me stopping pretty safely without the car dying. I got back to Sunnyvale, and ... Drew had gotten a haircut. Evidently, he had upset about losing, so had wandered next door to what he believe to be a Chinese restaurant to get some food... and they had promptly greeted him with "Haircut! Ten dollars!"... and he's random enough that he decided to take them up on it. We were all pretty amused. Finally, the tournament was over for the day. (John Michael had taken fifth out of ~seventy people in the CvS2 solo tournament, and we were all proud of him.) While we all pretty tired, people wanted to play more Marvel back at Reboot, and I grudgingly, sleepily agreed, since I needed the practice before Sunday's Marvel solo tournament. But... nobody bothered to bring a Marvel disc, so we ended up just using the Internet while the other fellas played CvS2 yet again. I ran across this, and people were really amused. Call me Steve! Fiiiiiiinallly, we got back to Dirty's place. I started to grab the blanket I'd used on Friday night from the top bunk bed, and realized that there was someone using the blanket! Whoops. (It turned out that Tony's kids were staying over that night, and nobody had told us.) I found another blanket, though, and quickly hit the hay. Next post will be the last of this torturously uninteresting recount. :) |
