A New Short Story!

What began as a very small, personal side project late last week quickly ballooned into a ready-to-roll short story.

Because I've been extremely lazy thus far this summer (thanks a lot, World of Warcraft), and because I want to make sure I stay sharp with my fiction, I've taken a stab at writing with a genre (or two, or three...) that I do not normally associate with: romance, sarcasm, and comedy. Yes, all three rolled into one.

The story, entitled "Triple Bogey" is subdivided into three smaller stories that form a fairly cohesive whole. I was quite shocked at how much detail I was able to reasonably conceive for the story, hopefully without becoming preachy. Let me know what you think of it.

As a warning: the story is sexual in nature, so some content may not be suitable for all ages, but that's just back-asswards American talking. Go ahead, let your kids read it, it'll be good for them.

Link: Triple Bogey (rich text format)

Out.

Rejected Wii Play

If you're a Wii fan, the linked video is quite humorous, but also points to some common criticisms of the Wii and its games thus far.

Rejected Wii Play

Out.

Eek! More WoW Needed

As I try to pull myself away from World of Warcraft day to day, I find myself becoming more tangled with it. No longer do I look forward to days off from work as being opportunities to enjoy summer, but merely days to "make progress" with my Main and Alt characters.

Where's my creativity gone? My fiction? My will to improve myself? The biggest problem I now face is that I admit to having a problem with WoW, but I don't want to do anything about it. I love WoW.

Somewhere deep inside me, I hope that my obsession isn't mediated. Christ, there I go again with the Don DeLillo talk.

Out.

A Copied Situation

For anyone even remotely interested in copyright and our beyond-broken system, this video on YouTube is absolutely a must see.

I've never seen a better use of Disney intellectual property.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo

Damn Straight.

More WoW

I'm posting tonight mainly for the sake of posting. Unfortunately, nothing real exciting is happening for me nowadays, save for my constant time spent on World of Warcraft. Which reminds me: both of my characters are viewable on the Blizzard WoW Armory. I've linked the respective profiles on the right. Symbe is my main, Kamed (pronounced "kah" - "med") my alt character.

See you in Azeroth.

The "Where Have I Been?" Post

Been a while, huh?

The past two weeks has felt surreal to me. Without BGSU to bother me throughout my day, I've been taking time to become reacquainted with an old, old friend of mine: video games. No joke. Although I did get my fair share of gaming in during the past two semesters, I never really had the opportunity to spend entire days in front of a television or monitor. I've had at least six of these days to myself in the past two weeks, and I love it.

To kick off the summer, of course, I purchased Twilight Princess and World of Warcraft, the latter of which is eating up most of my time. I certainly don't mind this, but the novelty of both games is quickly wearing off, which means I might actually get something else accomplished this summer.

On a more personal note, I've noticed myself becoming considerably more selfish and greedy, which I attribute to my inclusive gaming habits. I expect, as always before, that this is merely a phase that will pass once I move on from my recent obsessions. Getting through Twilight Princess will be a big step in the right direction.

I expect another two weeks before I settle down into a more regular summer schedule, which will tentatively be spotted with lots of biking, writing, and casual gaming.

I can't wait.

Ubuntu 7.04, The Nutshell Verstion

My Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn" experience is as follows:

I have been testing the waters of desktop Linux for about five years now. My first experience with a Linux distribution was Knoppix, the live-CD version. I slowly built up the knowledge and know-how (not to mention the courage) to try something more serious, and over a span of about three years, I tried Fedora Core 2, 3, and 4, Mandriva, Damn Small Linux, and eventually landed on a version 4 of Ubuntu Linux. Since then I have tested the water of Ubuntu 5 on a desktop machine, before accepting the challenge to move to a laptop environment with Ubuntu 6.06. I enjoyed a brief stay with this excellent distribution, but the update to 6.10 introduced bug after bug for me that hampered my experience with Ubuntu.

Recently I did a clean install of the latest release of Ubuntu, known as version 7.04 - or "Feisty Fawn" - take your pick. My thoughts, all positive, are below.

• As far as a desktop, "newbie-friendly" Linux distro goes, Ubuntu is getting closer to nailing it on the head with every release, and 7.04 just feels great. Installation is a breeze, as the ISO is a live image, which means you can test hardware and applications before ever touching your precious hard disk. The graphical installer (run from the live-CD desktop) is cake, and quite frankly, is far easier to deal with than an XP (and actually, Vista) clean install.

• Ubuntu has always come loaded with the proper binaries for a wide range of productivity software, including the GNOME (or KDE) desktop, OpenOffice, Gaim (now Pidgin), Firefox, the Evolution group ware suite, and many more. Best of all, these are always the latest and greatest version of each respective package, given Ubuntu's 6-month upgrade release cycle. Most Linux distros come with these software packages, which to me has always upped Windows: out of the box productivity is a grand step ahead for operating systems, especially compared to Microsoft's "spend $399" on our office suite if you don't like Wordpad.

• Partly GNOME's fault, but administering the OS is easy with two dedicated menus available with one mouse click. Any settings adjustment that needs lower-than-user level access prompts for "sudo" access, a la Windows Vista User Account Control. Unlike Vista, however, Ubuntu doesn't ask for credentials at every third button click. Damn you, Vista. This isn't a Vista/Ubuntu comparison, however, so that brings me to my next minor point: security feels solid, if for nothing else, than because Linux is a minority OS, and serious threats are few and far between, and Ubuntu features plenty of tools to allow a user to monitor system usage should a potential threat be loosed on the system.
  

• Hardware support is great across the board thus far, with every major component in my laptop detected and working just fine, with the exception of my wireless chipset. This was expected, however, as the Broadcom-based chipset is rarely ever supported outside of the Dell/Windows XP driver site. ndiswrapper got it working just fine, however. The Ubuntu devs now separate non-open-source drivers into a separate pool of driver management, but installing said drivers is still easy with the Synaptic Package Manager.

• Finally, Ubuntu 7.04 just works, plain and simple. Drop a Windows newbie at a clean Ubuntu GNOME desktop, and I promise that within minutes he or she can do all the same things on Ubuntu that they could with Windows.

Thus far, an awesome non-Windows operating system experience.

Butts Abound

Perhaps this was to be expected from a company like Meijer -- I've always gotten a chuckle from how our payroll system abbreviates the name of my bank. Anyone else seen random instances of mistakes like this?

BTW - It is most likely that the reason for the "Ass" isn't intentional, as it is most likely a parser for the PeopleSoft database is limited to so many characters - in this case, twenty. Still...

B3.0 Update

Today was my official - but unexpected - kickoff to my summer biking season. I only did a total of 8 miles on the Towpath, about half the trail, but by next week I expect to be cruising the entire trail. I'll be posting pics from my first full ride next week too, so stay tuned for that.

Besides biking, steady doses of World of Warcraft and Twilight Princess fill out my days, with work breaking the monotony. In the near future, I might do one of or all of the following: eat at B-Dubs, river walk, or swim somewhere. Eh, we'll see.

Out.

The WoW Of It All

Yesterday, my first full day of freedom for this summer, was a trip down memory lane. Awaking around 9:30am, I set out to Meijer immediately, where I purchased two games: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (GameCube build) and World of Warcraft. I'm assuming that all of my planned productivity for my summer is, for a lack of a better word, fucked.

In my first day of playing WoW, I advanced to the same place that took me a full 14 day trial to do nearly two years ago. Awesome or scary?

I've been worried about Twilight Princess. From what I've heard, it was a Zelda game that is strong but unoriginal, especially following in the wake of the genre-defining Ocarina of Time. After spending a solid seven hours with it thus far, however, I can see that it certainly challenges Ocarina of Time for the title of "best Zelda design." In short, my fears were unfounded, as Twilight Princess brings together the best aspects of the Wind Waker and Ocarina of Time, polishes the controls and gameplay to absolute perfection, all while presenting an unexpectedly dark and humorous story that is very un-Nintendo like.

Now the real challenge begins. I must balance a six-week summer course (starting next week), two massive games, and two pieces of fiction, one of which I plan to finish by the end of this summer.

School may be over, but I supposed the workload never really changes.

Out.

Spider-Man The Musical

Spider-Man 3 has come and gone. The trilogy is complete.

Spidey 3 is, for all intents and purposes, exactly how the Raimi films should have ended. The arc started in the first film and subsequently complicated in the second is wrapped up 99% of the way in the third film, and certainly feels satisfying to any fan of the series.

The short summary is like this: Spider-Man 3 is worth the ride. For the first time in the films, some of the emotions feel forced, shoveled almost. For devoted fans of the films, character interaction is perfectly natural, but the casual movie-goer may feel cheated. Action is plenty, and far more satisfying than either of the previous films. CGI is more abundant than ever before, although looks much more convincing that in previous film, especially the laughable Spidey model present in the second film during fight sequences.

Despite all this, however, the movie is overall excellent. The lessons taught ("revenge will destroy you," essentially) are standard fare, but definitely hit home within the Spidey universe. This is the film to kick of the summer movie season, and it will certainly be the one to top. Worth a watch.

Out.

Up and Coming

In a few hours I'll be sitting in a theater watching Spider-Man 3. A few hours later I'll be writing my review of the movie. I'll have it up sometime tomorrow.

Also, I have scheduled a tentative trip to Soak City/Margaritaville for June 14th. I'll have firm dates set for all of my Cedar Point/Soak City trips by June 1st, so stay tuned. In the mean time, I am...

Out.

The Night of Tornadoes

During the second tornado warning, I snapped this picture of some Meijer team members huddled in the break room, watching the progress of the storm on television.

I'll be honest. It doesn't appear that any real tornado touched down in the vicinity of Meijer. The damage that I witnessed leaving Meijer was more or less high-speed wind damage... still, it was crazy nuts damaged.

Anyway, my day:

8:30am: Began my CS 425 exam. Between this time and 10:20am, I would learn what "mental anguish" really meant. Painful exam, to say the least.

10:40am: Began my shift at Meijer, 50 minutes early.

3:00pm: By now I'm fairly certain that I hate the day, as I'm bored out of my mind. Good thing the sky began to darken by now.

4:30pm -- 7:30pm: Yes, that's a three-hour chunk of time carved out.

I can't quit remember the exact time, but around 4:00 or 4:30 the team leaders at Meijer began what I call their "freak out" phase. Carts were collected from the lot, the Garden Center shut down, and with the first tornado warning issued (I learned about it, after being in denial for 30 minutes, via the county warning sirens), everyone in the store was shuffled to the back.

This first drill was a complete joke, thanks in part to management that blew the situation out of proportion, didn't collect enough information about the situation before making decisions for our customers and team members, and in general acted before thinking. After a solid half hour of resting "in the back" with Dale, we returned to our usual posts.

Closer to 45 minutes later, a second set of storms moved in, and this was the mother lode. Wind, hail, rain, funnel clouds, and the biggest visible factor of all, darkness, consumed two hours of what basically amounted to "chill-out" time in the Systems Office. With a few dozen customers packed into the team center and the break room crawling with team members, I opened the Systems Office for a few friends to pile into, which resulted in card games, drinks, laughs, and of course, a mustard packet all over my leg.

It was one of those moments where you're forced to make the best of a situation, and with pitch-black storm clouds raging just outside the window, it was nice to gather friends and co-workers in a space and shoot the shit for a few hours (getting paid of it didn't hurt either). I can already recall this as one of my most favorable moments in my five-plus years at Meijer. Dustin, Laura, Amanda, Korinne... and everyone else that I can't remember right now... thanks for a great night.

I love storms to begin with, and I hope we have a very active season this year.