So, this year has been a fun-filled ride so far and I haven't made time for this blog. Or training. Or gaming. Or pretty much anything.

This morning, I spent a couple hours and updated this year's training log, my weight tracker, and the current Wish List. Some is better than none, I suppose.

I wrote this back in May and intended to edit it to be cleaner and better presented, but I'm clearly not going to "find the time" to do that, so here it is in it's ugly glory:

We tried out Shaiya - a "mature" rated MMO. It's also free-to-play (F2P) so the only thing lost by trying it out is a little time.

THE BAD

My first impression is that this game really needs a publisher. It looks EXTREMELY amateurish and unfinished. The text popups break in the middle of words so a quest might tell you something like:
" Go out into the wilderness and ki
ll seventeen wild tree monkeys. B
ring back their tails."

Really?!? You couldn't even program a way to make the text break on whitespace?

Monster names are often truncated. Only the first dozen or so letters are displayed so a long name gets appended with an elipsis. For example, if the monster were called "Thantalorn Evil Quest Monster" (a very long name) it would display as "Thantalorn Evil ..." The only saving grace is that it is displayed that way -everywhere- so you can kinda match up the truncated names in the quest log to the truncated names in the game world.

The font that use for names is a 1-pixel wide simplex font that scales to always be microscopic and annoying.

THE GOOD (sort of....)

The world graphics are very nice, albeit a bit dull in palette choices. The first time you come into view of a big city and the different sections of the model draw in, you go "wow!" It would be nice if they had used more dynamic colors though. The whole game feels a bit... brown.

The character models are very attractive. This is the first game in which the male characters actually look sexy and strong. Oddly enough, they are actually more attractive than the female models.

Skills can be trained as soon as you level up, no matter where you are. You don't have to visit a trainer, you just pop open the skills window and train right there and then. On the other hand, with no real way to know what skills are valuable and which are fodder, it's easy to gimp yourself early on. With a limited number of skill points and more skills than you could afford to buy, choosing the "right" skills to train can be a challenge.

Quests are standard MMO faire. Step one: go kill ten moneys, bring back the fur. Step two: go kill five elk, bring back the antlers. Step Three: go kill seven sealakel (??) and bring back the scales. Yawn. But you do get "free" equipment and weapons for doing them.

Leveling is superfast and easy. In four hours of play I've leveled three characters up to level 10+. I only died once and that was because I wasn't paying attention. The PvE game is almost mindlessly simple.

THE GREAT

RvR is very similar to DAoC. You go through a portal to the "Borderlands". You initially zone in to a "safe" area with friendly guards. Passing through a large gateway, you enter a land full of MOBs and enemy players. The "game" (so to speak) is to capture and hold a central tower. The tower becomes stronger (or weaker) depending on how many smaller capture nodes your side holds. So the RvR action becomes a large zerg at the central point, while smaller premade groups roam around capturing the smaller nodes. If you've ever played in a DAoC battleground, this is almost the same feel. The "borderland" areas are even level limited, to make it a relatively even paying field. The first area is limited to level 1-15. One significant difference is that it won't kick you out if you level up within the borderland zone. So as long as you do not log out you could be one, two, three or more levels above the limit for that area. Couple this with not needing to train and you often will have one or two people that are almost invulnerable wandering around.

Unfortunately, there are only two factions, like WAR and WoW.

THE WTF???

When you make your first chracter, you can start in "easy" or "normal" mode. Easy limits your level and how many skill and stat points you get per level. Normal gives you a nominal amount. Once you reach level 40 you can start a new character in "Hard" mode. Hard mode characters get extra points each level. So a level 10 "hard" character will wipe the floor with a level 15 "easy" character. This means that the first character(s) you make are essentially throwaway toons no matter what you do, and you'll need to grind out a character to level 40 before you can really play the game... by restarting and throwing away that progress.

Even weirder, when you reach level 50 on a "hard" character, you have the option to start a new "Utilmate" mode toon. These get a ton more skill and stat points, but come with a major drawback. If you die in PvE and are not resurrected within three minutes... that character is dead. Forever. Yes, they have permadeath. But supposedly the extra stat points make up for it. Personally, I’m not convinced.

CONCLUSION

We only played this game for a handful of hours, so its hard to say whether it is any good. I'm enjoying the character development portion. Thus far I've tried a Fighter (melee DPS), a Ranger (stealth DPS), a Mage (ranged DPS) and a Defender (melee Tank) on the "good" side. The roles play as one would expect.

The pace of PvE is pretty slow and bland (just like every other MMO) and the RvR action is insanely fast paced. We spent only 30 minutes in the first RvR zone and every time we saw a red enemy name, we were dead in 2-3 hits - faster than we could figure out what was going on. That's normal for the first venture into PvP in a new game.

I have a feeling that if we devoted the time to become familiar with the game, figure out how to recognize the other classes and gain some experience with the skill system that RvR would be fun and competitive.

In the past week and a half, I’ve played seven “new” games. I put the word “new” in quotes because one of them is actually an older game that I’ve played before, but haven’t seen in a while. It was a fun experience. In chronological order:

Aye, Dark Overlord!
This is a cute little story-telling card game. One player is the Dark Overlord and then he asks his minions to explain their failures. The minions (everyone else) have to come up with a story about how it wasn’t their fault, deflect blame and pass the buck to another player. The catch is that the buck-passing story has to involve one of three “hints” that every player draws randomly from a deck of cards. The person passed to then has to continue the blame avoidance by pointing the finger at a different player using one of their hint cards. If a player is unable to pass the buck, or can’t come up with a reasonable story, or if the Dark Overlord simply decides so (the Dark Overlord is the ultimate judge during gameplay) they get a Withering Look. Get three Withering Looks and you lose!! This is fun because everyone wins (expect the loser). The drunker everyone is, the more fun this is.

A Game of Thrones
This is an AWESOME strategy board game based on the George R.R. Martin book of the same name. It has about a million rules and uses cardboard chits, token, counters and card as well as a beautiful game board that is 2 feet wide by 4 feet long. It can be played by three to five (we played with four) and completely captures the intrigue, strategy and feel of the books. I found it unusual in that it is a “war” game, but the winner isn’t decided by the one who has the biggest army. It is very reminiscent of Diplomacy in that you really have to work with (or against) your fellow players. If you don’t make alliances, you simply cannot win. It started out slow. The first few turns took a long time to resolve (partly because we were still learning the game) but around the fifth turn, the game really got super-interesting. We only played seven turns but it took about 4 hours to complete. It has a nice mechanic that if the game doesn’t resolve with a victor by the end of ten turns the game juts ends and the highest score wins. I’m really looking forward to trying this one again as soon as we can, but this one will require some hard-core gaming geek friends.

Worms
Kyle actually bought this on my PS3 when he was visiting over the weekend. This game is the latest installment of the venerable “artillery” genre. Not that anyone would ever recognize it as that. Oh sure, you have the same base concept: choose an angle and a velocity with varying “wind” and then fire. But the “tank” is actually a little cartoon worm, you have four of them, the terrain is anything but flat, being made up of a psychotic mish-mash of over-the-top cartoon landscapes, and your gun is a wide variety of rockets, grenades, airstrikes and flamethrowers, each of which reacts to the environment slightly differently. Kelly, Kyle and I played this well into the wee hours and had a blast doing it. This was a great PSN purchase!

Linger in Shadows
I bought this PS3 “game” because I saw it has trophies and it was only $3 on PSN. It really isn’t a “game” per se, more like a semi-interactive 6-1/2 minute long graphics demo. It basically plays a really weird movie, and you can move the camera around (within limits) and change some of the items in the environment, in real time. There are a total of six “puzzles” and ten “hidden” items, all of which grant a trophy. It took me a grand total of 45 minutes to unlock all sixteen. Aside from being a trophy whore, this would have been a colossal waste of my time even at the low price.

Noby Noby Boy
I had heard a lot of good things about this PS3 game and since I was already on PSN, I bought it too. I played with it for about two hours and I’m still not entirely sure what the heck this thing is. I can’t recommend it because it is simply mind bogglingly weird. You control a worm-like creature (the “boy”) which you move by jiggling both analog sticks. One stick controls the front, and the other stick controls the back. The middle parts just get dragged along. One of the most annoying things is that the camera follows the midpoint of the “boy” which means that often you can’t see what you’re doing at all. And there doesn’t seem to be any point of goal that I could discern. It’s just your worm-thing in a very small square world. Another $10 down the drain.

Eye of Judgment
This is the one older game I’ve already played. I have a soft spot in my heart for collectable trading card games, even though I pretty much suck at them, and this one is no different. I pulled it out to grab a few more trophies and managed to beat all of the pre-made decks on “normal” level. I only lost a few times to the computer. I don’t have many card, but I do have a generalist deck that has a few nasty tricks in it and when it worked, it worked big. The problem with this game is that it never really caught on and due to its age, the only people still playing are super godlike experts that would kill me in five turns. I really wish there were a new-ish TCG that was moderately popular, could be played online and didn't require a small fortune to play.

Burnout Paradise
Well, I didn’t actually play this. I loaded the disc into my PS3 and patched it to the current version, but never actually started the game….

On Wednesday, a lot of people that I’ve been associating with for a LONG time (almost nine years now – time flies!) lost their jobs. I’m uncharacteristically not going to go into what actually happened, nor why. I wasn’t there, I wasn’t involved and I don’t know what conversations happened behind closed door. I do know that they were very talented people and they did not in any way deserve what happened to them. I also know that a few other people who I have very little respect for are still employed by the same company. It certainly lessens my opinion of that company as a whole, knowing that the upper management is willing to throw good hardworking people off the bridge and keep less valuable assets employed. Enough about that before I start to really rant!

Anyway, as a result of this, Karen “found” several of my friends on Facebook. While not a perfect solution, it prompted me to start a Facebook account of my own. It’s a neat little tool, but I’m not in love with it. I’m still unsure as to how much value it has overall. Like Wikipedia, it seems like the more “free time” one has, the larger footprint one can put on the Facebook community and also like Wikipedia, it allows people with strong political and/or religious views a nice perfect pulpit to spew rhetoric. Unfortunately, the only people hit on Facebook are people who are “friends”; that is, people who are connected to your personal network. Based on the people who have “found” me there – whether directly or indirectly or via connections with other people (to its credit, Facebook does have a really extensive organic network of friend-of-friend-of-friend linking!) I’m even less sure about it as a social tool.

Maybe it says more about me, but it is like meeting an old high-school or college acquaintance for the first time in twenty years and then having them instantly more in next door to you. I’m sure that some people would find that perfectly fine – Karen, for example seems to really enjoy it – but the level of immediate intimacy with near total strangers is a bit disturbing to me. Even I recognize their names from my past.

And that's really the key thing. I don’t consider my past to be a wonderfully happy time. Prior to about a half-dozen years ago I wasn’t particularly enjoying life in general (with very few rare exceptions). I pretty much hated everything about high school, but I had a lot of fun in the year after I graduated and went through a period of “better living through Chemistry”. When I entered my first long-term-relationship (which later turned into a marriage) my life took a major downturn and only got worse from there. There was a short bright period of time when I left the workforce became a full-time college student at my local Junior College. And then when I transferred to a 4-year school, my life turned into a living Hell. I can only think of three good things that came out of my college experience:

1. I graduated and that allowed me to get a job that I -love- working for a great GREAT employer.
2. The bullshit that happened while I was at Cal Poly (which, to this day, I consider to be the single biggest mistake of my life) ultimately led to the dissolution of my marriage (which I consider to be the second biggest mistake of my life), and
3. I ended up with a great friend (who, ironically, was a large part of the aforementioned bullshit)

Without any exaggeration I've been happier in the last five years than any other time in my life. Sure I've had rocky spots and trying times in the last half-decade, but prior to that it was mostly bad times interspersed with good stuff. More recently it's been almost universally great with a very few abysmal periods. Having people continually remind me of the less-than-happy times in my past is not a joyful experience. I’d prefer to simply forget most of my past life. And Facebook is not a good tool for that.

We made our first trip to the mountains in a long time this weekend. Kyle graciously let us stay at this family cabin at Echo summit. The trip up was wrought with minor disasters throughout the day. It started out as a late start, due to Kyle and Karen being hung over from a late night of drinking. (I was smart enough to retire at midnight and was instantly asleep whilst they continued to celebrate the end of the work week.) We forgot a whole slew of items while packing. Loading the car was problematic. At the ski rental place, it turned out one of the missing items was Karen’s insoles, so I went home to get those. And then I had to go home again to get a checkbook because the lift passes were cash/check only no credit cards. Then we had to stop for fuel. The stop at In-and-Out burger took about 17 years because they were busy and then when they finally got our order, they had forgotten to get our drinks. When we got to Kyle’s mothers home to pick up the cabin keys, the snow pants that Kyle needed were missing. When we got to the cabin, it turned out we needed a Sno-Park pass. The list goes on and on. It was one minor thing after another all day long.

Eventually we got to the ski mountain and had a GREAT time. Kyle got to take his very first ever snowboard lesson and he had a blast. Karen and I skied together for a few hours and then we split up for the last few hours of the day. I skied Sierra from top to bottom non-stop several times. The longest run on the mountain is over three miles in length and it took a considerable time to go that far. As I write this, my legs are sore from the exertion but I’m already looking forward to our next ski trip!

Despite the multitudinous minor setbacks, Kyle’s cabin is ideally located for a trip to Sierra. I hope we can do it again before the winter ends. Although at the current rate, the winter should be over in about a month.

In other news, about a week ago, I ended up leading a Warband in WAR and figured out why WAR’s RvR won’t work for casual players. See, I’m no stranger to leading groups. In Camelot, I knew so much about the game that people would just start following me and even thought I would never ask to lead, I always ended up leading a small group around, roaming and killing other people... or attacking and capturing towers… or seiging or defending a castle. WAR, on the other hand, has “warbands” which is 24 people in a single ubergroup. Despite that, the options of “what to do” when you have a group are much much more limited than Camelot. You pretty much can’t attack a keep unless you have a full warband, and if there is even a small defense force, you need two warbands. The parallel to a Camelot tower would be the WAR battlefield objective, but even one full warband is overkill for that and they become trivially easy. Open field player-vs-player fights are few and far between; the only place you really find enemy players is either at a keep or an Objective. So the group size is either optimally a small group of six (and limited to Objectives) or a huge zerg of 50+ people and limited to keep takes. The moderately sized group of a dozen people really doesn’t have any fun options.

To make matters worse, once you’ve captured the keeps and objective in your area (which takes about an hour total) there’s nothing left for you to do! So unless you just happen to be online at the right time, you’re basically stuck with all of the fun stuff already done, or not enough people to try doing it. This really is going to hurt the casual player who can only play for a few hours at a specific time every day. If it isn’t the “right” time, they’re never going to see any of the fun content. And that’s a shame because the fun stuff is REALLY fun. I wwas left very disappointed with the leadership experience.

Finally, I’ve been playing a small MMO called Wizard 101. It’s a totally kid-based MMO that strips away all of the fancy graphics and complex gameplay. It’s is basically a MMO skeleton. It still has all of the basic MMO concepts and gameplay paradigms, but without the “flash” to distract you. It’s actually quite entertaining.

They’ve done several things which I find simply amazing to keep it kid-friendly and kid-safe. Even something as simple as name generation has been sanitized and modified to prevent abuse. Chat doesn’t use a blacklist of “bad” words, instead it uses a “white list” of allowable words. And even then, “bad” combinations of “good” words are still filtered out of chat.

The core combat mechanic is a collectable-card game or CCG. Like any CCG, you have a “deck” that you build from cards. During each 30-seocnd combat round you choose to play one card from your “hand” which is exactly six randomly selected cards from your deck. Your deck size is limited by your equipment, and the cards that you have to choose from are gained as you level up. So when you start the game you have a deck with a maximum size of 10 but only five cards to choose from (each card can be put into the deck a maximum of three times). By the time you reach level 10, you can buy a deck size of 20 and you should have around 15 different card types… AND you can put up to four copies of each card in your deck. The effect is that as you level up and gain additional cards and a larger deck, you see a nice steady progression of power.

Of course, when you strip away the trappings, you get to see the MMO skeletons in the closet too. Like all MMOs, this one is not immune to “the grind”. There comes a point in the game where you aren’t doing anything new, you’re juts finishing things up and the challenges aren’t very challenging, they’re juts taking time. That’s “the grind” – you just “grind” out the gameplay to move on to the next area. Some people would say this is a pacing “problem” but its part-and-parcel of every major MMO out there today and I think that perhaps MMO designers have gotten a little too stuck on the idea.

To me, the fun part of the game is seeing my character grow and advance. When I get a new spell, or a new attack or even new equipment, I’m happy. When you start out, advancement is fast and furious. There is an imperative to give the player the basic toolset to compete as quickly as possible. Once past that, you’re going to see “fluff” advancement, upgrades to existing abilities and bigger versions of the same thing you already had. And to keep the player form finishing the game in just a few sessions, the advancement slows to a crawl. When you are level 1, you might need to kill ten snakes to get to level 2. When you are level 100, you might need to kill 100,000 snakes to get to level 101. In theory, this is supposed to simulate that it is harder to learn to become a master than it is to become an apprentice. In reality, it’s just a artificial way to stretch out gameplay and keep people paying monthly subscription fees. That’s “the grind”. And it is just as annoying in a kid-friendly MMO as it is in a major MMO.

A few years back, when I was still involved with Kristen, I had a conversation with her shortly after the holiday break. The first thing she asked me was “What did you get?” This seemed to me, both at that time and now, to be an incredibly selfish way of looking at the holidays. In retrospect, I’m not surprised by that attitude from her since she was an incredibly selfish person.

My best holiday memories are of giving gifts that were exceptionally clever or well-received. Like the “rat family” I got for my uncle Joe and his family, or the year I took Karen to San Diego for her birthday. Sadly, I didn’t give anything very nice this year. But I did receive a lot of very very nice gifts. My “wish list” has been pruned down to reflect that. (See the link on top left.) I’m going to list these in the order I received them…

From Zant: Chimayo Tequila Reposado. I had some of this many years ago when I was on vacation in Southern California. I’ve been searching for it ever since. Amazingly enough, our local Bottle Barn started carrying the stuff about a month before the holidays, so I bought a bottle. And then my friend Zant bought me a second bottle! This is “sipping” tequila, super smooth and quite tasty. I’ve already had a few shots of this. I’m going to try a little taste test with the Patrón Silver soon.

From Kyle: I received a very cool Rock Band instrument bag. It stores all of the instruments including the drum kit, two guitars, the mic, cables and the game itself. Everything in one bag. This is especially cool since I already have a carrying bag for the PS3, so now when I plan a Rock Band event at work or want to take the game somewhere, it is all self-contained in two cases. A much better solution that the vegetable box I was using previously.

From Karen: The best ski jacket EVER! This is a top-of-the-line North Face ski jacket with a removable liner and about a million pockets. I took it with me to New Orleans, but of course the temperature never dipped below 60-degrees while we were there so I didn’t need it at all. But I suspect we will be visiting the snow soon and my old ski jacket is about a million years old so this was an incredible gift.

From Yvonne: Blu-ray copy of 300. I’ve wanted this for a very long time and I’ve already watched it twice. Also a $50 gift card from SonyStyle. I suspect that this will turn into PSN credit soon and be used to buy more Rock Band tunes and downloadable games :)

From my Dad: BEST GIFTS EVER!! Not one, but TWO of the “Perfect Beaker” measuring cups. I know it sounds trite but getting these made me extremely happy. It’s such a simple thing and was the least expensive item on my wish list but was probably the one that I wanted the most. (For future reference the item that I most desire on the shorter list is the clock.) Also a copy of Valkyria Chronicles, which is a kick-ass PS3 strategy wargame. If this had a multiplayer mode I would say that it is the best strategy game ever made for the system. The gameplay is be –perfect- for that type of play. Alas, it only has a single-player campaign, but I’ve already spent about 10 hours playing it. It’s very story-driven and has Final Fantasy-esque cutscenes to advance the plot, but you can skip some of that if you just want to play the game. The gameplay is extremely easy to pick up and the missions are pretty challenging. In the six or seven missions I’ve played, I’ve failed two and had to replay them to advance. My favorite type of game: one that is easy to learn but difficult to do well with. Thanks, Dad!

From Karen’s Parents: $50 gift card from amazon.com. I’m not sure what this will turn into, but I have no doubt that it will be used (eventually). The last time I got an amazon.com gift card I spent it the very next day on a new network router/switch. Nothing is broken right now, but I –will- buy something from amazon eventually.

Overall, it was a very fruitful and fun Xmas.

TLDR version:

Karen's computer broke. We tried three different video cards, a new motherboard, two new power supplies, a new hard drive and after three weeks of dinking around with it constantly, it works again! We still need to replace here DVD burner, though.

The full story:

For some time now, Karen's computer has been giving odd warning messages about USB power. It would pop up an alert that a USB device was pulling too much power from the hub and could potentially be damaged. The odd thing was that the device listed was always "unknown device". The only things plugged in via USB were (and still are) a keyboard and a mouse.

About a month ago, some strange video artifacting started happening and programs that were graphics intensive (ie games) would sometimes close unexpectedly. She even got a Blue Screen of Death a few times with an error on the video driver. I had to reinstall the newest drivers for her card to resolve the problem.

Three weeks ago, anything that hit the video card would instantly crash and her computer would boot back up into 640x480, 8-color mode. There was noticeable artifacting and graphic errors even before the OS would load; there was vertical banding in the POST screen and the bootup splash had a checkerboard pattern. It was almost assuredly a dead or damaged video card.

Luckily, Kyle was visiting and he had just come from his brother's house. Apparantly his brother had not one but TWO GeForce 8800GTX cards sitting around unused. Serendipity! We offered to pay for the shipping to have his brother send us one and the deal was struck.

A week passed.

The new card arrived, I installed it and.... no video output signal at all. I tried everything I could think of, but could not get the card to output a single scan line. The card had been "altered" to work with a liquid cooling system, but had been reverted to the stock heatsink. After a visual inspection I found a bit of discoloration on the video board directly opposite the main GPU. I assume that there was some heat event or condensation or some sort of electrcial problem there. It had only cost us $15 to ship it so it was not that big of a loss. I packaged the whole thing back up and we went to Best Buy and bought a brand new GeForce 9800GTX.

I was shocked and amazed at the prices for video cards. It was only about $125 for a 1GB card that was faster than the $300 cards we bought only one year ago! So we bought one and brought it home and installed that. It output video (indicating that the "free" card was indeed damaged) but it had the EXACT SAME artifacting pre-POST and after bootup! It seemed that the problem wasn't the video card after all.

So, we returned the new video card to Best Buy and started thinking about what might actually be the problem. The most likely candidate seemed like the mainboard. We asked at BestBuy if they sold motherboards, but they did not. We drove to our local computer shoppe (which happes to be right around the corner from our house) and bought a new Asus P5QL-Pro mainboard.

It took about an hour to swap out the mainboard. I plugged it in and.... the computer powered on. Then it powered off. Then it powered on again. Then it powered off. It flicked on and off about six times in as many seconds, and then shut down. there was a strong smell of burned plastic in the air and nothing would get it to power on again. Thinking the worst, I swapped the old mainboard back in and tried again. The computer seemed dead and would not power on. I walked away from it before I broke anything else.

The next day, I went and bought a new power supply. I suspected that was the "new" problem. I put the new mainboard back in (clearly the old one has a video/"north bridge" issue) and disassembled the case to put in the new power supply.

It seems that the case we used to build Karen's computer uses a "custom" power supply layout and a standard power supply doesn't work. Luckily, again, fortune smiled on us. It turns out that Kyle had the exact same case with the exact smae power supply sitting around unused. He actually was going to throw it away so we all piled into the car and drove down to San Francisco to pick it up. Along the way we stopped and had some noodles in Japan-town. Hey, if you're in the area, might as well enjoy it, right?

The next few hourse were spent moving stuff from Box A into Box B. Finally it was time to test it. I plugged it all back in (and held my breath AND crossed my fingers, toes and eyes) and....

It started up. NO video errors, NO flickering power, NO problems at all! Except that it didn't detect the main hard drive. At all. It didn't show up in the POST detection, and it wasn't found as a bootable drive. It was as if it didn't exist at all. I tried switching power cables, I tried switching SATA cables, I tried moving the drive to a different (working) computer. It was well and truly dead. It was a brick. A dead, dumb brick.

So, I ordered a new hard drive. The smallest one I could find economically was a 320GB drive (double the 160GB that died) but it took a few days to arrive. I pulled the old (dead) drive ad dropped in the new (good) drive and rebooted and it was detected! Hooray! I put in the Windows XP install disc into the CD drive and... it didn't boot. GAH!!

I tried three different XP installation discs. I tried slipstream. I checked the boot-ability of the discs in another (working) computer. Everything was fine but the installation disc simply would not boot.

After a bit of thought and some research I decided that the next troubleshooting step was to pull a known working CD reader from another computer, install that and see if the machine was bootable then. But I didn't want to rip apart another (working) computer so I put it off for a day or two. And then an idea occurred to me: What if I made a bootable USB drive with a copy of the WindowsXP installation on it? I did some research and it certinaly seemed do-able.

It took three days of playing around but it finally came together last night. After -exactly- 21 days, I successfully installed Windows XP on Karen's computer. After that was done, I tested the optical drive and it too is dead beyond repair. I guess that when the power supply died, it took the drives with it.

I spent a good portion of today reinstalling her apps. Lukcily, we have a network attached fileserver, so I would copy the installation CD/DVD to the fileserver from my computer (with a working CD and DVD drive), create a windows "share" to that directory on the server, then map a network drive to that share and Windows would treat that like a local disc. It was very speedy to install things like that -- the slowest part was the copy from the optical drive to the server.

I'm still doing research about the optical drive and I will probably buy one this weekend.

21 days Karen's computer has been dead. Merry fucking Christmas.

The holi-daze shopping season is almost upon us. I know that the economy is in poor shape but in my close circle of friends and family, I think we're all doing okay.

I've updated my "wish list" (top link on the left) with some current wants and desires. I do update this occasionally during the year and pretty frequently during the end-of-the-year sanitized-ex-pagan celebration-of-your-choice.

A couple of weeks ago, the good folks at Penny Arcade blogged a little note about WAR. Ever since Karen read that, she comes home from her stress-filled days at work and asks if we can go fucking murder people. I think that it’s kinda sweet that she wants to include me in that.

I spent the entire weekend last weekend reinstalling XP pro on my computer. It has been nearly two years since I've had a fatal crash and Windows has been slowly eating it's own brain for the entire time. I finally decided that I was tired of all the little warts it had grown - like defaulting to the sound being off and losing the active user's name every 15 seconds - and started over.

And I'm also working my way through an anime series called "Fruits Basket". This is a cute little show that we discovered when we were at PAX and I've downloaded the entire thing off the internet. At 20 minutes per episode it doesn't take a huge time investment, but there ate 26 episodes, so it does add up. I'm 11 shows in, so far.

In other gaming news, the holiday deluge is upon us. Little Big Planet is out now, but I have thus far resisted buying it. I know it is an awesome product and would suck me in for a few weeks but I’m not buying it simply because I have too many other irons in my virtual fire. I ordered Rock Band 2 "special edition" from amazon on the day it was released. It arrived on Saturday, last, and I’ve managed to scrape together enough time to set it up, create our characters and five-start the first batch of songs. This was a monumental effort considering that there is this constant siren call to fucking murder people. We’re about ½ way to maxing out in Warhammer and then the progression will start to slow down a bit. We are, however, starting to form a nice core group of people that we play with often and building synergy with those folks. That will help us out a lot in later stages of the game.

Rock Band 2 is very slick, a nice incremental improvement over the first game. For an additional $5 I was able to transfer all of the 45 songs from the first game over to the second one, and all of the downloaded content I’ve already purchased works in the new game, so I have a bit over 200 individual songs on Rock Band 2, right out of the box. (It’s worth noting that this isn’t true for Guitar Hero; none of the existing content will work with the new game!) The new drum kit s a lot quieter and more "snappy" feeling. The setup phase is fully automated now and times things down to the individual millisecond, which is very cool.

I was hoping to set up a RB2 night at the office for those people who wanted to see the game. The sad part is that most of the new songs in RB2 are still locked up. I have to play through the game at least once to unlock them. And that might be hard to swing considering the pressure on me to fucking murder people every night.

So ever since PAX, I pretty much decided that I was going to focus my time and energy on playing games for the rest of the year. It was a messed up summer for doing triathlon – all the fires we had on June and July made the air quality so bed that it was almost hazardous to breathe outdoors. Plus the huge VA project that I’m still working had me going down to San Francisco two days every week and pretty much ruined every weekend for the entire summer. As a result my training has been basically non-existent (much like it was the year I took and passed my P.E. exam) and we had a TON of fun at PAX, so the decision was pretty easy to make.

As you can see from the last few posts I’ve made and the tracking that xfire does, I’ve really been going full-bore playing Warhammer. I logged 91 hours the first week it was out. The second week I only put in 50-ish hours.

And then someone from work invited me to go mountain biking.

It was supposed to be a casual thing, just a little ride in a local park after work. As it turned out it was a very technical, white-knuckle, adrenaline-filled, heartbeat-in-the-mouth kind of ride. Complete with grueling climbs up rocky fire trails and fireball careening down rocky singletrack at breakneck speeds. There is a path all the way around Lake Ilsanjo and we had a little “race” there and I swear there was at least three times that I was sure that I was going to go down in a bloody heap, or smash into a tree, or go flying off the path into some rocks… But every time my back tire slid out and it felt like I was completely out of control, I’d hit a root, or a rock, or something and my wheel would stay on the path and I’d breathe a quick sigh of relief and keep pedaling. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before something goes horribly awry and I do actually fall and I break myself in some uncomfortable way.

But it’s a LOT of fun and I’m doing it twice a week until Daylight Savings ends.

I took last week off from work to de-stress from my job. I basically spent the entire week sitting around playing Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and drinking beer. According to xfire, I played 91 hours of Warhammer in the last seven days. It was a very nice break and I really needed the time to “get away” from EVERYTHING. Amazingly enough, the day before I was to return to work I was actually thinking to myself how I was ready to get back to the office. So apparently it was long enough of a break.

I’m really enjoying Warhammer. It’s crazy how much fun it is to get out there and kill other people. When we work together we wipe through them like a cloth on a dirty window. The problem is that there are only the two of us, so when they work together in a group of six, we wipe through them like salt through water. That is to say, they completely destroy us.

Still, the good far outweighs the bad and we are having a blast playing.

EDIT: I found a site that creates dynamic signature images based on the current level of a character. Here is mine. Note that this image will automatically update as I gain levels and reknown! thatscool!

I’ve been lax in updating again, but mostly for lack of time to post. Several interesting things have happened in the last few weeks, but in the interest of brevity (and time) They are all only going to get a brief mention.

I’m spending every Wednesday and Thursday in San Francisco for the next month or so. This is a –huge- project that I’ve been working on since November of last year. And it looks like I’ll be working on it for some time to come. I’m actually getting tired of being “stuck” on the same project, but it is paying my salary and is making a bucket-full of money for W&K… some of which is actually trickling down to me.

We went to Tahoe for the weekend of the 4th (thanks Kyle!) and had a great time. We went on several hikes that never made it all the way to intended destination, but were still a lot of fun. We ended up meeting two women on the trail, one of which was a proverbial “cougar” who seemed to take a real shine to Kyle, and lives in Seattle. We got a business card and will probably be pushing Kyle to see if he can hook up with her when we’re in the Seattle area for PAX.

WAR beta is in swing again. The difference this time is that Karen has a slot (Thanks to Larian!) so we are both playing alongside one another again. After a false start, she is having fun with her second character – a DPS caster/healer hybrid. I seem to be settling on a melee/healer hybrid. This is weird for me, but the combination is quite deadly. If enemies go for me, she heals, and if they go for her, I heal. Between the two of us, we stay up for a long time.

Tri 4 REAL #2 happened a couple weeks ago, but we didn’t race. The smoke here has been very thick and it’s been very difficult to get outside. So our training really has been mostly non-existent. When race day came, it was amazingly clear and we probably could have raced, but since we had fallen off on the training we decided not to participate. I have high hopes that we will make it to Tri 4 REAL #3 in two weeks and I –am- training for it now, but we’ll see how things turn out in the next 10 days.

Well, there you have it. A one-page summary of my last four weeks.

So I got a call today from my doctor.

1. The x-rays came back "negative". That is to say, the infection had not affected any bone, so the only thing I have to deal with the is the infection itself.

2. The infection is a not anti-biotic resistant. There is apparantly a strain of staph virus "out there" that is resistant to anti-biotics and there was some concern that this might be the case. As it turns out, the pills I've been taking for the last week should knock it out in a couple more days.

All in all, good news!

This is a difficult blog entry to write. I have good news and bad news. Let's start with the good.

I'm becoming more and more happy with the PSP purchase every time I download something new. I recently downloaded Jeanne D'Arc - a single player RPG. I've only played it a little bit, but it is very reminiscent of the old-school dungeon romps I grew up with.

I really like the story thus far (and not just because it features a anime-style french girl either!) and I'm excited to see where it goes.

I also downloaded the third X-Men movie. After watching it on the PSP I'm -very- glad I did not waste the time to go see it in the theater. I actually bought a print copy of the Dark Phoenix saga for Karen to read before seeing it. I don't think she ever did, and I'm actually glad for that. If she had read it, I would have wanted to see the movie, and the movie was a train wreck in slow motion. I'd like think that I'm not one of those fanbois that isn't willing to let a filmmaker take "creative license" with the source material, but COME ON!!! They killed off (or neutralized) pretty much all of the main characters of the entire X-Men storyline. They aren't called the X-Men for nothing, you know? When you kill the "X" (i.e. Xavier) you pretty much kill the X-Men; and yet, the writers and director felt it was okay to do just that. And then, once they did this, they figured it would be just peachy to completely remove all mutant powers from the leader of the "bad" mutants. The "hook" (if you can call it that) at the end of the movie was that Magneto _might_ be regaining his former powers. Who the f--- cares!?! You've already taken a giant shit on the franchise, why bother trying to make it look like "it might be okay in the end." Too late!

Anyway, despite being a god-awful movie that made me angry at the filmmakers, it was cool watching it on the PSP. I'm currently downloaing Spiderman 3 and UltraViolet. I don't have high hopes for either of those, but they will be nice time wasters over the next couple of weeks.

Finally, I downloaded a game called PataPon. The game defies description, but it is both annoyingly difficult and amazingly easy at the same time. It's a little puzzle-y, and a little music-y, and a little RPG-y. (I told you it defied description!) It's been the game that I've been playing whenever I have a spare five minutes. Although I find myself "stuck" at a certain level currently, I'm working my way back out of the hole I dug for myself.

In other news, I finally got beta access to WAR for Karen. The beta is currently closed, but should be reopening sometime after the holiday weekend. Finally Karen and I will be able to play an online game together again. And we may have a lot of time to do just that because of the Bad News (tm).

A couple of weeks ago, I reported on this blog that we had done a training ride of the Vineman loop with some friends. What I didn't mention was that just prior to embarking on this ride I stepped on a tack or nail or something. My left foot was punctured in some way. It seemed trivial at the time, but it was sore for a couple of day afterwards. That was over two weeks ago.

Last Friday my foot started hurting. A lot.

I'm not talking about, "oh that's a bit sore" kind of hurt. Nor the "Ouch!" kind of hurt. I'm referring more to the "OHMYGODITHURTSMAKEITSTOP" kind of pain. I couldn't walk. It was difficult to even -move- without crying out in pain. And of course, it started hurting at 4:55PM and my doctor closed at 5. I tried calling but got the answering service. I looked at my foot and it had a red spot about the size of a silver dollar with a tiny white spec in the center. I know enough to know that is a pretty telling sign of infection. Luckily I did not see the telltale black streaks that indicated a SERIOUS infection. I considered going to the emergency Room, but I already knew what they were going to do - tetnus shot, anitbiotics, and bed rest.

And a $1000 fee, which my insurance would only pay 80%.

So I let it be. Over the weekend it oscillated between mind-numbing pain and a mere annoyance. On Saturday I barely got out of bed. Going downstairs was unthinkable. Yet, on Sunday I went for a 30 mile ride - my foot wasn't hurting at all.

Today I went to my doctor. A $20 co-pay later I got what I expected: a tetnus shot and a presciption for a sulfur based anti-biotic. But I also got something I didn't expect. She told me to get an X-Ray of my foot. I wasn't sure why I would need an X-Ray for what was obviously just a simple infection. So she told me.

Because of the time involved (two weeks) there is a possibility that the infection may have reached bone. (Thus the X-Ray.) If it turns out that the bad stuff has gotten into the bone, the only solution is to remove the affected bone(s). That is to say, there is a distinct possibility that part of my foot may need to be removed/amputated.

Yep. That's right. They might need to cut part of my foot off. Great, huh?

I'll know more later this week. I'm just hoping that the X-Rays come back clean.

So after plinking around with the PSP a bit, I posted an advert on craigslist looking for someone to mod my PSP to use “homebrew”. As luck would have it, I got a response almost instantly form some guy in Santa Rosa. After a bit of back and forth, we finally met in the parking lot of Taco Bell on Wednesday. It felt so “shady” to meet some strange guy in a Taco Bell parking lot – almost like we were doing a drug deal, but with high tech goods.

Anyway, he popped the battery and memory stick out of my PSP, put in the Pandora battery and memstick and while we chatted the PSP downgraded itself. It took maybe 3 minutes, tops. After that, he put my battery back in, changed to a different memory stick and installed what is essentially the exact same firmware that I had - version 3.90 – but in “homebrew” style. That took another 3 minutes. I handed him a $20 bill and that was it.

When I got home, I copied three ISO files onto the PSP. I had already downloaded a couple of games just to see how they worked. I have ISOs for God of War, Puzzle quest, Syphon Filter, Wipeout Pulse, and Crisis Core.

OMG

I’ve been playing Puzzle quest for the last two nights. The PSP is small and light so I can play it while I’m laying in bed. The screen is bright, but not as bright as a decent booklight and it has a headphone jack. Karen reads for a bit before sleeping and I play and then she turns off her booklight and I keep playing. This thing is super addictive. It has an internet connection so I can even play online multiplayer while reclining in bed. The game is pretty cool, it’s basically a little puzzle-y combat game similar to Puzzle Pirates. It has a multiplayer component, but I haven’t really explored that much. I don’t think there is a matchmaking server; even if there were, I’m pretty sure that there aren’t people just waiting to play.

I played a few acts of Crisis Core. It seems typical, albeit simplistic fighting game. I found it amusing that some of the cutscenes are rendered with voiceovers and other cutscenes are dynamic with text “voices” in the game engine. I suck beyond words in Wipeout. Racing games just aren’t my thang, apparently. (I plan on downloading the PSP version of Burnout to see the trend continues.) I haven’t moved the God of War or Syphon Filter ISOs to the PSP yet. I only have a 4G memstick and the ISO files are really big. The God of War ISO is nearly 2G all by itself. (UMD, the optical media that PSP games are distributed on, can hold up to 1.8G!)

I may have to buy another few memsticks just to carry different games around on. They’re very small though, so the chances of them getting lost are great. It would also be nice to have one memstick dedicated to just MPS3 and other media. That stick could be inserted into the PSP when we’re on long trips and want to listen to music (the stereo in the Rav4 has a iPod input).

Overall, my excitement level about the PSP has increased dramatically since I can now use it for a ton more things and not just commercial games that cost $30 to $50 each. There are homebrew emulators that allow the PSP to play a wide variety of games from –other- systems. For example, the PSP can play games for the NES, SNES, N64, Gameboy, Genesis, Atari VCS, C64 and NeoGeo. Tired of having a separate remote for your DVD player, TV, cable box, receiver, etc? There is homebrew software that lets you use the PSP as a universal IR remote control! There is even a homebrew httpd so you could run a website, not just host a page or two but actually host an entire site, from your PSP! The PSP homebrew community is very creative and has a ton of very smart people working on really cool things.

There is even a homebrew PSP GPS device. Why buy an expensive GPS when you can use the PSP?

Getting my PSP hacked was the best $20 I’ve spent in a long time!

So last weekend we gave what is most definitely the biggest gift we’ve ever done. Not the most expensive, because we’ve spent more on smaller items, but the surely the largest physically. We bought a car for Kyle.

It was his 33rd birthday. He’s been without a car for about a year now. He’s been bicycle commuting to work and when he had longer trips (or on the weekends) he would get a ride from Kelly. Well, Kyle broke up with Kelly about two weeks ago so getting around was difficult. He was going to make the trip from Mountain View to Santa Rosa using only public transit, but that was going to take about 4-1/2 hours. It wasn’t terribly costly, but it was annoying and very time consuming. Not to mention difficult to bring luggage or his bike along.

We really like when Kyle visits and he needed a way to move his stuff around. A car was the right answer. So we started car shopping. We had a maximum amount that we wanted to spend and started looking in that range. Karen found one that was more than I wanted to spend and it looked to me like a real piece of crap, but she was excited about it so we went and did a test drive. As expected, it WAS a piece of crap. But, as it turned out, it was being sold by a charity and they had a whole yard full of used cars. We told them what we were looking for (a –reliable- car that wouldn’t require much maintenance and was inexpensive) and they pointed us at a 1990 Honda Civic DX. We test drove that one and it seemed pretty decent. The only real flaw was that it had an aftermarket sunroof – those ALWAYS leak – and that it had some mysterious damage on the driver’s side. Not like car-type damage. It didn’t look like it had been in a crash. It was like the driver’s side door was really really OLD. The plastic was brittle and the rubber parts were all powdery. But the passenger side looked almost brand new. The same thing was on the outside. The plastic lens on the drivers side running lights was all white and pock marked like it was really really old and left in the sun too long, but the passenger side was fine. Even the paint on the driver’s side exterior was obviously oxidized and discolored, while the rest of the car looked decent.

As it turned out, the car had been parked next to a house that burned down in a fire. The driver’s side of the car was “cooked” in the heat. We had to replace the driver’s side seatbelt (it had melted), and did some work on the sunroof to try and get it to seal (unsuccessfully). We also spent a full day washing it completely, inside and out, vacuuming the whole thing and fixing little miscellaneous issues.

When Kyle came up for the weekend, we asked him to bring his bike. Not to ride, just because we wanted him to put it into the new car for the drive home.

Karen did a great job wrapping it too. She took a medium sized box and wrapped it. Inside that was some little trinket that she had bought with Kyle. That was good for a laugh. Kyle was like: but you bought this with me there!! Also inside the box was a smaller wrapped box. Inside that was another little toy (magnetic stix in this case) and a smaller wrapped gift box. Kyle opened the toy and we played with it for a moment before opening the next box. And inside THAT was a little toy car and a Starbucks envelope. Kyle was mystified by this one. So we told him we bought him a car. It really didn’t sink in since he was –holding- a toy car. I think he thought we meant we bought him a toy car. So he set it down and opened the envelope and a key dropped out. He was enev more confused by this. So we told him again. “We bought you a car.” And then it sank in.

Priceless.

I bought some new racing wheels about a week before the Tri-4-REAL #1. Since I’ve been doing pretty good at getting out and riding my roadbike semi-regularly I figured it was a good time to invest in some bike-related improvements. My original plan was to buy a new bike and replace my Y2K model road bike with a new TT bike, but I’m not riding enough to make that level of investment worthwhile (yet?) I have wanted to get a set of racing wheels for about a year, so I finally did the last bit of research and settled on a set of RŌL d’huez wheels.

I basically narrowed it down to that wheelset or the Shimano Dura-race wheels. In the end there were two things that swayed me. First, I naturally tend to mistrust large faceless corporations. While I do use many Shimano components on my bike, as I buy new things I have been slowly transitioning over to SRAM. And, really, Shimano makes a –lot- of stuff. Maybe they’re really good at making bicycle wheelsets, but they also make a lot of other stuff. I just don’t have the confidence that their wheelset is going to be the shining star of the production line.

After the wheels arrived, I needed to buy a new cassette. I wanted to have a complete set of racing wheels that I could just pop on/off my bike with out having to dink around with changing gears and readjusting things. After shopping around I found my preferred cassette for “only” $170 plus shipping. I don’t know if this is loss leader marketing, or if it was on closeout, or what, but the next lowest price I could find was $190. Twenty bucks is twenty bucks, after all!

I had tubes sitting around, so the last piece of the puzzle was tires. Doing research on tires was very difficult. Tires are one of those things that no one really notices but make a huge difference. I started looking at what the pros use and then reading any reviews that “normal” people would have seen of those products. Eventually I narrowed it down and bought some Michelin Pro3 tires. The silly part was that place I got my cassette from was the same vendor that had the lowest price on the tires, meaning if I had ordered them together I could have saved a few buck on shipping. Alas, I did not.

I finally assembled the entire shebang on Thursday. We had invited a couple of people up on Saturday to ride the Vineman route and it seemed like that would be a good ‘shakedown’ ride for the new wheels. If something broke, I’d have people to help out. So we did Karen’s longest ride ever, 61.3 miles. I found that the new wheels are really nice on the climbs. They’re over a full pound lighter so that’s less weight to haul up a hill. On the flats, they accelerate like I’ve got rocket boost – much ‘snappier’ feel than my old wheels. I felt like it took less energy to get them up to speed and keep them there. The downside is that they just don’t roll downhill as fast as my old crappy wheels. I don’t know if it is a terminal velocity issue, or if the hubs just aren’t as smooth or what. But whenever we would start down a hill, I’d have to work hard to keep up with Karen. Normally, I can pass other people on the downhills without pedaling (even if they are, sometimes!) but this time I was the one having to keep adding energy on the downhills.

I think they’ll be a huge advantage on a flat course like the Tri-4-REAL route. I’m not completely sold on them for a hilly ride, though. If it was a hilly ride, I might use my old heavy wheels because they go so much faster on the descents.

So the PSP arrived last Friday (a week ago!) and I spent a little time playing with what it could do. It has a lot of features that I think are pretty cool.

It works as a little handheld media player, MP3s WMAs and video all play on it. The nice thing about the video is that the screen is like 4.3 inch diagonal screen, so while it is small, it isn’t eyestrain-o-vision small like the iPod. And since it is a 16:9 “wide” screen, it doesn’t lose screen real estate to letterboxing. The screen resolution is “low res” but at that size, there just isn’t the physical space to fit in many pixels; I know that the resolution is only 480x272 but in actual practice it appears to be crystal clear and super sharp for images and video (more on this later).

It has WiFi connectivity and a built-in web browser. This is one of the primary motivators for me to buy the thing. I configured it to access the internets via the home router. Setup was quite easy and only took about 45 seconds. The speed was passable, but not great. Despite it’s small size, it seemed to have better connectivity than the PS3 and TiVo. I used it to read web-based forums for about a half-hour in bed. The small screen size was not much of a hindrance when it is only 12-inches in front of you. I did notice that that low resolution was not very good for text-based applications. There was a lot of visible aliasing and it made the text a bit difficult to read. As a test I pointed the browser at one of the ubiquitous pr0n websites and was surprised to see how sharp and clear the images appeared. The aliasing that I noticed on the text was completely invisible. The time to load an image-heavy web page was actually quite good.

One of the (many) kewl/nifty things that the PSP does is it can act as a display device for the PS3. Basically, I turned on the PS3 and put it in “remote play” mode, and the connected to it wirelessly with the PSP. At that point the PSP becomes the “screen” for the PS3 and the PSP controls work as if you were holding the PS3 controller. I tried playing a couple of the games I own on the PS3 and some of them work but others do not. The display of the PSP just isn’t up to the task of displaying a blu-ray image, and any game that uses the motion sensing aspect of the sixaxis/dualshock controller won’t work.

I was also able to play MPS3 and video files from our file server. Karen’s computer runs a DLNA media server on her computer. The PS3 acts as a DLNA media client, and the PSP acts as a the display device for the PS3. So essentially, the files were read from the file server by Karen’s computer, sent via WiFi to the PS3 which sent them out again to the PSP. Adding in the links between the router the data made seven network hops between the hard drive and the PSP, three of which were wireless! Wild, but it played with practically no latency in full screen video playback.

I’m told that it is possible to transfer TV video to the PSP as well, using TiVo software, but I haven’t tried it yet.

The only game I have right now is the one that came with the PSP when I bought it: GTA Liberty City Stories. I’m not a big GTA fan, but I did try it out for a little bit. Metacritic gave this game an 88 so it should be good. I only played it for a few minutes and it seemed to perfectly capture the story-heavy style of a GTA game. The graphics were passable - about the same level as a PS2 – but on a much smaller screen.

I did check to see what version of firmware is installed. Most of the really nifty-keen-cool stuff for the PSP requires what is referred to as “homebrew” firmware. The problem is that the homebrew stuff has to be installed over a very early version of the default firmware. Sony, in their infinite wisdom, have been adding things to the firmware that make it impossible to update to “homebrew”. Sadly, my PSP came with Sony 3.90 firmware. The only way to install "homebrew" on that is to use something called a Pandora battery and memory stick; those cost about $80 on eBay.

Well, the first “real” triathlon of the year is in the bag now and I did pretty well considering that my training ahs been hit-and-miss all spring. It really shows where my weaknesses are and what I need to concentrate on. My goal for this year is to set a new PR, but I’ve only got two more shots at it!

Swim: 30:44
I felt –great- on the swim. I went out with absolutely NO expectations on finish time for the swim. My goal was to stay calm and practice bi-lateral breathing. That usually means I have to slow down to stay aerobic in order to hold my breath long enough. Usually I’m pushing pretty hard in the swim and need to breathe on every stroke. So this time, I just stayed relaxed and swam. I didn’t do any bi-lateral breathing but I completely forgot about racing and just swam. I didn’t pay attention to when the first group of people from the wave behind passed me (I usually do) and I didn’t try to draft off of anyone that passed me (I also do this). When the swim was over I still felt VERY fresh and I was only 44 seconds off from my “ideal” swim time!!!

T1: 3:47
I’m still not fast in transition. I suspect that I never will be. I feel like this is about as streamlined as I am going to get. My wetsuit practically fell off. I probably might have been able to save a few seconds putting my bike shoes on, but only a few seconds. I might save another second or two doing a moving mount of the bike, but I don’t think that shaving those seconds is really going to buy me much.

Bike: 1:18:15
This is still my weakness. A few years ago I was doing bike-centric training and set my PR. Since then I’ve really been run-centric and have struggled on the bike. I really need to get back into the habit of riding my bike regularly and start doing focused bike skill/speed drills. The farthest half of the out-and-back bike course was all brand new smooth-as-glass asphalt and my overall bike speed –should- have been close to 20MPH on that surface. But alas, my legs just didn’t have the conditioning. I pushed really really hard on the bike to come up with the split that I got, and it isn’t all that impressive.
One thing though: I normally count the number of people who pass me. When I pass someone I decrement it so that it ends up being the number of overall places I’ve lost on the bike ride. Not really, but sorta. Anyway, it is a nice metric to measure my performance. This time the count was only four. So, I’m getting conflicting information here. Clearly, my bike times are not as good as they have been (and, truth be told, the bike route “felt” short) and yet I’m holding my own with the pace of the riders around me.
It doesn’t matter in the long run. I need to get faster on the bike and that’s all there is to it. This is one aspect that I can definitely work on and get some concrete benefit from.

T2: 3:17
Again, slow transition. My setup was in a poor spot for a speedy T2 and I bobbled a few items while changing from bike to run. I’d like to see this go under 3 minutes, but clearly not likely.

Run: 56:55
This run time is actually pretty kick-ass. It’s only 21 seconds slower than my fastest ever run split. I honestly think that if I focus on my bike training I’ll get faster on the run too – at least that is how it has worked out in the past. If I can knock 6 or 7 minutes from my bike split, I should be able to drop a minute per mile from my run times. That would put me in position to beat my current PR by a whopping 7 minutes!! I’m not going to count on that (or even try for it)… just beating my current PR by a few seconds would be gravy as far as I’m concerned. But I could see that happening with a little consistent training effort.

OVERALL 2:52:58

For the last few weeks I've been putting in low-ball bids on PSP units on eBay.

The PSP only runs $170 new in the box, but I was looking specifically at the more aesthetically pleasing "ice silver" model. These, unfortunately, retail for the slightly higher price of $200.

My desire to have this device is not so great to drop $200 on what is essentially a toy (albeit a toy with a lot of nifty features) so I was pretty firmly in the "looking... but not serious" phase of the purchase. Which brings me back to eBay. I had been tracking ice silver PSP units and putting in the odd bid when I saw one that was in good shape. I had pegged my highest price at $125, a nice solid 37% off from retail. So when I would see a likely candidate, I'd take $125, subtract whatever they were asking for shipping and enter that as a bid.

As expected, I lost a lot of these auctions. In fact, I lost sixteen of them. (eBay tracks this for some reason.) But as I mentioned, I wasn't really serious about buying a PSP so the lost auctions weren't even a consideration.

Yesterday, I won an auction. So I guess I own a PSP now. It should be arriving in a week or two. It will be interesting to see what it can (and can't) do when it arrives. I suppose my first task will be to see if i can install the "homebrew" firmware so I can play "backup" games and utilities on it. I'll post more as it develops.

So this last week I was playing a little Asian MMO that I’d heard of some time ago. It has what is possibly the stupidest name every for an MMO ever. It’s called Dofus.

Apparently a Dofus is a dragon’s egg and the goal of the game is to collect five or six of the little buggers. I can’t speak to what happens if/when you do that but I assume it’s something along the lines of “You win!” and then you re-roll and do it again.

Anyway, they have what I’d like to call a “misleading” game. Well, that’s the polite way of putting it. I’d actually like to use several expletives to describe their hook, but I won’t. They CLAIM to have a “free to play” (or F2P) game that you can subscribe to (“pay to play” or P2P) and get additional goodies and whanot. What they actually have is a free to play –trial- version that is level-limited that only allows you to access a small fraction of the entire game. You’re excluded from most of the crafting sub-games, you may only enter a small part of one dungeon for adventuring. There are only about 20 quests that you have access to. You can’t even pick up or equip any items over a certain specific level. Basically, it’s the MMO version of a single-level demo. I found this to be very frustrating and annoying. When someone advertises a “free to play” game, I expect it to be “free to play”. I don’t expect it to be “free to noodle around in the noobie area but that’s all.” I understand that they are trying to make a profit here, but even if I thought that game was worthwhile, this marketing scheme would have turned me off.

So the game has a few of what I’d consider to be fatal flaws:

1. Equipment is “level limited”. This is a huge no-no. If I’m good enough or lucky enough to end up with a sword of instakillyoudead when I’m only level 5, I want to use it. I do not want to put it in my backpack while I grind out 195 more levels of XP because it has a level limit that means I cannot equip it. “This item is too powerful for you” is NOT a fun gameplay mechanic. Sure, twinking is bad (especially in any kind of competitive MMO) but there are a lot of creative ways to deal with this issue. Limiting the level at which equipment can be used is not a good solution and it really annoyed me that I could buy a weapon that was level 45 for a few hundred kamas (the in-game currency) but I couldn’t use it at all. Meanwhile, a level 10 weapon (that I could use) cost several thousand kamas. Stupid, stupid game design!
2. Dropping an entire complex game design on a new player is intimidating. I really was hesitant to spend my first few advancement points because I really didn’t know what was “good”. This is especially problematic when you have specific racial/class limits on equipment that aren’t noted anywhere. I had to find out (by trial and error) what types of weapons I could equip/use and what types were useless. If you have artificial limitations on what kind of equipment is usable, you’d damn well better put that info in big giant bold letters. When I spent all of my hard earned kamas on a sword that my class couldn’t use I was flaberghasted!
3. The rate of character advancement was glacially slow, even at low levels. This game advertises 200 levels of character “evolution” (their word, not mine). In a good solid week of around 20 hours online, I managed to reach level 10. Admittedly the first few hours were spent just noodling around and trying to figure things out, but once I found the wiki page and read up on the various quests and abilites and game hints I was running pretty well. I joined a guild and we were running the starter dungeon over and over and the XP was moving in pretty fast. But advancement was still extremely slow. This is a deal breaker for me. I’m not going to grind away for months and months just to get to a decent competitive level!
4. Character advancement was completely linear. From the instant you started a new character you knew exactly what skills you were going to get and what level you would get them at. I suppose this was done to make players want to keep playing despite the slow level of advancement. When you know that you’re going to get new ability XYZ in just one or two more levels, it gives you incentive to grind it out. But with no alternate character development, there really wasn’t any way to distinguish yourself. One warrior was as good as any other. Why bother playing if I’m just going to be a_player_4973!?
5. The world is separated into distinct tiles (called “maps”), and combat occurred outside of the game world. This really broke the continuity of the game for me. It actually took me several minutes the first time I logged in to figure out how to move between maps. Once I saw how it was done, it became much smoother, but the feeling of discontinuity remained. When combat starts, you and the opponent are replaced with a combat symbol and whisked off to an identical, but different map. After 30 seconds the combat symbol vanishes and no one can even tell that you’re in a fight, much less help you out, or offer advice or anything. When the fight is over you just appear back on the map in your initial position as if nothing had happened, except you have a few more XP. Very

Things that I found annoying, but could have learned to live with:
1. Player commerce was extremely limited. The player-to-player selling mechanic was actually quite innovative (see below) but limited to only 5 lots per vendor. Lots were only allowed to be singles or sets of 10 or 100. so if you had, for example, four of one item, you could list four individual items but that counted as four separate lots. On the other hand if you had –exactly- ten of one type of item, you could list it as a set and it would only count as ONE lot. This led me to hoarding useless junk until I had exactly ten of them and then listing them at a much lower price than I could have sold them for individually. A simple NPC merchant that bought everything for a few kamas would have been preferred since I could have offloaded my entire inventory without worry.
2. Sales made to other players via the NPC merchants would result in the money going into my bank account, not into my inventory. This meant that even if I immediately sold an item (it happened a few times) I had to walk to the bank, open the box, and grab the money I earned from selling something at the merchant.

On the other hand, they did have some interesting bright spots:
1. Combat is turn based. You have a limited number of action points to cast spells, buffs or debuffs, or use weapons/abilites and a limited number of movement points to move yourself. You could move, cast, move in any order or sequence as long as you did not exhaust your points. You only had 30 seconds per turn to do this. This led to some interesting decisions in combat. Do I move forward one step and unload spells and then step back? Do I move forward and enter melee? Should I cast now and move later? The ticking timer lent a feeling of pressure and sometimes I found that I figured out the proper sequence of events just as the timer was running out and then didn’t have enough time to actually do them.
2. Player-to-player commerce. Every MOB drop was used by someone for something. So rather just having vendor trash loot, you would always take your drops to a merchant and see how much it was worth. Some of the most trivial items that dropped in the lowest level dungeon were required to make the highest level items in the game. This led to a lot of player-to-player interaction. The NPC merchants do a great job in matching buyers to sellers and a lot of times I would find that my items that were posted one day would be sold by the next time I logged in. Occasionally, “trash” items that I posted at a vendor would sell to another player almost instantly. Profits from sales are directly deposited into the character’s bank account, so I would have to check the bank occasionally to pick up my sales money.
3. The race/class interaction is actually pretty interesting. Rather than having classes and races, each race –is- a class. So, for example, if you choose to be a Feca, that means that you are a staff-wielding protector type with defensive spells. While this might seem to simplify things to the point of being too dumbed down, it actually doesn’t. What it does do, is allow for instant identification of specific character abilities. For example, the fairy-like Eniripsa is the healing class/race. So when you see someone with wings, whether it be big pink butterfly wings or little black bat wings, you know –instantly- that they are a healer type. The same sort of thing applies to each and every race/class, and this was really nice for “profiling” others in a fight.
4. Character customization. When you create a new character there are three different areas of the character that you can color. You can choose garish colors or nice ones; it is totally up to the player. For example, when I made my Feca, I chose to make him a blonde chap with yellow-gold hair, blue clothes and light grey boots and gloves. Even if I stood right next to another Feca, using the same exact model (and easily identifiable as such!) we looked completely different. In fact, despite having relatively “common” colors, during the time I was playing, I only ran across one other player with a similar scheme and it was startling enough that we both sent PMs to the other about the choices. It’s a simple little thing, but it really lends a lot of attachment to the character when you feel unique in the game world.
5. The game client is written in Flash® so it runs on a variety of different computer types. I think this is a huge bonus for a small game like this.

The final thing I wanted to comment on was the pricing scheme. We’re obviously not looking at a WoW type game here, and the pricing is accordingly low. The game is based somewhere abroad and the base prices are in euros, with US dollars accepted as an alternate (they also accept GB pounds, CA dollars, Czeck or Swiss francs or Japanese yen). It comes out to only $6.90 a month (5 euros), or $65 for a full year. This is roughly ½ the cost of a modern fantasy MMO.

It was a fun little diversion, but not worth paying for in my opinion. Too many fatal flaws to account for the few bright spots. Still, I’m glad I took the time to explore this product. It made me feel better about some of the items I’d like to see in a “mainstream” game and opened up a few options that I hadn’t previously considered.

To help me keep my blog current and semi-relevant, I’ve made myself a reminder in my outlook calendar that pops up annoying notices on my desktop every Monday morning. The theory is that I’ll have something interesting to say at least once a week, and it will usually be about those oh-so-precious days where my head is not stuffed full of volts, amps, watts and all things that keep a hospital operational.

Every year my company sponsors me and several other people to run in our county’s Human Race event. This is a “fun” event, but I always try to inspire a bit of competitive spirit in my fellow coworkers. I make a challenge that if anyone can beat me in the 10km race that I will give $10 to the charity of their choice. Well this year, it finally bit me. Two of my fellow employees bested me. And not by just a few seconds either. The guy who came in first (from our company) crossed the line a good seven and a half minutes ahead of me! Not only did he decimate my finish time, but he beat my 10km PR by over five minutes!! The number two man was within striking distance – only beating my average time by about 30sec per mile, but still. Maybe I’m getting older and starting to slow down. Well, no, that’s not it. I’ve had slower 10k races before. These guys just had a GREAT run and me… not so much.

One of the highlights of the race was that I actually ran the entire event with two different shoes on. I had my new Saucony shoe on my right foot and an older Brooks shoe on my left foot. This was completely unintentional; I simply didn’t notice until it was pointed out to me (AFTER the race) and I had to laugh. At that point I’d already been “in public” for a good two hours, so I wasn’t going to go run and hide in the car or change my shoes. I just had to throw my hands up and admit being an idiot (again).

I felt like my pacing was good, I just didn’t have it in the tank that day. Some days you wake up and you feel like you can take on the world. This wasn’t one of those days. On the good side, this has given me a lot of incentive to lose those extra 5 pounds and train much harder for the next Tri 4 Real on June 8!

My splits were
Mile 1 – 8:38
Mile 2 – 8:05
Mile 3 – 8:16
Mile 4 – 8:16
Mile 5 – 8:14
Mile 6 – 7:39
Mile .2 – 1:22 (6:50 pace)
FINAL 50:30

In other news, I tried The MMO With Possibly the Stupidest Name ever: Dofus. I saw this advertised at an E3 several years ago and was moderately intrigued by their casual-friendly price structure (ie: free, but you get “perks” if you subscribe). It’s all done in Flash, so it’s platform independent. I played iot for about 8 hours on Sunday and it most definitely isn’t for me. I did take one very strong lesson away from the experience.

If you have your own IP, don’t just drop it on the user and assume they are going to figure it out.

If you’ve got an IP like (for example) Camelot, you can probably fake it. Most people know the legend of King Arthur and even though they may not be familiar with the details of the story, they know that it is in Briton, and that there was a round table and whatnot. The basic framework is in place. So when you start seeing Welsh names like Bwca monsters in Llyn Barfog, people may not know –exactly- what it is or where it might be found, but they have a general feel that this probably is something Olde Englishe. When you start talking about Elves and Dwarves and Orcs and Dragons, people have a built-in understanding of what that means. The details may not be there, but given the basics, most people will figure out the rest.

The problem comes when you have a cartoonish race of dog-people and cat-people and rat-people and squirrel-people and bear-people and fairies and demons and cartoonish… uh, CARTOON-people, and then you drop some silly sounding names on them like Feca, Ecaflip, Osamodas, Pandawa, Cra and Iop…. Well, most people go WTF?? There isn’t any basis to start wrapping the game milieu around. It’s all uncharted and unfamiliar territory, and it’s just too much to expect the new player to assimilate it all at once. It’s a Berlitz course in some strange IP, without the payoff of taking a vacation to a mystical foreign country. I played for 8 hours and I still have no idea what each race/class combination is, whether they are good or bad or even possible. I’m sure someone put a –lot- of time and effort into making a cohesive game world, but it’s just too far removed from anything I’ve seen before to make it understandable.

It would have been better if they had introduced little bits of the IP over time. But they couldn’t do that without limiting player choices initially. I’m not convinced this is a bad thing. Especially for a brand new player in this (supposedly) vast online space. I don’t want to be coddles, but I’d rather be spponfed for a little bit before the game starts throwing not only shovelfuls of data but TRUCKLOADS of new info at me. Heck, just to creat my first character I had to read 12 different descriptions written in flowery high-fantasy style. I want to play a tank; is that the one that is “valued in groups because of their protective powers” or is it the one that ”are warriors beyond reproach”? In the end I chose the one with the shield icon on the class selection page.

The thing that kills the game for me is that the world is too compartmentalized. As you move around, you walk around on a “screen” and then you move to a little dot to load the next “screen”. So when you’re standing on the edge of the display, there could be a huge fight going on just over the edge of the monitor and you’ll never know because you haven’t loaded that map yet.

Still it was an interesting experience and it was completely an utterly free to download and play. I’d like to try it with Karen and see what her impressions are. As we know, even a bad MMO can be fun if you play together!

I read several blogs. Many of them are linked off in the left hand column. I know that when a blog goes quiescent for weeks, it makes one not really excited to read it. On the other hand, I’ve seen personal blogs which daily postings simply for the sake of having daily postings. Those are annoying. It’s like having some bubbleheaded girl telling you about how they went shopping yesterday and saw these super-cute shoes but they were too expensive and they didn’t even come in plum, but they bought them anyway because they were just so cute and they matched the new ankle bangle that they had found at the boutique the other day when they were getting their hair colored. Whew! Anyway, I’m falling on the “too few” side of that and I will try to do better.

My friend Zant called me last night and was asking about my life, so I’m going to update this. Tardy, I know, and I –will- try to be more punctual!

Carneros 10km
We did our first 10km race of the year on April 3. It was a bit rough since I really haven’t been training much over the winter. I had a GREAT fall training schedule and was sticking to it, but in mid-December when we abandoned the idea of running the Mardi Gras Marathon (which was held in February) I kinda stopped training for the most part. Oh, sure, there was the occasional run or bike, but pretty much I haven’t really done any athletic stuff for nearly three months. So I approached this event with a bit of trepidation. I just bought a new Heart Rate Monitor (HRM) to replace the half-dozen monitors I lost or broke last year. Two weeks out, I did a threshold test to see where I “should” be. As it turned out this was a lifesaver for me. Since I’m so out of practice from doing much of anything, I can no longer “feel” the right pace and either I end up going to fast and blowing up before the finish, or going too slow and having a lousy finish time. So when I saw that my threshold was 166bpm, I knew that I was going to try to keep it in the 165 to 170bpm range for a 10km race.

As it turned out, that was perfect! I fell into my pace pretty fast and just hung out there for the entire 10km. I probably ran a tiny tiny bit too fast in the first half because I found a lot more people passing me near the end than I prefer, but that may have just been because my endurance is so low. Or maybe I didn’t eat enough (likely since I was STARVING by the time I finished). I did feel like I pushed well though and despite having a mediocre result (55:50 for those who care) I still had a great time and I’m super glad we did the race.

Game night – April 2008
After the race, we had a Game Night. We had an interesting thing happen. A dozen people showed up and we found that we don’t really have any games suitable for more than 6 people. We had been to a game night at some friend’s house a few months back and when you have more than a half-dozen people playing anything with “turns” the long wait between turns as it goes around the table is an eternity and you lose interest. Players start chatting about non-game related things and before long you’ve forgotten that you’re even paying a game.

We did make a trip to the Comic Shoppe the next day and bought a new game that supports up to 8 players. We played it twice with Kyle and it was fun, but it is a one-shot game only I think. The second time around was more painful than fun. Still, we’ll give it a whirl at our next game night just to see how it goes with a larger group.

If we continue to have such a large turnout, we’re going to have to ‘split’ into groups and play multiple games. If we moved the “card game” people to the kitchen table, we could do a video game group in the living room. I’m not sure how well that would work though. We usually put the food on the kitchen table, but we could set up a card table for food (or set it up on the fireplace hearth) and then use two table for different games. I think that we will see how the next Game Night turns out before making any real plans.

Icebreaker 2008
We did our first triathlon of the year, the Icebreaker race. I didn’t do great – my overall finish time was nine minutes slower than my best ever finish there. I think this was mostly due to my abysmal bike leg. I was over 6 and a half minutes slower than my prior slowest bike at that race! But on the other hand, I didn’t do horrible either. Despite losing 6:28 on the bike, my overall finish was still faster than my slowest performance at this race. I feel like I raced as well as I could have given the circumstances, so I’m happy with how I did no matter what it was.

It was a pretty warm day so I tried putting my wetsuit on while standing in the water. Oh, that was a mistake! You would think that the water would provide a bit of lubrication and let you slide the wetsuit on easier. You would be wrong. The water formed a kind of suction seal and made it nearly impossible to move the wetsuit over my skin. I had to sit down in the water and work the neoprene fabric up over my body, inch by painful inch. It was a learning experience.

The swim was cold as always. This year the water level was so low that there were a few places where my hands hit the bottom during the swim, and I actually got up and walked around the first buoy. I really didn’t “settle in” to my swim until about halfway between the third (and final) buoy and the shore. For the first ¾ of the swim I was struggling and then suddenly BING! I was swimming! It was a wonderful feeling, going “Oh now I remember how this works!!” Of course, I haven’t been in the water since then so I’m sure my next race will be a repeat of this. I should make it a point to go to the pool at least once a week just so I can remind myself what swimming is supposed to feel like.

I mentioned that the water level was very low this year. It was so low that it was a good ½ mile hike up the “beach” (which was normally underwater – so it was technically the floor of the lake) to transition. It felt like an eternity making that long slow jog with bare feet and wearing my wetsuit. If I hadn’t known that this was an unusual event I would have likely decided not to race here again. I am noticing that my transition times are getting better. I came in with about five other people racked nearby me and I was out with the front of them.

My bike was, simply put, horrible. I couldn’t find my cadence. I started off too fast and quickly lost steam. I kept getting passed for the entire bike leg. Usually I find myself passing some of the slower women when they enter the course on my second lap, but I was even having trouble keeping up with them. Then about halfway through the second lap it suddenly went BING! I was riding my bike! My cadence fell right into step and I started shifting gears at the right times. My speed crept up by about 2MPH and I was starting to pass people. But it was too late to save my race.

Transition was pretty darn fast. I may be out of shape for racing, but for some reason my transitions have gotten faster. It took less than one minute for me to find my rack, drop my bike, change shoes and run out!

The run at this race is pretty challenging. That’s a polite way of saying it is FREAKING HARD!! They changed the run course (again) this year. The first two miles are difficult with some hilly single track trails that cross sand, dirt and paved surfaces. And then there is a huge climb up to the top of a hill with a water tank. After taking this beating, it suddenly went BING! I was running! The last mile of this run was a joy. I felt great, my foot turnover was fast and efficient and I passed a half-dozen people (kind of the opposite of my experience at Carneros). When I was coming down the last stretch of run, I was running all out and feeling great about it.

My final finish time was 1:49:22. It was a real eye-opener with respect to my personal training. I really need to ‘tune up’ my efforts and get back into race shape.

The Relay 2008
We made an attempt to put together a Relay team this year but had zero response. So when I saw a call for four runners on one of the mail lists that I read, I sent out an email introducing myself. As it turned out, Karen, Kyle and me ended up all in the same van and out friend Shellee was able to drive for us. So out of the seven people in van, we counted for four of them. We kinda ‘took over’ the van.

As always this event is a lot of fun. The team we ended up being on was really casual and aside from one guy who was really whining about everything, everyone did awesome! Both Karen and I ended up doing the exact same legs as we were assigned last time around, but this time we actually had a decent start time (9AM) and were running with others for the entire race. We even left some of the other teams that started with us behind and never saw them again. That’s a first.

We did end up in a weird spot when we started our third legs. Since we were faster than most of the slow teams, we were out in front of them. (We were actually third or fourth on the course at one point.) And then the faster teams started catching up to us. They had a much later start time, so we had a pretty significant head start (more than 4 hours in some cases!) so it took them a little while to make up the time. But just about the time we were running our final legs, the fast teams started blowing past us. It was a bit discouraging to be running as fast as you can and then suddenly have someone trot past you like you’re standing still.

I felt great about my legs. On my first run I passed five people. It was early in the race and we were still pretty bunched up with the other teams we started with. On my second leg, it was a lot more spread out. I didn’t see anyone for the first half of the leg and then they started coming. I saw some high-school girl walking through Fairfax, sobbing into her cellphone, followed by three other high-school girls. Real life drama, I assumed. I passed four runners, including one girl who was walking. I don’t know how that team did. If she was walking on her second leg, I can’t image how she did on the third leg. My third leg was spent running in isolation. There was only one other runner on the route, and she was about a mile ahead of me. But I was faster and by putting in a herculean effort I closed the gap to about 50 yards before we finished. I wanted to catch her SO BADLY I could taste it! Sadly it just wasn’t going to happen. I think I might have done it if there was another half mile of distance to cover, but it was just too much to make up in too short of a distance. Still, I came away feeling great about my effort.

We will definitely try to get on a team next year as well. I really like this event.

Warhawk + GTA4
I’m still buying games for the PS3. I picked up a used copy of Warhawk from eBay. This is an online-only FPS type game, with a crapton of usable vehicles. It also has a splitscreen local mode for up to four players on one console. We have two controllers so we started by playing little 2-player local games. I think I might invest in a third controller or try to borrow one or two for 3 or 4 player local play. I would love to do a Warhawk multiplayer Jeep race locally. I did try some online play for a couple hours, but with a game this old, the only people still playing are the hardcore people that know every nook cranny and gameplay mechanic by heart. New players like myself tend to not last too long in that kind of an environment. Still I had fun playing and it was a lot more casual than I expected.

I think Karen really enjoyed this game as well, because she was asking me questions about it the next day.

I also took the plunge and bought a new copy of GTA4. Karen has been sick this last week and I thought it would give her something to do while sitting around trying to get well. Plus WAR testing is going again (as the astute reader may have noticed is displayed in my xfire tag) so she is playing GTA4 whilst I am plugged into the Warhammer universe. Of course, since we live in close proximity, I’ve picked up her cold so I’m feeling pretty crappy about pretty much everything. I know from past experience that my performance in games is juts a tiny bit above the “You suck!” level when I’m sick so I’m trying to keep in mind that my piss-poor performance may not be due to any failing on the part of the game designers, but rather the game player. That is, me.

So there’s a good solid month’s worth of postings that should have been posted… well, a month ago.

The more games I buy for the PS3, the happier I am with my original decision to buy a console. PC gamers may sneer at consoles (I know, I was one of them until very recently) but I gotta say, their derision is sadly misdirected.

Last night I acquired a used copy of Rock Band for the PS3. We already had a Guitar Hero 3 game for it (also purchased used). I have to say Rock Band is a whole hell of a lot more fun. Being able to play with both of us working on the same song at the same time was a whole new level of interactivity.

I was playing guitar on "medium" level and it was actually medium difficulty! (This is different form Guitar Hero 3 where "easy" is actually moderately difficult and "medium" is actually hard. Guitar Hero 3's "hard" is just plain stupid crazy.) It was challenging but doable. By the end of the evening I did step it back down to "easy" level as I got more and more tired. My first three songs (which were also played on "easy") I came in with 5 stars easily on the first attempt. The last three songs (on "easy") I was having trouble not being knocked off the stage.

Karen was set up on the drum kit on "easy" and she was rocking every song. We would finish a set and she would look up at me and tell me how badly she had done... until the numbers flashed up and she had hit 98% of all of the drum notes. Of course she started to get pretty tired by the end of the evening too. Before we quit (at 1 AM) she was only hitting about 90% of the drum notes correctly.

It was interesting because as I stood next to her wailing away on the miniature drum pads, I would hear the beat of the song from the drumsticks hitting the pads and not from the music. So i would sync my guitar strumming to that. What ended up happening was that when Karen lost the beat of the song, I would start missing notes too! It really was a synergistic experience.

At the end of the evening -- which was actually morning by that time -- I plugged in the microphone and belted out a couple of vocal tunes. It was interesting because I couldn't really hear myself "singing" (I use the word VERY loosely). It was akin to singing along with a radio whilst driving. The game does some processing on your voice so that you almost, sorta hit the notes as they were supposed to sound. Unless you're horribly off-key (I was in a few cases) it actually ends up masking the awful-mess of an untrained singer screaming into a microphone. They also add in a lot of echo effect, which makes almost anyone sound half-way decent. Only half-way though.

Overall, it was a TON of fun to play together. The only real drawback (in my opinion) is that there is no way to get a second guitar controller for the bass part. The only way to get a second guitar is to buy an entire new Rock Band game (on sale for only $148 this week at amazon.com!) but I don't think that's a very good price for one piece of hardware.

I've already ordered a USB hub so that I can have all three (eventually all four) Rock Band instruments plugged into the PS3 and still have USB ports for the Eye of Judgement camera, a controller charging cable and a USB keyboard. That should be here by the middle of next week.

A stand-alone guitar controller -should- be avialable in a few weeks; they say it is due mid-April. Once that happens, I'm going to set up a friday evening Rock Band "event" at work. We have a handful of people who alreayd play Guitar Hero, so we should get at least four people on any given Friday.

The other big console game thing that happened was that my order of nearly 300 Eye of Judgment cards arrived. The guy shipped them min piss-poor packaging. The only saving grace was that the whole shebang came along with a complete game, field, AND a new camera! So I have a spare Playstation Eye now. I'm not sure whether I should bother trying to sell the original game assembly on eBay or not. I have enough "extra" cards now that I could give away a few of them and not notice. Maybe I can get $30 for the spare set.

The exciting part is I now have a couple "hero" cards and one "phantom" card. With those additions I might actually have a chance against some of the online people. I hope to put together my best deck this weekend and give it a shot. I expect a humiliating defeat, but am hopeful for any other final result -- even a drawn game would be a win, in my mind.

After publicly proclaiming that I will never upgrade my PCs again, Karen's computer needed a complete overhaul. So $375-ish got spent on PC upgrades.

Today, the hard disk drive in my computer is not spinning up. I am not a happy camper.

Hot on the heels of my proclamation to never upgrade a PC again, we had one of our main PCs fail. As I write this, $310 worth of new mainboard and CPU are sitting in my living room waiting to be assembled with the failed guts from Karen's machine. I can only hope that this is the only thing that failed and I won't need to continue to pour money into either of the PC systems.

In other news, we've been bitten by the Collectible Card Game (CCG) bug. On a lark, I bought a copy of Eye of Judgment. My thinking was that even if the game sucked, I would still have an Playstation Eye camera for use with Burnout Paradise. As it turns out, the game is a LOT of fun. We only have the 30 "starter" cards, plus the single 8-card expansion pack that came with the game (total of 38 cards). The first few games I played against the easiest level computer opponent, I lost within 10 moves. After that I enlisted Karen to play against me. Our first head-to-head game went 35 moves. We've probably played a dozen matches now and with the experience, I can beat the computer on "normal" level without too much hassle.

I've never played a CCG before, but this is such an interesting mix of strategy. Which card you play, what direction you play it, and where you play it all have an effect. And of course, with the PS3 doing all of the heavy lifting you don't have to consult arcane Tomes of Knowledge to look up rule #35729A-6, subsection 3, paragraph 9... you play a card, the PS3 knows the rules and it resolves the actions for you.

It seems simple enough. To win, all you need to do is have five cards on the game board. Of course, that's like saying chess is a simple game because all you have to do is capture the opponent's King. There are so many layers of gameplay here that it's almost uncanny.

I've only had the game for two days and I've already spent over $100 on eBay auctions for additional cards. I can't wait for them to arrive so I can try an online game.

UPDATE: After installing the new mainboard and CPU, I found out that my comments about PC upgrades were all too true. The one-year old DDR2 memory in the old machine is incompatible with the new mainboard, which requires DDR2 memory. Oh, wait, I already have DDR2 memory. But nooooo, it's not just DDR2 but it's New! Improved! DDR2 memory with a n all new (incompatible) form factor. So another $55 out the window. Even worse, we have to wait 3 business days for the bloddy memory to arrive. The time is the bigger loss in my opinion.

Maybe a set of EoJ cards will show up.

I wrote the bulk of this in early January and had intended to post it to my blog some time ago, but, as they say, you know where good intentions will get you. At least one reader will find this oddly familiar since much of it is cut-and-pasted from an email chain we shared at that time.

One of my full-time hobbies is computer gaming. Historically, I've spent around $1000 to $1500 each year on upgrades for my computer(s) to keep them current and able to play the newest releases. But I've had a bit of an epiphany this holiday season. I recently purchased a PS3 and I honestly think that the days of PC games are coming to a close. In my opinion, consoles are the way to go in the future.

For one, there would be no more endless hardware upgrade paths: you buy a console and it works until you buy a new one. You don't need to buy a new video card (two or three video cards if you are using SLI!) every nine months. You don't have to get a new mainboard every 18 months because the form factor for system memory and CPU sockets have changed yet again and you no longer have a valid upgrade path. You don't have to download new drivers every time you buy a new game because the newer drivers display are required to keep it above the level of a slideshow. You buy the console. You plug it in. It works. Period.

Secondly, no wierd interactions between hardware. Developers know what you have and they know what you don't have and that's that. How many times have PC owners had to deal with a game (or a legitimate program for that matter) that didn't like some particular piece of their system. Maybe it's the video card. Or the audio card. Or maybe the networking system. Or the printer doesn't work. Or the scroll wheel on the mouse isn't supported. Or it does something unexpected, since the program doesn't know what to do with it. These kind of issues have been part and parcel of the computer gaming experience for years and players have simply come to accept those issues as part of the deal. Game publishers basically sell you a game and it may or may not work on your system depending on whether they tested all of the different interactions. If it doesn't work with your particular setup, that's pretty much it. From the perspective of a playtester for a game publisher, the amount of effort that goes into making sure those kinds of issues don't come up is not trivial at all. With those issues removed, that effort could be redirected into making a better game, rather than making a mediocre game that will work on a lot of different configurations.

Most importantly, the "advantages" that the PC had (past tense) are now shared with the consoles.

Great graphics? HD video is as good as, if not better than, most of the PC graphics cards out there. Both the X-box 360 and the PS3 were designed from the ground up with multiple video processors that run rings around PCs that are 10 times as expensive. Modern cutting-edge gaming PCs come with THREE video cards at $600 each. A recent "ultimate gaming computer guide" had several machines that were over $12,000. That's not a typo. Twelve THOUSAND dollars!!! For a gaming computer! When was the last time you looked at a 1080p screen and said "It's nice but it would be better at a higher resolution"? I have a 50-inch diagonal HDTV in my living room. I have yet to see a computer screen that is 50-inches. And I have yet to see a 50-inch TV that costs 12 grand.

Input devices? Both the 360 and the PS3 are completely USB capable now. True story: When I was registering my account on the Playstation Network, it (naturally) asked me to input a name. When I started to do that with the joypad controller I got as far as entering three characters before I said "Screw this!" (literally, I said it out loud) I walked up to our computer room, grabbed an older (unused) USB keyboard, brought it back down, plugged it in. And it -worked- without any setup or configuration. Need a keyboard? Plug it in. Want a mouse? Plug it in. Want to use a joystick? USB. Some weird pointing device? No problem. Plug it in, you can use it. Even better is the PS3 with native bluetooth. With a BT keyboard or mouse you don't even need to plug it in. You tell the console to search for devices, it finds them and registers that and they work. (The PS3 controllers are BT devices.)

Networking? WiFi is the new standard and the consoles have it too. The PS3 is just as connected to the internet as my PC is. It even has a built-in browser that will let me stream you-tube video onto my 50-inch HDTV screen. The network hardware in the console is no worse than any wireless card in a modern laptop, and probably quite a bit better. Laptops have to deal with very stringent power and size requirements. A larger part in a laptop makes the laptop larger, so they use the smallest components possible. Also, laptops are often on battery power so they have to use the least amount of power possible. That's not good when it comes to wireless communications, where higher power means better reception and ultimately, higher connection speeds. The PS3, on the other hand, is a behemoth that is plugged into a wall socket 24/7. Size constraints are not an issue, and while power concerns are a nice idea, the reality is that anything that has a wall plug is probably using a decent amount of power. It boils down to the PS3 having a pretty good internet connection. I have used it to play realtime online games and I have to admit is works really well.

Digital Distribution? Heck, I bought and downloaded two new games on my PS3 over the winter break over PSN (PlayStation Network) without blinking. As of this writing, I've bought three complete games online, installed at least a half-dozen game demos and downloaded expansion content for another three of the games I own. I'm still a little uncomfortable with buying a product and "owning" it but never actually having anything "real" to prove it. If the hard drive in my PS3 were to crash, I would have no proof of my purchase and would have to trust that PSN would allow me to re-download and re-install the stuff I have already bought and paid for.

My biggest problem with the PS3 is the gamepad controllers. I really enjoy FPS type games. But I learned to play FPS with a mouse and keyboard. A joypad just doesn't "work" for me, so -my- copy of The Orange Box is the PC version. Console versions of first-person shooters all have a kind of "auto-aim" feature to compensate for the gamepad control system. I played a demo version of "The Darkness" on my PS3. While the game a creepy mobster/demon mix (who'da thought those two genres would match up so well, but it really works!) I was very nonplussed with the "standard" FPS controls on a gamepad. In fact, I was pretty much annoyed by it. I just couldn't get the hang of using one stick for movement and the other stick of aiming. I missed the speed and precision of mouse-reticle aiming. The funny thing is that the online console players (for example, people playing Team Fortress 2, Halo 3, and/or Gear of War online competitively) consider it to be "cheating" if you use a keyboard+mouse. According to the console crowd, it makes the game "too easy"!! I'm a pretty bad shot with the mouse and keyboard. During my short foray into the gamepad control scheme, I was hopeless. I unloaded four full clips of ammo at a single opponent and I'm not certain I managed to hit him even once. So essentially, I hate the console controllers. However most of the current crop of console FPSs work just peachy with mouse and keyboard (i.e. WASD control scheme) on the PC. Even on the fighter-style game I recently played (and beat) I was having issues with button-press sequences and timing issues. On the other hand, for some games the gamepad is great. For example, simulations and sports games. RPGs and simpler games where you don't really need a lot of keys or a full keyboard to communicate.

Outside of MMOs and FPS games, I really don't think that the PC has an advantage any longer. And even that is debatable in the FPS genre. With Halo3 checking in at 4.2M units sold in 2007, and Call of Duty 4 selling 3M (according to NPD) units in just 8 weeks, it's pretty telling. Out of the 3M CoD4 copies sold, only 383K were the PC version! Also, you might notice that the overall scores for the console version of CoD4 outscored their PC counterpart (on metacritic).

According to NPD, the people who track game sales, the two best selling PC games of 2007 were the WoW expansion and WoW. The third top-seller was a looooong way back, didn't even break a half-million units, and was an expansion pack for an older game. The combined sales figures for all ten of the ten best selling games of 2007 was only 5.6M units sold. Halo 3 (only available for the XBOX 360) sold 3/4 of that amount in six months, by itself! It sure looks to me, from my perspective, that consoles are doing a whole heck of a lot better than PCs are with respect to 'gaming' as a whole.

Don't get me wrong. I -love- my MMOs and I still have four active accounts in two different games and am playtesting a third one. I have two not-quite-top-of-the-line PCs in my house. Even as recently as 6 months ago I probably would have argued that PC games are just "better" than console games, and that consoles will always be hampered by their input devices and lack of upgradability. But that isn't true any more.

One of my online gaming friends (who plays WoW) just bought a new PS3 and the first thing he did when he got it was to install linux. For what it's worth, that OS is Sony-approved for installation. Google "PS3 Ubuntu" for a crapton of links. You can even use your HD TV as a monitor for your PC games, if you wanted to. Another friend was looking forward to playing Bioshock on his PC. But his "new" $3000 (2 year old) computer didn't even meet the MINIMUM system requirements! For the cost of an upgrade to current minimums (which would need to be upgraded again in a year) he could buy an entire XBox 360, which will play Bioshock in HD on the 42" Sony TV he already owns. Not to mention that the current generation of consoles are being used for some VERY serious computing these days. Mass Tech is using 16 PS3 units to compute the propagation of gravity waves that would occur when two black holes collide. The US Air force is buying 300 PS3s to run "technology assessment" programs. The consoles of today aren't just for playing games.

With respect to MMO development, I firmly believe that the current generation of consoles with their built-in networking and high-end graphics capabilities are a platform just waiting to be exploited. Moving an MMO to a console would allow developers to do away with the tired, old Diku model and try some innovative new ideas that would NEVER work on a PC version of an MMO. The only real "problem" with console MMO development right now is that there is a lot of pressure to make it "family friendly" -- since consoles are generally kept in the living room and the kids have access to the TV it is connected to, it's a hard sell to get a even a "Teen" rated game out there with the current "monthly fee" MMO business model.

Having said that, a micro-transaction based MMO (which is another reason why we need to let go of the current design model - it doesn't lend itself to microtransactions well) that didn't "require" an adult to enter a credit card number to install and play would be a lot easier to drop onto the console marketplace.

Looking into my personal crystal ball, I predict that the first company that puts out a viable console native MMO (it doesn't even need to be that good!) that allows the player to "get hooked" BEFORE asking for any money, and then asking for it in bite-sized chunks (based on player desire to "get ahead", rather than basing it on time based "access rights") is going to make gajillions of dollars. I suspect it won't be in 2008 though. And given a year, it is certainly possible that the PC market may pull a rabbit out of its collective hat and put the PC back at the top of the gaming heap.

I have a feeling my next computer upgrade will be a second PS3 and a 32-inch hi-def LCD screen.

It feels like the holidays are more work then they are worth. Even though I had nearly two weeks away from work, I fee like I've worked harder in the last 11 days than I have in the prior month. I refuse to pander to the New Years Revolution idiom, however. I won't make any silly "resolutions" that I am certain not to keep. I will continue forward with my life and try to be the best person that I can be.

Two significant events spurred this entry (and then I discovered something while entering it).

Last things first: Apparently a Turkish hacking group "hacked" my website. It was a pretty innocuous hack. Basically they just inserted a .php file into one of my subdirectories and then linked directly to that file which showed their "You've been hacked by..." banner. (You can see the hacked page HERE.) It was an obvious gaffe on my part; I left that directory writable by all. I've since changed the permissions to close that little loophole and deleted the php file. In the end, I owe Cılgın_HaCKer and Tu3d1 Polat a big THANK YOU for pointing out a silly mistake on my part and for being considerate enough to point it out in a non-destructive way. I'm a bit in awe of the amount of effort involved in finding the pathname. I mean, in retrospect I can see how it was done, but how do you find the places to look for these things? My little web page gets only a few hundred hits each month. Not exactly a high profile site to hack, you know?

Anyway.

Over the New Years weekend, I purchased my first PS3 game. I bought High Velocity Bowling from PSN. It's a lot of fun and it uses the motion sensing technology in the Sixaxis controller to let you literally "throw" the ball. We played it at out New Years Party for a while and it was quite fun. I also downloaded the demo version of Paradise Burnout and Oh MY!! I've played a lot of console games and a lot of driving games and a lot of game demos. This one is a great combination of flash, gameplay and just plain fun! Within 5 minutes of starting it I was completely sold on the game and have already placed a pre-order for it on release. (It comes out on January 22.) So you could say I bought my first TWO PS3 games this last weekend!

Second, my wireless router is giving me fits. It still works great as a wired router, but the wireless part is unreliable. And since the PS3 is connected wirelessly full-time, this will not do. One second it will have a 100% strength signal and connected with blistering WiFi speeds, then, only a mere second or two later, it can't even locate the SSID and the router doesn't even exist! And then a moment later it's back up to 100% strength again. I have no idea why this is happnening, but the router is at least two years old (possibly three years, I'm really not sure how long it's been here) and I'm hoping that it is just a sign of the age of the device. I'm working on a replacement and hopefully that will happen in the next week or so. In the interim, I'm connected to PSN using an unsecured wireless router in my neighbor's house. (Thanks Neighbor! Whomever you are.)

On a related note, one of the gifts we received this year (from Kyle) was a new HD TiVo box. The TiVo uses an optical output for audio. The PS3 also uses an optical output for audio. The problem is that my current receiver only has one optical input for audio. So it looks like it is time to upgrade to a new receiver. The smart money would buy a HDMI capable receiver since the PS3, the TiVo and my 15 month old TV set all use HDMI. Not to mention that single-cable connections are much easier to deal with. So I've started doing research on the next $500 I'm going to spend. Happy New Year!

One nice thing about this time of year is that all of the gaming press is scrambling to put out their version of the "Game of the Year". After reading several of these lists, I've added a few more titles to my wish list of PS3 games. Pretty much all of these can be purchase as "used" copies from Amazon and I would STRONGLY suggest that any gift-giver consider that as an option. The prices are much lower and the quality of the "used" products are typically indistinguishable from new products.

WarHawk - This was already on my list, but after reading more about it (and seeing the new expansion videos) I really want a copy of it now. This is an online only game in the same style as Battlefield 2149. We bought a new USB headset so I can actually use the voice features. As a die-hard online player, this one was already at the top of my wish list and now it's permanently there. If a copy doesn't show up over the holidays I'm certain to buy it.

Heavenly Sword - I downloaded and played the demo version and it looks play a lot like a hopped up version of God of War. Since I really enjoyed GoW, I suspect that this one will be a fun one too. The only drawback that I've seen in the reviews is that the game is stunningly short (but thats seems to be a growing trend in console fare).

The Darkness - I'd never even heard of this one before. I'll probably download the demo for this tonight and see how it feels. The reviews look good though and the description of the gameplay makes it sound a lot like a console-ish version of Half-Life ... without the immersive storyline and lengthy play times. Again a short game. Is a dozen hours of gameplay worth $50? Apparently so, because people buy them.

MotorStorm - This came free with a lot of people's PS3 and I downloaded the demo just "for fun" last weekend. It turned out to be a blast to play with the one track that came with it, although the single track of music was getting mind-numbing by the time I'd run through it a few times. I'd love to have the whole thing. It also has online mulitplayer and how can you go wrong with that?

Puzzle Quest - This is actually a PS2 game, but my PS3 is one of the models that has the compatibility emulator so I can run it. (I've actually tested this with several PS2 games and even a PS-one game. It works!) I know that Karen would eat this one up, and I'm always looking for new and innovative ways for Karen to waste time.

Rachet & Clank: Tools of Destruction - I'm not a big platform player but I played the first R&C game on the PS2 (thanks to Mr. Burdine!) and I was impressed by the storyline and unique weapons. I onlt made it about 60% of the way through the first game before retiring it (and the PS2). (And, no, Zant, I am NOT going to replay the first half of the game, so don't bother suggesting it.) I downloaded the demo level for the new R&C game and it looks to have the same "woohoo" kind of feel. Plus, the folks at Insomniac deserve a cookie.

DiRT - also knowns as Collin McRae Rally 2007. This is a wildcard on my list. I've never been a big racing game fan, but I have always loved simulations. DiRT is higher rated than Motorstorm -- Motorstorm isn;t really a simulation, it's more of an acrade-style "racing" game whereas DiRt is a real racing/simulation game. (I tried a demo of one of the PS3 flight sim games and was annoyed to find that you simply could NOT do any advanced maneuvers like a hammerhead stall, or an immelmann. If you're going to pretend to be a sim... BE A SIM!!!) A different kind of tweaky fun than arcade games, but I'm the tweaky kind of player that enjoys them.

A few months back I bought a Snap! server off of eBay for about $40. It came with four 30G drives (which I still have) but since I had a stack of 80G drives sitting around from the old TROUBLE machine, I swapped those in and formatted the whole thing. It cam out at just under a quarter terrabyte. While that may seem impossible svelte for today's data needs, I've never really had a plethora of things to store on rotating media. Both mine and Karen's computers have tiny (by today's standards) 160G drives. Neither machine is using more than 1/4 of the total drive. I think mine is the fullest with just under 40% used -- including two of three virtual copies of entire DVD images.

Anyway, last week one of the drives in the server failed spectacularly. Oyr first clue was the horrible SCREECH! noise. After a power cycle to test if it was an intermittent problem (as if!) it came up with an even more distressing ka-CHINK! ka-CHINK! ka-CHINK! sound. It literally sounded like a smoke alarm going off, it was so loud. The drive was well and truly dead.

So I ordered a new 120G drive for another $40. Three days later it arrived and I installed it. It was as simple as pulling the old drive, plugging in the new one and powering the server back up. It took about ten hours for the RAID-5 array to rebuild, but the server did it almost automatically and never lost a single byte of data. I'm pretty happy with that.

In other news, Saturday I did my longest run ever. 18.45 miles in total. I've never before had doubts about finishing an event. A lot of people express amazement about my triathlon participation but after the first race I completed, there has never been any question in my mind about how each event would end. The only question was how long it would take. But I'm not so sure now.

After 18-and-a-half miles I was ready to die. That single run was as difficult as doing the entire Half-Vineman race (or at least it felt that way to me). The marathon is another 8 miles on top of that. I just don't know. I'm not sure I can pull another 8 miles out of me to finish. Forget about a "good" finish, just getting there may be more than I'm capable of. I'm sitting here writing this entry a full two days later and I'm -still- suffering from that run.

It took just shy of 4 hours to go 18.45 miles. That puts me looking at a 6 hour marathon finish. Assuming, of course, that I can find another two hours of running somewhere in my legs. If this training run was any indication, I may need medical attantion at the finish line.

I suppose this post is largely irrelevant. We've already bought the game so the concept of a seven-day "demo" period is no longer valid. But I persists for two reasons. First, we haven't actually -received- out retail copies and are thus still playing on the seven-day trial period. Secondly, because I keep thinking of game mechanics that I haven't discussed yet. On that note...

LotRO has several little mini-game features. I know that some people would insist that a MMO doesn't need mini-games since it should be entertaining enough on its own. But these little mini-games are the kind of thing that give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside. When you've slain your ten-thousandth goblin and are looking at the quest counter and asking why you still need 65,000 more reputation points until you can get the über Sword of Ass-Kicking, you can just turn off the grind and play a little silly sub-game. I suppose that's the argument against mini-games as well; killing the ten-thousand orcs should be entertaining enough that you don't need to play a mini-game.

But here's the thing: MMO players like being "in" their fantasy worlds. LotRO in particular, is a simply stunningly beautiful place to be. Call it escapism or OCD or simply obsession, but once we're plugged into a game we don't want to leave it, even if it has stopped being entertaining and fun. I suppose that's why so many players leave a game with a mental "bang" and deride the game after they've left it. They still want to be "in" that place, they just can't stand the game that they have to pay when they are there. So, in my way of thinking, little mini-games that allow you, as the player, to stay "in" the game world, but don't force you to "do" the game... well that's a good thing.

The little mini-game that brings this up is: in-game music. By equipping an instrument, the player can just play that instrument and be entertaining to others as well as themselves. Obviously this requires no little talent. It's actually quite difficult due to latency issues and lag spikes. Imagine playing a piano were there was a 1/2 second delay between pressing the key and the hammer striking the string. Then start randomly changing the delay so that it could be 1/2 second... or it could be instant. That's the challenge to playing one of these things. I tried making a keyboard macro to play an instrument, but it ended up being just plain awful!! I'm very impressed with the people who can do this and do it well.

The really interesting part is that if you play (or watch/listen, for those of us who are not in the 3% of people with real musical aptitude) an instrument in a tavern, you increase your Hope. Hope, in the context of the game is a sliding scale stat that increases (and decreases) as you play the game. It is a straight up additive stat to all damage and healing you do and how much effect your armor has. For example, if you had 5 Hope, you would do 105% damage but only take 95% from monsters. So there is a real gameplay reason to play the music mini-game.

Speaking of gameplay, I wanted to make a little comment about the rate of XP in LotRO. Specifically, the rate at which the character "grows" as you play the game. While it seemed (and felt) relatively speedy the first couple of days, it quickly slowed to a crawl. It might just simply be that I've gotten spoiled by the lightning fast advancement in DAoC, but gaining levels in LotRO seems positively glacial. Not that we are running out of entertaining things to do. No, quite the contrary. We both have 33 quests to finish (not all of them are the same) and there is a LOT of the game "world" that we have yet to explore. (NOTE: We did, in fact, finish our Prologues last night, but I want to wait until we get our retail boxes before we start in on the main storyline.)

In 47 hours and 17 minutes of playtime, I've only hit the lofty peak of level 17. Over half of those levels came in the first day. Now, I'll admit that part of the reason my leveling has slowed is that I've been kinda "idling" and helping Karen on her quests. Looking at my list of active quests, I'd estimate that 1/4 of them are "grey" (i.e. much lower level than me) and I'm only getting 50-ish XP for completing those. Green colored (easy) MOBs are only giving me about 5XP per kill. And it takes something like 5000 XP to make a level now. Worse, I've noticed that the difficulty is starting to scale up so I'm forced to fight easier and easier MOBs, which means even less XP.

I'm hoping that the difficult is due to my crappy mix-n-match equipment. With no access to the crafted components that I need to make armor, I'm stuck with quest drops and random loot items. Karen took a trade that includes weaponcrafting and I already have Metalworking so between just us two we have all armor, shields and weapons covered. But neither of us can MAKE anything because the trial version doesn't allow player-to-player trading! I need boiled hides (which I can't make) and she needs metal bars (which she can't make) and we have no way to get them!!

Just another reason to look forward to the retail version showing up later this week. I'm really counting that days at this point. I'm sure there will be a few days where we can't log in when the trial expires, before the boxes get here.

The last item I wanted to comment on is the User Interface. The LotRO UI is incredibly powerful and has a lot of cool features. Unfortunately, it is a real bear to figure out. For example, you might click a widget to open a window. Inside the window there might be tabs along the top to select different aspects of that window. Inside each tab there might be more tabs, this time along the bottom to select different aspects of that particular tab. And inside of THAT there might be a collapsible multi-level list. Suppose the button/quest/item is at the bottom of that hierarchy and you didn't already know where it was. Would you intuitively just know, "Oh, I open this window select this tab, then that OTHER tab, then click the plus sign here, here and here and scroll down three pages and then click on the thing." No you wouldn't. We've been playing the game for six days now and we're still finding little hidden UI "tricks" like that.

The only saving grace is that nearly everything in the UI has a mouseover tooltip. Even the options screen. For example, when you mouse-over the description for a graphics setting a tooltip pops up and tells you -exactly- what that option does and how much it will affect you performance and at what cost. That's nice.

My thinking is that the UI team really didn't do much QC testing with new players. They tossed it at experienced computer users and long-time MMO players and called it a day. If you aren't intimidated by the UI then it can be quite powerful. But you really have to be willing to mouse over things, READ the tooltips and then choose the appropriate action. And very often that requires a lot of computer savvy and a lot of MMO experience.

Today will be our last day in Middle Earth until the retail boxes arrive.

Several things happened over the weekend in LotRO.

First, my co-worker Chris downloaded and installed the trial version. He started a Man Hunter. On Friday night we were up playing until 3AM doing various quests in Bree-Land. Between his high (ranged) DPS and my tanking we were able to breeze through a lot of quests. There were still a few that stopped us dead but it was a lot of fun. Chris also convinced his brother Jaime to install the trial. Jaime started a Man Champion. I haven't had a chance to play with Jaime yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Secondly, I ordered two retail boxes for the game. After a little poking around, I was able to find retail versions for $18 (shipped!) each. The monthly fee is $15 a month, and the box comes with a "free" (ha!) month. So essentially, we're paying $3 for the retail activation code. (LATE BREAKING NEWS: The vendor may discount the shipping since we ordered two copies, making the initial month even less expensive.) I don't think this game will be a long-time feature in our household, but it seems entertaining enough for a month or two.

Third, my impressions of the game thus far:

I forgot to mention this in prior postings, but LotRO plays nicely with the G15 keyboard. As soon as the game starts up, it takes control of the LCD screen and displays my character's hitpoints (called "morale") and Power level (Power is a combination of mana, rage and endurance). It also displays my character's "mood" which has an effect on how much damage I do and take, but I'm not sure what makes that go up and down. Still it is quite cool to see that happen automatically.

The presentation is pretty damn good. My hat's off to the Turbine artists and musicians that put this together. The graphics are nothing short of beautiful. Some of the scenery is postcard perfect. The models of the animal type MOBs are very lifelike. Heck, even the monster type MOBs are lifelike and most of them don't exist. I can't think of anything I've -seen- in the game that makes me think I'm playing a computer game. Clipping is done very well. The textures are clean and very realistic. Even the particle effects are above average. Graphically, the game is stunning.

Soundwise, I'm equally happy. The background music (which, I'll admit, I have turned of in every other MMO I've ever played) is unobtrusive and very thematic. When you're running across a sunny, verdant hillside, hearing a soft guitar strumming or cheerful flute in the background just seems... well, it feels 'right' somehow. Even though the landscape in the Ered Luin is almost identical to The Shire (aside from the building architecture, which is VERY different), the musical themes make it feel somehow 'older'. And when you cross the boundary between elf- and dwarf-land there is a distinct and very noticeable change in background 'feel'. The transition between environmental and combat music is smooth and fits into the actual combat.

My initial concerns about character individuality have been resolved. The Deeds and Traits system seems to be the distinguishing factor. By accomplishing Deeds, characters gain access to little passive mini-abilities that increase their power in a variety of small ways. Deeds that gain you Traits are many and varied. Some are simple: visit five locations. (Of course, you have to -find- the locations first. They aren't listed on the map and you aren't given directions. You just have to stumble across them as you play.) Or run a dozen FedEx tasks between point A and point B. (To mix it up a little, if you come within a certain radius of several moving obstacles you automatically 'fail' the current mission.) Some are combat related: kill NN of a specific monster type. (The killtask Deeds typically have smaller, less important rewards, though.) There are even Deeds that have to do with finishing a certain number of quests in a given area.

I'm sure a hardcore player would see the Deeds system as a liability, but the way it has been working for us is that we don't do Deeds that gain us 'uber' Traits, we just play the game and we accomplish Deeds naturally as we finish other things. Personally, I think that was the intent of the developer.

Speaking of hardcore players, LotRO as a whole seems to be a MUCH more casual-friendly game than anything I've ever seen. People claim that WoW is casual-friendly, but my experience was that it was actually quite hardcore with a thin veneer of causal-ity slapped on top to make it "look" casual. So instead of having to find a MOB camp and grinding for hours, Wow gives you a quest to kill 50 MOBs in a specific camp (and gives you directions!). But that's -still- grinding.

There are still those types of quests in LotRO, but there are also a lot of interesting ones. A couple come to mind that are completely non-combat related. For example, in one quest where I had to gather mushrooms from a bog. The bog was full of slugs and rats. The slugs smelled awful and if you killed any of them, the slime would coat the mushrooms and the quest would fail. So not only was it a non-combat quest it was an ANTI-combat quest. Another example is the 'mail delivery' sequence. All you need to do is get from point A to point B within an allotted time. The catch is that you can't use any skill, interact with anything, talk to anyone, or be attacked by anything. Oh and the aforementioned moving obstacles wander around on the 'safe' roads, and if you come too close to any of them you instantly fail the quest.

Finally, the BIG STORY in the game. Someone made a movie or three about that, as I recall. And there might have been a multi-volume book as well. Yes, the story of the War of the Ring is alive and well in the game and while you play you "see" the story happening. There is a main quest line that every single player in the game can do that directly relates to the meta-story. The opening of that quest is solo-able, and is unique for each different race. The race specific quest sequences are considered the 'Prologue' of the 'Book'. Once you finish your racial Prologue, you get to start Book 1, Chapter 1.

We finished the Hobbit Prologue for Karen last night. The plan is to complete the Elf Prologue tonight (or maybe tomorrow) and then sweep up the Man Prologue for Jaime (when he hits a high enough level).

One of the strengths of Turbine (as a publisher) has always been monthly episodic content. They've been releasing new "chapters" in the story every month and are currently up to Chapter 11 in Book 1. I haven't seen the end game yet (for obvious reasons) but if they follow the book layout in the print materials (and I have to assume that they are) then Book 1 will end with the hobbits reaching Rivendell. (Currently, Rivendell is the south-easternmost location in the game world.) If I were placing bets, I would expect Book 2 to add all the lands between Rivendell and Moria to the game landscape. I would also bet on Book 2 being a "for pay" expansion, doubling the size of the game world, adding a ton of more end-game "raid" content as well as more high-level solo stuff.

I saw this game at E3 in 2006. I asked a Turbine marketroid how their product distinguished itself from other MMOs currently out (WoW, DAoC, etc) and those in development (WAR). The deer-in-the-headlights look on his face was priceless. Apparently that was 'too hard' of a question. The stammered answer that he ended up giving was "Well.... it's... it's... it's THE LORD OF THE RINGS!!!" As if the title and IP was going to be enough to carry the product. I was not impressed and basically wrote off the game as a non-issue. I'm glad I took the time to try it out.

I've only played for five days so far, but my impression is that LotRO is a very polished MMO product. The more I learn about it, the more I like the concept and the execution. I'm not sure why it isn't sweeping the MMO-scape (maybe I'll find out as we level up) but as I think about it, this -is- the kind of game that I might keep an account active for and only play periodically. I haven't seen how much (or how little, as the case may be) each "Chapter" adds to the game as a whole, and that may not be worth $15 each month ($30 for two of us). When I finally have WAR, I may drop this like an acid filled clay pot. But for now, I'm feeling very excited about LotRO and am really looking forward to getting our retail product keys later this week.

Finally, I'm almost embarrassed to admit it but xfire has been tracking my online time. Since I've installed the LotRO client (last Wednesday!) I've logged over 40 hours in-game! That's a jaw-dropping 8-hours a day average. I suspect that will drop off as time goes on; I'm still dealing with the "Ooo Shiney!" effect.

I'm up to level 13 now with just over 15 hours played.

I find it interesting that, for a game that is so heavily biased towards PvE play, that the quest system is so weak. I would compare it to WAR but I'm bound by an NDA on that one and I don't want to risk my access. I will say that LotRO's quest system leaves a LOT to be desired.

As I've gone up in levels I'm starting to find that quest completion is a much larger fraction of my total experience than it used to be. At low levels I would gain maybe 50xp for killing a MOB and 300xp for finishing a quest. So essentially, unless the quest only took as long as killing six MOBs, it really was a losing proposition to do the quests. At level 13 I'm only getting about 16xp for killing MOBs but quests are granting nearly 1kxp. So finishing a quest is a big deal.

LotRO's quest designs tend to be fairly circuitous. The book of Deeds lists how many you've completed. I knew what mine said, but I suspected Karen didn't, so I asked her how many quests she thought she had finished. She guesstimated fifty. When we looked, it said she had completed only three. The reason is that each "quest" is actually a multipart task. For example, you might have a quest to go gather grape vines. You go out and fight your way to the vineyard and click on the dozen or so 'hotspot' vines to "gather" them and then go back. You get a reward and are offered a follow-up quest to get a wine jug from a vendor in the next town. Did you just finish a quest? No, you didn't. Even though it seems as if the follow-up quest is a new (but related) quest -- it even has a different quest name! -- it is actually a continuation of the original quest and you haven't actually "finished" anything yet. You need to pick the grapes, retrieve the jug, deliver the wine, return with the letter, and kill the Goblin leader that over-ran the vineyard (each of which is a seemingly distinct "quest") to get credit for finishing ONE quest. Doing each quest in serial would be impossibly time consuming so you end up doing six or seven of them at once and having to try to keep track of the various storylines simultaneously.

Speaking of storylines, the stories that the quests tell are usually pretty entertaining and reasonably well written. I tend to not read quest text unless I'm testing, but I've taken to at least giving them a passing scan. If nothing else, Turbine has a great team of creative writers. Notice I said CREATIVE writers. Because no matter how indisputable the entertainment value is, the directions that the quests present is often convoluted and occasionally just plain wrong. For example, the quest may direct you to go "north". In actuality, the location you should be looking for is three steps to the north, then 10 miles to the west. While the destination -is- technically north, if you were to put the two points on a map, it's pretty clear that you should be going west, not north. Even worse is when the route follows any of the many roads. For example the directions will say to follow the road south and east. What they MEANT is to take the south fork at the first intersection then east at the next one. The reason this is confusing is because the east road actually heads north-east, which is completely opposite from what the "south and east" directions say.

Occasionally, the directions leave out particularly important information. One quest told me to see a NPC in some town. What they meant was, go to the town, take the bridge across the river and then enter the adjacent housing zone (A process that, by itself, is not intuitive -- you have to select a housing market, select an existing house and then press the "visit" button. I never would have figured that out without spoiler site help!) and then run to the merchant square. Which is, inconveniently, named the same as the original town.

I've gotten to the point where I will make a decent effort at finding the quest location on my own. If, after 15 minutes I start to get frustrated, I alt-tab out of the client, do a websearch on the quest name and find the coordinates of the end point. I'm a lot less frustrated by the quests, but I'm also not enjoying the fact that I have to rely on a spoiler site to solve what should be simple fedex or killtask quests.

Despite my protestations to the contrary, I caved in and started crafting in LotRO. I chose to do Armorcrafting, as I always do. I did like the fact that shields are created by armorsmiths. This is different from Camelot, where shields are the domain of the Weaponscrafter. But one similarity between LotRO and DAoC armorcrafting is dependence on other crafters.

Making armor in LotRO is a multi-step process. First you have to find ore deposits. As a new Armorer you can only "prospect" two kinds of Ore: Copper and Tin. You use these to make Bars (still using the Prospector trade skill) or either Copper (cheap skill gains but useless, like Camelot's "trinketing") or Bronze (not as much skill gain but used to make armor). Bronze Bars can be converted into Bronze Plate and Bronze Chain using the Metalworking skill. You need both of those items to make a single piece of armor. But that's only 2/3 of the ingredients. You also need Tanned Hides. Unfortunately, Tanning is part of the Forester tradeskill and you don't have access to that as an Armorer. So you HAVE to find another player do do that for you.

Or not. My solution was to switch to Forestry, causing my Metalworking to 'reset' to zero. I tanned the 50-ish Hides I had been collecting and then switched back to Armoring. I lost all the skill in Tanning that I had accumulated, but that was fine. I just needed the Tanned Hides. Using my ill-gotten Hides I created the lowest ranked shield I could make and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a level 8 item! So even at the very start, I'm making items that are usable at a higher level than I expected. The lowest armor I can create is level 15 and I premade a few pieces for when I reach that lofty goal.

Aside from the requirement to have a Forester tradesman to work with, the real bottleneck to Armory is gaining the Ore. It isn't buyable so you have to forage for it yourself, or buy it from a Auctioneer. Sadly, those of us on a 7-day trial are not allowed to use the Auctioneer, so I'm stuck foraging. I have a small collection of Ore now and I take a few minutes out of my game every time I see a deposit to mine it.

One final item of note was something that Karen found late in the evening. There is a quest/mini-game in The Shire that turns you into a level 1 Chicken. You are given a couple of simple quests: "find so many worms", "go to these three farms". As a Chicken you cant attack, and you're easy prey for any wandering wolf-kind in the game. Karen had a blast playing around with the Chicken-mode for about an hour and I was chuckling beside her as I watched. Pretty interesting option, if I say so.

We have a guest staying with us this weekend but I intend to try to get in as much playing time as possible.

Some time ago, I downloaded and installed the Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) client on both of our gaming computers. With Camelot in decline and due to some recent changes in that game, we just stopped playing it pretty much. But we both still enjoy playing games together. I thought it would be a good thing to see what is "out there" and LotRO has a free-of-charge seven day trial period.

The client download is 5.6GB. Luckily, we're all networked so I only had to download it once and then copy it from machine to machine, but on our pokey outside-the-limit DSL we only get about 100MB/min at best. Typical download speeds are usually about half of that on average. It ended up taking about two days to complete the download.

Once installed, we had to patch. Unfortunately, each machine had to patch on its own. And the patch server would hang about halfway through the process. Thankfully, it would patch file-by-file so it was able to resume with only a little bit of lost time. The patch was about another MB each, so that took another solid day-and-a-half for each computer.

Overall it took just under a week to download and install the client. And then it sat. We only were going to get seven days so we wanted to make sure it was a time frame that we did not have other commitments. Last night we activated the trial accounts and started playing.

To activate the account, you have to use a web-based from and give them an email account to send a product code to. Karen got hers within about a minute. Mine however, was not so easy. I don't know why, but they refused to send me an activation code. No error message, no failure notification, no warning at all. Just no activation code. After waiting for a goodly time, Karen suggested I do my training run, so I left and jogged my 8-mile "moderate" run. When I got back, still no code! After a bit of frustrating tinkering, I created a "dummy" email account on my domain, sent a test email to myself to make sure it was working and then entered that. Within about a minute I had my code.

Upon starting the game we were given a suggestion to start on three specific servers. We chose the Meneldor server. I have no idea what the current clime is on other servers, but our experience so far has been pretty good. The areas we've seen so far are very sparsely populated, which is good (no grieving) but also bad (no socialization).

We tried to start nearby each other. The game starts you out in racially distinct areas. For example, if you chose to be a hobbit, you start out in Hobbit-lands. Similarly, if you are an Elf, you start out in a Elf-area. The two are not the same. Since I was stymied by the lack of an activation code, Karen had the opportunity to start first. She chose to make a Hobbit Minstrel named Corabell and started out in The Shire. When I got in, I wanted to do my typical melee-centric class, and I've always had a soft spot for Elves (how original... NOT!) so I (re)created my 'standard' Paladin-ish character, Penric. I tried to pick a location near the Shire as my starting spot. As it turned out, I ended up in Ered Luin. For those unfamiliar with Middle Earth geography, this is the area just west of The Shire, Unfortunately, Karen's questing was taking her EAST, into the Bree-lands. I comment to her that had I know she was going to be moving into Bree, I would have chosen Rivendell as my home base and worked west towards her. (I can't imagine that the game would push Rivendell starters east into the Misty Mountains... but maybe they do.)

We ended up playing for about five hours. At the end of the night we were both level 8. I can't speak for Karen, but the quests I was getting were starting to nudge me east into The Shire (or perhaps on to bigger and better things). So even though we weren't able to meet up right away, I got the impression that we were heading towards one another.

Random notes:

• Graphically, the game is very reminiscent of Asheron's Call. This makes sense since it is the same developer.
• It's hard to say with the short time we've been playing, but I'm already very concerned about character distinction. As I've gained levels I've seen new skills added to my options, but they all seem to be the -same- skills for the class. I don't wanna be a carbon-copy of every other Guardian in the game!
• The "Deeds" system is pretty cool. Already in the short time I've been playing I found a title that I wanted to get, simply for the sake of having the title, and sidelined my question JUST to become a Guardian of Ered Luin. I'm a little disappointed that I've already lost the opportunity to gain the >i>Undying title - you get that one if you make it to level 20 without dying at all. I managed to "accidentally" die by falling off of a cliff while on autorun. OOPS!
• The "Traits" system is also kinda neat, but I can see it becoming very grindy since the requirements are pretty high for a very minimal reward. But as a long time gamer I know that oft times even a minor power differential becomes a "must have" in the end game, essentially "forcing" players to complete even the most simplistic and rote tasks an improbably large number of times until they get the miniscule reward. But if you're vying for a group slot with a guy who has a permanent +1 to a stat, then you too will kill 100,000 rats just to get back on an even footing.
• Combat at this level is a little frenetic. The class I selected has two "taunt" styles, two AE "swipe" attacks (which can also be used on single opponents), two react ional attacks (need to wait for the proper opening), one "anytime" and one short-duration buff proc attack. Juggling timers during a fight to make sure that every swing is styled is a little difficult, but I imagine that it will settle down later.
• I'm seeing a petty significant power disparity between classes already. The "Hunter" class (LotRO's ranged DPS class) seems to be able to kill MOBs much faster than a melee class can ever dream of. I hope that they are equally weak in melee combat but not having played one, I don't know. I do know that players are tricks things and given a ranged class that can do oodles of damage it might be all but impossible to actually get to them to find out how squishy they actually are.

We have a dinner date tonight, so we wont have much time to continue. I'm torn between keeping going with the Guardian or restarting with a Champion. With a limited amount of time to play, I probably will keep on going with the class I've already selected.

It arrived on Monday. I spent the evening hooking up the cables (had to fish a new 5-prong component cable up to the TV) and updated the OS to version 2.00. And we watched Serenity again. It works as a DVD player, that much I can be sure of. The DVD control is done using the PS3 controller, but it's a little less than intuitive or user-friendly. And with no IR input, getting a master remote isn't really an option. I'm looking at ways around this (if any).

Tuesday morning I checked the PS3 documentation. It's all online, no printed manual. It turns out I had set a setting set wrong and wasn't getting HD video from it. I changed the setting and OH My GOD! What an amazing difference in the image quality. Having done that I played with the DVD playback a bit. It only "upscales" a DVD if you use a HDMI cable, and I'm not so DVD will still be 480p just like before. Then I sat down and played a little bit of God of War 2. Yea, its 'just' a PS2 game but I never finished it and there is no memory card slot on the PS3 so all of my old saved games can't move over. That's kind of unfortunate since I have about 15 hours into the first Ratchet and Clank game that I can't access any longer.

After work on Wednesday, I went to the local mall to see how much PS3 games cost. They look to be about $60 each 'new' and only about $10 less for used ones. That still seems like a lot. I browsed craigslist for about 45 seconds and saw a bunch of PS3 games for $30-40. Most of them are in the $55 range on amazon (used) so I may need to bottom feed fro a while. There's really only a couple of titles I'm interested in anyway. I just don't have enough time to play an extensive library.

By the way, I'd like to point out that people are fucking IDIOTS! Maybe its because I live in a sheltered microcosm. I work at an engineering firm where people are probably more intelligent than average. I hang out with pretty technically apt people that would best be described as 'fast learners'. I play in triathlon which is a haven for obsessive-compulsive persons. But just walking around in a shopping center for 30 minutes has me ready to go buy weaponry and wait for the end of the world. I swear 95% of the people I saw there have no fucking clue what the hell is going on, and no desire to know. I often wonder how the megacorporations have made so much money. Walking around a mall, I began to understand. Those morons are just walking meatbags with money falling out of them. Hell, I'm fairly socially-conscious and I wouldn't feel bad taking everything those people have, and leaving them to rot.

Anyway, after that experience, I went home and loaded up Settlers 6 on my PC. I used to love the Settlers series. In fact, I still have my hard copy of the original Settlers game for the Amiga (thats the ONLY remnant I have from that system). I played the first five or six scenarios and Karen kept mentioning that it looked like a game that she would enjoy. I think she would, too. It has a 4-player PvP mode, but the core of the game is in city-building not combat. The player has almost no control over the actual fighting so it is a lot less of a RTS than, say, Warcraft 3. It's more like Sim City with a PvP gloss on top. If the rest of the missions keep up the same pace (about 60-90 minutes each), I might have to finish the single-player campaign before diving into the PS3.

I added several PS3 items to my wish list. For those interested, it is the clickable link on the upper left of the sidebar. Yes, the red and green one.

I installed it on Karen's computer on Thursday morning, but we were walking out the door before the installation completed. As the Penny Arcade people put it, we have been swept up by "the whorls of Famhovor, the Family Holiday Vortex". We should be home on Monday.

We should have the fisrt disc of Planet Earth from netflix in the mailbox when we get home. The blu-ray version. I can't wait to see what a BD disc looks like on the 60-inch TV!

(Also, for what it's worth this is the first "real" blog entry that is being made in a long time. I'm all caught up with re-entering the old stuff and moving on into the future! Whee!)

Only three articles remain to be re-entered. By the time Thanksgiving weekend gets here, I should be all caught up.

I bought a PS3 off of eBay. As of this writing it is on a truck somewhere between Syracuse, NY and San Pablo, CA. It should be delivered next Monday. I picked out three games and put them on my xmas wish list. I also added a blu-ray movie and a couple of PS3 accessories.

I started playing The Witcher last night. After getting it loaded, I sat through the 7-minute opening animation. Then the 5-minute introduction sequence. By the time I was given control, a good 15-minutes had passed since I first started the game. And I only had control for literally 5 seconds before the game asserted itself and started talking again. I felt like I wasn't -playing- the game, but rather I was watching it play itself. Eventually I was given control and was allowed to play. I did manage to finish the entire Prolouge and acquired my first "card" (the game allows you to collect "cards" with erotic images of the in-game women that you have virtual sex with).

Maybe it's because I've been playing PvP MMOs for the last seven years, but I found The Witcher to be incredibly boring, with uninsipired, simplistic combat, almost ridiculously easy puzzles, a whole hell of a lot of exposition and very little "game".

If you read this blog, you may or may not have noticed that I've been (re)adding new (old) entries to the page at a rate of 3-4 every day. Because the new (old) stuff has been added to the BOTTOM on the blog, not to the top as you would expect. So if you just pop in here, see that the same top entry is listed and then leave, you're missing all the fun stuff that is going on below the break.

As of this writing, I've (re)added 111 entries to the BOTTOM of the blog, covering the period from December 23, 2002 through July 3, 2003. That six-month time frame covers a significant phase of my life as I was going through the final death throes of my (semi) relationship with Kristen, exploring my newfound single-ness after a failed long-term marriage (unrelated to Kristen) and, interestingly enough, entry number 111 is when my life entered it's current phase.

I've been re-reading my own writing, four years later. When I originally typed it all up, it felt so personal and each word was practically -dripping- with emotion and meaning. It felt very much like exhibitionism when I wrote it. But as I re-read it, I'm forced to admit it isn't all that. Yes, it's interesting and the drama part is kinda fun, but I remember how I felt and the words simply don't capture those emotions the way I thought they did when I wrote them. I'd like to think it is because I've gotten more mature.

It's like looking back on a letter written to the person you had crush on in junior high school and realizing how silly you were.

(It's worth noting that the top three entries on the front page are 'current' and only the bottom two are part of the 111 that have been added back in. Those bottom two will be updated as I continue to add the next 97 entries, but the top three will remain static. The archive link at the very bottom will get you to all 111 posts.)

Meanwhile, in the not-so-silly reminiscing corner, a few days ago I was reading one of the blogs that I follow (Eating Bees) and there was a link to The Escapist that had a link to Penny Arcade that had a link to a report on the PAX show that had a link to the keynote address given by Wil Wheaton. While I'm not a big fan of Mr. Wheaton's acting work, every time I stumble across his writing or his speaking, I can't help but be impressed by him. I literally laughed out loud more than a few times while listening to this speech. Be warned, this is nearly an hour long, but if you're 'plugged into' games or gaming you'll probably find something in there for you. Well worth the time investment.

Here's the URL in case you missed the clickthrough in the body: http://www.pennyarcadeexpo.com/PAX07_Keynote.mp3

While doing some reading on PAX I also discovered a link to Jonathan Coulton perfoming his song "Re Your Brains". And thus discovered the entire Thing a Week music collection. Now I should note that this is not the kind of music that I typically listen to,and it sure as hell isn't original (most of the music is recycled pop from past decades) but the song content made me laugh out loud in more than one case and I'm sure you've heard some of this before.

And finally, it's not summer any longer, but I stub=mbled across this great trailer for a movie I've never heard of but I simply MUST go see in the theatre. D-War Three great finds in one day!!!

In less entertaining news, my "wireless wire" (ie wireless bridge) the DWL-810+ arrived today. I'll finally get the stupid ethernet cable off the floor and have the torrent/winmx client machine back. About time!!

My new computer is assembled and finally works.

I purchased new central components (mainboard, CPU, RAM) to upgrade my current system; TROUBLE wasn't terribly slow, but I was noticing video hitches and frame rate issues in a lot of games. Especially WAR. So I decided to pop for an upgrade. The parts came in late July and I assembled them on the 30th. Unfortunately, there were "issues" and the whole thing failed time and again. It turned out to be failed RAM, which I sent back to the vendor. Once I put in some good RAM the whole thing went swimmingly. WHEELS has been up and running 24/7 for four days now.

I also bought a small fileserver. The four 80G Maxtor drives from TROUBLE (which was why the system was so much trouble!) are now living in a Snap server in a RAID5 configuration. They formatted to a tiny bit under 1/4T. The only real drawback is that the server is loud so I'm going to put it in the spare bedroom. I'm still working on how to get it on the network permanently. Right now there is a net cable running across the house and the third computer (which will be the guts from TROUBLE) has no connection. Between three computers, and a print server, all of the hard-wired ports on my router are full. So either I buy a bigger 8-port router, or I try to find a wireless solution. I think a D-link DWL-G810 will do the trick.

In other news, we've found a new MMO that is taking our time. It's a kind of 'casual' MMO and it is light on stats and items but still oddly entertaining and fun. Don't laugh, but we're playing Puzzle Pirates. Go figure.

My blog has been offline for the last year or so. The reason this occurred was... complicated.

As you may or may not know, my blog is powered by some custom perl/CGI scripts that I created back in Y2K. Last April, my webspace account was "upgraded" to a new server and all of my CGI scripts broke. Being a busy boy (and lazy to boot), I never 'got around' to fixing them. Until now. I did, however, upgrade all of the pages to use CSS compliant HTML. All of the tables are gone. As a result, the HTML shrank by over 2k per page!

I also purchased a new domain name and this page is now available at www.TheRealStupid.com.

In the interim, the main database where all of my past blog entries have been stored was corrupted. I had to manually pull all of the entries out in plaintext. (Yes, I could have written a script to do that too, but there were only 208 entries and the time to write the script probably would have been longer than the time it took me to pull the entries out by hand.) As of right now, they are (in)conveniently stored in a giant Excel spreadsheet.

While I was pulling the entries out, I realized what made this page so popular when it was active. (As a side note, at one point, my little personal blog was getting over unique 100 hits PER DAY!) The entries here range from sublime to the idiotic, from the pointless to the profound, from entertaining to bo-o-ring. The articles which are the most poignant are the ones written when my life was in the greatest turmoil, and the most useless postings are when I devolve into a reporter of facts only. Clearly I'm a better "writer" than I am a "reporter".

In the past few months, I've started reading chelseagirl's pretty dumb things blog, and when I read every entry I've every written here, I see a lot of similarities. Obviously, her focus is a little different from mine, but not terribly so. One of her articles which really hit home for me was her second anniversary solipsism. It was this posting, among other factors, that gave me the incentive to revisit my own blog.

Another major push was Amber Night's recent answer to "the end of the blog" meme.

I will be adding the past entires back in in chronological order until I'm caught up. I will be adding them back in at the rate of 4 of 5 per day, so don't go crazy with the refresh button just yet! If you miss an entry or two, feel free to use the 'complete archive' link at the bottom of the page. Amazingly enough, it actually works. I'll be correcting all of my old typos as I reenter the data, and some entires may simply be archive. For example, race reports will be pulled out of the blog and lovingly stored under the EVENTS tab on the left where they belong. So, hold onto your hats, grab a drink and get ready for a bumpy ride!

IMPORTANT NOTE: Be sure and check the DATE at the bottom of each entry before jumping to conclusions!!

We're finally back online.

On March 16, our DSL went away. I called the tech support number for Earthlink to see what was up and got put on hold with an automated message about the wait time being six minutes. About five minutes later, I heard a click and the line was dropped. I was slightly annoyed, but I figured someone pushed too many buttons and I was accidentally disconnected. When I called back, I got a message that tech support was aware of the issue and were working on the problem. Apparently I was not alone in having my DSL drop out and tech support was basically closed. So we called it a night and went to bed.

The next day, the DSL was still not back. I called tech support expecting to get the same message. Instead I was connected to support rep and told them my DSL was out. They had me jump through the usual hoops (reboot your computer, disconnect the router, connect directly to the DSL modem, new cables, etc.) but nothing helped. After a bit, the rep asked how old the modem was. When I told him that I had first received it in April of 2000, they offered to send me a new DSL modem. Of course I was going to have to pay for the new modem and shipping.... When I laughed in his ear, he quickly backpedaled and offered to send it free of charge.

It took nearly a week to get the new device, mostly because there was a weekend in the middle. I got the new modem on the 22nd and plugged it in, but to no avail. No DSL service. I called tech support back and informed them of my issue. They ran several tests and then scheduled a tech to come out to my home to look at the premises wiring. The problem was that they couldn't schedule it without me giving them a day when I was available at my home. I told them that I worked full time and I would be available for a short block of time, but they would have to choose the block. My mistake, since the block I got was Thursday afternoon, March 30!

After two weekends without DSL, the tech arrived. He checked my phone jack (no DSL), and then checked at the NID/MPOS (no DSL). He rolled up all his stuff and left to check at the Central Office. Apparently the DSL was active there, which put the ball into SBC's court; the problem was the wiring between the CO and my premises. According to the tech, it would be 24 to 48 hours to repair, but it was already late Thursday so I wasn't expecting any joy until Monday of the following week.

Monday came and no DSL service. I called tech support at lunchtime to find out the status and they told me it would be up in 4 hours. Joy! 5 hours later, still no DSL. I called back again. They told me it would be running by 10AM on Tuesday. Okay. At noon on Tuesday, still no DSL. I called again. They assured me that it would be fixed in one hour. At 6PM I got home from work and DSL was still not active. I called tech support again. They told me that they had identified the problem and to call back at noon on Wednesday. I did so and was informed that they had identified the problem and technicians were working on it. The sad part is that the problem was identified the prior Thursday afternoon, and technicians had been "working on it" for over three (business) days.

After another three calls to tech support, I came home from work on Thursday to find my DSL was working. Total time offline was 21 days. If you sent me email in this time period, I'm not ignoring you, I just haven't been able to get to my email at home. I'm working through my email now and should have it all cleared out by the end of the weekend.

We did our second run of the year this last weekend. (It should have been the third run, but we were sick for the Valentine's Day race in Concord.) This was our third time running the Carneros Vineyard run. We lucked out and the weather actually broke long enough for us to do the entire race without getting drenched. It was raining like crazy when we left Santa Rosa, and it started raining again as we were walking back to the car after the race -- the break in the rain was just long enough for us to do the race.

This race is a bit unusual in that they encourage people to bring their dogs to the race. I saw at least five dogs that were running the event, and at least two did the entire 10km. I was passed right away by the dachshund and even though it only has legs that are 5-inches long, it finished a good ten minutes faster than me. The 1000-year old black lab that I chased the entire way finished about a minute ahead of me.

I was sad to see myself getting passed by a lot of people in the second half of the race. This race is a mass-start, and usually by the time you reach the halfway point on a race like this, people have sorted themselves out by speed and the only real rank changes depend on pacing. If you pace it right, you should conserve energy in the first half and go slightly faster in the second half of the race. I failed at this and was passed by a good dozen (or more) people in the second half. I'm very disappointed in my fitness level, but that's to be expected since I haven't been doing any real training this year at all. (I've updated my training "plan" to reflect the lack of workouts this year.)

I ended up with a 9-minute pace overall.

So we went to the Super Bowl party in February.

As it runs out, we brought home a really nasty cold. As a result of that cold, we missed one 10km race (Valentine's Day Race in Concord, CA), a vacation in Yosemite (that I had to make reservations for in September of last year), the entire Amgen Tour of California, and an all-expense paid ski trip to Arnold, CA. I missed four days of work, and completely flubbed one project to the point that our client actually rejected my submittal and refused payment. (This ended up costing the company somewhere between $50 and $100 thousand dollars.)

We were -almost- well enough to have our Mardi Gras party on the first weekend of March. We had the party anyway and it was fun, but by the time 10PM rolled around we were pretty much wiped out.

Of course, we both still have little lingering effects... like a cough that won't quite go away, and a hoarseness that has us both clearing our throats every 10 minutes, and little assorted aches and pains leftover from being completely wiped out for a week and a half. But we're back up and running again.

It seems that everyone wants to pull me in different directions of late.

At work, I've got no fewer than three projects that are all due at the same time and all of the Project Managers want me to work on -their- project first. Plus all of the miscellaneous stuff that filters in each week. The result is that I've been working 12-hour days for the last two weeks.

At home, I've got the Dakota to deal with. The registration expired in January and I can't renew it without getting a smog check. But of course the battery is dead so I need to buy a new battery. We've been looking for a new bookshelf/media center to move all of our DVDs and video tapes into. It has to be about 40" tall and a minimum of 16" deep and it has to be able to support a 100 pound fishtank on top. Once that happens then we can paint our accent wall (we've had the paint selected since November) and start thinking about carpet colors for the downstairs.

In Camelot, now that we are guildmasters, we have a responsibility to feed our guild. This requires a minimum of one hour every day to check in, do a little maintenance and move stuff around. Plus I've set up a weekly event on Thursday nights that require around four hours.

In triathlon, I'm okay (so far) in keeping my running training going. I really want to do better at my next race, but I'm not getting a warm fuzzy feeling about Wildflower or any "real" races. Last night I went for a 3 mile run at 10PM because that was the first chance I had to go running.

Pretty much, Monday through Friday is overflowing with commitments to other people. So my weekends are very precious. Unfortunately, I'm being forced to spend over 5 hours in a car just to attend a birthday celebration for someone whom I've literally only met three times in my entire life. What a great way to spend an entire day!! And then comes Super Sunday. I'm not exactly a sports fan (as if anyone who -is- a sports fan even cares about this year's SuperBowl) so I'm not overjoyed about spending a whole day on a television event that I don't care about. Yep, this is going to be a fun weekend.

I just have to survive until the 11th. I'll be able to something for ME then.

This weekend we did our very first running race of the year, the Chinatown YMCA Chinese New Year 5K/10K Run. I ended up with a sub-9 minute mile average, but was not fast in any way. We have another run planned in the East Bay in two weeks, so I'm going to see if I can become a better runner in a very short time frame.

My mile splits:
1 - 8:06
2 - 8:42
4 - 18:29 (9:15 avg)
5 - 8:27
6.2 - 10:46 (8:58 avg)

My finish time was 54:31 which works out to a pace of 8:48 min/mile. I felt like I pushed too hard on the initial mile and it came back to haunt me on the only real hill on the run, right at the start of mile 4. I was passed by a 14-year old girl on that hill and was pushing really hard during mile 5 to catch her (I was NOT going to let some little girl beat me) so my speed picked up there. I finally passed her about 3/4 mile from the end and slowed down a little bit (but not a lot) to finish.

Overall, I'm about a minute per mile off of my expected pace, which should be just under 8min/mile on this distance. Time to get training!!

Karen's computer is working again after a two-week blackout. It was harder than expected to find a replacement mainboard. It's running at a lower clockspeed than it should be, but at least it's running now. I tried bumping the clock speed up a bit, but it became unstable. I'm not sure if it is due to the age of the mainboard (it only supports 100 or 133MHz FSB, that's how old it is) or if I'm just setting something up wrong. I'm going to have to dink with the settings over the next week or so. Running at a slow memory clock with a slow CPU clock is not going to make for a very fun experience.

I "upgraded" my webspace account this weekend. This means that instead of being on he.net, my webspace now lives on toad.he.net. Supposedly, "most" things will not be affected, but anything compiled will probably break. It's been such a long time since I wrote this blog software that I don't recall if any of it is compiled or if it is all script based. More changes are probably going to be happening in order to lower my web hosting costs. Ideally, you, the reader, will not see any changes. Anyway, if anything is broken, send me an email and I'll do my best to fix it.

The Dakota that has been sitting in a parking space for nearly a year finally got tagged for towing. The last time it was moved was when we used it to move a new washing machine. Of course, with it sitting and not being driven for such a long period of time (around 6 months) the battery has drained and it is impossible to start. With luck, the battery will still hold a charge, but that's not a sure thing. The current plan is to jumpstart the thing, move it into the garage, clean it up (there is a layer of fallen leaves on the hood) and list it for sale. It is nice to have access to a real truck, but realistically, we don't need it around full time and for the days that we do need a truck, they can be rented from U-Haul for $20 a day. It's just not worth the insurance and registration costs to have vehicle that is only used once every six to nine months.

Well, what a wild and wooley last few weeks.

When Karen came back, we started playing Camelot again. We started out by rejoining some of our old friends on one specific server, playing Hibernia. As luck would have it, a lot of changes were coming down the pipe that I was aware of due to being a Team Lead for Mythic. So I was getting really excited about paying Camelot again. Of course, I'm supposed to be representing the Reaver class, so I started playing in Albion more and more. Eventually, I ended up "adopting" the remnants of a guild on one of the newer servers.

After a few weeks of very dedicated playing and work, I managed to build the guild back up to around 25 active people, and formed an alliance with two other small guilds. I'm now hosting raids every Thursday evening. The first one only had three people attend and lasted about four hours (mostly because I kept hoping more people would show up). The second one had around fifteen people and lasted three hours. The third one only lasted about 90 minutes, but we had two dozen players involved and several people commented that it was the most fun they had playing in a long time.

The guild seems to be a success, and I'm happy to see it working out after the effort I've put into it.

And then, last Wednesday, Karen's computer died. It kept telling me that there was no video card installed. I pulled the video card and swapped it with a known good one and it works fine in a different machine and the other card also gives me the same "video not found" error. Ergo, the video glue chips or possibly the slot connector is bad on the mainboard. After a day of research, I ordered a new DFI mainboard for $75. It should arrive today and hopefully we will have two computers again.

My triathlon training is a non-starter. I did not register for swimming this spring and I'm barely running or biking. I started out strong for one week and then lost momentum. Mostly because I was focusing on making the new guild work out, so that didn't leave time for training. Still, we're both registered for Wildflower (Olympic distance) and we have our first 10km running race this Sunday.

Work is still incredibly busy. I've got way too much to do. We just hired a new engineer, but he's already loaded up to 100% and we still have more work to spread around. I suppose it beats being too slow, but the stress is getting silly. I'm starting to like doing -nothing- on the weekends simply because I feel like I have a zillion things to do all the time during the week. Which is not a good thing since we're starting to gear up our schedule for the spring already (our next free weekend is 6 weeks out already).

There are some bumps, but the road ahead is looking pretty sunny still.

On November 30, 2005, Karen came back home. That was two weeks ago.

The last two weeks have been a time of stressful soul-searching for both of us.

The short version (which is all I'm going to post here, at Karen's request) is that the situation was resolved. It wasn't easy or enjoyable for either of us and I'm sure that we will be dealing with the physical and emotional ramifications for some time to come. However, I'm also certain that our relationship is strong enough to get through this difficulty.

It's all sunshine and roses from now on.

On January 18 2003, Roommate Dave had a dinner party and invited many of his friends. One of these was an attractive woman with long brown hair named Karen. Sadly, she was there with a partner. She lived in Healdsburg, almost local, and Roommate Dave had lamented that he never really got to hang out with her much when he lived in The City because it was so far away.

Karen started to hang out at my house pretty regularly. She was a NetFlix subscriber and I had JUST gotten my brand new "free" DVD from my VISA Rewards program. She was working at Sonoma State at the time, and since my house was about midway between her job and home in Healdsburg, she would stop in pretty much every Friday with a new movie to watch. At first she was stopping by to see Dave. Over time, that started to change, she started coming by to see me. Dave told me that her relationship was pretty much over and she simply hadn't made the final decision to move out. I could relate, having just finalized my divorce only a few scant months prior. We would watch her movie and then sit around and chat. Dave would go off to bed, but Karen and I would sit in the living room and talk. For hours. About life, about love, about friends, about things we saw, things we did, things we wanted to do....

On July 4th of 2003, she moved in with me.

I look back on my life, the things I've done, the people I've met and Karen is the brightest light in my life. She has helped me where I was weak and been weak where I was strong. She shares many of my interests. We enjoy doing things together. She as enough interests that are different from mine that we don't grow tired of each other. In the last two and a half years, I've grown to love her more every week. Sure, she's not "perfect", but neither am I. I feel totally comfortable around her. I know that she accepts my flaws the same way I accept and enjoy hers.

I love feeling her nestled in my arms at night while we sleep. I love the look in her eyes when I come home after a day at work. I love when she would "hide" around a corner and playfully pounce at me when I would come home for lunch. I love training with her (even though she always was depressed about how slow she was). I love watching her round the final corner at a race, and seeing her improve every time. I love sitting next to her in our computer room as we play Camelot. I love the little voicemails I get at work, the emails, and the notes that she leaves for me in my wallet or in the pocket of my pants that say simply "I love you". I love her more than anything I've ever loved before. It's a natural love, one that grew without any help or underlying ulterior motivation, that grew from mutual respect and admiration and understanding and enjoyment.

On November 20 2005, at 8:30PM Pacific Standard Time, Karen will be leaving me, very likely forever. She is taking with her everything that is good and happy and wonderful and joyful in my life. I don't know when, or even if, she is going come back to get her possessions. She's never been really attached to "things". It doesn't matter. She will be gone. And the best part of me will go with her.

After about two weeks of trying, I finally was able to track down a copy of F.E.A.R. This is a new first person shooter, along the same lines as Half Life and Doom. I've completed the first two chapters so far.

The graphics are not up to the level of Valve's Half Life 2 engine. The character models don't appear nearly as life-like and the environments are significantly less interactive. That's the only bad points.

This is the game that Doom 3 wanted to be. There were several times during the game that I've literally yelled in fright (and scared Karen). Simply put, this is a very disturbing game.

The computer AI is a decent opponent. The computer enemies don't run willy-nilly into you as you wait around a corner for them, instead they chuck a grenade at you or try to flank your position by going around you. The thing you have on your side that they don't, is that you have a limited amount of "bullet time" play a la Max Payne. It didn't take long for me to develop the strategy of popping my bullet time, squeezing off a dozen shots and then going back into normal mode to line up the next enemy. Using that tactic it became easy to mow down four enemies at once without taking a single hit.

But the combat isn't the selling point here, the story is. I've only started getting into it thus far, but every time that little girl in the red dress appears, I find myself wanting to run away. The "flashback" cut scenes (if that's what they are) are horrifyingly disturbing. The in-game music is very moody and adds to the suspense of the game. In the few short hours I've been playing, I've already reached a point at least once where I -knew- a cutscene was coming and I just wanted to close the door and not continue. I was actually afraid to see what was going to happen.

If you are a FPS player, you could do a lot worse than playing this game. While not as graphically stunning as the Half-Life engine, the fine people at Monolith have created a horror masterpeice here. Play it with the lights on. Play it during the the day. But you should play it regardless.

Highly recommended.

I updated my xmas list.

Also check out Karen's list for more ideas.

Ha, only one month in this entry! I'm almost caught up!!

September 30, 2005: Serenity
I've never watched the TV show Firefly. I had no idea what the story was going in. I knew that the movie was getting good reviews and I wanted to get out of the house for a while.
THIS MOVIE ROCKS!!!
(Hint: the link takes you to a site where you can watch the first nine minutes of the movie, free of charge.)
As a testament to how good it is, as soon as we got home Karen (who is not a big sci-fi buff) put the whole season of Firefly at the top of her NetFlix list. This movie is nearly perfect. The story is engaging. The characters are lovable (even the "bad" guy) and feel very "real". The dialogue flows well. The acting is strong and the direction and cinematography are very strong. As a whole, it makes anything put out by Lucasfilms look like a high-school production. Don't get me wrong, there aren't any real surprises in the storyline. It's your standard good vs. evil. The only difference here is that the "good" guys are a bunch of outlaws and the "bad" guy is a Samurai. I didn't have the year's worth of back-story in my head, so the plot twist wasn't a "oh my god" kind of experience, but it was still enough to keep my interest. And then, just when you are starting to think about how long you've been watching a movie... it's done. Even the denouement is entertaining.
Simply a stunning piece of work. Without any exaggeration, this is the single best sci-fi movie ever made to date. Go see it. Now.

October 8, 2005: Superhero Party
Because our schedule has been so crammed, we didn't get to have my birthday party until now. This year the theme was "super heroes and villains". I actually spent a week learning how to sew and put together a right nice spandex suit based on DC's Nightwing character. Many hours spent learning to sew and many more actually sewing. I'd estimate I spent around 30 hours of time to put it all together and spent around $100 on all of the raw materials and pieces.

The actual party was... so-so. We were expecting around 20 people but only had half that number show up. Many of the people who were definite "Yes, I'll be there!" did not show. Our phone was ringing all day on Sunday with people calling to apologize. I've heard every excuse possible, running that gamut from "I overslept" (those damned afternoon naps!) to "My dog is dying" to "My car broke down halfway there" and even "My kid had a 104-degree fever".

It turned out that I was the only one in spandex. Kyle had a pretty damned clever costume. He was "The Sticky Wicket" with duct tape armor and weapons (sticky side out) that stuck to everything. Corrina and Karen were representing the ubiquitous drop-dead-sexy-girl costume category and doing a very good job at it.

I'm a little disappointed in the level of effort that we put into making this happen, only to have half of our party not show up.

October 15-16, 2005: The Relay
I've done this event twice in the past. Both times it was a kick in the pants, so when Brian offered to Captain a team for this year, I definitely put my name in the hat. After some early drama (which was resolved quickly by removing one person from the team roster) we were ready to go. Then one person dropped out. We started looking for a replacement, but not too hard. Then about five days prior to the race, I found out from one our couples on the team that her mother had been diagnosed with throat cancer and was going to need emergency surgery. We were now down three runners on a team of 12. It felt like there was no one looking and time was running out. In desperation I posted a last-second plea to the GGTC list. Amazingly, it worked and we filled in the last slots on the team on (literally) the last day.
I ran in slot #3 this time. My first run was easy, flat and fast. I completed it with a comfortable 7:56 pace, and really didn't feel like I was pushing too hard.
When we were at leg #13, the start of our second rotation, we were told that we were the LAST team running. The event was closing handoff points as we went through. That was a bit depressing. So when I came to me second run I was pushing REALLY hard! This run was supposed to be harder, and while I didn't notice it at the time, I really dug deep to make it happen. My pace was 8:26 but I really gave it everything I had. I was more worried about being "cut off" than saving anything for the last run. Of course, I learned later that there was no "cut off" and they would keep the event running as long as it took to finish.
When it came time for my third run I was dead tired. My legs HURT. But I ran as hard as I could anyway. Of course "as hard as I could" wasn't very hard. I posted a sad, sad pace of only 10:01. It was all I could do to hold tat 10-minute pace.
The really sad part was that when we finished, it turns out that were far from the final team. There were a few teams that started WAY before us (we started at 1PM, the first starters were at 7AM) and finished slightly after us. Our total time was close to 30-hours, with a rank of 171st. The slowest team was over 36 hours, and ranked 236th. (I'm ignoring the two one-person teams, since they aren't really comparable.) Of course the winning team did the entire 199 miles in only 20:53:26, over nine hours faster than us! So there's some perspective.
The event was a ton of fun (again). I'm thinking of putting together a team for the next 24-Hours of Adrenaline race in May '06. We'll see how that goes.

October 22, 2005: Bothe 10k race
Karen and I did this race last year expecting a nice fun 10k run. What it turned out to be was a hellish run up 1100-feet of vertical, and then back down again. Both of our finish times were around 40% longer than a "normal" 10km. So when Kyle suggested doing it this year, we were a bit hesitant. But in the end I caved in to curiosity and convinced Karen to run it again. I wanted to see how much I had improved (or not) over the last 18 months.
As it turned out, I finished quite a bit faster than my prior time. Last time was 1:08:09. This time I finished in 1:00:05 (according to Chip, the official race timer). Of course, last time I didn't end up with poison oak on my ankles. This time I did. It itches.

October 29, 2005: Halloween "Party"
Well, if nothing else, this made me feel better about my party. We got a call from one of our friends last week inviting us to a party. I don't know if it was stated, but we both assumed a Halloween party. We had our costumes from the super-hero party, so we were just going to re-use them. Sadly, we were the only people in costume. There were a grand total of six people there, including Karen and I. Not exactly a rockin' party. Still, the food was good, we had some good conversation and we didn't get in until after midnight, so not all was for naught.
I'm still jonesin' for a really good party though. It feels like we haven't really had a good one since last year.

new power supply (again) -
people that are not me -

Summer
Turns me upside down.
Summer summer summer!
It's like a merry-go-round.
-- from "Magic", by The Cars

It's been a looooong hiatus since I've updated this page. So long that I'm getting comments from friends and family that it is no longer serving its purpose. Thus, here is an abbreviated version of my summer. Yes, I'm going to try to be brief, since a LOT has happened in the last six months. So, pour yourself a nice cup of your favorite beverage and settle in. This is going to be a long one. Starting where I left off last...

April 17, 2005: Icebreaker
I completed this race in my fastest time ever, shattering my prior record on this course by over seven full minutes! It looks like I'm in an ideal position to finally break the 3-hour barrier at Wildflower. I just need to maintain my intensity level of training for two weeks. My run is still a little weak, but I'm more than making up for it in the bike leg. Full race report here or use the linkage on the left bar.

April 26-May1, 2005
So we picked up the RV (from El Monte RV who I gladly endorse) and drove down to Lake San Antonio. We arrived about an hour or two earlier than last year. Doing a loop through the hookup spots showed no available sites. Every site had either a RV in it or a tag on the site marker. As we were passing the last two sites, I noticed that the tag on the next-to-last marker was blue instead of white. We stopped to get a closer look. The site had only a shade cover in it and no car. As we were hesitating, a guy started walking out of the next site down, towards us. I turned to Karen and said, "Watch this guy is coming over to tell us he is holding this spot for someone...." Sure enough he walks up and says that he's holding the spot for his buddy. And then finishes up by telling us her just got a phone call from the guy and he's not coming so the site is available if we want it! So for the second year in a row, we ended up with full hookups when no spots were available. Can the trend continue? Tune in next year!

Admittedly, the spot we ended up in was not exactly "flat" (we were at about a 15-degree slope even after using the leveling blocks) but at least we had hookups. No complaints here at all!

One of the sites in the hookup loop was being "held" with a tent when we arrived on Tuesday. I can see holding a spot for someone, that makes sense to me. But this sport remained unused and unclaimed on Wednesday. And on Thursday. And on Friday! Over the week, there had have been at least 50 different people who came in, stopped, looked at it and passed on. Frankly, I think it was exceptionally rude of someone to come in on Tuesday to hold a spot that NO ONE USED until Saturday!! Meanwhile, dozens of people who had RVs were being denied hookups.

On Friday evening, we heard some noise outside. When we woke on Saturday, some guy had pulled a tent trailer in next to us and was "sharing" our hookups. It's easy since the electrical outlet has two receptacles and the water spigot has two heads. The only thing that really can't be shared is the sewer connection. So we made a plan. Next year, if all of the sites are taken, we're going to pick one of the flat spots and approach the occupants and see if they are willing to "share" hookups with us. The most critical thing is the electricity for the air conditioning. Second is the sewer, but since that in not a full-time connection (you only need it when you "dump" the tanks) it can be time-shared easily. I also made some 2x8 wheel blocks to use as levelers. After three years, we're finally getting better at RV camping.

The race was fun. I did not break 3 hours (again), but I did beat my best WF time by over 4 minutes with a final time of 3:08:54. I think I can shave about three minutes from my swim, and maybe another 30 seconds from my transitions. That's the easy part. Getting my bike and run times down is going to be a lot harder. I'm about as fast as I'm going to be. Even with dedicated training, I don't see saving more than a few minutes total. My best ever 10k run time is only 10 minutes faster than my WF run, and I'm not going to PR a 10km run after doing a 1.5k swim and a 40k bike, so the run isn't going to get much faster for me. And while I'd like to imagine puling in a 1:20:00 bike ride, even on a year where I felt my bike was my strongest event, I have yet to actually break 1:30:00. It's a goal, but it might not be realistic.

Overall, it was a great week, and (as usual) I can't wait to get back and do it again.

May 7, 2005: Human Race
I was hoping to see some competition this year from my office. Last year we hired a guy who is supposed to be some sort of super-runner. He was signed up to do this race with me, but did not show up, nor call or in any way announce that he would not be running. I'm disappointed that he was not there to offer some competition, and irritated that I spent time and money getting him signed just for a DNS.

I found out later that he did not race because he had a neurological "issue" and was busy being hospitalized. Ouch!

May 17-20, 2005: E3
This year's E3 was less. I'm not sure if I'm just becoming more jaded or if there was just a lack of innovation this year. Sure, the X-Box 360 was sporting drop dead gorgeous graphics, but so was the Nintendo Revolution and the PS3. But the games? Ho hum in the extreme. I was looking at these beautifully rendered images and I was thinking, "Oh, another RTS" or "top-down shooter" or "FPS" or "whatever...." There was NOTHING exciting being shown. The closest thing to "innovation" was the AD&D MMO being shown by Turbine and even it wasn't innovative. (It's all instanced, so the whole community that is required to make a MMO work might not even appear.) The booth babes were lower quality this year, and lower in quantity. Images can be found here. I really need to get a better camera.

The five most notable things about E3 this year (in order of appearance):

1. I managed to be in the right place at the right time, and ended up getting a personally signed playboy PS2 cover. This involved actually talking to a real life Playmate (for about 45 seconds). I was surprised how short she was. She looked nothing like her picture, in real life. Her hair was darker and she was actually a lot more pretty than the picture. More like a very attractive woman and less like a sexpot model. Compare the Playboy image (any splotchyness in the image is the fault of my scanner, not the image, she really has perfect skin!) to my own picture. (Yes, I need a better camera).

2. The AD&D (Turbine) booth was running a little contest. If you could "beat" the demo level they had set up, they would give you a free beta test slot. I was unsuccessful, so I got the consolation prize: a set of nice new gaming dice! For which I have absolutely no use whatsoever. You know its a sad state of affairs when a useless, yet cool (in a geeky kind of way) gimmick is one of the "high points" of a trade show.

3. Swag for the Conan booth was a giant inflatable sword. I was asked to get one for a friend at the Mythic booth (she couldn't get it herself because she was "working"). When I asked the guy at the Conan booth he told me I had to wait in line. When I looked disappointed, he quickly added, "Unless you're willing to inflate it yourself...." I hastily agreed and he gave me FIVE of the toys in a little shrink wrap package that was no more than 3-inches square. I passed one to my friend at Mythic, kept one for myself. One went to a co-worker, and the other two ended up going to some of the other Team Leads at E3. (Two sales gimmicks on my Top-5 list!)

4. nVidia was having a drawing for a new top-of-the-line Alienware game system. You had to jump through a flaming hoop to get a ticket and some people had four or five. I had one. It was simply too much hassle to get more. With no exaggeration it took around four hours to complete the circuit the first time; I was not about to repeat it. Anyway, when they finally came down to calling the winning number, they called the first six digits on the ticket WHICH MATCHED MINE!!! The announcer paused for maybe a half a second, but I was running on a huge burst of adrenaline and the whole word went into slow motion. I swear it was about 20 minutes before he called that final digit. My ticket number ends with a three and he called a seven. So close. Still, there is no award for being close and I did not get to lug a brand new computer home. I did however get a splitting headache from the adrenaline.

5. Last but most certainly not least, I was trying to scam a new ATI mousepad. This year I had two people helping me out. The ATI guys were not willing to give them away, under any conditions. Apparently these were not really "promotional" items in the sense that they were handing them out. Last year they had been taped down with stickyback. This year they actually used an industrial adhesive. I had already tried to pull one up by having my accomplices run a distraction, but the adhesive just caused the pad to rip. One guy actually convinced an ATI rep to give him one, but they had the same problem.

So around 4:30 on Friday I was camping the ATI booth. Somehow, I ended up with my back to a bank of computers that had been powered down already. As I stood there watching the last few minutes of the AD&D demo, I reached behind me and slowly pulled the pad up. As it warmed from my hands, the adhesive slowly gave way. The entire thing took about 5 minutes to release. I rolled it up and dropped it in my bag at my side.

So there you have it. The biggest computer gaming show of the year and not one single game made me say "I have GOT to get that!" Sad.

May 22-27, 2005: Yosemite
Karen has never been to Yosemite before. I decided that it would be fun to plan a "surprise" camping trip. Well, not really camping, since we were staying in one of the tent cabins in Curry Village. More like staying in a hotel in the middle of a forest. She figured out where we were going about halfway there.

It seems that Yosemite hosts a sort of adventurer/explorer type thing for junior high kids. The cabin across from us had six pre-teen girls. The cabin next to them was six pre-teen boys. With awakening hormones, close proximity and being in an unfamiliar environment where established mores did not apply. So all night long we were treated to the shrieks and screams of the youngsters as they would "sneak" between the two cabins, swat at each other through the canvas walls, and "whisper" (at about 80 decibels) to each other. Lights out was at 10PM but these kids would be awake "playing" until well after midnight. And yet somehow they still managed to be out and about every morning at 6AM, running around playing "tag" and generally being noisy.

The "restaurant" at Curry Village (more like a cafeteria, actually) had some of the worst food imaginable. Think buffet-style in Reno and bring it down two notches in quality. Luckily, there were lots of other options for dinner and we settled on a light breakfast at the coffee counter every morning. The funny thing was that we probably ended up paying less for better food than the people who ate at the "restaurant".

The week prior to our stay, there was a tumultuous downpour and the valley was evacuated due to flooding. When we arrived, the floodwaters had receded, but there was still a TON of water. Of course we did the Vernal/Nevada Falls hike. That evening, when we were wandering around, Karen spotted a postcard with Vernal Fall. She pointed out that it "looked different" in the postcard. I told her that the picture in the postcard didn't have as much water as when we had seen it that same day. So, in essence, we got to see all of the Falls and the park when it was more stunning than it is in the postcards!

We also hiked to the top of Yosemite Falls. On the way up, Karen started to get dehydrated. We had stupidly only brought two liters of water. Rather than drinking it, she was concerned about "conserving" our fluids and plodded along without drinking. I could tell her condition was deteriorating and by the time we reached the top, she was nearly delirious. I kept trying to convince her to drink, but she wouldn't. Luckily we were passed by a youth group on the path and the docent mentioned that she had iodine tablets. I offered her a few dollars to buy one and quickly purified another liter of water. Karen quickly drank it all down and within a few minutes was back to her wonderful self. Lesson to be learned: sometimes "conservation" is not the best course of action.

One of the days we went up to Glacier Point. Even though it was late May, there was still a good 6 to ten feet of snow on the ground. The roads were open and clear, but there was a LOT of snow piled alongside the road from the plows. We hiked up to Sentinel Dome, a hike I've never done before. The trail was pretty interesting since it was under four feet of snow. Interestingly enough, the signs marking the trail were about four feet tall, so they were not visible at all. Luckily a gigantic granite dome is pretty easy to find so we just headed "thataway" until we got there. The view was STUNNING, easily surpassing the view from Glacier point or the top of Yosemite Falls.

The last day we were there we went to the Hetch Hetchy valley and did a short walk. It was getting late in the day when we got there. It was as lovely as Yosemite Valley, but much more rugged. Fewer people too. I'd like to go back there someday and actually walk around the reservoir completely. Sadly, the only lodging in that area is a tent, and there are no places to buy food. It would have to be a "real" camping trip.

April-May 2005: Disk crash/reinstall
My computer is still not able to rebuild the array. I started poking around in there to figure it out and it appears that disk 1 is generating a CRC read error when it tries to rebuild to the new disk 3. I was 90% sure that this was the issue and had developed a workaround when I jostled the case during a powerdown and drive 1 bit the big one. Since disk 3 was new and unformatted, I basically lost the entire array. I also lost my cool entirely and violently attacked my keyboard, completely destroying it. About 2/3s of the keys ended up broken and the case cracked in half. So, off to the store to buy a new keyboard (I ended up with this one) and a new hard drive.

I tried reinstalling XP, but I can't even get the system to boot any longer. About 75% of the time it wont even POST. When it does, it will only get a few minutes into the installation before the drives start going ticka-ticka-ticka, as if they are having a seizure. I started buying new drives like they were going out of style.

I took apart Karen's computer and started changing out parts in an attempt to figure out exactly where the problem lies. After three days of testing, I finally discovered that my +5VDC rail on my power supply was running at 4.65VDC. I thought this was a bit low. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on your point of view) I had just purchased the power supply from my local computer store in February. I went back, with receipt in-hand and demanded a new unit. While it was too long for them to offer money back, the guy did give me a new Power Supply (he took the old one, probably to use in a new system for someone else). The first thing I noticed was the side of the box "guarantee" all voltages within 3% of rated values. That means my +5VDC should -never- be lower than 4.85VDC.

After I installed the new power supply, I saw a nice happy +5.000VDC. All four drives spun up with no errors. (By this time I had no fewer than seven drives sitting on my kitchen table. at a total cost of around $400.) I reinstalled windows and a real-time voltage monitor. I was able to return almost all of the drives for a full refund, with a couple exceptions. I did end up losing about $250 total on the exercise. But my computer is working again.

Part of that $250 loss was on a new 160G Western Digital drive, which I put into an external USB enclosure with it's own power supply. I now have "offline" storage that I use to make a Norton Ghost image on each month. I'm tired of losing all of my data. So now I have a 4-disk redundant array PLUS a hard disk image on a separate offline drive. Total cost for the hard drive system: almost $600 for 150G of storage. What a waste.

June 5, 2005: Tri 4 Real #1
It's amazing how fast the speed falls away when you don't train. After Wildflower, I really slacked off. Between E3 and Yosemite, I basically "coasted" through the last month. And, as the saying goes, if you're coasting, you're going downhill. True words, there. Possibly my slowest swim ever (37:18). A nice solid bike ride (1:21:23). And a not-quite-abysmal run (59:54). I did beat my Wildflower time for this year, but by less than 10 minutes. Considering that the course here was so much easier, that's nothing to be proud of.

June, 15, 2005: Bike theft
My Trek 4200 Mountain Bike was stolen from the front of Winzler & Kelly office. No, it wasn't locked. Anyone who thinks that a lock on a bike makes even slows down a bike thief should watch this 5 minute video. No, it's not what you think. The officer who took the police report didn't even bother asking if it was locked. It was, however, parked in a "secure" bike rack that is not visible from the street and is watched full-time by the front office staff. The guy that stole it was about four feet away from the receptionist when he took it off the bike rack. In full daylight. With one of our engineers watching him take it off the rack. He must have had balls that clinked when he walked, because that's pretty brazen, if you ask me.

My homeowners/renters insurance would have covered the loss, less my $250 deductible. But in order to file a claim, I would see a 10% increase in my homeowner's rates for the next three years. If I don't move, it would be a "break-even" proposition. If I moved or became a homeowner within that time frame it would be a huge loss for me. So I did not make a claim on the theft.

June 18, 2005: Beer-n-Brats
Thirteen packages of various sausages, a big cooler full of ice, and twenty friends. Here's how it worked. Everyone who came to the party brought one six-pack of their favorite beer. They were encouraged to bring a micro-brew or some boutique beer (it isn't so much fun if everyone brings Corona). All the beer goes into the cooler. You're only allowed to drink ONE of the beers that you brought, or unlimited numbers of other people's beers. (It's all "beer" so mixing is not an issue.) We ended up with a wide variety of brews, ranging from a super-bitter Pale Ale from E.J Phair in Concord, CA, to Red Stripe from Jamaica, to Sierra Nevada Stout, to Young's Double Chocolate Stout, and everything in between. Party-goers managed to consume forty different varieties of bratwurst and only left about 12 bottles of beer intact.
A great time was had by all!

June 25, 2005: Kyle's Party
Kyle turned 30 this year, but we were busy the weekend of his birthday, so we scheduled this party. It was originally intended to be a bus-trip/sushi consuming event, but when the final cost came in, we needed something like 14 people to make it possible. And most people were a bit hesitant to cough up the dosh. So it was scaled back to a limo and wine tasting. Which still needed eight people to make it work. When all was said and done we ended up putting a blindfold on Kyle, driving him from Sacramento to Armstrong Woods and having a "3rd Birthday" party, with an extra '0' hand drawn in on all the party stuff. We put up balloons and had ice cream cake. We ended up with six people total (which is kinda sad when you think about it) and ended the day with the usual drunken debauchery. A good time was had by all.

June 29, 2005: Kysrium theft
We went for a short bike ride on the weekend last weekend. 21-1/2 miles. Monday was a rough day. Tuesday I did a short ride at lunchtime at work, but because I took time away from my high-priority project to do that I ended up not coming home until after dark. I left my bike (locked) on the bike rack and went to bed. The next day I got up early to go a jobsite meeting in San Mateo. I noticed that the handlebars of my bike were askew on the back of the car. WTF? I walked to the back of the car to see what was up and saw that the front wheel was gone. The back wheel skewer had been released and loosened and the cassette was hanging from the chain. The frame was pulled off of the bike rack, but since it was locked to the rack itself, it couldn't be taken, so they left it hanging. Both of the nylon straps that secure the bike wheels to the rack were cut, even though they had simple quick-release tabs on them.
Here is the sequence of events as near as I can figure: Some idiot saw my bike. They pulled out a pocketknife and cut the straps intending to steal it. Tried to pull it off the rack, but foiled by the lock. Undid the front skewer and took the front wheel off. Undid the rear skewer but the cassette was "captured" by the chain (which they could have just pushed to the side, but apparently did not know how to do) so they couldn't get the back wheel off. They run away with my $400 front wheel.
So, they cut two nylon straps with quick releases, and they couldn't figure out how to remove a rear wheel. I'm 100% certain they had no idea what value of the wheel was and it was just bad luck. In the meantime, I'm out another $400.

July 10, 2005: Tri 4 Real #2
A new olympic distance PR!! 2:47:39 is now my record to beat. I'm still feeling like I'm not finishing strong and my training would be best described as "spotty". But a strong showing on the bike leg pulled my finish time down by nearly a full minute. Now if I could just combine my run workouts from three years ago with my bike workouts from this year, I'd be in a much better place.
Also of note was that Karen crashed on the bike course here and we ended up going to a Urgent Care hospital in Sacramento to get her arm stitched up. Eight stitches on her right elbow. Ouch!!

July 29, 2005: Jury Duty
The joys of performing one's civic duty! After making a daily phone call all week to learn that I was on "active standby", on Friday I was actually told to report for Jury Duty. I went in to the courthouse, I left late and forgot to bring a book or magazine or anything to pass the time. After three mind-numbing hours of watching CNN, the introductory "movie" extolling the joys of being a juror, and watching my fellow peers using the complimentary coffee vending machine, the judge appeared. Apparently, some "new" evidence had appeared that morning that made it impossible for the trial to continue, thus we were relieved of our service. He actually sounded apologetic, like we would be disappointed that we couldn't spend our time in court. At least I got a half-day of free time out of it.

July 31, 2005: Half Vineman
On July 31, 2005 I completed my second ever Half-ironman race, the Half-Vineman. I started at 8:21AM. Finished the 1.2 mile swim in 41:30.1. Not a horrible time, but not exactly speedy either. My prior swim was about 20 seconds faster, so essentially, the same speed. Middle of the road, in my opinion. I finished the 56 mile bike in 3:07:20.8. This is an incredible time for me. My prior bike leg time was nearly 10 minutes slower. And then came the 13.1 mile run. Around mile 4 I started to feel like my body was shutting down. I was pushing so hard that the blood was not getting to my digestive tract and I had a belly full of undigested gels and sports drink. By the time I got to mile 6, it was clear that I was in serious caloric deficit and my energy was running out quick. I pushed on to mile 9 by sheer force of will, but at that point I was completely tapped. Both legs were cramping up on every step and I was starting to feel woozy as I walked along. I finished (sorta) the run in a shambling 2:46:35.5, nearly ten minutes SLOWER than my prior race, and almost a full HOUR slower than my best half-marathon time!!

My total finish time ended up at 6:45:38. While I'm happy to have finished, I clearly need to work on my long-duration nutrition and endurance issues if I'm going to compete at the half-iron distance.

August 7, 2005: Tri 4 Real #3
One week after doing a half-ironman, I'm out doing an olympic distance race in 100+ degree temps. What was I thinking? I was thinking it would be a nice recovery race. Well, it kinda was. Except that the run kicked my ass seven ways until Tuesday. I've never been reduced to walking during an olympic distance race, not even the awful Pacific Grove race when I was sick. But in this race I walked, and I walked a lot. I was probably on-track to come close to my PR for this distance until about mile 4 in the run and then it all stopped. I literally walked the last two miles to the finish line. I ended up finishing in a bit over 3 hours, which is still a decent time. Heck, two years ago, I'd have been proud of it, but now it's 15 minutes slower than I "should" be. I think I may skip this race next year. I'll still do the first two, but the third one is just too soon after the half vineman. Unless, of course, my training actually happens next summer and I finish the half-vineman in a decent time (like under six hours). If that happens, I'll be back.
But I'm not betting on it.

August 13, 2005: 1/2 Vineman RELAY
For the last four years, Winzler & Kelly have sponsored several employee teams to participate in the Half Vineman RELAY event. In prior years, I've swum, run, ridden, and this year I was... a spectator. Yes, I did not race. I did however make sure that we had two full teams racing. One team was "stacked" and we were expected to finish in the top 5 relay teams. Our swimmer was actually the second fastest relay swimmer and the runner was the third fastest relay runner. The biker, on the other hand... well, just 25 miles into the 56 mile ride when his rear shifter broke. Stuck in his lowest gear, he was spinning at 110RPM and only going 10 MPH for the next five miles until he was able to stop at an aid station. With the assistance of an on-course mechanic, he was able to get his bike into a middle gear for the remainder of the route... which included the infamous Chalk Hill. He ended up climbing Chalk Hill in a gear best suited for a flat ride. And then to make matters worse, he flatted out one tire and had to do a tire change with other cyclists whizzing past him. After that setback our "top five" relay team finished in 18th place. Maybe next year....

September 5, 2005: New bike
A new 19" Gary Fisher Wahoo! It's red. I also bought toe clips, a new cyclocomputer, and front and rear LED lights. The bike came with cheap plastic pedals which I'd love to change out, but the price was already hard enough to swallow. The sales guy asked me to pick out a water bottle cage (which I did) and then charged me for it! When it was all said and done, the total was a bit over $500, about the same as my Trek that was stolen. The only difference is that instead of shouldering the cost, this time around I was able to submit the new bike as an "expense".

Yes, that's right. My new bike was paid for entirely by my employer! I think they felt a little guilty because my Trek was stolen from right in front of the office. So I'm a bicycle commuter once more!

September 9, 2005: Pacific Grove
This was my fifth time racing at Pacific Grove, and my second slowest time ever (the year I raced with a head cold I did worse). Considering that my training this summer has been lacking, I'm not shocked nor disappointed. The swim seemed much harder than prior years. On the second lap, as I rounded the first buoy, I glimpse something large, grey and oblong moving through the water about 15 feet under me. My heart stopped for an instant and I froze momentarily. One of the nice things about adrenaline is that it increases brain activity instantly. It only took a split second before I added it all up realized that I just saw seal swim by. Still, very unsettling. The bike was the bike. I did manage to have my fastest ever T2 at this race, and I finished the run with a 9:22 average pace.
Karen, on the other hand, had a GREAT race, smashing through the four-hour barrier with a stunning 3:55:05 finish. That's a PR for her on an Olympic distance race. I'm super proud of her!!

(Note: it took me nearly a month to compile this last posting. I've already started the next installment. It seems my blog is becoming episodic, rather than continual....)

Several important things have happened in the last few days, and all of them are blogworthy.

Thursday, April 14, 2005: I bought Karen a bike!!

Karen has been looking for a used road bike for a few months, but not looking that hard. With Wildflower coming closer and closer, she kicked that search into high gear last week and started sending me links to craigslist adverts. I'd look them over and most of them were crap bikes being sold for improbably high prices. And then one caught my eye. It seemed decent enough, but it was a bit more than I really wanted to pay. She set up a meeting with the seller and rode the bike. Apparently it fit like a glove. I told her that if it fit, she should buy it. So that's what we did.

The bike is made from Russian titanium. (Apparently most of the world's titanium actually comes from mines in Russia.) The tubes and frame were manufactured by a Dutch company, Blomson International. They tried to break into the roadbike market a few years back, but were not able to compete with the name-brand recognition of Litespeed, Trek and Giant. After a few years they pulled out of the market. The seller actually imported the frameset from Belgium and built the bike from scratch using a mixture of Shimano 105, Ultegra and Dura Race components.

The bike is 99% new. It is in -pristine- condition. It rides like a dream. Here is a link to a bicycle page that describes it, complete with a picture. The only difference is that Karen's bike is blue, not pink (the yellow text and highlights are the same).

Now we have to spend $500 on getting it set up, fitted to Karen, put on some good pedals, buy matching shoes, a new cyclo-computer.... Much like buying a house, the initial purchase is only the start of the costs.

Friday, April 15, 2005: Guild Wars!

The final Guild Wars Beta Weekend Event started on Friday. After a few hours of puttering around, I finally got invited into the guild I had selected. I ended up in the 'B' group and was unable to do any "real" fighting, but three of the guild went into the "tombs" section (a kind of guild vs. guild free-for-all zone). After a few false starts, we (three people) defeated five guild groups of 8... simultaneously. Guild wars is structured so that there are no "uber" items and the level cap is so low that everyone is maximum level. In other words, we won by being better players, not by being better equipped, with bigger characters.

Of course within minutes after that, my computer locked up. Upon rebooting, I discovered that a drive had failed. I ran out to CompUSA to get a replacement and installed it. The RAID failed to rebuild. I decided to walk away from it, and did a run and then went to bed.

Saturday, April 16, 2005: Bike ride.

I led Karen on a 20 mile bike ride. In the past, on her MTB, she has typically called 17MPH a "fast" speed on a flat road. After a 7 mile warmup, I told her to pop the new bike into it's highest gear and go as fast as she could. She topped out at 25MPH!! Wowza!!

(More to come...)

Let me preface this by saying that I rent my home. I really like living here and if I was given the chance to buy it, I would most likely try to accomplish that. however, realistically, I probably can't afford the price of admission.

When I arrived home from work last night, I was surprised to see a sign had grown in my front yard. Not just any sign, but the sign of a local realtor. Hurd Realty was advertising my home for sale.

I've been on pretty good terms with my landlord. I've been here for nearly three years and I always pay my rent on time (with two exceptions: one month I just completely spaced out and forgot to mail a check and one month I actually sent TWO checks by mistake). I've done a few thousand dollars in improvements to the house and I always provide the original receipts to my Landlord so he can use them for tax purposes. When the refrigerator stopped working, the landlord had a new one delivered within 24 hours. Like I said, it's been a pretty good relationship.

So I was surprised that I hadn't heard of any plans to sell the house. And while I -am- on a month-to-month contract and not a lease, the contract still requires 30-days notice. So even if he decided to put it up for sale without telling me (which would be well within his rights, even if it would be contrary to decent behavior) I would still have 30 days to find a new home.

I called his local hone number, expecting to hear that I was going to be out of a home. A distressing thought, to be sure. The phone rang... and rang... and rang... and rang. No answer. Suddenly, my mind changed tracks. (Obviously, I was thinking negatively at this point.) My landlord is an older guy, and one never knows when accidents happen. But the house is also owned by his son, a guy I've never met. If something had happened and my landlord was out of the picture, the son could conceivably put the property for sale and he probably wouldn't think twice about it. He doesn't know me, so why would he care what happened to me? I was getting an increasingly bad feeling about the whole situation.

I called the realty. It was local, but since I don't get home until 5:15PM, the Agent was long gone. I left a voicemail explaining that I rented the property, and I had not heard that it was for sale and could she confirm that it actually was?

I called my landlord's remote number. He spends the winters in Florida and the summers in Santa Rosa. Normally, he comes back to Santa Rosa in April, but I was running out of options and I was getting increasingly nervous. The phone was answered right away by my landlord's partner. I've spoken to her on a few occasions in the past, and I think they're not married. I'm fairly certain that she isn't involved in the rental properties that he owns. I explained the situation to her and expressed my concern. She told me that she wasn't aware of any sale, but she would have my landlord call me back when he returned in a half-hour.

I went online. My first stop was the realty's web site. I checked their active listings and found a property that was eerily similar to the home I lived in. No address was listed on the realty web page, but the zip code matched. The number of rooms, beds and baths matched. I went downstairs into the garage to check the building permit date (it is still stapled on the wall behind the water heater). The construction date matched exactly. Things were not looking good. The listing included the MLS number so I tried to access the MLS service for Santa Rosa, trying to find a street address. Sadly, the days of "free" MLS services are long gone. You have to subscribe to access that service.

After a bit, I noticed that on the listing there was a little "151" label, almost as if there was extra data in one of the fields and the software didn't know what to do. I started hoping that was the unit number that the listing was intended for -- I live in #191. I put on some shoes and walked over to #151. The garage door was open and there were several boxes inside, but it did not look like the current residents were planning on moving any time soon. Not a good sign, but I was still thinking that this was just a mix-up and I was okay.

As I walked back in, my landlord called. After a bit of stammering from me, he confirmed my beliefs. He was NOT selling the house and I wasn't going to have to move. After a short talk, we hung up.

Only a moment later the realtor called. She confirmed that it WAS #151 that was supposed to be listed, not #191. Apparently the sub-contractor they use to place signs had mis-read the address and put the sign up in front of the wrong house. She apologized profusely and assured me that they would relocate the sign the very next day (it was after 6PM by this point). At that point I was so relieved that I wasn't going to homeless that I thanked her and hung up the phone.

Of course, my landscaping in the front yard has now been trampled (twice) and I've got a gaping hole where the sign was placed. I think I may call the realty and complain. It's not like they are going to try to sell my house.

Last night I did a bike workout. About 2/3 of the way through the session, I had to get off the bike and lay down on the ground. I simply could not push any more and my heart rate was well over 200bpm. For about two minutes, I just lay there on the ground, gasping for air like a fish out of water. I haven't had that kind of physical breakdown in over two years. It was frightening when it happened last time and no less so this time around.

I suspect the daylight savings time change has something to do with it. I'm just so tired.

I finally got my copy of God of War on Thursday. For those not paying attention, this was my Game of the Show pick for E3 in 2004. It's a PS2 game, not a PC game.

Having played it, let me restate that. This is not a PC game. And how! It isn't Politically Correct in any definition of the words. I expected it to be bloody, but this game goes so over-the-top that the developers found an extra three floors and then went over the top of THAT. There is one puzzle which you find a grave, open it and then rip the rotting head off of the carcass to use as a key for a door. There is a minigame where you have to move the joystick in time with random on-screen prompts to bring a menage a trois to it's successful culmination. The preferred way to defeat many of the game's monster opponents is with "fatality" type moves such as stabbing them through the mouth with a resulting fountain of blood, ripping their heads off or beating their skulls into pulp against the stone floor... all of which is shown in graphically detailed glory. This game goes directly to the heart of all that is brutal, demented and just plain BAD in every person and shows it in living color.

I beat the game on "easy" mode yesterday. I never went lower than 1/2 health the entire game, but I died many many times to puzzles, mistimed jumps and the usual platforming nonsense that these types of games always seem to have. There was one level where you have to traverse a maze constructed completely from a bunch of narrow balance beams. Thankfully there was a save point both immediately before and immediately after that sequence. It took me over three hours to complete that one step. In perspective, the final "big boss" battle only took me about twenty minutes to complete.

I'm replaying it now on "hard" mode. I'm sure there will be a point where I simply can not continue to advance at that level, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway.

This game is possibly the best example of the RPG/action genre that I've ever seen. You have to be able to look past the gratuitous gore and violence, but there is a damn fine game there as well. It isn't some platforming and fighting crap that someone just threw together as an excuse to highlight a bunch of spewing blood and guts. If you removed the gore, it's still a great game. It gets five golden stars from this player. If you have access to a PS2 and a strong stomach I -highly- recommend this game.

In other news, Karen and I ran another 10km race this weekend: the Carñeros Vineyard run. Last year I finished in 50:09. This year I came in at 49:45, a teeny tiny bit faster. I'm happy with this. I would have liked to have done a bit better than that, but at least I'll be as ready for Wildflower as I was last year. Of course, I'm shooting for shaving nearly 15 minutes from my Olympic finish this year, so "same as last year" may not be a good thing. Only three more training weeks to go!!!

I hate doing these novella like entries. I need to make it a point to sit down and type things out when they need to be typed, and not wait until a week and a half has gone by to make a gi-normous entry.

DATELINE March 18: The monthly GuildWars beta weekend event kicks off at 12:20AM. Yes, I stayed up Thursday night to catch this. I started playing a new character just to try out the newbie areas and was instantly hooked. New Ascalon is fantastically designed breaking a new player into how to play the game very well. There are oodles of quests and you gradually gain skills and abilities like a regular MMORPG. As one point, Bob the Cat came into the room and started fussing. I looked up to see what was the issue and was shocked and amazed to see daylight outside the window. I played all night long without even realizing it!! That says something about the immersiveness of the game. I'm a HUGE fan of GuildWars and it continues to get better and better every month. I think this one will be a winner when it is released in May.

Kyle, Karen and I drove down to Oceanside for the Ralph's half-ironman. We left at 10:30AM, expecting an 8 to 8-1/2 hour drive. We were right on track until we hit El Lay. Then traffic stopped. It took two hours to go ten miles across Los Angeles. We ended up missing the cutoff for packet pickup by one full hour, making the entire drive a 10-1/2 hour oddessy. Coupled with me only getting about 90-minutes of sleep the night before, I was little cranky by the time we rolled into Oceanside. Luckily, Kyle was able to arrange a packet pickup the next morning so he was going to be able to race.

DATELINE March 19: Kyle raced. Karen and I spectated. Somehow, despite being in an ideal spot to watch for racers, we managed to miss Kyle pass by us at least three times. We never saw him. As the clock ticked past the 7-hour mark, we started asking volunteers about our "missing racer". We were told that there was a HUGE crash on the bike course and that at least one racer was airlifted out to the local hospital. With massive head trauma and a possible broken neck. Amazingly, they did not know who it was, by race number or by name. WTF?!? Suffice it to say that we were more than a little concerned. Heck, I was really worried at this point. Luckily, we had already met up with Kyle's father, so we had a bona-fide family member to help smooth over any needed administrative issues, legalities and whatnot. After about 30 minutes of talking to everyone we could find about this, Kyle just nonchalantly saunters up. He had finished with only a minor injury (some friction on the inside of one shoe had caused a bleeding sore) but nothing life threatening or even serious. Whew! Not only was he safe, but he came in with an awesome finishing time! WTG Kyle!

After a shower, and a entertaining lunch with a multi-colored adult beverage, we were back on the road. A quick stop in El Lay for desert with Karen's friend Ingrid (who is a local entertainment maven -- now I know who to call for restaurant ideas when I'm down there for e3!) and we made it home just after midnight. The trip home was MUCH faster than the trip down, with a total travel time of just over 7 hours.

DATELINE March 20: Amazing what a difference a couple of days makes! Did the same bike workout that I did on Thursday. I was feeling very tired afterwards on Thursday, but today I ran through the whole set with energy to spare.

DATELINE March 22: Started doing speed work finally. Feeling pretty slow still. My run times are about where they should be though, so it could work out. I really need to focus on my training to pull this one off. That 3-hour finish time at Wildflower is looking pretty questionable at this point. I really slacked off way too much in February and March and it's going to be a tough road to get it back in the short time left. My workout format has changed from doing X gear or pace for Y time, into doing X -speed- for Y intervals.

DATELINE March 26: Another great Santa Rosa Cycling Club ride. 4000-feet of elevation gain, in a 50-mile out-and-back ride. At the summit (and turn around) I was surprised and amazed by seeing a snow-covered vista open up in front of me. Truly amazing views, and who knew we would be coming close to the snow line? It was a shock to be sure. I also met a local fellow triathlete. This guy is not in my age group (he's much older) but he probably could kick my ass any day of the week. He dropped the entire group on the return trip hammering out the last few miles about 1-2MPH faster than everyone else. Of course, it was only a few miles so he ended up finishing only a couple of minutes ahead of the rest of the group. I got a business card, so I might have found a good workout partner that is going to push me a bit harder. That could help when it comes time for Vineman. (BTW, I -am- registered for this race, finally.)

DATELINE March 27: Finally got my taxes done. As expected, I'm getting money back from the feds, to the tune of a bit less than $1000. Also as expected, I ended up owing the state a few dollars. When all was said and done, I ended up with an overall refund amount of $856. That would be a nice windfall except that I also balanced my checkbook and discovered a $571 error (I hate that!) So, when it all worked out, I'm only ending up $285 ahead of where I started. It's not a trivial amount, but it isn't going to incent me to go buy a car or anything.

I always notice when things end for some reason. Today we did some house cleaning and I tossed out the old CD player from the Jeep. This was a bit weird since I bought that player as a birthday gift for someone in a past relationship. Full circle I guess.

I've been tracking my foods for the last week and entered them into a nutrition site. I'll post the graphs and charts shortly. The summary version of my diet for the last week is an Atkins advocate's worst nightmare: 65% carbs, 21% fat, 14% protein. I average around 1600 calories per day, which they seem to think is too low (they want me to have 1750 per day) but seems to be right on target for weight loss (even though I'm NOT losing weight). The upshot of this is that I need to eat more proteins and a bit more fats and I need to cancel the carbohydrates and sugars. Looking at specific meals, it looks like my usual breakfast of cereal with 1% milk is my -highest- protein percentage of the day! I think maybe a meat-based sandwich will start moving onto my personal menu, and I'll have to make a concerted effort to drop out some of the sugars. Maybe I can drop those last 5-10 pounds before wildflower after all. Clearly my diet needs a little work.

There! Now I'm caught up with my blogging. For now. And it wasn't even that painful. (Even if it did take two additional edits to get it all in.)

One of the amazing things about skiing is that it is an almost completely anaerobic activity. Since I've been training for triathlon related events, running races, swimming, and biking, I've grown accustomed to feeling "tired" when I'm out-of-breath, my heart rate is high and my body goes into oxygen debt. I'm not accustomed to being "tired" when my heart rate is only about 50% of my max, I'm not breathing hard and I feel like I just got up form the dinner table. But my legs didn't care what I was accustomed to. They screamed at me on the slopes on Saturday, they were sore on Sunday, and this morning I feel like an 80-year old man with bad knees.

I really need to make better plans for skiing next year. I'm putting it on my calendar to schedule a few trips. In September.

In other news, I received my registration confirmation for the Half-Vineman in July. I think I'm on-track to do pretty well in that race. Speed work starts this week -- only 5 "real" training weeks left before Wildflower!

Several minor but interesting things happened recently.

First off, I purchased and received a new heart rate monitor (HRM). I got the next model down from the one I had last time, and saved around $40. I had to give up a couple of things, but I never used those features anyway.

I did a bike workout on Friday morning with the new HRM. I was shocked and amazed to find how -low- my heart rate was when I was pushing very very hard. I'm not sure what that means. I'm hoping that changes when I start doing speed work mid-march. It just seems "wrong" to have a heart rate that it only around 170-ish when I was seeing 205-ish one year ago during the Valley Ford Relays.

We went down to Lake San Antonio (LSA) for our second Wildflower Training Weekend. This time we had eleven people and we rented the largest cabin that was available. Despite tumultuous downpour on Saturday, we still managed to get in some good training time.

During the rain on Saturday, we jumped into the lake (you get wet swimming anyway, so who cares if it is raining?) and swam around for a few minutes. I rented a wetsuit for Karen so she would get a feel for how it felt to swim in a neoprene baggie. The water was around 52 degrees, and the wind was whipping across the lake, so she really didn't get to much more than paddle around in the boat ramp area. I was kinda disappointed about that. Following our swim, we all headed out for a nice rainy run. We did the "rainy day" 10km route up Beach Hill. It was cold and miserable run. But, by the time we all got showered and warmed back up, it was still only early afternoon, so we spent the remainder of the day lounging around, napping, reading the variety of triathlon magazines that people brought. Dinner was dee-lish-us!! (Thanks to Zak and Rita!)

Sunday we got up bright and early... so early that it wasn't bright. And when the sun finally got up, the day was a party cloudy, but still cool and NOT rainy day! We completed the 40km bike ride with racing tips being bandied about by Kyle and myself.

We were showered, packed and on the road by noon. Returned the wetsuit by 3PM and home by 5PM. While we were away, Bob the Cat decided to destroy one of the Corwin-Vega speakers. While these speakers were free to me (a long story which, while interesting, I wont repeat here) they originally retailed for over $1000. I'm sure it will be a few hundred to "fix" them and the sound quality will probably be much degraded. The joys of being a pet owner.

Later, I sat down to log in to GuildWars, but my computer spontaneously rebooted. A few times. And then it shut down. A new power supply was installed on Monday and so far that seems to have fixed the problems. (I've been suspecting a power related problem for some time and I -sorta- confirmed it a couple weeks ago when I unplugged all four hard drives, both optical drives, all of the 'extra' fans and lights and the machine STILL had cold-start issues.) I suspect that the spontaneous reboots that Karen is having on her computer are probably the same thing. New-fangled Radeon cards draw a LOT of power and the old power supplies just can't handle it. We'll see how the new power supply holds up over the next few days.

The numbers are in for the Second Annual Valentines Day run.

2004 -> 49:48, 33rd overall
2005 -> 49:49, 32nd overall

So basically, I ran exactly the same time as last year.

We did our first "race" on Sunday, a 10km run in Concord. The CHS Academy Valentine's Run is a super-flat running course on asphalt. We both beat our times from last year, but not by a whole lot. Of course, last year it was an all-out run, while this year it was a training run. I consider that a huge win.

On Saturday we did a long ride, too. Well, medium-long. We rode our bikes to the ride start locations, did the ride, and then rode home. I put in 40 miles (not counting the commute to and from the ride) and Karen did 35 miles (counting everything).

In other news, my current Camelot project, a new Bainshee character, capped out of the newbie Battleground this weekend. When I went back to killing monsters again, I was surprised when I lost a fight and lost exp. I'd gotten so accustomed to simply being killed with no downtime in RvR that I'd forgotten completely about the PvE death penalty. So I was surprised when I died doing a quest and lost 1/100th of my current level. I'm really enjoying this caster class and I expect to be in the mid-level Battleground in about a week.

So I did another SRCC ride this last weekend. This brings to mind two discussions.

First off, the ride itself. The ride would have been a GREAT training ride except for three things:
1. Traffic. Call me crazy, but I consider a nice ride where you see a car every ten to fifteen minutes is ideal. That way, if you break down, you can flag a passing motorist, but they aren't whizzing past you often enough to make you worry about your personal safety. On this ride, however, I was being passed by cars about every fifteen seconds. A section of the ride was actually on the infamous Silverado Trail - a great road to find Napa Valley wine-tasting tourists. Not so good for the bike.
2. Hills. The ride leader advertised 4000' of climbing. Normally, a lot of climbing wouldn't be a bad thing, but on a hilly road with a lot of traffic, you worry on the uphills because you're going so much slower then the 45MPH cars. And on the downhills, you worry because the idiot drivers think that it is their duty to pass all the bicycles. Some moron decided that he just HAD to pass me on a downhill, crossed a double yellow line and then realizing that he was going 65MPH down a two-lane road on a hill, slowed down so much that I nearly rear-ended him. (UPDATE: I spoke to the ride leader today and apparently the GPS using riders informed him that the total actual elevation change was closer to 8000'. Nice. Only -double- what I expected!))
3. Distance. The ride leader advertised 45 miles. My cyclo-computer recorded 52-1/4 miles. 45 miles is a bit long for me at this point of the year. 50+ miles, with over 4000' of climbing is freaking insane! And as a result of that, the ride ended up taking a LOT longer than expected, and completely ate the remainder of the day because I was too tired to do anything afterwards.

As I mentioned above before I started to rant, the ride had the potential to be a great training ride. But it wasn't. (Update: I spoke to the ride leader today and he told me that this was one of the hardest "short" rides the Club hosts! Now he tells me!!)

Secondly, I've now done three rides "with" the club and I'm starting to think I should join. Well, thats a bit of a question.
I did the Geyser's ride with the club, but they all dropped me, so I was really only "with" the group at the regroups.
I did the Cotati ride with the club, but since I forgot my shoes, I started an hour behind them and only saw them as I passed them at rest stops.
I did this last ride with the club, but I started late and since I took the "short" option (there was another 20 miles that was "optional") I only saw two or three people the whole ride.
So... out of three club rides, I've met zero people, and actually ridden with only a handful, for a very short time. I'd have gotten the same benefit from just printing the club ride list and not even trying to show up when the actual club rides are taking place. So is it worth it for me to support them with my membership fee? Hard to say.

I've been tracking my weight and training plans over the winter break, but I haven't been updating them on this page. I'll start making a concerted effort to make at least one update a week from now on.

My weight log can be found HERE.

My current training log can be found HERE

This weekend I did a ride with the "B" group. It was pretty clear from my last ride that I couldn't keep up with the "C" group. (Bike group classifications are "backwards"; the higher the letter, the faster they go, the longer the rides, and the more hills they will tackle.)

Well, sorta...

I showed up at the ride starting location about 10 minutes before the ride started. I knew I had some time, so I wasn't in a rush to get my bike out of the car and get set up. I leisurely meandered around for a few minutes, and eventually got around to pulling the bike out and putting my helmet and riding gloves on. I pulled my VISA card and my driver's license out of my wallet and tucked them into my center jersey pocket, along with my spare car key. And then as I was about to step over my bike, I realized I still had my old running shoes on. Well, no problem, I'll just change my shoe--

I'd forgotten to bring my bike shoes.

So, I frantically threw my bike back into the car, jumped in the driver seat and sped home. When I got home, I saw that I'd ALSO left the garage door wide open. Obviously, I was not thinking straight at that early hour.

So, I printed out the route directions, grabbed my bike shoes, closed the garage door and drove BACK to the start. I was an hour late when I started.

The ride was EPIC!!! I would have to say that this was one of the three best bike rides I have EVER been on. The route was comparable to the Wildflower Olympic course ride in difficulty (a bit longer, but a bit less hilly). The weather was PERFECT, temps in the high 60s to low 70s, full sun and no wind whatsoever for the entire ride. And when I came around one curve after the "rest stop" (I actually caught up to and passed about half of the group that started an hour ahead of me there) I was surprised by a breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean! The entire route went through rolling green hills, and I think I saw maybe ten cars on the roads the entire time. Simply put this was an AWESOME ride and I will be repeating this route again. 43.62mi in 2:59:30.

The problem is, of course, that I now know that the "B" group is too slow for me to train with. I started a full hour behind these folks. Even if I assume that they were late in getting started, I was still at least 45 minutes back when I got rolling. Now, I'm not the most humble guy in the world, but anyone who has ever seen me ride can tell you that I'm no Lance Armstrong. Heck, I'd call a 17MPH -average- speed "fast" (Lance sprints uphill at that speed). My overall average for this particular ride was only 14.6MPH. And yet, despite this not-so-great speed, despite starting 45 to 60 minutes behind, I caught up to, and passed the main group! That's kinda sad, when you think about it.

So it looks like I'm going to be with the "C" group next weekend. It may be hard, but that "B" group pace just isn't going to cut it for me.

Oh, and I realized today that I will not be running the Valley Ford RELAY event -- I will be at Lake San Antonio for a Wildflower training weekend that day.

We did our first timed swim last night. Basically, this was a 30 minute swim and we just had to count laps. I finished 54 laps. I stopped about 25 seconds short of the time limit, so I probably could have gone 55. Even if we assume that I did 55 laps, that translates into a 36 minute 1.5km swim. Slow slow slow!! And today, my arms feel like lead weights. I'm really out of shape!!

This weekend saw my first long bike ride of the year. I joined up with one of the cyclists at work (who happens to be a member of the Santa Rosa Cycling Club) and went on a nice cheerful 55 mile jaunt that included over 3500' of climbing. All of which was in the first ten miles. Of course, with all of the climbing out of the way right away, there was a fast and furious downhill that followed. I wish I had known the road a bit better. As it was, I would brake hard for each turn, then have to pedal hard when I realized it was only a gentle curve and not a death defying hairpin turn. The end of the ride was an easy 15 mile mostly-flat cooldown. Of course, by that time my legs were completely ruined and I ended up finishing a good half-hour behind the leaders, despite a regroup and the bottom of the hill. (Yes, I really was a full 30 minutes behind on a 15 mile ride.)

Karen and I also did a nice long, slow run. We went around Spring Lake three times (that's 6.75 miles) at a moderate pace. While it wasn't a hard run, I was surprised how unprepared I was for that distance.

By popular demand, here is my probable race schedule for this coming year. Spectators are welcome at any race. Click on the name of the race for details.

Valentine's Run February 13, 2005. Concord, CA
Valley Ford RELAY February 20, 2005. Valley Ford, CA
Icebreaker Triathlon April 17, 2005. Granite Bay, CA
Wildflower Festival May 1, 2005. Lake San Antonio, CA
Tri-for-Real #1 June 5, 2005. Rancho Seco Park, CA
Tri-for-Real #2 July 10, 2005. Rancho Seco Park, CA
Half-Vineman July 31, 2005. Santa Rosa, CA
Tri-for-Real #3 August 7, 2005. Rancho Seco Park, CA
Half-Vineman RELAY August 13, 2005. Santa Rosa, CA
Pacific Grove Triathlon September 10, 2005. Monterey, CA
Treasure Island Sprint November 6, 2005. San Francisco, CA

First of all, thank you to the many people who emailed or called to express concern about my prior entry. Secondly, the resolution (for me) was positive. For Karen, it is still in flux, but I'm not here to report on her feelings.

Even though is it the middle of the month of January, I'm going to post my resolution for the year 2005. Last year, I didn't see a need to do anything like that. I ended up living the year 2004, like any other year. Not that it was a bad thing. In fact, 2004 was probably the best year I've had in my entire life. Regardless, I'd like to set some goals for the 2005 calendar year. So, in no particular order:

1. Get out more often. When I was single (and actually a bit before that) I was going out with friends at least once a week. Since I moved into my current home and become "attached", a night of excitement meant a bottle of wine and a video. I don't want to become one of those old couples who have no friends.

2 through 5. Fix up the house. Yes, it's not my house, but I do live here. I want to make it a nicer place to live. Things that need doing are the front yard, the dryer vent, the dishwasher, and the carpet. The back yard needs some help. Air conditioning would be HUGE. Also, I still have yet to actually re-hang all of the door casings from when I pulled them off when I was painting when I moved in originally (over two years ago). I'm going to make at least three significant improvements to the house this year.

6. Become a better triathlete. Last year I kinda fell down on my races. My goal this year is to complete Wildflower in under 3 hours and Vineman in under 6 hours. Note these are the same goals i had two years ago, and did not meet.

7. Work on my relationship. I love Karen very much. I think she deserves to be reminded of that at least once a week, so I'm going to resolve to do something special for her at least every seven days.

8. Be more focused at work. Recently, I've been putting in hellacious hours and getting more done. But I need to put in FEWER hours and keep my productivity as high, or higher. I know there is a lot of "wasted time" that can be trimmed from my workday, and I'm going to work on keeping my work hours dedicated to doing work-related items.

9. Enjoy my games more. Too much of my time playing some online games has been frustrating rather than fun. But on my desktop I currently have Half Life 2, Knights of the Old Republic (the original one), Prince of Persia (the original one), Warcraft III, Camelot, GuildWars and even World of Warcraft. Between all of those enjoyable games, there is no reason to play anything that I am not having fun with.

10. This one, I'm going to keep secret. I will say that it is a great resolution and it will definitely change my life.

I don't want children. I've never wanted children. Although my Mother would probably tell you a story about how I used to longingly gaze at infants and sigh with the desire to procreate, I have never wanted kids. I can recall saying that as a young man, and my family would tell me that I would change my mind as I grew older. When I got married in my mid-20s, everyone assured me that by the time I was 30 years old, I would be a happy father. But as I passed the 30-year mark, I still did not want kids. Of course, they just smiled and nodded knowingly and said, "Just wait until you're 35... then you'll change your mind." And then 35 came (and went) and no inclination towards reproduction manifested. In not very long, I'll be looking at the low side of 40-years old and I still don't want kids.

When I was in high-school, a horrible thing happened to me. Like many teenage boys, I was more interested in getting laid and less concerned with the consequences and ended up with a pregnant girlfriend. I still recall the feeling of utter helplessness, like a fish that has already been hooked, waiting for the line to reel him in. I knew that my entire life hinged on this one thing. Whether or not I wanted it or would have chosen it didn't matter. The girl had the power to completely change my life until the day I died. The decision was entirely hers and there was nothing that I could do except hold on and hope for the best. I entertained thoughts of suicide, murder, and worse. I'm not religious, but I remember praying for horrible things to transpire. Luckily (for me) she chose not to take my life away from me. No matter what your stand is on abortion, I honestly feel that on that day my life was saved. A few months later we broke up. Years later, I learned later that she married, had three kids and then was abandoned by her husband. I look back and know that could have been my life and I am thankful that I avoided it, no matter how narrowly.

On December 15, 2004, Skylar Dawn, my sister's first (and probably only) child was born by Cesarean. It was a difficult birth, and it's not my place to report on my sister's personal issues. Regardless, this Christmas was spent at my sister's home. Karen and I were there for several hours on Christmas Eve and again for a few hours on Christmas Day. While the birth of my niece would be significant alone, it also served as a lit match in the powderkeg that is my life.

Karen wants kids. She wants kids a LOT. As in, her entire life's goal is to have a family. This, obviously, is not exactly "compatible" with my desires and hopes. The real problem is that we each want a different aspect of a binary choice. There is no "sorta" in children, you either have them or you don't. If we have kids, I end up giving up my entire life. If we don't have kids, she gives up her lifelong ambition. Neither one of us can change without fundamentally altering ourselves. Neither one can make the other happy without changing. And by changing ourselves to make the other person happy, we ultimately make them unhappy. A classic paradox with no solution.

After a year-and-a-half of living together, I can honestly say that I am ready to spend the rest of my living days with Karen. She's everything that I've wanted: she's loving without being demanding, she cares for me and allows me to care for her, she never nags me but she still reminds me to do all of the things that I keep putting off, she supports me in all of the crazy things I do and allows me to support her in the things that she does. I look at her when she wakes up in the morning, with her hair askew and her face all squished from the pillow and I fall in love with her all over again. I remember our first night together, our first kiss under fireworks, the first time we walked through a redwood grove together... and I want to spend more firsts with her. I want to take her to amusement parks and watch her squeal with delight on a roller coaster. I want to show her Yosemite and Sequoia Park and Kings Canyon and all of the great places that I've been and see her face light up at the wonder of it all. I want to go cross country skiing with her. I want to spend a week with her and a motorhome. I want to cross the finish line of a hard triathlon and see her waiting there for me. And I want to be waiting at the finish line for her when she runs her first marathon.

When my marriage failed (and even before that) I vowed that I would never remarry. It just is too much hassle. But in the past year and a half, I find myself toying with the idea of marrying Karen. More than once I came a hair's breadth from asking her.

But right now, I'm scared to death of her. Sunday night, I learned that she skipped five pills over the last week. I honestly don't think it was done maliciously, or "on purpose" or with any intent of trying to change my mind by forcing the issue. Karen has been living with near-suicidal depression since Skylar was born (which I knew about, but not the cause) and those little hormone tablets kinda slipped off the radar. At this point, however, the intent doesn't matter. Whether it was intentional, or accidental, or caused by Martian rays beaming in through the window of our bedroom, it just doesn't matter. The only thing that matters right now is whether or not she is pregnant.

There, I've typed it. I just sat here for 20 minutes trying to type those last six words. The thought makes my chest feel tight, my ears ring and every muscle in my body tense. I'm having trouble breathing and I feel dizzy. I have this overwhelming urge to hide under the desk until the bad stuff goes away. I'm scared to death, because I really and truly think that she is. As I run through my memories of the last week, I make a mental tally of the times that we made love, backtrack to when her last period was and... let's just say that if we were to put odds on it, it would be a good bet.

But it's NOT a good bet, no matter how you slice it. It's a shitty decision to force someone to make, even in the best circumstances. And no matter how I feel about Karen, I'm not ready or willing to sacrifice my life for a child that I don't want. If she is pregnant, then our relationship is going to be over. Maybe not today, maybe not next week, but it will be a knife through the heart of our love. And that makes me incredibly sad. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. Maybe I'm being a little selfish or unfair by putting my needs and desires above Karen's. Maybe. But there just isn't a middle ground on this issue. It HAS to be one way or the other. There is no possible compromise situation. When you only have a choice between "Yes" and "No", if you're 60% in favor of "No", then "No" wins, even if it isn't completely the right thing to do. She means the world to me, and if I could do anything to make this situation better for her, I would. But I can see the end bearing down on me like a runaway freight train.

And it hurts. I love her so much.

Treasure Island Sprint Distance
Year	Overall	Swim	T1	Bike	T2	Run
2001	1:26:30	11:57	4:26	40:39	2:53	26:35
2002	1:29:07	11:25	4:59	42:56	2:03	27:44
2003	1:19:37	11:24	3:40	38:43	2:19	23:31
2004	1:21:11	11:46	3:51	38:38	2:02	24:54

I started out nice and strong on the swim. About 100 yards in, I sighted on my left side and saw that I was tracking pretty good, but I looked forward and could count the guys swimming ahead of me. One, two, three four, five.... I knew that I couldn't -possibly- be the sixth swimmer, so on the next stoke, I sighted on the right and counted the swimmers ahead of me. One, two, three four, five, six.... Wow. I actually was in the lead pack of swimmers. Of course, that freaked me out psychologically and my swim stroke went to crap and I started dropping back, and fast. To put it another way, I lost my rhythm. But the time I recovered from that momentary lapse, I was already past the second buoy in a three-leg swim. I started strong, finished strong, but had a weak center. Still, despite not having seen any water since TFR#3 in August, I was only 22 seconds off my pace from last year. My goal at this swim has been to break 10 minutes, but that might be impossible. I'll keep trying though.

T1 felt impossibly slow. I was just all out of sorts and having all kinds of problems changing gear. I didn't have any Body Glide and my wetsuit didn't come off smoothly. I couldn't get my socks on. I couldn't get my bike shoes on. It was just a bad scene. And despite all of that, I only lost 11 seconds from last year's time. That "feeling slow" was to be a trend for the whole race.

The bike felt slow. About the second lap I started getting hungry. If I was feeling hungry, it was not only out of food, but -past- out of food. (You typically won't feel hungry/thirsty during a race until it is already too late to recover from.) Luckily, I had ONE PowerGel that I grabbed from the freebie goodie table in transition before the race. I sucked that down as I was finishing my second lap. I think it saved me from a complete bonk. Even though my bike time was the fastest every on this course, I still did not feel like I was pushing all that hard.

The first lap was nice. The second lap I had that food issue. The third lap was crowded. About that time the female waves were hitting the course and I just happened to be lapping at the same time as a group of about 20 of them were just joining in. I had to weave and jog and dodge to get through that big pack of bikes. Some of them were a bit faster than me (I think the fastest one finished her first lap about a minute ahead of me) but most were slower.

19.2 MPH average. I still felt slow.

T2 felt slow. In actuality, it was a pretty fast transition, but I felt like I lost a lot of time changing shoes and grabbing equipment. It was a decent transition, but I think it could have been a lot more streamlined. I think my T2 has gotten to the point where I'm going to have to start putting in some real effort to get faster. I've pretty much figured out how to not have 5-minute T2 times. Now I've got to work on getting a 1-minute T2.

The run actually felt pretty good, even thought this was where I lost the most time off of last year's finish. I still managed to hold a nice 8-minute pace (8:01 to be exact). I was passed about 1/2 mile from the end by a guy in my age group. He was up maybe 100 yards on me when the finish line came into view. I tried to catch him, I really did. I was pretty much putting in an all-out sprint. About 200 yards from the end, he looked over his shoulder -- I'm sure he knew I was there since he had just passed me a few minutes prior. I had cut that lead down to around 50 yards by that time. He sped up a bit. I continued to close in on him and when we hit the finish chute itself, he was only around 25 yards up on me. But that was all there was. I simply ran out of time and real estate. He ended up finishing 12 seconds ahead of me. If it had been another 50 yards, I might have been able to catch him.

Overall, I finished 00:01:34 slower than last year. Last year I trained like crazy for six weeks prior to this race. This year I did not train at all. Based on the regimen, giving up only a minute and a half... I'm happy.

And I'm already thinking about Wildflower 2005.

I normally don't "do" political commentary, but I'm going to do it just this once. Quite frankly, I'm disgusted and frightened by the results of this year's presidential election.

At one time in my past I played World War II flight simulations online. As is typical for myself, when I was learning about these flying gunships, I learned everything I could about them, the time period and the situation in which they came to be. As a result, I know a little bit more about WWII than the average person.

I keep drawing parallels in my mind between Mr. Bush and Adolph Hitler. Both had a "scapegoat" (Hitler blamed the Jews, Dubya blames the Iraqis/Al Queda/Muslims). Both were loved and blind followed by the "common folk" of their respective countries -- even when the Allies were marching across Germany, the German people clung to the hope the Der Fuhrer has some super-weapon that was going to save them. Both had a 'master plan' that was written prior to their rise to power that describes their ultimate ambitions. Both ended up being the ringleader of a small trio of countries that the entire world allied against. For Hitler it was Germany, Austria and Italy; for Dubya it is the USA, England and Israel. I'm dead certain that history (assuming there is someone left to write it) will look back on George W. Bush as an evil man and he will join the ranks of Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Idi Amin, Pol Pot and yes, Adolph Hitler as one of the most evil leaders the world has ever seen. (If you don't know who those names are, I strongly suggest you do a little history reading.)

The major difference is that THIS madman has nook-yoo-ler (sic) weapons at his disposal. When he manages to touch off World War III and his Joint Chiefs decide that the time is right to simply nuke the opponent into oblivion, the big bombs aren't going to be limited to being used on the other guys. No one wins in a nuclear war.

And I honestly and truly believe that is where we are headed.

It's been a loooong time since I've updated my blog. Not because nothing has happened; no, I've been extremely busy. So much so that several friends have contacted me and asked if everything as okay. I'm fine. And here are two months worth of updates!

DATELINE September 2, 2004:
My employer is building several new private office spaces in our building, and some old cubicles are going to be demolished to make way. The people have moved into new cubes, and got all new "modular" office furniture. The old built-in cubicle furniture ended up being up-for-grabs and since I had expressed a desire to get this in the past, I was offered a set of this stuff. I had a meeting in Redwood City today, so I asked the intern to install it while I was out of my cube. When I returned, all of my office "stuff" (papers etc) was scattered in my cube. The stuff that was in my old desk ended up in a banker's box on the floor.

So as I'm putting stuff away, I find a blank, white envelope with my name on the outside. I don't recall what this could be, so I open it up. Inside is a smaller tan envelope with my name on it. Thinking this is a bit odd, I open the second envelope. Inside is a greeting card. I open the greeting card and it's a Christmas card from my father. Inside the card are six $100 bills and six $20 bills. $720 in cash money. Was sitting in my desk drawer at work. I have ZERO recollection of ever putting it there, and I've only been working here for four years, so it had to be from a recent holiday season. No matter what: THANKS, DAD!!!

DATELINE September 11, 2004:
The Triathlon at Pacific Grove is my favorite triathlon. It was my first ever race in 2000. Last year I posted my slowest EVER Olympic Distance finishing time in Pacific Grove. This year, my goal was to beat last year's time by one hour or more. My best finish time to date on this course was the very first time I did it at 3:02:39. My Personal Record on any Olympic Distance course is 2:47:57. Last year's time here was 3:49:29, so I was pretty confident. I was also looking to beat my PR, but that was more of a secondary goal.

The swim is two 1/2 mile laps in a kelp forest. The first lap was horrible. I swam decently, but the kelp slowed me down horribly. Going through a kelp frond is like swimming in jello. Sure, it works, but it isn't fast. The second lap, on the other hand, was like magic. I started to sight correctly, was able to spot the kelp fronds and wove my way around the majority of them. I'm not sure if I figured it out, or I just got lucky and missed the majority of the kelp. Either way, the second lap was MUCH faster than the first lap. 34:58 is not a great swim time, but I'll take it considering the difficulty of the swim.

The bike was the bike. I'm pretty much dialed on on my bike speed. Sure, I can get faster, but that would require a level of dedication to my training that I'm not really willing to devote. I have too many other interests to put 20 hours a week into -just- bicycle training. I've always wanted to beat 1:20:00 on the 40km bike and I'm pretty much there. For the four Olympic distance races I did over the summer, my bike splits have been
1:26:15 - Tri for Real #1 (June)
1:19:34 - Tri for Real #2 (July)
1:18:05 - Tri for Real #3 (August)
1:17:54 - Pacific Grove (September)
As you can see the trend is improving, but I'm close to the top. I only improved by nine seconds in the whole month of August. This tells me that I'm not going to get much faster. But I'm okay with that.

The run went pretty well. I am learning how to really push myself on the run. When I first started triathlon, I was told by someone, "Don't worry about the run, it takes care of itself." In the last few years, I've learned that is completely wrong. The run is probably the second most important part of the race. A good clean run can make up a lot of time. A lousy run can cost even more. This whole year I've been struggling to get my triathlon 10km times under one hour. In a pure running race, I can beat 50 minutes (49:30 in the Human Race last May). Plus, I honestly think that getting to be a stronger runner will make me a faster cyclist too. So I was happy to see my run time come in at a speedy 50:55, an 8:12 pace!!

Overall, a very good race experience!

Afterwards, we went home and got smashed. A great time was had by all, even those that can't remember it (and shall remain nameless to protect themselves).

DATELINE September 18, 2004:
We hosted a barbeque at home in celebration of my birthday. At it's peak, we had about 20 people crammed into our little townhouse. It actually ended up being a lot of fun with people showing up from pretty much all walks of my life. We had a few friends form work, a few friends from online games, a few friends from my single bar-hopping days, and even a few 'adopted' friends that Karen brought in. We ended up closing it down around 2AM.

DATELINE September 25, 2004:
My 20-year class reunion was held in Walnut Creek. I would guess there were about 100-200 people from my graduating class that showed up. It was interesting seeing a lot of those people. It was especially odd that there were some people there that, even after being introduced to them and knowing their name, I couldn't recall them at all. I thought I knew pretty much everyone in my graduating class, at least enough to know who they were. But I guess 20 years of chemical experimentation have altered some of my recollective abilities, because there were more than handful of people that were complete blanks to me.

It was both entertaining and a bit scary seeing the single people in action. I fully admit that had I been single,I probably would have been in there with them, but this gathering was a total hook-up. I'm not talking about the old boyfriend-girlfriend-from-high-school-get-back-together-after-20-years here. It was more like a "Hey, I'm single, you're single, let's laugh a bit and then go get a room and rip each other's clothes off." type deal. I'm sure that is normal and expected in today's dating climate. When a typical "date" consists of dinner, a cocktail and then a roll in the hay with no intentions of going any further than that, why not take advantage of a willing and able pool of people that are definitely in the same demographic as yourself?

It was still entertaining, but I never really had any close friends in high school. There was no desire on my part to "check in" with people. It was interesting seeing how some people looked like they had been hit with a the old fugly-stick a few dozen times in the last two decades, and other people still looked like themselves, just older.

The dinner was awful. The drinks were overpriced. I knew we had a 2-hour drive home afterwards so we were not drinking that much anyway. Overall, it was an entertaining night, but going out to a local dinner and movie would have been more fun and less costly. I doubt I'll go to another reunion for a good long time.

DATELINE September 26, 2004
I finally hit level 50 in Camelot. I started playing this game on October 9, 2000 as one of the phase one development testers and after four years I've finally topped out my first character. I started this one when the Shrouded Isles expansion went live in October of 2002. So two years of elapsed "real" time to level from 1 to 50. I still enjoy the game, and I'm still playing. Four years later and I'm still playing.

DATELINE October 5, 2004:
Catacombs beta started today. This is the new graphical enhancement for Camelot. It is essentially Camelot part 2. The download was just under one full CD (700MB) and the installation took just about two hours. The character graphics are amazing, but the background textures are still the same old Camelot engine. Of course, the only realm that is playable at the installation is Midgard, so I started a new Valkyrie (that's the new class). I can't really comment on it much since there is still a NDA in effect. From what I'm seeing here, Catacombs will build in a lot of player retention, but I don't think it will attract many new players to the game.

DATELINE October 6, 2004:
We interviewed a potential new electrical engineer at my company. She is a tall, willowy blonde haired, blue-eyed girl with a wicked sense of humor and she's totally reminiscent of Kristen. Based on both looks and personality, they might have been sisters. I immediately mistrusted her based on that alone, which probably isn't fair, but that's life. I only had a chance to talk to her for about 20 minutes but as the conversation went on, I kept making comparisons between her and Kristen. One major difference is me. When I met Kristen there were certain things missing from my relationship at that time and Kristen was willing to fill that void. (I never took her up on the offer, a mistake that I still regret, but hey, the past is past and I'm over it.) My current relationship is fulfilling and happy and while I still feel that primate-level urge to spread the seed among nubile females, it's very easy for me to shut that down. Even if it came with no-strings-attached (see prior discussion on "dating") I would still decline. I'm very happy with the way my life is going and I wouldn't want to mess with that.

DATELINE October 13, 2004:
I've been playing my Valkyrie pretty much non-stop up to now. In fact, in the last seven days, I have a bit over 3 days of online play logged. Add 8 hours a day of work, and time spent eating, drinking, bathing and all of the other stuff that a living person has to do and then 39 hours of online gaming and guess what I haven't been doing? That's right, sleeping! I've been averaging about 4 hours a night all this week. I've made it to level 30 in a week. Considering that it took me two years to level to 50, going from level 1 to 30 in one week is insane fast. It's more a factor of the amount of time I'm investing than anything else.

Albion opened up in Catacombs today. I started a new Reaver to test the low level quests. I'm finding a ton of issues and reporting them all. I'm getting the impression that Mythic is using the beta test as a QC period as well as a play test phase. Most people in the beat seem to have fallen into this role pretty well, but typically a software company pays their QC testers. Online gaming, I suppose, doesn't need to since people who play these things tend to play a LOT and given a chance to play even more, they take it. I'm starting to wonder how long I can keep up this pace. I know I'm going to fall behind the curve this weekend, but I have to have a life.

DATELINE October 16, 2004:
We went to Lake San Antonio this weekend. A bunch of women from Karen's online triathlon forums are thinking of doing Wildflower next year, so I came up with the bright idea of doing a pseudo-training weekend. We rented one of the cabins (actually a mobile home). The prices are event, but not great. We got the cabin set up for six people. When we actually made the reservation it turned out that we were going down in the off-season (whatever that is) so we got it for half-price!! After the split, it worked out to $25 per person for the whole weekend. Not a bad deal at all.

We ended up doing the bike course with four stops for regrouping. It wasn't a fast ride. Of the six of us, only three had even seen the bike course. So it was more of a "tour" type ride. We rode a bit, stopped a bit, rode a bit more, stopped a bit more. I think it took something like three hours total to finish the ride. After lunch, we then ran the run course. This was a complete run, but Karen and I were doing base training so we did it really slowly. Like 1:45:00 slowly.

Dinner was a bacon and flank steak roll. It came out decent, but not great (I cooked). After dinner we sat around, added some wine and beer (amazing how much six reasonably athletic people can drink!) and a great time was had by all! We're planning on doing a follow-up trip in February. Hopefully it wont rain.

DATELINE October 25, 2004:
Hibernia opened in Catacombs. The graphics in Hibernia are jaw dropping. We also got second accounts into beta, so I got Karen playing a bit on Pendragon. Of course, her computer is a bit too slow, so she has a lot of lag, some textures don't load and in at least one location, the computer simply crashes.

THE REMAINDER OF THIS ENTRY WAS LOST TO THE EVILS OF DATABASE CORRUPTION.

I made my LAST mini-ding last night. My nearly two-year old Reaver, finally made level 49.5! Only five more bubbles of exp to go until I top out at level 50.

Of course, then, I'll be stuck farming for gold to buy "real" equipment. Joy.

Kill a cyclist: go directly to jail, do not pass "go", do not collect $200.

14-year sentence in cyclist's death

Wednesday, August 18, 2004: Well, I finally bit the bullet and bought a PS2. I found a used one on craigslist and dropped $100 cash for a PS2, one 8M memory card, one controller, four games and something called a "gameshark". After a little internet research, it turns out that this gameshark thing is a cheat code dongle. I have no idea how to make it work, and quite frankly don't really care. I may try to sell off the games and gameshark thingie to help make back some of the $$$ I spent on the basic box. All I wanted was a PS2 and I got one for a decent (in my opinion) price. It works.

I'm still trying to figure out how to download games and burn them so that I can "sample" some of the stuff that a PS2 has to offer. I'll probably buy my top 3 picks from E^3, when they are released.

Saturday, August 21, 2004: Karen and I went down to Great America. I was disappointed how much the place has been dumbed down. Well, not really. See, I have fond memories of that park being host to some of the best roller coasters in Northern California, plus a lot of fun attractions and basically a full day of "stuff". Well, call me a sissy, but the new bottomless-style roller coasters like "Top Gun" and this vomit machine they call "Invertigo" just aren't fun to me. I don't enjoy the feeling of motion sickness. Nor do I enjoy not being 100% sure how gravity works for a good half-hour after taking a 45 second whirlwind tour of my stomach's contents. So, basically they have narrowed the park's attractions down to the tamest of the tame "old style" rides and the most violent stomach churning rides possible, with precious little in between. Still it wasn't a bad day, just not all that I had hoped for. Maybe I just had unrealistic expectations. Still, I had more fun going to our "local" park, Marine World.

On the way home, we stopped in Burlingame and ate dinner at the Ramen Club. I haven't eaten there since before I went to Cal Poly and it was as good as I remembered. We ended up having two HUGE bowls of delicious authentic Ramen that we couldn't finish and after paying and tip it still was less expensive than the crappy fast-food style fish and fries we had at Great America.

Overall, a fun day, and a long day.

Saturday, August 14, 2004: I completed my first official 1/2 Vineman Relay bike leg. I did this leg as a bandit three years ago when I was the swimmer on my relay team. I was pleased that I completed the bike leg faster than the actual cyclist on my team that year. This year, however, I was one of two cyclists. The other team had a much faster swimmer, so I knew that I would be starting about 10-15 minutes back. I also knew the other cyclist was stronger than me, but that wasn't going to stop me from trying.

I started strong. Since the relay leg started dead last, the people that were directly in front of me on the bike were the slow people from the waves preceding (the two waves just ahead of us were the Barb's Race, women only, racers. So if nothing else, the view was nice). I quickly passed around two dozen of them in the first 10 miles. Around the 15 mile mark, a lady in a yellow jersey slowly passed me. She didn't get far because I was determined not to lose any ground. After a few miles I crept back up to her. As I passed her, I took the time to thank her for making me work a little harder than I normally would have. As we were chatting, an Asian girl in a blue passed us both with the comment, "What... socializing?"

At mile 30, I stopped to use a porta-potty. I'm not to keen on on-bike evacuation. I was stopped for maybe 3 minutes. When I jumped back on the bike I knew I had to make up some time, so I pushed even harder. After a good ten miles, I finally caught up to (and passed) that same lady in yellow AND the Asian girl in blue. If nothing else, I had made up the time from my "pit stop".

And then came Chalk Hill. My legs were starting to ache and I simply could not hold the pace. I had been marking out people about 1/2 mile up the road as my "target" for the whole ride, but now I was losing them in the distance. The yellow jersey lady passed me and I never saw her again.

On the other side, I was passed by the second girl. She pulled about 1/2 mile away from me on the rollers. I dug deep and stuck with her and at one point managed to close the gap to tens of feet. About one mile from the end, I was passed by the third girl and my legs finally gave out completely. The third girl dwindled and the second girl was gaining distance.

I finished the ride with an official time of 3:08:53.1 - an average speed of 17.79 MPH.

Sunday, August 15, 2004: Roommate Mike moved in. We've been looking for a roommate for a while and Mike seemed like a really good fit. He is a huge baseball fan, plays computer games and seems to have some semblance of a real life. Both Karen and I found it really easy to talk to him when he stopped in and he seemed to like the place and us as well. The only real gotcha is that he is only 18 years old, but it doesn't seem like it will be that big of an issue. Here's hoping for a good house-sharing relationship.

Tuesday, August 17, 2004: Roommate Mike sat down tonight while Karen and I were eating dinner. He apologized profusely, but he asked to move out next weekend. Apparently he hadn't completely realized how much time school was going to take, and with no real income he simply can't afford the place. His intent was to get a job locally, but since he has been spending 10+ hours a day at the school, he claims (and I tend to agree) that living at home and commuting makes sense for him. Heck, I did the same thing when I was going to SFSU, long ago. I would drive to school, stay there all day long and then drive home. Sure it was a lot of miles and the commute time sucked, but it was a lot less than trying to live locally to the school. I told him that he could move out whenever he wanted but I was going to keep his rent for the second half of August. A rental agreement would state 30-days minimum, and I'm letting him out after only 15-days. He seemed disappointed - apparently his money issues are pretty severe and he REALLY needs the extra money that the 15-days of rent amount to. That's life.

The final effect: I'm looking for a roommate again and I've now missed the beginning-of-school rush.

The last seven days have been amazingly full and frenetic!

Tuesday, August 3, 2004. I officially accepted the Reaver Team Lead position with Mythic Entertainment. This is an unpaid volunteer position, and it requires about 10 hours a week of time. Of course, most of that time is going to be spent either playing Camelot (which I already do), reading message boards (which I already do), writing postings (which I already do) and being an ombudsman for the Reaver community (which I used to do). So basically, it means I get to keep doing what I'm doing, only now I have to be "responsible" about what I say in public, since I'm a sort-of "representative" for an entire class of people. Oh, and I get accolades too.

Wednesday, August 4, 2004. Two separate projects were due today at work. One was completed, one was not. On the other hand, a different project that had been on-hold, finally got finished up and sent out. Overall, a very busy day and very productive too.

My friend Zant Burdine II (yes, that really is his name) stopped in for a visit. He's being shipped out to the Persian Gulf on 15-AUG-04 as part of the National Guard force being deployed there. He and his wife, Suzanne, decided to take a second honeymoon and see some sights before his tour, and California was on the list. We went to Spring Lake and I ran two laps around the lake while Karen did a brick. She rode her MTB around the lake three times and then ran around once. Go Karen! Afterwards, we ordered some pizza and invited April over. The five of us played a fun game of Pit for a few hours before we all retired for the evening.

Thursday, August 5, 2004. I'm falling further behind at work. The job that was due on Wednesday is probably not going to get done this week. I have another project that is due on Friday and it looks like it will be pushed back to next week. The project that I was supposed to be working on next week might have to get bumped by a full week. A few weeks ago I was searching for things to do at work, and this week I'm falling behind. It's a crazy job.

Karen, Zant, Suzanne and I went to Spring Lake again. This time it was swimming for everyone. The plan was for Karen to swim 8 laps, I was going to swim 10 laps and Zant and Suzanne were going just float around for a while. Karen and I swam six laps and then we both decided to call it a workout. My arms were sore and aching and I wanted to be sure to be in good form for the Tri-4-Real this weekend.

Zant and Suzanne checked out of the local Motel 6 and decided to stay at my house in the spare bedroom. No reason was stated, but I suspect it had something to do with internet access; I set up Zant's laptop to work with my DSL on Wednesday night. Zant and I stayed up until 12:30am playing Unreal Tournament 2004. I'm a better FPS player than he is, but as the night goes on, I start making stupider and stupider mistakes. Zant ends up winning the last match after I annihilate myself with the Redeemer.

Friday, August 6, 2004. The wrong synapse finally fires in the morning and I check usenet for Doom3. I flag the appropriate messages and start the download before going to work. At lunchtime, I have one complete disc and a ton of parity files. I un-flag the parity files and by the time I sit down in the evening, I've got the full game, crack and keygen.

Of course, before that happens, Zant and Suzanne roll out, to go visit with Jeff Johnson for a couple days before continuing on their honeymoon. Karen and I go over to April's apartment to jump-start her car so she can drive to Sears and get a new battery installed. I make dinner for Karen and then settle in to play Doom3.

I can't help but compare Doom 3 to Half-Life. Even though HL is five years old, Doom3 feels LESS immersive. The small little touches like sinks that turn on, hand driers that work and toilets that flush (in Half-Life) make Doom3 seem like a much older game than it actually is. When you shoot an abandoned fire extinguisher lying on the floor, it doesn't explode, or even burst, it just moves around a bit. It is almost as if you are playing the original Doom game (circa 1986) with updated graphics and sound. Oh, the graphics! If you want eye-candy, this game delivers! The graphical effects are nothing short of awesome, but the gameplay is severely lacking. The game is full of multitudinous dark hallways that are not "spooky" or "scary" but merely annoying. It almost seems like the developers had to lower the light levels to nearly nothing so that you can't see what's shooting at you, just to make the fights fair. I am playing on the "normal" skill level, and I played until I died the very first time. I played the first three levels (out of 30-something) completely and died about 90% of the way into the fourth. Quite honestly, I think the only reason I died was because I was getting tired (it was after midnight again) and I was thinking about how many hours of sleep I was (or wasn't) going to get before driving to my race the next morning.

Saturday, August 7, 2004. We got up at 3:30AM (three hours of sleep for the win!) and drive to Rancho Seco. Karen is set to do her second ever triathlon. I'll let you read her race report. After the race, Karen won a free entry to the Luna Bar Challenge in October. We did discover a pretty good Italian restaurant in Lodi that evening.

Sunday, August 8, 2004. Back to Rancho Seco for the Tri-4-Real #3 race. I still have write my own race report, but I finished in 2:48:29, a full 32 seconds slower than my target time. Of course it was 99 degree in the shade on Sunday, and that may have been a factor. I also did the math and computed my USAT "score" for this race. It isn't a USAT sanctioned event, but the math still works. My overall score works out to be 62.6946. Compare this to my score at Wildflower, which was only 57.3054.

I'll write a full report later.

Karen claims that she pointed this out to me a few weeks back, but apparently I was having a loss-of-brain service at that time because it didn't sink in. Kyle convinced me to look at the Pacific Grove web site, claiming that it "looked" like I was accepted to race there. I checked it out, and sure enough I was on the "approved" list. $145 later and I'm registered for the Olympic race on my birthday!

Now I have to get training... 5 weeks to go and two races in the interim. This is going to be tricky, but I'm ready for it. Bring it on!! My current training schedule is online under the EVENTS heading on the left.

Yesterday was the half Vineman race. I did not participate. To be honest, I'm actually pretty glad that I did not. I'm in nothing even close to half-ironman distance shape. After Wildflower, my training took a nosedive, and I pretty much coasted for a month. After Tri-4-Real #1 I started to pick it back up again and was on track for racing the half Vineman and setting a new PR for that distance.

And then, only one week into that schedule, I got hit by a car on my bike ride home from work on June 14.

After that, my training pretty much stopped. For the next two weeks, all I did was some light swimming workouts. If I tried to do any kicking, my knees would ache. If I sat in a chair too long, my knees would ache. Finally, at the end of June, I did a 50 mile bike ride and my legs completely locked up on me. When I put my foot down to dismount, my quads cramped so hard that I had to reach down and push on the back of my leg with my hand to unlock my knees.

I picked up my training and I even raced in Tri-4-Real #2, even though I was still not back up to 100%. After that, my training was back up to speed and I started feeling good about racing again. But it was too little, and far far too late. With only three weeks between Tri-4-Real #2 and the half-Vineman, there just wasn't enough time to get into shape.

Oh, sure, I could have muscled through it. I could have thrown myself at the course and finished. But I want to race at Tri-4-Real #3, which is NEXT weekend, only a mere seven days after the half-Vineman. Had I done the half, there is no way I would have even been recovered (much less race-ready) in one week. And then I am running a half-marathon as part of the W&K relay team seven days after that!! It's sad to pay for a race and then not do it, but I think I did the right thing.

Moving forward, I'm not sure what my next target will be. Normally, after the half-Vineman, I'm looking towards Pacific Grove. Sadly, this year I had a brain failure and did not register for that race before it closed. I am entered into the lottery, but I can't count on getting in. Other options in September are the Nautica Malibu race (a sprint in SoCal), or Sentinal (Olympic in Santa Cruz) or maybe even the Big Kahuna (a half-ironman in Santa Cruz). After that, there really isn't anything until Treasure Island (which I'm already registered for) and then the winter break. It's really too early to start looking at Wildflower 2005, but without a solid target, I'm finding it difficult to justify 10-15 hours a week for training in the immediate future.

A funny thing happened at work.

There was this project that I worked on during my first six months of employ at Winzler & Kelly, the Casanova Pump Station Upgrade for the City of San Mateo. I wasn't a licensed Professional Engineer at the time, so my work was supervised (and later signed) by the guy who hired me.

Well, this was done way-back-when, in Y2K. The project wasn't terribly complex. In fact it was a lot LESS complex than anything I'm currently working on. Heck, even a simple tenant improvement project has more confusing things. Anyway, the project was designed and sealed in late Y2K, but the City did not have funding to build it, so it sat on a shelf for a couple of years.

Fast forward to today. The City has the funding now, so it went to bid and a contractor was selected. We are now receiving pre-construction Request For Information forms (RFIs) from the contractor prior to him breaking ground. The guy who gets to deal with these RFIs is the Engineer-of-Record, the guy who signed the drawings. Of course, he can't remember what we did (it was nearly four years ago, after all) and the paper file lives in my cubicle. So when he finally got a hard question, he cames over to my cube and asked me, and we dug into the old paperwork to find the answer.

This was quite an eye-opener. I got to see a design that I did four years ago, in all it's glory. Wow. It's pretty sad. Sure it was four years ago, but... wow. I'd be embarrassed to put out a drawing set like that today. Yes it was a simple job, but there are glaring holes in the design big enough to drive a cement truck through. As I read the specifications and scanned the drawings, I couldn't help but ask questions: what about this? why didn't we spec that? why isn't this detailed? and so on and so on.

I guess the short version is that I realized how much I've developed as a designer and as an engineer. A lot.

It was so nice to have a weekend where I didn't have any real plans. Yes, the plans that I have during the weekend times are usually FUN stuff; it's not like I'm going to work or forced to do community service or serve jail time on the weekends. But for the first time in a long time, I slept in BOTH mornings.

Saturday we went for a nice run up at Annadell park. Slow jog up to Lake Ilsanjo, a sprint around the lake, and then a slow jog back down. After a leisurely warm shower, we went out and gorged on sushi, followed by a few hours of playing Camelot. I sat Karen down and had her play my buffbot account which served as both a way of introducing her to Camelot and a way to stop the bot from dying all the time. A level 8 bot is at some significant risk when it is following a level 48 toon around.

Sunday, we went for a bike ride. Separately, of course. I did my usual Guerneville ride (29 miles) in 1:36:xx. Last year, my goal was to do that ride in 1:30:00 before Wildflower. I'm almost there.

Despite that, I'm thinking of pulling out of the Half-Vineman this year. I'm certainly not feeling "ready" for a half-ironman in two weeks. I could go ahead and "wing it" and have a slow finish time, but then I have an olympic distance race the following weekend. Recovery from the Half-Vineman would be my taper for the olympic. In other words, weekend warrior style, I would race->rest->race. And then, to round out the month, I would run a half-marathon the very next weekend as part of one of the relay teams my work is fielding. I think this is like the old "good/fast/cheap: choose any two" saying. I'm committed to doing the half-marathon as part of the relay team. I basically have to decide whether I want to blow off the Half-Vineman or the Tri-4-Real #3.

September looks just as bad. I'm entered into the lottery for Pacific Grove. I missed the registration, simply because I was too busy to sign up. Even though I had a chance to pre-register two weeks prior to the general opening of the registration, I still managed to miss it. So depending on whether I race there or not, I may do PG, or possibly the Nautica/Malibu sprint, or maybe Sentinal in Santa Cruz.

This is why a relaxing weekend was so nice.

Tri-4-Real #2 was held last weekend. I did "okay", which is actually better than I did in T4R#1, but not as good as I did at T4R#2-2003 (which remains my PR race). I was wearing Karen's HRM which was good because I could split my times more finely than the three-split "official" results, but bad in that I was not 100% comfortable with the equipment and made a big boo-boo in my personal timing.

The Swim

The swim went decently. Karen did her 1km swim the day prior and she reported the water to be bath-water warm, so I did not take a long time to "warm up" (which is usually more accurately described as a cool-down in most of the races I do) in the water. The water was plenty warm, but by skipping that 5-minute 20-stroke swim out-and-back-to-shore, I did not get my wetsuit "set" on my shoulders. Consequently, for the first 1/5 of the swim I felt like my shoulders were being held by rubber bands. In a way, they were. At the first buoy, I stopped to tread water and wave my arms around and slide the neoprene around a bit. After that, my swim felt a lot more comfortable, but the damage had already been done. The shoulder that was bruised when I got hit by a car a few weeks ago had been intermittently sore since that accident, and the strain of fighting against the wetsuit for 5 minutes had irritated it. I finished the rest of the swim with a gimpy pull on the left side. (On the plus side, this -forced- me to have an efficient stroke in order to preserve my shoulder.)

The official swim split is 31:00, even. When I left the water I hit what I thought was the "split" button on the HRM, but what I actually pushed was the "hold" button. So the stopwatch stopped when I was in T1. I hit the same button when I was leaving transition. When I looked down, it was still flashing "LAP 1" at me, so I knew I had done something stupid. I finally lap-split the HRM 41.8 seconds later. I learned from my mistakes and split everything else correctly. Despite me being an idiot, because I had -stopped- the timer in T1, I was able to figure out my T1 time by doing some time-arithmetic.

T1

I felt pretty good leaving the swim, and actually jogged the entire way into transition. I felt pretty good doing my transition stuff too. The wetsuit peeled off quickly. Everything was where I expected it to be. I sat down, dried off my feet, pulled on my socks, pulled on my shoes (that I had gotten ready BEFORE the race - first time for everything), grabbed my sunglasses and helmet and bike and jogged (with bike in tow) to the bike start.

The "math determined" T1 time was a mere 2:55, which may be my best ever T1.

The Bike

This bike course is fairly flat. Not as pancake flat as Pacific Grove, but I'd guestimate that there isn't more than 50 feet of elevation difference between the highest point and the lowest. The kicker is that the way out is slightly downhill (overall) and the wind is at your back. Of course, this means that the return trip is generally UP-hill and against the wind. I split my ride on the way out at 36:28.3, plus the erroneous 41.8 seconds that were leftover from the swim/T1 fiasco, gives me a 1st-20km bike split of 37:10.1

Less than a mile after the turnaround, I saw a large group of riders going the opposite direction. I thought that was a bit odd, but didn't give it too much importance. Until they caught me. Now I don't think that it was intentional, but what had developed was a Tour de France style mini-peleton. It was a fast-moving gaggle of riders, maybe six of them, all drafting off of one another, jostling for position, but no one was breaking away. The leader(s) would break the headwind and the followers would "rest" in the draft, until they felt they could break and pass, and the process would repeat. The key thing is that these people were CLEARLY drafting. I did get "stuck" behind them for a short time and automatically fell into the group, doing exactly the same thing. For about two minutes. And then I realized that what was happening was completely and utterly against the rules and contrary to the spirit of triathlon. Sure, I could have worked the group and finished the bike with a lot more energy and saved several minutes on the run. But would that have been an accurate indication of my personal efforts? No. So, on the next uphill, I dropped a gear, let my cadence wind up to 120+ and pulled about a half mile away from the group. Of course, now that I was all alone ahead of them, I was fighting the headwind and they were not. So it only took a few minutes for them to catch me again. This time I did not wait around and as soon as they caught me I pushed again and pulled way out in front. And again, the headwind slowed me enough that the group caught me. Four times this happened.

Now, the thing that was abundantly clear to me during all of this was that I was a stronger cyclist than all of them. When I pulled out in front, any of them could have followed me, which would have broken up the pack (or at least spread it out some, which would have had the same effect). But they didn't, or couldn't. Clearly, in my mind, I "won" the bike leg against all of the people in that pack. Of course, two freaking miles from the end of the bike leg, the fastest one in the pack (who was a girl) FINALLY broke away... followed at about 30-second, non-drafting distance intervals by everyone else in the pack. On an uphill. And of course, since they were all "fresh" (they weren't working half as hard as I was on the main ride since they were all drafting, and thus had a lot more left in the tank) they were all able to drop me on the last stretch. To my own credit, I was able to re-pass two of them before we finally pulled into transition. Those guys were CLEARLY getting benefit from the draft-pack; I was faster than them one they were on their own, even with me being far more tired than them.

My 2nd-20km bike split was recorded as 38:16.7, about one minute slower than the first half, and the overall "official" bike time was 1:19:34 (which includes both transitions). That's a new PR for the bike leg!

T2

Contrasted with my first transition, my T2 was completely confused. I couldn't focus on changing. I had trouble figuring out how to change my shoes: okay, bike shoe off, okay, sit down, no wait, don't sit down, stand up, okay, pick up running shoe, wait, I'm still wearing one bike shoe, put down running shoe, sit down, no wait, stand up, take off bike shoe, no wait, I should put the running shoe on first, pick up running shoe.... I was a bit blurry about the whole process. I do recall that the fast people from the drafting group were leaving transition at least a full minute ahead of me.

The HRM claims that I was only in T2 for a bit over a minute at 1:08.8. I think it is lying about that. I'm pretty sure I was wandering around aimlessly for a lot longer than that.

The Run

The run was pure hell. It was (as Nancy says) "afrika hot", dry, dusty, and the run is on a rocky dirt trail with rolling hills and poor footing. I split every mile and kept a running tally in my mind of how far above or below my target 10-minute pace I was.
Mile 1 - 8:52.7 - Looking good! I'm hot, I'm tired, and I'm feeling mighty slow, but I'm running. I walked from the 1-mile mark until the clock hit 1 minute, putting that "mile" at 8 seconds under my pace.

Mile 2 - 10:43.1 - There was an aide station in this mile, and I walked while I drank a dixie cup of Cytomax. Between that walk and the initial stroll, this mile sucked. I'm now 35 seconds slow.
Mile 3 - 9:26.1 - There was an aide station in this mile too, and I stopped to drink there, too. But I'm pushing hard to make up that 35 seconds and actually did it! Yay me! I'm back "on track" for my pace. Well, not completely, I'm actually still 1 second slow, but I can make up one second, right?
Mile 4 - 10:00.5 - Apparently not. The aide station was right at mile 4, so it did not impact this split. Regardless, I'm only holding steady and not gaining back that one second deficit.
Mile 5 - 10:17.1 - The fatigue is getting to me now. I get passed by a two or three guys in my age group and a half-dozen women. I'm not passing anyone anymore like I was early in the run, but I'm not losing ground to those that I've already passed. I went through the aide station that Karen was working and got a kiss on my way by. She says that my face is beet red and asks if I'm okay-- apparently I look like I'm about to pass out. I feel hot and I'm hurting, but otherwise fine. I'm now 18 seconds behind and I'm thinking I'm not going to be able to make that up.
Mile 6 - 9:51.4 - Pulling out ALL the stops here, I was able to gain back nine whole seconds off my pace. I only did that because I knew that it was almost over and I could rest at the end. Even though I was almost sprinting this mile, I was still only just barely under a 10-minute pace and did not make any significant comeback on my deficit. I'm only 9 seconds under my pace, but for some reason I lost my mind and thought I was a minute behind.
Mile 6.2 - 1:24.1 - This should have been a two-minute leg, but I was thinking I only had one-minute to do it so I pushed REALLLY HARD here. It was the finish chute so I let my stride go long, pulled my stride and did my best "finish strong" imitation. I ended up beating my pace by a whopping 25 seconds!!

The "official" run split was 1:00:31

The results

This was race #2 of a three race series. I'm not fast, finishing 48th in a field of only 56 people. But in order to be considered for the series, they had to have finished race #1 ahead of me. Removing all of the people that did not compete in race #1, I'm ranked 16th in my age group. Awards are given five deep, so I'm only 11 places away from a podium. I've never gotten an award before. This makes me want to do well in race #3. I suspect that I won't be able to move up 11 places, but it's a nice dream.

My finish time was 2:51:05, which is only 0:03:08 slower than my PR (which was this same race one year ago). My REAL goal is to beat that PR time in three weeks when I do Tri 4 Real #3 on August 8. But I'd settle for a podium spot, too.

One more item of interest from E3:

Some of the most coveted "schwag" (ie toys) that everyone wants to get from E3 are the "glowy" things. This year, Nintendo was giving away a glowy non-brand specific Palm stylus. The catch was that they pretty much forced you to watch their presentation on the DS (Dual Screen) handheld that they are releasing later this year. Now, I'm not much of a handheld gamer, but I can watch anyone's presentation for 15 minutes. But the line! The line was 2 freaking hours long! So, being smarter than the average consumer, I asked where the exit of the presentation was. I waited by the exit. When someone came out and tossed the stylus into their bag, I would approach them and ask if they were going to keep it. The first few people told me that they did, in fact, want the stylus. But after a few minutes, some guy responded that he would trade me his stylus for the green glowy necklace I was wearing. I pulled the necklace off and took the stylus. And then I walked over to the monstrous X-Box booth and got another green glowy necklace. I win! It only took me 15 minutes to get my stylus (the duration of the presentation) and NO line!!

Well, I'm having a potential new roommate looking at the place tomorrow, so it basically forced me to go through my E3 bags and pick out the good stuff from the bad. Most of it was crap, but there were a few gems in there.

First, though, the pictures. I use my little 640x480 Clié camera to snap a few images, and those are available here. Another attendee totally unknown to me has a similar taste in imagery; his shots are here. He used a much better camera than I did. And he did get one shot of the THQ girls (who were some of the sexiest things on the show floor) and there is a blurry shot of the sexiest SRS dancer (most of the rest were pretty mediocre). Sadly, he did not get the most attractive woman at the entire show. I saw her walking around on the last day (wearing a purple tanktop and blue jeans) and the show would literally stop when she walked by. The funny thing was, she was sitting in a booth where a babe from the Baywatch TV show was supposed to be the main attraction (you can see the teaser picture on the table in my photo) and people were more interested in HER than the big-money hired help! The booth manager sent her away away, which led the the aforementioned show stoppage. When all was said and done, I had to go back to that booth about 20 minutes before closing and specifically get a final picture. Sadly, it doesn't do her justice. Overall, the babeage at this year's E3 was far superior to last year, but they were fewer in number. Quality over quantity is a good thing!

On to the games! My three top picks this year:

1. God of War (Sony). Yes, this is a PS2 title. Deal with it. Read the GameSpy GameSpy preview, then go buy a PS2 and pre-order this game. Really. From what I saw at E3, this is going to be big like Half-life was big. This one convinced me, a true-and-true PC gamer, to start looking for a PS2 to call my own. Luckily (or sadly, depending on your point of view) this won't be released until next year, so there is plenty of time to get that PS2. Believe what you want but when this one comes out you WILL hear about it. Every single person that I spoke to at E3 (including the 30-some odd MMO players I was there with) commented on this game and every single one of them wanted to buy it. Trust me, buy a PS2 and pre-order this game. I'm not kidding.

2. Death by Degrees (NAMCO). Okay, call me a sucker for a blue-eyed blond, but this game had more going for it than just stunning looks. It has a kick-ass attitude to back it up, as well. The gameplay varies between weapon-based to straight-up knuckle fighting, with a James Bond-ish plotline. And (who knew?) this one is a PS2 game as well.

3. Guildwars (NC Soft). I mentioned this as a title to watch last year, and it is even nicer now. This is a class-based PvP MMO, but they have addressed most of the issues that PvP games have. Basically, they have given every class of character a major weakness that can be exploited by a different class. So no more solo ganking. If you want to be successful in this game you NEED a "guild" (or at least a group) to back you up. Coming from my DAoC-centric perspective, this means cooperation of a bunch of people with very different playstyles is important, which means a varied game. The game allows for almost instant action with "instanced" gameplay. Currently in closed beta (they call it alpha, but they are WAYYYY past that point from what I saw at E3). This may be my next MMO.

Also worth mentioning:

Blood Will Tell (SEGA): Another PS2 game. Read the GameDaily preview. Look pretty nice and the gameplay seemed varied. It stood out among a lot of other products, but not enough to make me rave.

XTango (BinaryCraft Ltd.): This one is an XBox title, and despite its rather unusual gameplay was still quite compelling. Who would have thought a game about learning to dance could be fun? Sadly, this game is unlikely to ever see the light of day in the US. Really a shame. Read the 1up.com preview.

Liesure Suit Larry (Sierra/Vivendi): Yes, Larry is back. With a bevy of hot digital coeds, and several simple mini-games that determine whether Larry gets to see them naked or not, this one caters directly to the shallow male audience. While the mature responsible side of me laughs at this game, the immature schoolboy secretly wants to play it just to see if animated soft-core computer porn is as much fun as it used to be. I think it will be.

Era of Faith (TQ Digital, China): This one caught my eye, not because of gameplay of technical reasons, but simply because of its pricing structure. This is a typical MMO. The game engine is a free download. There is no monthly fee. You can play as normal like a regular online game, but with NO COSTS EVER!! Of course, there is a catch. This is it: you have the OPTION to spend $8 to buy a "power up" - think of it as a skill point, or a level that you can use to increase some aspect of your online avatar. Of course, all other players also have this option. According to the company rep, this is so popular, that they limit players to buying "only" ten power-ups in a single month. Want to be a high level character? No problem, you can do it the old fashioned way and grind out the levels (and some undoubtedly will) or you can reach into your pocketbook and be there instantly. Talk about a great marketing strategy aimed squarely at the MMO market! Whether or not the gameplay is compelling enough to get people to keep coming back for more remains to be seen however.

Half Life 2 (Valve): Yes, this last on my list for a reason. I'm only mentioning it because everyone in the whole world is waiting for this game. It was nice seeing Counterstrike running on the HL2 engine, which is freaking GORGEOUS... I've played with the pirated beta version and I wish they had shown more of what this thing is capable of. And seeing the first bit of the introductory level (which was very cinema-like) gave a good "flavor" for the game. And there were some serious "hints" that Team Fortess 2 would be part of the package. And I did get a rare HL2 t-shirt (which I gave away after finding out that they were selling for $50 on eBay).

Notable non-game things:

At the demo of Lineage II, they had some nice little 250ml cans of Coke with some elf chick on the side. When I sat down at the computer, I was told everyone who tried the game would get one. When the session was over, the girl who was handing out the cans said that "only the person who died first" could get a Coke! I did my best disappointed, crushed-male-ego, sappy guy look and wandered around slowly in the booth. After a few minutes, this same girl appeared next to me and handed my a can of Coke. The amusing part of this was that the guy who was sitting next to me at the next computer (one of my group) tried to bargain with her and completely failed. I so victoly!!

Intellivison sponsored a booth where they had gaming consoles and games from the dawn of computer games. This ran the gamut from coin ops (Space Invaders! Pong! Millipede! Defender! Pac Man!) to handhelds (Lynx! Gameboy!) to consoles (Atari! ColecoVision! Vectrex!) to computers (Pet! Apple ][!). It was fun seeing some of the stuff that I played with in Junior High School. It made all us "old folks" feel like part of an exclusive club. When standing in that booth and hearing someone exclaim "Wow, I haven't seen one of those in twenty years!" those of us that had been around the block all exchanged a knowing smile while the kids and newcomers wondered what the excitement was all about. Who can forget the old "Adventure" game on the Atari? Or the original "Pitfall"? It was a fun jaunt down memory lane and one of the highlights (at least in my mind) of the show.

Overall, E3-2004 was as much fun and as tiring as ever. Knowing what to expect sure made it easier to find the stuff that I was interested in, I felt like I got both more, and less, from the show this year. More because I was able to make better use of my time, and less because there was less there that catered directly to my personal tastes. On the other hand, I was able to play around more with the things the interested me and had loads of fun talking to several booth-babes. Every year I learn more, and the big lesson this year was to spend time in Kentia Hall on the very first day of the show, not wait until the end. Even though Kentia is the place where all of the small not-really-a-name companies and products end up, it had the most interesting, cutting-edge stuff (as well as some of the lamest you-have-got-to-be-kidding, that-will-never-work-in-a-million-years crap).

I'm definitely looking forward to next year!

Some number of months ago, I had a hard drive crash. What happened exactly was that the utility power "blinked"... that is to say that it went out for about a second, then came right back. This did Something Bad™ to a hard disk and it crashed. At the time I was running a 2-disk RAID0 system, which was later upgraded to a RAID0+1 system. Subsequently, one disk of the RAID0+1 system crashed for reasons unknown, and upon replacing it, I found that the controller would not "rebuild" the array. I elected to buy a different controller.

Today, while I was sitting here playing Camelot, the same exact thing happened. The power "blinked". When my computer came back up, I got all sorts of warnings about a failed disk. I was told that the system was usable, but that Something Bad™ had happened and I was given about five different options on how to fix it.

As I sit here, the system is 90% rebuilt.

If anyone ever asks me about building a RAID system, I have to give a glowing endorsement to the Promise Technologies TX4400 controller, and a glowy NON-endorsement to anything from Silicon Image. (Sadly, the "built in" controller on many mainboards is a Silicon Image controller -- use it at your own risk and don't say I didn't warn you!) Buying the TX4400 was the best $100 I have spent on my computer.

Pretty much any group can be separated into two major groups. Bicyclists, for example, can be separated into ones that have been hit by cars, and ones that will be hit by cars in the future. Yesterday, I joined the first group.

I was coming home from work and some guy in a silver pickup truck totally did not see me and made a right turn into me. He was in a hurry (as if that is an excuse) and was looking the opposite way to try and merge into traffic. Luckily, he was starting from a dead stop and I saw it coming. By the time I hit the pavement, I was already out of my toe-clips and was rolling to get out from under his tires. He did come to a stop on top of my front wheel, but aside from a few scratches (and possibly a bent front rim) my bike was undamaged. I distinctly remember hearing the tinkle of broken glass, so I'm pretty sure that he lost a headlight in the impact.

As far as bodily damages, nothing significant. I really lucked out. Both of my knees are bruised form the fall. My right knee got scraped a teeny tiny bit, but my left knee got wrenched sideways. My left elbow also got a tiny scrape. Nothing was torn or broken, but my knees are VERY sore and don't like bending, and my left shoulder (which wasn't hurt at all at the time) is very stiff. I will heal.

Of course, I won't be running or riding for a few days until my knees stop hurting. At least swimming class started this week.

TBF posted the split times for the race last weekend.

Swim 27:27 (good!)
Bike 1:26:15 (includes BOTH transitions, so also good!)
Run 1:04:19 (ARGH!!)

As expected my run time was... "not optimal". It works out to a 10:21 minute/mile average. That's a full minute per mile SLOWER than my best Wildflower run time and a darn near 15 full minutes slower than my best 10km time.

Only seven weeks to Vineman.

After a full month of NOT training, after being sick for about a week-and-a-half, after not planning anything until the last second, I completed the second annual Tri 4 Real #1 in Rancho Seco Park on Sunday.

My finish time was a bit slower than last year (by about 11 minutes), but I still came in under three hours. I think that I probably would have had a better showing if I had been better trained (duh!) but I'm still pretty happy with my performance overall, considering the LACK of preparation that went into this race.

The swim went amazingly fast. Of course, it is a faster-than-a-pool swim. Glassy water in a ten to twelve foot deep lake that is naturally around 80 degrees. My watch reported a 25-minute swim split, and amazing as it may seem that matches my swim split from last year on this same course.

The bike is generally downhill, with the wind at your back on the way out. I split the turn-around and it was 37:29 to the half-way point. Of course, the way back is generally uphill, going into the wind. Not exactly conducive to a negative split on the bike. I still managed to get a second-half split of 41:34. Of course the official splits will include both T1 and T2 in my bike time, so I expect it to be higher than what I've got here.

The run...well, the run blew chunks. I really see a problem here now. My run times need some SERIOUS help. I split on every single mile mark and for the 10km run I saw 9:13 (not bad), 11:23 (what?), 9:38 (pacing issues!), 11:29 (d\'oh!), 11:00 (not doing well here), and 10:07 (better, but a bit slow). I was shooting for a nice 10-minute average, but failed miserably. Note that I did not get a good split for the last 0.2 mile of the run. Regardless, I know my run time is going to be around 1:06:00-ish, which just plain sucks!

Last year I trained my running a LOT and let my biking slack. I didn't really see any slowdown in the bike, but no improvement was made either. This year I focussed mostly on the bike, and while I feel that I'm a lot stronger on the bike now, I'm not seeing any significant time improvements. And I -AM- seeing some serious degradation of my run times. I think I'm going to start doing more run training over the next seven weeks.

I have one more "check-in" race before the 1/2 Vineman in August: Tri 4 Real #2. We'll see how that goes.

Oh, and by the way, I'm ranked #49 in the running for a $2000 purse that pays down to 5th place. No new entrants are allowed (it is a three-race series), so I can only move UP the list. Now if only 44 of those guys would either not do the next race in the series, or have a flat or something that makes me faster than them..... (as if)

We watched "Lost in Translation" the other night. It was very illuminating. I was able to make a pretty strong parallel with some fairly recent events in my life, so it had a pretty personal message to me as well as being a good film. A year ago, this movie would have thrown me into a suicidal depression. Not now though. I really am over it.

It's nice being able to look back on my life and see how I've become a better, stronger person. The life events which I went though during that phase of my life were very painful, and I wouldn't want to do it again. But I also wouldn't want to avoid them either. Growth is always painful, and I grew quite a bit.

I am a Nationally Ranked Triathlete! Yes folks, yours truly is actually on the books as a Nationally Ranked athlete in the sport of Triathlon. I am listed as the 2176th ranked male Triathlete aged 35-39.

Okay, okay. So maybe being ranked as number 2176 is not that big of a deal. But when you consider how men there are in the USA that are between the ages of 35 and 39 that are not ranked (or are ranked even lower, the poor guys) then it starts being a pretty significant accomplishment.

In other news, the Wildflower report for 2004 has been written. Read it by clicking on the link on the left (look under "EVENTS").

Wow.

Wildflower. E3. Jamaica. Grand Cayman. Cozumel.

I'm going to be blogging every day until I catch up.

Watch this space.

ps: the E3-2004 photos are online at http://www.therealstupid.com/_images/E3-2004. Sorry about the quality. I think a new digital camera needs to be on my gift list this year.

This is not a race report. I'll write that later and stick it in the "events" column over there on the left. This is my accounting of several things which were "interesting" leading up to the race.

Monday, April 26, 2004:
I was hideously unprepared. Nothing was packed. I hadn't even shaved my legs. The shearing took nearly 90 minutes. This is a new long-time record for something as simple as shaving my legs. I can only account the difference to doing it "right". See, in past years I have used cheap-o one-blade disposable razors to shave leg hair that only sees a razor once a year (i.e. about 1/2" long). Most women would shudder at the thought, but I've had good success with that method. Prior to this year, I've never even -nicked- myself with those cheapy razors. Despite that, I decided to use a "good" razor, a 3-bladed Gilette model with the smooth-glide strip and built-in moisturizer and all of the fancy gimmicks that the razor people want to sell you. It ended up taking twice as long. It didn't do nearly as good of a job of shaving. And I ended up taking off my skin on several points along my knee. Verdict: using a cheaper razor for infrequent shaving works better.

Tuesday, April 27, 2004:
Karen and I packed everything up and tossed it into the Jeep. I had hoped to be on the road by noon, but it was closer to 1:30pm before we got out of town. I was feeling a bit of stress going into Santa Cruz since I was unsure as to where the CruiseAmerica place was - the place in Felton was no longer renting RV's and this new place was in Watsonville. As it turned out, it only took two tries to find it. We picked up the RV and quickly tossed all of our stuff inside without unpacking it and drove away. We got to Lake San Antonio around 7:15pm, just before sunset. We drove through the 'D' loop where I stayed last year, but there was no space. We drove through 'C' loop and all the spaces were reserved or had someone set up in them already. I knew it was pointless, but we drove through 'B' and 'A' loops as well. As expected, no spaces. We even went to the top of the hill across from the TNT festival area and it was all reserved as well. Admitting semi-defeat, I drove to 'O' loop and pulled into the same spot that we had parked the "other" RV in three years ago. While Karen actually unpacked our stuff -- pulling it out of the bags and boxes that we had stacked on the RV floor and putting into the various drawers and cabinets -- I went out and walked down to 'D' loop. I was thinking that maybe I could find someone leaving and "adopt" their spot. As it turned out, I met a very nice retired gentleman named Bert who was leaving the next day at 10AM. After a short discussion, we pulled our RV into the fire lane directly behind Bert's trailer. (The discussion was to assure Bert that we were not going to be playing any rap music, nor running our generator.) When he pulled out in the morning, we pulled into his spot within seconds, and hooked up. There was one other guy leaving the next day too, but he had already made a deal with some people to give his spot away, so we quite literally got the LAST SPOT in the park!!

Friday, April 30, 2004:
We had finally filled up the grey water tank, so I decided to hook up the sewer hose and dump the tanks. While I was doing this, a guy comes up and says "Excuse me, sir, you might not want to do that just yet." I was a bit confused and I'm sure it was reflected on my face. After a very brief conversation (during which I continued to hook up the sewer line) he informed me that the spot I was in had been "reserved" for the medical staff, along with the three spots to my left. The odd thing about this was the site immediately to my left was where the Monterey Park "live-on" volunteers had their trailer hooked up. They were a very nice older couple named Bob and Joannie and had been there for about five months already. I was a bit flustered by this, but I wasn't about to give up my spot. I more-or-less ignored him and went back inside. After a few minutes to collect my thoughts I came up with my plan. I was going to assume that this guy was smoking crack and I didn't have to move. But if I -did- have to move, I wasn't going to do it unless they also got Bob and Joanie to move (unlikely). Later I came up with the plan that I was only going to move if they comp'ed me with free -transferable- entries to all Tri-California races for the rest of the year (including the already sold-out Escape from Alcatraz and the already sold-out Triathlon at Pacific Grove). As it turned out, the Tri-Cal guy WAS smoking crack. The medical staff were supposed to be in 'E' loop, which was empty and marked as "reserved". But it was a fun little adventure.

Saturday, May 1, 2004:
Long course. Kyle raced long course. I'm impressed that he did it. It is a difficult, gruelling race. His finish time was under 8-hours, which I suppose is a decent finish time. Two of the GGTC people that I have trained with in the past took DNFs on Saturday. I'm glad I did not race that day, I'm not sure I could have done it.

Sunday, May 2, 2004:
Race day.... (see report to left)

Monday, May 3, 2004:
We got up bright and early and cleaned and unhooked the RV. Again, our start was not as early as it should have been. Especially considering that there was a $25/hour "late fee" for getting the RV back after 11AM. This fee was enforced by the registration computer, so if we were checked out at 11:01AM it would automatically tack $25 onto my fees. As it turned out, we pulled into the CruiseAmerica place at about 10:45AM and they would not do the walk-through until we had already unpacked our stuff. We hastily tossed everything into the Jeep (we had already re-bagged and re-boxed everything, so it went fast) and did the walk-through. By the time everything was done, the wall clock read 11:05, but apparently it was a few minutes fast because I got a refund of $10.03 for unused mileage and no "late fee". It took another half-hour to get the Jeep drivable (put the bike rack on, close the doors, etc) and then we were on the way home.

Tuesday, May 4, 2004:
I found out today that the WISH beta 1.4 opened up on the 28th and is closing today at... well it closed 20 minutes ago. Oh well.

E3 in less than one week. I'm looking forward to it!

My five season box set of Babylon 5 arrived yesterday. That's 110 hours of Babylon 5 on 30 DVDs.

We watched the first episode last night on my computer. I remember thinking how much I hated Michael O'hare as an actor when the show was on the first time, and seeing him again brought it all back. Being that it was the first episode, all of the actors are unsure, uncertain and definitely NOT BELIEVABLE in their roles. The writing feels wooden and the story is pretty darn weak. In fact, if this was my fist experience with the show, I would have to say that I probably would not continue watching it.

Luckily it isn't my first experience. I know that the story becomes very intense. I know that the writing improves. A LOT! (The show actually won an award for Best Teleplay two years in a row.) I know that the actors "settle in" to their roles around season two... even Michael O\'Hare who comes back to play Jeffery Sinclair for one episode in Season 3.

I leafed through the informational paperwork in the box for season one this morning. It was fun remembering the different episodes, and even though some of them weren't exactly "strong" stories, pretty much all of them are entertaining.

I'm looking forward to watching them again.

On Easter Sunday (April 11, 2004) two cyclists were stuck by a car in Santa Rosa. Alan Liu of Mountain View was killed instantly and Jill Mason remains in critical condition. The driver was found to have a Blood Alcohol Level of 0.30, nearly four times the legal limit.

A mere eight days later, on April 19 2004, another Santa Rosa cyclist is dead. This last killing occurred on one of the roads that I ride regularly. The "Calistoga" ride that I use as my hill training route follows Mark West Springs Road and I cross the Riebli intersection about once every couple of weeks on my bike.

Scary stuff.

In other news, I updated the BIOS on the new Promise controller card and the Windows-based RAID utility now works like a charm. It was crapping out with a sever system error about version numbers. I'm still not impressed with the Promise software, but it works, so not too bad.

I made level 47 in Camelot this weekend. I've also worked my Aten's Shield up to level 8. Two more levels for the shield and then I'm back to Oceanus to work on Master Level 2 and try and get a Benthic Legendary weapon.... (Meanwhile, the New Frontiers beta test is calling my name....)

I've ordered the entire five-season DVD set of Babylon 5. It is supposed to arrive Friday of this week. Joy!

My new RAID controller actually arrived a day early, yesterday. I skipped out on my swim/bike workout -- I wasn't really sure how this week was going to work anyway, so it actually (sorta) simplified things -- and plugged in my three existing drives and one new drive to the new controller.

Promise makes a much nicer BIOS than Silicon Image. It was a lot easier to configure and set up. Of course the flip side is that the Windows-based utility for maintaining the array seems to crash every time I run it, but it seems pretty counter-intuitive to use so I might be doing something wrong. (By comparison, the Silicon Image utility was extremely user-friendly and very simple to use.)

In any case, I reinstalled XP last night. Spent a few hours downloading all of the "hotfixes" that MS has available. Reinstalled all my hardware drivers. Reinstalled OfficeXP. Reinstalled VirusScan. Reinstalled Camelot. I ended up going to bed around midnight and I'm only about 1/4 of the way done rebuilding my "essential" system tools. That's just the way it is with a clean OS install. I usually budget about a week to get everything dialed in, and that seems to work pretty well.

Now the big test will be seeing if the array explodes on me. For the next few months I'm treating the system as if the hard drives are 50% likely to fail at any given time. I just hope the coin-flip comes up a winner.

So this last week I was pretty busy between work and training. I really didn't have time to deal with the dead computer until Friday. I reconfigured the RAID 0+1 and reinstalled XP and started in on my applications.

On Saturday we did the Carneros Vineyard Run, a 10km race. I finished in just a few seconds over 50 minutes, which is decent. The course was pretty hilly (I think the proper term would be "rollers") and I was pretty satisfied with my finish time. It was helped by a very lovely lady in a blue jogging suit. She was wearing some spandex shorts that were 2 sizes too small, and no underclothes. By being stretched across her behind, and in full sunshine, the shorts became practically transparent. Suffice it to say that it was just the prefect amount of encouragement I needed to hold a nice 8-minute pace for the whole 10km. I ended up finishing 4 seconds faster than her (I didn't need the eye-candy in the finish chute, after all).

I did come home with some nasty shin splints though. No running for me for at least a full week. The timing is pretty bad, with only 3 training weeks until Wildflower.

On Sunday, I went for a ride on the new Ksyriums. After 26 miles, I hit -something- (I still don't know what it was) and blew out the back tire. Rather than use my emergency flat kit, I called Karen for a ride. Even though I hit something hard enough to blow out the tube, the rims are still as true as the day they were installed. Amazingly enough, despite spending over $700 on these things, my ride time was about the same as before. I finished the first 17 miles in about 2 minutes less than my prior test. In a 75 minute ride, that's such a small variance that it could be considered "noise".

Today, my reinstalled RAID array failed on me again. My computer is my primary form of entertainment at home. With it out of the picture I'm very unhappy. The fact that it is not only broken, but it doesn't seem to be reliable when it is working is extremely depressing to me. And of course, the beta test for Frontiers, the new Camelot expansion, started today. And the newest version of Wish is available. To say that I'm unhappy about this would be the understatement of the week. At this point, I'm almost ready to simply take out a small loan from VISA and buy a complete Dell system. I know it won't run very well, but at least it will RUN.

This sucks.

This last weekend was supposed to be the GGTC Wildflower Training Weekend. I did this last year and it was pretty fun and instructional. So I planned on going this year.

You know when you're driving on the freeway at 70MPH, if something is amiss mechanically, sometimes you don't notice it. Mostly because the billowing smoke that your car may be emitting is hidden in the haze behind you, and usually spread out by the speed so much that even if you are looking for it, sometimes you won't see it. Until you slow down.

So as traffic slowed in San Rafael on the approach to the Richmond Bridge, a huge cloud of smoke passed the truck. More smoke was coming from the seam around the hood. A quick check of the gauges and everything still seemed fine, but an ominous hissing sound was coming from the engine compartment. Since we were still in a pretty developed area, we pulled off at the next exit and found a service station after a short 2 block drive.

Opening the hood revealed that the top of the radiator had a 2-inch long crack in it and the hissing sound was the high-pressure steam in the engine cooling system being vented. After turning off the engine and letting it cool for a moment, I popped the radiator cap, had Karen re-start the engine and proceeded to refill the radiator. I suspect that the coolant had all but boiled off, because within 20 seconds of topping off the radiator, the timer on the water pump at the service station shut off.

The drive home was uneventful. I tend to think that the radiator has been cracked for some time and it simply took however long it took for the coolant level to boil down to a critical point this weekend. Regardless, I need to get it fixed. So over all, I missed the training camp, and I'm out $450-500 for a new radiator.

To make up for the lost training, I did an easy 10km run (three loops around Spring Lake) on Saturday, finishing in a bit under an hour. Then on Saturday, hopped on the bike and rode to the top of Mountain Home Road, the border of Napa county. This is a nice 17.3 mile climb, pretty much uphill the whole way out. I certainly noticed that i was stronger than in prior years. On some of the less intense uphill grades I was not only able to hold a good speed, but I was able to speed up. I was holding 21.9MPH on the flats, both into and with the wind.

On Monday, Karen called me at work and told me that my computer was "making a clicking sound." I had her do a soft reboot, but it did not respond. So I told her to hit the reset button. When I came home, I was greeted by a notice
SYSTEM DISK NOT FOUND, PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT
This is the THIRD time that my mirrored RAID system has crapped out. I'm no longer a happy camper. I have four freaking 80MB drives, which were configured as a striped-mirrored set. I used the striping because it speeds up the system, particularly for page faults. I used the mirror so that I wouldn't have to worry about disk crashes. But after three complete losses of my data, I'm thinking that something different is in order. I'm not sure what to do about this. I'm already $500 into drives and controller cards at this point.

I had hoped to have the new Ksyriums mounted and ready to roll for this weekend, but alas they did not arrive on Friday. Nor did they show up on Saturday. They did, however, show up on Monday. Last night, while Karen cooked a DEE-LISH-USS dinner, I mounted the new wheels on my bike. The chain was a problem, but I worked through it. I think I've got everything installed correctly, but I won't know for sure until I have a chance to spin it a bit. Of course, with the way things have been going lately, I'm almost certain that I'll blow up the chain, break something sharp and metallic and end up with a life-threatening gash in my leg as a result.

I actually got an email some time ago about online applications for Pacific Grove 2004. Because I had done the race a few times, I was given a chance to pre-register. Of course, this was during the week that my credit card was stolen, so I put it on the back burner and promptly forgot about it.

Well, today I looked, and PG2004 is completely sold out!!! I entered my name in the random drawing for a slot, but the chances are low. That kinda sucks. It's my favorite race and I'm not going to get to go because some idiot stole my credit card number.

In other news, I ordered my new cassette (finally) and with luck it will be here by the end of the week. I have a cassette tool and a new chain, tubes and tires, so as soon as the cassette shows up, I can be ready to ride the new wheels. I hope it gets here by Thursday so I have time to actually assemble everything prior to my ride at Lake San Antonio on Saturday.

I seem to have picked up a patch of poison oak during the trail run a couple weekends ago. It itches, but it hasn't spread (so far). I wish it would heal faster!

This last weekend was the second weekend this year when I did not have a full weekend planned. In fact, I had n-o-t-h-i-n-g planned. And that's just what I did.

On Saturday I got up around noon, plopped myself down in front of the computer and played Camelot for 14 hours. I got my newbie Animist character up to level 19 and played around in Abermenai (BG0). We took the Center Keep, which was interesting considering that BG0 is full of people completely new to the game, and getting them to realize the difference between a hole in the ground and their own butt was... challenging.

Then on Sunday, a nice slow trail run at Annadel, followed by sitting down again at 4:30pm. This time on my Reaver, my "real" character. This is the first time I've actually played that character since before we went to New Orleans. I logged in just in time to help some people on Master Level 1, then an artifact hunting adventure. When all was said and done, I had about an hour extra, so I teamed up with a guy to hunt the artifact that I've been looking for since the release of Atlantis, last fall.

This artifact involves opening "Treasure Chests". Most times, the chests contain some monsters, which you have to fight. About one in 20 is a "winner" and will have either nothing, a "sell gem" (loot), or the artifact. People have developed a strategy of simply running around popping chests until they get the item, but that leaves a ton of monsters for the next person to clean up. So it took about 20 minutes just to fight TO the island. After that, we were limited to which chests we could open. Since it was only two of us, we could not clear the really hard monsters that were "left over" and had to stay away from some areas. Eventually, my hour was up. It was 9:58pm and I had set a limit of 10pm. "One more chest," I said, "and then I really need to log off." I looked at the last chest. I thought to myself, "A real gambler would be going 'This is the one, I can feel it!'" And then I hit the chest. It was empty. I almost laughed, because it was time for me to go and I didn't want to die at the very end of the day. But I still had a minute, so I moved over and popped another. And won. I FINALLY GOT IT!! It only took -months- of trying, but I got it.

Now I get to play in Darkness Falls. Artifacts are different than normal loot in that they "level up" just like characters do. As you use them, they gain new abilities and effects. The item I got only gains experience when you fight Demons, and Darkness Falls is chock full of Demons. So while I fight in there, I will be gaining -real- exp for my character, leveling up my new toy and gaining gold coins to buy my next set of armor.

Sometimes it is the small things that really add joy to one's life.

I have GOT to stop going out on Thursdays. About two years ago, I started going out on Thursday nights with Heidi and Jenny. Being a mid-30s guy going out to bars with two attractive college-age girl was a lot of fun. And somehow, my body didn't really complain (much) despite that I was often out until 4AM, coming home more-than-a-little drunk, and still going to work on Fridays.

I'm not sure what has changed in the interim. This is the second week that I've gotten drunk on Thursday night. It's also the second week that Friday morning at work has been BRUTAL. Oddly enough, I seem to be more productive when I'm feeling like dog shit. It's an interesting trade off, but one that I'm not really looking forward to exploring.

I'm still waiting on my new cassette for the Ksyriums. I finally settled on a SRAM 9.0 Powerglide II cassette which is a MTB cassette with the same exact gears as I currently have now, 11-32. I'm pairing that with a SRAM PC-89r hollow-pin road bike specific chain. I tried to buy them from a single vendor, but the MTB shoppes don't typically carry road bike chains, and the road bike stores don't stock MTB cassettes. It ends up being an impossible combination, so I had to order things separately. I'm still hoping to get everything assembled before the Wildflower training weekend, but that's starting to look iffy.

I'm still tracking my weight and training. With the nice weather of the last two weeks, I've started riding my bike to work (with the exception of Fridays) and that helps a LOT.

Thursday night Karen and I went over to the hot tub. Karen took a sippy-cup with about 1/2 a bottle of wine and since we were out of vodka, I poured a cup of tequila into a plastic cup and mixed a tequila sour (1 part tequila, 2 parts sweet-n-sour, 1/2 part triple sec). Over the course of the evening I managed to drink most of that drink, but we didn't make it home until around 2:30AM, very intoxicated.

Friday morning at work was brutal. The day did not let up. I was able to take a short nap between 6PM and 8PM. Karen was great and made a wonderful dinner of pasta. I ate the first plate with gusto and asked for a "small" second serving. When I got a second full plate I was sure that it was too much, but to my own surprise, I ate the whole thing. And ended up going to bed at 10PM.

Saturday dawned bright and VERY early. We did the Bothe Trail Run in Napa county. First off, a trail run is a very different thing from a normal run. It uses a whole bunch of muscles that normally aren't used. There is a lot of side-to-side action since the trail is unstable, canted to one side or the other, and anything but flat.

The first mile wasn't too bad, running on flat ground. Some of it was paved, some of it wasn't. The second mile started to hurt me. Running uphill is fine, as long as you are ready for sky high heart rates. The real problem was my calves. For some reason, both legs were cramping up. I started walking on the uphills. The only real saving grace was that walking was no slower than running due to the incline (similar to the first Relay that I did). At about 2-1/2 miles, the uphill stopped and I breathed a sigh of relief... until I saw the cliff that we were supposed to run down. After a couple minutes of steep descent, it was back to uphill and the agony in my legs. At mile 4, there was a volunteer that was stationed on the trail who did nothing but say "Be careful! Steep downgrade ahead! Slow down!" She wasn't kidding. It was steep enough that if you fell, you would -slide- to the bottom. And this wasn't steep like a road, it was steep like the side of a mountain, complete with rocks, ruts, roots and all sorts of tripping hazards. Oh, and a couple of water crossings. Not just jumping across a puddle, or muddy ground (although there was a bit of that too) but full-blown crossing of two medium sized creeks, with mossy rocks and actual rapids. Luckily, I managed to not fall in to either one, but I did see a couple people who did. I know what it's like running in a squishy wet shoe from Icebreaker last year. I'm glad I did not have to repeat that experience.

Pretty much the next mile-and-a-half was downhill. Eventually it flattened out and I finished up the 10km run in 1:08:09. Considering the difficulty of the course, and the fact that I still had not completely recovered from Thursday night, I'm overjoyed with that time!

Following the run, I went home and went to sleep for 4 hours, got up, had dinner and a couple drinks, then back to bed and slept for another 12 hours. Thank God for Sundays.

I went home for lunch yesterday and sitting in front of the door was a 2-foot square box. I picked it up and the whole thing weighed maybe 5 pounds. Yes, my new sexy 2004 Kysrium SSC SL wheels finally arrived.

Despite sending nearly a dozen emails to the seller, I have yet to receive any email reply. I'm not happy about that. But I got my wheels, so I'm not upset with them. Now I have to buy a new cassette, chain, tubes and tires. I want to have the new wheels completely up and running by the time I go to the Wildflower Training Weekend the last weekend of March.

I'm happy.

Last weekend was the annual W&K ski trip. As usual, the weather was perfect. The temps were in the mid 50s and the snow (amazingly enough) was deep. Despite the warm temperature, the slopes did not turn into a giant slushball even late in the day. The skiing was not quite so epic as it could have been, but this was the first time I had clicked into snowskis in two years. In fact, I had to clip off the last lift pass from my skipants, and it was dated March 16, 2002.

Karen took her very first ever ski lesson and learned how to to turn and (sorta) stop.

Of course, with the sky being completely cloudless and the snow being well-groomed and pretty white, we came back looking like lobsters. As I type this, my face is peeling, and little flakes of dead dry skin are falling like snow. Ironic, isn't it?

Last night I did my first timed swim of the season. The swim coach had us do it a bit differently. We did a timed 30 minute swim rather than a timed mile. So it was a challenge to see how far one could go in the alloted time, instead of seeing how long it took one to swim the alloted distance. I kinda liked that strategy better. Amazingly enough, I was able to eek out 64 laps in the 30-minute time frame. That works out to 1463-meters, only two laps shy of a 1.5km swim. If that is indicative of my swim times for Wildflower, I'll be a happy happy camper! My best time there so far is 30:30 for the swim, and we still have 7 weeks to train.

I still have not received my new Ksyriums. Considering that I paid on March 1st, I'm getting a bit worried. I'd hate to lose $650 on a "bad" transaction. I did a little investigating and it looks like there aren't a whole heck of a lot of recourses for me if the guy simply never ships them to me. Paypal is only willing to go to bat if you purchase their "protection" (which I did not). eBay couldn't care less, and leaving negative feedback does nothing to get my money returned. I suppose I could dispute the charge on my VISA, which is probably what I will do if I do not see the wheels by the 15th. I really want to have these set up and ready to roll on the weekend of the 27-28, when I go to Lake San Antonio for the second time this year.

Work is going like gangbusters, but despite the heavy workload, I'm seeing threats to my continued employment. A new Senior Electrical Designer was just hired. Coupled with my abysmal performance last year and some of the things said at my review meeting in December and the general attitude I get from the ONE person who will be the strongest voice, I'm not getting a warm-fuzzy feeling. I don't think my neck is on the chopping block (yet), but I do see the potential for my employer to cut me loose if the workload were to slack off in the future. Up until now it would have been impossible to do so, since giving me the axe would have left the electrical department short some important skills. With the new hire, that is no longer the case.

In my favor, I'm a licensed Engineer; a "designer" is not licensed. That makes me a bit more valuable than this new guy. On the other hand, I know that we have staff in-house that would be willing to sign work with minimal involvement. On the same note, as a "Staff"-level engineer, I will probably be billed at about the same level as a "Senior" designer (and, I suspect, produce the same level of work). So, that all balances out. The real big question is: how will the new guy get along with the Senior Engineer. If they work well together, then I should probably update my resume.

There are a few things I can do make myself "indispensable" around here. One of them is to start working 60-hour workweeks, and "donate" a lot of time to the company. That would make me a much more valuable employee, since my projects will be completed for less money. The catch is that I'm not willing to do that. I have no problem working 45 hour weeks and coming in on the odd weekend day when it is crunch time. But I have too many things going on outside of work to willingly give up an extra 20 hours each week. Another possible tactic is to make sure that I become the "go to" guy for electrical support inside the company. I already have a few people that will come to me first, and other electrical staff second. (Partially because of "personality issues" with other electrical staff.) That's a good first step. But I pretty much have to expand that to encompass all of the Design Team leaders in order to fully entrench myself.

And of course, I have five major projects going full-steam ahead right now. To the point where I'm wondering if it is even -possible- to meet deadlines. So any "entrenching" I need to do is going to have to be over and above that workload. Which brings us back to that 60-hour workweek.... It just doesn't seem like a real happy place.

In other news, I purchased some new 2004 Mavic Ksyrium wheels. I've removed them from my "wish list". They should be here by next week. I need to buy a new cassette and some tires to put on them Real Soon now.

We are going on our first ski-trip this weekend, to Mt. Reba/Bear Valley. That is, provided that I can crank out the projects that need to be done this week before then. If not, then we will probably bail out on the ski-trip and I'll end up working this weekend. Right now, it is an even bet for either path.

This weekend I took the long drive down to Lake San Antonio and did 2/3 of the Wildflower course (I did not swim this time around).

First off, it was freaking COLD there. We arrived around midnight on Friday. Since we slept in the back of the Dakota, setting up camp was as simple as crawling into the back of the camper shell and spreading out some bedding. The back of the Dakota has carpet lining and about one-inch of padding on the bottom. On top of this went my 35F degree-rated sleeping bag and a flannel sheet set which we slept in. Above us was one Beiderlack brand polyester "fleece" blanket and one heavy, super-king-sized knit blanket folded in half. Despite the many layers, and having to sleep nearly on top of one another (not much room in a truck bed along with a bicycle, after all!) we both were very cold. Karen actually got out of the bed at one point during the night to put sweats on. It was really really annoyingly cold.

When the morning came, we stayed wrapped up until around 11AM. When we finally arose, it was still chilly. After a short breakfast of granola cereal, I did the Olympic bike course, while Karen ran some approximation of the 10km run course. It was a fairly windy day, and starting the ride at 1PM did not help that. It reminded me of the bike ride at last year's Wildflower. It was against the wind the whole way out (which is "mostly" uphill) and with the wind the whole way back (except for a few uphill spots which were against the wind BOTH ways). My overall time was somewhere "around" 1:40:00. I say "around" because I forgot to actually turn off the timer when I got back to the campground; I only noticed it after riding (very slowly - Karen was walking along with me) all the way up the hill from the transition area to the "E" loop where we were camping. I estimate that added 3-4 minutes to the time, which (when I finally stopped it) was registering 1:44:55. Amazingly enough, this is about on-par with my first (and slowest ever) Wildflower bike time: in 2001 I came in at 1:41:10 on the bike.

The moral of the story is that I really need to work on my STRENGTH on the bike. I'm going to be designing some new trainer workouts to push my legs power. Rather than spinning (fast) in low gears, it's time to crank up the resistance a LOT and push as hard as I can for short bursts. Interval training at it's worst. This isn't going to be fun.

After the bike ride I put on some running shorts and ran the 10k. This went pretty well. I've never considered myself a strong runner, but the more I train, the easier running gets for me. I'm still far from anyone's opinion of "fast", but I certainly can finish these races strong. I completed the run in 55:33 which is actually FASTER than my FASTEST Wildflower run, which was last year's at 58:07.

Based on these times, I think my training really needs to be BIKE-INTENSIVE for the next few weeks.

I have been slacking on the swim, but that really isn't going to make or break my race. My slowest swim there was (last year) 35:59 and my fastest was (the year prior) 30:30. Only a difference of 5:29. The swim won't kill me for time. I'm still aiming for a 30-minute swim this year and will be switching to the long-distance swim group this week.

The run seems to be well in hand. Going from a 9-minute mile to an 8-minute mile on a 10km run is only going to gain me 6:13 overall -- not a lot of gain for a lot of effort. So I'll just keep my run-training at keeping my speed right where it is.

The leaves the bike. If the rain would stop, I could start riding my bike to work again. That seems to help immensely. I guess it is going to be daily spinning for a few weeks. And strength work.

Ack, I've been busy! So busy that I keep putting off writing a blog entry.

Valentine's/President's Weekend was a lot of fun. On Saturday we ran the 1st annual Valentine's 10k in Concord. This was a very nice run. SUPER FLAT! The day was cool and clear. In fact, it was possibly the best conditions ever. The only bad thing about this race was that it was on city streets, so the road surface was asphalt and not a track. Other than that, it was perfect. Except for the fact that they did not have mile-markers, so it was impossible to split your miles. Perfect, except for those two things. And the last part of the run was TWO laps on the track at Concord High School... which was poorly communicated, so I only did one lap before finishing. So I ended up running 400 yards short of a "real" 10km. So three things were bad, but everything else was great.

Karen beat her "best" 10km time by over five minutes. I've entered my finish time and pace on the training page. The reason I was going so slow was:

On Sunday we did the Valley Ford Relay Race. Rhonert Park is one of the clients of Winzler & Kelly. Somehow, one of the guys who works for RP "challenged" W&K to a race. So of course we took hem up on the offer. Each team was four people and we managed to find four people in the office who were willing (and able) to run. We ended up soundly beating the RP people and I turned in a nice 7-1/2 minute pace. I honestly think I could have pushed it up a notch if I had known the course a bit better. I'm sticking to that story (for now) because it looks like one of the runners on the team (Leslie) may be faster than me!!! I was happy being the fastest person in the company, but there may be a new contestant now. Time will tell.

Last Thursday, I gave blood again. Always a fun experience. They told me that I would probably not be able to give blood again next year. Apparently, if you are very fit, the body is "tuned" to a certain specific set point, and it does not handle losing blood in a good way. The cut off (or so I'm told) is if your resting heart rate is 50bpm or less. My heart rate was measured at 52bpm. So while I have a rare blood type that is in high demand, I may not be allowed to contribute for much longer.

I played Camelot a couple of days. With the new RvR expansion coming out soon, I should start devoting more time to that. I'm still not level 50, nor do I have good gear for RvR. Since I fully expect to be doing the Frontiers beta, I need to work on that. It is just a time investment. Of course I don't have much free time these days.

I did start a new character. I had been meaning to start an Animist for a while now, so I did this on Sunday. I played for 6 hours and worked it from brand new to level 10. It took a few hours to figure out how to play the class effectively. In fact I would say that I could probably cut that time in half, if I were to do it again.

Saturday I received my beta invitation from Mutable Realms. This is for the "real" beta. The last part of the beta was a "open" free-for-all and it went as "open" betas typically do. There were a lot of people complaining about how unfinished things were, how simplistic the game was, and how the devs were idiots. I'm always impressed by the short-sightedness of people and how they are willing to provide negative feedback with zero basis on how much effort is involved in what they are criticizing. Anyway, the next phase of beta will be starting in March sometime, so there goes more of that non-existent free time.

And of course, my wireless card for the Clie is broken and will not talk to any WiFi. Another $100 down the drain. I'll need to fix that before e3.....

Friday night was awesome. We had a friend over for drinks and dinner. There we were, imbibing copious amounts of alcohol, killing not one but TWO bottles of sweet-n-sour mix and one complete bottle of Rose's Sweetened Lime Juice, and very nearly all of the Tequila in the house. Conversation and fun for all, and after the "100 Naked Girls on a Chair" book was passed around, everyone went home to their respective bedrooms and did what people typically do in an alcoholic blur after a fun filled party.

Saturday was awesome. We loaded my bike into the Dakota and drove down to the Golden Gate bridge. I did the Paradise Loop while Karen went to a baby shower for a friend in the City. I can't speak for the shower, but I did Paradise in 2:03:56 -- last time it was closer to 3:35:00! Of course this time I actually did the actual loop, and didn't get lost and wander all over Corte Madera and Larkspur like a little puppy. The actual distance was 29.54 miles, which puts my average speed at a mere 14.30mph. That's slower than I'm shooting for (I want to average 18.64mph at Wildflower this year) but I felt strong for the whole ride.

Saturday night was awesome. We were both hungry, and wanted to try something different. Karen has a list of restaurants on the 'fridge from the local free tabloid. One of the places on there was an Italian restaurant on Hwy 12 out in Rincon Valley. We drove out and it looked pretty dicey from the outside. Just an unassuming putty colored stucco building, the kind you would expect to see as a roadside diner on any highway in suburban California. We go in, not sure what to expect, and it turned out to be the best Italian food I've had since I moved to Santa Rosa. This was a notch higher than the old San Mateo/Belmont standby of Viva la Pasta! (Affectionately known as "Pasta la Vista.") Of course the price was a notch higher as well, and the place was packed to gills by the time dinner hour came around -- they literally ran out of chairs for people to sit on! But it was a very nice atmosphere, the food was AWESOME and the service was pretty damn good considering the number of people they were dealing with. We WILL be going back.

Sunday was awesome. GGTC was having their first "trail run" of the season, in Marin. Since it was scheduled to start at noon, and did not involve a bridge crossing, I wanted to go. Karen did as well, since she wants to become a stronger runner. And as it turned out, two of the girls from the baby shower on Saturday also were interested. So we met in Mill Valley, drove to the Mountain Home Inn where we met the big group. The run was a 5.4 mile out-and-back on a beautiful trail in the Marin headlands. Since it is summer in SF right now, we were able to take in awesome views of both the ocean AND the bay at the same time from the top of the ridge. The day was gorgeous. Afterwards, Karen and I and her two friends sat on the balcony at the restaurant and shared a bottle of Champagne.

Sunday night was awesome. After coming home and cleaning up, we ordered a Pizza Gourmet special "Acapulco" pizza. Dee-lish-us!! After pizza we did some food shopping...hooray for food! I baked a lime-tequila cake (yeah, yeah) and then we went over to April's apartment to soak in the hot tub.

This is what weekends are all about!!

I completed my first "race" for the 2004 year. It was a pure running event so it doesn't really count as much more than a training checkpoint. I posted my total finish time and my mile splits on the training plan page.

The start was typical for a mass start event. The "gun" goes off (in this case it was a bunch of firecrackers), the seeded runners in the front take off, the people mid-way back start walking and the people in the back watch and wait for about a minute to start moving. Once you finally are moving, it takes a good couple of minutes for the crowd to thin enough for anyone to really get a good pace going. So the first mile is always crowded and slow.

The second mile I was basically free-wheeling downhill.

The third mile was mostly uphill, ending with a killer one-block incline. The race was held in San Francisco, and while there are some scary-steep hills in that city, this wasn't one of them. Still, it was an incline and it took a lot out of me. This is where I finally got clear of enough people to set my pace. The course was a 2-loop 5km course, so mile 4 and on was a repeat of the first three miles.

Mile 4 I was recovering from the hill at the end of mile 3 and was a bit off my pace. Somewhere near the end of mile 4 I finally remembered how to run and my pace picked up quite a bit with less effort on my part. I missed the mile marker at mile 5, so I had to use my 2-mile split from mile 4 to mile 6 and divide by two for the mile 5/6 splits; that's why those two are identical.

When I hit mile 6, I attacked the hill and sprinted in to the finish. Of course, the hill was bigger than I was and I ran out of gas one block before I got to the line. Still, I hammered it out and finished strong. Plus I got (another) new T-shirt! Not bad for so early in the season....

Tuesday night Track Training starts Feb 3, 2004.

I've updated both the training page and the rankings page. My late year performance fell off considerably last year at the end of the season. (Note to Zant: I told you so!) I've also deleted items from my Wish List to reflect things that I either received as gifts, or purchased for myself.

I've been playing online games for a long time now.

When Ultima Online was released way back in the early-1990s, a cottage industry sprang up with people buying and selling virtual in-game properties, magic items, and money. The benchmark sale was, of course, the Ultima Online account, complete with castle, well developed characters and complete sets of equipment for over $100,000 U.S. dollars. The trend has not changed.

Three years ago, when Camelot had just been released, my "main" character had just over 1000 gold coins. The cash value of that non-existent coinage was about $1 per gold, or $1000 cash money (on eBay). Since my account was (and still is) a "comp" (ie, free) account, I was bound by an agreement not to take advantage of that. But the fact remained that some people who did not have those limitations were starting to actually "farm" online games and make a real profit selling pretend items for real money.

Some years ago, online game publishers started to get into the act, selling real advertising space in their virtual worlds. One notable event was when one publisher was selling "billboard space" on the outside of a space-station in one space-based combat flight sim product.

Today, I just read this. Apparently, the Themis Group, who happen to be the publisher of Wish, the new MMO I'm currently testing, have formed an strategic alliance with a company which was formed solely to make money selling virtual goods.

What does this mean? Well, it means that our monthly fees for playing online games (which are much much lower than the hourly connection fees that were the standard prior to the explosion of the internet) are likely to get smaller. But the flip side of that is that our armor, spell components and in-game equipment will likely start to be purchased with dollars, and not in-game currency.

Oh sure, there will probably be the option to work for hours on end to "make" the in-game money. But when it boils down to spending hundreds of hours to make a few gold goins, when you can simply buy them from the publisher for $1 each... well, as anyone who has played an online game can tell you, these things are addictive, and most people will pony up the cash.

In a way it makes me sad.

The beginning of eternity
The end of time and space
The beginning of every end,
And the end of every place

This morning I recevied my invitation into Mutable Realm's WISH product. This is a new "ultra" MMORPG which stands to be the main competition for Camelot when it is released. Not that I'm unhappy with Camelot -- I certainly am not! But after 3+ years with the same game, it is getting a bit "tired".

Of course, the first thing on the agenda for a new beta program is downloading the installer. In this case, the download is 523MB in size, about one complete CD worth of data. The developers recommended a download accelerator called NetLeech. I've tried a few of these things before and have had bad results with them, so I immediately ignored the suggestion and started downloading the file normally. Using a nice happy leased T-1 line, and was seeing a download speed of around 11KB/sec, which works out to a nice 12 hour download. Obviously unacceptable.

So I installed NetLeech. All I can say is WOW!! Maybe this only works with the server that the wishinstaller file is stored on, but with a 5 segment download, the speed jumped to 40MB/sec and a 3.5 hour download. By pushing the segmentization up to 10 segments, the speed slid up a tiny bit and the estimated time dropped to 3.2 hours.

The way this works is by starting multiple FTP streams, each "starting" at a different point in the file. For example, if there were two streams, the first would start at byte count 0 (the file start) and the second would start at 50% of the file. If both streams come in at the same speed, you've basically doubled your download speed. Of course, this really only has an effect on sites that support multi-point transfers and when the total bandwidth between you and the server is not saturated already. So it isn't an overall win, but it certainly is a win for this case!

Now if Covad would fix my DSL!!!

This weekend I kicked off my Wildflower training program and realized just how far I've backslid during the holiday break.

On Saturday, I did the well-known "Paradise Loop". Well-known to everyone but me, it seems, since I got lost twice doing it, and instead of being a 35-mile social ride taking a bit under 2 hours, it ended up being a 50-mile ride from hell, that took just over 3 hours to complete. By the time I was done, both legs were cramping, with knots in my left hip and right knee. The really sad/scary part is that this ride is "about" as difficult as the Wildflower course (Olympic, natch). The only really good thing that came out of this experience is that I now know how much work I have to do to get "up to speed" for Wildflower. And it looks like a LOT!

On Sunday, I did two laps around Spring Lake for a total run of 4-1/2 miles. Had I been in good form, this run should have taken around 45 minutes. As it was, I stumbled to the end of the second loop in very nearly an hour (57 minutes) for an average pace of exactly 12-2/3 min/mi. Admittedly, I was running on "un-fresh" legs after the bike ride the day prior. And, admittedly, I was suffering some sort of stomach-thing which forced me to make frequent "pit stops" at the various restrooms around the lake. Still, I was running 10 min/mi a year ago and I was down to nearly 7:30min/mi.

Of course one of the very good things which came out of this is that I'm now very excited about getting my level of fitness back up to where it should be. The whole time I was riding and/or running, my mind was toying with possible workout schedules, and after nearly five hours of cogitation, I've come up with a Plan. Not necessarily a GOOD Plan, but a Plan nonetheless. Now I just need to make the time to sit down and write it up.

Training has started. Yipeee!!!!

While every other blog in the known universe is posting year-end wrap-ups and/or Lists of Things I Would Like To Do, I thought I would not. I'll deal with New Year's later. Maybe around February. Instead, I'd like to comment on something which has changed recently.

Karen brought the cats in.

Yes, I now have two cats living in my home. One ("Bob the Cat") is a moderately well-behaved orange housecat that is taking to his new environment with the usual trepidation that a relocated feline normally experiences. I suspect there will be a few cases of remedial cat-lessons that will be doled out in the coming weeks ("No, Cats are not allowed on the dinner table", "No, your tail does not make a cool sound when it is stuck in the computer fan", etc.) but I'm confident that Bob will prove to be a fast learner and that such lessons will be few and far between.

On the other hand, the second cat (who goes by the unlikely moniker of "Little Girl") is an ex-outdoor cat. I've dealt with semi-feral outdoor-turned-indoor cats before (one of the two cats that Donna acquired was born feral and later tamed into being a housecat). I've only been able to interact with the Little Girl for about a total of 45 seconds so far, but I'm not getting a good feeling about her transition. The entire first night in my home, she spent stuffed into small dark places under counters, behind furniture and doors and basically trying to not be there. I recall one holiday season that Donna and I took the cats with us to my sister's home and the already housebroken-but-born-feral pet spent the entire week stuffed behind a bookcase, coming out only for water. This is much the same.

I expect it to take some time for her to figure out that being indoors will not cause her to spontaneously combust at the slightest provocation. But past experience has shown that if she is unable to make that transition in a few days, that it simply may never take. I'm actually concerned that if she doesn't settle in less than a week, there exists a definite possibility that she may hurt herself through starvation or urine retention (a very real problem in cats). And that would be bad.

Today I took the "little truck" to the junkyard. This was the first new vehicle I ever purchased, way back in 1987. It was actually a joint-purchase made by me and my then-girlfriend, later-to-be-wife, and current-ex. It was involved in an accident in the first two weeks of its life, and through some fineggling with the insurance company, ended up with a "free" rear bumper (which was an extra cost option that we elected not to get).

That little truck took me back and forth to work countless times, commuted me to school at College of San Mateo, San Francisco State University, and even got me around town in San Luis Obispo on the odd occasion. It made probably two or three dozen trips from San Mateo to R-Wild Horse Ranch (near Red Bluff). It drove back and forth between Santa Rosa and San Luis probably a dozen times, plus at least that many trips from Santa Rosa over the Santa Cruz mountains to go to Pacific Grove. It even took me to Las Vegas one Labor Day weekend.

It had a mesh tailgate at one time (which I found tucked behind the seat last night when I was taking everything out of it). It had the lock on the passenger door popped out with a screwdriver sometime in the early 1990's when I was attending CSM, and even though I got a $225 settlement from my insurance company, I put in a one-inch knock-out seal (est. value forty cents) in the opening and left it that way. It had a leather (well, cloth vinyl actually) bed cover that was stolen, paid for by insurance, replaced and then allowed to rot into shreds. (Cloth-backed vinyl is not terribly sunlight resistant, it seems.)

I met a girl while washing that truck at Apple Creek who was probably my first "one night stand". I got yelled at by a CHP officer for having my registration sticker in my glove box but NOT on the license plate while driving to Pacific Grove in it. I got my first seat-belt violation in that truck. Interestingly enough, I was cited as the driver, my ex-brother-in-law was cited as a passenger, but my young, blonde, newly-married wife who was sitting directly between us was NOT cited (even though there were three seatbelts installed in the vehicle).

As I took it to the junkyard, the little truck had a non-working battery (I had to jump-start it), the engine was so "tired" that it couldn't even climb a hill in a residential neighborhood, and oil hadn't been changed in 12,000 miles (around 3-1/2 years). On the other hand, the stereo still worked, it ran fine (as long as it didn't have to go uphill) and I just used it a few months ago to move the old entertainment center away. I found myself thinking that it was a shame to junk it (as I was driving to the junkyard). And over a half-tank of gas (probably around 7 gallons).

A lot of memories go with that little truck. But after three signatures and a 30 minute wait, Pick-a-Part gave me $99 cash money and I no longer have a semi-working little pickup truck in my garage. C'est la vie.

I've been meaning to sit down and write a blog entry for about a week and a half now, but I never seem to find the time. I think I probably need a remedial time management course.

Dec 5 was the Winzler & Kelly Holiday Party and the usual drunken intra-company debauchery occurred. As they say, what happens at a holiday party STAYS at the holiday party, and I'm not going to relate the gory details of the evening. I will, however, say that the Saturday following the party was not a good day for me. Important safety tip: do not drink 10 double Martinis in a single evening. Trust me on that.

Another interesting thing which I learned was that the Executive Vice President of W&K reads my blog. Apparently he found it while doing a web search on our company's name. I'm still undecided whether that's a good or a bad thing. On one hand, it it a bit worrisome that someone who has the power to more-or-less walk into the office and end my employment at the drop of a hat is (sort of) (virtually) watching me. On the other hand, this is my -personal- web space. While it may or may not always present my employer in an appropriate "marketable" fashion, I'm pretty sure that is an understood caveat in the mind of any potential client of ours that anything they read on some webpage written by a guy who calls himself "Stupid" is probably NOT "officially sanctioned" by the company and shouldn't be used in the decision making process. So, having said that...

Work has been hit-or-miss again. It used to be that I would be super busy for months, then have a couple weeks of slack time, and then a couple months of busy. Over the last year, with the slowing of the economy, work has cooled a bit and I found that trend reversing: I would be super busy for a couple weeks, followed by a couple slow months, and then a week or so of being busy again.

And then on the 12th I finally got to sit down with my bosses and discuss my yearly performance. Some things were pointed out to me that I thought were good hints on how to improve my performance as an engineer. I'm a big fan of self-improvement so this was a good thing in my mind. I like it when people tell me where I can improve myself.

BUT (and there always is a big "butt") I noticed that the little box that said "adequate performance" had been scratched out and the box that says "falls short" was selected instead. I got the impression that I was being given an ultimatum. The word "layoff" was dropped onto the table, where it was left gasping for air like a beached fish. I hope that there was no real or implied threat to my continued employ here, but it sure felt like there might have been. I prefer an up-front discussion and a lot of stuff that was discussed was along those lines but sorta semi-hidden meanings seemed to be lurking behind the spoken words. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. I sure hope so. I really really love my job and I'd hate to lose it. Suffice it to say that I'm working extra hard on the tings that were mentioned.

Enough work related news.

I'm working with an artist on a user-developed skin for Camelot. He does the pretty pictures, I do the XML. XML is pretty easy to work with, not even that time consuming and it is entertaining. I've (re)written a couple of windows for the interface already, adding a widget here, moving a widget there. Pretty basic stuff. But the artwork is AWESOME and the whole thing ends up being incredibly nice overall.

I reinstalled Dungeon Seige on TWEAK-II. It runs. This is amazing to me since it -never- ran on TWEAK, nor would it run on either of Coworker Chris' home systems. The only common thread was XP Pro, so I just assumed that it was busted under that OS. (For what it's worth, the game did, and still does, run just peachy on STUPID, the Win2K box.) I've managed to get to about the same point I was at the last time I played this game. I'm about 14 hours into it according to the game-time tracking system. It's an entertaining little diversion, but nothing special.

I also re-installed Agent newsreader. My DSL/ISP provider is mindspring.com and last year they had me using nntp.mindspring.com. This newsserver was spotty at best. I use a lot of the alt.binaries.* groups and getting a multipart posting was impossible. After a couple months of trying to get a single thing (and failing) I gave up on it. Well, they now use earthlink's newsservers and WOW!! The first thing I saw when Agent grabbed headers was a near perfect list of multipart messages. Agent automatically combines them and tells me which ones are missing sections and pretty much all of them are complete. Oh sure there was the odd incomplete one here and there, but those were very rare. so for the past few days, my DSL line has been working full-time downloading new and fun stuff.

Roommate Dave is moving out on Dec 20. He's an okay guy, but I can't say I'm going to miss him. He's too much the Drama Queen. He's neurotic about some things (leave a magazine on the kitchen table and he flips out about "clutter" but there is a pile dog hair an inch deep under the couch). And he likes to blast the heater at all hours of the day and night driving my power bills up to around ten times what I normally pay (really). But the worst of all is he's ALWAYS at home. One of the things I was looking forward to in a 3 bedroom house is NOT seeing my roommate occasionally. But for the last 12 months, Dave has been home 24/7 (with the exception of two nights when he went to Vallejo). Oh sure he had school, but that is typically when I'm at work, so I don't see him gone. As far as I know, he is home continuously and constantly. And I don't care if he is the nicest, most understanding human being on the planet, being around him for 12 months has been enough.

And interestingly enough, my good friend April (who happens to work in the word proccessing department in my office) is moving in to an apartment right around the corner from me. So I may be helping Dave move out on the same day that I'm helping April move across town.

I'm registered for Wildflower 2004 (Olympic distance) and the Icebreaker (sprint distance). I bought a long-course Wildflower registration for Kyle so he will be racing again. I should start training seriously again after New Year. I ran a bit this week and my legs and feet were hurting me. This is not a good sign and makes me a bit concerned. I hope it is not a sign of something serious. Time will tell.

I finished book 3 of the Wheel of Time series. I have the first half of book 4 on CD and just need to sit down and start listening. I'll be on vacation in New Orleans, Louisiana starts on the 23th and runs until the 2th. That will probably be a good time to start. I hope to blog a bit while I'm there, but we'll see how that goes.

Well, that's enough of a novel for now. Happy holidays!!

A lot happened this last week.

I finally got around to installing the two new 80G drives into TWEAK on Monday night. Actually, I installed them over the weekend, but I was missing an IDE cable and I ran out of power tees. So after a quick trip to Santa Rosa Computers at lunchtime on Monday and the drives were running. Sadly, I still had my existing (primary) RAID 0 (striped) set on the -secondary- IDE connector. It seems that the engineers at Silicon Image (the makers of the RAID controller I'm using) assumed that the main drives would be on the -primary- channel. So as soon as the whole thing powered up, it tried to mirror the primary (unformatted) drives onto the secondary (existing) drives. The net result was that I lost everything I had done since I installed XP on TWEAK in May.

Still, six months is better than six years. After two or three days of fighting with the machine, I gave in, reformatted the whole shebang and reinstalled XP. Stellar Phoenix re-ran and pulled all of my "old" data off of the still non-functional 20G Fujitsu drive that was previously in STUPID. Basically, I was back to where I was when TWEAK first was built, but six months later. I renamed TWEAK to TWEAK-II (since it is basicaly a rebuild).

As of this writing, TWEAK-II has a redundant RAID 0+1 (stripped/mirrored) set, and I'm going to be spending the next two weeks going through my old data and throwing away the trash and moving the good stuff into where it belongs.

The other exciting thing was that we went to the Shasta National Forest and got a "wild" Christmas tree. This is no farm grown, cultured and manicured tree. This is a real tree. The kind that you go out into the forest and see. Tree permits cost a kingly sum of $10 and allow the buyer to chop down pretty much any tree that a sane person could want within the National Forest. We ended up with a very nice pine tree that was about 10 feet tall, and very full of foliage. Of course, being a "wild" tree, the bottom of the trunk is only about 2-1/2" across. Trees in the wild grow UP before they grow OUT. We had to do some creative trimming of the branches to get it to fit into our 8-foot ceilinged home. All in all, getting a "wild" tree was quite an adventure. I heartily recommend it to anyone to do at least once in their lifetime. (I suspect that we will be getting a permit and doing a similar thing again next year.)

I'm shocked at how "fresh" the tree is. Having always had lot-type trees, I'm accustomed to the tree losing needles pretty much every time someone looks at it sternly. This is not the case with a fresh tree. Heck, we were laying it on the floor, cutting and snipping away at the limbs with a saw and trimming shears and not a single needle has come off of it. It even FEELS nicer than a lot-bought tree. When you touch it, it feels like a real tree, not like a tree that has been chopped, shipped and stood around for a couple weeks prior to moving into a heated and dry home.

After a trip or two to the loval K-Mart, the tree is now very happily lit and decorated.

I broke down and added my Christmas "wish list" link to the menu bar on the left. I said I wasn't going to do this until after Thanksgiving, but with the way things have been going this last couple of weeks, I thought it would be best to do this now.

Work has finally taken off... and how!! It seems like so long ago that I was worried about how to fill out a 40-hour work week. This last week, I worked six days and I'm still behind schedule on two projects. All of the stuff that was on "simmer" in the background has come to a nice boil and as we enter the "slow" holiday season, I find that I have more work to do than I can actually fit into my workday.

Trials of Atlantis is still sucking up a goodly portion of my free time. I'm online playing pretty much 2-3 hours a day. I have a couple of goals in there and having a concrete goal to work towards gives me incentive to play longer hours than I normally would. (Side note: I just made level 46, my highest ever! Topping out at level 50 before the end of the year -- one of my New Year's Resolutions for this year -- is still in question though... I don't play nearly enough for that.)

In other news, Karen and I watched the movie "Chasing Amy" on DVD this weekend. I think that this is probably one of my favorite all-time movies for several reasons:

1. Plauseable surrealism. There are several scenes/dialogs in the film that are borderline surreal, yet they are presented in a simplistic and very plausable manner. Say you got up one morning and discovered that while you were sleeping, someone had broken into your house and stolen all of your possessions. That would be a very surreal experience, but yet, it is plausible enough that one doesn't automatically dismiss it, saying "As if THAT could ever happen..."
2. Subject matter. This movie is about life. It is about how life is sometimes is very very good, sometimes very very bad, and how people just keep plodding along through it all, even if they are completely screwing things up in the process. And how, no matter how hard you try, sometimes life just plain sucks.
3. Timing. When I saw this movie for the first time, I could relate to it on a very personal level. I was going through some emotional upheaval. At the time, it seemed like it was a hard point in my life. Little did I know that was the easy part. It's like when you are falling down a mountainside, and you're bumping into rocks and getting cuts and bruises and you're thinking how much it hurts... and then you tumble off a precipice into nothingness and suddenly you realize just how screwed you really are. And how so much NOT bad the rolling down a hillside actually was. Luckily, in my case, I finally got smart and pulled the ripcord on my parachute and glided away to safety rather than crashing to my death. Upon rewatching it, I'm reminded that some people aren't so lucky and it makes me thankful to have friends that actually care about me. And reminded me that I need to make a few phonecalls this week.

We also watched "Kama Sutra", which was an interesting film based in India. I found it to be an uplifting film about a very beautiful woman dealing with a very bad situation, dealing with it as best she could and actually coming out of it okay. Not recommended for anyone who has even the slightest compunction about watching graphic sex, but if you can get past that, there's a really REALLY good movie there.

My training has been slacking off since Treasure Island. I ran three time last week, twice around The Box (3.0 miles) and once at Spring Lake (three laps, 6.75 miles). On my way home for lunch today I saw a couple people from a neighboring office heading out for a bike ride in full gear and it made me want to start riding my bike again. I think I might set up the trainer tonight and spin for an hour while Karen is at swim class.

One of the wierd things about blogs, is that they display in reverse chronological order. That is if you read things from top to bottom like most english-speaking humans, you'll be reading this article prior to the one below it. So you'll know the conclusion of the story before you hear about the disaster.

After running CHKDSK -five- times, my computer booted up and is now running fine and dandy.

I'm sure I lost some data. CHKDSK found a -lot- of lost clusters, missing files and basically the kind of stuff you expect to see when a drive fails. I'm sure that had effects on my system that will probably make themselves apparant over the next few months. In the meantime, things are smoothly running again.

In the meantime, I still have two 80GB drives on order. The place I ordered them from AirCup.com deserves major kudos for:
1. Having the drive in stock and ready to ship,
2. Having one of the lowest prices for the drives (they were third lowest on prcewatch.com,
3. Shipping the drive for FREE via UPS ground, and most importantly,
4. Shiping the drive within one hour of my order being placed. I placed the order at 1:24PM and I received a confirmation of shipping (complete with a tracking number) at 1:54PM. I expect to see the drives on Monday of next week.

I'll install them and do a mirror for my current striped set. That way if a drive fails in the future, I won't have to slash my wrists about losing all my data.

Yesterday as I drove home for lunch, I noticed that the radio faceplate in the Jeep finally died. The stereo in there has been acting "funny" for a few months already. First some of the buttons stopped working. Then some of the buttons moved around: for example, you would push the 'scan' button to turn the volume down. In order to eject a CD, you had to release the faceplate and then hit the eject button with the faceplate partially removed. The radio never worked, but even with the funky button scheme, it played CDs and it was livable. So I noticed that the faceplate was completely blank. No clock, no track display, no backlight, nothing. Completely blank. But the CD still played.

When I got home, the clock on the microwave was reset. I asked Karen if the power had gone out and she said that there had been a little "bump" that morning. So I set the clock. I needed to download my email (I had nearly 100 messages sitting on a server somewhere and wanted to bring them local) so we went up to the computer room. Karen amused herself by browsing Horrorscopes while I did my email. She noted amusingly that my Horrorscope mentioned that things would be "breaking" today, perhaps due to electricity. We got a little chuckle out of that.

The first thing I saw when I sat down was a little requester that claimed "Unknown Hard Error! (OK)" I clicked on it, and it popped right back. After a dozen clicks the machine just gave up the ghost and rebooted. Whether this is a testament to WinXP or simply the quality of machine I built, this was the first real BSOD experience this machine has had. Upon restart, CHKDSK ran (I didn't even know that was available in XP until then) and found a few lost clusters. While CHKDSK did it's thing I was jokingly telling Karen about what happens when one disk in a RAID-0 setup fails. Then XP loaded and away we went. I did my email housekeeping and went back to work.

At dinner I slashed my thumb open while cutting some of the scraps of meat from a porkchop bone. Nothing serious. Just a little insicion about 1/2" long on the side of my thumb. It was a pretty good cut, and it closed up almost immediately after I washed it out and put some pressure on it. I probably only lost about 10 drops of blood total. A band-aide and a little care and I was (almost) as good as new. After dinner I went up to play Camelot. And a drive failed.

A drive failed!

It made a horrible ka-click-ka-click-ka-click sound and the system locked up solid. I dinked with the computer until 12:30AM and I simply could not get it to run. Upon startup, sometimes one drive was not found. Sometimes NO drives were found. Sometimes it found both drives, but would lockup during bootup, or shortly thereafter. I finally got XP to boot up in "safe mode" (another surprise) and set it to do a complete scan of the system drive. While that ran, I used the other computer to order two more drives. (As a side note, I was surprised to see that the drives I bought for $107 each last October were now selling for around $70 each.) Maybe they will be replaced, maybe not.

My current theory is that the little 'blip' in the electricity blew up something in there. Whether it was a drive or the controller or something even more basic still remains to be seen. I'm not too concerned about the hardware, I've already solved that problem by ordering new parts. I can buy new parts. I -am- concerned about my data. I've got probably 10GB of irreplaceable data on those two drives. I can't reproduce that. Among which is my ONLY copy of Atlantis.

This sucks. First the CD player. Then my finger. Now my data. I guess the Horrorscope was right.

My 2003 triathlon season has come to a close. Last weekend I raced in the 2003 Treasure Island sprint-distance race.

Last year, this was the race that was a big eye-opener for me. After studying for my P.E. exam and doing NO exercise for four months, this race kicked my butt. This year, I was going into this race with three crushing failures in previous races. My finish time at the (half) Vineman in August was 45 minutes slower than I hoped. My finish time in the (half-marathon) Vineman Relay was 20 minutes slower than I had hoped. And then the humiliating defeat at the (olypmic distance tri) Pacific Grove race was my slowest time EVER; even my first Wildflower race was faster by over ten minutes!!

After Pacific Grove, I decided to make a training plan which I (mostly) stuck to. Some of this was due to Karen "keeping me honest" and providing encouragement. Some of it was due to the installation of new showers at my office, which allowed me to do workouts at lunchtime. And some of it was just plain old stubbornness. In any case, it seemed to have worked.

This race was a new Personal Record for a Sprint distance. This is the only sprint distance race I do each year. This was possibly my best race EVER. It was the first time I've felt like a "real" Triathlete during a race.

My swim was "long"; I went WAY wide on the course and probably swam an additional 100 yards making the 440 yard loop. But when I got out of the water (20th out!) I still felt fresh and not completely tapped like I normally am after a swim. I was swimming 100 yards in 1:50 during training, so I had budgeted 8:15 for the 450 yard swim. My swim time was significantly slower than this, coming in at a meandering 11:24.

T1 was amazingly fast (for me). I normally budget 5:00 for each transition. I know I'm slow in transition, and I account for that in my goals. This time around, however, I was out of transition in only 3:40 (22th fastest in my age group)! Maybe it was because I was not so out of breath while trying to put my bike shoes on. Maybe it was the flaming socks that Karen bought me. Maybe it was just that I've finally figured out how to do transitions. In any case, I got changed quickly and on the bike.

During the bike, I was passing people. I was still getting passed too, but almost all of them were from the next higher age group. Some people are just faster than me. I can accept that. And I have no problem with it, either. So when I'm passed by a guy that is 41, that's fine. Maybe he's the fastest guy in his age group. But the point is that I didn't see ANYONE pass me on the bike that was in my age-group. Looking at the results, there was one guy in my group - only ONE - that passed me on the bike leg. The people faster than me were already ahead of me. On the other hand, I passed quite a few people in my group on the bike. I stumbled a bit on both the mount and dismount; I probably could have made up 30 to 45 seconds between the two of them. While that may not seem like much, in a race this short, a fraction of a minute is a major difference. I was shooting for a average speed of 18MPH or 41:26 for the whole 20km ride. despite the lost time (which was ALL counted in the bike leg) I was pleased to turn in a time of 38:43, or 19.26MPH!!

T2 was similarly fast. Instead of the 5:00 that I had budgeted, I was in and out in a mere 2:19. Of course, this transition is supposed to be FASSST and I was ranked 39th in my age group for this one. I still thought it was fast (for me).

Usually when I'm doing the run, my body is running on fumes. As I'm watching people go past me, I look down at their calf and see way too many of them are in my age group and I falling back further and further... but that's all I can do. This time around, I felt strong during the whole race. I kept my pace the whole way and I was picking off people one by one. I would pick out someone a few hundred feet ahead of me and set my pace and in a few minutes I would pass them. Then I would pick out a new person and pass them. I was hoping for an 8 min/mile average or 24:51 overall for the run. I blew that away with a 7:35 pace and a run time of 23:31!!

After all was said and done, I still had enough energy for a sprinting charge across the finish line. My target finishing time of 1:30:00 was completely blown away. My prior times were 1:26:20 (2001) and 01:29:07 (2002). This year I rocked both of those times with a stunning 01:19:37 finish! (119th overall, out of 538 and 19th in my age group, out of 52)

Today is release day. After 5pm tonight, I'll be online probably around 12-16 hours a day for the next week. But I'll be "in" Atlantis. I typically do that every time a really exciting product comes out.

Of course, one of the reasons I have so many diverse hobbies is because I can't stand to do the same thing for a really long time. So I'm sure that by the time I get to the end of this week, I'll be ready to move on to something else.

Or maybe Karen will have to learn strip-tease to lure me out of the computer room :-)

Well, it's only two more days until Trials of Atlantis is released and a little less than a week until Halloween.

I was reminded by several family members that it is time to start putting together the infamous Xmas Wish List. My goal was to add enough items to fill one complete screen. It was difficult, and it took several hours of brain wracking, but I was able to come up with a bevy of items that range in price from under $10 to over $20,000. (Note to any wealthy benefactors or family members that win the lottery before Christmas: If you need more detail, please don\'t hesitate to ask!)

Anyway, here's a link to the Wish List. I'll add it to the nav bar on the left after Thanksgiving.

No blog entries in a while. Mostly because nothing has been happening. I get up, go to work, swim/bike/run at lunchtime, come home, play Camelot, eat, sleep, repeat.

Then...

Last week on Monday, I reported in that I had 2 to 2-1/2 days of work. On Tuesday afternoon, I ran out of tasks to do at work. Wednesday I came in to the office in the morning and cleaned off my desk. Literally. Not only going through paperwork, but I got out a damp rag and dusted and wiped down everything. I stayed until 11AM and then went home. On Thursday, I came in and actually had a little work to do. some of my drawings had been drafted, so I did my backcheck and sent them out to the client. I ended up working about 3 hours and then went home. While I was home on Thursday night my cellphone rang, but I was in the middle of a beta test "event" for Camelot, so I let it go to voicemail.

Friday, I simply called in sick... sick of not doing anything. After swimming, Karen was asking me about weekend plans. She reminded me that this weekend was The Relay. I did the The Relay a couple years ago and it was a lot of fun. I was hoping to pick up a spot this year, but nothing had turned up, so I had pretty much given up on it. Then I checked my voicemail.

It was Sandy. Apparently she was on a Relay team, but due to workload, and she was planning on going to Kona to watch the race there, and bevy of other things, she was looking for someone to take her slot. Of course I agreed! I was going to be in Van #1 with five girls, running leg #2, the third easiest assignment!

By the time our 1PM start time rolled around, I had been shuffled off to Van #2, and swapped to leg #8, the fifth hardest leg.

My first run started out at dusk, on a dirt trail, through rolling hills and woods. Then I hit a monster hill. It was so steep that the dirt had been paved over so vehicles could climb it without spinning out. I walked that portion. Then it was a long gradual descent through a vineyard, out onto highway 12, across the Napa->Sonoma County line, take a right on Napa Road, and four miles to my hand-off. I felt nice and strong for the first 4-5 miles, passing a half-dozen people. After around the 10k mark, however, my legs started loading up with lactic acids and I could feel my running getting slower and slower and slower. I finished the 7.4 miles in 1:04:37. 8:44 minutes per mile average. Slow, slow, slow!!

After our van did our last hand-off, we went to Terry's apartment in SF, showered, and got about 2 hours of sleep. That was to be my only sleep for the whole weekend.

My second leg was much worse. It started in the early morning (5AM) at the intersection of Sloat and the Great Highway. Anyone who has ever lived in that area knows that this area is foggy 350 days a year. Sunday morning was no exception. As I took the "baton" (which was actually a plastic spring bracelet), the fog was just starting to get thick. As I ran south it got worse and worse. while I was on the Great Highway, I was fine. I had a headlamp (a very nice white LED lamp that had a range of about 25 feet) and I could see the white line on the side of the road. Just follow the line, thought I. Yeah, right. Within two miles, visibility was down to around 15 feet. My glasses were completely fogged up, limiting my range of sight to around 5 feet. I plodded along, uphill the whole way, cold, wet and blind.

At mile 4-ish, the course did a little one-block zig to the right. I would have missed it completely, if not for the van that someone had parked across my path. Despite being parked directly under a street light, I did not see the van until I was less than 10 feet away from it. I yelped, and the people in the van yelled "Turn RIGHT!" I'm sure that they were waiting for their runner (not me) but I am sooo glad they were there. I'm sure there was a neon green sign on a post somewhere, but I couldn't even see the ground, much less a signpost.

One short block later, another van was parked in the middle of the road. I asked these people if the course turned again, and was rewarded with a "Yes, it goes left here." Now I was in a residential area. No more white line to follow. As I ran along, a dark shape would suddenly appear in front of me, about 10 feet away. A Toyota Corolla. Or a Volkswagon Vanagon. Or a Seville. People park their cars in front of their houses. But in my limited visibility, these things were huge obstacles. I ran in the middle of the street to avoid parked cars, but whether it was due to me not running in a straight line, or the road turning, eventually I would almost hit a car and have to correct for it.

I caught up to another runner at one point. Having a car swim out of nothingness a few feet away was startling. Having a PERSON appear a couple of steps away was frightening!

At the next turn, there were a few vans parked around. I thought to myself "Self, these vans must be here for a reason." Just as the thought formed in my mind I saw a HUGE chalk arrow on the roadway telling me to turn left. That was mile 5-ish. I was only running through the residential section for a mile and a quarter, but it was so stressful that my upper body was clenched the whole time. I felt as if I had run twice that distance.

A short time after the last turn, the fog began to thin a tiny bit. I could see maybe 30-50 feet now. It was getting a little lighter too. I saw another runner ahead of me, crossing the street. I followed suit, hoping he knew where he was going. A car approached so I hopped up onto the sidewalk, nearly missing my step since the red-painted curb was nearly invisible in the fog. As I ran along the sidewalk, a rough-finish concrete wall was on my left shoulder. Like the outside of an office building, or a supermarket, or... AHA!!! I suddenly knew where I was. This was the back wall of Serramonte shopping center! My leading runner turned left at the corner, behind the building.

I turned left and there was someone standing there. I literally stopped in amazement. I quickly (and breathily) asked "Which way?" The reply was, "Right over there, that's the exchange." I was thinking "Where?" as I started off in the direction he indicated. It was diagonally across a 4-lane road. A well-lit gas-station. Which I couldn't see from 50 feet away. I ran in and handed off the "baton". Finally, I was able to relax. I was drenched. Not with sweat, but with condensation from the fog. I looked like someone had dumped a bucket of water over me. My clothes were literally dripping. Fun stuff.

I finished the 5.9 mile run in less than one hour, but my overall pace was well into the 9+ minute per mile range. Considering it was all uphill, and the condition, I was satisfied with my performance.

After our hand off, we drove down to Cañada College, showered in the gymnasium (no hot water, but at least it was a shower!) drove to Woodside and had a totally unhealthy breakfast of a giant cinnamon roll, bought a premade sandwich and then drove up Page Mill road to "sleep" at the next hand-off. Sadly, there were about 100 other vans there, plus it is a popular motorcycle route. Sleep was not possible. But I was able to doze off and on for about an hour and a half.

Before I even started my third and final run, my legs were sore and tired, my head was aching and I was looking longingly at the asphalt road thinking that it wouldn't be that hard or uncomfortable to sleep on.... As I started to get the pre-race jitters, the adrenaline smoothed out the headache and washed away my fatigue. By the time I was running, I actually was feeling pretty good again.

The run started with a steep downhill section. After that it was rolling up and down hills. It actually was pretty fun, despite the ever-present pain in both of my legs. As the distance crawled along, I could feel my leg muscles shutting down a bit at a time. It was not only a race against the clock, but I was also trying to finish my relay leg before my body stopped working. I had reached my endurance limit, and was pushing past it.

I ended up passing three people and was passed by three people. I finished about 1-2 seconds behind two others. My total elapsed time was 37:05 for 4.7 miles, an average speed of 7:53 minutes per mile! This was my fastest run, and it was when I was nearing total muscular breakdown. Way to push the limits!

I got home Sunday night around 10PM, 34 hours after I had left on Saturday. In that time, I had two deli-style sandwiches, one cinnamon roll, a LOT of water/gatorade/cytomax, a handful of energy bars, three hours sleep and two showers. And had run the equivalent of a full marathon.

Monday was spent lying on the couch.

It seems I'm back not making blog entries in a timely manner. I really need to schedule a week of NOTHING. Of course, my head might explode if I did not have ten things to finish by the end of the day.

Episode One
Thursday after work, I went for a nice 28 mile bike ride with Carolyn. She was on her road bike and I was on my mountain bike. The plan was for her to have a nice easy training ride and me to work a little harder and build some strength in my legs. Yeah, that was the plan anyway.

We started out at a brisk pace and as soon as we hit the flats, Carolyn spun up to 19 MPH and held there. For the next 15 miles, I had to WORK to keep the mountain bike moving at that blistering pace. When we hit the closest thing to a hill that the Gueneville route offers (50 feet of elevation gain, woot!) Carolyn powered right up the grade at 10 MPH. We had just done this same route the weekend prior and she was running about 15-16MPH in the flats and 6-8MPH on the climbs. That's why I thought it woud be "safe" riding the mountain bike; those are humanly possible speeds.

Anyway, after 18 gruelling miles of agony and pain and not being able to speak from the need for oxygen, I flatted out in the rear. (Thank goodness!) We stopped to examine the flat, and found what looked like a 1/8" long metal shaving sticking out of the center of the tread. It took a little effort to coax the metal piece out of the tire, but when it came out I was shocked to find this. No, not a dime -- the black object on the right. It was stabbed into the tire lengthwise so that only the short end was sticking out of the rubber. (This image also highlights how bad the focus is on my cheap-ass camera.)

I still need to get to the bike shoppe and buy a new "spare" tube for the mountain bike.

Episode Two
Friday night Karen dropped by. Supposedly with a DVD to watch. Sadly, no disc was in attendance. Delivery pizza appeared (Mary's Pizza Shack) but it wasn't very good. The evening ended at an early 10PM. Feh.

Episode Three
Saturday was Camelot day. I logged in at 11AM for a pickup group in Caledonia. Not only was there not a group in there, but there were no players either. Not even so

Sadly, this remainder of this blog entry was lost to the evil of database corruption and has returned its potential energy back to the universe.

Sept 10, 2003: My fun LBNL job may be canceled. The client has a budget of $1.1M and we estimated the cost to be $3.2M. That project is now in limbo.

Sept 11, 2003: Happy birthday to me! Karen brought home a nice bottle of champagne, some fresh strawberries and a huge block of chocolate. Much happiness ensued.

Sept 12, 2003: I lost access to the private Mythic developer forums for the first time since joining them in October of 2001.

Sept 13, 2003: Finished Pacific Grove olympic distance triathlon for the third time. Posted my worst EVER olympic distance race at 3:49:29. This is even worse than my first Wildflower race. Amazingly, this new "personal worst" comes less than three months after my personal best at Rancho Seco.

Sept 14, 2003: Visit to the Monterey Aquarium for the first time since I went to Monterey with Donna's family. It was nice, and all I could think about was seafood.

Sept 15, 2003: My office tells me that due to the slowdown in workload, I am going to a reduced workweek. I will be only working three days a week unless there is something for me to work on the requires more effort.

Sept 16, 2003: I'm told that I have a full week this week and that I will be working five days.

Sept 17, 2003: I'm told that I have additional work for next week which will be three days total. Added to the day and a half I already had, I'll be working all next week as well.

Sept 18, 2003: Karen stayed home from work sick, so I played Camelot. Relic raid style RvR. Playing with ToA client and getting -horrible- lag; almost unplayable.

Sept 19, 2003: Karen is still sick, so I'm playing more. This time the relic raid succeeds and we lose a Power Relic. I'm still over 1000 RPs short of my goal.

Sept 20, 2003: Bought a new tube for the MTB (about time!), and new running shoes. After trying on about six different shoes, I settled on the same shoe I already own, but a 1/2 size larger. A close second was the Adidas shoe. After shopping, we drove to Pacheco to visit with Yvonne. Had a nice time catching up with them, and got to introduce Karen.

Sept 21, 2003: The travel yesterday hurt Karen. She's resting today, so more Camelot for me. I ended the day about 2 bubbles from level 44, and still 1000 RPs shy of the Merchant Keep 2 quest (which awards a full level).

Sept 22, 2003: Started training again. I biked for 50 minutes on the rollers at 80+ RPM. I was supposed to go for 60 minutes but I simply had to stop due to fatigue. I'm incredibly out of shape. I'm thinking I may have to adjust my training plan. I'll see how the rest of the week goes.

Sept 23, 2003: Regained access to the Mythic developer forum. It will take me ages to catch up with the messages, I'm sure. Also made a blog entry (about freaking time!!) trying to catch up on the last couple weeks.

There are people who would kill to have my problems.

At home, I have a lot of things that I would like to do and not enough time to do them all. I shouldn't complain because it is all "fun" stuff. It's like I have a lot of ice cream and a lot of chocolate and only one small bowl... and it makes me unhappy letting some of it go to waste.

For example, I haven't done any training in over a month. I looked at my bicycle the other day and was mildly surprised to see that I still had not taken the 1/2 Vineman number off of it. In other words, since the at race I haven't ridden my bike at all! I've gone running maybe a handful of times, but not for very far, and not fast. I can't even recall the last time I went swimming.

I'm still only level 43 in Camelot and the upcoming expansion is geared towards 40+. Translation, if you ain't level 50, don't buy it. Trying to grind out levels, test new encounters, and gain RPs all at the same time is practically a full-time job. One I don't have time for.

I want to spend more time with Karen. Yesterday we spent all-day long in San Francisco. Baseball at Pac Bell park followed by a yummy noodle dinner. A very VERY nice day. I'd like to have more days like that.

The point is that I simply do not have enough time in a day to accomplish all three of these things. Add in all of the various and sundry tasks a person has to accomplish to stay alive and healthy (sleeping, eating, bathing, etc) and I think I might have time to do ONE of these things, but not all three.

Then, work. There the problem is NOT ENOUGH work, not too much. I took a whole week off already because there was nothing for me to do. The week before that I spent three whole days moving boxes, because there was nothing for me to do. Last week (a short week) I was billable for 30 out of 32 hours. This week I have one, maybe two days worth of work to do.

I would just take more time off, but I'm starting to run out of vacation time and I am going to be taking practically a whole month off next May. I already have two and a half weeks worth of "stuff" planned for that month which will prevent me from coming in to the office.

There are people who would kill to have my problems. But they're making me depressed and grumpy.

Well well well.

The entire month of August was pretty much a relaxing one for me. Work was abysmally slow. In fact, for one week of August I only put in 8 hours; the other four days I was able to stay home and sleep in. Another week, I had no "billable" work, so I spent three days of that week moving file boxes from one storage location to another. Add in a couple of 6-hour long trips to a meeting in Berkeley and you've pretty much summed up my month at work.

Life at home has been equally calm. Karen seems to enjoy letting me do my own thing and puts very limited demand on my time. She won tickets to a local concert, so we went and saw Los Lobos and Buddy Guy at the LBC. (Los Lobos was "okay", but Buddy Guy was a lot of fun!) We went for a hike at Montgomery Woods, a small state park that is well off-the-beaten-track outside of Ukiah. We had lunch/dinner at the Mendocino Brewing Company's restaurant (they of the "Eye of the Hawk" beer). We went and saw a Zydigo band play in Courthouse Square downtown and then had some pretty good sushi afterwards. Even though she seems to make a big deal out of me agreeing to do this type of thing, I find it pretty easy to acquiesce. Plus it gives me opportunity to do things that I normally wouldn't do, left to my own devices.

I finally got my new monitor on August 25th. As it turns out, I was able to get a $50 credit on my original purchase. Dell has back-ordered the original monitor, and then a few days prior to the "expected" ship date, ran a special on them for a lower price than I had paid. Since mine was backordered, I ordered a new one (at the lower price) and then called to cancel the original order. Amazingly enough, they had shipped my original (more expensive) order (earlier than expected). After a short conversation with the Customer Support Representative, she canceled the second (cheaper) order and credited me the difference. Net result: I got the monitor sooner, for less money.

It has a 25ms refresh time. I do notice a little bit of smearing when I'm aggressively panning in games. It's not unbearable, but I do tend to be annoyed by it after some time. But the advantages of the LCD (less space, less heat, sharper image) far outweigh that disadvantage. I'm up to level 43 in Camelot. I got my über shield built and I'm working on my weapon now. I may have to bail out and test Atlantis for a while.

Anyway, I'm back to work now. Life should be returning to normal this month. I've been goofing off long enough.

I detest public politicing, but in this case I can't resist. My friend Mike wrote a wonderful essay on the current state of California politics. Despite my different feelings on the matter, I have to agree with this essay completely. This deserves to be spread around, so I'm doing my small part.

Read it here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/allanorn/120964.html

This last weekend, my aging 21" CRT finally decided that it was tired of being used as a monitor. After an "on" time of between 5 and 30 minutes, the screen shrinks to a 3/8" high strip in the center of the screen. It doesn't compress, but rather everything outside of that thin strip gets smashed into a very bright single line at the top and bottom the the tiny viewable area. After turning off the monitor for 10 to 30 minutes, it works again (for a short while).

The last two days, I've taken a crash course in LCD technology and the (dis)advantages with respect to gaming.

The big problem with LCDs and games is the refresh rate. Rather than a scanning electron gun which uses a fixed frequency to refresh the screen, LCD screens are updated on a "per pixel" basis. Thus the speed limit is based on how fast each individual pixel can turn on and off.

I've settled on a Planar PL190M from Dell. Using a couple of easily found Dell coupon codes, I was able to get this for $550, shipped. Not a bad price for what is essentially a 21" CRT, but with lower power consumption and a much smaller footprint.

This screen has a 25ms (15 ms rise, 10 ms fall) refresh, which isn't BAD as far as games go, but not good either. It works out to a maximum screen refresh rate of 40FPS. Decent, but certainly not great. The sad part is that I can't even bump the resolution up to make up for the low framerate since the native (max) resolution is only 1280x1024. I'm still not sure how it will handle FPS games like Savage or the upcoming Half-Life 2, but we'll see about that in a couple months. I'm sure it will be fine for stuff like Camelot, though.

Still, it's hard to argue with that kind of price for a 19" LCD. The other option was to buy another 22" CRT (i.e. 250-Watt heater). Between just the monitors, I have about 1000-Watts of waste heat in my home office. Add in the CPU exhaust and that room is NEVER cold, even in the deep of winter when the outside temperature drops into the "freezeing" range (well, freezing for this area... around 50 degrees)

The long and short of it is that until the new screen gets here, I'm not going to be able to play anything. Heck, I can barely use the computer for anything at all, since it is only usable about 40% of the time, and never for more than 30 minutes at a stretch. This really sucks, since I have a shiney new Trials of Atlantis beta disc that is just screaming to be played with. Expected delivery date is August 19.

The results are in. I'm half an Ironman. While I did finish, it wasn't pretty. I more-or-less staggered across the finish line. It was a more of a testament to my stubbornness than my athleticism (or lack thereof).

I always go into a race with multiple goals. This time around my goals were:
1. To finish in 6 hours -- FAILED
The "expected" times are the ACTUAL times I put in on the SAME course in prior attempts. I did the swim and the bike in 2001 and the run in 2002. My performance this year was worse than before.

	Target	Actual
swim	0:39:46	0:41:10
bike	3:34:52	3:20:01
run	2:07:05	2:37:13

2. To finish no slower than one hour behind Kyle -- SUCCESS!
My finish time was EXACTLY 59 minutes and 56 seconds slower than him, which is less than one hour. Four seconds less than one hour, but still less.
3. To finish faster than Sandy -- FAILURE
Sandy was faster than me on both the bike and the run, with a total finish time of 6:25:02. In our prior races, Sandy has always beaten me by a matter of seconds, so either she was having a really good race, or (more likely) I simply fell apart.
4. To NOT finish in the lower 25% -- MIXED
My finish was 250/262 in my age group, or 1065/1688. So I was faster than 4.5% of my age group, or 36.9% of all finishers.

In short, I sucked. Out loud.

Maybe you've heard of or seen the video arcade game Dance Dance Revolution. If not, this game is a huge stand-up monstrosity with a colored, lit "dance floor" in front of it. The object of the game is to step on the correctly colored squares in time with loud music. Thus, the better you "dance", the better you do.

If you are the least bit obsessive-compusive, or if you enjoy music -- not like "background music", but if you can't help but tap your feet or fingers in time to music you don't even like... if this describes you at all, no matter what you do, do NOT click on this link! I warned you.

Flash Flash Revolution

The Past

Lance calls her "Ezekial", Kyle calls her "psycho-slut", I call her "my Ex-Girlfriend Who Wasn't". Looking back on the experience, I can appreciate what I learned from the experience. It was painful, but growth is never easy. I'm sure that without her entering my life, I would still be stuck where I was before and not have been able to move on and develop as a person.

In January, she invited me to France to watch the last week of The Tour. When the invitation was made, she more or less offered to pay my way, if I couldn't swing it myself. Gwen advised me to go to France with her; the reasoning was that people often act differently in a different situation and that maybe, just maybe, I would get a bite of the proverbial golden plum.

The Tour is coming to a close this week, so she has been popping into my mind. Mostly because of the association with The Tour. Regardless, if the stars aligned just so, and the gravity of the planets caused her to have a flash of inspiration and call me and invite me to come see her today, I honestly don't think it would be all that difficult to say "no".

The last time I was in SLO, I said I was "Finally Free" (I actually chose that as my little saying when I finished my second Spike's card). I really am. And I'm glad.

The Present

Dredging up memories and feelings which should remain undisturbed is relevant for another reason as well.

Over the last couple of months I have been training with a recent divorcée. She was older than me, not unattractive, and she obviously was attracted to me. As we trained together, things did develop and we spent a few nights together. It was fun and enjoyable (for both of us). Had things been different, it could have been a long-term semi-serious relationship.

The problem is, I treated her much in the same way that Kristen treated me. I was disrespectful of her feelings, uncaring of her expectations and generally a Bad Person™. She was not willing nor interested in a semi-casual relationship, and I was not forthcoming with her that I was. Instead, I remained silent and allowed her to draw incorrect conclusions.

In the end, she was hurt. Last Friday she sent an email to me which paraphrased down to "You're a jerk; I never want to see you again." I'm not going to say that I didn't deserve that, because I certainly did. I lost someone who could have been a good friend, not because I was unable or unwilling to deal with her situation, but because I created a situation that was impossible for her to deal with. I know that she also lost a friend, but I lost far more than she did.

I'm sorry about that.

It was no less painful than the lesson I learned the first part of this year. I know now that when I said goodbye to Kristen, what effect it had on her. I can only hope that she was able to learn from that experience as I have. But I strongly doubt it.

The Future

Like the song says, the future's so bright I gotta wear shades. Karen is completely a part of my life now. She has been living in my home for the past ten days, and I have no regrets at all. She makes me insanely happy without all of the self-immolation that I went through in the past. She is kind, caring and seems to genuinely enjoy being around me.

It's a very odd experience for me. In ALL of my past relationships, I have been in the situation where I provided support to the other person. Either emotionally, physically, mentally or otherwise, I have always been in a "giving" role in my past relationships. I've never been involved with someone who not only isn't "needy", but seems to provide more to me than she asks for in return. Sometimes I feel like I'm taking advantage of her since she asks for so little from me. And when I do find a chance to provide some support for her, she acts like I'm the best thing since sliced bread.

It's really odd. I'm certainly not going to complain, though. It's a sweet deal for me. I hope that she stays a part of my life for a reasonably long time. My biggest fear at this point is that she will move on and leave me with impossibly high expectations for The Next Girl™ to meet.

That would suck. In a big way.

Work has been rough, and it doesn't seem to be lightening up anytime soon. Friday night I was up until 12:30AM reading specifications for this hellish project I'm working on.

Saturday I finally finished painting the townhouse I've been living in for the last year. I still have three door casings to replace, and one additional casing that needs to be stripped, stained and rehung. That's about two hours work, maybe less. I'm holding off on any additional home improvement type projects until I spend those two hours though.

Saturday night, we drove to Sacramento and had a yummy meal at The Old Spaghetti Factory. Sunday morning, we got up bright and went to race at the TBF Tri 4 Real #2. Karen impressed the hell out of me by volunteering. We were standing around pre-race and the announcer asked if any spectators wanted to volunteer, and she just went right over to the volunteer booth and asked what she could do to help. I'm still in awe.

The race was fun. I set a new Olympic distance PR for myself. The preliminary results have me finishing in 2:47:57, nearly 15 minutes faster than my prior record for that distance. We'll see if this improvement streak continues on to Pacific Grove (which was my prior PR race, and also my first and favorite Olympic course). I'll do a full writeup of the race and course as time permits (hopefully before Vineman in 3 weeks). Regardless, it's pretty cool that I have a new Olympic PR.

After the race, we came home and I spent another half-dozen hours reading more specs, this time until 1:30AM. I'll be so happy when this blasted project goes out to the client. At least then I know I won't have to work on it any more.

I used to laugh at people who would meet someone and get married in only a few months, or move in together after a few weeks. I guess I shouldn't do that. It has been exactly fifteen days since our first real "date", and I'm deliriously happy. I'm both frightened and excited about how quickly my life is changing to make room for her.

Friday the 4th I took a 56 mile bike ride with Sandy. The plan was to start in Guerneville (success!), ride the Vineman route (success!) and then warm-down with the 18-mile ride back to Guerneville (oops!); that would have been a total of 74 miles. As expected, we pooped out at the end of the 56 mile route. Luckily, Karen was at my home, so I called for a ride. After a shower, quick food, sending Sandy on her way back to SF and a couple hours of much needed rest (which included a VERY relaxing massage), there were fireworks. Both literally (it was the 4th of July) and figuratively. I've never had so much fun watching things blow up before. I think it had something to do with the company.

Saturday the 5th. After getting out of bed (late) we went to Six Flags Marine World. After a bit of a rocky start, a fun filled day was had by all. There were many roller coasters, squeals of delight, laughter, and a lot of public displays of affection. After nine hours of amusement park fun, there were more fireworks. I never realized the variety in explosives before, but seeing two different shows on subsequent nights was pretty illuminating. Of course, the company was the same, as were the feelings.

Sunday the 6th. Another late morning start led to a champagne luncheon at the Mountain Home Inn, followed by a scenic hike down to Muir Woods National Monument. On the drive home, we stopped for an early dinner at Moylan\'s.

To say that it was a great weekend would be the understatement of the year. The weekend was good in much the same way that the Pacific Ocean is a bit of water or that the sun is a little hot. The last couple of days, I've been going home from work and basically immersing myself in Camelot. Partly to ignore that I don't have anyone around. Which is kinda weird since it was only a few days, and I'm already accustomed to having someone in my life, full-time. It's both frightening and exciting.

I think I like it.

Last night, after work I went home, put in my contact lenses and ran off to the Monticito Heights Health and Racket Club to go swim for the Wednesday night "masters" workout. I felt super fast. After the swim, I sat in the hot tub and chatted for about a half hour. That was nice and relaxing.

I was running horribly late, but I was not in a big hurry because no one was waiting on me... or so I thought. I went home again with the intent of ordering take-out Chinese, eating and then going for a 3-mile run. Unfortunately, I had to stop in at the office to pick up my cellphone; I had accidentally left it there in my hurry to get to the pool.

When I got home, I was looking for the menu for the Chinese delivery place when my cellphone rang. I looked at the caller ID and answered. Since roommate Dave was watching TV, I started to walk upstairs for both a little privacy and to not be talking over the TV. A sexy voice asked me what I was doing. "I'm walking up the stairs," I answered. A question was asked what I was doing for dinner. I replied that I was planning on ordering Chinese delivery. "Wouldn't you rather have a burrito?" she asked as I opened my bedroom door.

The first thing I noticed was several bags and boxes on the floor in front of my closet doors. The one that sticks in my mind was the Teva box and the green plastic bag next to it. I thought, "Well, that's wierd. Why did Dave put this stuff in my room and where did it come from?" And then I realized that I wasn't alone in my room. She was calling me from my own bedroom! What's more, she was calling me from my own BED!! It sounds cliché, but the words I uttered at that point were a simple "OH. MY. GOD!"

This was definitely the single best surprise I have ever had in my entire life.

This is a multi-blog entry.

Babysitting

The last couple of weeks have been a new experience for me. I've been placed into a new role at work: as a Project Manager. This is a good thing for my career, but a bad thing for my life. In a normal situation this would have been all good, but the person who I would rely upon to "help" me with the new role is the same person who -gave- me the role. And is now on vacation. That makes it hard to ask for advice.

All together, this would not be a horrible thing, but I'm expected to do my normal design effort on top of this. So in the 40 hours last week, I spent 3 days (out of 5) doing nothing but "hand-holding" the various engineers working on the project. I would literally sit down at 8:30AM intending to do electrical design, and someone would come to me with an "issue", which I would help solve and then someone else would show up, and so on, and so on. And then when it finally would calm down I would start with my design and it was 4:30PM. I burned entire DAYS just running around keeping people happy and fed.

All well and good, like I said, except that I still have 40 hours of design effort to do at the same time. So, I end up either not doing it, or working 16 hour days. Joy.

The Pattern

I'm reading Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series. In these books, the Wheel makes time pass, and the Pattern is the way that the world goes, similar to the Fates in Greco/Roman mythos. The quotes which apply to my life right now are (and this will only make sense to someone who has read the books):

"The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills." and "Everything has a place in the Pattern."

That's a very obscure way of saying that I met someone this weekend. Someone who I hope is going to be a very special part of my life. So far, things are off to a very good start. At least I think so. "Met" isn't really the right word since we were actually introduced in January. That's why the Wheel of Time quotes seem so relevant. Even though we've been spending time together (in a non-intimate way) we never really "connected" until this weekend.

I keep trying to figure out why we waited so long, if we could have met much sooner (like YEARS sooner). There was no good answer. It just wasn't "right" until now. The Pattern put us in the right places at the right time. When you try to move against the weaving of the Pattern, the weaving changes to put you back in the place where you were intended to be. And it sure looks like we were intended to be together this weekend. I hope that the weaving allows us to stay together for a while.

I'm deliriously happy about this. Of course, I'm expecting a crushing loss as a result, but I really don't care about that. I'm simply far too happy to even think about worrying about the future right now.

Linkage

I just checked my activity reports and the most popular referrer is http://suicidegirls.com/girls/Hel. 102 links from that site. Strange. Maybe I should buy a digital camera.

Last night I went home from work and went directly to bed. I did not pass "Go" nor did I collect $200. Flat, soft, comfy bed. And sleep. Precious sleep.

It was only 102-degrees in my house (according to the wall thermometer) but I had no problems sleeping from 6pm until around 8:30pm. I woke up then, being hot and overheated. So I got up and made some dinner. Around 9-ish, I opened ALL the windows and by 10, I was back in bed.

Of course, since I'd had a couple hours of rest, I couldn't ignore the heat any longer. Even though it was cooler, I could not sleep. So I resorted to a blanket on the floor in front of the wide-open sliding glass door in my bedroom. With the cool outside air cascading down onto me, I finally dozed off.

I was awakened at 4:15AM by some bloke across the street trying to open his car door with a claw hammer. Or at least that's what it sounded like. Bang, bang bang, CRASH! [Pause] Repeat. I closed the slider and crawled onto my bed.

Which brings me to my point. When I lived in the Bay Area proper, on a cool night after a calm, hot day, all of the smog in the SF Bay basin would "settle" into a concentrated airmass that was only about 200 feet deep. Above that was cool, crisp and clean air. I'm told this was an "inversion layer", where the hot air falls down and the cool air rises to the top. When I was getting up to go to work in construction at 7AM, I would often see this effect in section view. Working outside gave me an opportunity to see this sort of thing.

So last night when I crawled into bed at 4:15AM I noticed that the temperature at the elevation of my mattress (about 2 feet) was markedly warmer than the temperature at floor level. Being of an experimental mind, I stood up on my bed and raised my hand. The temperature just below the ceiling was uncomfortably warm. There was, essentially, a major temperature stratification effect going on in my bedroom.

I wonder how much an attic fan would help to alleviate that issue.

I was forwarded a pretty cool link this morning. Of course I forwarded it to half my office, which resulted in comments ranging from "WTF are you doing on company time?" to "Why are you sending me this?" to "Who the hell cares?", and even one who asked "Why is my CD open?"

April (the word processor) launched into a tirade about the word "pwned"... after she asked four or five people what it meant and finally resorted to doing a web search. After that discussion, I was reminded of a TweetyRant.

I need sleep.

Saturday night I went down to SF for Heidi's 24th birthday party. In attendance were Marci (which is short for Marcella), Mariah, Jenny, Marcia (which is pronounced "Marsha"), Phil, and myself. Marci works for Doubletree, so she got us two comp'ed rooms at the SF Hilton. Nice place.

Marcia is Heidi's new roommate, and epitomizes everything evil and bad about the female gender. She's young, blonde and very attractive. She's also a a very bad driver, a pathological liar, a drama queen, and an emotionally abusive person, and incredibly manipulative. As the result of a fairly innocuous chain of events, I ended up sharing a room with this individual. I don't know exactly how far things went in the bed next to mine, but let's just say that both of the people who were in that bed were very sleep deprived the next day and that the sounds I heard when I was awakened at 4AM were a bit more than "R-rated". An uncomfortable experience, to say the least.

But more uncomfortable for Marcia, I think. In exchange for being an unwitting audience for her nocturnal symphony, I relayed my experience to her friends the next day. (All women are evil. I -know- that information will get used eventually.) And during a friendly chat with Karen on Sunday night, we discovered, much to the amazement of us both, that Marcia is Karen's "student assistant". So, of course, I was obligated to tell my story once again. To her (sorta) employer.

Marcia is going to hate me, I think. Too bad. I'm still going to go to Heidi's Birthday Party, part 2 (which should be this coming weekend-ish).

Sometimes, life is soo much fun.

I need to spread things out a bit more. Last night between 5PM and 10PM, I went for a 29 mile bike ride, ran a mile and a half and swam 1600 yards. I then followed that up with cooking dinner (Chicken Parmesana, yummy!) and then getting only 4-1/2 hours of sleep.

Someday I won't feel like I'm going to fall over in a strong wind. Maybe next week I'll get more rest. Maybe.

On Sunday I got up at 11AM, thinking it would be just another day. That was 72 hours ago. Since then I've gotten a total 13 hours of sleep. To compound the lack of rest, I've managed to squeeze in a 54 mile bike ride, a six mile run, and have skipped dinner on Sunday and Tuesday and breakfast on Wednesday. To say that I'm a tiny bit tired would be an understatement.

The scary part is that I'm looking at my calendar, and I'm not going to have any chance to sleep until next Monday. Unless I give up some of the stuff I have planned.

Speaking of giving up plans, last night I had planned on going to sleep at 7PM. Instead, while I was eating my skimpy dinner of barbecued bovine and rice, I did a little check-in on the game Savage. This was one of the games I was VERY impressed by at E3. Sadly (for my plans) they are now allowing anyone to "buy" a beta slot. If you preorder the game, you get a prerelease copy NOW and you can start playing as soon as you download it.

This is actually a nice model. I ordered the game with a credit card, the email confirmation came back from EBGames almost instantly and I was downloading the full game within 5 minutes. I was going to buy it -anyway- so why not spend the money now and start playing a few months before this thing hits the shelves?

175 megabytes later, I had the game I had just paid for in my possession and installed on both TWEAK and STUPID. And of course, I -had- to test it out, right? Right. So much for sleep. I was up until 2AM.

Let me just say that this game is REALLY in beta right now. It really reminds me of Camelot a year before release. It looks great, and it plays great but there are huge gaping holes in the design. The kind of holes that you can fall into and break your neck if you aren't careful. I certainly would NOT recommend it to the "casual" gamer in it's current state. Game balance is non-existent; there are a couple of weapons that completely dominate the game and the game is currently simply a race to see which team develops their "I WIN" weapon first.

Aiming is problematic for me. I've never been a marksman in a FPS and this one seems to be even worse than normal for me. (Lack of sleep might have something to do with that.) I usually play a support type class in FPS; I pretty much suck in all-out offense. And (sadly) that style of play is the ONLY choice in the FPS mode right now.

The RTS portion of the game seems a lot more polished and actually plays well. But I'm not really a RTS player and I don't grok the RTS controls. The right button is used for some things and the left button for others... "just like a normal RTS" (according to the other players). Unfortunately, the last RTS game I played was Dune, the predecessor to the original Command and Conquer! Heck, the last time I played a RTS, the term "RTS" hadn't even been invented yet! So a "normal" RTS control scheme is anything but intuitive for me.

Overall, I'm still pretty excited about it as a game. I'll have to watch and see how it develops.

It seems I'm back not making blog entries in a timely manner. I really need to schedule a week of NOTHING. Of course, my head might explode if I did not have ten things to finish by the end of the day.

Episode One
Thursday after work, I went for a nice 28 mile bike ride with Carolyn. She was on her road bike and I was on my mountain bike. The plan was for her to have a nice easy training ride and me to work a little harder and build some strength in my legs. Yeah, that was the plan anyway.

We started out at a brisk pace and as soon as we hit the flats, Carolyn spun up to 19 MPH and held there. For the next 15 miles, I had to WORK to keep the mountainbike moving at that blistering pace. When we hit the closest thing to a hill that the Gueneville route offers (50 feet of elevation gain, woot!) Carolyn powered right up the grade at 10 MPH. We had just done this same route the weekend prior and she was running about 15-16MPH in the flats and 6-8MPH on the climbs. That's why I thought it woud be "safe" riding the mountainbike; those are humanly possible speeds.

Anyway, after 18 grueling miles of agony and pain and not being able to speak from the need for oxygen, I flatted out in the rear. (Thank goodness!) We stopped to examine the flat, and found what looked like a 1/8" long metal shaving sticking out of the center of the tread. It took a little effort to coax the metal piece out of the tire, but when it came out I was shocked to find this. No, not a dime -- the black object on the right. It was stabbed into the tire lengthwise so that only the short end was sticking out of the rubber. (This image also highlights how bad the focus is on my cheap-ass camera.)

I still need to get to the bike shoppe and buy a new "spare" tube for the mountainbike.

Episode Two
Friday night Karen dropped by. Supposedly with a DVD to watch. Sadly, no disc was in attendance. Delivery pizza appeared (Mary's Pizza Shack) but it wasn't very good. The evening ended at an early 10PM. Feh.

Episode Three
Saturday was Camelot day. I logged in at 11AM for a pickup group in Caledonia. Not only was there not a group in there, but there were no players either. Not even soloists. I can't create RPs out of thin air, so I moved to Camelot City and worked on crafting for a couple hours, got bored, logged off, read web pages, tried again. Still no one in Caledonia. This was not looking good.

Eventually, around 8PM, a small group formed in Caledonia. Unfortunately, there were -three- Hibernian gank-groups to our five-man team. We were decimated time and again. And then in one fateful battle right around 10PM, everything fell into place, our tactics worked (or maybe the Hibbies were just getting over-confident) and we decimated around 20 of them with only three losses on our side (with three left standing). Luckily one of our survivors was a healer and was able to rez the fallen heroes. That single battle took me over the limit for Caledonia, so I was basically done the next time I died.

Which, of course, was about 30 seconds later when the damned Hibbies came swarming over the hill like a pack of rabid cockroaches. My entire group was wiped out and the Hibernians camped my corpse for the 20 minutes it took me time out. Thus endeth my Caledonia days.

My target was 8000 RPs. I ended up with 7236. It's still more than 100 points over the limit for Calednoia, but far short of my target.

Disappointing.

Things are starting to get back to normal. I'm no longer working 12 hour days at work. It was tough for a while, but I've -finally- dug myself out of the hole that Wildflower and E3 put me into. I've been going home at 5:00PM every day this week so far. (Yes, I know it is only Wednesday.)

I installed Office 2000 on STUPID last night. That means that my weight tracking page is back and is being updated again. I use excel to log and chart my weight every day. I weigh myself when I get out of the shower in the morning. Or in the afternoon, or evening, depending on when I actually take my daily shower. The point is that it is consistent, so the comparison actually makes a little bit of sense. I'm happy to see that in the month of "downtime", I only gained about a pound.

I'm starting to get a little nervous about Camelot. I'm looking at my schedule for this week and starting to question whether I have time to get the Realm Points. I know it is just a game, but I really want to move up a few ranks in the overall server rankings and it will take nearly 8000 RPs to move up three spots. The really big worry is that I know that the Trials of Atlantis beta phase will be coming soon and I'll need to race to level 50 to participate in that. So time is an issue. Unfortunately.

Training is going well, but not steadily. I really need to set a schedule and stick to it. If nothing else, that was something that working with Coach Phil provided. Since I was paying someone to put together workouts for me, I felt obligated to actually DO the workouts. Now that I'm no longer paying Phil for this, it is a lot harder to motivate myself to go running three nights a week, biking three times a week and swimming three times a week. I have a general workout plan assembled, but working it around all of the other aspects of my life is the hard part. Something that would help, would be to