I said no to Modern Warfare 2

For the last few years, I have enjoyed playing games online with a community that I found at Austin Servers. First with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and then Call of Duty: World at War. Until recently, we had been looking forward to what, from all preview footage, looked to be a very promising next installment - Modern Warfare 2. It's a big game for 2009 and has garnered unprecedented advertising - I've even seen Wal-Mart commercials advertising that they would have the game on sale at 12:01am for today's launch.

But, I, like many others, are saying no to this game. In the last few months, disturbing stories came out about crippling of features that PC gamers have expected as standard for more than a decade. You can read elsewhere for details if you're really interested in the minutia of it all.

In essence, the company that makes the game series has given up on the PC gamers that made their series popular. They are pretty much focused on the console market - the Xbox360 and Playstation 3. Only a token effort has been made at producing a PC version of the game and it has been stripped of everything that has historically made PC games better than console ones. Activision/Inifinity Ward doesn't want us anymore. That is certainly their right. They can make whatever games they like for whatever market they wish. But, I'm simply not going to waste my money on a half assed and insulting effort that they have put forth. It would have been better, quite frankly, if they had just declared from the beginning that they would not be making a PC version of this latest game.

Circuit City Offer????

Now, I get a number of emails from various vendors. I have one of my accounts that I direct all of this near spam to. Circuit City is one of my regular deliveries. This week, I get an offer of 10% off my entire purchase of $199 or more using a code given in the email. So, I think, "great, I was looking to buy a few games and Turbo Tax and all". But, here's what comes at the bottom of the email:

"The offer is good for 10% off your next combined purchase of $199 or more. Offer good for one use only and applies to total qualifying purchase on a single sales receipt dated between 1/17/08 and 1/19/08. Not valid on previous purchases. Offer excludes GPS navigation units, Bose, Polk, Infinity, Velodyne, Kicker, MTX Thunder, KEF, Denon, Polaroid, Olevia, Element, Vizio, Apple, Zune, Verizon Wireless, cable and DIRECTV services, notebooks, desktops, PC software, outlet, music, movie, game hardware, Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3 instrument bundles, City Price products, Clearance products, pre-paid cards and Circuit City gift card purchases. Delivery fees, shipping charges and sales tax not included in total purchase calculation. Not combinable with select Circuit City offers. Not redeemable for cash. Void where prohibited or restricted."

It seems like it would have just been a short list to tell me what this coupon IS good for. I'm trying to think of what else CC even sells that isn't on this list. Of course, "PC Software" is what I was interested in, so no luck for me with the coupon. Thanks for a whole lotta nothing there, CC.

I am not a Blogger

Look at this - I've let a whole two weeks slip by without a new post. And it's not like there hasn't been anything to post about. Quite the contrary.
Work has been very busy and will remain so for well into 2007. Every day I leave work I'm farther behind than when I arrived in the morning. One of my friends says I just need to stop coming in so I'll quit losing ground. Doesn't sound like too bad an idea some days.
For the past week, the wife has been in Chicago for business, so it had been me alone with the Princess and the Tornado. Which, in itself would not normally be so bad. But, the Tornado decided to start running a 102F Fever the first night and I ended up staying home with him part of the week, pretty much staying awake the whole time trying to comfort him. My mom came in a few days ago to help watch him so I could get back to falling behind at work.
As I read postings on the blogs of friends, I must come to the realization that I'm not really a blogger. I can't really write during the day, especially these days. At night, after the kids and wife are taken care of, I usually just want to vedge out a bit, catch up on some news, and crash. Gathering my thoughts and writing about the day just doesn't rise up to the top of the stack.
I've got the time to write now because I've just gotten the Tornado back to sleep after being up with him for two hours. I've got to get ready for Church in a little while, so there's no point to trying to get back to sleep myself at this point. As you can expect, this is not the kind of free time that comes very often and certainly not the kind of free time I'm looking for.
So, I'll continue to check in, hopefully I can commit to at least once a week with some kind of write-up. But, I can see that this place is not going to be the spot for my pontificating about the issues of the world, unless it is something really big and I can make extra time.
As always, Life, the adventure, continues.....

Fighting with HP

Remember that sweet laptop I bought for the wife last year? Well, last week, it crapped out. All data beyond recovery. Which, for my wife, was mostly her Itunes collection. But, thanks to CopyPod, I'll be able to recover that pretty easily.
Now, finally, the laptop is back up and running again, but it has been a major pain dealing with HP this past week. To start with, their call centers in India are sadly understaffed. We had to call them four times and it took us anywhere from 40 to 60 minutes on hold before we ever got to talk to anyone. And then, despite the fact that I bought this machine directly from HP and it's registered with them, we had to start over every time we talked with them - when did we buy the machine? What is the problem? Did you try xxx? How about yyy? Even though we had a case number from the first time we talked to them and referenced it each time, it did no good. I'm just about convinced that the case number is just some random string of digits that they feed you to make you think they know what they're doing. Every time we talked to someone new, they had no information on what we had already been through and seemed to know nothing about our particular machine.
After the first call, they decided the hard drive had gone bad (seems to be a lot of bad hard drives going around lately). So, they sent me a replacement. For starters, the replacement drive was a much slower model than what I had bought for the machine. I specifically upgraded the drive when I ordered the computer. But, I figured I ought to stick it in to at least see if that would work. Well, the Windows XP CD that came with the computer gave me an error message about a corrupt file. Great. So, does that mean the DVD drive or something else was bad? I pulled out my old copy of Windows 2000 and was able to install that to the drive with no trouble. So, I concluded that the XP CD itself was defective. I called them back, waiting for over an hour, to request a replacement CD and the correct hard drive, which took about an hour of struggle. But finally it was done and the new CD and drive arrived today. Thankfully, I had no trouble installing the drive or XP with the new stuff. The one saving grace is that there was still one month left on the warranty, so it cost me no cash, just a lot of time and frustration.
Still, I would have been even more monumentally pissed if the drive had crashed, say a year from now. I would have been able to buy a new drive pretty cheaply, but the defective XP CD would have been a show stopper.
After this ordeal, the wife has declared that we will not consider HP for computers in the future, and I can't argue with that. We will definitely spend a couple of extra bucks to find a supplier that is going to offer more capable service. Those who know me know that I'm a pretty tech savy guy. I don't require hand holding when it comes to dealing with software and hardware. But, when something breaks, I expect the manufacturer to be there to fix it. I had to fight too damn hard and spent too damn much time on this for me to put up with this from HP again.

One long Day

This has been one long day (Saturday). Thanks to the City of Houston's shortfall in traffic ticket revenue, I got a citation back in January for running a red light. Now, let me say first that, I hate red light runners. They're a danger on the road and should be routinely beaten. For me, this was the usual making it through as the light was yellow. In Houston, unless you got a good amount of distance, you don't even think about trying to stop on a yellow light, becuase chances are the two people behind you are gunning it to beat the light.
That said, I don't doubt that the light went red before I cleared the intersection. If you're not out of the intersection by the time the light is red, you've run a red light. 99% of the time you don't get stopped for this (shoot, most times, the flagrant red light runners don't get stopped either, but that's another rant). I don't bear any ill will to the officer. Those guys have a tough job in Houston, particularly trying to fill a quota of tickets that shall not be named becuase, of course, it doesn't exist (wink, wink).
It's been a while since I'd gotted into any trouble, so I was allowed to take Defensive Driving. Funny thing about government information, it seems everyone can get there hands on it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Houston sells it as a revenue stream, but over the last few months it has resulted in a weekly barrage of ads in the mail from what seems every DD school from here to Dallas.
I finally picked a "comedy" class being held in Clear Lake at a Ryan's steakhouse/buffet. I hadn't been there before and I would definitely recommend Golden Corral as having better food in the all you can stuff your face cheap buffet category. The state mandates a six hour minium course, so I was there from 9a to 3p. As usual, the information was all good an important and mostly stuff I do already. The comedian was ok. I don't think I'd seek him out if I was looking to go out for a night of comedy, but he got the job done. I'm sure part of it was him having to be "clean" in his humor for the mixed crowd. He said as much. Although, if you can't be funny without having to be dirty, that's not much of a comedian in my book. During the breaks, he had a videotape of "Bill Cosby - Himself" running on the TV. Getting to see that classic again was probably the best part of the class.
So, I survived that ordeal and returned home. I was able to go to the community pool for a while with my daughter and that was nice. We went a few weekends back when it first opened and boy was that some cold water! This time was much better. We only were able to make a short visit as we get to the rest of my day.
The KC council that I'm a member of has a nice hall here in Pearland. One of the main ways it is being paid for is through rental of the hall to various events. The two biggest are wedding receptions and Quinceaneras. There is a bar that serves beer and other soft liquor along with sodas, chips, popcorn, etc. Volunteer teams of Knights work the bar each weekend for these events to raise more money to get the hall paid off. Last night was my team's turn and it was a Quinceanera. If you've never been to one or seen one, it is often a most elaborate production, often times bigger than wedding receptions. Days like this, I'm glad I am not Hispanic, because this looks like an expensive proposition.
The hall was reserved from 6p to midnight. So, I show up at 6p with the other guys and things are very quiet. Guests don't really even start showing up for the first hour. We send about half the guys home at it looks like it is going to be a rather small and quiet affair. Uh-oh! About 8:30, the action starts picking up and from 9:30 to midnight, that bar was hopping and the three of us still there were scrambling. Working the bar crew is a lot of fun, but it will wear you out.
Was was really interesting this time around is that there were a lot of small kids. The parents of the young lady had prebought a bunch of tickets for sodas and beer. About every 15 minutes, the dad would come by, pull out a wad of tickets, and walk off with a dozen beers or 20 sodas. The sodas (actually, Cokes - they literally bought every can of Coke that we had in the coolers that night) were being given out to the kids by the mother and father and the father would walk off with a case of beer at a time to pass around to the adults guests. Always Bud Light. I'm not sure why, but it seems like at least 80% of the beer we sell at the bar is Bud Light. The Corona was also a big seller as well. It was pretty amazing to see how much work the father and mother would putting in to paying attention to the guests. Those two have got to still be asleep recovering after the night of work they put in!
I finally made it back in about 12:30 on Sunday morning and crashed. (Yes, I know the timestamp says Saturday, but that is the day I'm writing about).
Whew!

Spring Cleaning

 
There's one problem with owning a house (OK, OK, there's more than one, but I'm just writing about this one today!!) JUNK. Back when the wife and I were in college, we worked our way through by spending alternate semesters in Houston working for a company. Every six months, we moved from one apartment to another. That forced us to stay pretty lean with the crap we owned as it was a lot of work to move. Every move, we would look at stuff as we packed and ask "Do I really want this enough to move it again and again?"
Then, after graduating, we settled down and moved into a house. We got a bigger house than we needed with the plan to "grow" into it. I wanted this in part becuase my parents bought a house way back when with the intent to move after a few years. My parents are still in that house, which is fine for the two of them, but was tight for a family of four. I wanted to make sure that we had enough room that we could be comfortable, even if we never moved.
Well, it's been nine years and we're settled to the point that it's going to really take something to get me to ever move again. However, since we've had all this room, the amount of crap we've collected over the years and expanded to fill the space. I think this is covered by one of Newton's Laws, but I could just be confusing him with Murphy.
Anyway, closets, the kitchen, the dining room that we never eat in, all had become full of stuff over the years. Much of it we added ourselves, but a lot of it came courtesy of friends and family. Another Elephant collectable for my wife...some new A&M paraphenalia....assorted nickacks that are generally good for nothing but collecting dust.
Well, we've finally started making moves to reclaim the house. Over the last two weekends, we've thrown out a good 10 bags full of crap. Much of it old paper, instructions for broken telephones, homework from high school, clothing with holes in it. As they say in the commercials "Everything must GO!". We've been looking at everything with a critical eye. Most has been useless junk that gets tossed, some is stuff we just have no use for ourselves and gets donated or given away. I've put the relatives on notice that we will be accepting no more of this stuff for Christmas and Birthday presents. It had gotten to the point where we just can't have people over becuase the house is always a mess and we spent a lot of time just pushing the mess from room to room, closet to closet, trying to have a liveable space. We've still got a long way to go, but we've both bought into the mindset that we want to own our stuff, not have it own us. The picture in the post is our master closet after the purge. We spent over a day on this closet alone and can actually see the floor for the first time in years. I was able to lay down in there and play with my son rolling a ball back and forth to him. Last weekend, I'd have been putting both our lives in jeopardy to try such a thing.
It's tiring and it's tough, but it's coming together. I estimate it's going to take us a good six or seven more weekends like this to really get the house in order. My parents came to vist this weekend and we pretty much left the kids completely to them so we could focus on this. We'll be doing it again in a few weeks and whenever we get a chance.
If you haven't done it, I highly recommend that you, too, consider wading through all that crap you have collected and start asking yourself - "Do I really need to keep this?" I bet the answer for a lot of it is going to be NO! 

Computer - Internet = SUCKAGE!!!

I'll have to cach up with some extra posts this week. We've been without internet access since Thursday thanks to the neighbor's lawn crew cutting the cable line. Thankfully the Road Runner guy was able to fix the cable and get us back up today. We were warned that if a new line had to be run, it would have been another week to get that contractor out here.