Category

Life

Things I do, things I think, etc...
Anything that doesn't fit the other categories usually gets thrown in here.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Once more in the Saab, dear friend

better title than “LAXitive” I guess…

It feels good to be home now! I've actually been busy since my last update. I went to Ohio from the 13-15th to see people since I haven't been working a lot. I got in later than I wanted on Monday but no one could give me a ride earlier. Had dinner with my mom that night and later went to Jo's. I spent Tuesday out at the KSU airport. It was Kent's turn to host the regional flight competition. I hoped to help judge but they had enough already so I mostly just talked to people I hadn't seen in a while. It was great to see the planes and everyone since I spent just about every day from 2004 to 2007 at that airport it's kind of weird to be away from it now. Had dinner with Tim and my dad and then went to Tim's apartment to play some Quakewars.

Tim (Alkali) and I are pretty good at Quakewars together, and it would be awesome if more people would play with us. We stick together, usually with me as an Engineer and Tim a medic. I sometimes change my class depending on the objective, but typically it's my job to complete the mission and tim's job to revive me when I get shot. I prefer offense and Tim likes defense, but we usually just play on the Strogg (Alien) side. We played for about 2 hours. In one mission we were on the human team and it was our job to construct a generator underground. It's a good map that requires teamwork by the GDF (humans) to get into the highly defended area. If people just rush in randomly you will get mowed down or set off a mine. The strogg side was putting up a strong fight and we were getting pissed off so I came up with a strategy. I waited for some teammates to run in before me to take the fire, then I jumped in onto the generator, setting off the mines and dying. Then tim jumps in behind me to revive me and we got the generator built. After that we were able to rush the map before they could get a solid defense up. I had a good airstrike at a critical time to finish the map too, but it was our classic revive strategy that won the map. I always wish more people would get the game before like Wolf:ET, some people are just too good.

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Wednesday, October 08, 2008

LAN Weekend and Days Off

These days it's getting hard to tell the days that I work from the days I don't. I'm enjoying being on reserve, or "On Call" for an airplane Eagle doesn't fly anymore. I've gotten called into the airport once out of 6 or 7 days and it doesn't look probable for many more days. The way to tell my days off from my days on are that I can travel on my days off. I did just that on Saturday, traveling back to Cleveland for a LAN Party hosted by one of Jo's coworkers, Caleb (Not sure exactly what his handle is, ma shtie or something).

It was a fun time, a great minilan. Caleb provided bawls, hamburgers, and good amish sweet bread or something. It was pretty much pure sugar. The network had some small hiccups, but I got to play some good Quake 3, and UT2k4. I have to say I am not a UT fan when playing with all those mods. I think it was an RTS mod where you get experience points which can be traded in for powerups. The whole reason I play FPS instead of RTS is to avoid that. It's no fun to jump in a game and be pummeled by someone with a ton of points. Most FPS set everyone pretty much the same so it's a game of skill. The highlight of the day though was definitely ET:Quakewars. Finally! This game has been out for a while but no one wanted to play it with me, due to WoW and xboxes. It really doesn't take too much to run, I was playing decently on my macbook pro. Being the only person who really knew the maps and gameplay, I took the role of the leader as a medic. I didn't think it would be fun for everyone else if I just ran through the levels completing the objectives myself. I shouted out what needed to be done, what classes were needed and where, revived teammates, and showed how all the different classes worked. I think everyone enjoyed that. We ended up playing pretty late into the night. I want to keep it up, but no one else has actually bought the game, so we can't play online. It was good to see Jo and Tim, and wish Dan would have stopped by. The party broke up about 1am eastern.

Crashed for about 4 hours on Jo's couch, before waking back up to jumpseat back to Dallas. Big thanks to Jo for picking me up, dropping me off, and letting me stay at his place even with work in the morning. The flight out of CLE was delayed by a flap issue or something. The captain boarded and we sat on the plane for 90 minutes before finally departing. I don't think there's been a cloud in the sky since Ike rolled through, but it was raining monday. I had planned to go to the "Big Tex" Texas State Fair with Alison, but it was looking like we couldn't go. By the time I got home though, the rain was clearing up, and although there were some short showers, we did go to the fair and had a pretty good time. The fair was pretty much a game of "how much $ can we take from you before you start to notice". After paying $14 for admission and $10 for parking, you had to buy a bunch of tickets to do anything. We walked around the free stuff, shops, and the auto show was pretty nice (one of few free things there). The food is always really popular there, even though it's not good for you at all! I got a turkey leg and a fried snickers bar. We walked everywhere to find that one place with the fried snickers bar, and it was something else, that's for sure! Very hard to describe, and it was good..but not really $4 good.. Alison and I both agreed just a normal snickers would have been better and cheaper. But by all means you should try one if you get the chance. It's not bad. We didn't want to ride a lot of the spinny fair rides since that's where you hear about people getting killed on in the news, but we rode on the big ferris wheel and the carousel. The wheel was $6 each and the carousel was $3, and most of the rides were 2-4 bucks. I didn't really like that approach, although I guess we saved money compared to an amusement park. I don't want it so seem like I didn't have fun either because I had a lot of fun and it's great to hang out with Alison. We have our routines and stuff we do together a lot, but this was special :D

Tuesday I spent working on my website again on the friends page. From 1.4.2 to 1.5, this is a very big change, although it doesn't look like anything changed from the initial look. It's largely a backend change where instead of copying the code several times and editing it for each person, I created a multidimensional array of friends and their website data, and I run a loop of the same code until it runs out of people. This means one day I should be able to sort by post date instead of person if I choose, and it's far easier to edit overall. Also, and this is a big one: You can now control the image on the friends page yourself! RSS feeds can contain a link to an image if you set one, and my page will use whatever you select. If none is set in the feed, it defaults to an image saved on my site. LJ uses your default pic I believe.. Anyways if you're not sure if the image is yours or mine, click "History" and see if it displays a pic in the title. If it does, that's the pic I'm also using on the friends page. So now if you don't like the pic there you have nothing to complain about. The last thing is that "Tweets for Today" doesn't light up, you actually have to write something constructive.

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

2008 Volkswagen Eos

How do you make it rain in Dallas, Texas?

Buy a convertible.

Well technically I leased it, but its still freakin awesome. For a long, long time I wanted a manual transmission 4 seater convertible. Of course, living in Ohio it's kinda pointless, but that's one of the great things about living down here now. I had been looking at the Chrysler Sebring Convertible for a while, but the only manual transmission they had was on a GTC version for like 2002-2004. Needless to say they are rare and rarer in good condition. But enter the Volkswagen Eos! Basically a replacement to the VW Cabrio, its essentially a hardtop convertible version of the Jetta. It's a 4 cyl, 200 hp turbocharged engine 6 speed manual and it looks really classy in black. I got both black exterior and interior. It's basically a two-seater but it's not terrible in the back.

So why get rid of the mighty Saturn? I didn't really want to, but I have to get Texas plates before the Ohio ones expired. To do that, I had to get the equivalent of an e-check so I took it to a shop and they told me it would cost more to fix than it was worth. Bummer. But as a last gift to me, the VW place gave me $3000 for it, far more than I was expecting. You just can't help but love the old saturns (pre-2001).

So today I'm supposed to pick it up at noon so we go and they don't have it yet. Also the 2 salesmen I worked with aren't there. Come back in an hour they say. So Alison and I go shopping and do some errands. We come back at 2. Oh it'll be done in a few moments! 40 minutes later...Oh it's just getting gassed up! 20 minutes later I'm mad and they let me go back to see it and finally send me to another guy to do the paperwork and get the keys. By the time I actually get behind the wheel it's rush hour and raining a lot, so I don't really get to have fun with it like I want. And hence the pics below aren't the greatest... It's T-storms all week here but Friday morning I should get the chance to take it out and have some fun and get some good pics.

Anyways, I really like the car so far. With the top up it's quiet and there's no leaks and it has a huge sunroof. Enough to make you forget the top is still up. The sound system sounds great. (I have an aux in instead of my ipod line-in but it still sounds good) The engine is way stronger than my old saturns, the clutch feels great, leather seats and steering wheel... I really like it so far.

On with the pics! Click more

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Monday, May 28, 2007

In Finland

Well I’ve been away in Russia for the last two weeks.  It’s been….interesting.  Now I’m in Finland with some way extended family until the 13th of june.  Ouch!  Well at least I have internet a little now that I am off of that boat.  So I went over to the dark side.  I got a facebook.  Now I’ve been a pretty big advocate of hating the social network sites and liking the personal blog sites.  (especially making your own, but I can accept livejournal)  Well facebook isn’t really intruding on the blogging world I have discovered, so I made one and trying to find everyone on it.  If I don’t find you, then you find me.  More later maybe.

Friday, April 13, 2007

New Entry!

I haven’t had a whole lot of time and/or interest in this website for a long time.  Lots of things have happened and there’s a lot on the horizon.  Lately I haven’t been feeling too well.  I have been pretty lonely and it’s going to get worse when Alison moves to Texas in a few weeks.  The only people I really talk to face-to-face on a daily basis are my students at the airport.  They are nice and fun and all but they really aren’t my friends per se.

I have lots of stuff coming up in the near future.  Helping Alison move to Texas, Flight Team Nationals (I get to see some of my internship friends again!), and leaving for a monthlong trip to Russia/Finland.  All in the first half of May.

I got my instrument instructor rating on Tuesday and the review board prep for KSU is intense.  I’m studying all the time and damn tired of it.  My liking of flight instruction varies week to week.  I am feeling a little overworked right now and not really liking it.  One of my students is almost done so hopefully that will cut down on my workload a little.

I kept the 23” Apple Cinema Display.  It is big and looks very pretty with my laptop and silver desktop.  It works well but has some quirks.  The power button works when it feels like it, since it’s trying to work with OS X to put the computer to sleep.  I won’t bring it to any LAN as it’s too expensive to risk theft or damage.  I also think it’s too big for my brother’s desk but hopefully I won’t be using it too much longer.