Month: December 2005

Well, I made it… Not without incident though…

Sunday morning, 3 am, my latest adventure began and it ended at about 9:15 pm, which means I spent about 18 hours either in a plane or at an airport yesterday. What fun!

I made it through security without issue and got on the first plane, from Denver to Cincinnati, as soon as they would let me: 6:50 am. As my seat was –way- in the back, between the engines where no one else likes to sit, I got settled in with my ipod shuffle and determined to sleep for the next two hours…

Nope.

About twenty minutes into the flight a loud ratcheting sound coming from the engine next to my head woke me up, followed shortly by a flight attendant stopping to listen then phoning the cockpit. Then the plane then banked hard to the left and dropped to about 10,000 feet, followed by an announcement that we were returning to Denver do to a mechanical failure.

This elicited all sorts of panicking on the plane: Kids hollering, old ladies praying… A real circus…

Joy.

The pilot limped the plane back into Denver at about 8000 feet and 300 knots, which is about 70 knots over stall on an MD-88 jet, thanks in part I’m sure to only having the left side engine running.

The plane landed way out on the end of one of the runways at DIA and was met by lots of fire trucks, emergency vehicles, and guys in aluminum coated ‘moon suits’ wielding thermal imaging gear who were looking for the fire.

As it turns out it was only a hot air line from the right side engine that is run into one of the air conditioning packs that are used to pressurize the plane. The mechanic figured he could replace the part, test the engines for about ten minutes, and get the plane back in the air…

So, at 10:15 the 10 to 12 of us remaining, who are brave enough, get back on the plane and head once again to Cincinnati.

And once the plane hits 20,000 feet the ratcheting returns followed by another hard bank to the left, another drop to 10,000 feet, and another return flight to Denver.

So now it’s a little after 11 and they’ve decided that the plane isn’t going anywhere for a while, so they book me first class on another airline which has a flight at 1:10 pm. So I slog across DIA, grab a burger at McDonalds, and board that flight…

Everything is going smoothly until, during the passenger loading where the isle is full of people trying to cram their overly large carry on into a bin while wrangling their three kids, someone in the aft end of the plane realizes that they boarded the wrong plane… This guy, two kids in tow, manages to get on a plane headed to Charlotte North Carolina when he –and his tickets- were bound for Arizona. So much for all the PITA security I guess.

So after a lot of pushing, shoving, and general anger they get him off the plane, get everyone else on the plane, and get us in the air… About 20 minutes late.

The flight is uneventful and I land in Charlotte with about 12 minutes to get to my connecting flight to Richmond, which leaves at 7:10… So I blaze through the airport and arrive at the next gate to see that the flight has been delayed till 8pm.

Sigh.

So I sit around till that plane shows up and eventually make it to Richmond at a bit after 9pm.

What a day.

Well, I’m using Zeze’s laptop to write this and we’re going to try and get rolling early so I’ll sign off here and get rolling.

It’s now less than one week till I’m on a plane to Virginia… Have I mentioned I hate planes, flying, and all that ‘plummeting to your death in a mass of twisted, burning aluminum’ stuff? Well, I do…

This particular trip is going to be, quite simply, the worst possible. See, I’m flying one way, on Christmas morning, with no checked luggage, on a ticket that someone else paid for, on a plane that flies over Washington D.C. to get to southern Virginia, and I have long hair… All of this comes together to make me – according to some computer somewhere – ‘the mad bomber what bombs at midnight’.

I’m fully expecting a full body cavity search at Denver International come Sunday morning.

Sigh…

Anyways, time for me to trot off to work. Have a great day out there folks.

Ahh, my favorite kind of day… it’s snowing lightly outside, it’s close to the holidays so humanity is sleeping in, and I’m sitting here with my ever-present cup of Earl Grey and listening to my ‘old people’ music.

It’s a really nice snow, the kind with the really big flakes that float slowly to the ground… They don’t obscure ones vision, but they do tend to soften the edges of everything. It makes everything seem so much calmer.

So today let’s have more update and less rant shall we?

Hmm, let’s start with movies… I recently saw the special effect bonanza called ‘Narnia’ and I rather liked it. Of course I’ve read the entire book series almost every other year since I learned to read and therefore could be labeled as a ‘fan’, but it was still a good movie. But I’m also a bit nit-picky regarding my mythological beasties and I just wasn’t happy with the centaurs; they got the proportions all wrong – too much horse, not enough human – a centaur, for those of you who don’t know any, is fully capable of braiding his or her own tail, checking their hind hooves, and other such feats. The ones in the movie would have had a hard time even reaching their own rump.

Now the fauns were well done, especially Mr. Tumnus who really got the spit and polish treatment as he got the most screen time of all the Narnians with maybe the exception of Mr. and Mrs. Beaver.

Oh, and Aslan should have been bigger.

I really liked the more Germanic representation of Father Christmas in the movie, which holds true to the book quite well and which also segues nicely into the holiday portion of this update.

For those of you who have created some sort of ritual out of my yearly ‘end of the world’ announcement, here it is:

There are, as of today, only 2550 shopping days left till the end of the world.

See previous announcements for further information.

My gift to myself this year is a really stellar (and equally expensive) 24” LCD monitor. This monitor has so much screen area that I can put three 8×10 pages of information, side by side, on the desktop at the same time. It’s color-correct, has an 8 millisecond refresh rate, and is just a real joy to sit in front of while working on the computer here… And it makes the high res desktop wallpapers I purchased from Roger Dean a few years back for my Mac look *really* good.

Let’s see, what else… Oh, I’ll be flying out of Denver on the morning of the 25th and landing in Richmond that afternoon. From there I’ll be hopping into one of Scott’s 2005 Chrysler ‘PT Cruisers’ and driving cross country back to Denver. Sound like fun? It doesn’t to me either… But these are the sorts of things we do for those we deem to be friends.

See, Scott, aka ZeZe, will be moving in with Jae and I right before new years. This is a good thing as ZeZe is required for a lot of the side projects I want to do and will take some of the work load off of me at work by being able to perform the I.T. role better than anyone has in the history of the company… No more people coming into my office and griping about something not working because Jon and/or I are too busy with our regular jobs to really fix the damn thing.

This also drops the monthly rent for everyone here at Chateau D’Isaster to less than $350 a month and the rest of the bills by one third, which frees up more income for the fun things in life. Fortunately Chateau D’Isaster has enough room for about five people to live comfortably – it’s a huge place – so three people are pretty easy to deal with.

Another thing that having ZeZe here will provide is the drive to finish the theater… One quarter of the living room, known as ‘the cave’, has been ear-marked since we moved in as the home theater… Unfortunately neither Jae nor I watch TV and we tend to go to the theater for actual movies. ZeZe on the other hand does watch TV and has quite the collection of gear dedicated to this pursuit, so I’m sure with his prompting we’ll finally get the theater finished.

Well, I’ve exhausted my free time for journaling this morning and have to move on to the next item on my list. Have a safe and happy holiday everyone!

Well then, where was I? Oh, right, I haven’t actually posted anything in a month or so…

Same excuse as always, just plain old garden variety ‘busy’ and ‘worn out’.

The game of choice right now is “Horizons”, which you may recall I played some two years ago. I’ve played just about every multiplayer game available right now and I’ve found them all lacking after a while, usually due to there not being an age limit for the game.

“World of Warcraft” was fun for a while, till all the damn kids caught wind of it. It seems the games these days are being over run with trash talking munchkins with the imaginative capacity of a grapefruit. World of Warcraft, City of Villains, Everquest 2, etc, etc… All have become infested at this point.

The biggest problem with internet based games and too many kids is that, given anonymity and an audience, well over half of them will become the biggest asshat on record within a few minutes.

Enter ‘Horizons’, a game with a very odd story behind it and one which is mercifully free of ‘leet speaking freaks of nature. See, Horizons came out a little over two years ago to much fanfare, as it was truly revolutionary in concept: A fully player driven and dynamic world that players, and nature, could change over time as well as the most detailed crafting system in existence which creates a player owned economy in the game… Oh, and playable Dragons!

Well, there was a bit of an issue with this concept as it was so large and grandiose that the technology just wasn’t there yet. The game launched with all sorts of problems due in part to the publisher, Atari, rushing things out the door. Soon after Atari decided they didn’t want to be in the MMO business and left the developer, Artifact Entertainment, holding all the bills… About a year later Artifact folded and filed for bankruptcy.

So, move forward in time a bit and you’ll see a small Texas based game company, Tulga Games, buy the rights to Horizons in the bankruptcy auction. Tulga hires back several of the core people responsible for Horizons and they set about both fixing it, and bringing it in line with current technology – in a small garage-like atmosphere.

So here we are today: Horizons is still in what I would call a Beta, though I pay $13 a month to play it, and as it is both a ‘dead’ game and there is no PvP, all of the players are adults who are interested in the story of the game and the role-playing opportunities it represents. Horizons is recruiting some interesting folks to help them in their quest for the most accurate fantasy world simulation ever, and the latest is writer Peter S. Beagle of “The last Unicorn” fame who will be creating more backstory for the world.

In all of the ten or so MMOs I’ve played over the years, I’ve not found as great of a community as the one in Horizons. These are people that you’d not give a second thought to inviting over for movie night, if they lived next door you’d have BBQs with them, and you’d certainly be ok with having them watch your pets while on vacation…

Really, Horizons is as close to the old BBS era as I’ve been able to find since the inception of the internet. No one plays to get the biggest sword, the best stats, or to simply be annoying. Jae has done nothing but craft things for two weeks and he’s happy as a clam.

I’m playing a Dragon in the game; a mere hatchling. Though I’ve been taken under the wing (literally) of one of the ancient dragons (huge, building sized beings) who is helping me find my way in the world. In another few weeks I’ll be ready for my ‘Right of Passage’ into adulthood where I’ll not only be able to learn how to fly, but I’ll get about twice the size I am now. Ancient status won’t happen for at least another six months, but there’s no hurry – I’m happy.