Emptyeye

Over the last five months or so, I’ve been hitting the gym. More specifically, I’ve been going to the Planet Fitness locations in Waterbury and Meriden; which one I go to depends on what I happen to be working out that day.

Despite the fact that I’ve been going for the last five months, working out something different each day of the week, I have to confess I don’t actually like exercising. I like the results, don’t get me wrong. I like being 13 pounds lighter than I was at Awesome Games Done Quick (As my cousin would say, “that’s close to an entire bowling ball’s worth of weight you lost!”). I like how I feel at the end of workouts. The actual process of working out, not so much. I read an interview with Jack LaLanne (He of berating a much younger man for not being active enough…at age 94) where he, surprisingly, said pretty much the same thing–that he liked the results of working out, but wasn’t a big fan of the actual process.

That said, cardio work is probably my favorite out of any of the routines I do. Part of it is that I’m not aiming for raw muscle mass (Preferring to be more lean and agile), but part of it is the easily trackable progress. From the cardio machines at the gym, my current target heart rate for the “cardio” range is 154 beats per minute. Depending on what machine I’m on, I can either work from there (On the bike, where my legs as opposed to my cardio system are the weak link), or go up into the 170-175 BPM range (On the Arc Trainer, or “The Beast” as my mom calls it). There’s something about watching my heart rate climb that makes me feel good, I guess.

How about everyone else? Anyone out there have a favorite workout routine?

-EE

Today was the last Connecticon Member Appreciation Day before the convention itself. Today was spent both playing Rock Band and preparing for the tournament. Dan came up with a scoring spreadsheet that, after a bit of experimentation, we decided seemed to be fair, which primarily takes technical ability into account, but with a performance element in it as well (The formula is currently about 80% technical ability to 20% performance). We also discovered that, while it isn’t directly stated, there does seem to be a “hidden” Band Difficulty for each song in Rock Band 3. This makes things a lot easier in terms of having to tell bands what their choices are.

Honestly, I’m more nervous about running this than I ever was participating in it. First of all, despite what happened last year, I’m working from a pretty solid foundation that I don’t want to have come crashing down. Secondly, prize support for the tournament was not cheap–while I’ll ultimately end up being reimbursed for it, for the con to fully reimburse me and still hit the break even point for it, I have to attract a total of sixteen qualifying bands somehow. I made a post on Score Hero about it, and I’ll have Dan post on the Rock Band forums as well (His 2 posts there is an infinite number more than my 0). After that, I’ll have to do some Internet searching for places to promote it.

So, I’m still here, and still being productive.

-EE

Saturday night, my friend Brian and I went to Mohegan Sun. My purpose for this trip was two-fold. First, it was to meet Nick Houser, one of my Skype friends and a fellow SDA member, who had turned 21 last week. The other was to play in one of the casino’s midnight poker tournaments.

At about 10 o clock, I briefly ran into Nick, who was actually winning for the night thanks to his choice of slot machine (I’ll withhold that here for his sake). Then it was time for some limit hold ‘em before the midnight tournament. My money-hemorrhaging skills were on full display, as I lost $70 in just under two hours. After that, it was no-limit hold-em tournament time.

The basic rules of the tournament were that it was a turbo tournament, meaning blinds and, eventually, antes increased every twelve minutes. This is slightly quicker than the average online tournament, but in a live tournament, what it means is that you’ll get maybe one round around the table before the blinds and antes go up. What it also means is that, given enough time, even the chip leaders have either “All-in” or “fold” as their only two options.

Suffice to say that while Brian gets knocked out somewhere around tenth place out of 31 entrants, I manage, through a combination of (Mostly) luck and (Maybe some) skill, to make it to 4th place, when 5 positions paid. Dan Harrington writes in Harrington on Hold ‘Em that you need some luck to get deep into a poker tourney, and while a 31-person midnight tournament is not the main event of the World Series of Poker, I found Harrington’s thoughts to be accurate. Multiple times, I either had a worse hand suck out, or actually had a very good hand against an opponent who had no choice but to move with a worse hand.

In all, my fourth-place finish earned me $122, which after the tournament entry fee was enough to basically make up for my losses earlier. It was a fun time, and I don’t know if I’d do it regularly just because it starts so late, but I might have to make it an occasional thing I do there.

As you know, I got married in January. Since January is not a very good time to hold outdoor parties, and since both Silver and I have pretty big families, our parents decided to hold our wedding celebration (One of the things I was adamant on is that it was not a reception, per se) yesterday, at the Italian-American Club in Waterbury, CT.

I have to say that in all honesty, I enjoyed the more casual picnic/celebration a lot more than I would have enjoyed a formal reception–greeting anyone and everyone is not something that appeals to me, especially since our parents made up most of the guest list, so I wasn’t even sure who a few of the people there were (This is almost inevitable when the guest list is at ~120 people). Talking to Silver afterward, she felt the same way–that not having to be, as she put it, “all formal” helped her relax and have fun talking to people.

We, of course, got presents. These included a Ninja Blender, a saladware set, and a wine glass set. The big thing, though, is that we are no longer stuck in standard-definition land when it comes to television. We are now the owners of a 32-inch Sony BRAVIA HD TV. Despite the fact that we don’t currently subscribe to any HD channels, this is a huge step up in a few ways. For one, it’s a lot thinner and lighter than the TV we had in the living room previously. For another, said previous TV is now back in my little lair in the apartment, representing a 7-inch upgrade in that room on my speedrunning TV. For a third, the TV that was in that back room is now going to college with my sister-in-law. So everybody wins!

Overall, the party was a lot of fun, and the gifts didn’t hurt either. If I could find a way to do it again that didn’t involve divorce and re-marrying, I definitely would.

-EE

Lately, I’ve been putting a lot of effort into the Connecticon Rock Band tournament. I finally finished the spreadsheet of songs for it, containing all 661 songs you can currently play on my Rock Band 3 setup. The spreadsheet will be printed out to help people get a sense of what they can pick, especially for the finals, where the tentative plans are to allow free song selection with the disclaimer that the same song can’t be played more than once throughout the finals. It’ll help for the qualifier too, but I have another weapon up my sleeve for that that might help even better.

That weapon is an OpenOffice.Org database. With this, I feed the spreadsheet into the database, and then, using queries and the like, can spit out the list of allowed songs (Current plans for the preliminaries are one “easy”, one “medium” and one “hard” song, with those adjectives determined by the total number of dots the song has for whatever combination of instruments are in play) for the combination of instruments being used, and the difficulty we’re trying to find a song for.

The other big news is that I’m considering a site redesign. The site, and the look for it, is almost four years old now. It has some quirks I never entirely fixed, and site technology has improved a lot as well. In other words, I don’t need to, EG, list out every single month on the sidebar anymore, I can theoretically just put the years with the number of posts, and then from there you could click and get to the months. So sometime soon, I’ll start looking into themes I can modify for my own purposes, coming up with new categories, and so on. It should be fun.

In less big news, I do still intend to finish a speedrun of Magician. In the meantime, I plan to upload the best run I have so far on my Screw Attack account, where you can currently see a couple “work-in-progress” versions of the run. I’ll make sure to post when that’s done. Really, this time.

-EE

Just a quick note to say Happy Memorial Day to everyone whom it applies to (I just learned that the US is not the only country that celebrates it). I have several relatives and people I know in the armed forces, and while I (and they) been lucky enough that they’ve all survived the experience, I want to thank them anyway for voluntarily doing something that I never could. Suffice to say that the armed forces were definitely not an option for me. And thank you everyone who did make the ultimate sacrifice in the service of the US, or any country who celebrates the day, really.

-EE

Earlier in the week, I made a trip to Home Depot to price out air conditioners. When Silver and I moved into this apartment in 2008, there was an air conditioner already in the bedroom window. This was good, since we didn’t bring one of our own. The bad thing is that it was an ancient monstrosity, and by “monstrosity” I mean “It’s wide enough that our bedroom window is actually broken to accommodate it; the window doesn’t stay open even if you try locking it.”

After a couple years of moving this thing in and out of the window, we decided it was time for a change. I had actually wanted a portable air conditioner, but since they need to be “hooked up to” a window anyway, Silver convinced me to put the money toward a smaller window unit and use the leftovers to put toward a new bed. At Home Depot, units ranged from a cute little 5000 BTU unit, all the way up to the 25000 range (In the words of my uncle John, “I don’t even think my CENTRAL air is 25000 BTUs!”).

Today, we went to purchase an air conditioner, and it turned out I was in for a pleasant surprise. I had thought the 5000 BTU unit was $149. It was nice and light, but the downside of it (And A/Czilla’s one upside was that it cooled everything) was that it would only be enough to cool our bedroom and not the rest of the apartment. As it turned out, I misread the signs; the 5000 BTU unit was only $99, and our $149 would get us a slightly bigger 6500 BTU air conditioner. Even at the larger size, though, it was far quicker and easier to get into the window than the one we had; I feel like I could actually install and remove it (Properly, not the way I removed the last one) by myself if I absolutely had to.

Not only that, it actually works pretty well. Even if it didn’t, though, I feel like the electricity savings will help the unit pay for itself. Plus, we’ll be able to actually take it with us whenever we ultimately move out of this apartment.

How about all of you? How’d your air conditioner installation go, if you live in a place where it’s necessary and you’ve done it already?

-EE

Indeed.

Japan Relief Done Quick is done. From an “SDA-as-a-Whole” perspective, it went incredibly–putting the marathon together in just two weeks, over $25000 were raised for Doctors Without Borders, and people seemed to like both the Commentator’s Cheat Sheet and the PC Game Collection I donated towards it. From a personal perspective, please do me a favor and pretend it never happened.

I’ve been making some changes in my life lately. Immediately after JRDQ, I went offline for a week, with the exception of any website I needed to do work at my day job. To the surprise of a bunch of people, including my wife, I actually made it the entire week. And I think I’m better off for it; for one, I’m actually capable of doing stuff like “washing dishes” or “playing some of the many games I haven’t beaten yet”, and not being addicted to Skype even during the weekdays. For another, I’m more productive at work, or when I’m not productive at work, I’m at least unproductive in a way that won’t also get my boss into trouble.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that I’m basically destined to flit from project to project and hobby to hobby and never really finish anything. And at last, I’m fine with that. My current time-killer–ask me in two weeks, it’ll probably be something different–is writing short stories of all kinds. This started out because I had an idea for a world/novel in my head, that was nothing more than a bunch of unconnected stories with no real force tying them together. Eventually, I just said “Screw it”, and wrote them as stand-alone stories. I’ve basically finished one, and am working on a bunch more, some tying into that original concept, others being completely standalone.

Who knows, maybe something good will come of this “writing” thing.

-EE

With the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, combined with the fact that without Japan, there would probably be no video game industry as we know it today, the fine people at Speed Demos Archive saw fit to quickly organize a charity marathon for Japan. This one is both shorter and a lot more casual than the last marathon–for one, we won’t even all be in the same location this time, and for another, if people want to use emulators (No slowdown or re-recording though), that’s actually allowed this time around.

This is actually good news for me, since it means I can stream Magician for it (The game’s almost total lack of sales, combined with it being a game more suited to playing than watching, mean it’s not really a good choice for the once-yearly “big” marathon SDA does)…a fairly representative speedrun that I did while trying to get an SDA-worthy submission (Which is still ongoing) is available here, albeit in a slightly squished form. Oh, also, I can see in the Caverns much better than you’ll be able to.

The bigger news here, though, is that I’ll be donating basically my entire collection of PC games to the cause in an effort to spur donations. My “lair” in my apartment is a rather large mess as it is, and i don’t play any of these games anymore, so I figure everyone wins if I just donate the entire lot to this cause.

I’ll be putting up another post later tonight that details everything I’m giving away. Suffice to say that the minimum donation to have the potential to win the lot is less than the price of just one of the games in the collection, let alone the entire thing.

Amazingly, I’ve been slowly working on some of the projects I mentioned a few entries ago.

The card game is coming along. I have the “mechanics” of about 30 of the cards down, and I’d like to get another 30 or so made before I start doing some testing of it balance and mechanics-wise. Then…I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with it after that.

My speedrun of Magician met with its first real success a few days ago, with a run clocking in at 17 minutes and 31 seconds recorded to DVD. The main advantage to it, truth be told, was the ability to figure out precisely what I’ll have to do to improve it–being able to pause and playback was a big help in figuring out exactly how much Mana I need in certain spots to execute some of the quickest strategies.

I hope this productive spurt continues.

-EE