Emptyeye

A few things that I didn’t mention last night:

• I actually managed to miss every other tournament I had wanted to enter (Either directly or indirectly) as a result of Rock Band. I missed the DDR and Guitar Hero pre-III tournaments because Rock Band was still going on, and also missed Guitar Hero III because I was eating. Sam, whom I mentioned in the last entry, was actually eating with us, and ran to the tournament as she realized it was time to start. I knew this, but elected to continue eating, with my logic being both “Food is good” and “This is a convention; there is no way the tournament is starting on-time.” Oops, owned.
• In the bottom of the last entry, I probably made it sound like no one knew what the heck they were doing with regards to the tournament. I suppose this is true to an extent, but it’s not as bad as I made it sound–amongst other things, certain TVs being better for gaming than others is not exactly something intuitive; the only reason I know about it is because of my DDR enthusiasm. Darren absolutely did the best he could with what he was given (As he explained it, there’s essentially one “volunteer staff” for the entire convention. He’s the Director of Video Games, yes, but as basically has an equal chance of getting a volunteer who has never heard of a Nintendo Wii and thus makes jokes about its name that were old two years ago as he does of getting someone who actually knows games), and he should be commended for that. Plus, this was the first CTCon Rock Band tourney–truthfully, I like the first-of-a-Con type tournies the best, as they tend to be more laid back than later ones, because the tournies aren’t yet dominated by people who look down upon anything less than perfection on the hardest difficulties (I specifically remember playing on Medium in the Guitar Hero tourney back at MAGFest 4 for just this reason…I’m pretty sure my opponent and I both played GH for the first time at that same convention)–so naturally there would be kinks to work out. In any event, the point is that I had a lot of fun at the tournament, and despite all the adversity in terms of both participating in and running the tournament, I’d definitely do it again next year (And not just because I now have a title to defend).

(This post is huge; most of it is hidden behind a tag to prevent you from having to read it all each time the page loads)

This past weekend was spent at Connecticon. Quite honestly, I had hoped to have the CD/business cards/etc. out at this point, but various circumstances that I have documented before have prevented that thus far. In any event, I first became aware of this convention sometime last year, and went on the Saturday of last year to play in a DDR tournament. I didn’t do very well, but that’s beside the point–I had fun, and decided to go to the entire convention this year, and actually booked a room at the hotel despite living fairly close. This made more sense when I lived in Waterbury (My thinking was I’d go right to the hotel from work on Thursday, because I didn’t want to go from Waterbury to Cheshire, back to Waterbury, and drive back through Cheshire again on my way to Hartford), but as I’ve since moved out to Milldale, I did go back to my apartment after work to pack and then headed off to the Convention Center at about 7:30 Thursday night.

(Continue reading…)

The title of this post pretty much explains my past week–I’m watching a StarCraft-related video as I write this update, in fact. I continue to be terrible at the game, though I seem to be learning, if nothing else, the patterns of the computer opponents (Or, put another way, “How to Hold Off the Computer Until I Can Mass Carriers”).

Other than that, I haven’t been up to a whole heck of a lot. This upcoming weekend, I’ll be heading to Connecticon, and Tuesday night, Jess and I are going to the Poison show at Mohegan Sun. She likes Poison a lot, and I figure I’ll at least enjoy Sebastian Bach, so…

Until next week…

-EE

“I can tell you are lookin’ for a way to live
where truth is determined by consensus
full of codified arbitrary directives
come join us” -Bad Religion, “Come Join Us”

I’m a big fan of The Urban Legend Reference Pages–I go there whenever I get some implausible-sounding e-mail to see whether said e-mail is really being truthful, or if it’s just scaremongering from one party or another. I actually posted on their message boards for awhile before drifting away from there, as I tend to do with pretty much everything (Witness my complete lack of work on The Six Day Exile, although that isn’t totally self-imposed). In contrast, I am not a big fan of Wikipedia, though I’ll admit it’s useful if you don’t plan on seriously using any of its information, to the point where I’ll try to avoid linking to it whenever possible. Part of my problem with it can be summed up in the lyrics above (Which, interestingly, predate Wikipedia itself by about six years), but I have another, related problem with it.

One of Wikipedia’s guidelines–indeed, one of the pillars upon which Wikipedia is constructed–is the concept of “Verifiability, not truth”. Put another way, Wikipedia doesn’t care if something is correct–they just care if it’s been repeated before. This probably reached the peak of absurdity in early October, when some prankster wrote a silly, untrue fact about a guy named Ronnie Hazlehurst, who soon after happened to die. Lazy obituary writers then essentially copied his Wikipedia entry, complete with untrue fact, in their papers. You can read the absurd part of this here, or even check the discussion page on Hazelhurst’s Wikipedia entry. To summarize: Some Wikipedians actually argued that because the incorrect fact (Which originated on Wikipedia) was now in verifiable sources (Hazelhurst’s obituaries), it passed the aforementioned Wikipedia pillar and should thus stay in the article. Cooler heads ultimately prevailed, yes, but really, that isn’t the point. Coller heads shouldn’t have to prevail–the system essentially encourages the behavior mentioned in the lyrics at the top of this entry. And that’s a system I can do without.

This past week as far as the site goes mainly consisted of me finding out why my soundcard doesn’t fit my new computer. Apparently I have the next step up in card technology in the computer…which renders the soundcard obsolete, at least temporarily. My options now are either getting an adapter for the port, which is expensive in and of itself, or trying to find another sound solution–the current hardware is not going to cut it, if my brief experiences with trying to record Astyanax speedrun commentary are any indication.

Other than that, the main thing that’s been happening with me is work. Without going too into the details, we have a big project we’re trying to roll out, and a rather severe lack of resources to add some of the features that are basically needed. Not a lot of fun.

And I continue to be awful at StarCraft, if you’re curious.

-EE

I went to visit my parents today, mainly to celebrate my mom’s birthday which is roughly around this time of the year. While there, I used her computer to look up my port problem. I’m ashamed to admit that I used The Font-of-All-Knowledge-Some-of-it-Even-Accurate to do so, but credit where it’s due, it did help me out. Apparently the entire Cardbus standard is outdated, and there’s a new sheriff in town called ExpressCard. Furthermore, there apparently exist adapters to go both ways–old-to-new and new-to-old. The problem for me is that these are expensive, in the neighborhood of about $120 (I paid about $160 for the soundcard). So I’m waffling on that at the moment.

Yeah. This past week, I did a lot of playing StarCraft and very little of anything else. I continue to enjoy the game, despite the fact that I continue to be terrible at it. Hooray for that, I guess. Mainly, I just need to get faster at performing actions. It won’t magically fix everything, but it’ll be a good start.

Other than that, I did take steps toward creating commentary for my Astyanax speedrun. I just basically have to learn the very basics of Audacity and then record the commentary itself. I even made sure to re-watch the run again, to be ready for anything particularly interesting that occurs in it.

That’s pretty much it for the moment, really. Until next week…
-EE

Yep. It’s my new obsession, again.

Anyway, as fun as it is, I’m of the opinion that the Campaign Mode of StarCraft really doesn’t do a very good job of preparing you for online play (Whether or not it should is another subject, I guess). Most of the missions that are the traditional “eliminate your opponent” variety can usually be won by amassing huge amounts of one given unit and going nuts all over the map, which will generally get you steamrolled in online play.

Oh well.

This past week here on the site, not much happened, though if you pay close attention you’ll note I updated the about pages to make them more current (The About the Site page had a reference to the long-gone donation button). And other than that, I’ve really been pretty lazy.

Neil Peart once wrote “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”, and I suppose that’s what I’m doing at the moment with The Six Day Exile–rather than decide to forge ahead without my Echo Indigo, or see if I can fix the problem (Outlined here), I’m just sort of letting it sit in limbo and playing lots of StarCraft, which I continue to be terrible at. I’ll have to eventually find a style and stick to it; I actually found a neat little map that trains your multi-tasking abilities, which I’ll have to practice a bit until I can improve those skills.

Until next week…

-EE

There are enough blogs out there about companies giving awful customer service–Verizon Math, which spawned from Verizon’s inability to tell the difference between “cents” and “dollars”, is probably my favorite–that I wanted to share one customer service call that was actually as pleasant as could be, given why I was making it (Which was to make sure I actually got my electric bill. Yeah, I could’ve played dumb for awhile, but fear of ultimately having some collection agency at my doorstep told me this was probably not the wisest course.).

So yesterday I called the customer service line of Connecticut Light & Power, to have the billing address changed to something that the post office will actually deliver to. After wading through the various automated menus, and attempting to pick the option closest to “get billing address changed”, within literally seconds, a very nice young woman named Hannah is on the line helping me with my problem. As a bonus, she spoke very clear, unaccented English (I don’t want to sound racist/ethnicist/whatever here, but to heavily paraphrase Daniel Day-Lewis, if your accent prevents me from understanding you, and my completely different accent prevents you from understanding me, and we have no other method of communication….this…screws…my…customer service experience! IT SCREWS IT UP!)..hooray! After I sheepishly admit that I don’t know my account number (An effect of having not yet received an electric bill), I proceed to give her my service address, and in about two minutes, I’m no longer a dirty energy thief (As it happens, they hadn’t sent out my first bill yet anyway, but better safe than sorry when it comes to something like this.). One of the easiest service calls I’ve ever made.

So hooray to Connecticut Light & Power for actually employing competent customer service people whom I can understand without effort!