Did It Again

So it occurred to me that I've done it again. I've let this blog lapse into obscurity with no new posts. You gotta make sure you have new posts or Google won't index it. I considered for a long time how I would keep this one alive. Obviously any life has enough stuff go on that one could not only fill a few paragraphs a day, but volumes and volumes of books with what happens. We just don't assign enough significance to it. I know what I want to do here, but I'm not sure I have the wherewithall to pull it off. Yet, I think it's the only way to do it without feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of documenting my days.

Here's the plan: I'll keep notepad open all day long and record what happens throughout the day, and once the day is done, I'll record it in here. I would be willing to wager that some days will be drier than others, but that's how life is sometimes, isn't it? Some days are interesting, and some are boring. I will try, however, to stick to high points and not just a timeline of the little things. After all, you, as a reader, won't be interested in what I'm wearing every day, would you? At least, I wouldn't think so. My clothing choices as a geek are actually really uninteresting. Khaki pants and a polo shirt sums up 66% of the year. Jeans and a polo shirt sums up another 20-25%. There you have it.

Hence, most of my future posts will be dated for the end of any given day. For today, I'll touch on a few high points for yesterday.

My job is changing for a big one. A guy who has been at my workplace for eleven years took a job somewhere else (we wish him the best), and given how fast I learn stuff, the powers that be tapped me to replace what he does. It occurs to me that this would have been a good decision to make within a day of him giving notice, so I could sit with him for his last two weeks. There are other people who collectively know what he knew, so I'll pick it up little by little, but getting it from him would have been better. Oh, well. Hindsight and all that. The job is  partly programming, which I do enjoy, and a bigger part just supporting a different product with my company, which is ok. The programming language is still BASIC, which I started on when I was seven, though the "version" they use here is Visual Basic, which has a few extra parts to it that old school BASIC (or even Turbo BASIC from high school) didn't have. Should be interesting though.

Other than that, yesterday consisted of meeting with my parents and siblings at Ron's Hamburgers for dinner. We meet with them every week and have done so since before the Queen and I were married. It became a weekly tradition, and has worked out very well since it allows us all time to catch up and they can see how the princesses are all growing up. The place varies from week to week and even the days have shifted around here and there, but we almost always get together once a week. I typically order the sausage cheeseburger (plain and dry, yeah hold your comments) and some chili cheese fries. Very good, as usual.

In the evening, I worked on my Saw project, which I'll go into in more detail on a different post. I basically converted one of the MPG's I made of part of the chronological cut into an iPod compatible file so I could view it on my iPod.

Following that, I sat down with the Queen and watched the musical, Company, that I got from Netflix. Yes, I watched a stage musical on DVD. I've always loved musicals, and even wrote a couple once upon a time. It's a medium I'd like to get back into writing someday when life allows more time at the keyboard. Company was really, really good. The staging was beyond clever. I never even conceived of a show where the actors were also the orchestra. Seriously. The actors/singers played various instruments on stage eliminating the need for a pit orchestra. It made me smile a lot especially when they were switching instruments. I swear, each person up there played at least 2 to 3 instruments, and not always from the same family. Several string players switched to saxophone, for example. The oboe player also played tuba. Since not every person was in every scene, it made each person that much more essential and on stage for the whole show instead of disappearing into the green room except for cast numbers. So I thought it was really cool.

The only weirdness I have was last night at around 2am. I woke up and thought I heard voices. The voices were female and muffled, like they were coming from behind the walls. Whether they were from outside the house or the princesses woke up in the middle of the night, I couldn't say, since I couldn't understand what they were saying. The computer was compiling another MPEG2 of another part of my Saw Project, so the processor fan was going full speed, drowning out a lot of the voices anyway. When I got up this morning, the house was more than intact, so it's not as if someone was where they shouldn't have been, though I discovered the reason the Queen was crowding me in bed was because Ladybug joined us during the night. I'm sure I'll hear about what was up with that tomorrow.

I do recall something about her wanting to sleep with us before we went to bed, but I don't remember what the reason was behind that. Oh well. Maybe I'll be reminded today...

Let the day commence!

Insignificance

So why is it when you critique someone, and it prevents them from doing something they want/need to do, they focus on the most insignificant part of what you say and make that sound like the sole reason they have been denied. While I can't give the specific example here, I can relate it to a couple of real world ideas that sum up the situation nicely.

Consider a loan application at a bank. The bank person might deny with something like this:

Bank Guy: Thank you, Mr. Geek, for your loan app, but I'm afraid we'll have to deny you. You credit score is a 5. I'm not even sure how that's possible, but you haven't paid anything on time for the past 20 years, you've defaulted on every car you've ever purchased, your house is in foreclosure, and it appears your income to credit ratio is upside down. In addition, when you sign an application you should place the year after the date.

Irrational Me: You're denying my application because I didn't date it?! That's ridiculous!

Or perhaps you might go to a high scale restaurant that require the whole jacket and tie nonsense:

Maitre'd: Sir, I'm simply cannot allow you to enter the restaurant. Not only are you missing your jacket and tie, but what's left of your t-short is in tatters. You smell like you just crawled out of a dumpster, you actually tracked mud into our entryway (or at least I hope that's mud), you're overall very dirty, and your breath is atrocious. You also may want to tie your shoe, or you could trip as your search for a civilized lifestyle continues outside of this establishment. Thank you.

Me as a Vagrant: You won't let me in because my shoe isn't tied? That's ridiculous!

As stupid as these seem, I have a job that requires me to review stuff and occasionally send things back for further info. On more than one occasion, I denied stuff because info was missing or wrong, and then (purely as a courtesy) I commented on one point that was more minor, but I figured I'd mention it since I was emailing anyway. Yeah, recipient fixated on that point over any other. And yeah, pretty much to the extreme above. They were missing critical information that was central to this original request; I mean, to the point that the request could not be handled without it...oh yes, and I commented on the format of something else that was crystal clear, yet technically incorrect. I would have fixed it if everything else was right. Seriously.

So people need to actually read emails in their entirety and not just the last sentence. Maybe I should put the important stuff at the end...

Twilight Princess

On August 29, 2007, for some reason I can't fathom, I stopped playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the GameCube after 46 hours logged while at the doorstep of Hyrule Castle preparing to get into the final level of the game. That date was the last saved date when Rock Girl decided she wanted to start her own game. She played for 55 hours or so before she and the Queen asked if I would look at my game and see if I could actually finish it since I hadn't touched it in over two years.

The only Twilight Princess I'd played since then was a short play of the Wii version of the game. I really have no idea why I never finished the game. I never even entered the castle. I completed the Twilight Temple, and then stopped. So, since they asked, I figured, "Why not?" I prepared myself for a bit of a steep learning curve since I knew there were a few special sword moves that were essential to playing the game and instrumental in completing several key battles.

So I started playing. After some digging through the menus and playing with the controls, I found the button strokes for the special moves, and I was on my way. I went into the final level with 0 potions, and since it had been so long, I had no idea where to find any, so I just went in as I was, with (I think) 16 hearts and three empty bottles.

The level was setup as a series of one on a dozen or more enemies which really served to get my Zelda chops back in a hurry. It was just like riding a bike. I dominated the lower levels of this temple, no matter how many enemies they threw at me. The mini-bosses (and there were several) were no match for my too-long-dormant skill and I wiped them out with hardly a heart lost in the process. The puzzles in the temple, while mildly clever, were mostly easily deciphered (with only a couple causing any sort of long thought). It was all a matter of figuring out what everything did and doing something with it. I even rocked the spinner climb up the stairs bit, which the Queen and Rock Girl got a kick out of. 

Now, LadyBug and Sassy Pants were there, but they only mildly enjoyed the hopping around as neither of them play the game. They did watch for a little while though, especially when I got to the end.

Reaching Ganondorf was really easy in the end. I walked in and the cinema sequence began before final battle part 1 began. Part 1 was easy enough and more about patience and timing than skill. Part 2 was a bit annoying, but once I got the hang of it (and a tip from the Queen (the only one I needed) who was looking at the strategy guide), that one was also defeated.

Then came Part 3. Oh, I hated Part 3. This part left be complaining to high heaven about this game. Nintendo does some really strange things sometimes. They create these battles that are difficult enough, but not so difficult or repetitive that you want to throw your controller at the screen (too many times). Part 3, however, was one of those one off Nintendo battles that was more irritating than it was difficult where the enemy had a tendency to get you over and over and over again if your timing was bad. Well, timing was only a part of it. Thinking about how I eventually got this section figured out, it was a combination of timing and placement of self as well as general persistence that won it. I think the persistence part was the most annoying of them all because it had to do with a horseback ride. Ganon's horse goes slightly faster than your horse (naturally), but you still have to catch up to him, so you have to whip the crap out your horse to get her to go faster...and then you run out of hits so you have to wait for it to charge back up, which sets you back a little bit...and then Ganon releases his undead horsemen to whack you (as if his own hits weren't enough). After I got him figured out, I knew the point of his undead entourage, but it was still annoying. The whole ordeal (which probably cost me more lives in a single battle than any battle in the entire game, primarily due to my lack of potions and the game's tendency to start you after a game over with only 3 hearts) made me compare it to Metroid Prime.

I love Metroid Prime. It's a great game. Fun to play. Awesome play controls on both the GameCube and then the Wii revision in Metroid Prime Trilogy. The maps are great. The bosses are challenging but fun to fight...until the end. And this is just Metroid Prime because I haven't played the other two games to their final bosses yet. Metroid Prime gives you a save point at the beginning of the final level, and then expects you to traverse this entire final level every time. This level is long and time consuming with its endless supply of Metroids constantly attacking you out of holes in the ground. Yeah, they have no end because the ground is reproducing them, so as soon as you finish one set (they're made in twos), you have about 30 seconds to move before another set is on you. And these Metroids are the classic freeze and kill variety. No, these are the ones where you have to use a specific beam-and-missile combination after freezing them, so not only do they both consume a lot of time, but they consume a lot of resources to get past them. Hence, after fighting a grueling battle through this level that takes probably 30 to 45 minutes, minimum, you get one point to recharge your missiles, fight a few more of these dreadful Metroids, and then face off against the big bad bass, Metroid Prime. The thing is huge, uses a gross amount of resources to defeat, and I have yet to do it because once it beats you, you have to start all over at the save point...yeah, another 30 to 45 minutes of an uphill battle fighting those danged Metroids again. Hence, when I was actively playing it, I tried once a day since that was all the Metroid I could handle, and then I finally stopped. I had gathered every item in the game, and still couldn't defeat the Prime boss, nor did I have the patience for that final level. But I digress...hugely.

Once I figured out the secret of that horse battle, it was on to Part 4, which was a classic one on one sword fight between Link and Ganon. I ended up using a single special move over and over again after scavenging all the hearts (and fairy) from the ring of skulls inside the battle wall. I really dislike these battle walls, since they swipe a quarter heart form you wehn you hit it, but the bad guys, of course, can do what they wish without damage.

Anyway, it only took a couple of times, and Ganon was down. It showed that I was, indeed, at the end of the game when I inexplicably stopped playing, and that even after almost 2 1/2 years, I was able to play the game just fine.

 I also found that the Wii's motion controls have spoiled me. Two years ago, I was not interested in the Wii version because it was identical to the GameCube version. Well, after having to aim with the control stick again, I wanted the Wii version so I could just point at the screen. Funny the way that these things change you.

So, I finished another game. Rock Girl got a kick out of watching it, though she was shocked at how much I had done in 46 hours and how she wasn't even close to the end after as much time as she had put into it. I assured her that I was able to do this due to this being my sixth Zelda game along with over 20 years of playing video games. But it was fun to play it again, and once I get through my Metroid Prime Trilogy (whether I defeat the big bad bosses or not), I might look into Twilight Princess again.