@Wudan07

Several years back, while job-hunting, I thought, I have customer service skills and computer skills, I could do technical support for an ISP. So when it came up, I took the job.

During the course of that job I had to work weekends to learn some new skills and move ‘forward’ with my skills.

I eventually (February of this year) am at a weekdays schedule, which I love.

I love getting up on Saturday and cooking pancakes for the family. I love spending time going shopping, watching movies, and just sitting around playing games with the family.

Well, I also wanted to be a Systems Administrator, and now I got offered the chance. I’ve been looking for jobs and this one kind of landed in my lap, but I know from looking at other jobs that this could be a good launching board – it’ll look superb on my resume.

There’s a catch – a super catchy catch – I have to work weekends again (grrrrr.) I did ask my would-be boss how long the weekend situation would go on, and he said it would most likely not go on forever, and there’s a chance that I could trade days with the other guys on the team to take days off when I need to. Basically, it’s a much more flexible system than what I’ve been in.

My loving wife, Sukie, doesn’t want me to take the job. I understand where she’s coming from but I don’t really think she understands how much this means to me. I don’t want to work the same job forever and ever, and even my dream job is going to most likely cut in to our time together, but eventually EVENTUALLY EVENTUALLY I’ll be where I want to be.

So, I have taken the job, but Sukie’s going to hate me for it. I can’t stand when she’s unhappy with me, but I really need to move on with my skills. Basically, if I didn’t take it, I’d eventually have to kill myself for passing up this opportunity. I’m capable of so much, now’s the time to show it!

I saw Big Fish last night. I didn’t think I’d watch the entire thing through, seeing as how I got a late start on it, but I did watch it through. It was an entertaining and captivating peice of art, as most Tim Burton films are, and I think it has a subtle message that I’m still pouring over in my mind. I kind of like pouring over it, too.

Other than that, I didn’t get much else done over the weekend besides nearly finishing off a mountain of laundry and helping Sukie through this slump she’s been in.

From Go-Quiz.com

http://news.uns.purdue.edu/hp/DeBranges.Riemann.html

Louis de Branges, a professor of mathematics at Purdue University, has presented a solution to the Riemann hypothesis, first presented by Bernhard Riemann in 1859. Realistically, it’s roots go all the way, and is tied to number theory as strong as …

Well shit, it is a strong fiber of number theory.

If it’s right. I tried reading his paper, I understand the ideas, but the thing that gets me is the syntax.

Oh well. Anyway, huge deal for math geeks.

Name Acronym Generator
From Go-Quiz.com

Wow. W is for Wired. Now THAT’s a quiz … or was it?

Yawn.

Ok, so Sukie is hosting Meryl’s bachelorette party tonight, so that leaves me and Mighty Dragon Number 7 out on the town for the night. Our stop? Good ole’ grandma’s house for some fun-loving video game action.

To be honest, I know that after about an hour or two I’ll want to see Sukie and go hang out, but I’ll try to stay strong.

Remember how Dax got me Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4? Well, Mighty Dragon Number 7 is just cwazy about it. First thing when he gets home from Daycare, he washes his hands, munches on a snack and demands that we play Tony Hawk.

Hey, he’s my son damnit, and if he wants to play a video game, then we’s a’ gonna’ get our game on’. I can only imagine what Sukie must think when she comes through the door to find the both of us playing that game …

I’m hoping that theorb77 remembers to bring his computer this weekend 🙂

Last night I couldn’t sleep at all and I was going nuts so I hopped on to this here ‘net thang to play some Diablo 2, which I’ve had a hankering for. My old characters are dead and gone (again!) so I had to start anew the other day. I’ve done Barb’s Amazons, Necros, Paladins, Sorcs, Druids, but I never really like Assassin. But I figured I’d play an assassin for a while and see how I like it.

I hit a bit of a brickwall, up until I dumped the short sword (hey, it was RARE) and opted my way in to some hatchet-hands. Those were working great, and then I splurged on 2 ‘Cestus’s which do like 5x the damage. I’m not quite the killing machine I want to be, but I’m doing all right 🙂

Happy Hunting!

ps – I’m gonna miss my Sukie! Have fun though!

The weekend went off well, I’d say. We didn’t get to travel south to Nephi or Mills on Monday, but oh well, we can probably make the trip some other time.

If I recall, I got Resident Evil Zero on … last Thusday night? Then, I think on Saturday, I got Resident Evil, and yesterday I got Resident Evil again, from Dax (which we took back to the local GameStop and traded in for Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4.

It’s been a long time since I’ve played a skateboarding game folks.

Sukie spent about 20 minutes customizing her own skater, then about 10 minutes playing, and decided she didn’t want to play anymore. 🙁

Well, at least she tried.

She also tried to take on the original Resident Evil, which is where it all started. I’ll warrant you that the controls can be tough, but I think that the controls are exactly what they need to be – they aren’t overtly frustrating, and mastery of them gives you the edge you need to survive the horror.

We learned from Dax that she really shouldn’t have tried to fight that first zombie, instead running him back to Barry and having good ol’ Bar’ dust him off.

I didn’t remember that tidbit, nor did I remember how hard the original Resident Evil is – I think she’d be more comfortable with Resident Evil Zero, which has actually been a bit of a cakewalk so far (which really isn’t that far).

I haven’t heard from theorb77 if we’re going camping this weekend or not, so I’m guessing not. That’s fine, if not, because that’ll mean that theorb77, Dax, and myself can go on a cwazy cwazy D2 outing, or maybe play some of my JA mod, if they’re game for it.

Ok, so maybe I wanted to be startin’ somethin’. I guess I succeeded.

My last post was entirely inflamatory, and was met with a very predictable reaction.

I know the points I raised are ‘moo’ points, and they really didn’t tackle the problem at hand.

What I really meant to say was that when theorb77 said, “being a smart guy my entertainment needs are different than the 100 IQ crowd,” and this made me feel upset because it insinuated that people who didn’t like Angel were not as intelligent and a complex show about a vampire doing good things for other people obviously went over their heads.

Why don’t we backtrack and say something about this, shall we?

A television show, aired on public television has one responsibility to it’s network – it has to attract advertisers.

If I’m a network executive (talk about playing the devil’s advocate!), I need to know who is watching my show so I can sell advertising space (aka commercials.) Enter demographics.

Ok, so I’m still a network executive – I can plainly see what demographics cop shows and family drama appeal to – but in this case I’m a WB executive, and I need to figure out how the hell I’m going to convince potential customers that they can sell their products to Angel’s viewers.

There-in lies the problem – it isn’t that they (I’m me again, referring to the WB) don’t know their viewers – it’s that it either doesn’t appeal to a narrow band of viewers or that it’s viewers are too spread across one o’ them charts that the marketting types use to figure out where their viewers are.

This info is handy to have – it makes selling advertising EASY. It’s not that a show like Angel couldn’t be sold – it’s that it’s hard to do so.

So, on the topic of smart people loving angel – that can’t really be proven, though I’m sure there are smart people do love Angel, I’d wager there are people who just plain like vampires, and a show about one who does good stuff must sound like 4th of July Fireworks and an ice-cream sundae to these kinds of people.

Regarding politics, and the defensive, you can say what you want about SUkie’s blog but I think she has perfectly valid points, and so I’ve done my part to encourage her to keep reading and finding info.

News, has become her Angel, of sorts, and so she reads about EVERYTHING, even stuff they don’t cover on the 5 oclock news. In recent times, her interest has pointed at India, which is in political turmoil right now. This is important because the two industries that I work in, a Call-Center and Computer Programming, are being so adversely affected (job-availability wise) by this tiny intelligent-people packed country. By the way, they DO have WMDs. (pssst – so do we!) It’s offensive to say she doesn’t know jack-shit about it, not defensive. She’s entitled to say Bush is a Dumbass – it’s her prerogative, and he really has made some very questionable moves, whether you like him or not.

On an almost unrelated point: I really like theorb77 and antigonehg. I really fricking do. I don’t like that they’re so far away and I even told theorb77 that if he didn’t come down to SLC for his birthday I’d go up there to visit him.

We done here?

theorb77 refuses to shut up about Angel.

His posts over the last several weeks have been about how Angel is superior television, because he’s so intellectual, and because his IQ is too high for normal television and that Joss Whedon is some kind of demi-god, meant to create great TV.

First off, let’s start by saying theorb77 has a predisposition towards vampires – lots of people do, so it’s not really an affliction. Most people, however, like the occasional vampire – like in Underworld, Dracula, or even Van Helsing. (theorb77 didn’t like Van Helsing, probably because Angel wasn’t in it.)

A weekly vampire – let alone a nightly vampire, is simply too much. Add in the weird demon guy with the green face, or that dude in the wheelchair (or was that Dark Angel …) – and it just gets rather stagnant.

It’s not that all the vampire is too much – it’s that it’s supposed to be entertaining. I didn’t find the stories gripping enough to command TiVo to ensnare it every week – even though it occasionally decides that Angel might be something I want to view – and I flat out don’t find it interesting.

‘So-and-so threatens to destroy the universe by using the blank-of-blank’ type storylines don’t really add up to much. What would have been cool is a series of adventures with a slowly massing large story in the background – a Saga Grande, if you will.

These cheap, repetitive, ‘always threatened’ storylines have lost their appeal a long time ago – they are also part of the reason that the Star Trek series of the Deep Space Nine and Voyager varieties became uninteresting to me, and yet Star Trek: The Next Generation maintained an appeal for 7 seasons (because the episodes were always different and unique – which is appealing) — DS9 and Voyager both had the same repetitive story week-in and week-out – “Oh no, something very menacing has come through the wormhole thing! – Did I mention that I’m the solution to all of these problems?”

Blah blah blah, BORING.

Bottom-line, I didn’t find Angel entertaining, and it didn’t appeal to a strong enough core audience that the WB was looking for – they are actually trying to amass a large younger-viewer audience – when they realize that the Gilmore Girls isn’t reaching the people they want it to, they’ll kill it, too.

Well, ok, so it’s been 8 days since my last entry. Did you miss me? I thought not.

Well, a lot happened in the last week – Dax’s birthday, Lucas’ birthday, I think I finally have stopped watching Days of Our Lives, and I’ve tried to focus on finishing one of my programming projects, a gameplay modification for the somewhat-of-a-dud Jedi Academy.

It is definitely superior to it’s predecessor, Jedi Knight 2, but isn’t different enough to warrant the $50 purchase when it is noticeably similar to Jedi Knight 2.

There was a contest at a site I frequent, to vote for your favorite Jedi Knight 2 mods, which I had nothing up for the contest, because, in my … 3 and a half years or so of making mods for this particular series, I haven’t actually completed and released a mod … at all.

In fact, when I tell people that I’m really in to graphics programming and graphics mathematics, it’s kind of embarassing that I don’t have anything that kicks ass to show them – nothing that’s complete anyway.

But it’s really my fault. For my flagship project, Dragon, I chose to write my own UI system, and my own texture loading system, didn’t want to use an external library for math and math conversions, and generally was going about it in a very industrious and, I am told ‘Unix’ manner (I hope SCO doesn’t come after me for my use of the word Unix in this post.)

I have several projects that are being worked at, I have only completed very tiny tiny small ones. I know my work is good, but it never reaches the maturity state that I’d like it to.

This is because I’m a perfectionist – it’s not enough that the program works, it has to inspire wonderment at the same time.

I’m trying to take a much saner approach to my mod, and make enough drastic changes NOW so that I can tweak to balance when the maturity phase comes.