Practice makes perfect

I was just on Andy Savage's show a minute ago. I called in to do some spelling be thing, where they have a guy with a speech problem say a word and then you have to spell what it is he's trying to say. Well, I went fourth....so I got to listen to a few people do it. Most of the time, he'd get it totally wrong the first time, then get progressively better as time went on. Then, on a few words....he got it right out of the gate.

So I thought he said "Electric" for my word....but he didn't. :-) He was trying to say electronic or something. Oh well.

So, I played more games to get ready for the Omegathon last night. There are only 4 days left until the 1st day of the tourney, and I'm still hoping that I'll be able to get my skills up to par by then. I think I need a lot more practice than I'm going to have time for though.

Oh well...no use worrying about it.

Life is better now

I got dressed and went to Top Foods. I bought the milk, a donut and even a sandwich for Heather who probably deserves a sandwich for all those times she bought the milk.

I'm going to go play Dance Dance Revolution now. Sigh. There's a sentence I never thought I'd be saying about a month ago.

Rainy Sunday

Damn, I'm hungry. We don't have any milk in the house, so I can't have cereal without driving. We don't have any eggs. I could probably make pancakes....but that's kind of blah without some eggs on the side. I can't go out to breakfast, because my Dad is coming up sometime this afternoon and we're going to go to dinner. If I have a big breakfast, I won't even be hungry.

So I'm just sitting here.....starving, trying to figure out what to do with myself. I suppose I could eat some pizza.....but that's not fitting for a Sunday breakfast.


WHY don't we have milk?

One more thing

Heather and I gave up on the Amazing Race because we missed too many codes on the radio. We kept seeing tons of people at those stupid events.

Frankly, I'm glad not to be doing it anymore. That was the worst radio station I've ever been listened to. The worst part of the contest was having to listen to it for more than a few hours at a time.

The best part of not being in the contest is I haven't listened to it since.

Stupid fucking Me

So apparently that post DID make it online. I'm not sure why my browser timed out...but oh well.

Now my summary of the Omegathon next weekend is back up for all the world to see. Or ignore. Whichever. It just felt fun to write it down.

Hey, my nephew is coming up this weekend. I'm hoping I can bring him to the PAX with me for one day. I'm not sure, but I think he might really dig that. Maybe. I'm not sure how much there will be to do if you haven't signed up as part of a tourney.

I guess we'll see.

Stupid fucking Blog

Man...I just composed this huge post, hit Publish....and the damn thing got erased.

I'm mad now...and I'm going to debate whether or not to republish it at all.


Grr!

Video games: Friend or Foe?

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been selected to participate in the Penny Arcade Omegathon which takes place in Bellevue next weekend. While I'm really excited about it, getting ready is a lot of work. There are 5 Games we'll be playing (that I know about).

The first is Diceland. This is a game with little cardboard dice with little dudes on the sides, and the dudes have special powers. Robot Dude can take a lot of damage, while little Elf Girl can poison you with her magic knife and so on. Normally, this is the kind of game I would laugh at people for playing. It sounds way too "rpg" when you talk about it and that has never been my thing. However, because it's the first game in the Omegathon, so I have to know how to play it.

The second game is Halo. Anyone who knows me can vouch for my skillz in that. However...I'm guessing that's the game that EVERYONE in the Omegathon is going to be the best at....so I just have to be on top of my game.

The third game is Mario Kart Double Dash. Again...I have mad skillz. The kicker is...I have them in the one player version of the game. The two player is a whole other story.

The fourth game is Dance Dance Revolution. That's on Sunday. I hate dancing, but I've played this once or twice at Gameworks. Maybe I'll get lucky and play against someone who's worse.


So, for the last couple of days I've spent pretty much all of my free times playing those games of one sort or another. Last night was John's birthday and he came over to my place with Jason for some gaming. We played Deathmatch Doom all night (They were on the downstairs PCs and I got the office to myself). Then we played some Diceland until Justin showed up for 5 minutes or so. He popped in to visit, and then took off.

BTW....I've just heavily edited this post, because I realized posting my entire strategy for the Omegathon might be a dumb thing to do. I'm sure one of my opponents could be reading this. So...if you are, no help for you! You're going down come next weekend. You might as well just accept that.

There....that's cocky enough, eh?

Never ending Tech Support

So, that tech support call with my sister yesterday started in the afternoon, proceeded into the evening (with a break for dinner) and lasted until I wanted to go to bed at about 1130pm. This morning she called me bright and early at 830 so we could get started again.

We finished re-installing Windows XP and now she's on the phone with MSN trying to find out why MSN isn't working for her. Apparently she needed to upgrade that or something. She's doing that now and is going to call me back when she's all finished with that.

There's something all "techie" people have in common, and that is that they are the sole source of computer support for all of their friends and family. Whenever something on someone's computer breaks, they call me....and I get to walk through everything from getting a printer installed to backing up files and reformatting their machine to reinstall Windows.

It's very frustrating...but at least they don't have to pay 40 bucks an hour to HP or something. I'm not sure exactly what I get out of the deal. :-)

I'm looking forward to the weekend. It's supposed to be really nice. Maybe we'll go to the Wild Waves water park like we've been talking about doing for a few weeks now.

Contests and more Contests

Still trying to win that stupid radio contest. Now we've missed two of the codes in two weeks. While some people might say "Gee, that's pretty good considering that means you got the other 30 or 40" it's probably not that good. Nevertheless....Heather and I went after another one at lunch time and are that much closer to winning the whole darn thing. :-)

Jason and I applied to be on the Amazing Race 7. We spent all day Sunday making a little video, then filling out our applications and getting pictures taken. Then the next day he Overnighted the thing to the producers of the show and now we're just crossing our fingers.

ALSO...there is a video game tournament at the end of August that I just got entered into. It's called The Omegathon. They only select 20 people to be a part of it, and somehow I got picked. So I'll be getting busy with the video game practice and hopefully get to the second day at least. :-)

In non-contest related news:

I have to call my sister in a moment to instruct her over the phone in the arts of burning a CD. Apparently, she has herself a virus that Norton can't fix, so I'm going to help her get all her important stuff off of the machine and then tell her how to reformat and start over. At that point, she can scan the files she burned and see if any of those are the culprit. Of course...that's in theory. In practice...who knows how any of this is going to work?

Flash forward 10 minutes...

Her computer won't even boot up, so she's going to call me back if she can get into it. Then I have to teach her to create a folder, how to drag and drop..and THEN how to burn a CD. That's going to be a fun afternoon on the phone for both of us, I can already tell.

:-)

The Great Race

So, Heather and I have decided that we are going to try and win the Great Race. It's a radio station contest where you try to collect all these bonus codes by listening to the same radio station for a month.

I'm only two days into it and I'm already sick of their horrible playlist. It's sort of like what you would get if MTV's TRL had it's own radio station. Avril Lavigne gets more airplay than at a 12 year old's slumber party. If I hear one more R&B ballad.....I may just have to quit this contest. However, the prize is a free apartment for a year (which I don't need) but more importantly....like 7500 bucks you can use to buy cool electronics at Circuit City. Being a geek, that is of course the coolest gift certificate you could ever win, and a worthy prize. I could finally build that Halo room! I could give the apartment to a friend, and make them promise to let me come visit.

OH, and there's also a lease on a Hyuandi (woohoo), a gift certificate to Ikea that would be usefull and a gift certificate to a mall (which I'm sure we could find great stuff to buy with).

Of course, there are probably people out there with no life at all that will win this thing, because they are the kind of people that can:

1. Stand listening to the same station every hour of every day from 5am-10pm for a month.
2. Travel to all these events where they hand out codes.
3. Listen to Avril Lavigne and some of this other schlock without wanting to hit something.

I'm not sure I'm one of these people.

Anyway....this is just the silly goal of the moment. I'm sure by next week, we will have tired of trying to gather all of these codes and decide that we can't win the contest. If we actually did win, I'm not sure the 10000 bucks in prizes would be worth listening to this station for a month.

:-)

Guess who's back....

I am going to be really lazy and copy the first part of this post from an email I just sent to a friend describing the last week or two:

Today is my first day back at work after my week long vacation. I was down in San Diego for Comic con from Weds the 21st to Sunday the 25th, then got a rental car and drove to Vegas where I stayed until last Wednesday the 28th. Then...flew back to Seattle and had a few days off right here at home.This is basically the exact same trip as last year, except we went with quite a few more friends than we did last time. It also ended up being more expensive, not so much because we spent more but because I didn't share any hotel rooms this time around so I ended up PAYING more. It's really hot up here. Or...hot for Seattle anyway. In the 80's and low 90's this last week, although it's supposed to cool down.

Nothing else really exciting to talk about right this second. I had a bunch of friends over Friday night to play some Halo on a few Xboxes. That's a lot of fun, and I have this big dream that someday I'll fix up the downstairs of the house to be this giant game area where we can play Halo on big screens or projectors. Of course, I need to get enough money for something like that before I can actually do it. :-)

---and that was the summary taken from the email, which pretty much covered it.

Things not included in that email:

Although it was over a week, this vacation was not nearly long enough.

I lost over 100 dollars gambling in Vegas, and then won it all back in one morning of blackjack and some craps (which I just learned to play). I ended up leaving about 60 bucks ahead despite wasting 2o bucks on the "Wheel of Fortune" machine at the Vegas airport.

I bought so many toys at Comic Con that I had to enlist the help of John and Elizabeth to take a carry on suitcase each full of them home on their plane. In the end, I bought about 20 or 30 different things and they all made it hope relatively undamaged.

Despite the fact that we packed a total of 5 costumes in two trunks down to San Diego, we were only actually in costume at Comic Con for a total of about 4 hours combined between all of them.

The new Star Trek ride at the Hilton is not nearly as cool as the old one (which we also rode again).

We are already planning another trip to Vegas this year.


VIVA!