I mean, I'm not reading anyone's mind or anything like that. But judging from a lot of people's comments about That Bird Hell Site, you'd think that people would be dying to get away from it.

It's not that easy.

There's a reason it's called social media. It's social. It's your connection with a list of other users that you presumably have curated over a span of months or years. For some of those connections, it's your only connection to them. It also costs a lot of energy to make connections like these to begin with. So, it makes sense that people wouldn't want to start over elsewhere. In fact, I recall reading a couple people fearing that they were being abandoned by people who decided that enough was enough at Twitter.

A very fair conclusion to make, but not one that is without its flaws. Social media is a double edged sword. Sites like Twitter are designed to get you to engage the site as frequently as possible. How? Twitter has critical mass. Everyone you know is probably on Twitter or at least tried it, so you get comfortable with it because most of the people you know are there. They want you to stay on their site and browse around, so they try to learn about you and your friends through your posts, and then throw them all in an algorithm to try to make a few cents off an ad you might click on. Sure, Twitter has other ways to monetize, but the general rule is if a product is free, you - or more specifically your data - are the product.

To some people, this is just the absolute worst. However, I decided that I was generally okay with this as long as the product was useful and the people behind it weren't completely evil. Symbiotic relationships aren't necessarily bad relationships, after all.

When I "left" Facebook - "left" is in quotes because I still log in to and even use the account from time to time, much like I did during my Twitter down time - I made a conscious decision that I wasn't going to support what Facebook had become. When I first joined, it was fun to keep up with everyone. When I left, keeping up with everyone meant suffering through arguments, bad political takes, and opinions about things you didn't want to know. I saw the worst of people I cared for many times, and interactions on the site straight up ruined several relationships between friends. It was too much. The product ceased being useful, and I quit.

Earlier this year, I "left" Twitter - again "left" is in quotes because I still logged in, read everyone's posts every day, and even sometimes replied - I again made a conscious decision that I wasn't going to support what Twitter was about to become. My leaving was 100% about Elon Musk's planned purchase and privatization of Twitter. Why would something like this prompt me to leave?

Simple. The guy is an asshole.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no angel myself. I mean, just read this blog in its early years, or dig up some of my older posts on Trax in Space. However, someone with the money and influence that this man has who is consistently stooping to this level of dehumanization is downright dangerous. Sure, there are other billionaires out there with less than reputable personalities, but no one comes close to touching Musk right now. So if the top man at Twitter is going to be this kind of person - and this is not to mention anything about the recent political views he has taken - it will cease to maintain my loyalty.

Joining and using Mastodon regularly is simply me hedging my bets. Don't get me wrong, it's not perfect. Far from it, in fact. The main thing it's missing is critical mass - the people and organizations you know are very likely not on Mastodon. The other problem is it's hard to actually do any discovery on the site, although this might be good for some people whose main complaint about Twitter is that discovery leads to some bad mental health situations (ie: doomscrolling). However, consider this discovery is what draws a lot of people to Twitter, and is a contributing factor to its critical mass. A third problem is that its sharding is poorly done. You can only belong to one server, even if you have more than one interest, and it's not trivial to move servers if you decide you want to do so. I feel like with this being its cornerstone feature, it should've been more thought out and useful. But the good things are that it is actively moderated, it's easy to follow the posts of people you follow (even on other servers), there's no algorithm on your timeline to deal with, and you get 500 characters instead of 280.

I returned to Twitter once it was clear that the acquisition was not yet a done deal. No need to abandon ship if it's not sinking. Besides, I'm doing my part trying to keep it afloat. But like I said, there's social in social media, and that's the main draw. Remeber, that feeling of abandonment that people get by reading about people like me leaving is by design. I feel for people who are hooked like this, but it's not going to stop me from at least trying to do the responsible thing.

I'm hoping that if the worst happens and the deal is closed that I'll be able to formally pack up and leave for good without coming back, but if there's one thing I've learned from the last couple months?

It's not that easy.

Labels: Elon Musk, Life, Mastodon, Twitter

Sunday, January 24, 2021

Uhhh...
Posted: 2:17:00 AM 0 comments

Hi. I'm roncli. You may remember me from some of my greatest hits, such as Got nasty VB.Net ListView flicker? Double Buffer it, Of tigers and clowns, and most likely OTL's player disconnection issue because I haven't written anything on this blog in two years. Needless to say, I haven't done much here lately.

I don't know if that's going to change. This blog used to be where I wrote things that I wanted to talk about. Over time, that moved to Twitter as my musings turned more short form. As a result, I'm quite active there, and I've had no motivation to keep this blog up to date. At all.

That makes it quite unfortunate that I chose to make my blog the main feature of my home page. When I was putting this version of the website together, I had grand plans to start getting creative again in music, keep writing on subject I enjoyed, and maybe even build a small community around the website. None of that happened.

What has happened? My interests have changed dramatically. Instead of being creative in the music space, I'm creative with my streams to Twitch. Instead of writing about what's going on, I've increased activity on Twitter and Discord.

But one interest that hasn't changed is coding. I've done so much over the past 2 1/2 years with various coding projects that 2005 me would be super jealous of how much I've been able to accomplish, and that kinda feels good. I have a lot to write about on this subject, and hopefully will find the time to do so over the coming weeks, but the project that I'm currently working on is a complete rewrite on roncli.com. While the content will largely remain the same, the amount of real estate I give on the front page to this blog is going to be reduced dramatically. The truth is the content of this blog isn't all that great, and I don't really want to give a ton of space to something that I don't update often. I certainly will keep it around for archival purposes - mostly to remind myself of how unfiltered I was in my younger days - and make an attempt to make it a bit easier to browse.

Here's to hoping that this post won't burn another image into the site's front page for the next couple years.

Labels: Life, roncli.com

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Report Card: 2015
Posted: 12:38:00 AM 0 comments

I often do a "Year in Review", but this year I thought I'd change it up a bit. Last year, in addition to reviewing what happened the previous year, I added some goals for 2015. This year, instead of just reviewing what happened last year and adding the goals, I figured I would also add in a kind of "report card", where I grade myself on how I did towards those goals from the previous year.

I'll be honest. These goals stayed with me all year long. When I thought about what I want to do, I compared that to my goals. Having goals I actually thought about has made me learn a bit more about myself than I knew before.

So, without further ado, here's the 2015 report card!

Music

2015 Goal: Complete and release full versions of "All In My Head" and "Paper"

There's no beating around the bush here, neither of these goals happened. In fact, I was musically silent for the first half of the year. I did, however, come out with three different pieces of music, but none of them were original works.

In 2015, I started a podcast with Dr. Zing and Morfod called the Self-Destruct Sequence Podcast, which is a podcast all about Descent. Dr. Zing kind of dropped off the face of the Internet a few months ago, but Morfod and I picked it back up late last year, and have been having fun with the episodes this year. I mention this in the music section because when we were putting the first episode together, we wanted to have some Descenty music, and I delivered in a big way.

Our title music, Self Destruct Sequence, is a remake of the level 1 music, while our outro, Mars Processing Sequence, is a remake of the level 8 music. Both had electronic elements, and two guitar tracks each that I performed myself. This is the first time I've actually been happy with guitar tracks that I've created, especially the lead guitar parts. Hopefully I can take my experience from this and translate that into better guitar tracks in my music in the future.

The third piece was something I couldn't get out of my head, a piano cover of the song "The Wight to Remain" by Danny Baranowsky, which is best known as the music to Zone 4 Level 3 in the game Crypt of the NecroDancer. This has always been a beautiful track to me, and could be the launching point of a piano-only soundtrack to the game, if I get so inspired to complete some day. I even put the song's score up on flat.io if you so desire to try to play it yourself.

So while I kept the dust off of my music, I didn't do what I set out to do. At all. I tried to work on "Paper" once, but couldn't get any inspiration for the one part I still don't have a working idea for. Maybe that will change in 2016, but unfortunately, this gets poor marks this year.

2015 Grade: D

2016 Goal: Complete and release full versions of "All In My Head" and "Paper". For real this time.

Coding

2015 Goal: Finish the updated roncli.com site

Well, you're looking at it, baby. I'm still quite proud of this accomplishment, and it really took a load off my shoulders last year when I completed it. It's even gotten a few updates since that fixed some bugs and added (and, sadly, removed) some features.

So with the main 2015 goal accomplished, what else have I done in 2015? A quick glance at my GitHub profile shows I've contributed to Descent's DXX-Retro source port (this was the mouse fix), and started a series of Descent 3 tools written in node.js, including the rebirth of Descent DSN. However, in recent months, coding's not exactly been a priority to me.

The main project I have going right now is getting Six Gaming's official website off the ground. It is going to be started pretty much directly from roncli.com with a Six Gaming theme. At first it's just going to be a static page with links pointing to most of our presence on social media. Later, it will include episode-specific links for the Six Gaming Podcast, and the final version will be a full fledged social site where people can come to find other people with whom to play games they enjoy.

So 2015 was good, and 2016 has a clear goal. Looks good to me!

2015 Grade: A

2016 Goal: Finish the Six Gaming site

Gaming

2015 Goal: Grow Six Gaming into a bigger and more general gaming community

So at the beginning of 2015, I had this great idea to make Six Gaming a big community, not just for World of Warcraft, but for all the games we play. Over the years, we found that many of the gamers in Six Minutes To Release enjoyed other games as well, so it made sense to want to cater to that while keeping the close-knit community we've created from the core members of the guild over the previous 7 years.

Two major events accelerated this goal to fruition. First, Showsan got the jump on me. When he returned from his service in the military, he came in and lit a fire under everyone. He basically rebooted the Six Gaming Podcast, gave it a new format and new life. Since then, we've added a ton of cohosts that bring their own unique perspective on the games that we are playing. The Podcast has stayed fresh and has been enjoyable because of it, and we recently completed our 100th episode, which we call... Episode 48. Don't ask.

Second, Warlords of Draenor happened. What a bad expansion! I would rehash what I've already written, but suffice to say that not much has changed, and on top of it we're looking at another 6-8 months until Legion, which will make a 12-14 month content drought, similar to the one at the end of Mists of Pandaria, and exactly what the devs previously said they didn't want to do. Add in their stance on flying, and I honestly couldn't tell you if I trust Blizzard to get WoW right anymore. Legion is their last chance to get it right for me, and until then I am probably going to be doing some different things.

Like Descent. Descent: Underground made it known that Descent still exists for a lot of people, and despite the issues they are having (a topic for a future blog post), I am genuinely excited for a release of a new Descent game, even if it's not by the same people who gave us the first three. Naturally, a new Descent game has raised interest in the original games, and Descent 1, 2, and 3 have all seen an uptick in activity.

Case in point is the Descent Champions Ladder. It went from 1,408 games played in the fall 2013 season, down to 938 games in spring 2014, and down further to only 504 games in fall 2014. At the end of that season, Descent: Underground was announced, and the spring 2015 season saw a massive ressurgance with 2,218 games played. The late 2015 season, which was only 3 months, had 1,416 games played, and not even 3 weeks into early 2016 we have 510 games played.

Playing Descent again has been awesome, and has inspired me to learn a new control scheme. I used to be all keyboard, and now I do mouse and keyboard. I play at the high bronze/low silver level on the DCL currently, but I feel I have a lot to learn about the game both mechanically and philosophically.

I've also been involved with the Crypt of the NecroDancer community, racing most recently in CoNDUIT 7, and will be playing again on CoNDUIT 8 on the 29th. I'm not that great, which is why I'm in the "junior" league, but it's still a whole lot of fun getting some competition in. I still need to complete story mode and an all characters run to unlock Coda (I have no false impressions that I will BEAT Coda, mind you), so there's still plenty of room for improvement. I'm mainly known for having the Bard Deathless world record at 112 wins, and have performed fairly well at deathless mode with a few other characters as well.

I've also done a ton of streaming on Twitch. While I've stopped playing League of Legends, I still stream things such as my DCL games, Crypt of the NecroDancer runs, and even some Sublevel Zero speedruns. Basically, if I play it, it ends up on Twitch at some point.

Gaming has become a central part of what I do. I play a wide variety of games, involve myself in the Six Gaming, Descent, and Crypt of the NecroDancer communities, do two weekly podcasts involving games, and stream many times a week. I don't see this slowing down in the near future, so the only thing to do in 2016 is embrace it.

I have plans to start a regular Descent-themed competition show on Twitch, and am most interested in growing my stream large enough to get partnered. I don't think partnering will happen this year, but I at least want to get started. I've played with some ideas for growing my YouTube channel as well, but nothing's really stuck, but I'll keep trying.

2015 Grade: A+

2016 Goal: Substantially increase my streaming presence on Twitch

Life

2015 Goal: Get back to the Bay Area at least once

I think I nailed this one, at least in text. However, my experience thus far has been... less than ideal.

So instead of taking a trip to the Bay Area, I actually MOVED out here. In October, I packed my things, drove West a few days, and settled into the Belmont area. Central to everything, I've done... nearly nothing since I've gotten here. Sure, I've ventured to Pier 39 in the city, finally ate some Iguanas down in San Jose, and have occasionally taken in some of the area's scenic routes, I've yet to really do something... defining when it comes to the Bay Area. Seriously, I've seen more of the Bay Area the last time Kathy and I came out here in February 2013.

This is compounded by the fact that many of the people I knew and hung out with here are gone. One of the reasons I gave for moving out here was to be close to people I knew and give myself opportunities to "get out" every so often. I have done that a grand total of zero times since I got here.

There have been several reasons why I haven't really capitalized on my new living situation. The first is that I work remotely, yet am wanting to work locally. My job in Houston allowed me to work remotely when I told them I was moving and giving what I thought was going to be my two weeks. While the remote working part of the job has been going okay, I know through my experience with Sift that this isn't something I want to do forever. I have been really slow on advancing this agenda, however.

Second is that I've found myself in somewhat of a funk recently. I can't really put my finger on why, just that I find that I don't have the energy to do a whole lot since just before Christmas. My focus has been poor in coding-related projects, and I don't really feel that I've "settled in" very well. I don't at all regret making this move, in fact I think it's the best thing I've done for myself in a long time. However, I need to really break out of whatever it is that's causing me to, for lack of a better description, lose time doing nothing.

So, yeah, I made it out here, but... what next? Well, the first thing is going to be transitioning to a local job. Even before then, though, I need to find a way to get more active again. I have a plan, it's just acting on it - or more accurately getting over what's preventing me from acting on it - is proving challenging.

I hate these lethargic, stagnant days. I've had them before and have gotten past them, and have no doubt I will again. But the time until that happens can be downright depressing some days.

Oh, and there's this house thing. Yeah, we want a house. Soon.

2015 Grade: C

2016 Goal: Get more active, find local employment, and begin planning moving into a house

Overall

I've had an up and down year for sure. I recognize that my strongest point currently is with gaming, and recently that has been the outlet I go to in order to unwind and have a good time. I also find enjoyment in coding, but need to find a way to motivate myself to finish projects like I did with roncli.com. While my music still remains on the back burner, I am doing my best to keep sharp and avoid going flat... okay, I'll stop with the music puns! I recognize that I need to make some changes in order to improve my quality of life in my new surroundings, and am hoping that I can get those taken care of quickly.

2015 Overall Grade: B

Labels: Coding, Crypt of the NecroDancer, Descent, Descent Champions Ladder, Descent: Underground, Gaming, Life, Music, roncli.com, Self-Destruct Sequence Podcast, Six Gaming, Six Gaming Podcast, Twitch, Year in Review

Monday, March 09, 2015

A Recommitment
Posted: 4:02:00 PM 0 comments

I recently went back in time to the beginning of this blog and revisited the things that interested me back then. I found that I did a heck of a lot more blogging then than I do today, largely because I made a commitment to keep people updated as to what I was doing.

I started this blog when I was working on OSMusic.Net back in the day. I had a lot of free time, largely because I had no idea what kind of focus (and design, for that matter) I needed to get the site to take off. I ended up doing things in my free time that didn't help the site along. Such as blogging.

Blogging became a regular part of my life in mid-2005, and it was fun. I wasn't involved in much back then, as TiS 1 had died and TiS 2 hadn't been thought of yet. I started blogging about on-again-off-again gaming, then about the struggle I had with maintaining all of my side projects, then focus shifted to stresses at work, until finally things got so hectic I pretty much just fell off the face of the Internet, only blogging on major events such as hurricanes or job changes. I've tried to kickstart things over the years, but nothing has stuck.

But with the revamped roncli.com website on the horizon (I'm looking to finish coding and content by the end of the month), I strongly feel that a recommitment of sorts is required to keep content on the site fresh, and to enable easier Nightstalker-stalking, so to speak.

So, here's the deal. I do a lot of things during the week that I've taken for granted. The Six Gaming Podcast, World of Warcraft raids, League of Legends streaming (specifically Ron's Bronze Plays on Sundays), and other random streaming events.

I also still code a hell of a lot. Previously, I'd blog frequently about my findings with certain things, which would result in code snippets that show you how to read an NWS weather feed, or double buffer a list view. I still want to do stuff like this, especially since I'm playing with cutting-edge libraries such as rendr.

I just haven't given myself enough time to do any of this. But with me no longer running raids for Six Minutes To Release, that time now exists.

Therefore, here's my commitment. On days when I do something noteworthy, I will blog about it. You won't see me talk about every WoW raid, or every line of code I write, but it'll be frequent enough to give everyone an idea as to what's going on in my world.

Labels: Blog, Gaming, League of Legends, Life, Rendr, Ron's Bronze Plays, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Year In Review: 2014
Posted: 3:37:00 AM 0 comments

In many ways, 2014 was a big year for me. There were a lot of big changes made right at the beginning of the year, with some exciting plans starting to form up.

Where to begin?

Music

I will always remember the end of 2013 as being a kind of inspirational epiphany for me. In the span of 4 short months I wrote 4 songs complete beginning to end, managed to record 2 of them as stripped down versions, and penned the final lyrics of a few more that had been floating around.

The only major song that has come out of 2014 is a dance-ish piece I call "Bullseye", which is designed to be more about the music than about the lyrics. Even the lyrics that are sung focus more on the melody, making strong use of some of my unique vocal inflections. There is only a single verse and chorus, but the usage of such are designed to give the song added texture, not added meaning.

The main problem here is that a grand total of zero songs were released in 2014. After having such a strong finish to 2013, I expected things to carry over into the new year. Looking back, much of the music that came out of 2013 was due to having a lot of extra time on my hands while in San Francisco. I was able to put notes to Reason because I had little else to do, and with commute times being upwards of an hour some days, it was not uncommon for me to do some writing in my head, and then later pen it down into lyrics or Reason. I haven't had nearly the luxury this year since I've not been in San Francisco at all, and opportunities to write have been few and far in between. I've got this awesome guitar I want to play around with, and just haven't had the inspiration to do anything with it.

I've always toyed with the idea of setting aside just one night and dedicate myself to nothing but my music, but right now I take care of Six Minutes To Release five nights a week, spend Fridays with Kathy, and do the Six Gaming Podcast on Saturdays. Music has been playing second fiddle to pretty much everything else these days. I don't like it, but I know that I will never lose the drive for my music. It will come back some day.

Coding

After leaving Sift in February, I took a month off and then joined HCC Insurance Holdings as a .NET programmer. So far, I've been doing a lot of VB.Net in WinForms, but this last month has seen me start to work on an ASP.NET project again. It's in C# with a Bootstrap framework, and communicates with a lot of different moving parts within the company, so it'll be an exciting project to start 2015 with.

Personally, well, I'm always full of coding projects. My big project this past year has been the remake of roncli.com. This project is designed to stretch my understanding of the node.js stack, as I'm taking advantage of projects such as Bootstrap, Rendr, and Express, and have been working with APIs from Twitter, Google Blogger, and Tumblr, with many more in the works.

roncli.com as a domain turns 15 years old this February. The current design is its second, but is one that it has had for most of its lifespan. I've grown to absolutely HATE it. I've tried a number of times to remake it but nothing ever stuck... until now. Currently, I'm nearly done with integrating the blog into the site. It is going to be a pretty big hub of all things roncli, so I don't expect it to be complete any time soon, but I have made steady progress on it since May with no signs of slowing down. The fact that I'm learning the innards of these node.js projects is arguably more valuable than the site itself.

Gaming

2014 brought about a gaming renaissance of sorts. Sure, I'm still playing World of Warcraft, but I've expanded my horizons into games such as Diablo III, League of Legends, and countless other indie games that have been slowly filling up my Steam library. I've not exactly shaken off the "hardcore casual mobile gamer" title, either, as I still am very much into gaming on my iPhone.

What brought this on was the fact that while I was with Sift, I really did not have any time to myself. Gaming became a luxury to me, something that I couldn't spend a lot of time on. Once I left Sift and realized that evenings do exist, I had a lot of free time. I began streaming to Twitch regularly, and this past July took the reins of the Six Gaming Podcast while cohost Jacob "Showsan" Showalter is deployed in the military.

Between all this and the increase in popularity of streamers and professional gamers, gaming itself has taken on a new meaning for me, and is something I feel I could take advantage of given the right environment. After I am done with roncli.com, I want to build something gamer-centric around the whole "Six Gaming" concept we've got going on, so I don't expect much to change when it comes to my gaming, at least in the early part of this next year.

Life

This year I celebrated my 5 year anniversary of marriage to my lovely wife, Kathy. The fact that I've survived this long without her trying to cash in on the life insurance policy speaks volumes. And the fact that she has supported me through so many things, both good and bad, really makes me blessed.

Leaving Sift was a hard decision. I felt I held on a lot longer than I should have. In some ways, I did. Perhaps I could have made a more positive impact by leaving sooner. Or maybe I didn't hold on long enough, as it seems as though some of the things that caused me to leave have passed. Whatever, hindsight is 20/20, and I'm not going to dwell on the could-haves. I did what I did.

And what I did was start a new job. It's quite a switch going from the rushed startup environment to the slow-paced, meticulously-planned environment of a publicly traded company. At the same time, however, many of the habits I learned while at the startup I've been able to apply to the new job, and the transition couldn't have gone better.

But there is still that bit of emptiness, that missing sense of adventure.

I only managed to take 3 trips this year. The first was our 5 year anniversary trip on a cruise around southeast Alaska in June. Then came BlizzCon in Anaheim in November. Finally, I just returned from Christmas break in Buffalo, where the temperature averaged a balmy 45 degrees, much warmer than usual.

I'm hoping to get back to the Bay Area soon. I made a lot of connections out there, some friendly, some professional, and some both! I am still very much fascinated with how differently things work out there. It was very exciting to be a part of the culture, and I look forward to my next visit out there, whenever that may be.

A Look Ahead

It's hard to predict what's going to happen in the next year, but I'm going to state my goals here. No, they're not New Year's resolutions, but rather things I want to get done and say that I've accomplished.

Complete and release full versions of "All In My Head" and "Paper"
Finish the updated roncli.com site
Grow Six Gaming into a bigger and more general gaming community
Get back to the Bay Area at least once

Some strong goals. Now, to work on fulfilling them!

Labels: Alaska, BlizzCon, Buffalo, Bullseye, Coding, Diablo III, Gaming, HCC, iPhone, League of Legends, Life, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, Steam, World of Warcraft, Year in Review

Monday, April 07, 2014

All Good Things and Such
Posted: 10:18:00 AM 0 comments

It's been a long time since I've written anything of substance here, so let this post serve as a catch up to what's been going on.

Since April of 2012, I have had the pleasure of working on the iOS application known as Sift. The company developing Sift is a San Francisco Bay Area startup, of which I am a founder. Needless to say, I put in many hours of work into the product.

Sift was more than a job to me. It was an opportunity to do something big, and perhaps make a profound impact in the way people shop online. It's still in its infancy, but the product that we put out there is pretty awesome.

However, I decided to step away from the company in February after three months of consideration. It was a very difficult decision for me, as I truly believed in the product and the company. I was a remote worker in a high-impact position, and I found that it wasn't easy maintaining the visibility required of such a position in a remote location while still being able to get done the stuff that needed to get done. This became especially true as the company grew, both with more internal employees and having to work with multiple contractors outside of the company (and the country), which would have me going as early as 8 am and as late as 2 am. Combine that with the demanding travel schedule - I spent only 8 of the final 18 weeks of 2013 at home - and it's not hard for most people to see how stress levels were through the roof.

Extreme stress levels aren't something I'm particularly fond of, which led to my decision to move on. I did spend a good deal of time with the company, accomplishing and learning plenty along the way. I learned much about the open source world, and found that I very much enjoyed working with Node JS. I met a lot of awesome people as well, and I can only wish for their further success as Sift continues to grow.

While leaving was certainly not a decision I came to lightly, I'm quite happy that I was able to leave my second startup on my own terms after being able to accomplish so much for them. My first startup, Trax in Space, ended in financial disaster, and I wasn't ready to step away when it all fell apart. This time, I look back fondly on the experience, knowing that I was a major contributor, and that the company is still growing upon the foundation that I helped to build.

So what's next for me? Well, back to the Monday through Friday, 8-hour a day grind, resharpening and honing my .NET skills while bringing my schedule back to a sense of normalcy that I have found was very much missed. What else?

Music. I'm slowly getting back into my music, and as always have several songs floating around. I want to get myself a new electric guitar next, as my last one bit the dust some years ago. In the meantime, I post things I'm working on to my creative blog as I work on them.

Coding. I'm in the process of upgrading all of my .NET projects to 2013, will be updating LibWowAPI, and plan on slowly transitioning my websites over to Windows Azure. I plan on learning Rendr and incorporating it into my personal website, roncli.com, as a way of learning and showing off my node.js skill. And I am wanting to figure out Xamarain so that I may be able to write mobile games.

Gaming. And of course, I spent a ton of time between jobs gaming. I'm big time into Diablo 3 these days, have gotten into streaming my gaming experiences, and am a regular host on the Six Gaming Podcast where we talk all about gaming.

Seems like I'm getting back to my roots these days. That could be a sign of some wonderful times to come.

Labels: Azure, Coding, Diablo III, Editorials, Gaming, LibWowAPI, Life, Node, Rendr, roncli.com, Sift, Six Gaming Podcast, Stress, Tumblr, Twitch, Xamarian

Monday, July 30, 2012

Return to Starbase: San Francisco Rush 2049 post mortem
Posted: 7:29:00 PM 2 comments

This past Sunday, I visited Starbase Arcade for only the second time in 12 years. My previous visit came in late 2000 when I participated in a Midway Games tournament for their soon-to-be-defunct "Tournament Edition" of Rush 2049. At the time, the machines were hopping, and a lot of players were busy trying to post their best scores. As I recall, I placed in the top 5, a pretty good achievement I thought for never having touched the tournament edition that most of the other players had access to.

This past weekend, I went in mostly on a whim. I'm staying in the San Francisco bay area this month to help my startup get prepared for a product launch, and figured I'd take one day out to head back to Starbase and play some Rush. They had a third machine, a prototype, added to the two they had when I was there. However, all of the machines were in bad shape:

Both of the connected machines had their phone pad disabled. This meant every game played on those required me to input my PIN number to start play.
The left of the connected machines and the prototype had an issue with the accelerator not working 100% of the time, with the prototype much worse off due to the differing design and unavailability of the parts required to fix a prototype.
The right of the connected machines had a rare issue where the manual shift refused to stay in 4th gear, dropping to 3rd. Fortunately, this was not a big issue.

I played most of my games on the right of the connected machines, and it turned out to be pretty good. The steering wheel was in amazingly pristine condition for its age, giving me the kind of control that I remembered having when I played at Dave & Busters in Houston.

I arrived at about quarter after 11 in the morning on Sunday. I half expected the arcade to not open on time (as I remember something about it not usually opening on time on Sundays the last time I was there), and sure enough it didn't officially open until about 11:30. I must've seemed kind of nerdy, wearing a Pac-Man shirt that reads "Original Gamester", standing outside of an arcade waiting for it to open on a Sunday morning, but there you have it.

I got to business quick. My plan of attack originally was to focus on Track 2, by far the easiest track when you take shortcuts into account, to get back into the groove. Within an hour, I had posted a time of 3'15"440 and beat the Free Game car. That was about 5 seconds off of the leaders, which given the fact I haven't played seriously since about the time I last visited Starbase, I wasn't going to complain. I moved on to Track 7, and that's when reality set in to how long it had been since I last played the game.

When I first visited Starbase, I scored a time of under 5 minutes on Track 7, and, as I stated earlier, placed in the top 5. My first several runs of Track 7 were abysmal, with one time over 5'50 (the time limit was just over 6 minutes). After a few tries, I figured I needed to play an easier, yet more challenging track. I moved to Track 3.

I spent a few races remembering exactly what the shortcuts were, and after a while I managed to hit everything required... except for the fall into Twin Peaks. This is the shortcut you use on the final lap, because using it gets you across the start/finish line faster, but you can't get to the shortcut at the beginning of the next lap, and ultimately you end up losing more time than you saved.

The shortcut requires going up a specific part of one of the hills of Twin Peaks and falling into a pit. I know what you have to do to get in there... essentially you need to go up a thin slice of the hill as straight as possible in second gear, and when you get up to the edge you flip the car head over bumper once and land on your tires and you're good to go.

I could not land that to save my life. Either I'd crash trying to get up the hill, couldn't get the right speed going up and fall down, or go in crookedly and either hit the side and crash or not make it in at all. I did land it once and posted a time worthy of a free game, but not a time I'd necessarily be proud of.

After a few more tries I decided to ratchet up the difficulty a bit and moved on to Track 4. Track 4 was almost everything I remembered. I hadn't really played the game in Special Edition, however, and did not expect one of the shortcuts to be faster. This shortcut is the one where you drive into a tunnel, and at the end of the tunnel you drive on the inside of an extremely tiny sphere with green arrows on it. Driving into and through the sphere correctly landed you in a position to drive out of the other side of the tunnel without losing any speed.

It probably took me 10 races to figure out how to land that right. Half the time I'd end up crashed on my hood, or crooked enough that I'd spin out. I only really landed it well enough to be competitive twice, but the ghost car on the machine - that had nowhere near the best time, mind you - always sped ahead of me.

At this point I took a break and decided that Track 7 was the main reason I came to play, and now that I felt practiced up enough to compete, I took a lunch and came back with renewed determination.

After about half a dozen races, I properly recalled exactly what you need to do to ace Track 7... except for the execution. I got my best time on the track early at something around 5'24"... more than 45 seconds off the best time. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn't nail a few key aspects of the track:

I never properly mastered the double loop, which caused me to not have enough speed to get into the tube shortcut on lap 2.
For whatever reason, the shortcut through the train station ended in a fiery auto crash after collisions with unexpected trains.
The big one for me was the downhill that ends in a 45 degree left turn. I had that near mastered at full speed, and I couldn't even figure out what to do this time around. I had to slow down to be competitive.

There were also a myriad of turns, twists, and jumps that I just could not do efficiently. I never bested that time, and after about 30 runs I got frustrated enough to just run Track 2 the rest of the time. At least there I bettered my best to 3'15"407. Shaving, as me and Mr.X would call it.

I did run into Video Bob towards the end of the night and reintroduced myself. He remembered me and Pianodakin, a Rush 2049 to NFS Underground convert, from past visits, and we talked a bit about how Special Edition came to pass. It was good to catch up and see that his business is still very much continuing to do well.

My biggest wish is that I had the time and money to invest into becoming a hardcore Rush 2049 player again, because I feel that is one of the best racing games ever created. If I could, I'd buy up a machine, get it fixed up good, and race a few times a day, relearning all the tricks.

Maybe someday I'll catch that butterfly.

Labels: Life, San Francisco, San Francisco Rush 2049, Starbase Arcade, Video Bob

Friday, April 06, 2012

A New Adventure
Posted: 10:01:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: Sixx:A.M. - Life is Beautiful (3:35)

Today, I am embarking on a new adventure. Yesterday was my final day with my previous employer, and today I'm working full time on a new endeavor. Unfortunately I can't share what I'm working on yet, but here's a few details about what I'm doing.

First of all, the company I work for today is a small startup based in the San Francisco bay area. No, I haven't moved out there, I am still based in Houston. I do all of my work remotely, contacting the team via Skype or phone. This alone is exciting. I mostly get to set my own hours and working schedule. Today I was up by 9 AM, and began to be productive fairly quickly. No more commuting or having to "get ready for work". I just get up and start. It's quite awesome.

Secondly, I'm delving out of my comfort zone. My previous two jobs involved the .Net Framework, with a lot of that work in ASP.Net. This project has me working largely with JavaScript, relying on some cutting-edge features from HTML5 and CSS3. Oh yeah, and the back end is in PHP. Talk about stepping out. The last couple of times I got tangled up in PHP I was working with Cute Trance Girls and Trax in Space 2. (No, this isn't another music site. I gave up on that a while ago, remember?) Prior to that it was a failed project run by a guy that had no idea how to code, only how to sell stuff. Here, I pretty much own the PHP coding process, and it has been far more rewarding than any previous endeavor involving PHP.

Finally, I am working with people who love what they're doing. The team is sold on the concept, and the level of excitement about what we're doing is incredibly high. I am hoping that this excitement translates to an awesome product.

Speaking of the product, we are hoping to have a beta out by the end of May, so hopefully by then I'll be able to tell a little more about who we are and what we are doing. We're still kind of in stealth mode, so we've got to keep what we're doing under the radar.

Until then, I think it's time to take my place on the couch with DarkSide and get to work.

Labels: Life, PHP, Sift

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

I'm not a phony anymore
Posted: 4:00:00 PM 0 comments

I came across this old post by Scott Hanselman via Twitter today that got me thinking. The jist of his post boils down to the fact that no matter what level of success we achieve in our lives, we all feel like phonies because there is something that is out of reach, or something in our lives that is slipping away, or something that we started that ended up being a failure.

I asked myself if I felt like a phony, and realized that for me the answer was "not anymore". So I decided to respond to Scott's Google+ thread on the subject with this:

Some years ago, I felt like a phony. So, I decided that I was going to start cleaning up all of my projects and make a good deal of significant progress on them. All of them. No matter how slow the progress, I thought to myself that if I could make some progress, I wouldn't be a phony.

I actually finished a few of those projects. But as the weeks went by, I realized something... I hated much of what I was doing. I didn't hate coding them, I hated the ideas themselves. It didn't take me long to realize that a lot of these projects that I had started were projects I simply didn't care about anymore.

When I realized this, I also realized that I wasn't really a phony. I had started so many of these projects based on a small bit of interest I had on them at the time, but deep down I didn't really care about them. Things that sounded like a good idea got a good start, but then interest waned and the projects were abandoned.

Today, these projects still exist somewhere, but I don't feel like a phony for starting them anymore. Instead, I decided to narrow my focus into the projects that I care most about. I stopped feeling like those projects that I started but never finished were my children.

It's a matter of pride and learning that too much pride is a bad thing. It's a matter of identifying what's really important to you and cutting out the things in your life that aren't. For me, my real interests lie in making music, staying on the bleeding edge of web technologies, entertaining myself with immersive games, and staying connected with those that I love. Once I realized this, it changed how I perceived everything that I do, and it made me a whole lot happer about the things I choose to do with my life.

The jist of my post is that everything in life changes. What was important to me five years ago may not be important to me anymore. Even my four primary interests today - music, coding, gaming, and life - may eventually change. And when they do, I hope that I'm strong enough and smart enough to recognize this and make the appropriate changes in my life to match them.

Labels: Editorials, Life, Phony, Scott Hanselman

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

An excuse
Posted: 11:57:00 AM 0 comments

This is the 400th post I've published to this blog since starting it almost 7 years ago. If you told me back in 2005 that I'd make this many posts before the blog became yet another side project I'd stop working on, I'd probably not believe it.

Anyway, the purpose for this post isn't to talk about this being the 400th post, it's about the excuse I'm making to write this. Which is, namely, this:

No, not the Chick-Fil-A sweet tea glass. I'm talking about my new 11" MacBook Air, appropriately named DarkSide.

I've been wanting to get a Mac for a while, but never really knew if I wanted a laptop or a desktop. Well, truth be told, I have no more room for another desktop, so the laptop was a slam dunk.

I got it at the beginning of December, and since then I think I've used this thing more than I've used any of my other iDevices. I moved my PHP/MySQL development off of Ox, my main desktop computer, onto this thing and haven't looked back. PHPStrom works just as well on this thing, and being able to use Macports to install Apache, PHP, and MySQL was a breeze.

Despite being a tiny thing - this is the smallest laptop I've owned - this thing's got all the power I need. RockMelt installed and picked up my settings from my Windows machines seemlessly, Grooveshark still plays all the music I like, and I even moved my Ventrilo client off of my web server and on to this thing.

DarkSide came with GarageBand, which piques my inner musician's interest, and getting an early Christmas present of a KeyStudio 49 certainly helps. I've already rearranged some of the spare room to have a little music space away from the rest of the noisy computers and servers, and at some point I'd love to get Reason with Balance to get into a familiar music editing environment.

On top of that, I can unplug this and use it anywhere with a wireless connection. Now, I've had Windows laptops in the past, and I've not even touched them unless we're going on long trips. This thing is almost a companion, I take it just about everywhere, and I use it when I do take it.

The only down side is that there is no real .NET development environment for the Mac, which means that for most of my personal projects I still have to sit at the desktop. I'd love to remedy that at some point, but that may not even be possible. If I had that, though, I wouldn't need to sit at my desktop ever again. Except to play WoW and Diablo III. The D3 Beta's awesome, by the way.

I've even thought about using DarkSide to expand this blog to include some video blogging every once in a while. We'll see how that works out. In any case, I think DarkSide works out as a pretty good excuse to go with post number 400.

Labels: Life, Mac

Saturday, July 16, 2011

It gets worse... but it gets better
Posted: 1:42:00 PM 0 comments

Well, the tests came back.

The Wednesday before I took off for Hawaii, I received a call in the morning from the nurse of my doctor I had just visited the day before. I remember her voice was as calm and pleasant as could be. Her message, anything but: "Your results are consistent with diabetes."

Yeah.

321 was the blood sugar reading going in on that visit, and the A1C was a staggering 13.8%. I was immediately put on medication and was scheduled a followup visit with a diabetic specialist for the Monday after vacation.

The news was, initially, devastating. Yes, it runs in the family (thanks, mom!), but being only 34 it wasn't something I expected any time soon. But life has a funny way of making you expect the unexpected, and here we are.

Since then, I've changed my eating habits somewhat, and Kathy and I approximately doubled our walks to two miles. That plus some medication has helped. Last Tuesday, my blood pressure was measured 110/70, and my blood sugar has come down to commonly be in the 100-150 range.

Everyone I've talked to that lives with diabetes has said the exact same thing, word for word: "it's not the end of the world". That's certainly true. I had tons of fun on the vacation, and after coming back life has been pretty much normal.

It was a simple eye exam that pretty much saved me from a much worse fate than medication and stabbing myself every day. The human body often changes in subtle ways to major problems like this, often in ways that you aren't going to be able to detect yourself. Please, if you aren't checking up on your health regularly, I strongly encourage you to start. Sure, having diabetes is a lot worse than the high blood pressure. But knowing I have it has made it a hell of a lot better.

Labels: Diabetes, Life

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Of Flaming Eyes and EKGs
Posted: 1:38:00 PM 0 comments

Last year at this time I got some fairly surprising news about the health of my eyes, namely Posterior Vitreous Detachment, or PVD, in the right eye. Fortunately nothing ever came of that aside from annoying blind spots coming and going in various places in my vision. I actually had the same thing happen in my left eye over the course of the past year without the fireworks I had in my right eye.

I had my annual eye exam scheduled for last Friday. The Tuesday before, one week ago today, however, I had to take a day off from work to deal with a mild ear ache. Nothing I'd normally go to the doctor for, but Kathy and I will be taking a vacation to Hawaii soon, and I didn't want anything to go wrong. Turns out it was just excess wax.

They took my blood pressure before and after removing the wax. Before, it was 164/114. Waaaay over normal. After it had come down to 140/94. More acceptable, although still high. I got the diet and exercise lecture, and thought little more of it.

Which brings us to the eye exam on Friday. The University Eye Institute is a place on campus at the University of Houston where students learn by doing the exams themselves, and then have an instructor check their work by doing the same exam again. Kathy and I like the fact that this basically results in two sets of eyes looking for bad stuff.

And, this time, it paid off.

The student didn't find anything. In his defense, they were expecting a normal eye exam, and then I hit them with "hey, I've got PVD and have had a few minor spots in my eye since". So when the instructor came back in, she looked in there and almost immediately began rattling things off. Microaneurysms. Flame-shaped hemmorrhages. After a few more tests, Hypertensive retinopathy was the diagnosis, and spiking blood pressure the probable cause.

All I wanted was a new prescription for lenses. And now I've got flames in my eyes.

Wait a second... How cool is that! Fiery eyes! That's way better than being a pirate.

So today, I visited with my doctor again, with the blood pressure running at 146/110. With the readings they have taken plus the changes in my eyes, it's become official: I have high blood pressure. They're screening for other things just to be safe, with EKGs, blood samples, and an ultrasound.

I really shouldn't be surprised. It runs in the family, so it was very likely I'd end up with it at some point or another. The best thing is that nothing serious has happened, and now I can take steps to keep the blood pressure under control. And I'm sure a trip to Hawaii won't hurt, either.

Labels: Life, Vision

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Upgrading iPad to 4.3 when you can't delete your backup
Posted: 3:34:00 PM 0 comments

I was having issues upgrading my iPad because it said I had a corrupt backup. The specific message was "iTunes could not back up the iPad (name) because the backup was corrupt or not compatible with the iPad".

The resolution, found in the comments on this page, is to manually delete the folders located inside c:\users\(your username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\backup.

Labels: iPad, Life

Friday, August 13, 2010

Social Listening
Posted: 3:08:00 PM 0 comments

I've finally jumped on board the social networking of music. Yeah, yeah, I'm late to the game, but until now, I've never had a really convenient way to listen to stuff I want to listen to, wherever and whenever I want to. That is, until now.

Grooveshark has some nifty features and is really easy to use, so I setup an account on there. I also have set it up to scrobble to my new Last.fm account as well.

You can find me on Last at http://www.last.fm/user/roncli, and on Grooveshark at http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/user/roncli/3550034.

Labels: Grooveshark, Life

Monday, June 14, 2010

"Eye" Yi Yi
Posted: 6:28:00 PM 0 comments

So it was two nights before my 33rd birthday. I was up late, tinkering with some things in Caesary, when I noticed something odd. As my eyes wandered around the web page, there were various letters coming in and out of my right eye's vision. Little tiny spots obscured my vision. It was late, but I figured I was just a bit too tired, so I went to bed, thinking it would be gone the next day.

Nope.

I got to work and noticed them again immediately. It scared me enough to see an eye doctor the following week. What they found was a little unnerving.

Vitreous detachment is a rare event for people under the age of 40, and in extreme cases can lead to retinal detachment, which can only be repaired with surgery. Fortunately, that is very low chance, and the fact that I still have 20/20 vision in my right eye gives me a measure of relief.

The process can take anywhere from 6 to 12 weeks to complete, so apparently there's a good chance that I'm going to be in for a visual show before all is said and done. For now, there's nothing good that can come of worrying about what might happen, so it's still business as usual.

But I must say, becoming a one-eyed pirate does have some appeal to it. Yarrrrrr.

Labels: Life, Vision

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Married Life
Posted: 3:01:00 AM 1 comments

Ah, the married life.

Um, it seems to be the same as unmarried life.

Anyway, it's been far too long since I've posted here. First of all, you'll notice a new picture! This is from my wedding, and probably will be the one I use online going forward, as opposed to that silly surprise smile face from 2001. I'll likely still use my side Vegas photo occasionally, but this is going to be my common photo for the time being.

I'm still heavily addicted to World of Warcraft. Six Minutes to Release is still going strong, and I have done a lot with it since my last update. Right now I'm working on updating the broken LibWowArmory to work with all of Blizzard's latest Armory changes. Woo, this post is already linkerific.

Cent has resurfaced as a project when I discovered C++/CLI. Basically, all the calls to Crystal Space are done in C++/CLI while I do the actual game logic in Visual Basic.Net. It's not been without its difficulties, though. For instance, passing a System.String from VB.Net into C++/CLI for use as a char* parameter without causing a memory leak was interesting. I finally came up with this function:

const char* Marshalling::StringToConstCharPointer(String^ strIn) {
    marshal_context^ context = gcnew marshal_context();
    return context->marshal_as(strIn);
}

So far, I've gotten a blank screen with an FPS counter in the upper right touching 2,400 fps. I'm currently working on the static loader module that loads the images, music, and other various files needed by Crystal Space. Then I get to start working on the menu, which will be designed a heck of a lot smarter than the old one was. That is, no more 10,000 line classes.

The only thing I have yet to figure out is the new event system of Crystal Space, which is probably just for lack of trying. Right now I cannot handle keyboard, mouse, or joystick input without breaking the frame processor. If I try to handle all events, the frame event doesn't fire. If I comment out the part that handles all events, the frame event works fine. I'm sure I'll figure it out with time.

My music has, unfortunately, been put on hold. I just don't have the time nor the proper equipment to do anything with it. I've probably written half a dozen songs in my head in that time, but the overall motivation to actually do something with it is mostly gone. Hopefully next year I can get something from Open Labs and get myself out of this funk.

And finally as a footnote, I am quite into Kado Kado, a competitive mini game website. I am doing really well in Iron Chouquette, Ellon in the Dark, Opalus Factory, and for some reason Cooking Lili. I absolutely hate Cooking Lili. But I'm good at it. Bleh. But seriously, many of the games are fun, and they're coming out with more all the time. You can play five times per day for free, or if you become heavily addicted like me, you can buy the ability to play more.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Cooking Lili, Crystal Space, Ellon in the Dark, Gaming, Iron Chouquette, Kado Kado, LibWowArmory, Life, Opalus Factory, Six Minutes To Release, Wedding, World of Warcraft

Friday, February 06, 2009

Deja vu
Posted: 10:44:00 AM 0 comments

Hmm. Apparently, I did post on LibWowArmory, but when I looked at my blog page the other day, it never got published. WTF?

Labels: LibWowArmory, Life, Silliness

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

I just don't keep up with this like I used to
Posted: 4:51:00 PM 0 comments

I am mildly annoyed at myself. I used to do a real good job at keeping up with what I'm doing as a way to keep contact with people out in the real world. And yet here I am, realizing yet again that it's been more than a month since my last post. Hmph.

Anyway, a lot has happened lately. First and foremost, if you don't know that I've gotten engaged, you've been out of the loop! I proposed to Kathy on the 16th at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. It's been over 7 1/2 years since we've been together. The only explanation I can gather is that I like outdoing my brother, who's got this thing he calls the "five year rule". Well, I did 50% better than ya, bro. Heh.

Anyway, the date we're looking at is June 20, 2009, which would be 8 years exactly since we met at the Seabrook Beach Club. Which is closed. Would've made for a great reception.

So the plans have begun. The bands are bought, and all of the fun of planning is on the way. Finding a ceremony and reception site, getting a planner, booking catering and a DJ, and all the other extras that go into setting up that special day. Admittedly, I feel I'm going really slow, but we're making progress.

I did take a trip to Buffalo this year, although it was a lot shorter than usual due to me mismanaging my days off at work. I promised myself I won't do that again this year, but with the wedding, I may have little choice. Anyway, the trip was out of the ordinary, as the day before I was supposed to leave it was 60 degrees! The backyard flooded some with all the melting snow from Christmas eve and Christmas day, it was nuts. Then the next day the airport was closed because of high wind and power outages. Ugly stuff, I had to miss a day from work I couldn't afford to take.

It was there that I got the idea to get proposal plans going when my mom commented, "Maybe I should take you out to look at rings." She was surprised when I took her seriously.

Also while I was there, I got to see my brother play live again. It wasn't his usual band, but they still sounded pretty good. But the place he played out, yikes. It reminded me of when I saw my sister at a similar place the year before, except this one seemed smaller and seemed like it had four times as many people in it. We were packed wall to wall.

I also extended my luck at casinos, as I posted a $200 profit from Casino Niagara. But this time it was off of a near straight flush in Let It Ride. The last card needed to be the five of diamonds for me to walk out with some awesome five digit figure. Instead it was the queen of diamonds, which was good enough for a flush. Now, what gets me is that I don't really understand why I sat down to play that game, because I normally go exclusively for Blackjack. Not only did I win on the flush, but I kept even for the rest of my time at that table. Yet the brief time I played Blackjack, I actually lost a bit. I have to wonder what kind of uncanny sixth sense I have when it comes to gambling, because I have only really lost badly once. I figure I'm up on casinos by well over $1,000 by now. Thank goodness I don't have a casino nearby in Houston, because I would be very tempted to play frequently.

Hmm. A straight flush... that would've made for a nice wedding.

Anyway, I got a lot to talk about, so I'll try to play catchup.

Labels: Blackjack, Buffalo, Let It Ride, Life, Wedding

Sunday, September 14, 2008

All's well
Posted: 4:16:00 PM 0 comments

Kathy and I are home after spending a relaxing night and morning in San Antonio, TX. The ride home was a bit rough, lots of traffic, and some getting off at rare exits along the way.

When we got home, we were excited to see the electricity in the Galleria area on, when it had been off in practically every other area we saw. Sure enough, we get home and electricity's up, and I fired up the computers to find working Internet as well. Can you believe that?

It sucks for the rest of the city, and especially Galveston, for they aren't so lucky, and may have up to three weeks without power. Kathy and I are very fortunate.

So now it's business as usual for us, safe and sound. I still don't know if I have work tomorrow, as the power may still be out and the servers there are down. I'm sure I'll find out soon enough, though.

Labels: Hurricane Ike, Life, San Antonio

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Sleepful in San Antonio
Posted: 10:55:00 PM 1 comments

We just got into our hotel in San Antonio, away from the mess that is Houston. They're estimating over 4 million people without power in the Houston area, and some may not have power again for possibly a week to a month. If that's the case, this next week has the potential to be full of suck.

In any case, Kathy and I are going to get some much needed sleep. When we get home, I'll report on how Houston is doing.

Labels: Hurricane Ike, Life, San Antonio