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I'm thankful for a lot of things, but one thing is more important to me than the rest. I'm thankful that I got to spend this holiday alone with my wife. No relatives, no schedules to keep, just us. We were in control of our own destiny and it felt good, even if some of the details didn't go quite according to plan.
After Ian's bed-wetting experience last night and in light of his recent string of similar incidents, it was decided that a trip to the vet might be in order. I'm not sure if I got good or bad news, but the end result is that no physical cause was found, and it was concluded that he's just mental. The vet gave us a huge pamphlet with some helpful suggestions, so hopefully we can break him of this habit before Beth kills him.
Beth also wanted me to inquire about getting a teeth-cleaning for Bagheera. I kind of scoff at the notion, but she's big believer in it, so I checked it out. Turns out it costs $225, but in February ("Feline Dental Care Month") they give a $50 discount. The procedure is fairly involved - you bring the cat to them in the morning, they sedate the cat, do some bloodwork and go to town on their teeth. Then you pick them up in the afternoon, drowsy and none the wiser.
Before I went to the vet, I did some cursory surfing for info on cat dental care, and ran across this. There's one quote in particular on that page that shocked me: "A recent survey held on this site showed that only twelve percent of cat owners brush their cat's teeth on a daily basis."
I'm stunned to find out that this number is greater than, oh, 0.1%. Don't get me wrong - I believe in taking proper care of your pets, but if you're brushing your cat's teeth every day, feline gingivitis is probably the least of your worries.
Saturday was Beth's birthday, so we did something we've been talking about for a while - we visited the Wildlife World Zoo. Notable happenings there: a very disgusting camel burped at Beth, a "wild african dog" peed in my general direction (we were separated by a chain link fence and a distance of 3 feet), and Beth fed a giraffe with a tongue like Gene Simmons. The literature at the zoo states that giraffes' tongues are purple and a foot long, so feel free to draw your own filthy comparison. I took some pictures on Beth's camera, and if she's feeling bold, she may post them.
Saturday evening, we went to eat at the Melting Pot here in Ahwatukee. Their raison d'etre is fondue. We'd heard it was a very nice and somewhat upscale place, which I have to admit didn't mix with my vision of what a fondue restaurant might be.
Turns out that it was, in fact, very nice and fairly upscale but definitely worth it. It was actually a good restaurant for us: Beth enjoyed the hoity-toitiness, and I enjoyed being able to play with my food without attracting stares. The typical dinner is 4 courses. The first is an appetizer course where you pick a cheese and they fondue it up so that you can dip breads, apples and vegetables in it. You wouldn't think green apples dipped in swiss cheese fondue is good, but it is. It's the crack of the new millennium - mark my words. The second course is the salad course (nothing gets dipped here, sadly). The main course is next, so you pick your fondue style (we picked something with a long French name) and what you want to dip in it (we got the lobster/steak/shrimp/chicken combo) and then you go to town. After all that, you pick a dessert fondue (white/milk/dark chocolate or a mixture) and they bring out a plate with strawberries, bananas (the devil's fruit), pineapple, brownies, poundcake and cheesecake. All in little skewer-sized bites for dipping into (in our case) white chocolate fondue.
Then you pray for death to come. My prayers were answered in the form of "fondue farts" which, sadly, were very memorable as well. Still, it's a small price to pay and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
It's commonly said that the internet was made for two purposes: to disseminate pornography as widely as possible and to allow people a forum to rail against their fellow man using terms that would be begging for a punch in the nose in a real-life conversation.
My Halo rant covers the latter, so it's time for me to get on the bus with the former. To that end, I present this. Maybe you've seen it before, but it's new to me. You probably shouldn't watch this with children in the room, unless you wish to put them in therapy and off Pokemon and pets for the rest of their lives.
The title isn't as snarky as it might suggest at first. Take a look at the comments on this story on IMG and then read some of the comments about Halo on the IMG forums.
In Halo you have what is arguably one of the most technologically cutting-edge games, in that it uses bleeding-edge pixel and vertex shader support to draw cool effects throughout the game. But unfortunately, Halo was shown running on a G3 and a Rage 128 back in 1999 and suddenly everyone thinks that this is somehow a relevant indicator of what they should be getting today. Never mind that the demo shown in 1999 was totally unfinished, was essentially lacking most everything that makes it playable and was at least a year off from release, if not more. It was demoed in 1999 and for a lot of Mac gamers that (combined with Bungie's purchase by Microsoft) has turned Halo into the One Game That Everyone Has An Opinion On. "If Halo doesn't run on my blueberry iMac, I'll never buy another Westlake game again!" "It'd better use Altivec or I'll start stabbing monkeys with chopsticks at the zoo!" "If it isn't threaded to use 200% CPU utilization, then I'm sending over the Russian Mafia to crack some skulls!" "I'm going to pirate this game to within an inch of its life. That'll teach 'em!" Slight exaggerations, perhaps, but not by much - which is scary.
I've talked to Ken, Phil and Duane since I left Westlake about Halo, and they've done some damn good work on it. But holy god, do I ever feel for them. It doesn't matter much how good a job they do - they're up against a tide of public opinion that borders on a lynch mobbing and it's pretty much out of their control. Halo could turn your own shit into nuggets of pure, solid gold and it would still get panned for, oh, not depositing the gold into your safe-deposit box when it was done. The simple truth is that it hurts to be on the receiving end of criticism, but when the criticism is frequently "fuck you for even trying," it's the sort of thing that makes you want to just stay in bed all day with a bottle of whiskey, some pizza and a pile of "Girls Gone Wild" DVDs.
I tend to believe that the reason Halo has become such a lightning rod has to do mainly with Bungie's acquisition by Microsoft and all the wounded pride that spawned in Mac users. The end result is that some folks are (often irrationally) striking back with their full fury, and losing sight of the reality that Halo is just a game that you play for entertainment, not a religious screed about the next coming of Christ.
News flash: so what if it doesn't run on your iMac or PowerBook because you've got a gimpy video card. It's a game. And you know what? Sometimes games demand a little more from your system than, say, Mail.app. Halo isn't the first game to push the envelope, and it won't be the last.
Last week sometime, I was reading As the Apple Turns (as I frequently do) when I came across a mention of Grimace from McDonald's. This had two almost instantaneous effects.
1. I got an instant craving for Big 'N Tastys sans mayonnaise
2. I was instantly reminded of some old McDonald's collectors glasses that we had as kids, featuring Grimace, Captain Crook, the Hamburglar, Mayor McCheese (my favorite) and Big Mac.
To that end, I'm ashamed to say that I've been to McDonald's three times in the past week. Please don't let the folks at Wendy's find out. I've also been on eBay and purchased a set of said McDonaldland glasses, along with two other sets that we had as kids: a Camp Snoopy set and a set of Great Muppet Caper glasses.
It's this sort of nostalgia that makes me unreasonably happy. When I started collecting vintage Kenner Star Wars figures, it was such a rush to see and hold these things that I played the crap out of when I was a kid. And so it is, to a similar degree, with these glasses. When we'd go to the cupboard for a drink, my brother and I would go for these first thing. For the dirt cheap price I paid for these new sets, the memories they brought back were priceless.
It's safe to say that work is going full steam ahead. In fact, it's probably going full-and-a-half steam ahead. Even though Jedi Academy is moving at a pace akin to a near-light speed flight through the superstructure of an unfinished Death Star, I know that once it ends, it'll be a while before I have to go through that again.
Expect sparse and unwitty (even more so than usual) blog updatage for the near future.
When I made the move to Panther, I decided I'd give Apple's Mail.app a shot because I wanted the tighter integration with the OSX Address Book, and the new threading feature looked compelling.
What follows are my thoughts after roughly a month in Mail.
In short, I still prefer Entourage. There are lots of little things in Mail that annoy me that add up to a lot of frustration.
* Adding a rule involves too many mouse clicks. You should be able to configure rules from the application menu, not a subsection of the preferences dialog.
* The new "threaded" view is flaky. Sometimes when you click on an entry in the thread, Mail stops recognizing your clicks. You then have to click on another mail message in another thread and back again to get it to work.
* When you reply to e-mail, Mail places your cursor at the top. I hate "top-posting" and prefer to make my reply comments appear appropriately in the body of the original message. There is no preference in Mail to switch this behavior.
* My dock is on auto-hide, and getting Mail to bounce the dock icon is an exercise in frustration. If you have multiple rules set up, and the last one is a catch-all spam rule, then you have to manually add "bounce the dock icon" to each non-spam rule. Worse, if you get mail when Mail is at the forefront, the icon will bounce, and you'll have to switch Mail to the background and back to the foreground to get the icon to stop bouncing.
* I had Entourage set up to color various eBay auction e-mails (red for not paid, blue for paid and not received, green for paid and received). With Mail, I can either flag an e-mail or not. There is no middle ground.
So right now, I'm kinda regretting switching to Mail, but I'll stick with it for a little while longer. I've noticed that my e-mail archives when imported from Entourage are huge (1.8 gigs), and they're uncompressed. I wish Mail had a means to store e-mail a little more efficiently, but I can live with the standard mbox format. Hopefully Apple will continue to refine Mail and give it some much needed usability attention.
One dark horse that I'm watching is GNUMail.app. It's an open-source Mail-like client. It's not nearly as robust or polished as Mail or Entourage, but with some love and attention, it could get there.
On Saturday, Beth and I went to the Desert Botanical Garden on a whim. We were going to visit the Phoenix Zoo, but it was closing in an hour and admission was $12 a person, so we didn't think we'd get the best bang for our buck.
It has probably been at least 10 years since I last visited the DBG, and it had changed quite a bit since the last time. For starters, it looks nice and modern now. It's quite scenic, more than you'd think and definitely more than I remembered.
The guy who gave us our tickets wondered about my t-shirt; it said "Venetian gondola assoc." and was one I'd picked up when we were in Vegas. I explained this to him and he told us an amusing story about his trip to the Venetian. He and his wife were eating there in the evening and left one of the restaurants in the mall inside the Venetian. She made the comment that for 9:30pm, the sky sure was bright out. The amusing part is that in the mall, the sky is painted on the ceiling.
We got the tail end of a bonus at the garden - they were having some sort of Chilis and Chocolate festival with a variety of booths set up in the park and a cooking demonstration. We sat in on the cooking, which was for some chili chocolate tart thing. It was really, really good - the chili is used in very small moderation and really brought out the full flavor of the chocolate. Even Beth, who is not a fan of chocolate, liked the taste.
So we walked around the park, saw the various types of cacti, visited the bee and butterfly nooks, saw some hummingbirds, visited the "Desert House" and saw a garden stocked with things that grow here (that was more interesting than it sounds), and in general had a relaxing time walking around. There was live music, and in general a very artsy-fartsy atmosphere. It suited the part very well.
They have some sort of holiday luminaria thing coming up that looks interesting, so we might try to go to that. We went to the "Zoolights" at the Phoenix Zoo last year, and it was a lot of fun, as those things go. ;-) There was one part of Zoolights where they had these 4 or 5 trees lit up across the lake, and each tree would light up in different colors and pulse in time with, IIRC, the Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt.
I noticed that Corey and Peter are trading tales of woe about the weather. I'd just like to point out the hell that is November weather in Phoenix. You think it's tough in Ontario and Massachusetts, just try suffering through what we're dealing with here in Phoenix.
Honestly, 66 on Sunday? Weekends are the weather equivalent of prime-time! I need consistent 70+ degree weather, or my day is shot. It's just not fair, dammit.
The press release about Angus has gone out today, and his true identity can now be revealed.
It's Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy! It's on the fast-track for release either later this year or early next, so things are going to be hectic around my neck of the woods until it ships.
If you're wondering about the Angus connection, it goes like this: Angus Young (of AC/DC) -> he dresses like a schoolkid -> school -> academy. Yeah, it's not the greatest codename in the world, but everyone is apparently going to guess a Star Wars title any time I open my mouth, so what does it matter? :-)
Today started off with a bang - literally. Beth had today off (due to Veteran's Day) and took advantage of that to get up early and get some chores done.
I awoke upon hearing a "Ow!" followed immediately by a crashing noise. I figured one of the cats probably did something like inadvertently claw Beth and then bolted into something and knocked it over - it's happened many times before. Upon wandering into the family room, I find Beth behind the TV, bleeding from her noggin with a cable box on the floor - not quite what I was expecting!
After some dabbing, we got the bleeding to stop, but after some cleansing, we got it to start again. ;-) This is when we made the executive decision to see about getting this looked at by a Medical Professional. Let me make an aside here to mention that it's been many years since I've been in a hospital in a way that didn't involve my own employment, so my knowledge of where exactly to go was pretty much non-existent. After a call to Beth's health care (Blue Cross/Blue Shield of AZ), we determined that there was an "Urgent Care" facility down the road that would fit the bill. I honestly didn't know how this was different from an emergency room. I assumed it was less, well, "urgent" than an emergency room visit. This turned out to be the case, which was fine since this wasn't a life-threatening injury, just a painful cut to the scalp.
My firsthand experience with medical care is very limited, and my dim memories told me that it was a slow, paperwork filled process. This was also not far from the truth. We arrived at the facility at 12:05 (that's when we signed in) and we were one of two people waiting. We were ushered into an examination room around 12:20 where a nurse briefly cleansed the wound and sat there cracking jokes about if the distant rumbling noises were Beth's belly or someone dragging heavy machinery outside. (It was roughly 50-50.) Around 1:05, we finally caught our first glimpse of the doctor, who breezed in, glued her wound shut (lucky break - she was fearing stitches) and blew out probably no more than 2 minutes later. Luckily the prognosis was good - she'll live! He told us to sit tight until the nurse came back to finish up our paperwork.
So then we sat waiting for the "check out" nurse to pay us a visit. 10-15 minutes, and considerably fewer jokes, later, she came in and ushered us back to the original waiting room. We watched around 10 minutes of a bad soap opera then finally paid our bill and left. Total time, start to finish - roughly 90 minutes, with approximately 5 of it involving actual medical care from either the doctor or the nurse. There's a rant in there somewhere, but I don't have the energy to bother with it.
After some lunch, we went to Target in search of bandanas for her to wear for the next several days. This is because she can't get the glue in her wound very wet, and as a result, washing her hair is going to be problematic for the next several days. Perhaps she could get one of the cats to help lick it clean. That seems like a fair trade, since they were indirectly responsible. Plus, I don't think they'd mind.
What a way to spend her day off, eh?
When we returned from Vegas last weekend, we came back to a bed full of cat pee. And since that time, we've flipped the mattress, put on an entirely new set of sheets, bought a new blanket and Febreeze'd the living hell out of everything.
That's apparently not enough. This morning, no later than 30 minutes after I'd arisen, I returned to find Bagheera pawing madly at the sheets and Ian hiding under the bed itself, with a small puddle right in the middle of the mattress.
These cats are damn lucky to be alive right now.
OK, I'll admit it - I'm getting grey hair and it bothers me a little to have so much at age 32. But fine, I can accept that - it's the Circle of Life, after all.
What I can't grok is why AARP decided to mail me a membership form yesterday. Is the grey hair that pervasive? I wonder what would happen if I returned the membership form, complete with my annual dues of $12.50? Would I run into trouble using my AARP discount at places?
I think this is karma for my making jokes about Furr's Cafeteria in Sun City on our drive to and from Vegas. Bah.
Find out why they call them...ANIMALS!
If there's one phrase I hope to never hear again, it's the phrase "I myself" as in "I myself enjoy integrating chocolate, whip cream and Smucker's Goober into my sex life." It has supplanted "Trust me.", "Period.", "I'm/he's/she's/it's baaaaaaack" and "muwhahaha" as things that when I see in writing cause me to completely tune out the author.
Save yourself some typing and drop the "myself" - we'll all understand what you're saying. (Side note: if you need to say "trust me" to earn my trust, then you probably need to provide better reasoning to gain my trust.)
Thus ends this mini-rant. :-)
Our trip to Vegas this past weekend went pretty well. We were able to book, through the magic of Priceline, a room at the Venetian for $83 + tax, so that really started things off on the right foot. The standard room is quite large - it's got a sunken "living" area and a raised sleeping area, kinda like a suite. The bathroom was well-marbled with two sinks, a tub and a separate shower, and a toilet room. It also had a separate makeup area, so that gave us more space than we knew what to do with. The living area also contained a fax/printer, and the hotel would send you a printout of your room charges that way. I was hoping they'd give us a little gondola toy to play with in the tub, but no dice.
After our stay at the Venetian, we moved on to the Aladdin. Paul and Maureen were staying there also, and since it's changing to the *blech* Planet Hollywood at the start of the year, we figured we might as well stay there while it's still nice. ;-) And it was. The standard room was about half the size of the Venetian, but the bathroom was comparable, with separate shower/tub and a toilet room. It only had one sink, but we toughed it out. :-)
We saw "Mystere" (yeah, I know there's supposed to be an accent in there) at the Treasure Island - sorry, the "TI" - on Saturday night. It was well worth the price. This was the second Cirque du Soleil show I've seen live; the first was La Nouba at Walt Disney World. There was a lot of audience participation in this particular show, more so than I was expecting. The "audience clown" went around spilling/pouring bags of popcorn on people throughout the show, and generally being an amusing nuisance. Unlike La Nouba, Beth and I didn't get ushered onto the main stage by the clown, for which I am grateful. The theatre was a bit smaller in person than the seating layout makes it look, so our seats were much better than I thought they'd be. I'm looking forward to seeing "O" and "Zumanity" on future Vegas trips.
We watched the Bellagio fountain show from atop the Eiffel Tower at Paris, and that was pretty cool. I had no idea the tower was so tall - it's second only to the Stratosphere in terms of height on the strip. From the ground, it doesn't look like it's as tall as some of the hotel towers around it, but it definitely is.
We ate at a nice place at the Venetian whose name I forget, and had buffets at the Aladdin (my favorite), the Mandalay Bay, the Bellagio and the Paris. I don't think I'll eat again for a week.
Our iPod got a workout on the drive to and from. I had bought a few comedy CDs and audio books to listen to, and that worked out very nicely. The only gotcha was that I'd brought the power cord but forgot the iPod docking station, so we had to grab a car charger at the Apple Store in Fashion Show Mall in Vegas as we'd run the battery down almost completely on the drive to Vegas. The mall itself was nice and huge, but the Apple Store within was perhaps one of the smallest I've seen.
In the end, everyone had a good time, and very little gambling was done (although I did manage to win $50 at BJ). I look forward to future trips like this. :-)