Russellmania.com

People In My Way!

06.04.2007

I'm an easy going guy. My key in life is to make it as stress free as possible. For the most part, I succeed. Every once in a blue moon, I get a little stressed, It's not big things that stress me out, it's the little nit picky things that most people ignore or quickly forget. For the past 2 days people driving in front me have been ticking me off. Not everybody, just two people. Allow me to share.

Sunday I'm coming home from my weekly jaunt to the Wal Mart for groceries and other things I don't really need. Traffic is light, but as we near the curve on the highway a half mile from my house, everyone starts slowing down. I see a state trooper stopped in the right hand lane past the curve. Something has happened and we need to get in the left lane. No problem, with this little traffic everyone is able to move over without jockying for position. The speed limit on the highway is 60. Even though traffic is light and there are no cars actually on the road ahead of the state trooper, the car ahead of me decides to slow down. To 10. At 10 we can all gawk and look at the car that's flipped into the ditch on the right, the family of 5 that's sitting on the grass to the side of the road, the state trooper that's in his car (not needed by anyone in the accident by what I can tell), and the 5 cars that have pulled off to the side of the road. Once past gawking range, the car ahead of me zooms up to 25. The one thing in my mind is "If you make me get caught by the light on the other side of this hill I'm going to run you off the road!" We make it over the hill and the car in front of me is able to make the light as it turns yellow (he's now up to 50 at least). Since any oncoming traffic is still stopped, I went ahead and ran the freshly changed red light.

This morning on the way in to work I am stopped at a red light (the last one before getting to the parking lot!) behind 4 cars. The light turns green and 3 cars go. The guy in front of me keeps looking forward, but is reaching into the backseat for something. He's reaching instead of going. Would you @%@!#ing go! He starts to pull forward, but he's racing some imaginary turtle and wants to make it close. As he pulls forward into the intersection the light turns yellow. As you can guess, I decided to run that @#%@er and stayed on his tail as he continued grabbing for god knows what in the back seat. He pulled into the 1st parking lot of another business as I went on to work.

Red lights are my bane.

Mid-to-end-of-week Update - I've been corrected by someone in Arizona (not naming names) that red lights are not my bane, but "hurry" is my bane. I started to argue that I wasn't in a hurry, but rather I didn't want to be bothered with the red lights, but that seems to be a weak and feeble argument given that I was irritated by the slow drivers in front of me before the red lights were an issue. So with that revelation I accept that my bane is indeed "hurry" as opposed to "red lights".

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Memorial Chores

05.29.2007

Over the Memorial Day extended weekend, I managed to get a couple of chores done, while missing out on a few things that I had intended on doing.

Jacob's High School Graduation - CHECK
Take Gina Out On A Date - CHECK
Replace Dining Room Light Fixture After Putting It Off For THREE FRICKIN YEARS! - CHECK, although it was a 30 minute job that took me four and a half hours since I don't know how to follow wiring instructions.
Replace Foyer Light Fixture After Also Putting It Off For 3 Years - CHECK, and after a little learning with the dining room this one only took half an hour.
Replace Hallway Light Fixture (oh, you get the idea) - CHECK
Memorial Day Cookout At Dad's - Oops, found out Monday morning that Dad had his cookout Saturday.

I'm ready for a vacation now.

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Trek Trivia

05.22.2007

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BF2 vs BF2142

05.19.2007

Back in February, maybe late January, I started playing Battlefield 2142. I sucked at first, but with a lot of dedication I've been getting better. Here's a look at my rather pitiful stats after just over an hour of playing (you can click on it to pop up an enlarged view):

Since joining up with the Starfleet Command Gaming Clan last month, I've found not only the first message board I've gotten addicted to, but a few people to play games with. One such member is greatly experience in Battlefield 2, the precursor to BF2142. Now I'm an odd one and have never played 2142 online. I've had the game for a while, and had a single player mod that would let me play the maps, but as I've learned with 2142, real people provide a whole different challenge.

But I'm more apt to try something new now that I've got gaming buddies. So Saturday I un-modded my copy of BF2 to where it wouldn't get marked as a a modified copy by real servers, and I went out into the world of modern combat presented by BF2, lead by ww2twit76 (I love gamer tags!).

After trying repeatedly to get my mic working so we could communicate as a well oiled, precision machine of a squad, I gave up on the stupid thing and just listened for commands. Much like my early days of 2142 I died, and I died a lot. Although I was a little frustrated, I realized I wasn't dying so much from lack of skill or doing something stupid, but I was trying to learn the way the weapons of the game worked while being completely lost on the maps. Luckily my main job was to follow my squad leader Twit (nothing better than abbreviated gamer tags!) so I didn't have to know where on the map we were going, I just had to keep up.

It was frustrating. It was fun. After it was over, I looked up my "official" stats:

My status between these two games is close to the same for these stats. I've got an extra 20 minutes on 2142. A couple of things caught my eye when I compared these stats:

Even with less time, my BF2 score is a lot better.
I can't hit crap in BF2 (8% accuracy vs 21% in 2142)
Even though I can't hit crap, I've got almost triple the kills in BF2 while my death rate is about the same.

This online gaming death, destruction, and mayhem is kind of fun.

Here's a look at how I've been progressing in 2142.

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