Kansas City: The Return

08.16.2007

Just a quick note that I've survived my adventure back from Kansas City. I've got a couple of pics and more details to post later, but for now "I'm back and ok, mom!"

Here's a few pics from the camera phone just to show how uneventful the trip turned out.

Some wierd KC sculpture?

Lunchtime in the ATL airport!

Waiting time in the ATL airport!

Lobby of the hotel I was staying at. Swanky!

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Kansas City Here I Come

08.13.2007

This week I find myself on a trip for work attending the American Correctional Association Conference in Kansas City, MO. While I'm sure the conference will be chock full of interesting and exciting tidbits to share, I'll save that for later. I'll start out by sharing my journey from my little hovel in Athens, Alabama to the big and exciting metropolis of Kansas City!

 

The first leg of our trip involves an itty bitty plane, in this case a 70-seat CRJ-700 traversing from Huntsville to Cincinnati. I lucked out on this flight in that there was nobody in the seat next to me (the flight was only half full), so my shoulder wasn't going to be crammed into anyone's face.

For those that don't know, I hate flying. I hate roller coasters, so it's only natural that I hate flying. I don't drink because I don't want to lose control of myself - well, the alcohol tends to makes me hot and sweat a lot - and flying is pretty much giving up all of that control. Add in that planes aren't made with people my size in mind. The first thing I have to do when boarding a plane is ask for a seat belt extender. Of course, the way I'm wedged into the seat I doubt I'm going anywhere, but there are FAA rules to follow.

I also have an anxiety problem, mainly at take-off. The roar of the engines,the shaking of the cabin, those fleeting moments when the god of gravity is toying with the plane about whether or not it should really get airborne. Inevitably there's a sharp turn while climbing at 70°. I am not exaggerating! But once cruising altitude/speed are reached, I'm usually ok. In preparation for this trip I made visit to the doctor last week and he prescribed something to help with my anxiety. He said that it wouldn't knock me out, but it should help with the anxiety. Cool, I'm willing to try anything.

Time to board and I get my seat with seat belt extender all to myself. I've got my iPod on and am cranking out some music to drown out the engines. My hands are sweating but not at the gallons/minute speed of past flights. Maybe these drugs are going to work? Engines roar, gravity god gets distracted, plane shakes a little and we're up. Hmmm, these little planes (before the smallest plane I've been on is an MD-80 seem to handle a little better. We fly a while and start to make the decent to Cincinnati. There's a little rumble as the landing gear lowers. There's a little rumble as we touch down. I had to look out a window to make sure we had actually landed, it was that smooth.

I also tried a little trick when hitting a couple of spots of turbulence, and this is incredibly dorky. On previous flights I tend to have a death grip on a seat, cushion, somebody, etc. Watching the ground swing to and fro, and even the wings shake doesn't help. My last flight to Miami I remember deciding to only look inside the cabin, but you can see it shake too. This time, I was going to try and treat it like a video game. I can do some insane piloting in games, so if I could just visualize that in my head, maybe I would do ok? We hit some turbulence and started to go lower. I closed my eyes and felt the plane shake, but I kept my (sweaty) palms in my lap. In my head I was playing Battlefield 2142, piloting a transport and swooping in, down, and over enemy bases. Damndest thing - it worked. Part of it was probably the drugs, but mental video game piloting helped too.

 

I had never been to Cincinnati before, so this airport was a new adventure for me. First thing to do on my list was to grab a little something to eat (McDonalds, because it was fast) and take another anxiety pill since it had been 7 hours. We were a little late leaving Huntsville, and our hour layover before going on to Kansas City was down to 35 minutes. That was until I had gulped down some food and taken my pill. At that point the outgoing plane was delayed another hour.

I wasn't as lucky in my seating arrangements on this flight. My shoulder was stuck to another guy's for an hour and a half. There was a thunderstorm we were trying to avoid, so I got to play mental video game piloting. I played a lot of mental video game piloting when making the final approach to KCI. Once the landing gear came down it felt like we were all over the place. Nose down, hard turn right, hard turn left. Even with the pills I was freaking out a little. Thankfully I had my superior flying skills to fall back on :)

 

10:35PM - Made it to Kansas City. My luggage made it too. I went and booked a shuttle to the hotel downtown I was staying at.

11:00PM - Where the hell's that shuttle?

11:15PM - Talked to the shuttle ticket guy. He thought I had gone on the 10:30 shuttle. He called for another one to come pick me up.

11:30PM - Where the hell's that shuttle?

11:38PM - Oh, there he is.

12:10AM - Greeted at the hotel with a "Good Morning, sir". People around here are as anal about that as Jerry, evidently.

Thus ends the first day of my trip. On planes. That I suddenly don't hate as much as I did when all of this started.

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Hot (and) Accountant Mother!

08.10.2007

The young'un and his entrepreneurial shenanigans have made it into one of the local papers! I like how Gina is referred to as "accountant mother". I'm going to start calling her that. It should make for some hot romantic conversations.

 

On the subject of hot, it's also been hot. Damn hot. Yesterday on the way home the external thermometer on the car hit 105°. I don't remember any 100+ days last summer. This summer seems to be making up for it.

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Not Quite A Juke Box Hero

08.06.2007

This weekend found myself and my close person first tier associate Jer partaking in Jerry & Russell's Day of Fun 2. The first Day of Fun, back in March, found us at the R/D store, the comic shop, and probably a couple of other things that I don't really remember in detail. Saturday we grabbed lunch, then went to the R/C store, followed by a trip to Wal-Mart for the off chance that they still had a Wii. After that we sauntered to the local game store and picked up a few games for the Three Hundred and Sixty. After that we went to Casa Boonies and commenced the playing of games.

Game #1: Gears of War.
Jer tends to excel at the shooting game, while I lean toward wrestling and driving games (although not together). We popped in Gears and found that we both suck at it. The controls weren't as intuitive to those of us trained on the PC in First Person Shooters as to the kids these days growing up on their hippity hop. It'll take a little time getting used to the controls on this one.

Game #2: Full Auto. I had read mixed reviews on this release title for the 360. But it mixes driving (for me) and shooting (for Jer) so I figured it was worth the bargain price I had found it for at my local CompUSA the previous weekend. Luckily, the controls were more intuitive for us than the Gears of War control scheme. We raced. We shot. We blowed up. While fun, it wasn't as graphically pleasing as I had hoped - there seemed to be a constant fish-eye perspective. Maybe I need to check those HD settings?

 

Game #3: Guitar Hero 2. Although not a rhythm game kind of guy, I had heard others speak of this game and it sounded fun - especially with other people playing. It also comes with a guitar controller, and I'm a sucker for gimmick controllers. We cranked up the Guitar Hero and played.

And played.

And played. No death. No destruction. No shooting. I think we played for about 3 hours. Nerdy middle aged white boys playing 1 level above air guitar. Hootin', hollerin', cheering each other on. I would sing along, usually trying to frantically get my fingers on the fret/buttons while singing "dammit shit shit dammit" to the beat.

Never a huge fan of the rock scene, I might have know half the songs. For the half I didn't know it was a game of trying to find the rhythm and then hitting buttons. For the ones I did know, I was playing a guitar!

There's an 80's version for the PS2. I have a PS2....

Permalink video games

Fried?

07.30.2007

I have a 5+ year old laptop that I use when traveling (for checking the electronic email on the interweb) along with some web development. The laptop originally came from Spiritus, and it was refurbished from Dell when we originally got it. There have been a couple of recalls for laptop power supplies, something about them bursting into flames, but each time I've checked the model numbers that are being recalled and I'm never in the lists mentioned.

About a month ago I was using the laptop and it suddenly went into hibernate mode. I didn't understand, as it was plugged in. After looking at the power supply, the transformer, actually, I saw that the little green LED was not lit. I unplugged the plug, then plugged it back in, and the light came on. I powered up the laptop and the battery started charging. Since then I've noticed a few times that the LED doesn't light, and I try unplugging/plugging back in until the LED lights, and then everything is copacetic.

Sometimes I use the laptop at work, and I've noticed that after I've plugged the cord in, there's an odd sound if I get the transformer near the PC. I'm not sure how to describe the sound, other than as a faint crackle.

Saturday I went to plug in the notebook at home. I plugged the cord into the wall. No green LED on the transformer. I tried again. Nothing. 5 times I tried before the LED came on. Along with that came another crackle, along with a spark from the transformer to part of the power cable. The spark managed to open up the plastic cable insulation, exposing the silver wire underneath. Then little tiny sparks traveled intermittently up and down the cable.

Normal people, I think, would gasp "oh no!" and unplug the cable. I, slightly less normal, looked closer and turned the cord to get a better look while saying "what the... cool". Then I realized the cable made my fingers tingle. "Uh oh, that can't be good." I looked at the laptop (not plugged in, by the way). Then I realized I should unplug the cord.

So I don't think it's safe to use this power supply any longer. Yes, I can hear the collective "duh" from the populace of the interweb even now. But there's nothing else wrong with my 5 year old laptop. I just put a new hard drive in it, upgrading the 30 Gig drive to 120 Gig. For what I use it for, it runs fine. So I guess it's off to CompUSA Monday afternoon to see what I can round up in the replacement power supply department.

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