Author Archives: Shadowtwin

Battle for the tread: Neither side is giving in

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The battle against the treadmill persists. A week into the war and neither of us is showing any signs of quitting -that disappoints me a little bit, I was hoping by now the treadmill would have succumbed to my strength and admitted that I was the victor. You know, so I could stick it out in the shed and never speak of it again.- although as far as signs of fatigue go, I am definitely showing a lot more than the bargain basement treadmill is.

I have yet to complete a full thirty minute workout. What is sad is that there is a part of me that wanted to lie about that here; write that I had completed it so that anyone who happens across this seldom visited page wouldn’t know how horribly out of shape I am. Thankfully I haven’t yet allowed myself to do that. I say thankfully because I really believe that being honest with yourself is one of the most important parts of trying to make a lifestyle change for the better. If it hadn’t been for an offhand remark by a coworker, I would still believe that I was in great shape, if a bit heavy, and finding out that I wasn’t isn’t something that I should try to hide, but something that I should try to correct. If I were to exaggerate my progression in the treadmill war it would take away from the small victories that make it possible to go from the out-of-shape lump that I have become to the slightly-less-out-of-shape lump that I am striving to be. And currently that is my goal (sort of), to just be a bit less out of shape. Ultimately, of course, to be in good shape, but to get from where I am to there, well… If you were to try to put it on a bar graph, the line for what I wanted to achieve would be vertical, and since my line of progress would be horizontal that would be a tough program to stay with.

So I will use the treadmill’s own built-in training programs as a gauge. First attempt was with a 9% incline and lasted for all of 8 minutes (that was in two separate attempts: 4minutes with 9% and 4minutes with 6%), it also left my legs so sore that I wasn’t able to do it the next day (this, again, is from (the hard surface on my shins). I just got off of the machine one week after I started using it and I made it 16 minutes this time. I was able to do it this time without adjusting the speed set by the program, and I probably could have gone on a bit longer if it hadn’t been switching back to running at the 16 minute mark. This, however, didn’t have anything to do with my shins, I was starting to get a cramp in my side.

I will admit that I am a bit disappointed that I have not yet succeeded in doing a full thirty minute program, but I have showed at least minimal signs of progress on each successive attempt which keeps me going. For instance, the previous run ended at 15 minutes, this time I wanted to better that, so I set my goal to make it 1 mile -knowing full well that it would come far sooner than the twenty minute mark. Next time I will probably aim for the 20 minute mark, but allow myself to slow the speed for the last 4 minutes until I am able to do it without modification.

The good new is that while I am not showing any outward signs of the attempts at physical conditioning (another downside to starting such a program; it can take weeks to see any results at all), I am feeling the effects of it. My lungs don’t feel like I am breathing molten fire by the tenth minute, I am starting to perspire more regularly (don’t ask), my shins are barely hurting, and, perhaps most importantly, I am not dreading the task of getting on it to do my exercise. It is becoming routine, and hopefully I can keep that up.

The shoplifter that made me excercise. Bastard!

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It was just before midnight on a Tuesday night when I saw the kids come into the store. While I have over fifteen years in retail that makes me keenly sensitive to the signs put out by potential shoplifters, these kids were throwing out signs that anyone would have picked up on: The were both so nervous as to almost be shaking, they were looking back and forth more than I have ever seen anyone not on crystal meth do, when they saw the cashiers, their eyes went straight to the floor. Long story short, this would be a beer run, and one that was telegraphed so clearly that everyone in the store new it.

Nearly all retail stores have a fairly strict policy of not pursuing shoplifters. In the past several years several store clerks have been killed while trying to stop shoplifters, and in turn, several shoplifters have been killed by store owners who fear for their lives -a situation that only comes to bear when they have made the foolish decision to pursue the shoplifter in the first place. When it comes right down to it, there is nothing in a retail store that is worth a human life, neither the store clerk’s nor the shoplifter’s, and with security cameras able to catch every angle from inside a store nowadays, it really isn’t necessary anyway.

All of this I know. But as I stood watching two kids, probably both between the ages of 15 and 17, so clumsily making preparations, it started to piss me off more than a bit. Being a salaried manager, my bonus comes directly from controlling profit and loss -which they were about to take a chunk out of- and maintaining a corporate set profit margin -which the loss directly effects-. I took up a post about 30 feet from the door and stared at them as they walked through the store, hoping that they would get the message. They didn’t. But as they made their way to the door, someone opened it to come inside, and not having to stop to open the door gave them an extra second that I hadn’t planned for when I took up my post. They were both in a dead sprint by the time they got to the door, and I had a corner to make it around plus the 30 feet to cover.

When I reached the door they were 20-25 yards ahead of me, running with, and quite possibly the funniest part of this, exactly: two 18 packs of budweiser, one 12 pack of budweiser, three 32oz bottles of gatorade, two 20oz Nestea Iced teas, and 2 bags of Cheetos Puffs. Frankly, if it had been just the beer I would have stopped at the door and let them go, but something about the random nature of the snack food just seemed so insulting that I got so angry I just couldn’t. Also, they were running towards a gold Jeep Cherokee that was inexplicably parked at our fuel drop station, nearly a hundred yards from the front door. I wasn’t going to let those little fuckers get away with it.

As anyone who played in sports knows, you can run much faster than your body thinks it can. While it is difficult to explain, you can overcome the limitations your body places on you more or less by willing it to be. I first discovered this back in High School while doing some distance running. Near the finish, when my legs could hardly carry me and my ribs were painfully cramped, I could call on this unforeseen reserve of energy to finish the last eighth of the lap as fast as if I was on fresh legs. I soon found that this energy could be called upon at will, and it made me a terror on the kickoff squad in football (affectionately called the meat squad), able to close the fifty yards in far less time than anyone my size had a right to. And while my body isn’t conditioned like it was back then, the discipline to control it is still there.

I had to make up 20-25 yards before they made it the 70 or so yards to the safety of their vehicle. Game on. I caught up to them about 2/3 of the way to their car, and that was when I realized that I didn’t really have a plan for what to do once I did. I was pretty sure they were both underage, and I wasn’t (and still am not) sure what would happen to me, or the store, if I was to injure them. I smacked the beer from the hands of the larger boy, who then looked over his shoulder to see who was behind him. He yelled something I couldn’t make out and the other boy threw down all he was carrying as well. Not sure what to do at this point, knowing that they would be leaving with nothing, I knew I had to let it go. Before I dropped the pursuit, in a final act of anger, I gave the big guy a firm push in the back which sent him tumbling to the ground. He was back up in a second and kept on running. The jeep that they had been running towards had long since taken off, having surely seen the pursuit, and no doubt knowing that if I was able to get their plate number it would be pretty easy to I.D. all involved, so both kids ran off the lot, through the desert landscaping, on the way to the freeway overpass. The Jeep was actually parked on that overpass waiting for them, but I had no intention of following them off the property; pursuing them into the lot was questionable at best, off the property was definitely going to get me fired.

As I began picking up the goods, which were now strewn about the parking lot, one of the clerks brought a couple of bags out to help me (the beer packages had split open when I knocked them from his hands, there were broken cans all over, but we could get credit on them, so it’s all good). As we were picking the items up, he said to me, “You have amazing speed for your size.” Obviously it is the last part of that line that did it. He didn’t mean it like I took it, of course, but he said it all the same for my size. As we entered the store with the stuff, the other cashier said, “You’re a lot faster than you look”. Which is really just a variation on the same theme. I know they both meant it as a compliment, but when it hit my ears it came across as “Holy shit! Lard ass can move!”

I should take a moment here before I get into the self-deprecation to point out that at 5’10” and about 190 pounds, I am in better shape than most Americans. In this deep-fried, super-sized world though, that isn’t saying a whole lot. As my weight would indicate, I am not into the range of morbidly obese. In fact I only show the weight in the form of love handles and a gut – a gut which, I am proud to say, doesn’t flop over the top of my belt when I do up my pants (you know you have seen these guys who wear a 36 inch pant, even though it cuts through the flab, and the flab hides their belt buckle). And the weight fluctuates so that in the winter I usually go about 190 while in the summer it is more like 180. I know I am not in great shape, but I didn’t realize the signs of it were so outward. But what really, really, got me to thinking about it was that I was winded, and couldn’t even speak when I got back inside. A sprint of sixty or seventy yards had never done that to me before…

If my being out of shape were purely aesthetic, I would probably let it go. At least until 200 pounds. That is a deal that I made to myself long ago: If I ever hit 200 there must be a regiment of diet and exercise put into place to get me back below that mark. The 1000 pound man, I reasoned, must have crossed that 200 mark at some point, and if he had taken action then it wouldn’t have come to a bed-ridden existence. It was the breathing and heart-rate that really had me concerned. At 34 years old, I shouldn’t be winded with chest pounding after such a small exertion. I’m not sure what role adrenaline may have played in all this, but regardless, for my health something must be done.

I don’t have the time or inclination to go to a gym, so I needed to find some sort of cardio training for the home. The first thing that came to mind was an elliptical machine. I spent a couple hours online reading reviews and found a couple that seemed to be pretty good value for the price at Wal-Mart. I looked at a few of them in store, and while they seemed sturdy enough, they were just so loud and clunky. I looked at some that cost a bit more money at Sears, including a Nordic Track, but it was just as loud and clunky as the others. I am at my most active between 2 and 4am, while my wife is asleep and I am winding down from work, and every machine that I looked at was loud enough that I feared it would wake her up if I used it. So I decided to just go with a simple treadmill.

I went for a low-end treadmill for several reasons. First, I’m not as young as I used to be, and one of my knees has been pretty screwed up since high school. I can certainly work through the pain now, but if the impact should become a problem in the future, I don’t want to have a huge investment in the thing. Second, I’m not sure just how much use I am going to get out of it. Hopefully I will continue to use this thing as preventive maintenance for my body, but I am enough of a realist to admit that I may not. Third, it is just a motor and a piece of tread, all the rest is just frills. Why does one cost 300 and one cost 1000? Can the motor or tread really be 3x better? I guess I’ll find that out in the future, and I will hope the answer is no.

And now to the whole point of this post. I had no idea just how bad of shape I was in until I got on the damn thing. Thinking I was in better shape than most (I think a lot of us walk around with that delusion) I set the incline to max, which is only 9% and started the first workout plan. 6 minutes into it I felt like I had a dagger under my ribs on the left side (a cramp) and my legs couldn’t take it anymore. I adjusted the incline to the middle setting 6% and slowed it down to 4mph (a slow jog, or a really fast walk) and still only made it a total of 9 minutes before I had to give up. I had to give up from the pain in my shins though, and if you ever played sports on a hard surface you know that the shin splints hurt like hell. If you stop when you first start feeling them you won’t be in debilitating pain the next day. So for the immediate future the plan is to use shortly every day until my shins can take a full thirty minute workout. Then I will probably get into an every other day, 30minute type thing.

So, 189 pounds and winded after 10 minutes to start. I’ll check back later.

On alcoholism (the addiction, not the disease)

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In a casual conversation with a co-worker today, the subject of alcohol came up. Since I quit drinking I have been of the mind that while quitting drinking is a great accomplishment, it is also a personal one, and not one that I really run around telling everyone about. If asked directly, however, I do freely admit to having been an alcoholic. And this was the sticking point in the conversation. Having been an alcoholic.

First and foremost, I would like to say that I don’t think anyone who has never personally had a substance abuse problem is capable of forming an educated opinion on the subject. You can read all you want to about, and know a lot about it, but without living through it you just don’t know what it is like -much in the same way that I don’t know what it is like to fly a rocket to space, even though I have read a great deal about it. Doctors are able to diagnose the substance abuse problem, but all they can really do is recommend detox and/or some form of third-party program to help deal with it.

In the conversation today, the co-worker said that I had a disease, and the fact that I hadn’t drank for a couple years didn’t mean that I wasn’t an alcoholic anymore. This is where I call bullshit. I think the key point I want to make here is that I never claimed that I had a disease. That is an important point for me to make. Calling alcoholism a disease seems (to me at least) to absolve someone of blame. I disagree with that 100%. I had a very serious addiction, but it was entirely self-induced. I don’t think a disease can be self-induced. There may have been factors that made me more susceptible to becoming an alcoholic, but again I had to make the choices to send me down the road to alcoholism. That’s far different than suffering from a disease. You don’t have much of a choice over whether you are going to have Parkinson’s Disease, for instance. I always maintained that what I had was a compulsion; an addiction. Much in the same way that I used to have an almost subconscious compulsion to bite my fingernails. I was able to overcome that as well, and to my knowledge no one has ever referred to nail biting as a disease.

Since I don’t believe that I had a disease, I think that since I quit I am just not an alcoholic anymore. I am not a “recovering alcoholic”. I quit, I am done, end of story.

The co-worker went on to say that quitting without a 12-step program is extremely difficult to do. I agree with that completely: it was hard as fuck. But I did it. He then went on to say that I had completed most of the steps of the program, just that I had done it on my own. I disagree. Here are the original twelve steps, borrowed from the Wikipedia entry for Alcoholics Anonymous:


1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Let’s just start with point one, the argument won’t get past there anyway. “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” I will agree to the latter part of that sentence, my life had become unmanageable. The first part, however, is the polar opposite of what it took for me to quit drinking. I did not admit that I was powerless over alcohol; I forced myself to admit that the alcohol was powerless over me. It was entirely my decision whether or not I would drink it, and I decided not to. That is really skipping past the reality of how difficult it was to maintain the willpower, the weeks I went with literally no sleep as my body waited for me to administer a dose of the depressant, the mornings that I would wake up trembling, knowing that with just one drink my body would relax. But that is what it took to beat this addiction, so that is what I did.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that AA works for a lot of people, and if you are an alcoholic you should use whatever means are necessary to reach the sober end. For me probably the biggest part was that I never said that I was going to “quit drinking forever”. Instead I made a choice each morning to not drink that day. If I needed to, I reasoned, I could go ahead and have a drink the next day. And the next day I would make the same decision. And then a couple of months passed, having decided not to drink each day. That is still the philosophy I use today, though I rarely even think about alcohol anymore. And if I decide to have a beer with my friends one day, I don’t think that will automatically make me an alcoholic relapsing, I think it will just be me having a beer with my friends. The me that was an alcoholic lost the battle a long time ago.

Take this post for what it’s worth to you. I just wanted to get it out there that for some admitting they are powerless over alcohol may not be what it takes to beat the addiction. To admit that you are powerless over something can be really like giving up control completely, and feeling like you have no control is what leads a lot of people to alcohol in the first place.

More dungeon, more metal

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With my posting schedule having dwindled down to nothing, I am always amazed when I check the site mail and find that there are still people reading, and that they still care to send me email. What is more surprising is the topic that is generating that email: Music.

I don’t know a damn thing about music. Sure I can play the guitar (not as good as I could back when I practiced for hours on end every day, but I still have the gear just in case I get the call from Metallica..), but my musical tastes are, at best, questionable. The Dungeon Metal that I wrote about in the last post, and one some time earlier, generated more feedback than anything I have written here that wasn’t poker related. There are two possibilities here: 1) There are a lot more people who like this type of music than I had ever thought. 2) There are only a few people who like this type of music, so few that they found my site because there are no other sites talking about it. While I refuse to believe the latter -can anyone seriously be coming to my site for actual information?- it is almost as difficult to believe the former.

Spending in excess of two hours in a car every day really gives me the opportunity to listen to a lot of music. The first few weeks I just listened to cds, but after I had worn out just about everything in my collection, the wife added me to her Sirius Radio account. There are dozens of stations on there dedicated to Rock, and many different types of it. I am partial to Octane, which plays mostly new Metal, mixed in with some classic Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, and the such, but when a band that I don’t care for comes on (System of a Down, for instance) I venture to other stations. Mostly Hair Nation (big hair bands rock!) and Hard Attack. I can’t listen to either of those stations for long though; I hate the growling, cookie-monster-esque voices of most of the bands on Hard Attack, and one can only take about so much Bon Jovi. During those times when I am listening, however, I do occasionally hear a band that I like, that I had never heard of previously. And since I had to listen to hours of mediocre crap to get to these few shining gems, I am really doing you a service by pointing them out here.

A lot of the times when I do hear a band that I like, it never merits a post here. Some of the bands, Forced Entry and Dark Angel come immediately to mind, are bands that I should have heard back in the early 90s, but for some reason missed. Since they aren’t putting out albums anymore, I don’t see a reason to tell anyone about them. The ones I put up here are currently putting out music, or at least currently enough that they have an album released within the last year or so. The one that I discovered today though has about 30 cds in the last 10 years, how the hell had I never heard of Nightwish?

These guys are like the Dungeon Metal I love so much, but take it to another level. The music is really fast, the beats are awesome, you can certainly bang your head to it… But, and I am sure I am going to lose some of you here, there is actual singing. I am not talking about a gruff sounding man barking out lyrics, or words for the sake not being an instrumental, I am talking about full-on, almost operatic singing. Looking for an example on Youtube, I found this version of Kinslayer(which is laid over clips from Silent Hill, and looks pretty good IMHO).

I understand that this isn’t the music for everyone, but if you have listened to any of the other Dungeon Metal I have posted and enjoyed it even a little bit, and if you haven’t heard any Nightwish, go listen now. You won’t be disappointed.

I am the walking dead

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I sat in front of this computer screen on Friday night with the intention of writing a humorous little post about something rather corny, the thing is I found it simply impossible to do. You see, Monday was a rather significant day in my life. As most recently recounted here, it was the day that I was supposed to die.

As the years have passed since I first started to have the dreams about December 17th, 2007, I had started to take it far less seriously. When I started having the dream, it was shortly after my father died. As I have gotten older, possibly wiser, I have started to understand that the horrific dreams I was having were probably just my mind trying to convince me that there was some sort of order to it all. Watching my father die at such a young age (both his age when he died, and my age when I watched it) had an effect on me that ran far, far deeper than just emotion, and it left me feeling like everything around me was chaotic; there was no reason for anything, things just happened. I could die at any second. While that is all true enough, I think the very sudden realization of it was a bit too much for my tender brain to cope with.

My mother was living over a thousand miles away when dad died, and through choices of my own and others I was left with my eldest brother (he is 4 years my elder) as my legal guardian after it happened. Books could be written about everything that could have (and did) go wrong with that arrangement, but for my purposes here, suffice it to say that he was no better suited to deal with the loss than I. After that, the girl that I had been dating for several years (a very significant percentage of my life up to that point) and I began to have problems. When our break-up was imminent, on the heels of dad’s death, everything that I had ever known was taken from me. Everything was in disorder and I simply couldn’t cope with it all.

My inability to cope with everything that was going on would ultimately lead me down a long, lonely road. I retreated into myself, and wouldn’t let myself get close to anyone for fear that they too would die, or worse just decide that I wasn’t good enough for them anymore -and worse yet, I started to believe that they were probably right. That sort of self-loathing played a huge part in why I started drinking: I simply didn’t care if I lived or died, and figured that no one else really did either. The battle with both alcohol and my self-esteem would take over a decade to resolve, but that is a story for another day, or possibly a story better left untold.

As for dreaming of my own death, I had always thought that it was a premonition. A frightening glimpse into the future that would be a constant reminder that everything I worked for would all be taken from me. While that may be true to a certain extent, and I think everyone probably thinks about their own mortality from time to time, I have started to think that maybe my mind was just trying to trick me into believing that there was an order to things. At a time in my life where everything was spinning out of control, my mind just kind of picked a date in the future for me to die. Far enough away that it wasn’t that frightening (it freaked me out in the beginning, and even a little right up until December 18, 2007), in fact not meant to frighten me at all, but to assure me that I had at least 17 more years to go. Of course my mind probably didn’t know that I was going to use this as license to do some pretty insane shit along the way; I felt pretty bulletproof after I started having the dreams, and as I was speeding down the freeway in excess of 160mph (or whatever crazy thing I happened to be doing), I did it knowing that I was going to live through it.

The fact that I have come to believe the dreams were just my mind trying to put a sense of order back into my life, though, didn’t mean that I wasn’t a bit freaked out when it actually got to be December 17th, 2007. When I tried to write a little something about the impending date, I couldn’t do it. And I went through that day with an awareness of what was going on around me such as I have never had before. I drove to and from work more defensively than I have ever driven in my life. I took special care to avoid even the tiniest bit of confrontation with others (I stopped short of catching a teenage shoplifter in the parking lot at work. I had his license plate, and we had it on camera, no need to take a chance on him having a knife and an attitude).

As an aside, I got my promotion at work somewhere near the middle of October. Through clerical and accounting errors, I was not receiving my paycheck. Each payday the District Manager was having to email the corporate office to get them to write me out a check. This week was the first week that I received a salaried check without all the fuss. The date of the check? December 17th, 2007. So I didn’t actually die on that date, but I certainly started a new phase of life. Maybe it was a premonition.

Dungeon Metal!

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I have always liked what I refer to as “dungeon metal”. I have never seen anyone else refer to it as such, but when I listen to old Yngwie Malmsteen that is still what I think of. This type of music was huge in the late 80s and into the early 90s, but I hadn’t really heard a lot of it lately.

I happened to catch a Dragonforce video on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball (I thought they canceled that when grunge and hip hop pushed metal into the underground in the mid 90’s), and downloaded a couple of albums. Pretty good stuff. The guitarwork is excellent, the beat is fast, but the vocals are mixed so loud that they really take away from the song. In this type of music, the vocals are really irrelevant IMHO, the less you hear of them the better. This guy’s voice in particular sours me, it is just too … I dunno … happy maybe? Not looking for growling here, but it really shouldn’t sound the like the vocal track could be taken as is and laid over an Irish Spring commercial. Like I say, the music is awesome, and the vocals aren’t really that bad, but I can’t just sit and listen to it, mostly because of the vocals.

Last night I happened to hear a song by Symphony X on Sirius satellite radio, and was curious enough to look at some song samples from recent albums. This is exactly the kind of music I am talking about. The one I linked above is heavier than most of their stuff, but it sounds great. Probably a more representative song would be Paradise Lost (the vocals are mixed pretty heavy in that as well, but you get the idea). The music is awesome, and the vocals just add another layer to it. It could almost be classical music if you were to take away the distortion -which is pretty much what I am looking for.

I’m sure this isn’t the type of music for everyone, but if you really like the musical side of some of the great Metallica songs, particularly the instrumentals, you should check these guys out. They write excellent melodies and the songs flow smoothly. Not so overly loud as to be deafening (again, IMHO), but heavy enough to be rock. Sort of like an opera without the the falsetto vocals and done in English. Some songs are relaxing, some are invigorating, and I have yet to hear one that I just dislike.

And coming from me, that is something.

Compaq: an old Indian word meaning huge, steaming pile of SHIT.

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I know that I have made mention of the three computers that I keep running in my office on this site before. Reasoning was thus: One for me, one for the wife, and one just in case either of ours happened to go down. If you have ever had to go without your pc for even a few days, you will certainly understand the potential benefit of having another one, with all your software and the such already loaded onto it, right next to your main machine. So each time I bought a new machine, the eldest of our three would go to a needy relative (Hi Mom!) while ours would rotate so that the newest was the wife’s, the oldest was the backup, and I generally always have the middle machine. So you see I absolutely knew that one of our machines would go down at some point, and I had planned for it pretty well. I just never really expected that it would be our third machine that went down.

It happened after a power surge a couple of months ago. Some cursory exploration under the cover led me to believe that it was just the power supply that had gone out, but as this was the eldest of our machines, I wasn’t sure if it was worth it to me to fix it. Its 1.8Ghz processor, 512mb of RAM, 80Gb hard drive, and 256mb video card are pretty dated by my household standards, and the parts aren’t replaceable to any other machines on hand (still using standard ddr ram, not ddr2. Video card is AGP and none of our other machines have such a slot. I could recycle the hard drive, but being only 80gigs, I could also replace it for about 20 bucks at this point). So for a couple of months I let it go, wondering if I should indeed replace our third computer.

Over the months that passed while I was debating whether to replace it, I kept my eye out for specials at Wal-Mart and Best Buy, my go-to places for getting good prices on the base eMachines that I like to buy for upgrading. But during this time, I came to realize that I really like having the third machine around. Since we have always had a spare, my mp3 library is backed up to it, and I listen to it over a set of speakers that are run through a shelf stereo unit with speakers directly beside my pc speakers. This takes the load off of my own processor (a must for gaming) while making it much easier to adjust the volume of the music without having to also fuck with the different device volumes on the games, audio player, and windows components on my machine. Lately I have also been listening to Sirius satellite radio online since it comes free with the subscription, and of course the streaming is another burden that really should be avoided while gaming if at all possible. The absolute worst of it all is when playing the mp3s through the audio player. Whenever it switches songs there is about a half a second where my keyboard controls will become unresponsive in game. As anyone who plays online games can tell you, a half a second can easily mean your life. And it did, on several occasions.

Because of all of that, I started my search for a new machine in earnest about eight weeks ago. I wasn’t able to find an eMachine that met my simple criteria -had to have a faster processor than the old one, double the hard drive, expandable to 4x the memory, and a PCIe video slot. At least I couldn’t find one being sold without the monitor, and I certainly have no need for the monitor when I already have three LCD monitors (two 19″ and a 15″ on the backup) in the room. Instead of waiting until I did find a suitable eMachine, I made a horrible, horrible mistake. I bought a Compaq.

The support and drivers page for it can be found right here. If you ever should buy a Compaq, you will no doubt be spending a lot of time there. No doubt by now you have probably figured out that this isn’t going to be a glowing praise about the Compaq, so I may as well dive right into this.

I took the new computer out of the box, plugged in the basic cables (mouse, keyboard, monitor and power) and turned it on. After about a minute, it said “Please wait while windows prepares to install for the first time……” and it stayed that way for, well, I left it for about an hour, knowing that it was completely frozen (pc working light not flashing), for about an hour before doing a hard reboot. Straight out of the box, touch the power button once, computer freezes on boot. Try a second time, gets through that initial part but freezes on the page where you enter your information to register Windows. Call Wal-Mart, they don’t have another in stock, but don’t sound too enthusiastic about exchanging it anyway. So, I tried the only thing I could think of: I used the system restore disc that came with the PC. Never actually loaded Windows, but already reinstalling the OS. Not a good sign.

After using the restore disc I was able to get the OS loaded and download current drivers for my DSL modem. After that the thing would freeze absolutely randomly. Could be 3 minutes, could be 6 hours. I restarted it in Safe Mode several times over the next few days as that was the only way I was able to keep it running long enough to actually download and install some of the drivers that it needed. The motherboard driver, for instance, is outdated. There is a new one available for download from the above-linked site, but why wouldn’t they include a current driver when they actually boxed up the machine?

Anyway, I spent the next couple of weeks thinking that maybe it wasn’t the new computer that was having problems, I was blaming it on Windows Vista. I have no experience with Vista, but I do have some experience with Windows ME, and the problems I had with that OS were very similar to the problems I was having with the new, Vista-installed Compaq. I was trying to soldier through the problems by uninstalling every program that it was running. This included the antivirus software, automatic update, windows firewall, anything I could think of that would be connecting with something outside of the computer itself (the freezing seemed to happen most often when downloading over the network), but I eventually took a day to just try to figure out what the fuck was wrong with it. Here is what I found:

Tested Video Memory from Windows: Failed. hmm. maybe something serious.

Tested Hard Drive from BIOS: Hardware Error.
Tested RAM from command prompt: Failed hmm. maybe somthing REALLY serious.

I installed a known working PCI video card, and known good RAM into it (changed the path to make it ignore the integrated video) fired it up and ran the same tests, with the same results. So the only thing left to do was *cringe* call customer support. While I didn’t actually keep a transcript of the call, I can assure you that at some point I did tell him that the problem was that “the very first time I turned the power on, before I connected it to a network of any sort, I turned the power on and it froze before it could finish windows installation.” and he really did reply with “This is a sign that you have downloaded a virus.” I told him several times, yelling at him a couple of them, that I had not connected the modem or network card to anything, only the power cord. And he said, I shit you not, “A virus can be transferred over any cable connected to your computer.” So he is saying that the fucking power cord is where I got my virus, I mean it is the only thing that was connected to both my computer and anything else.

I had to talk to this moron for at least an hour. This guy is proof that people in other countries (I believe he was from India) really do watch American television, and it dumbs them down just like it does our own native sons and daughters. Certainly not the type of influence to be proud of. He made me try to use the system restore disc again, but blissfully it froze in the middle of that process. His response “It should not freeze during system restore. The virus should have been eliminated with the drive reformat.” So an hour in I think I have him believing that there really is something wrong with it, until he says “Unless you have a boot virus.” Dumbass.

After a time I was transferred to a supervisor. Being the senior technician on staff, he also spoke the best English. Aside from a very sleight accent, the only thing that gave away that English was his second language was the quote “My name is XX, I will provide you perfect customer service and make satisfactory your problem.” He was at least willing to take me at my word that this wasn’t a simple driver problem. He asked if I knew how to access BIOS, and had me check a couple of stats from there (hard drive type, Boot Path, a couple of other things) then said to try one last time to turn it on. When it froze this time, he had an empty box overnighted to me to pick up the defective piece of shit.

Along with the empty box there was a page that said, “Please describe your problem in as much detail as you can.” Unfortunately I didn’t think to save a copy of the message that I included. I tried to keep it under 2 pages, figuring they would quit reading by that point anyway. I told them every symptom it had, gave a list of some of the specific error messages I was getting, some from the event log (a Modulo20 error kept appearing while testing the RAM), and details of every piece of hardware that I had changed out attempting to isolate the problem. I concluded it with “I will guarantee you that either the Motherboard or the CPU are defective. Please let me know which, I am quite curious by now.”

I got the thing back today. While they didn’t specifically reply to tell me what was wrong with it, it did have a copy of the service report, which reads as follows:


Repaired (The customer problem was duplicated during full diagnostics)

Failure: MB118 No boot/Hangs at POST
Failure: RC514 TATTOOINFORMATIONINCORRECT-MODEMBF2 TATTOO MOTHERBOARD
Failure: RC515 SWReloadedduetoCorrupt/MissingRecoveryPar
Failure: MC912 LocksUpConsistently MBF 1 Replaced Motherboard
Failure: RC515 SWReloadedduetoCorrupt/MissingRecoveryPar
Failure: VC316-1 VideoMemoryTestFails
Failure: CP512 ConstantLock-UPS/ApplicationandOSERR Replaced CPU

Since one of the error codes is there before the motherboard and again after, I must assume that this is the exact order in which they got these errors. Guessing by the incomplete descriptions, it looks like they attempted to reinstall the software -just as I had- from a disc. The recovery partition of the hard drive was destroyed when it froze up during the attempt to restore it. After that they were still getting lock-ups and video errors. So they replaced the CPU. I was almost right, I said it was either the motherboard or the CPU, I never dreamed they would have sent it to market in the first place if Both of them were defective

The repair was free of course. And aside from being treated like an idiot by a nameless schlob in India, I don’t suppose the service was too bad. I have yet to plug it in since getting it back though, so I won’t set forth any judgment about the service over there just yet.

But seriously, how does it make it out of the shop when the first time you touch the power button it locks up?

How I spend the better part of my life

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I have always been a gamer. When Atari hit the shelves back in the early 80’s, or when it hit our television set to be more specific, I was absolutely hooked. I was intrigued especially by the game Adventure. The game wasn’t much to look at, and seems beyond horribly cheesy by today’s standards, but back in the day that was my first experience with honest-to-gosh action/adventure games. My fascination with Adventure would actually go on to influence my console purchases over the next decade or so.

I must have been about 14 or so when we got our first Nintendo. There were several games that came along with it (I believe we bought the system with games at a yard sale), one of which was The Legend of Zelda. I was an instant addict. Here was an adventure game that was far more expansive than my previous experience in the genre, and there were actual graphics and gameplay! Many times I stayed up overnight playing that game, forever trying to save the princess.

There were a couple of other games for the Nintendo that caught my fancy for a time back then. Faxanadu is the first one that leaps to mind. That stands out in memory as the only adventure type game that I was never able to complete. This may have been because I never actually owned the game, so my play was limited to the 24 hours I could get it from the video store back then.

I was 16 at this point, and had just started working. When I decided to buy a console of my own, Zelda and Faxanadu would influence my decision a great deal. In an odd twist however, they would actually lead me away from the Nintendo platform.

A teenage gamer is a pretty shallow creature, and I was of that group. My friends were based more on their machines and game selection than their character or even whether I actually liked them. The next generation of consoles was just hitting the market, the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo were in competition for my paycheck and in due diligence, I made it my mission to play every title I could on both systems before making a purchase.

I chose the Sega. I made that choice for basically two reasons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun and Shadowrun. Warriors of the Eternal Sun carried on my love for the fantasy genre. It was the next similar to Zelda, but with better graphics, a better interface, all the things that influence my game purchases today. Shadowrun was completely different. This was my first experience with a more Sci-Fi type fantasy. I absolutely loved this game, but was never able to get involved in any other games from this genre (although I am still anxiously anticipating the release of Hellgate:London, just to see if the fire still burns).

When I moved to Arizona, I came without a console. The Playstation was released a couple of years after I got here, and I bought one of those as soon as I could. This would be my first experience with Final Fantasy, and it would last for many releases thereafter. There were many, many other similar games for the playstation platform. While I remember Suikoden and Vandal Hearts as being a couple other favorites, I also remember that they were just the ones I happened to grab out of dozens of similarly themed games.

When my wife and I got our first PC, I was still playing games on the playstation. As a result of that, she spent a lot of time playing games on the PC. She started playing a game called Diablo. While I played it in bits and pieces, I was never able to get as involved in it as she was -what with my neverending quest to save my girlfriend awaiting me on the playstation. However intrigued I may have been by the initial Diablo game, I was still a console gamer.

Sometime in the year 2000, my wife made mention that she would really like to get a new game for the PC. It was Diablo II. Being the loving husband, I bought the game for her. Our PC was so ancient at the time though that I often had to tweak a lot of settings to make games run, so I wanted to install it and make sure it was playable before she made it home from work that day. That was what I would really consider the precise moment that my gaming went from a pass time to an (unhealthy?) obsession. I just stepped out of the little village to make sure everything was loading correctly, make sure the machine wouldn’t freeze up, etc. Hours passed. It was with reluctance that I let her play it when she got home later that day.

I bought a laptop computer later that year, as well as another copy of Diablo II. That way we could both play it at the same time. When the Lord of Destruction expansion was released, we got two copies, on the day they were released. When we moved from our studio apartment to an actual house, we set up a room for the PC, but I mostly played on the laptop so that I could watch TV with her in the living room.

I continued playing Diablo II: Lord of Destruction well after she had given it up. And would probably still be playing it were it not for a chance click-through on an ad at the diabloii.net website. “E3 for everyone!” it said. A demo weekend of a new game called Guild Wars. We both enjoyed that game so much that by the time of its release, we had a second computer set up in the “office”. We would go on to get headsets to communicate with other people in the game and eventually buy multiple accounts..each..

The simplicity of Guild Wars would lead to it falling out of favor in our house. Character level max was only 20, so it was possible to take a character from creation to max level in a day (if helped) and with a limited amount of gear and skills, your character was no different than anyone else’s. With one patch they started offering titles for certain goals. Protector of Tyria, for instance, was available to those who had completed all missions and bonuses on the Tyrian continent. This was what we did to keep ourselves playing the game after having completed it on multiple characters.

Then Guild Wars made a huge mistake. They were going to implement difficulty levels. You would have to complete all the missions and bonuses on Hard to get a title. So we would have to go back and replay every mission to get the title. This pissed off the wife something fierce. In fact I think it was on that very day that she downloaded World of Warcraft.

With multiple characters, multiple professions, and 70 character levels, this one takes a while to get through. I don’t remember exactly when we started playing it, but we have been playing it ever since leaving Guild Wars. 1 person from our old guild made the switch with us, and it has been a lot of fun bringing up our new characters from lowly n00bs -especially so after having had all the elite gear that Guild Wars had to offer.

So that is where I have been all this time, and where I will likely be going as soon as I hit publish on this post. While I have made it to level 70 with one character, I have others at 53, 51, 46, 35 & 15 that I still need to play. Plus even the highest level one (a mage named Nukenheimer ((I wanted to name him Oppenheimer but didn’t think anyone would know who that was))) hasn’t maxed his professions yet.

And once I have completed all the goals I have in this game, I am sure that there will be another to take its place.

Mental Giants: The Wal-Mart cashier

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Sometimes I have to interact with people who really aren’t very intelligent. In fact that happens most days. Sometimes I find it humorous, sometimes it makes me angry, it really all depends on the mood I am in going into it. Well, that and just what their incompetence happens to be. While I may find it funny when someone is trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole, it is more likely to make me angry if I suffer a loss of time or property as a result -say like if I owned the peg and hole they are trying to mash together.

I find that the most common form of incompetence that I run into on a day to day basis is Math. I suppose that makes sense, since every time I make a purchase at a store it involves Math (well, nominally, since most of the transactions are strictly card-based at this point). The thing is that I have always been good at Math, so I can’t understand how someone can struggle with it. I am not talking about Calculus or Trigonometry here, I am talking about very basic addition or subtraction; the type of 2+1=3 crap that you have to learn to make it out of the first grade.

A good example of this is when you are buying something at a convenience store and the total comes out with a few cents change. Say the total is $3.14, and you give the clerk a $5. After they have already entered that in the register, you realize that you have the 14 cents and hand that to them as well. Now they are staring at a screen that tells them to give you back $1.86, but also holding your 14 cents, and sometimes they just can’t do the math in their head. I try to help them along when I see them struggling with it; “you owed me one eighty-six and I gave you fourteen, that makes two-hundred.” If they don’t get it pretty immediately (usually claiming a brain fart or something) I will just take the change back. No sense ruining my day and theirs over a pocketful of change. If you are feeling really sadistic you can take this to the extreme: when the total comes to $6.86, give them 12.11 and watch them stare vacantly.

Anyway, the particular circumstance that I ran into today was something much simpler. I had to buy a new air conditioner for my bedroom, so I found myself at Wal-Mart looking over their selection. Of the three that they actually had in stock, the two that were still in boxes were far too small for the room. That meant that my only real option was the larger display model. I am no stranger to buying display models. Basically you get an item that has never actually been used, but that item may come with a couple of scuff marks on it, and you get it for a decent discount -just how decent the discount depends a lot on the store, since many stores just do a stock 10% or 20% discount for floor models, and they don’t allow their cashiers any latitude for negotiating. Such was the case with the air conditioner at Wal-Mart. 10% off the already reduced price (prices on air conditioners were slashed somewhere around the end of June, that I know because I was trying to find one for my office at the time, but couldn’t find one to fit a vertical window opening).

I can’t find the exact machine that I bought on the Wal-Mart website, but this one is damn close. The price was reduced to $217.00 from the original $237.00, and they were going to give me an additional 10% off. That was going to put it right about the same price that I paid for the tiny little machine that it was replacing, so I was all over it. I threw that bad boy in my cart, making sure that the department manager put a note on the tag reflecting that the discount was in addition to the marked price, and made my way to the register.

I got to the register and waited as the cashier keyed in the UPC code, hoping that it would ring up at the discounted price. It took her three tries to get the code right, but it did indeed ring up at the $217.00 price, so I was halfway home. Then the register prompted her with the message “enter reason code”. I thought for sure that there must just have been a button that she pushed which allowed for an immediate 10% discount, but alas it was asking for the reason she had to manually enter the UPC in the first place. After she looked up and entered the code for that, it was time to get to my big 10% savings. The cashier pulled a small scrap of paper out of her trash can and began to write the following equation on it:

217.00
x    .10
________
    0 0 0 0 0
2 1 7 0 0
________
2 1 7 0 0 0
I shit you not. She wrote the equation down, complete with the multiplication sign, did the long multiplication, then added the columns together. After which she counted one too many decimal places over and proudly declared that my discount was $2.17. Of course I corrected her, saying that $2.17 was 1%, $21.70 was 10%, and she didn’t believe me. She walked over to the manager’s station (whatever happened to calling for help?) and came back a few minutes later with the receipt paper from a 10 key, where someone else had actually taken the time to multiply the whole thing out instead of just moving the decimal point one to the left. Anyway, now she knew that the discount was $21.70, so I figured that all she had to do was type that into ye olde register and I would be able to pay and get on my way. Instead, she started writing the following equation on her piece of scrap paper:

217.00
– 21.70
_______

In the time it took her to actually write that down, I had subtracted 22 from 217 in my head then added 30 cents back onto it (I always do it that way too. When subtracting odd decimal amounts I always round up -even if the decimal is like .08, I will subtract the next whole number then add .92 back to it. Since that is the way I have always done it, I don’t have to try to remember if I rounded up or down. It is always up. Of course that is just me). I told her it was $195.30, and she just kind of stared at me. She didn’t even try to do the subtraction on the scrap of paper, just headed back over to the manager’s station. Why she didn’t think to go ahead and do that the first time she was over there is beyond me. A few minutes later I was pushing the cart out the door.

I won’t fault the woman for not being able to subtract the 21.70 from 217 in her head, not everyone can do simple math that quickly, I accept that. What I will fault her for, and her manager as well, is actually doing the math on a 10% discount. I mean, it’s 10% FFS, that’s not Math, that’s moving a decimal point! I would lay down even money that any child in the third grade could have done that without having to resort to a calculator.

When the woman actually started writing down the equation for the 10% discount, at first I was going to get angry, then I was going to laugh, then I was kind of dumbfounded. I imagine that I must have looked much like that guy I handed $12.11 to at the convenience store earlier…

Happy new keyboard day to me!

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When I initially set this site up all those years ago, I never really planned for it to become a daily “blog” type thing. That just sort of happened. Much in the same way that I never intended for it to become a daily thing, I also never really planned to stop posting, that also just sort of happened.

As I write now, I have just had a birthday (33 candles, happy birthday to me!). As I sit and think about it, I have had more changes in my life -very drastic changes- in the last year (18 months to be fair) than I had experienced in the other 31+ years leading up to it. Without going into too much boring detail, I will just say that now, for the first time I can really remember, my life doesn’t suck. I am not unhappy. I can’t think of anything that I would really want to change or improve (sure I would love to be rich, and I have always wanted to have chiseled abs, but one mustn’t be greedy). A lot of what I used to post about here was self-deprecating, and with the changes in my life over the last year or so, I am just about out of that type of material. I guess what I am getting at here is that happiness just isn’t a very rich subject to write about.

That is the deep, philosophical reason for why I haven’t been posting anything lately. Now for the shallow, material reason that I haven’t been posting anything: My keyboard sucks!

I bought a new keyboard about a year ago, I remember writing a post about the process, but I can’t seem to find it now. Anyway, I always have a problem finding a keyboard because it has to, and I mean has to have four very simple features:

1) It has to be a v-shaped keyboard. Most companies call that “ergonomic”, but I happened across a keyboard that used that term for a standard keyboard. I guess having some wrist padding on the front of it also qualifies it as such. When I do get to writing, I write a lot and I write pretty fast. A standard keyboard starts to really burn on my wrists after only thirty minutes or so of concentrated writing action, so when I do decide to write something, I need the relative comfort of the v shape or it is right out the window.

2) The left, down, and right arrow have to be lined up side by side. I always thought that this was the only configuration for them until I started trying to find a new keyboard. For some reason a lot of keyboards now have all the arrow keys lined up almost in a cross pattern; like a video game controller. I can’t use them when they are set up like that. When you spend 30 years typing on them in one configuration, it is difficult to change to another layout. So any keyboard that doesn’t meet this very simple standard is out of the question.

3) The backspace key has to be a double-sized key. I am so used to using a larger backspace key, and I use it so often to correct myself while typing that if it is a standard, letter-sized key, I will end up with sentences that look like this “Teh=he cow jumpd=ed over teh=he mon=on”. That is assuming that the key next to the backspace is the “=” key. I don’t look at the keys while I type, but I also don’t really look at the screen. When I am typing, I am putting it to paper (well, the keyboard) as fast as I am thinking it, and I know, even without looking at either, when I have made a mistake. I will correct the mistakes as I go without ever having to look down. Unless, of course, the backspace key has been secretly replaced by another key, in which case I will be throwing a whole bunch of random characters in that I will have to go back and decipher later. So, no double-sized backspace key, no keyboard for me.

4) The [insert][home][page up] keys have to be in a single row right above another row with the [delete][end][page down] keys. For unknown reasons, some keyboards have changed those rows to being only 2 keys wide but three keys high. That may save them a fraction of an inch in overall keyboard width, but it seriously fucks with me when I am trying to find the keys. I may not get a hell of a lot of use out of those keys, but they need to be where they should be, and in the right damn order, when I do need them.

It would seem like those four things would be easy enough to find in a keyboard, but in practice, it is hard as hell to find all four on the same keyboard. First off, it seems that the v-shaped keyboards are falling out of favor. It used to be that if you searched keyboards at any pc supply website, you would get at least half of the returns for v-shaped ones. Now it seems that there are usually only one or two, usually either Microsoft or a brand that you have never heard of. Never anything in the middle of the road on that one. Not a cheaper one from a company that you may have bought some other product from to be able to judge whether you would like it or not based on previous experience (unless you count Microsoft, but if I get to basing whether I will like a keyboard on how much I hate the latest version of their OS, I will never buy another MS product. I still think it has been straight downhill since windows 3.1), either Microsoft of Nakashimiashi. Nothing else.

The last time I bought a keyboard, every Microsoft keyboard that I could find was missing one of my four key features. In fact the only keyboard that I could find which actually had all four was a Belkin, which I am sure you will all recognize as the leading manufacturer of pc accessories (I put that in as sarcasm, but for all I know they really are). The keyboard looked just about like this one:

I started having problems with it almost immediately. Since the shape of the keyboard is basically like a little hill, with the t and y keys right about the top of it, one would assume that the keys were somehow set up so that the keystrokes would be slightly off from straight down. One would be wrong. So while my hands were not sitting flat, it was required that I push the keys down straight, else they would be hard to push, and also stick a lot. This was a nuisance for sure, but something that I got used to since it was my only option other than a keyboard that either wasn’t v-shaped, or one that was missing most of the other features I was looking for.

As time passed though, the problem got much, much worse. The last time I actually tried to type anything other than an instant message on it, I had to spend at least 3x as long correcting myself as I did writing it in the first place. The keys were sticking on nearly every word, and some of them didn’t get pressed hard enough (or straight enough down) to show up at all. Note that the keyboard still function just fine, you just have to hold your hands slightly raised from it while you type. If you rest your palms in their natural position, you can’t push the keys straight down. That is both maddening and painful.

After having to type something on my pc, the wife decided to gift me a new keyboard for my birthday. See, she hated it so much after just one session, and a short one at that, that she had to do something about it. She ran into the same wall when trying to find a keyboard that was suitable though. When she finally did find one that matched all of my criteria, it was actually a Microsoft one. The one that she bought me looks just like this:

The layout of the keys is right, but the shape is just a bit odd. Some of the keys really are curved a little bit, and it feels a bit odd to type on it. However, it doesn’t seem to be having the same issue the old one did when it comes to pushing down the keys. Also to note that I didn’t install whatever it was that came on the cd with the thing. I have never done that with any microsoft product that I have plugged into my machine; every problem I have with my pc is with a microsoft product. Be it windows or messenger (which I use very rarely, and which always encounters an error on close), every pc problem is microsoft related and I somehow doubt that adding more ms products to it is likely to help -like putting gasoline on a fire to put it out. For now it seems to be working just fine for me.

And who knows, maybe if the keyboard works out okay for me, I might go ahead and throw a post up here from time to time.

I make no promises.