Damn You, Garage Door!

10.05.2011

My garage door hates me. I hate it back. Yesterday when I got home from work the garage door wouldn't open. After entering through the front door, which is just wrong for me, I went into the garage and discovered the cable running to the drum on the tension spring was no longer attached to the drum. The door is stuck closed, which is what I prefer if it has to be stuck. The car is outside, the mower is inside. I need to mow, but can't. Awwww, shucks.

This has happened before, and I had to get Mike to fix it since it's more than I can manage with my set of hands, and if you look for instructions on the Google for how to fix such a problem every post/entry/suggestion you find will say "hire a professional to fix it or you'll kill yourself".

Over the past 13 years of living in this house, the garage door has broken 2 other times. The last time was the exact same problem (which Mike fixed a couple of years back). The other time was more traumatic, as the tension spring came out of the wall, causing the garage door to pretty much collapse since it's made of sections that are kept together by the tension. Even worse, the car was inside that time, so I was stuck at home until someone got the door fixed enough to open all the way. It was then I discovered how hard is is to get a garage door repair business to come to my house.

For as much of the house as I've renovated and replaced, I don't know what's keeping me from replacing the garage door. I hate that thing. Passionately, at times. Mike's supposed to come by tomorrow and take a look to see what it will take to fix (again). I'm going to see what replacement options I have.

Permalink random renovation/remodelling

Taking A Little Break

09.29.2011

It's been a week or two since I mentioned anything game development-wise. Quite simply, it was time to take a little break from trying to make something and instead PLAY something! My biggest accomplishment on the development front was for Joe, who's been trying to export the soldier from the boot camp demo.

Lots of people try to pull the soldier out of the tutorial level, and it's a good exercise. Like most things in the Unity world, people want to pluck out the soldier and plop him in their game with no effort, and that just isn't going to happen. One forum post led me down the path of selecting the soldier, then finding out what the dependencies are and exporting all of that. While that's a good first step, you still need to go through the code and take care of missing references to get the soldier to compile. I managed to fill the holes of missing function calls and the like, but it's still not optimized - I've still got a "birds" script sitting around that's required to compile. Why does my soldier require a bird?!?!

After a couple of hours of messing around with the above I decided it was time for a little change. I had been working through the Burgerg Arcage tutorials and had gotten around Tutorial 90, then I needed a break from Petey's voice. I like his style and I've been learning a lot, but after a couple of weeks his pronunciation of certain words ("array", "project") was a little too much for my southern ear. I went from there to 3dBuzz's 3rd person camera tutorial, and worked through 3/4 of those until I got to the point where I was happy. They went into a lot more detail, and if you don't have a membership/the character model they're using, it's hard to keep up and see the difference at a certain point.

After all of this, I had spent so much time over the past couple weeks (maybe months?) learning to make games, I hadn't played any. Although there's a part of me that would think it's a waste of my productive time to be playing when I should be making, I may be heading down the road of making something that would suck. So there I had it, my excuse to go play! And play I did! I've had some games purchased and loaded for months that I never even started up. I would start up a game and give it a try, and if I didn't like it I would just move on to the next one.

Game #1 was Warhammer 40K Space Marine, a 3rd person futuristic shooter. The first thing I disliked was the camera angle. I wanted it to move around more. I think this has become the defacto camera angle since Gears of War, but having only played Gears for 15 minutes, I'm not real sure. The enemy AI seems stuck at "charge player to point blank, Grrrr!". While probably a good game in it's own right, after 15 minutes I decided it wasn't what I wanted to play after a multi-month hiatus, and moved on.

Game #2 was Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale. This game has gotten horrible reviews so my expectations were prematurely lowered. Once again, I was hating the camera. You can swivel around your character, but there's no vertical movement to the camera (I miss Warcraft...). The combat is repetitive, and there's some graphics bugs. After another 15 minutes, I decided to move on.
Edit: For whatever reason, I've gone back to playing this for an hour or so after work. Leveling is fairly easy, so my goal has been to get to the level 10 cap. Last night I reached level 9, so I'm almost there! I've gotten used to the camera limitations, and the graphics bugs have become comic relief. My favorite is that it looks like textures are missing for about half the armor sets I choose, so my character has a plain white and pale-blue texture.

Game #3 was Brink, 1st person, RPG shooter. Jason told me it sucked right before I started to play, so I immediately thought I had the trifecta of screwed for my gaming choices. Instead of getting involved in the storyline, I opted for single player deathmatch. Much to Jason's chagrin, I found I really liked this game! It played like I remember Unreal Tournament, but added some skills leveling since you pick different roles (which I first discovered in Battlefield 2142), and you can mod out your weapon with scopes, extended magazines, etc (which I just think is awesomely cool!). I've been playing this one pretty steady, but still haven't started that campaign mode.

So, I've been enjoying playtime. Pretty soon I'll have to get back to doing something productive. After I get to level 10 in Daggerdale. And get a silencer in Brink.

Permalink game dev video games

WWE Loot

09.21.2011

I was browsing the internet and taking advantage of some post-post-Wrestlemania sales by ordering some iPhone/iPad skins directly from WWE. I don't know if I'll ever get around to sticking the graphics to my phone or iPad, but for $3 a pop I was thinking of it all as just another souvenir from Mania 27. The iPhone skin came packaged as follows:

The packaging is a little more generic than most of the WWE stuff I see, but the title/text is what kept catching my eye. Fully Removable iPhone 4 Skin. Peel. Apply. Protect. The whole "4 Skin" and "foreskin" just kept jumping out at me. If you just left the "iPhone" out, it would still sound like a viable product.

Not a good product, but I bet there's a market for it.

Permalink random wrestling

Still Not A Man-crush

09.07.2011

14 years ago I first met Jason. I talk about Jason off and on, but I had no idea I've known the man for that long.

The first time I met Jason was at the Ground Zero: In Your House PPV in Louisville. Jason had comped me a ticket, and I had no idea who he really was - I had heard about him through Gina's family, but I had never met the man. I still remember the drive to Louisville (a drive I was used to since my job at the time had a group of us going to Louisville monthly), not really knowing what to expect. It was my first visit to the Will-Call window. I'm a pro a Will-Call these days.

I made my way to Will-Call, showed my ID, picked up my ticket and proceeded to wait for the gates to open. Once the gates opened, I made it my goal to track down and meet Jason so I could thank him for the ticket. Inside the arena I found a couple of guys wearing WWF Crew T-Shirts and asked if they knew Jason Robinson. After I got a "yeah" back, I asked if they knew where I could find him, which they quickly wanted to know why. I explained that he had gotten me a ticket and I wanted to thank him, so they pointed me to where he was set up - way up near the roof, maybe 10 rows from the top. So I trekked up to the top and asked another group of guys if Jason was around. Somebody grabbed his attention and he came over and I introduced myself and thanked him. We had a nice little conversation (about what, I don't remember) before he got busy again, and I made my way to my seat which was a couple of sections over and 2 rows from the ceiling. This marked:

• The only time I've seen Jason that I didn't give him a huge bear hug
• The worse seats I've ever had (not that I really care, then or now)

I remember very little about the actual show. I mostly remember the first match between Goldust and Brian Pillman, mainly because the little kid behind me (right up next to the ceiling) was cheering vehemently for Goldust, and when Goldust lost there was a crying "Nooooooooooo" behind me. In retrospect, I think I remember that match because Pillman would be found dead less than a month later right before the next PPV.

I'm not sure how many wrestling events Jason's gotten me into. I try not to take him for granted, as I've enjoyed them all. Thanks to him, I got to live a 27-year-old dream and went to Wrestlemania this year. Matt and I got to go backstage at Nashville, where I moved a diva and Matt had his close encounter with John Cena.

Over the past year I've gotten to where I bother stay in better contact with Jason, usually by texting him on Monday nights when he's trying to work. I can tell him jokes about wrestlers or gripe about the lack of Teddy's TV time thanks to me being a huge wrestling dork and knowing what it is Jason actually does for a living. On the rare occasion, I get to talk some non-wrestling topics with him, like motorcycles. But that's a rare occasion just because he's so blasted busy.

But I don't think he'd be happy if he wasn't busy. And I've got plenty of txt minutes to use up. Probably another 14 years worth.

Permalink wrestling

The Center of my Wellness

08.31.2011

After putting it off for years, I've finally started exercising again. Sure, I rode the bicycle intermittently last year for which it became too damn hot to ride in recent months. Before that I was training in the martial arts, but that was 5 years ago. I've mentioned before that my weight has shot up to the above 400 range (again) since Christmas, and since Christmas it's fluctuated up and down within a 15 pound range dependent on how I felt/illness/tidal shift.

I've been meaning to go talk to the people at the East Limestone Wellness Center for months. The East Limestone branch is less than 2 miles from my house - convenient to say the least. My main goal was to make sure they had a treadmill that could hold me. You would be surprised that treadmills have weight limits, but when you have to pay attention to that kind of thing you make sure to ask.
For those of you curious, when you're on a treadmill which you exceed the weight for, it doesn't crumble and fall apart. The belt tends to stick under the extra weight, which means that intermittently it will stall/slow down, so you feel like you're tripping while walking on the treadmill. I'm not sure how much better that is than the thing crumbling. Crumbling would be more graceful.

I went Friday and talked to the fine folks at the Wellness Center. I would have to go to the main Athens office to sign paper work and give them money, which I quickly did before I could change my mind. The Wellness Center requires you to have a fitness evaluation before you begin an exercise program (which they give you after evaluating your fitness), and I was fine with this since every exercise program I've been on has been something I've made up. My evaluation, taken on Monday, was not the treadmill-stress test I was afraid of, but a questionnaire which I answered honestly. Even when he asked my weight instead of digging out some industrial scales (which, clothes in shorts, shirt, and shoes on the scale at home that morning came out to freaking 417). That was all for Monday, and Tuesday I would come back for my exercise plan.

Zac, the tech holding my hand through all of this, told me Tuesday that he had made me an exercise plan that focused on cardio. I knew that would be best for me, having never done cardio. I'm a firm believer that lack of cardio + the slowest metabolism in the world = freaking 417. Luckily, Zac is realistic and doesn't expect me to be running around... well, anything. One of the reasons I picked the Wellness Center instead of a gym is that there are a lot of feeble old people there that get around worse than I do. I shan't be the bottom of the fitness barrel there!

Zac bestowed unto me my exercise program, which consisted of:

• Treadmill: 15 minutes; 2% grade, 2.5mph
• Recumbent Bike: 15 minutes; level 2 (whatever level 2 is - it goes up to 15)
• Rowing Machine: 10 minutes
• Sit ups: 3 sets of 15, 30 sec per set (or long torso extensions, whatever they call them, they're sit ups)
• Knee to chest: 3 sets of 15, 30 sec per set (for me it's knee to waist)
• Back Extension/Range of Motion: 3 sets of 15, 70lbs, 30 sec per set.

A 45 minute workout. I thought I might be able to do it. This is how it went.

Treadmill: I actually made it the whole 15 minutes. I've never increased the grade on previous treadmills, and 2% is close enough to 0% that I didn't really notice.
Recumbent Bike: At 5 minutes the balls of my feet were hurting, which meant I was pushing too hard on the pedals. The pedal had little straps, so the balls of my feet were securely fastened to the pedals. I tried not to push so hard, and around 12 minutes got my second wind and breezed through the 15 minutes.
ARowing Machine: I knew I was in trouble when I said "Oh god I'm tired and my thighs got nothing". I knew I was in more trouble when I said this 3½ minutes into the exercise. I made it to 5 minutes, which Zac assured me was good, as this was all to give me a baseline for what I should actually do.
For the exercises with sets, Zac just had me do 1 set of each, so the sit ups and knee-ups weren't a big deal. He focused on getting the machine settings for the seat, base, and back pad right more than me doing the exercise. I did a set with 70lbs, then I went ahead and did 3 sets with 90lbs. To be honest, I wasn't feeling much resistance, so I maxed out the weight stack at 150lbs and did a set. I started to feel it around the 12th rep :)

After my first successful exercise, I came home and had a salad (lettuce, cheese, a smattering of ranch, and some turkey pepperoni). I topped it off with my blood pressure medicine and 3 Aleve (learned this one from the boss whilst karate-ing). I felt good. Better than I had in a while.

So good, that after going to the chiropractor today I decided to try another workout instead of giving myself a recovery day. I wasn't that sore from the previous day, so I thought I would give it a shot. My shot went like:

• Treadmill: 15 minutes, same settings as yesterday.
• Recumbent Bike: 7½ minutes. Feet started hurting again, but my thighs weren't giving up any power.
• Rowing Machine: skipped, I knew my thighs couldn't take it.
• Sit ups & knee-ups: 3 sets of 15 each. After the first 2, the rest of the sets were hard to get through. I was feeling a burn.
• Back Machine: 3 sets at 90lbs. I could tell I was using my back more instead of pushing back with my legs, due in no small part to my sit up/knee-up burn.

So I learned that for now I need a recuperation day. Thursday I shall recuperate. I'm not going to do a whole lot tonight, either.

Permalink diet