Checksum Arcanius

At the Seattle Robotics Society‘s Robothon 2004, I bought 50 raffle tickets to help support the cause, and to get a t-shirt along with it (a $20 additional value!). I stayed through the prize drawing, and was disappointed, but not unexpectedly, when I didn’t win anything. About a week later, I was very surprised to get a call from the SRS saying that, in fact, I had won three prizes. It turns out that they had read the “M” on the tickets as a “W” – the three-prize-winner who wasn’t there turned out to be me. So I recieved the package with the three prizes in it today. There are a good number of motors, controllers, and a 6-axis robotic arm kit from Lynxmotion. The kits should provide ample things to do at upcoming hack sessions.

My good friend Maneesh was in town today for a local consulting contrat he’s working on. We met up after we were done with our respective work, and ate as Azteca before cruising around Redmond talking about girls, women, and various females before ending up in his hotel room watching Bad Boys II on HBO, while continuing to talk about, well, girls, women, and females. When Maneesh and I get together its usuallt one of those three topics. Sure, work and life comes up every once in a while, but not so much really.

Needless to say, it was awesome seeing him again, and who knows – he might make a habit out of this travel to bellevue thing. It’s a very real possibility, apparently.

First (for all us nerds): On my way to Ichiro’s record-breaking game…

Second: At Edgar’s final game – as a player, at least.
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Being emotionally unstable can be a real drag sometimes. At one level, I know everything is fine, but nothing feels right, and life just seems to suck a lot for no discernable reason. Other times, everything seems fine even when its not. Which is nice, sometimes, but doesn’t really lead to realistic goals or working through issues in a straightforward manner. Some of my other characterisitcs can kind of make up for this, but I can’t help but feel that I’m not achieving full potential.

A few days ago, Microsoft tricked me into turning Kaleidoscope, my desktop machine, into a brick (but with pretty lights). It wasn’t too much of an issue, because Kaleidoscope is almost exclusively a gaming and video editing machine.

At a LAN party last night, I was able to get the computer bootable again, on a seperate pair of hard drives, but I was unable to rescue my semi-important files from the other RAID 0 partition, so I mostly wasted a lot of people’s time and didn’t get around to actually playing anything on the desktop. But this is where nice laptops won at robotics competition kick-offs come into play.

After watching me flounder like a beached whale over my computer for a few hours, we finally got down to the business at hand: 5-on-5 CounterStrike, but using Kleinoscope (the laptop from which I perform most of my arguably useful computer-related feats outside of work). It took me a while to get used to the 1.5 feel again, and the differences inherent to the laptop (such as a lower framerate, slightly different feel, etc), but after I was warmed up, we played some de_clan1_mill – in my opinion an excellent, well balanced, interesting map perectly sited for 5-on-5 battles.

Blu and I got down to business fairly early, despite playing my un-favorite terrorist. The rounds were each quite intense, but we got the upper hand mroe often than not, thanks to Cheuk’s leadership, Blu’s mad AK skills (including an early ace), and my AWP pwnage (although I traded for a Colt M4 dropped by a CT in a heartbeat. I was pleased to end up with the best ratio and the most kills of all players while we were terrorists, a feat I repeated when we played 4-on-4, with mostly the same teams (Cheuk Hung was the traded player), on the other teams. As a CT, I played almost exclusively with the Colt M4, and it paid off quite well. At the end of the match to 15 wins, I had racked up 30 kills with just 9 deaths. My best moment had me watching the door at the second bombsite, and beginning to fire right as it opened. Three died almost immediately, and a forth followed quickly,though the ace eluded me. I had another chance at an ace later on, but I got too excited and only ended up getting two before being gunned down. Such is the way of CS though.

But I digress – I digrss a whole bunch. The whole point of this post was (supposed) to be about the computer. Well, the good news is that I performed some open-box surgery and recovered the video files and configuration files that I wanted to retain. And now I’m in the market for some Y-shaped power cable splitters, so I can power all four of my hard drives and my CD drives at the same time (novel idea, no?). Then I can whip up a 320-gig 4-drive RAID 0 setup that will (ideally) blow my socks off.

For your (supposed) enjoyment.

Currently, I am at a LAN party at Erik’s house. Funny how that works.

A sign at the final Mariners game of the season – and the final game of a stellar career of Edgar Martinez – read liek this: Edgar Martinez is spelled C-L-A-S-S. And that was about all Edgar had going for him on his final night. It ended relatively disappointingly, with the veteran designated hitter grounding into two double plays and with a few pop flies. But, for the second time in as many attended games, I was struck by the fact that the moment was swallowing almost everything else up.

Edgar was always one of my favorite players, ever since the wee old Kingdome days. And I’ll never forget what is now termed “the hit that saved baseball in Seattle.” For that hit, I was sitting in the shoe department of Nordstrom’s in Bellevue Square, watching on the smallish, vertically stacked TVs. In fact, the whole store was pretty mcuh watching those TVs when it happened. It was a pretty exciting time – the first time in the playoffs, and beating the Yankees at that, in such spetacular fashion. Its one for the ages, and one that a loss to Texas can’t ever take away.