Dallas, 12:25 AM (4/13): I’m sorry, but the Mavs were just too interesting to watch to pull myself away from my TV to make a post before midnight. Yeah, I have a tablet and everything, but it isn’t like I was going to miss my “real” midnight deadline. If that was in danger, you can absolutely bet that I would have come up with a different solution rather than waiting.
I’ll let you in on a secret: tomorrow my posts will once again be from Seattle. Yep, my extended trip is finally coming to a close, but there’s a second one waiting in the wings for me. One of my top priorities for the weekend? Figure out how to make a week’s worth of scheduled posts just to entertain you all. I cannot fail my duties once again in such a short timespan, but I’m also not delusional enough to believe that live posting will have a chance in the world at working on this specific trip.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 11:55 PM: For the first full night of sleep that I was able to get in about a week, I spent a good 12 hours in bed. Today is not a day that I would have wanted to wake up and go into work, so the fact that I could use it as a recovery day was very appreciated. Prime isn’t as bad since there’s not really any travel involved, and both Sunday/Monday nights are fairly normal.
In order to satiate my desire for Draw Something and to avoid buying a $200-250 Android tablet to do so, I went ahead and just sideloaded it onto my Fire. Aside form some slight graphical issues when scrolling (which I’m not 100% sure aren’t on officially supported devices as well), it seems to work fine. Of course, if there are such things as notifications when you have a new game waiting to be played, I don’t get those since the Fire has no constant internet connection aside from when it is in use.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 10:45 PM: Look at you, you were expecting this post to come from Seattle I bet… To channel some Ducky, “nope, nope, nope” would be the response to that. I’m here through the end of the week, keeping the trip posts coming. I kept the PAX posts pretty much limited to what I had been doing, but the rest of the world apparently cared about our “controversies” more. Rather than detail them out here, I’ll just point you to the PA news post that addresses each of them.
On that note, the live posting experiment was a completely success with no gap occurring just before the five year mark was reached. Two years ago I completely forgot about the day, and this year it’ll come in the midst of a scheduled (yes, actually) post set. I guess five years is a little special; maybe if I can do my math correctly and remember, I’ll give you a bonus piece of entertainment that day.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 11:35 PM: Mass Effect 2, I’m going to put off playing you until I get back up to Seattle, but you might have to wait a little longer than Sunday to get started. That’s because if I can learn the basics of Android app development and submit one to RIM within the next week, they’ll give me a free Blackberry PlayBook. Sure, the device may be about to be end-of-lifed, and I definitely have no need to buy one even at a discounted price with a 7” Fire already and a 10” Touchpad arriving on Tuesday, but for free, I can put my CS degree to use in my spare time. Besides, you’re about to get an OS update later this month that addresses a lot of your shortcomings, and I’m sure I can find some use for you.
In other news, the PATV episode today was about the Child’s Play golf tournament and dinner last year, both events that I worked. You’ve seen the videos of PAX, you’ve seen the video of what Enforcers are like, so it seems only fair that I let you round out the video experience by seeing what the third component of my Penny Arcade volunteer life is like. Go watch, my readers.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 11:50 PM: So I thought I had moved all of my 360’s saved games to the cloud, but apparently Mass Effect was one that I overlooked. So, instead of starting on Mass Effect 2 tonight, I’m currently just downloading the DLC to this Xbox and have a choice to make tomorrow. Do I wait until I get back to Seattle so that I can do the character import, or do I just go ahead and start a new character while I’m down here? Please note that the answer is not start a new one now to get used to the game and them import when I get back home; I had enough game restarting experiences with the first one.
The presentation went well today; as always there were more people than what Microsoft was anticipating it seemed like. You’d think that by now they should just plan on 300 people at presentations and reuse whatever is left over at the end. Oh well, I’m not the one who gets to make those decisions. In fact, my only real decision to make for the rest of the trip is the one in the first paragraph as aside from work, it’s the primary candidate for consuming the most of my next 40 or so hours.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 11:00 PM: I’ve only had to mask the fact that I was going to Dallas since Thursday of last week as this trip was done on pretty short notice. Of course, if you’re my friend on Facebook, you would have known about this trip all along. Are my parents my friends on Facebook? Why no they aren’t, so my plan to keep them in the dark about this was a success until I actually showed up inside my house.
As I’d think would be obvious, this trip is for recruiting, but it isn’t nearly to the scale of the fall one. Literally the only thing I have going on is a presentation at 5:30 tomorrow, and that’s it. I fly back on Saturday because while my normal plan would be Sunday (and was in fact that for 16 hours or so), there’s this little thing called the Super Bowl happening that I sort of want to watch. So yeah, heading back on a day that I’d otherwise just hanging around here rather than being on a plane getting updates from the pilot.
This trip is also the reason why I had to adjust my February YotGotYGP game; I decided that since a 360 is down here and hooked up, it might be worth my while for it to be a game that I could actually start. In fact, this is a game that I was planning on starting down here last Christmas, but Fable didn’t get played quite effectively enough for that to happen, and it’s been languishing on my shelves ever since. Never fear though, for now is the time to play it…
YotGotYGP Game for February 2012: Mass Effect 2
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 2:50 PM: This post is even earlier than it needs to be because, well, I have a couple scheduled posts that need to get written as well, and I have free time at the moment. At the current moment this will be my last Dallas post for nearly five months, although in just over three I’ll find myself passing through DFW on my way to Boston. Also, who knows what other travel plans could bring me back to the land that has finally begun to realize once again that temps in the 60s (and today even 70s!) is absolutely the way to spend winter.
I’ve successfully set up and trained my parents on how to use Kinect (perhaps “trained” is too strong of a word…had them demonstrate they’re not completely incompetent with it?), so that should take care of the last thing that was on my checklist to do down here. We’ll see if Kinect Sports: Season Two gets any more use than Tiger Woods did as far as games being played go. Eventually I’m going to find a game they like, even if it does take numerous attempts.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 1:40 AM (12/30): So, I would have made my post before it become “tomorrow” in Dallas, but that Baylor/UW game was just far more entertaining than it needed to be. By the time it was over it was 11:55, and I didn’t feel like fighting with the day boundary. So, you just get a post now instead, and you’ll like it (or at least deal with it).
Let’s see, my upcoming post schedule: tomorrow will be an early post since I don’t have faith that I’ll get to Seattle at 9:00 like I’m currently supposed to, New Year’s Eve will be scheduled since no one really needs an 8:00 AM post from me talking about how comfortable my bed was, New Year’s Day will be another scheduled post in which I reveal my grand plan, and then finally on the 2nd you’ll get another normal, evening post to read. How does that sound, hmmm? I think I should have an interesting enough collection of media to provide that the lack of any timely news shouldn’t cause anyone to get bored reading my posts. Right, like that’s why anyone reads these to begin with…
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 11:50 PM: Has flight prices not been so outrageously expensive for traveling yesterday or today, I’d be in Seattle right now. Alas, I’m still in Dallas and remembering why I was wanting to leave one of these days to begin with. After about a week and a half down here, I just start to get bored and long for all my forms of entertainment that didn’t make the trip down with me.
Trying to use up all my free Amazon Video money is much more difficult than it would seem because I’ve already rented pretty much all the movies I care about seeing (or, you know, I own them). In fact one of the first movies I rented expires tomorrow, so I’ll be watching Rio before I go to bed. Maybe at this point I should just rent the movies I don’t really even care about seeing, but if I get super bored in the next month, at least they’ll be there as an option.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 11:50 PM: With only 74 unread emails in my inbox, “going back to work” wasn’t nearly as painful as it could have been. My laptop did want to give me some grief about being able to remotely connect to Microsoft’s corporate network, but fortunately I don’t need to do much of that this week. Anything that I need to accomplish in that realm can wait until next Tuesday. Give me email and perhaps the ability to communicate via IM (although that wasn’t cooperating either), and I’m good. Trust me, I’m a PM.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo as a movie actually stuck very close to the plot of the book. So close, in fact, that the one thing they ended up changing (for reasons unknown to me) caused me a great deal of confusion until I later figured out exactly what the deal was. Why they changed that one aspect of the story is beyond me; if you’re going to keep everything else so similar, why throw off the part of the audience who has read the book with a change like that? My score: 8/10.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle