The original plan was for Dominica and I to drive back to Geneseo tonight since we didn’t manage to make it home last week but as this is February there is supposed to be quite a bit of snow back home and we decided that it would be silly to go home this weekend. So we have another unplanned weekend in Newark. We didn’t make the decision until this morning when we looked at the weather. It isn’t supposed to be so bad but considering that we don’t really need to travel and are just trying to get things done early at the house it doesn’t seem like a good idea to take the risk for no reason. Coupled with the fact that the PR5 has summer tires on it and not its winter tires, needs an oil change and needs to have its bearings replaced it seems like we will be better off just waiting. Next weekend I have a three day weekend and may just head back home by myself to take advantage of the extra day (although I think that Dominica just wants me to go back on my own so that she can take the entire weekend to play video games.)
Work was actually slow today! Yay! I have plenty of work to do over the weekend though that can’t be done during the week so it isn’t like a slow day today means that I have nothing to do this weekend. That is unfortunate. I have to stay a little late tonight as we have after hours diagnostics and maintenance that has to be done and then tomorrow I have a bit of updates to do to support compliance. Boring. But hey, at least I get overtime right? It could be a lot worse. No complaints here. And it works out that we could travel this weekend too. Although I am really looking forward to installing Vista and I have to hold off on that for yet another week now. I am not as excited as if Novell had released the latest version of openSUSE Linux but Microsoft only releases operating systems like every five years so I have to say that I am very curious to see what they have done and I have heard that there are some really nice changes. Although the install is supposed to just take forever.
For those who don’t know my personality, I am a very cyclical person when it comes to my interests. I have a set of primary interests – mostly in the areas of my personal entertainment – and I cycle through them over a period of several years. I imagine that this was very frustrating to my parents as during my childhood the cycles would have been so long as to make it seem like childhood stages and not as a natural cycle that didn’t noticeably emerge until I was in my mid-twenties. One of the areas in which this is very noticeable is video games. I can sometimes go for one to as much as three years without playing any significant amount of video games. This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy them from time to time but I have no major desire to play them for an extended period of time. I believe this to often be triggered by external factors like the existence of a video game that I just can’t put down or a new technology becoming available – but I am not sure that I could prove that.
That leads me to: I am addicted to video games again. 🙂 It happens every so often. The last time that I really got into a game was Age of Empires II several years ago (which I really wish I had some time to be able to play again) and before that it was Quake II back around 2001. Both of those times I got hooked when we found a game that really allowed me to play games against friends. Andy, Bob and I played a lot of Quake II and later Quake III (and to some degree Call of Duty) against each other and that was a blast. Now I am starting to play all of the great console games that I have missed over the last several years. I owned a PlayStation and a Nintendo 64 as my last real consoles (I did get a DreamCast recently but that was recently and long after it had left the market.) The Nintendo 64 had almost nothing worth playing available for it except for Perfect Dark which lead us to try Quake II. The PlayStation I never really used and I even forgot that I had. I think that I gave it away at some point but I am not sure. The only games that I really used on there were Ridge Racer IV, Final Fantasy VII and Suikoden. It is weird to think that for several years I owned this really cool (at the time) video game console and really didn’t use it at all. So much so that I totally forgot about even owning it. I have no idea how that happened. I guess I was just too busy doing other things during that time period and, I suppose, the PlayStation was pretty old by the time I bought it and I hadn’t intended to have bought it (someone borrowed money to buy it and never paid me for it.) So I guess I hadn’t been prepared to play it at the time and was never happy with it because of that.
Towards the end of the day things slowed down even more than usual and exceptionally early for a Friday night which may be, in part, to the fact that I have been phased off of supporting a small client who does a large amount of late Friday evening deployments. So tonight I was actually able to leave the office before six! On a Friday night! It doesn’t get much better than that.
Dominica was home ahead of me and was already deep into Kingdom Hearts II before I arrived. She will be playing this all weekend. I got home and once she was able to save her game in progress (which can often take half an hour or more to be able to find a save point in KH2) we headed over to Food for Life for dinner. We didn’t feel like being away from the house tonight and thought that a quick trip over there would work well. They have a new menu item called the Tahitian Event that Dominica is totally in love with.
We came home and I hooked up the new cable for the PS2 (we switched from the cheap, included A/V cable – aka composite video – so a cheap component video cable from GameStop) and the difference, even on a low quality game like Kingdom Hearts II which is just 480i, was very noticeable. The biggest differences were the sharpness and the colour saturation. If you have a PS2 and are still using the included cable definitely get out there and spend fifteen or twenty dollars on a halfway decent component cable. Every game will look better and the high definition games will take on a whole new life.