July 13, 2007: Paraskevidekatriaphobics’ Day!

I got twenty or more pictures scanned in and uploaded to Flickr last night. Good stuff in there. Lots of old stuff from long ago and the first batch of my sports photography stuff. I am quite proud of the work that I was able to do in high school taking sports pictures using my Nikon 5005 film rig. I did most of my black and white sports work using Eastman Kodak’s high performance 3200 ISO film and did my own darkroom work. I am scanning everything, good and bad, which is tough because generally photographers only show one percent or less of the pictures that they take but I want the collection online so only the totally worthless stuff isn’t going in. So don’t expect every picture to be great. This is raw stuff and many years old and scanned on a cheap scanner.

Scott Alan Miller in Medieval Garb

Today ended up being a completely crazy at work. I was going nuts all day. I came into work early at six thirty planning on being able to leave quite early and to be able to get on the road the moment that Dominica got home. No such luck. I ended up having to work late so that I put in a twelve hour day. Not what I was hoping for at all. I was totally exhausted by the time that I got back to Newark so that we could start packing up the car.

It was about twenty after seven when Dominica and I finally managed to get onto the road.  We are taking the BMW up because it needs to go into the shop tomorrow for its New York State Inspection.  Luckily we were able to get an appointment for it.

Our drive felt like it took forever.  We stopped at Burger King on the road and grabbed a quick dinner while we traveled.  Not in the diet, I know, but it is very difficult to eat quickly while driving.

We were totally exhausted by the time that we got to dad’s house and Dominica had to drive for the last hour or so.  There was a lot of construction on i390 and they made us drive north on the southbound side – but not with two way traffic, just converted to northbound traffic with the signs facing the wrong way.  We didn’t see a single vehicle traveling with us all the way from Dansville to Sonyea and it was very disconcerting.  We thought that we had gotten onto the wrong road or something.  But it turned out to just be weird and labeled poorly.

Coleco Vision

On December 24th, 1982 my parents gave me a Coleco Vision video game console. It was the hot, high end video game console of the day and we were really excited about it. The Coleco Vision remained the only video game console that we owned until I bought a Nintendo Game Boy for myself in the early 1990s and it was the only traditional “hook to your television” console that I owned until I bought myself the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1992 after hit had been on the market for about a year.

The Coleco Vision would have a major impact on my life as it was my first introduction to video games at home. When we got it we knew a few people who had the Atari 2600 system and the Coleco was supposed to be much more powerful than the 2600. The Coleco was also very expensive and did not sell nearly as well as Coleco had hoped as people found that they just were not able to afford the system. In total, only 170 games were ever made for the Coleco (in contrast, the Atari 2600 had over 900 games made for it.)

For the first Christmas all we had was the console itself which came bundles with Donkey Kong and one additional game, Zaxxon, which was the really hot “3D” game of the day that was used as the shining example of the Coleco Vision’s power.

By the time that our Coleco Vision was retired in the late 1980s we had amassed several game cartridges for the system:

Donkey Kong
Donkey Kong Jr.
LadyBug
Mousetrap
Zaxxon
Cosmic Avenger
Smurfs: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle
Q-Bert
Wargames
Centipede
Defender
Carnival
Space Fury
Turbo
Destructor
Sir Lancelot
Ventur

Turbo by Sega was one of the really amazing games of its time in that it used a real steering wheel, shifter and accelerator that you put under your foot in order to play. This was a very expensive game for its time costing, if I remember correctly, almost $100! This is more than many game consoles have cost over the years. It was a truly ground breaking driving game though. No other platform had anything to compete with it.

Smurfs: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle was recently (circa 2006) rated by Microsoft’s MSN as one of the ten worst video games ever made and they might be right. Smurfs was a horrible game even for its time. But it was special in that it didn’t use a black background like so many games of its time did.

Wargames and Mousetrap were special in that they used plastic overlays to put on the twelve button Coleco keypad giving you a keyboard with which to command the game. Both games widely used the extensive keyboard for gameplay and, for the most part, used it well.

Donkey Kong was a port of the all ready classic arcade game and had weaker ports on other consoles but the Coleco version was almost identical to the arcade system. Donkey Kong was made by Nintendo and bundled with the Coleco Vision and served to make both companies famous. The Coleco Vision would go on to be THE console for Nintendo’s early games include Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Donkey Kong III and Mario Bros. These games were so popular at the time that in 1983 a cartoon on the Saturday Morning Supercade called “Donkey Kong” was made. I used to watch it and the Pac Man cartoon as well when I was young. These four early titles went on, of course, to spawn many Nintendo titles including the Super Mario Bros. series of games, Donkey Kong Country and other series that would exist on many consoles over the years.

LadyBug was my parents’ favourite game and dad played it quite a bit. LadyBug was more or less a Pac Man clone although the sound and graphics were a bit better and the swinging doors made for more interesting game play. MouseTrap was yet another Pac Man clone but making use of the Coleco’s unique gamepad to do some things that Pac Man could never have done.

Wargames was one of the most innovative games on the Coleco Vision console. Wargames was a strategy game before its time that truly took advantage of the Coleco’s game pad and made it really make sense. The game was not an arcade style game but was a new breed of games designed for home based play instead of arcade type play. This was definitely one of the best Coleco titles.

[This post was originally a “page” but that was not a good way to manage it so I changed it into a post instead.]

July 12, 2007: Busy Day at Home

Today is a beautifully clear sunny day after yesterday evening’s torrential downpour. Everyone back home in Upstate New York has been complaining about how they are getting no rain at all this year and we keep getting slammed by huge amounts of rain and flooding here.

Newark, NJ Train

Like most Thursdays today was a chance for me to work from home and for Oreo to sleep. He isn’t the youngster that he was two years ago when we first brought him home to live with us from Houston and he needs a lot more sleep these days than he did back then. Daycare is tough work for him and although it keeps him in shape and healthy it also really wears him out. He has been going there for well over half a year now and when he started he would never, ever lay down and nap while at daycare but now he takes regular, long naps in the sunlight when it is available to him. And he used to only sleep “most” of the day on Thursdays but now he is out of the count all day long – which does make life easier for me when I am working but it also means that I almost never get to play with Oreo which I miss.

I took some spare time this morning in between requests at the office – which were pouring in steadily all day keeping me tied to my desk all day long – and created a handful of “video game listing” pages on SGL so that I have an easy way to keep track of the video games that I own and have owned over the years. This is both nice from a memory and nostalgia standpoint as I tend to start forgetting about these things as I get older even though I appreciate their memories more and more but also, for my more recent systems, to keep track of what games I already own! This gets worse as many games are in series and have similar names. I begin to lose track. It gets worse because sometimes I buy games from systems that I don’t own (I own Shenmue II for the XBox and Enchanted Arms for the XBox 360, for example, neither of which system do I own.)

I am starting on a new schedule at the office starting on Monday. As of Monday I am doing the “early” shift starting around seven in the morning Monday through Wednesday and then working my normal hours on Fridays and still working from home on Thursdays. I think that this will make life in the apartment better because I won’t be waiting for Dominica to head off to work so that I can start to get ready. And there is always a backlog of work created during the time that I am getting ready and driving in and, of course, traffic is almost non-existant when you head in for seven but is horrible the rest of the day. So this way my day automatically becomes thirty to sixty minutes shorter just because of the difference in the traffic situation.

I am working the early shift tomorrow but that has nothing to do with my schedule change starting next week. It is just a coincidence. The great thing is that my working early coincides with Dominica and I making the trip up to Pavilion for the weekend. It is looking like we will have a really good chance of getting out of Newark on the early side and actually making some good time if all goes well. It would be great to get to leave early rather than late for a change. We are driving the BMW up this time because it has to go into the shop in Geneseo on Saturday for its inspection. Otherwise we would drive the most cost-effective Mazda PR5 which is just about to turn one hundred thousand miles.

Things finally started to slow down at the office as we approached the close of the day. I managed to sit down just before Domincia got home and work through one small section of Suikoden III getting maybe thirty minutes of actual game play in. I did manage to clean the kitchen and get all of the dishes done and to do a little light cleaning throughout the house done.

I managed to find the power supply for our image scanner today so I hooked it up and scanned some prints that I have in our huge stash waiting to be scanned. Immediately we noticed that the quality of the scans wasn’t very good so we decided that we are going to go buy a new scanner because most of the pictures that we want to scan are our wedding photos so we don’t want the old scanner making the pictures not turn out well. So I did some scanning of some low quality old black and white prints that won’t be noticeably affected by the scanner’s issues.

I spent a while on the phone with Craig who is venturing out on his own and is going to be working in the New York area very soon.

It was off to bed around nine thirty.

Weight Lost So Far: 28 lbs

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

This is my page for tracking the games that I own or use to own on the Super Nintendo (SNES.) I bought the SNES at the Walmart in Geneseo (the old one, not the Super Walmart that is there now) back in 1993 when they released the SNES/Super Mario All Stars Bundle. If I remember correctly my maternal grandparents were visiting us at the time – they would often come up for a few days to a week during the summer. I took the console to college with me in Flint, Michigan in June, 1994 when I started at GMI Engineering and Management Institute there. I only had it with me there through September. I took the Commodore Amiga 13″ colour monitor to hook it too. So I had no television but I did have my SNES.

A large number of the games that I ended up with on the SNES were given to me when the console was fairly old and were not titles that I would have spent my own money on. My big titles for the console were the Mario games (because I had never had an original NES and they were practically new to me) and the RPGs like Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger. The one odd game out that was a real classic for me on this platform was Dark Waters 2.

July 11, 2007: Harry Potter V

Untitled: Lake Ontario

I just couldn’t resist this amazing picture of the Lake Ontario shoreline by Hodge from Niagara Falls, Canada. This is just beautiful.  I do miss the Great Lakes.

Today was really busy at work.  I spent about five hours on a long continuous phone call (technically there was a few minutes break in the middle but that was it.)  I was really burnt out by the end of the day.

About an hour before leaving work it started to rain and quickly turned into a flood making downpour.  Traffic is going to be terrible tonight.

I left work and ended up sitting in what seemed to be an endless traffic jam that would never end.  Rain always causes serious issues in New Jersey.  No one can handle driving in rain at all.

It ended up taking so long for me to get anywhere close to home I called Dominica who was in Rutherford with Oreo getting him some shots at his vet to see if she wanted to get dinner in Clifton and try to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix tonight.  She thought that that was a great idea as we had tried yesterday and failed and were thinking of trying tomorrow but that is not looking promising.

It took me three and a half hours to go from Warren to Clifton!  Some of the roads are completely underwater.  Under no traffic conditions the drive should have been around forty minutes or maybe less!

We ate dinner at Chevy’s which was perfect because they were really fast.  We walked over to the theatre and got really good seats, amazingly.

The movie was good.  It is the fifth installment in the Harry Potter series and was very much in line with the third and fourth installments which were all better than the first two.

It was just minutes before one in the morning when we rolled into 1180.  Time for bed.

Weight Lost So Far: 27.5 lbs