Chris Holmes Online

Like the new layout? I do. It’s called Jillij. I found it on the WordPress Theme Viewer. There are a lot of neat themes listed, but most of them are two-column layouts, and I really don’t care for the two-column layout on a blog. This is one case where I agree with Russ. His blog uses a nice, clean, single-column layout and I think it’s perfect. I just wanted a bit more color than what Russ uses.

I particularly like the iPod look to it. Very cool, since it’s my favorite device right now.

There are very few disadvantages to living in the countryside. For every minor annoyance one can think of (like the inability of pizza restaurants to deliver) there are several major bonuses (like not having to listen to neighborhood dogs barking 24/7, or watching helplessly as they crap all over my lawn). But there is one disadvantage that never occured to me before Carrie and I moved into our remote house a few years ago: hunters begging for permission to shoot creatures on my land.

I shouldn’t call them hunters though, because what they’re doing isn’t hunting. They’re shooting. They’re driving around looking for game to shoot from the road. That’s not hunting. That’s shooting. They might as well be shooting traffic signs or pop cans, because they would be applying the same amount of hunting skills: none.

Of course, I have a pretty strong opinion about this because I grew up a bowhunter. Bowhunters don’t shoot, they hunt – they have to hunt if they want to kill anything. And hunting isn’t simply a matter of wandering around until something comes within range to shoot. If that were ‘hunting’ we bowhunters would never shoot anything.

No, hunting is much more than shooting. It’s an art form all it’s own. It requires a deep and intimate understanding of the animal, it’s behavior, it’s habitat, the terrain, the effects of weather, scent, wind, and concealment. I’ve probably left something out, but you get the point – hunting isn’t as simply as cracking open a Bud Light and driving the backroads. To truly hunt requires a lot of knowledge about a lot of different things. Ingore any one of them and you’re going to come up short. Pay attention to all of those things though, and you’ll find yourself doing more than shooting – you’ll find yourself hunting, and gaining a huge admiration and respect for nature at the same time. Shooters don’t respect nature, they just seek to blow holes in it.

And this is precisely what irks me about the bozos who show up at my house on a Sunday morning, with me in my jammies watching NFL pre-game shows: they aren’t really asking for permission to ‘hunt’ on my land, they’re asking for permission to ‘shoot’ on my land. There’s a big difference.

Two such bozos showed up to our house the day after Thanksgiving. They saw our pheasants across the road, near a tree next to one of our barns. I call them ‘our’ pheasants because they live on the land around our house – we see them every day and they are like pets to us. They are the ideal non-pet pets. They are always around, like a pet, and we become attached to them like pets, but we don’t have to feed them or clean up after them. They’re the best of both worlds.

And some road-rangers wanted to leap out of their truck and ‘hunt’ them. Yes, they actually asked, “Hey, we saw some pheasants over by that barn and we were wondering if we could go hunt them.”

Hunt them? Do you even know what hunting is? Are you aware that hunting from the road is not really hunting? Are you aware that I see those pheasants every single day and I don’t really want some redneck jerk like you coming around and shooting my beautiful birds? Do you honestly think I would let you shoot anything on my property when you just now showed up to my house asking permission?

That’s the other thing that irritates the hell out of me about road hunters: they think it’s perfectly acceptable to ask permission after they see game on your land. That is not how I was brought up in my family of bowhunters. I was taught hunting. And part of hunting is scouting – going out before the season starts, figuring out where I wanted to hunt and then asking permission from the landowner before the first day of the season. You don’t ask permission the same day you go out hunting, and you sure as heck don’t ask permission after you see game! It’s like asking a woman to marry you after you see her bank account. Not cool.

So, I sent them away – politely of course, although in my heart I wanted to go off on a rant right then and there, and completely lambaist them. This sort of thing happens at least a half-dozen times each fall, and every time it makes me want to throw the Deliverance DVD in, since you can plainly see our TV from the front porch steps. Queue that puppy up to Ned Beatty’s scene, and then put some gnarly, stained false teeth in before I answer the door in my backwoods coveralls and low-IQ drawl… Maybe word will get around to the other ‘hunters’ and they’ll quit asking, eh?

Yesterday, Carrie and I were in Spokane for a medical consult, and we stopped by the Northtown Mall to do some Christmas shopping. There were some bathrooms right inside JC Penny, so we stopped to use them, and it was there that I ran into the most absurd engineering decision I can recall in quite some time.

The sinks in the JC Penny bathrooms have push-button-faucets: two buttons, one for hot and one for cold. The way they work is like so: in order for water to come out of the faucet, you have to hold down the corresponding hot/cold push-button. Some engineer determined this was the best way to prevent water-waste, since water won’t come out of the faucet if you release the push-button.

Now, unless you’re a monkey with a tail that you can use as a fifth appendage, or some sort of creature from a fantasy novel with four arms, you should immediately see the problem here: you’re trying to wash your hands, and yet you have to use those same hands to hold down push-buttons so water will exit the faucet. And one side is hot, and one side is cold. If you want to have warm water, you need to press both buttons at the same time, which doesn’t leave your hands very free to actually be washed.

But wait: I’m supposed to be washing my hands, not holding down buttons. How does this work? Who’s genius idea was this anyway?

So now the difficulty is, how do I wash my hands with this stupid device? Well, washing both hands at the same time is out of the question, so I’ll have to wash them one at a time. Great, start by pressing down the right button. Hmm… Cold water on my left hand. Get both hands soapy. Press down the right button again to wash my left hand. Now the right button is soapy, but at least my left hand is clean. Ok, press the left button so I can wash my right hand. Crap that’s hot!

Now I’m standing there with a wet, scalded right hand. I want cold water on it, so I get to play Twister with the sink: press the right-hand-side cold-water button with my left hand crossing over the sink. Crap, the button is all soapy, so now my clean left hand is too. But at least my scalded right hand is cooling off…

By the time I was done with the Twister-Faucet I wondered if there wasn’t some sadistic ass with a hidden camera behind the mirror in the bathroom, waiting to take the recording of me and countless other victims to some stupid Candid Camera show where they would poke fun at our expense, a safe distance away from me and a hand grenade.

But in the end, I determined this was just another example of engineering gone bad. After all, not all engineers are created equal, and not all of them are very smart. If they were, Dilbert would never have been invented as a cartoon.

Still, that knowledge didn’t quite satiate my desire for human bloodshed, and thus I decided to curse the fool who invented that sink, wherever they are. To them, I pass along this curse:

Dear Idiot Engineer of the Push-Down-Faucet,

Wherever you are in the universe, I hope you are cursed with many devices that require all sorts of idiotic and illogical contortions from your person. I hope that if you work in the computer industry, that the left side of your keyboard only works when you hold down the right side CTRL button, and I hope the right side of your keyboard only works when you hold down the left side ALT button. I hope your electric garage door only opens when you are outside of your vehicle, and I hope it immediately begins to close the second you get back in to your car. I hope your TV only stays on if you hold down the POWER button on your remote, and shuts off the second you release it. I hope the lights in your house only work if you touch them with your hands, and I hope your hands burn like toast in an oven. And most of all, I hope your toilet only flushes if you put your head inside it.

About three years ago I was playing Everquest, when a guildmate of mine let me in on a little secret: he’d wiggled his way into the Star Wars Galaxies Beta Test. At the time the thought of a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game taking place in the Star Wars universe made me giddy all over. Like Everquest, but in the Star Wars universe? You didn’t have to ask me twice – I’d be there.

But my buddy in Beta relayed to me some horrible stories.

“It sucks,” he said. “Doesn’t feel like Star Wars at all.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Combat is clunky,” he said. “Doesn’t feel epic. Doesn’t feel like Star Wars. There’s no ships either – no space fighting. And there’s no loot. Everything is crafted by players.”

“Serious?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “And you can’t start as a Jedi.”

“What?”

“No Jedi. Not in Beta anyway. Supposedly they’ll be in the final launch, but you have to ‘unlock’ them, and no one knows how to do that.”

My heart sank. After all, slashing Imperials as a Jedi and blasting Tie Fighters are two of the most Star Wars related things you can do in a game, and he was telling me that neither was going to happen. Overall, the vision he painted for the game was one of tedium and boredom. It just didn’t sound like a good old Star Wars time. So, I reluctantly passed on the game when it came out.

A few months later I read where some players finally figured out how to ‘unlock’ their Jedi characters. Turns out that was a ton of ‘grinding’ work. Yay, sounded fun – not. Any hope I had of picking the game up and becoming a Jedi quickly went out the window when I heard that it would take months of playing before I’d even have a hope and a prayer of unlocking my Jedi. Ouch.

And then Sony released the Jump to Lightspeed expansion. At long last, real space combat. It almost was enough to lure me in, but continued reports of ‘boring’ gameplay prevented me from laying down the money for the game box…

But all of that is about to change. This week SOE and LucasArts announced a Massive Rewrite of the core game mechanics, including combat. The number of professions in the game has been paired down from 30 to nine. The combat has been made more streamlined and faster-paced. The game is being overhauled to be more quest-driven. The icons of Star Wars lore (Leia, Han, Chewbacca) are now going to be part of certain quest events. And yes, you can now start the game as a Jedi.

It’s finally going to be Star Wars.

It takes guts to completely rewrite a game after it’s been on the market for 2+ years. It takes some serious balls. And I’m sure they’re going to lose customers over it. There are already a host of people pissing and moaning about it, and threatening to cancel their subscriptions.

Fine, do it. But I know come November 15th I’m going to be looking for a new Star Wars Galaxies box set that contains all of the original expansions and the game. I’ll be ready to hop into the Star Wars Universe and create my first ever Galaxies character. I’ll be ready to blast some Imperial lackeys…

Star Wars Galaxies 2.0, here I come.

It’s time for Verizon to change their slogan. If you haven’t noticed, they spend a lot of money advertising. You can’t turn the television on for 15 minutes without seeing some sort of Verizon ad touting the quality of their network. But apparently this only applies to their mobile users. Us land-line users must fall under a different corporate tree.

I mention this because Saturday our phone service went out. Living in a rural area, this happens. Wind blows, trees fall down, squirrels and magpies decide to play daredevil with transformers and wires… Power outtages and loss of phone service are fairly common occurances.

What’s not common is the response we got from Verizon.

I’m sure in a normal metropolitan area when land-line services goes down no one really notices. After all, it’s the age of the cell phone. The country is wired for mobile technology. If you’re using a phone connected to an actual phone line you’re probably still commuting to work in a horse drawn wagon and hand-churning your butter.

Or at least that’s what Verizon thinks. They must have a giant map somewhere in their main offices where every rural route in America is labeled as “Amish Territory – Do Not Trespass.” Anyway, that’s the impression I got when Carrie returned from town. See, we can’t even use our cell phone from our house because we live in the Bermuda Triangle of Cell Phone Towers, where all signals disappear without a trace and are never heard from again. So in order to actually call the phone company and notify them that our service was out, we have to drive into town to get a cell signal.

Normally, I wouldn’t care if our phone was out. Especially on a weekend. The phone being out of service means I can rest peacefully. It means my almost-two-year-old can have a nap without being interrupted five times by people wanting me to give them money just because they know my phone number and have the cojones to call me on a Saturday afternoon.

The problem is, when the phone is out, so is my connection to the internet. Yes, not only do we live in the Bermuda Triangle of Cell Phone Towers, we also live in The Place Furthest from Civilization, So High-Speed Internet Is Not Possible. No cable modem. No DSL. Nothing. It’s a 28.8 modem baby, and I’m pushing that copper wire to the limit.

Saturday is my time to play games. Specifically, it’s the best time to play Everquest 2. And to do that I need a connection to the internet. When the phone line went out I figured Saturday afternoon was over, but at least they could send someone out to fix it and I’d have service at night, or at the worst Sunday afternoon. Right? Right?

Wrong.

Verizon informed my wife that because we lived in a rural area and because so few of us had actually lost service that they would not be sending anyone out to fix our phone line until Monday morning. Monday. In other words: You’re not important customers to us, so screw you. We’ll fix it when we feel like it.

So there you have it. Verizon’s new slogan: We’re never really working for you.