August/September Entry

Yeah…August was busy and stressful, hence no time to make an August entry. I guess that’s a good thing since some of the less important things are now forgotten and probably didn’t need to be chronicled for future reference. The one big thing that stands out in my mind for August all dealt with the Roast dvd leading up to my birthday so we’ll start with that.

- August – The Roast and Birthday -

So the Roast originally happened on 09.02.07. Since then, Mike was working on editing the footage and adding fancy graphics etc to make it shiny and smell nice. Of course he’d be working on it on his spare time and not nonstop because he has his own life and a job and other things. So as the date came closer to the play date of the dvd (08.31.08), I started to ask him more about it to make sure it got done. We were coming to final stages of it to rendering it and putting it to tape for me to capture at work and put onto a dvd. I myself even worked on some of the extras for the dvd during lunch time. And what happens? His computer blows up along with everything else and he loses everything he had worked on for that year for the dvd AND anything else that was on his computer that he didn’t have backed up…

So quick thinking and rationalizing what could be done in a short time frame lead to us giving the footage to Tony at work to quickly put it together with minimal edits and no fancy graphics. Tony himself was busy so this meant putting in some off hours on his part and on mine. There was a lot of leaving stuff running at night hoping nothing goes wrong while no one was there to keep an eye on it and thankfully nothing did. Friday night, the video was left capturing. Saturday around noon, Tony and his brother were there to take care of stuff they were doing and I was leaving the computer to compress the video. I occupied myself with other things at that time since it was going to take more than an hour to compress. Then we had to leave early since they had an event to go to. Sunday morning I was there again with Tony. Now I was putting the video with all the extras to dvd. I had previously had the extras all set and transcoded earlier in the week to take off some time in this final day. So I left it pumping into the dvd while I went to a hair appointment. Came back to see that it had finished. Put in the dvd to watch and quickly view it to see if any glitches existed…and they did. 20 minutes into the main video it would freeze and not even be ejectable unless shut off and waited on for a couple minutes. I tried another dvd burn because sometimes mistakes happen on a burn. 2 more tries later and the video froze on the same spot. And there was nothing else I could do at work since Tony had to leave for another job. Luckily I brought my external harddrive and copied the video to it.

Home. I needed time to rest so I didn’t do anything birthday related for that hour. Called AndyN to find alternate ways to play the video. He came up with the solution to play it on the PS3 if we hooked up the external harddrive to it. I tried it and it wouldn’t read mine. Of course the PS3 could only read certain ones, which AndyN does have. So I went to his place, we transferred the data to his harddrive, hooked it up to his PS3, and it didn’t work. So…make a data disc, the PS3 can read normal data discs. Burned the large file onto a dvd, tested it out, and it worked. Got back home and it was around 5:30 that I had a working copy of the Roast to show. Finished setting up for the party and guests started to arrive an hour later.

The party was fun. I’m glad that we were able to watch the Roast and do the activities afterward. Those planned activities would not be doable had we not had the Roast to watch. I’m thankful for all those that came and enjoyed themselves along with me. Thanks for the gifts. Thanks for the memories. And I hope you all enjoy watching the viewing of the Roast on dvd next year, ha.

- 09.02.08 -

So pulling off the party was stressful. So many things didn’t happen, but ultimately things worked out. I had a couple of things that didn’t happen that did upset me, but didn’t let it ruin the night. I wish I could say the actual day of my birthday went smoothly. I don’t want to go into the details of it as only a handful of friends know what happened.

Things weren’t going great and I just wanted to go home. I did order a gift for myself like I do every year. I purchased BoA’s Live Tour 2008 The Face on dvd. I also took a late lunch by myself to go to Fry’s and buy “The Big Bang Theory” on dvd as another gift. I came back to work and coworkers were bugging me about having cake to celebrate my birthday. I didn’t want it, I didn’t ask for it. I appreciate it, but from the start before things went bad I didn’t want to celebrate my birthday at work. Not all of them knew what had happened to make me so sour for the day, but they later found out slowly. I never touched the cake and let everyone else have it.

So yes, I do not have a fond memory of the actual day of birth anniversary. Don’t worry about it, it has passed. Plans were made to make up for it and I’d like for that to still happen sometime.

- Hurricane Ike -

I can almost remember everything I did during the coming and passing of Hurricane Ike.

09.11.08 – At work we packed up the more valuable items we had (masters of videos, cameras, etc) and packed them into a trailer we had. And everyone was to unhook their computers and elevate them in case of flooding and also to secure tarps and covers over them in case of leaking. Some of us went room by room to help fix up individual offices. Outside, we were having wood placed to board up our windows in the front of the building. All of this was finished around 1, but we weren’t allowed to leave till 3, but some of us stayed after 3 to finish setting up the offices that were made to stay up till 3. Other complaints and gripes abound.

Took Mike to the grocery store so he could stock up on some food. It wasn’t as packed as I thought it would be, but it was crowded. It didn’t really hit me till we both saw that the bread aisle was basically empty. Got him home and went home to see that we weren’t going to board up like I thought we would. Kept in touch with the news and friends and then went to sleep like a normal day.

09.12.08 – Thankfully we were allowed to stay home from work. Originally they were planning to have us come to work, but I guess since they saw how legit the hurricane was, they started to worry. What did I do? Stayed online and talked to those who popped on. Called a few people to make sure they were prepared. Listened to the news most of the morning till it got boring. And I spent most of the day playing Super Mario RPG on the Wii’s Virtual Console.

Only during the night did things pick up. Winds grew stronger. I know we experienced a couple of glitches of power surges as well as others I was talking to online. Went to bed around 11. I can remember waking up once to see the power had gone off (fan stopped, clock was blank, a/c stopped, and cellphone lit up). It came back on shortly after, but then cut off a few more times throughout the night. I looked out a few times to see things, but it was too dark to see anything. One loud distinct noise occurred that night and I later found out it was a fence blowing over.

09.13.08 – I think I woke up around 5 to the sounds of strong winds and things moving. Of course with power gone, it wasn’t a comfortable night of sleep, but I got some at least. Around 9 was when I stayed up. I looked outside my window to see all the debris that had been blown onto lawns and the street. Took some pictures through windows. Later on in the day I went outside to take more pictures of just outside my house.

We had no power, but we had water and gas working. I have a stereo that was also battery operated so I brought that down for my parents to listen to. I took a nap later on and was woken up by outside noises of neighbors cleaning up. Tried contacting people to see how they were, but obviously it was hard during this time. Texts would go out, but would come with late responses. I kept busy for the majority of the day by playing Final Fantasy IV Advance on a previously (not planned) charged GBA SP. I would also listen to my iPod for an hour before attempting to go to bed.

It was hard to sleep that night. Windows were left open for the convenient breeze to flow through, but it would just get hot. I ended up going downstairs and sleeping on the leather couches. However, I found myself switching from couch to couch every half hour when the couch I was on would get hot. At one point I did go back to sleep in my room.

09.14.08 – Still no power. Nothing else to do really. More of neighbors fixing up around the neighborhood. My mom went in to work at the hospital. My brother went to a cousin’s place that had power. Dad went off to find places that had food for sale. I was actually alone in the powerless home for a good 5 hours. All I did was play more of Final Fantasy IV Advance. I also took some time to organize and clean my cds. That ate up a good hour or so. I did learn to leave a Starburst in my mouth and not chew on it to make it last longer. It was like having a piece of delicious flavored fruit in your mouth for a few minutes. The previous GBA SP ran out of power and so did another one that was not planned, but charged. I then moved on to playing Final Fantasy IV Advance on my DS.

Mike called and we talked about whether we should go to work or not the following day. Our production manager got in touch with him and said that workers were expected to come in to work IF work was there to begin with.

09.15.08 – So we went to work…and work was still standing. This was actually the first time I had seen the outside world outside my neighborhood. It was eerily interesting to see empty streets, downed fences, trees uprooted and cut, streetlights hanging, poles leaning, etc. Work suffered NO damage at all. Not a thing.

Not many people showed up for work. I want to say at least half. Some claiming to have power and others claiming what they did not have. We started with unpacking things in shipping so that orders could be filled. That took some time since we had tons of tapes and other masters to put back. Patrick worked on getting our server and online services up quickly. Our “president” immediately got back online since all he was doing was making sure all the boards were taken down from the building.

Tony and Abraham went on location to anywhere to take some footage of after shots of Ike damage. The owner came for about an hour to check on us. Dolores (HR) came by also because she had actually come back from a trip (wasn’t here during the hurricane). She stayed for about 2 hours till her husband came to pick her up. Patrick, Mike, and I went around to each office and started to set up everyone’s computers. That took a while, but we actually managed to get all that done by 1. We were expected to get right back to work, but those of us without power just spent time catching up on stuff online. I was actually given an assignment to do, but it was close to the end of the day. The 3 of us along with Gerry took an extended lunch. We didn’t know what was open, but thankfully a taqueria we frequented was open for business. Patrick was nice enough to order us a round of beers, which we all could use after all this hurricane/work drama we were enduring. We were graciously allowed to leave a whole half hour earlier, yay…

Back home…no power still. Spent time playing and beating Final Fantasy IV Advance. I didn’t feel like continuing with extra quests on that so I played the first case of Apollo Justice. I forgot how long that case lasted. Listened to my iPod for about an hour and attempted to go to sleep to the nice breeze.

09.16.08 – Back to work again. More people showed up and others were still not present. We were pretty much back to a normal working schedule. I actually ended up helping in shipping more than half the day since we were backed up on orders and had one really big order to fill for Fiesta. I forget where we ended up going for lunch since we were still not sure what was open around our area. Other work drama.

At home, we had power again. It was so good to have working a/c and just to have lights on and running. We had no internet or cable, but I was fine with that for the time being. Just very thankful to have power again. Couldn’t really watch non-cable tv since I had no antenna and of course I couldn’t go online. I did watch a few videos on my computer to relax. I also turned on my Wii to finish up Super Mario RPG. After that, I watched the Roast. Still funny. I did pick it apart in my head, but I still laughed. A comfortable night of sleep.

(above picture not from this day, just a little intermission now that there is power in the house)

09.17.08 – Woke up with a sore throat. Work. Normal work day. Work drama. Things were pretty much back to normal. Although you can feel that things were different amongst the workers. Work drama.

Back home and still no internet or cable. Still nothing much to do so I played another game I had on Virtual Console, Cho Aniki. Beat that game. Started to play Sonic The Hedgehog 3. I had purchased that for Virtual Console the day it came out, but never touched it for some reason. Went to sleep a little earlier that night because I was feeling a little sick.

09.18.08 – Again, woke up with a sore throat. Went to work and things are back to the normal retched state they usually are in. Nothing else special.

Still had no internet or cable at home. I finished Sonic The Hedgehog 3 some time after coming home. Then I spent the rest of the night watching videos I had on my external harddrive on my computer. I knew I backed up and saved videos for SOME reason, ha. Finally I was putting a lot of them to use. Memories.

09.19.08 – Felt a little more sick than just a sore throat, but nothing more of a fever and cough. Work was blah. We went to lunch at First Colony Mall. We actually saw Katie there shopping. She sat with us and talked for a bit about how she faired during Ike. The power actually went out at one point for a good minute, ha. I finished eating early and went with Katie for a bit to help her shop. Then we went back to work.

After dropping off Mike, I went around to Best Buy and Wal-Mart to look for Ranma 1/2 Season 1 on dvd. Couldn’t find it. I had been looking for it for a while, but couldn’t find it at Fry’s and a few other places. Since Ike hit, I had not looked around for a while.

No cable and internet at home still. It was Friday and I had already missed a few nights of wrestling. Since Smackdown is on local tv, I tried to see if I could watch it. It didn’t come in clear. So I had static over the screen (not too heavy that I couldn’t tell what was going on) and the audio signal dropped here and there. If I stayed in one position for a while it would be fine at least.

09.20.08 – Still without internet/cable. I started off by watching Wrestlemania 21 on dvd. Watched my favorite matches and it wasn’t even noon yet. I went out to look for Ranma again. Went to a Best Buy, looked to the mall’s FYE that was no longer there, tried Circuit City, and went home. None of them had it. Oh well. I was really hoping to find it since I was still feeling minimally sick and was thinking to just stay in bed. It would’ve been nice to watch during that time.

Still no connection at home. Watched Wrestlemania 22. Since Wrestlemania XX, all of them have been 4 hours long so I had time eaten up with it thankfully. But around 6PM, I flipped the channel just to see if the cable was working. Had been doing that every day here and there just to check. And finally we had gotten a signal back. Checked our internet connection and it was up and running. Stopped watching wrestling and quickly did all the things I had to do online that I wasn’t able to do at work. It didn’t take that long since I was caught up on most things other than the gap from Friday at 5PM to Saturday at 6PM.

The one thing I made sure to do was download Mega Man II on the Virtual Console and the new Strong Bad game for WiiWare. They were released on Monday and I couldn’t get them till now. The rest of the night I spent playing Mega Man II and ended up beating it. Yummy 8-bit classic.

09.21.08 – So things had pretty much returned to normal. I spent most of the day playing and beating Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People (SBCG4AP) Episode 2: StrongBadia The Free. Mike called around 7PM saying that he finally got everything back. I was still feeling a little ill so I took some medicine before sleeping that night.

And this ends the entry portion about Ike

- Video Games -

For having a hurricane come, I sure did play a lot of games. Not only that, but I beat a bunch.

Final Fantasy IV Advance

Super Mario RPG: Legend of The Seven Stars

Cho Aniki

Sonic The Hedgehog 3

SBCG4AP Episode 2: StrongBadia The Free- click

Also, it was brought to my attention that I was playing a lot of old school games. Since I was without an internet connection, I was playing games that I played in the past when I didn’t have a computer to begin with (minus the Strong Bad game). It was kind of a trip back in time. I actually did play and beat those games back then, every single one of those on the list except Cho Aniki since I never owned or really played a Turbo-Graphix 16. It’s just a funny jumble of events and coincidences and etc.

- Miscellaneous -

Ike - Ike wasn’t that horrible (for me). Our household was prepared and we fortunately didn’t suffer any damage to our house. I do think that not everyone is in the right mind frame when a natural disaster strikes. That’ll cause some conflict and make haste for a few possible irrational decisions. For instance, my mom is a nurse. I expected to not see her from Thursday till whenever. She didn’t want to be a part of the coming hospital rush. I thought to myself that that was kind of selfish of her. She’s a nurse and she basically should be there with other doctors and nurses for times like this when they are needed the most. A day later, I looked at it from her end. Sure, maybe she didn’t want to be super busy with patients and victims, but she’s still a mother and wife. She wanted to be where she felt she was most safe, at home with her family. I was saying to myself that if work wanted me to come to work on Friday and my mom said not to that I would listen to her over them. So I guess it’s priority and security that takes over during these times. Of course seeing people freak out and being overly selfish was ridiculous.

There were a few Ike stories I heard that were great though. I know some people still talk about Ike or that was the subject of talks for a while. So I still have my stories ready when people want to share them.

Ranma – I know I could just buy it all online and it would be done with. Looking for it locally would’ve just been nice. I would find Season 2, 3, 6, and 7 here and Season 5, 6, and 7 there, but every place I checked did not have Season 1. And I kept telling myself that I don’t want to buy all the later seasons without starting at the beginning. I had seen all of the first season years ago and sprinkles of other seasons whenever I could find them. Only recently did it come to my head that I could finally own and see the whole series. I might just hold off on it for now. I might do it for an after Christmas gift for myself. Need to see how much I’m spending on gifts for others first.

Work – Ugh…I really feel that Ike created a more obvious rift in work. I (as well as others) think that management handled things poorly and inefficiently when Ike was coming around. We did well on the Thursday prior to Ike when we were putting things together. When I say “we” I mean those of us that actually did all the packing and stacking and storing and moving and etc. While 4 people were told to continue doing their normal job, 4 others weren’t doing much either other than “managing” what went on and then disappearing for hours to “not” get supplies for themselves and their home. We all have families and homes to take care of. If everyone (except the few that physically can’t) helped out, we could’ve left earlier and had more self time to prepare. We were graciously let out at 3, but what was the point of staying any longer? Everything was set 2 hours before that. We just had to wait for the few others that had their stations up and running to wait for 3 to finish preparing work for Ike.

And then there was the after-Ike issues. I won’t delve much into that work drama because it’s ridiculous. It just really shows how much management cares about their employees in a few different ways. It’s horrible. You can ask in person to hear a nice rant if you wish.

Birthday – I kind of believe in karma. It’s weird, but it always seems to balance itself somehow, which is why I believe it to a degree. So last year my birthday was super great. This year it balanced out with it not being great. The celebration a few days before was great though and I’m thankful for those that came out and enjoyed themselves. That even didn’t go smoothly. Yes, even though it was stressful getting the Roast to work, that actually happened and worked in the end. I was fine with all that. There were a few things that didn’t happen and promises were broken that day also that did mar that day. Any other day I would’ve blown off those broken promises, but of all days…no. That didn’t ruin the day completely, only 10% of it. The other 90% was great and that is majority and that was what mattered more in the end.

Other Stuff – I had a few things I wanted to mention, but had forgotten over the days it has taken me to type this out. Maybe they weren’t as important. If I remember, then they’ll go into the next entry if they are worth mentioning.

Okay. That was lengthy with only a few pictures. On Word, this paragraph is the start of page 8, dang. For those that took the time to read it all, I applaud and thank you. Next time it will be short unless something major happens that I’ll get caught up in. We shall see.

Take care.