Okay, Monday night I went to the Gate after work. I'd seen Katie someplace and she told me they were having a Crimson Skies thing. I'd just finished reading the book and was thinking about playing more of the Xbox game. So I went to play a little even though it'd been about six months since I played any of the WizKids games.

Turns out Katie had taken an idea we joked around with last year at the local game convention and made it the theme of the tournament. Thus birthed the "Confederate Air Demolition Derby". Entrance to the squadron was contingent upon your ability to collide with another aircraft (it could be one of your own) and inflict a click (or more) of damage while not taking any yourself. The two of us are the founding members, she's president and I'm vice-president. And events dictated that the choice was wise since at one point in my first game one of Erik's planes (oh, I sucked him into this game now!) collided with two of mine. During the first collision determination I rolled snake-eyes (a serious collision which results in one of the planes being totally destroyed, locked together in a death-spiral). His plane survived so we rolled for the second collision. This time he rolled snake-eyes and my plane survived. Nice.

Now this is starting to piss me off.

I tuned in Saturday night to channel 10 hoping there'd be the 2nd half of the two parter they showed last week. Knowing (now) that it wasn't even close to season 7 like I'd hoped. What do they air? The same thing as last week!

HOW is this supposed to do anything but piss fans off. Time to write them an email to express my displeasure (okay only to vent since they're not going to do anything about it).

Well this is annoying.

I got into watching Stargate SG-1 after they stopped showing Trek twice in a row (all reruns of course) on channel 13 on Saturday evenings. They switched to X-Files, Voyager (which they started over again for the third time not including the original airing) then X-Files again. I had tried to watch X-Files but could never keep it straight or it never grabbed me and made me stay tuned (like it did so many other geeks). So I look around to see what else is on at 10:30 on Saturday evening. I find Stargate on channel 10 and watch for a couple of weeks.

It got me. Despite the fact that for the next eight weeks they showed all of three episodes, some of them two parters (which I didn't see half of since they never showed the 1st part the previous week or the 2nd part the next week). So I ordered the Season 1 dvds off Amazon. Then I really got sucked into it ("I have heard of a place where humans do battle in an arena filled with jello" - Teal'c). I ordered Season 2 not long after that. Then it was a race to remember to order the next season before I finished watching the latest one I had so that I wouldn't have any breaks.

I've got all the way up to Season 6 now. And I could tell that the episodes aired on Saturday evening were reruns. But then I see one three weeks ago that was need, not on any DVDs I had and I hadn't see it before. It even seemed to advance the plot line. I was all pumped thinking it was Season 7. But talking to Ryan and Blake earlier this week I come to realize that Season 7 is done, in the can and aired already. The season cliff-hanger is already done. So channel 10 must be showing only reruns. Sci Fi channel has it but when I got my cable modem and downsized my cable I got the "new and improved" package, which is to say that you pay less but you get squat. So I don't have Sci Fi channel.

And the last few days my cable modem has been slow and if it only dropped 30% of the packets it was a good day. I wonder if more people are on my cable trunk now and I have to share my bandwidth? I wonder if I can find out. I wonder if there's anyone at their tech support who might know the answer. I wonder if I shouldn't just junk Mediacom and go with a faster more reliable ISP and satellite TV.

Guess I'm off to Mediacom's site to see what I can find out. And I'll start tracking the times I've got a piss poor connection. Luckily I didn't sign any sort of contract (well I hope I didn't or that it's over now).

Well that turned out to be typical of me.

Andy's wedding was at a small church southeast of Lynn, which is 25 miles or so (I know that *now*!) east of Jefferson City at noon last Saturday. Jeff city is 30 miles south of Columbia. So I figured that 50 minutes was plenty of time to get there. I left at about 5 after eleven after doing errands most of the morning.

Well 50 minutes later I still wasn't there and it was pretty obvious that I was going to be about 10 minutes later. Having been to a few weddings before I didn't think that was too big a deal. I mean dillb's wedding lasted a good hour and a half I think. Of course they are both members of a religion who takes communion at weddings (don't remember which).

I finally find the church and pull up and Jason and his wife see me arrive and step over (the yellow car is hard to miss once you've seen it the first time). He sounds like he's joking when he tells me that it's over but he wasn't. The ceremony took all of 7 minutes and they started 10 minutes early because the pianist ran out of music to play. He did have a plan for me to sneak around back, go in the basement door then come out the front and go through the receiving line (as if I haven't been through enough receiving lines in my military days!). It might have worked if their doors hadn't been locked.

D'oh Seems par for me these days. Talk about "low key"!

Okay I've got the space from Brian and he's put a php board up for me. I've got it configured and it's at

http://www.games-asgr.com/phpBB2/index.php

It's mainly intended for the Transcendence game but we can use it for other things as well.

Andy's wedding is tomorrow. Should be pretty low key from what he said at our last game.

Well I got the link changes to stick. And then two days later I decided to go with a different template and had to do them over again anyway!

When Jeff read the last message, it didn't register quite right. He "read" the url and thought it said "sky dive vagina". When he mentioned it on the ASGR list Brand set up Aaron put a motion on the floor to cancel our reservation in Dixon and get lodgings in this place!

The menu for the ASGR seems okay to most everyone so we're nearly done with the planning. Now the grocery list and then figuring out who/how to record sufficient footage to make another embarrasing DVD like Aaron did last year. Oh and the games are going to rock too!

Okay this is spooky. In our email "Transcendence" game that Jeff started after he left Missouri for Colorado, I've been looking at getting some server space from Brian Dourty and setting up a php message board arrangement. That would work better than our current email arrangement. As part of this I went out to domain.com today to see what domain name I could gin up based on my various nicknames. Nothing wasn't taken so I put my last name in and that lead me to google myself. I found a guy named Jim Heivilin in Virginia who apparently teaches skydiving and remodels houses. There's also a Donna and a Naomi out there that got quite a few hits.

http://www.skydivevirginia.com/staff/heivilin-jim/

http://www.housingzone.com/projects/modremod01/remodeler.asp

Whoa!

Games

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The planning for the Third Annual All Star Gamer's Retreat is coming along nicely. We've got a date and Jay has locked in the location. The schedule of games seems to be pinned down. Now the menu.

Well I keep trying to change the template so that my headers are correct. Dave Barry got a new blog on the paper (the Miami Herald) so I wanted to correct the URL. No luck so far.

Well this is ironic. Not two days after I post the bit about driving like Han Solo flies I get stopped.

This morning on the way to work I ran into the usual crowd of people who were either not in a hurry or too timid. I change to the other lane since it's moving a *bit* faster. A pickup stuck behind someone does exactly what I would do, he looks over, sees there about enough space for his truck to fit between me and the car I'm behind and pulls in front of me. I spot a cop on a cross steet and think "Great, now they're going to freak and drive as slow as my grandfather used to walk". Sure enough but eventually our lane gets by the slowpoke. I think the pickup is going to pull over but he doesn't. I do when I have the space and boom flashing lights.

So he takes my information. I don't get a ticket but I'm sure that I'm in their computer now so that if I have any other problems in the immediate future then it's driving school for me (or worse).

Time to change my middle name to "MilqueToast". :-)

Okay back for more details now.

First I drive like Han Solo flies in the 5th Star Wars film. The asteroid belt scene. And it seems that as long as I'm traveling at warp 2 I'm fine (I've only ever had accidents ... well car accidents when I was going slowly, parking lots and the like). It's not that I hate people who don't drive fast, but rather that I often wish they would not-drive-fast in another place besides to my front. But people who don't pay attention to their driving remind me rather forcefully of my motorcycle accident. Them I don't want out here with us at all.

And it stretches to more than just people who don't pay attention to their driving. I seem to see people not paying attention to things happening around them all the time. Bikers or joggers wearing walkmans (walkmen?) oblivious to the car, driven by someone talking on a cell phone while eating a Big Mac, about to run them over.

This just grates on me since way back in my military training it was drummed into me "attention to detail" on the idea that if you took care of the little things then the big things would tend to take care of themselves (not really accurate since you deal with them as you're examining the details but it all works well from what I can tell). This is one of my buttons. And so many people push it so often. One of the little sayings I've coined the last few years is "So many drivers, so little skill. (you may quote me on that)

More later. Maybe the next section will be more coherent.

The Obliviousness of America

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Is that a word? "obliviousness" I was going to call it the incompetance of America but I don't think it's quite that. It's not that people can't do things but rather that they won't or perhaps don't care enough to. The prime symptom is not paying attention to what's going on around them. While we've been this way in regards to the world situation for a long time, now this attitude seems to be creeping into our daily lives and we don't know about the car at the cross stop sign (nor do we seem to care).

Well more on this later.