Well, Mom and Tom are on their way to PA for a mini vacation. Mom is showing Tom where she grew up. Hard to believe that we really have never been there as adults. (Not that I fully qualify as an adult most days of the week.)

I'm out of my zone today and celebrated by picking up Soul Calibur 4.

Here's a mini-review of my two latest video games. Haze really does kind of suck. I didn't want to say it. And I it's not just because I keep getting eating alive in multi-player games. I think it finally hit me when I got to the big "plot twist" in the story line. All I could say was, "Seriously?" Banal doesn't really cover it.

And then of course multiplayer is kind of bland, etc., etc. I went online to see what other people were saying and all of the reviews -- all of the reviews -- were terrible. No more impulse video game shopping for me! Check the reviews first!

In a similar vein I took a chance with Soul Calibur. Like Haze, everyone expected this to be a great game. Unlike Haze, it seems to be live up to the expectation so far. There are no "combo moves" in the game; I'm still getting a little used to that. And the manual is like a myster novel with no climax or resolution. But it's fun so far. I'll try multiplayer once I finally get a handle on how the moves actually work together.

Got assigned a change for work at 5pm this Friday afternoon. I don't know what bugs me more: the fact that so many things get scheduled at the very last minute, or that I really am just an SA now. If I ever had to switch jobs I don't know how I would explain the transition from what I did before this job to what I'm doing now. "Well, I was an effective leader in charge of budgets, a data center that I built, a national network of doctors' offices that I built, and had my own team of technicians. Then I moved up to applying service patches on Windows servers and dealing with filespace issues..."

Last but not least, I'm taking the plunge with my fence finally. Not having a fence in the back yard has bugged me the entire time I've owned my house. And the situation got worse when my neightbor put up a fence that was well over my property line. (I didn't realize how much until recently.) Long story short: he took it down, I'm putting something up, and it's going to cost a fortune to do the entire thing.

I'll feel very, very good having it finally done though.

Carly came over last night and we played Haze all night. Or rather, I should say that I played Haze all night, because she and Dawn went to bed at a reasonable hour.

I could go on and on about what draws me into games so much. Beyond a general compulsion to play them period, and the general fun-factor they have, each genre is a little different. With FPS games, First Person Shooters, the compelling reason is that I hate to suck. And I am kind of bad at FPS games -- especially on a gaming pad; I'm a little better if I can use a keyboard and mouse.

But when a game ends and your kills are at, let's say, 9 total, and the leader has racked something like 43 kills, it's just hard to put down. Never mind the fact that the thing I almost lead the board with was "most times died."

Sure, I don't play FPS very much, and it was my first night, and I wasn't at the bottom at least. But I really hate not being good at something. I don't know if I'm getting older or if kids are getting much better. (Or maybe they're not spending enough time doing homework.)

Anyway, as the morning sun grew brighter and brighter this morning, I knew it was time for bed. Two hours later, work paged me.

The thing about being on-call 24/7 for a whole week is that it really don't matter when you go to bed. If you sleep at a normal hour, you'll be page in the middle of the night, and vice versa. And I expected to be paged this weekend, hence taking a day on Friday to spend with Dawn. But man, two hours of sleep. (It's really sad that it's so hard to find people to swap shifts with nowadays. Things have really changed at work.)

I had to bow out of any activities today because the work call ended up being a ridiculous all-day affair. (It's still going on.) I missed out on a trip to Pei Wei and a the video game store. --We thought that Soul Caliber 4 came out today.



Turns out that it comes out on Tuesday. Silly day to release a game. But they traded in some of the more crappy PS3 games that I've purchased like Warhawk, Folklore, and Viruta Fighter, and pre-ordered Soul Caliber 4. Pre-orders get a free Soul Caliber t-shirt, so come Tuesday, I'll be geekier than ever.

The good news is that I was able to nap a couple hours, so I'm not feeling morbidly bad. In fact, for now, I'm quite peppy. The wall of fatigue will hit me a truck in a few hours, but if I have to stay up all night and sleep working and sleep during the day -- well, throw me into that briar patch if you must.

Tom, I was telling Dawn about this comic and had to go dig it up for her a couple months ago. I'm posting it here in response to your last Twitter.

If you Twitter in the woods and there is nobody there to read it, have you really written or said anything at all? Starting off a blog is a little depressing. I feel like someone on Lost writing in a journal.

On the work front, how long do you suppose it takes 7 tech and 2 account managers to remove three routes on a database server? The answer is approximately one hour. And that is even after typing detailed, numbered instructions. "Back up this, delete that, test this…" Offshoring has done nothing but increase my job security. It turns out that if you unleesh three nations worth of IT people, your ratio of good to bad is still the same as it ever was, if not worse. And good people will always be in demand.

I'm really enjoying photography though. It's fulfilling, though a little slow right now. I desperately need to shoot at least 6-12 portraits over the next month. It's funny how as a small business with nearly no budget you play a back and forth game with your cash. A little to get started and get that first customer, then a little more to improve equipment and marketing, a few more customers, then more improvements and advertising…

On a side note, "Planetary Funk Alert (Vocal)" from LTJ Bukem's September 200 Progression Sessions really rocks my socks. If I listen to it much more I'm going to make myself sick of it.