My Wife keeps complaining that I never blog. Seems everyone else in our little circle keeps the regular update thing happening, and I don’t. Oh well. Every day at work is hectic, every night is busy with unpacking more boxes. I have tons of potential posts in my head and most of them wither on the vine either because I forget them or they’re not quite as good when I finally do hash them out.
Quick life update – I have now entered the bracket of home owners. Well, “owner” in the respect that I’m indebted to a financial institution for the next three decades or so. I’ve obviously unpacked my PC, got my office set up with the glued wood furniture which almost didn’t make the five mile trip, and purchased a pool table which I’m determined to not have go the way of the treadmil or metal detector.
Ironically, we live in Frisco, TX and we used to live about a block south of Main, which is pretty much where the “city” portion of Frisco effectively ended. We were determined to move further south in Frisco. We wound up moving about five miles further north. You literally have to pass a ranch with cows to get to where we live. Our visitors don’t consider us “city folk” anymore.
We bought a home from a builder, but it was done when we found it. It was an “inventory home” meaning essentially that they cut us a discount to get us in the house ASAP. We found the house and had moved in within a month. That same month I expereinced job stress in the form of my boss being fired (which was good – but it’s still stressful) and my original cat Jenny passed away after 21 years. Stressful.
But overall things are good. If there’s anyone out there who wants to rent a house in Frisco, TX, contact me (long shot, but we still owe rent at our rent house)
Sleeping in on a Saturday morning is not really possible yet – roughly 9 AM or so the construction on nearby homes commences. It’s almost disturbing to see how fast these houses go up – say what you will about the people who build houses for a living, they’re a well-oiled machine. Compare this to the movers we hired – two of them were white guys who would not stop bitching about how much stuff there was to move and how heavy it was – and they move stuff for a living. With the exception of my grandfather’s man-killer of a player piano, I don’t know what the big deal was.
Like I said, we got a pool table. We went originally to Billiards & Barstools, the trendy place, but besides the fact that every pool table there was hideously expensive, the help there was snooty and no help to us at all. Then I spotted a girl on the side of the road holding a sign pointing to Universal Billiards who not only sells nice pool tables for a fraction of the price, but were nice and helpful as well. We got one right away.
How much of a geek am I? All I can think about when I play pool is how Virtual Pool makes you a better pool player thanks to the optional trajectory lines in the game. So I dig out my old copy of this 1998 game, and it really can’t handle itself too well – certian windows won’t work and it won’t accept higher resolution modes. This is something I’m noticing – the DirectX notion of “it will run in Windows forever” almost holds up – but not quite. Anywho, a little searching shows that the last title in the series, Virtual Pool 3, was published in 2000. I find the demo for it and it kicks ass, so I start downloading it off of eMule – but then I try and see if the game’s in stores anymore. To my surprise it is, and the Lewisville GameStop has a copy for $10. So I go get one, but by the time I get home my download has finished.
Here’s the funny thing – the version I downloaded has a woman named Jeanette Lee who “hosts” the affair and offers advice through instructional videos. The version I bought doesn’t have this. The game was published in 2000 by Interplay but since Interplay has more or less gone the way of the Dodo, this copy states “Copyright 2004 Global Star Software, a Take Two Interactive Subsidiary”. The game itself also shows itself as “Copyright 2004 Celeris Software”. Celeris Software is the company that made the Virtual Pool series but other than a cell phone game, the company appears to be dead. Were I to guess, I’d say that Global Star got a lot of Interplay’s assets through bankruptcy and they decided to release Virtual Pool 3 as part of a line of bar-themed budget reissues. Not sure about Friday Night 3D Bowling or Friday Night 3D Darts but Virtual Pool 3 is less a pool game and more a physics simulator and in that respect, it kicks serious ass. It makes sense that the rights to use Jeanette Lee have expired and it was easier to just cut the tutorials and crap out of the game than try to re-acquire her rights. Interesting that in some places the spider fonts (Lee’s nickname is the Black Widow) remained in place.
Oh well, at least I’ve got a legit copy and I’ll use that to play online.