The Escapee

This morning I took a trip to the nursing home to visit my grandmother, which is never a long stay since she doesn't really recognize anyone anymore. Right after I walked into the building, this painfully loud alarm went off. I was half asleep at the time, so I'm surprised I didn't crap my pants right there. At first, I thought I had caused the alarm to go off by coming through the door -- I had to come in through the side door, since they were blacktopping the parking lot at the front of the building. I then noticed that all the nurses were running towards the front of the building, so I peered down the hallway to see a little old man in a wheelchair trying his damndest to open the SECOND set of doors leading outside. That's right, he had already gone through the first set of doors, and now was just one thick pane of glass away from being outside.

I suddenly got this vision of the little old guy zooming down the road in his wheelchair with the nurses running after him. I'm sure those chairs would be able to build up a lot of steam if you got a nice downhill grade. I was laughing all the way to my grandmothers room for two reasons: 1) The mental picture I had painted in my head was quite hilarious. 2) It reminded me of ANOTHER incident that actually happened with a wheelchair.

A few years ago, I took a business trip to Jersey City to visit one of my company's customers. It was a two-day stay, so the first night the three of us on the trip took a drive into Time's Square in New York City. We had a rented car, and parked this at a garage so we could just walk around the place. It was around 3:00 AM when we made our way back to the garage. As we waited for the watchmen to open the gate for us, we hear something coming towards us from up the hill. We look to see some guy in a wheelchair rolling towards us at a furious pace, and we all step out of the way as he zoomed by us with his arms flailing about in the air. He was followed almost immediately by a woman who was clearly out of breath, who then asked us if we'd seen a guy in a wheelchair. We pointed her in the right direction, and then laughed all the way back to the hotel.

Boom!

Games have come a long way in the last 10 years. We've gone from playing pixelated, 16 bit games on atari to fast paced, full 3-D rendered, bump mapped, bit textured, dynamic shadowed, pin point damagable masterpieces. But there's one thing about games that hasn't changed in 10 years. What is that you ask? How much fun it is blowing shit up!

And so my journey through Painkiller continues, and it's only getting bloodier as you can see.

Get ready Satan. I'm coming for YOU.

Grrr!

To the person who bid on the Hiei auction this morning: Kiss my ass!

LOL. Yeah, I'm a sore loser. But I take condolence in the fact that I made you pay out of your ass. (And made you have to bid in the last 10 minutes too, that was quite enjoyable.)

For those who'd like to see the end result, check out the auction here. If I didn't already have a cel from this sequence, I probably would have kept going. But I can't justify going any higher, since I paid about one third that price for the one I have.

Consider yourself lucky!

What a coincidence!

So it was a rather nice evening, thus I decided to head down to the park to do some pitching. I was there for about 15 minutes when a white pickup truck goes zooming past on the main road. After it was beyond the courts, I hear the brakes squeal, and turn to see the driver putting the truck into reverse and speeding backwards on the road back towards where I was.

It was then I realized who it was -- Shawn Clark, a dude I used to work with at Descartes. I haven't seen him in probably 8 months. He was one of the few people I enjoyed working with at that hell hole, so it was good seeing him again.

PD's Blog

Why? Partly due to boredom, partly due to the very small part of me that really is trendy. I will make an attempt to add logs to this thing often, but don't hold your breath. This is more for my benefit, so in 25 years I can look back on this and say, "Wow, had I nothing better that could waste my time?"