Office Visitor

A red tailed hawk decided to perch outside a window in our office building lately.

Cabinet Part 1

We had our new entertainment center installed today. It looks great. I only have time to post one picture really quick, so here it is. I'll update more tonight.

Halo Wars!

Big news today.

I haven't updated my blog for a while, and I've even received a comment scolding me about it (thanks, Mats), but I have a good reason for that. I've been extremely busy at my job at Ensemble Studios working on our latest project, which was announced to the world today. The game is called "Halo Wars" and it is a real-time strategy game, designed for the XBox 360 console system, which takes place in the very famous and very popular HALO universe.

For those of you who are not game players, but remember Nintendo from the 1980's, mentioning the word "HALO" to a game player of the XBox generation of players is like saying "Super Mario Bros." to a 1980's kid. If they have heard of ANY game, they have heard of HALO.

As expected, when the announcement came today at the end of a very impressive press conference called X06, which Microsoft held in Spain, people could not believe it. We are told the room erupted into cheers and applause, and all the press furiously blogged and updated their webpages. Sure enough, within a half hour of the announce, everygaming webpage that I know of had exploded with commentary, and user feedback about our teaser trailer that was released.

Simultaneously with the announce, our new webpage for Halo Wars went live on the internet. Also our Ensemble Studios webpage got a facelift to notify visitors of the new announcement. People for the most part are drooling over the cinematic teaser trailer we showed, and many people have already downloaded the trailer on their XBox 360 console in XBox Marketplace to watch on their TV's at home in full HDTV glory.

Gamers are very excited about the potential of this game, and although few details have been given out about it, that is not stopping them. This is truly like nothing I have experienced in this business to date. I am extremely excited about this project and it's been fun to work on. It has definitely been excruciating keeping everything a secret for so long. But now that it's announced, I'll link to our webpage when there are updates and news blurbs released to the public.

Here are a few pictures we have released, and here is a link to the trailer if you would like to watch it. It is pretty darn cool!

Pictures, pictures, pictures.

I have been taking a lot of pictures lately. I bought a new digital camera. It's a Canon PowerShot A620 and it's a very nice camera for a very good price. You can get them for around $200 and they are awesome. I bought mine at NewEgg.com (who is also awesome) and got a free 1GB memory card for it.

The A620 is 7.1 megapixels, has a swivel screen and lots of controls. Best of all, it takes AA batteries. My old Canon PowerShot S-30 digital camera took special Canon batteries that cost a lot of money and always went bad after a short period of time. I highly recommend buying a digital camera that takes AA batteries if you can, becuase you will never be stuck without power in a pinch. In the worst case you can drive up to the convenience store and buy some extras.

Maggie was very interested in the new camera as you can see here.


So far so good, although I haven't taken any amazing pictures with it yet. It takes very nice pictures and I have some ideas for locations where I'd like to shoot. We also get some good lightning storms here (unfortunately no rain but that's another story), which would make a really cool picture if I get a tripod. I really am a point-and-shoot kind of guy, although I took photography class in high school, I would like to learn to compose some more professional shots.

Work insanity.

I haven't kept my goal of updating this blog three times a week in the last week. I was working extended hours and not getting home until after 10:00 p.m. every night, so I just didn't feel up to it. Now that I'm back on more sane hours, I'm back to updating.

I disputed our property taxes this week. It didn't go over well and they are not going to lower them. The main reason is they did not give me all the information I required to dispute them. Primarily, they did not give the specific parameters they use to calculate the taxes. For example, they only factor in home sales in the same neighborhood as your home. Nowhere on the paperwork did it say that. So, when I went in with several comparable sales figures for the nearby area, none were in my exact neighborhood and would not be considered. It's great that I know now, and will be better prepared next year, but I'm pretty certain they leave out that information in order to screw the taxpayer out of excessive taxes for an extra year.

My family is also down to visit right now. Everyone is here and we're just hanging out. They have visited Texas before so all the tourist stuff has been done. For the most part we're telling stories, playing cards and watching my wife and mom play the puzzle games on the XBox. ZZzzzz...

There's some other interesting stuff going on but I'll put that in another update.

When good weekends go bad... part 2.

Just a quick follow up on the car shenanigans from last weekend. I took the Taurus to the Ford dealership next to my office and had them check out the broken light and determine if it was caused by the accident at the first shop. It turns out it was not caused by any accident, it was just an unhappy coincidence that we noticed it the same day. Happily they were able to replace the lights. Unhappily, that part costs $300 to replace. Doh.

Do-it-yourself landscaping

When we bought our house, it came with a little landscaped area along the front of it. There wasn't anything special about it, and it mostly contains unremarkable bushes which are neither pretty nor fragrant. It is mainly fillter plants the builder threw in there to say it has been landscaped.

For the first 18 months that we lived in this house, I ignored this area completely. Recently I noticed how the yard had taken over the landscaping completely and beat it into submission. Our yard is bermudagrass, which spreads quickly and without mercy. The most annoying thing is it spreads underground, so you can't just pull the grass, because there are thousands of root-like things (I think they are called stolons) under the ground ready to sprout new grass as soon as you do. No, you have to dig it out, and in my case, I had to till it out with a garden cultivator/tiller. It only took a week of work to do. In the end I had about five garbage bags full of grass, weeds, rocks, bricks, glass, plastic, nails, etc that were left just inches below the grass by the home builder. Sadly, if I don't put in some sort of wall around the landscaping with some weed blocking material, the grass will be back in no time. However, right now it looks pretty good. Not perfect, but much better than it looked a few weeks ago.

When good weekends go bad...

This weekend was really interesting. It started with something good, then went downhill from there.

First off, I got a call midweek from the title company in Michigan where we bought our first house, saying they had a check for us. I had long forgotten about the check so when they called and said it would be here by the weekend it was a nice surprise. We got the check on Friday and deposited it at the bank. At that point we figured it would be a nice excuse to buy something for the house. That was the high point of the weekend.

Carole went to the Rascal Flatts concert with two of her coworkers in Frisco on Friday. She was supposed to get home around midnight. About 11:15 she called to say that they were in the parking lot outside the venue and her car battery was completely dead. Furthermore, she had several people try to give her a jump and it wouldn't start. I had her call AAA but they were going to be at least thirty minutes to arrive. By the time all was said and done, she was able to get a jump start from AAA (turns our her jumper cables were defective), and get home, but by that time it was after 2:00 a.m. and we were both exhausted.

The next morning I went out and checked the car and it was dead again, so we borrowed the neighbors jumper cables and jumped it. Then we drove it to the nearby car shop / car wash place. They tested the battery and indeed it wasn't even holding enough of a charge to start up, and needed to be replaced. Since the car was overdue for the 30,000 mile maintenance, I decided to do the whole deal there and get several hours worth of work done on it. Goodbye $500 check. :(

When we were about ready to go pick up the car, the phone rang and it was the guy from the shop. I could tell immediately by the sound of his voice something was not right. It went something like this: "Mr. Hanson... about your car. There was a... um... problem..."

Apparently after they flushed the brake system, whoever was working on it forgot to bleed the brakelines (get the air out of them). If there's air in the brake lines, you don't have any brakes. Well, he pulled the car around after the work was done to the car wash to make it look all nice and shiny for us, and ended up driving right over a curb into a ditch when he stepped on the brake and it didn't stop. Two driver side tires popped and one rim bent and another scuffed up. They immediately went next door to Goodyear and got two exact match tires to replace the popped ones. They had to order a replacement rim which they will install at some point this week. They were thoroughly apologetic but didn't offer anything on top of replacing what they broke, which was kind of weak. At least a free oil change guys!

Anyway, we made them write onto our receipt a statement saying they forgot to bleed the brake system and basically what happened, in case the engine falls out this week. It may be a good thing too. When we got home I noticed the rear light on the car (the white light that comes on when you reverse) on the opposite side was not working. Upon closer inspection, the taillight and brakelight actually were full of water. The water clearly came from the carwash, since we haven't had rain here in quite a while, but it's not certain if the seal on the light was broken from the "accident" or if it was like that. I haven't spoken to them about this yet and will have to call them tomorrow since I forgot today.

Now I really have to decide if I want to take the car to another independant shop to be checked out. They haven't done anything to indicate they are trying to screw us in some way, but I'm not sure I can just take their word for it that they checked it out and "everything is ok now".

Oh, and when we got home the dog had crapped on the living room carpet.

T.G.I.M.

My computer ist kaput!

When I returned home last night I went up to the office to check my email and noticed my PC was turned off. Unusual because I usually leave it running 24/7. When I pressed the power button, silence. Nothing happened at all. I checked the cords and breakers and figured that the power supply must have blown, which would make it the third power supply in about four or five years. So now an emergency trip to Fry's Electronics is in order today. Sorry about the short update.

Our arcade has grown from one to four.

Here's an image of the final result of today's adventure. Before today, only the Pac Man machine was there.


We just finished up moving the machines from work to the house. I am totally exhausted. It was a lot more work than I anticipated. The arcade in our office is on the 16th floor which is the top floor of the building. Getting the machines from there to the parking garage involved two elevator rides, and carting them halfway across the building on an appliance dolly we rented from U-Haul.

After we got them all to the garage, we loaded Sinistar and Luner Lander on the trailer along with Tekken 3 which was the game won by my coworker. We took the legs off the pinball machine and put it in the back of the Jeep (and it fit, barely.)

We then made a very slow drive home in order to not disturb the 1000 lbs. of arcade machine on the back of the trailer, and only had to make one emergency stop when the Sinistar panels all seemed to come unlatched and start flapping about in the wind.

After we arrived home, it was 99 degrees outside and the sun was very bright. Not exactly the ideal conditions to be moving huge bulky stuff around. The machines, having been blasted by the sun on the drive home were also extremely hot and the radiated heat made them uncomfortable if not difficult to move. We totally lucked out when our neighbor from across the street, Don, came over and helped us move the machines up the stairs in our house. He saved our butts because I don't know if we would have been able to manage with two of us. Did I mention the stairs? That was the worst part. It basically involved the three of us doing the old heave-ho up the stairs with each machine on the dolly, one at a time, and usually doing the last few stairs in one final surge of desperation before passing out.

So we now have a nice little mini-arcade in our house. Pac Man works of course, but the three new ones all need varying amounts of work. The Star Trek pinball machine almost works, but has a few switches that are stuck and need to be fixed. The Sinistar machine has a broken plug that needs to be replaced, and beyond that I'm not sure if anything else is broken. Ditto for the Luner Lander. It doesn't currently power on, although I know it worked a few months ago. Possibly a simple fuse exchange will fix it and get it working again.

Well, that's all for now, I'm going to go mess around with the new toys.

Pac Man has brothers!

We have a "game room" upstairs in our house. In this part of the country this particular type of room is called the Texas basement. I think that's because almost no houses in Texas actually have basements so they instead build a large multi-purpose room on the second floor to compensate. In our particular Texas basement we have several things. We have a television and two chairs, a bow-flex exercise machine, an old kitchen table we were hoping to fix up and a Pac Man coin-op arcade machine. The Pac Man machine was made in 1980 so it's over 25 years old now. It's still in really great shape and works perfectly. It's definitely the conversation piece when company comes over.

I work at a video game studio and we have a small arcade of machines that we recently auctioned off to make more room in the building. I won three of the items in the auction: A sinistar arcade machine (needs to be fixed), a Luner Lander (classic) arcade machine which also needs to be fixed, and a Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball machine, which needs to be fixed but not as much as the other two. In about an hour or two I'm going to be heading out to the office to meet up with a coworker who also won an arcade machine and we're going to load all of the machines onto his trailer and deliver them. So long as his trailer is large enough, it shouldn't be too difficult with a cart and an applicance dolly. The hard part will be getting them upstairs once we get to the house. Ugh.

I'll update this with some pictures when I get back this afternoon.

Welcome back. Please excuse the mess.

I apologize for the ridiculous looking webpage here, but I have promised so many people I was going to start updating this thing regularly that I couldn't wait until I figured out how to make a good looking webpage. I'll work on making things more presentable soon, but for now I wanted to get the updates started.

So, why did I finally crack after years of faithfully ignoring what I said about updating my webpage regularly? Well, this weekend is my ten year high school class reunion, and I'm not going. Why? Well, partly because I live in Texas now and the reunion is in Ohio, approximately an 18 hour drive from here. There's a handful of people I would love to get back in touch with and I've actually tried emailing several of them recently, and (if any of them are reading this) will truly make an effort to stay in touch. But I just can't justify a trip cross-country at this point in time for a reunion.