Running on Eddie

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Lucky 13 Half Marathon - Honeyville Utah

Well, today was my first half marathon of 2014. It almost didn't happen: I went for a 5 mile run on Tuesday and felt a dull ache in my lower calf / achilles tendon -- both signs of Achilles Tendinitis -- one of the worst injuries to get in terms of recovery. I was kind of stupid (okay, very stupid) to keep running on it on Tuesday because as soon as I started running I felt it. I didn't run for the rest of the week and hit it with NSAIDs and ice and rest.

By Friday I wasn't feeling it (much) and decided I was a go for the race. If I hadn't preregistered for it, I don't think I would've done it, but heck I had shelled out $50 for the race, so I figured I'd go up and run it, even if I had to limp through it.

Getting There

It is about an hour an ten minute drive to Honeyville -- a small, one-horse town north of Salt Lake City. The race started at 7AM so that meant leaving at about 5:15. Luckily I woke up a bit earlier, shoveled a bowl of cereal down my throat and headed out. I left at 5:05 and got there a smidge after 6:20. I had zero problems finding the race site.

I took some really nice pictures of the sun coming up over the eastern ridge of mountains and the race started pretty close to 7:30. It would've started on time but there was also a triathlon so the number of cyclists they had to start took longer than expected.

The Race

I really didn't have a goal for the race. I wasn't sure what my fitness was, whether my Achilles would hold out, and how hilly the course was. The race itself was held at Crystal Hot Springs and the area immediately around the race start was rolling hills. I was a bit nervous as I saw how long they were. I asked around what the profile of the course was and found out that it does get flat after the initial start and then the "real" hills started at mile 4.

I went out cautiously, hitting 8:20 miles. After the initial set of hills on this out and back course it did level out so that the next 3.5 miles were pancake flat. I was able to knock off 8:20 miles like clock work. My achilles, initially barked at me but soon I forgot about it. I never had a single problem with it during or after the race.

The hills certainly lived up to their expectations and right at mile 4 there was a climb. It affected my pace but it didn't ruin my energy level. I'd reel in the hill, recover and then hit the next hill and rinse and repeat. For the most part I was nailing 8:20's except when I faced a bad hill.

What goes up, must come down and sure enough at the turn around point, we got to go down the hills we had climbed. I did remember clicking off a 7:57 mile.

I felt strong up until about mile 10 or 11. While normally around that time my pace plummets, I was able to maintain my pace reasonably well. I think my slowest mile (outside of hills) was a 8:45.

My final time was: 1:47:54 / 12th place in the men's / 4th in my age division (but the winner was a 40 year old, so I got to claim third) You can see the results here.

The course, in my opinion was short. The turn around point should've been at mile 6.55 (making a 13.1 race) but instead it was at 6.40-ish I believe my Garmin said I finished with a total mileage of around 12.85 or so. I suspect the course was a quarter mile short, so you can 2 minutes to my time.

If you want to see where the course ran, you can look at the race site: http://www.lucky13race.com/ or use maps.google.com and search out Honeyville Utah. I ran Route 38 North from the Springs for 6.44 miles through Honeyville and through a little town called Deweyville.

Post Race

One of the perks of the race is being able to soak in the natural hot springs at the Crystal Springs. According to their signs, they have the highest number of minerals in the country. Through the grapevine, I heard I was sitting in 20,000 year old water that was lava heated. There was a hot spring that was too hot to touch as well as a cold one. Suffice to say, I sat in the hot springs for no less than 90 minutes. The air temperature was about 50 and other than a bunch of annoying 10 - 12 year old kids climbing all over the place, it was a wonderful experience. I wasn't sore at all from the race and I think a lot of it has to do with the miles I've been logging as well as the hot springs.

Post Post Race

I wasn't sure what I wanted to do after the race and after soaking. Logan -- an idyllic town up in the middle of Cache Valley was 30 minutes away and while they have some good eats there, I knew that they also had a Golden Corral. Holding to tradition that's what I did: I went to Logan and to the Corral.

Luckily the race route followed Route 38 North out of town so I stopped and took pictures at various junctures along the way. After a 30 minute absolutely beautiful and peaceful drive, I arrived at the Logan Corral and ate to my heart's content.

Afterwards I headed to Richmond Utah, another 15 - 20 minutes north to go to the Pepper Ridge Farm Cookie Outlet and scored $20 worth of factory seconds.

I looked at my phone and discovered that I was a few minutes from Idaho. Being curious and also being in the market for a cheap bottle of white wine (for cooking purposes -- honestly) I drove into Franklin Idaho and Preston Idaho.

Afterwards I made the drive home. I am really sunburned and my skin feels salty despite the shower I took at the Springs. It was a really nice day for a run: perfect weather, I had a good time in my race afterwards. I wish I had had a better agenda and had figured out a hike, but I really didn't know what time I'd get to Logan and what the conditions would be like.

I did take a lot of pictures, however.

Sun coming up near Crystal Hot Springs

Looking east at Crystal Hot Springs

Campground at Crystal Hot Springs

Rolling hills near the start of the race

More mountain shots

Swimming pool awaits!

More hot springs

Where I hung out for 90 minutes

My finisher's medal and 3rd place ribbon

Another lap pool at the Springs

Typical section of the course

Typical section of the course - I ran down this road

Typical section of the course

Typical section of the course - One of the hills

View of the valley along the course

Historical Marker

Typical section of the course - North is Idaho

Typical section of the course - Looking into the valley

Where half marathon heroes eat

Boxes and boxes of Goodness

Lots of fish crackers

Half of my haul

T-Shirt

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Third Computer Programming Job - 1995 - 1997 - Welcome to Illinois

My Arrival To Illinois

As stated before, I found a gig in Buffalo Grove, IL. For those not in the know, I was born and raised in Illinois... from 1969 until the 7th grade in 1983. I lived in Riverside and Lake Forest until my dad found a new job in Southern California and relocated all of us. So coming back to Illinois wasn't totally unexpected and I still had some relatives and distant / vague friends in the Midwest.

People ask me why I went to cold and dank Illinois from beautiful Southern California. I still answer: for a job and a change. Southern California is beautiful and has a lot going for it, but it has also a LOT of negatives and I got to the point where the negatives outweighed the positives. I believe everyone needs to make that judgement call for themselves. Mine came in 1995 and I have absolutely no regrets about my decision. Sure the winters sucked, but life goes on....

The company that I fell in with was huge. They have businesses in all forms of entertainment, mostly television and cable channels. They also owned amusement parks, movie production studios, a video store chain, as well as liquor. They had about 100 or so people in the Buffalo Grove office and our primary existence was to take their intellectual properties and make computer games out of them. Some had been successful, while others, not so much.

Either way, they paid 100% for my move, put me up in the Marriott Suites in Deerfield Illinois for a week until my stuff arrived from California. 24 hours after landing I went to the Glenview Saturn dealership and bought a car - I had looked at a Saturn in Santa Maria, CA but I fell in love with it after driving it. Plus Consumer Reports gave it a best buy. Best car I've ever owned (I'd wind up driving it until 2010 and it was still running great then).

I suddenly had a very much needed, new lease on life...

Life in Illinois

I had rented an apartment site-unseen on the corner of Smith and Dundee in Palatine. I don't know how I got lucky but it turned out to be a nice place. I just saw the picture in a catalog and the price seemed good enough so I called and did everything by the phone (again no apartments.com). I was really fortunate; it could've been a disaster. I wound up living there for about 18 months...

I was still doing the country music thing and Illinois actually had two country bars that I would frequent with some regularity. The Sundance Saloon in Wauconda (which has since moved to Waukegan),and the Cadillac Ranch in Bartlett. I had some success in dating for a change. I suspect the change had more to do with me: I was 3000 miles away from "home" and I was more independent and confident. I ditched the glasses and found a set of contacts that I could actually wear without wanting to rip my eyeballs out. I also ditched cable TV, which forced me to seek entertainment anywhere but in front of the idiot box. I also didn't have home Internet. So I was really were forced to find entertainment and subsequently I was always on the "go". I'd get up early, go to work, do my thing, and come back late at night having lived a full day. I'd go fishing or hiking all weekend and just be plain busy. I didn't have time to be bored.

I also quickly made friends from a variety of sources. I was finally getting somewhere in my ability to meet and have lasting friendships with people. Within a few months I had a large piece of paper with people's phone numbers on it (outside of work). I went fishing in St Charles, hiking in Starved Rock, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana. I attended White Sox games and people's family gatherings who I hadn't known just a few months before. I even got an occasional date... so things were definitely looking up, especially compared to my social life in Santa Barbara.

The Job

The job that I went to had awesome benefits, great pay, discounts at major retailers, etc. I had my own office, with a door, telephone and spacious conditions. There was an onsite gym, showers, Karate classes after work, basketball courts, a suite with Nintendos and Playstations with every imaginable game. An arcade room (with actual coin-op games) -- just super nice working conditions. When I arrived, I felt like "wow, now I am getting somewhere"

I was put on a game that was being developed for the Playstation, which was just coming out at that point. You may ask yourself, "I didn't know you had PS1 experience". Well, up until that point, I hadn't. The only thing I had developed for was DOS using Pascal and C.

So suddenly I was throw in an unfamiliar environment. To compound matters, the documentation for the PS1 was spotty. Much of it was translated Japanese. They had plenty of examples to work from, but the comments in between the lines of code as to what they were trying to accomplish were, as you might've guessed, in Japanese.

Keep in mind that this was before StackOverflow and other sites, so mostly I was on my own in terms of learning, and I struggled mightily. One of my first tasks was to figure out how to play a movie on the Playstation, look for ways we could possibly reverse engineer it to do things that other companies could not as well as to make a new encoding program so that we could generate movies in hours, rather than days (the existing Windows program for the PS1 took about 24 - 36 hours to render a minute long movie). It was rather vague requirements but I dove into it as best as I could while the other developer ran with developing the rest of the game.

For a guy whose toughest task up to that point in my career had been to program the ability for a restaurant to split checks, this was daunting and I spent several months stepping through non-Intel assembly language dumps, figuring out DCT algorithms, and how to encode BMPs into an MPEG. I was completely out of my element and from all of my estimations I was failing.

I wasn't terribly happy working in this role and once we had gone as far as we could with the MPEG encoder (we actually did get one to generate movies in hours, rather than days) I got some small tasks like the save / restore screen, but mostly I was relegated to a few other research projects and quietly pushed aside so the head developer could complete the game.

For some reason, they did like me, it would seem. I got a mini promotion and a nice bonus / raise. I am not sure why. I was learning, but I wasn't accomplishing much. I suspect they saw me as an investment, as computer programmers were suddenly in demand: salaries were suddenly skyrocketing and finding the right person was becoming more of a challenge. I heard rumors of what people were making at this place and suddenly the light went on: the more I knew, the more I could make.

At this point Java came out, and I was given a research project to convert one of our games. While I never finished my game, this is the Game I started. Whether they used any of my stuff is another question (my guess is probably not, but I did get it to work in a crude format). I quickly dove into Java and loved it, despite Java having a lot of bugs and incompatibilities in its first rendition. I bought a TON of books on the subject and came up to speed pretty easily. I just about bought any book that came out with Java on it. It was refreshing to be on the cutting edge of something and seeing it through. This knowledge would actually pay great dividends three years later, but again I digress.

I also learned MFC / Windows programming and was put on a small project that was going to used in the now defunct Westwood Studios Online.

While it may sound like I was busy and happy, I wasn't. When I wasn't stuck, I had very little to do and I spent a great deal of time reading. There was also a long period after the Playstation game where I was on no one's team. So I'd go to work, check in with someone (sometimes), be told to sit tight and come back tomorrow. Suffice to say, that my lunches got longer to the point where I was in the office for a few hours a day, if that. And sadly, I think I mostly fell off the radar there and wondered half the time if I didn't even come in, would anyone notice? (Answer: no)

The End

I knew the job wasn't what I wanted soon after arriving there. After about 8 months I dropped a hint to someone that I wasn't happy and was considering looking. Turns out that I needed to read the fine print on the moving clause. I discovered I had to stick it out for a year or pay my moving costs. I wound up sucking it up for another year.

I really wanted to be working on something and the long wait in between projects was killing me. Every now one would materialize but after seeing the track record of the previous projects and the way they were handled I knew they would never see the light of day. We (or I should say the lead programmer and project manager) would gather ideas for a week or two or three on a particular project idea. Ultimately it required major staffing, major funding, and license acquisitions and eventually someone would put the kabosh on it and we'd be back at square one. Also people were starting to think about building online games and have it ready in a year, with 2 programmers and one artist, only. Nuts. Either way, multiply this over the course of a few months and you'll realize why I nearly lost my sanity.

To make matters worse, the parent company was starting to make noise about selling the entire unit off. Strangers would come in, look at the offices, analyze the talent, and hushed meetings would occur. Rumors of layoffs were abound.

It was time to move on.

I did interview at a major financial institution. I didn't get the job and thank goodness I didn't. It looked horrible and knew it the minute I walked into the place. I think I purposefully failed their financial test that they gave out so I wouldn't have to deal with it. To this day, I've never really gotten a good lead from a head hunter and I suspect that is the reason why: they are pushing jobs that nobody wants.

I also almost got a job at a computer reseller. The interview went really well but for some reason the job never materialized. I did finally get a job, by chance when I took a walk, and that story I will tell in Chapter 4.

Aftermath

The year and half I was there was perhaps the most frustrating and agonizing of my career. I worked with some incredibly talented people there -- some of the smartest and most inspiring computer "gods" I've ever had the privilege of working with. Sadly it wasn't the right place for me in the long run.

However, my life suddenly felt on track: I had a girlfriend and had a strong social circle. I really loved living in Illinois: the sports, the fishing, good eats, money in the bank, country bars that weren't an hour away, ample job opportunities... the only thing that didn't fall into place was the job. Exactly the opposite of what I had in Santa Barbara.

In closing, I had always wondered how the Playstation game I had worked on had done (I never heard anything about it after it was released). I remember looking at a Playstation magazine in a bookstore about a year or two later which reviewed all the existing Playstation games. I picked it up, thumbed through it and found my game. I'll paraphrase here and it pretty much sums up those tough years:

"Shooters come a dime a dozen in the Playstation world, but this one is the worst. Frustrating, unforgiving, and just plain not fun. Avoid"

And next to it was an abysmally bad score (like less than 20 out of a 100). Sadly even during the brief testing I had done, I could hardly play it for more than 5 minutes without feeling the exact same way...

You can read another review by going here: Gamespot Review Please don't ridicule me about it.

Life would get better, but that story I will tell in Chapter 4.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

2nd Computer Job - 1994 - 1995 and Living in Santa Barbara, CA

Looking for work

After being laid off, I was pretty devastated. Although I wasn't in dire straits thanks to the ability to live at home, the computer industry wasn't going gang busters back then. I'd crack open the Sunday LA Times and peruse for jobs and send out as many resumes as I could. I was also interested in moving to Las Vegas so occasionally I'd drive down to a newspaper shop and pick up the Vegas newspaper.

During this time I worked as a math tutor for an academy briefly, making about $10/hr on weekend work. I was only there temporarily until they could find someone with professional teaching but I remember helping eighth graders with their math homework. I also would work under the table at JDC Records doing warehouse work or at Mindcraft for a few bucks destroying games. I got super angry one day when I noticed in an ad in the paper for Mindcraft looking for programmers when they had just laid me off a month earlier (Mindcraft wound up folding about 3 months later)

I also collected unemployment which actually was pretty decent considering I had very few expenses. In the afternoons I also helped my brother mop the local school bathroom floors (he did some janitorial work). All told, I think I was unemployed for 3 - 6 months -- my memory is sort of hazy....

I interviewed at just about any place that would let me. I almost got a gig doing Visual Basic for a company that was just starting out doing accounting software (husband / wife team). I also interviewed at a major tax preparation place for a Pascal job. I am not sure why I wasn't hired there as I was a master at Pascal and I remember the interview going well. However, I think they were more interested in how the folks at Mindcraft were doing than me (the Mindcraft founders used to work at the tax place). Their loss.

I finally came across a job way up in Santa Barbara, about 100 miles north of where I was living at the time, Palos Verdes. It was with a point-of-sale company who needed C/DOS programmers. I sent them my resume, made the 100 mile trip up there (with my mom of all things, who actually went to the interview with me) and somehow impressed them enough to hire me. I remember my dad and I going shopping that weekend to buy ties, nice socks and dress slacks. This was an IBM-like company and the dress code was professional (no jeans except on Friday).

I got an apartment off of Patterson Avenue on the border of Santa Barbara and Goleta. I had virtually no furniture, no vacuum cleaner and only a basic TV. I did wind up buying a couch, but my dinner table was a folding table and a few folding chairs. I'd watch TV laying in bed in the bedroom and saw it about 20 feet away in the living room.

I wound up working at the POS place for about a year a half. I immediately did very well there, getting a TON of stuff done in record time. I believe when I was hired on, they estimated that they had about 18 months worth of work to do for a team. I did all of it, in 6 months. My work soon was on cruise ships, major casinos throughout the country, as well as some major hotels and restaurants.

This company still exists but is now under a different name and appears to be mostly located in Las Vegas, catering to the Vegas hotels. There were about 75 people employed there with about a dozen developers, mostly doing C or some weird form of BASIC that the IBM POS machines understood. I had a touch screen monitor where I programmed the ability for waiters and waitresses to enter in food orders, swipe credit cards, use thermal printers, and all that. It was also the first time I used e-mail, had a network and learned about Client-Server relationships. I was on a DOS machine with a 486 processor and used Microsoft C. While I was a 100% rookie at C when I got there, in a matter of a month, I was a seasoned hack.

Santa Barbara

Most people are in awe when I tell them I lived in Santa Barbara. It is a jewel of Southern California. For me, it was my personal hell. And here's why:

I started off making not a lot of money. Most of it went towards rent. Santa Barbara is also a super expensive city. So I had very little money left over to enjoy whatever there is to do there. I also owed my dad money for my insurance and for all the fancy duds we had bought for the job (I did manage to save enough money to go to Nashville that winter though).

I was also into the country scene back then and when I got there, there was a saloon in downtown Santa Barbara that I would go to to dance and so forth (Red Dog Saloon). Eventually it closed or rebranded itself and I wound up having to go to Thousand Oaks to the Borderline Bar and Grill -- 60 miles one way south. I did wind up making a few friends to carpool with, but being a tee-totaler I was also the designated driver and it put a lot of wear and tear on my car.

I also survived the storm of 1995: http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/pw/engineering/lmc/references/floodvid.asp

Fishing became on of my hobbies as well up in Lake Cachuma, a scenic lake up in the mountains above Santa Barbara where I'd catch Rainbow Trout and occasionally go hiking. The fishing dried up though when they drained the lake in order to repair the dam.

Any visitor or date that I had who made the journey to Santa Barbara was often rewarded with a trip up into the mountains. While I didn't have a lot of extra money for gambling, we'd occasionally drop into Chumash Casino which at the time was little more than a warehouse filled with slot machines. I'd also do the wine tour, visiting Fess Parker, Firestone and many other wineries. I lived the life of the Sideways movie, and after doing the wine tours for as often as I did I could almost give the wine tours as well as the tour guides. I still get nostalgic after watching that movie because I walked down some of the same streets that they did. I often took dates to Mattei's Tavern for dinner or lunch, an idyllic stage coach station from the turn of the century. If you ever get a just to visit the area be prepared for some absolutely beautiful territory.

Sadly it was a lonely existence. While beautiful most of the people there were either college students who loved to party or old people with money. I simply didn't fit in and I didn't have the social skills that I have now to make friends. I did a TON of walking / thinking. While I couldn't run on account of my knees, I would walk for long miles after work. I wish I had a camera back then but I would take the bike trail from my apartment all the way to the beach, walk through California State University Santa Barbara and walk along the coastline. Some of the most beautiful scenery in the world was there. I often ate at some of the dirt cheap Isla Vista food places that had absolutely FANTASTIC food. My favorite pizza is still Woodstock Pizza. I also got involved with the church down there, even for a while becoming a Eucharistic minister.

Perks of the Job

I did extremely well at the POS place. I was given a lot of raises in short order and while I started off making not a lot of money, within a year I had boosted my salary up nearly 33%. Some of the largest raises in terms of percentages were at this time.

I also was given the opportunity to go to Vegas to see the opening of the Hard Rock Casino. The company I worked for had done the computers for their restaurants and my efforts had been instrumental to closing the deal. So my boss took me there, put me up in a suite in the Flamingo (we did a lot of business with Hilton back then) and told me to check in with the IT guys to see if they needed my help. I rolled in once and they told me to get lost, so I basically got a 3-day vacation in Vegas.

I got to see the security room of the hotel, meet the president of the Hard Rock, as well as one of the main managers at the Flamingo. Also just about every hotel in Vegas that I went to was running the software I had helped write. It was very rewarding to see my efforts being used. To this day, I can still go to Vegas and see the terminals with the company logo on them. However, the DOS machines that I worked on have been replaced with Windows versions, so probably very little code of mine is in use any more, but who knows.

I also got to see Slaughter perform at the Joint and got to eat at one of the Hard Rock's restaurants for free, since they were training the waitstaff.

Also, when I went to Nashville, I was given the name of the manager of the Wild Horse Saloon and got a personal tour of the entire place, including the dressing room (at the time, the Wild Horse Saloon was the set of a TV show on The Nashville Network).

Time to Move on

Sadly, I ran out of work to do. I would sit for weeks and months with very little to do and as those of you who know me, that doesn't sit well with me. This was also before the internet, so it made for some super long days. I'd read a book, add com

ments to the source code, or simply take long lunches.

To compound matters, I was lonely, bored and became depressed living in Santa Barbara. I was largely "Geographically Undesirable" living up there. A 60 mile trip (minimum) to date someone made it tough and to chat on the phone was a toll call. I'd go entire weekends without speaking another word to another human being. I was having some success going as far south as Orange County (about 130 miles one way) and hanging out at the Denim and Diamonds off of Beach Blvd in Huntington Beach, but again, not conducive for having a relationship.

I did entertain an offer from Denver from my old boss who went there. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like today if I had taken that offer. But I remember talking with an employee who went there and he told me quite bluntly not to take the job (hint taken). That company has since vanished as well.

The company loved me and definitely wanted to keep me, but I needed work. Santa Barbara was like a albatross around my neck and I was slipping into a deep depression that was NOT healthy. To compound matters, I went through a horrendous girlfriend break-up that was absolutely devastating to me. The only thing that was "working" in my life was my job and with the lack of work I wasn't happy there.

I started applying around like crazy to any game company with an address. I wasn't interested in living in California any more either, having had enough of the traffic, the people, the expenses, and the attitudes. So I was mailing out resumes to New Mexico, Las Vegas, Texas, -- anywhere in the south. One company took notice and flew me out to Illinois -- hardly south but I jumped at the opportunity to be rescued. I somehow impressed them enough for them to move me out there.

While not my ideal place to live, it was back to gaming and with a solid, reputable company... what could go wrong?

Me standing in front of the Santa Barbara Mission, circa 1995

First Computer Job - Mindcraft Software

I've always worked. Ever since I was a kid I've done some sort of gig to earn money. From babysitting, delivering the Chicago Tribune at the crack of dawn, mowing lawns, making pizzas at the high school cafeteria, to delivering the Daily Breeze I did whatever it took to make a buck.

I also worked about 6 - 9 months in a grocery store as an apprentice butcher (totally illegal being I was 15) for $2.45 an hour. I also worked in a phonograph distribution warehouse (JDC Records) (hey, I can honestly say I worked in the music biz) shipping and packaging records (I can still tell you what cities go with what zip codes)

It wasn't until 1988 that I got my first break in what I was hoping to be my calling: the computer game entertainment industry. My high school teacher knew me to be a gamer and had a friend of his who was starting a business and was releasing a computer game. They needed some volunteer testing on it and was wondering if I'd be interested.

I jumped at the opportunity. I signed the NDA papers, played the game, found a few bugs and did what I could in the time provided. That summer, they offered me a job working tech support. They needed someone to enter in the registration cards that people mailed in and answer phones. Since I knew the game, I'd be perfect.

I jumped at the opportunity, making $6 an hour, which was good money back then. I was studying computer science in college and I definitely wanted to get into the entertainment industry. This could certainly be my ticket in to the exclusive computer entertainment industry.

This company was Mindcraft Software, located in Torrance, California. If you Google around, you'll probably notice they are out of business. They had a fantastic run but had a lot of bad breaks along the way. It was also a gaming company that had a HUGE potential, as their first game was a monster hit as well as several of their subsequent releases. I worked on their Magic Candle Series (I was the dude who put together Magic Candle II's dungeons) and did quite a bit of work on their other games.

During the summers and holidays I worked full time and when I didn't have classes at California State University Long Beach I'd show up. I went to CES before CES was all about electronic gadgets. I talked and dealt with the press who would wind up reviewing our games. I answered phone calls all day long with people looking for hints or having problems with our games. I also did all the bulk mail... sending out 10's of thousands of pamphlets and flyers.

The company started with just its founders and family and a few tech support people. But as the years went by we grew. Soon we had half a dozen developers, full-time artists, and tech support doubled and eventually tripled. There was no "process", no "agile" here. Everything was ad-hoc and it was truly fun.

New code was passed around via a floppy disk and hand merged. Emails didn't exist. LANS / Networks? No such thing. Defects / bugs were written on script of paper and thrown in a box and delivered to the developers at the end of the day. Sometimes they'd be fixed, other times not. Code was changed up to the last second with no testing done on it.

Without a process we often had very buggy software -- and this was before you could just put a fix on the internet and have people download it. We had to mail them out -- hundreds of them, if not thousands. In fact, entire days of mine were spent making upgrades (by manually copying them onto a disk) and preparing shipping and running to the post office. Each of their games had a major problem. Eventually we did run a BBS system to help but not everyone had a modem and not everyone was willing to make a 20-minute long-distance call to download a fix.

I suspect Mindcraft could've survived the buggy software, even though our reputation was suffering, but to make matters worse we had what appeared to be unscrupulous distributors. One pretty much walked away with the lion's share of profits from the first two games (which were wildly successful). I believe there was a disagreement over returns with the second distributor. The third distributor -- who still exists today - was flawless but they demanded that games be delivered on-time, otherwise there was monetary fines,so that compounded the buggy / rushed releases.

As a result of the defects, we had a LOT of returns -- mountains of them. I think that ultimately sank the company. I distinctly remember we had to rent a special warehouse so that we could store all the returned games. Boxes piled high from floor to ceiling with returned games. All saying pretty much the same thing: the game wouldn't install. To make matter worse, because of the installation defect, people would think it was just bad floppies and go back to the store and get a new one. So often the same customer would buy 2 or 3 (or more) copies. I'd open the boxes, salvage the parts that weren't bent or obviously used and pitch the rest. Again, 1000s of copies of games were sent to the dumpster.... and I'd spend weeks processing them. It was truly heart breaking.

The installation defect worked like this: you'd put in disk 1, type install and it would install disk 1. At that point, it would request disk 2. You'd insert disk 2 and then it would ask for disk 1 without installing disk 2. This would go on in an infinite loop. We could never reproduce it in the office, until one day I while I was reviewing the code I discovered that the configuration file on disk 1 was opened and NEVER closed. So the DOS OS complained about it and by inserting disk 1, the program was hoping to close the file, which never happened. Delete the config file on disk 1 and it would work fine (or fixing the installation program to close the file). Again, 1000s of games were returned because of a configuration file that wasn't closed on disk 1. Each one dinging the company whatever it took to make the game plus shipping.

In addition to processing returns, all throughout college I answered phones, did the occasional tool in Pascal, and took care of the BBS. I was going to be made a programmer once I graduated from college. And sure enough once I did I was put in the driver's seat of an upcoming game. I was given some simple tasks to do. I hadn't been a big fan of C programming. My initial forays had been corrupted memory and I even wiped out the FAT table of a hard drive. I probably had the talent to be put there earlier but I think there was some prejudice in assuming I didn't know what I was doing because I had started as a rookie.

Sadly, about a month or two after I graduated I was laid off. The company's reputation had suffered and a number of the latter games turned out to be poor sellers. The company had about 20 employees at the time and I remember it being a very emotional time. I was in the first wave to be let go and in a matter of months the rest of the group would be shown the door too. I was one of the few that didn't have a family or rent to pay so I was the most expendable. I was only making about $10/hour at the time though -- good money for someone living at home with his parents.

Not only had I been working there for a long time, but many of the employees were like family to me. I had met or spoken with many people in the industry who would go onto bigger and better things (Blizzard Entertainment was just a blip on the radar back then). I worked closely with the creator of Everquest for a while. Many of the workers there are still in the industry producing games, while others slipped off into the horizon.

I'll always be grateful for the opportunity there. It kick started my career and very likely I'd be pontificating English literature (that was going to be my fallback career -- an English Literature major). It also gave me an "in" into the gaming industry. Occasionally I still get a feeler from a recruiter wanting to know if I'd want to get back into it, but so far, I've been K-12 education focused.

You can learn more about Mindcraft and the Magic Candle series on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Candle and see some of my gaming credits on Moby Games

Me, 1990 with my dog Taffy. Not work related, but that's me.

Saturday, March 1, 2014

10 Years of Road Racing....

Ever since college, I've been a runner. Well not exactly consecutively. In high school / early college I was a smoker. Not a hard core one, but maybe 5 - 8 cigarettes a day. Certainly, enough to be addicted to them and enough to making quitting tough.

I finally got sick and tired of getting colds and sinus infections. I was also constantly ridiculed for being out of shape. I remember playing outdoor games and running 50 yards and being winded and sucking wind. I had quit many times, only to pick it up again when life got tough.

I finally kicked the habit mostly for good in my later years of college. I started running to get myself in shape. I also did a life overhaul and fixed up my diet -- going from Oreo's and Cokes to stuff you'd find only at Whole Foods. I started to lift weights and soon was running 3 - 8 miles in a shot.

I didn't know jack about running and I was on the hook for my own shoes. Being a poor college student I probably put a 1000 miles on a pair before getting injured. I got a bad case of runner's knee and even after a month of rest, if I went out for a run I'd get debilitating knee pain. I remember looking at the Nike's and seeing how worn and lopsided they were and I couldn't believe I had run in them for as long as I had. One thing I've learned about running: keep your shoes fresh!

I do like the fit of Nike's but anytime I wear them I get knee pain. I am a New Balance guy or a Brooks guy these days.

I took a several year hiatus from running and picked up smoking again. Again, I'd smoke for a few months and then get sick again. I'd quit for a while and then another life event would happen and I'd buddy up to the Marlboro man. It wasn't until 1997 that I finally put the smokes down for good.

I had been dabbling with the smokes again then and life was getting complicated: I was getting married and coming on board with 2 step-children, I was buying a house and I had just started a new job. Talk about a bunch of big life events coming together all at once.

So one night while sitting in my Palatine Illinois apartment, I decided to go out for a run. Maybe my knee was better. That one night I did about 2 miles without any problems. No knee pain, and best of all, I felt fantastic.

That started the addiction....

From 1997 - 2004 I ran recreationally. Every few days I'd log a few miles. Sometimes, when the mood struck me, I ran long. I remember running 18 miles once (from McHenry Illinois to Woodstock via Bull Valley Road). I never raced, although I fantasized about running a marathon... but I didn't know much about it.

In 2004 a chance conversation in the locker room with a friend of mine led me to my first race. He wanted me to run the Lake In The Hills "Run Thru the Hills Race" I wasn't terribly interested but I humored him and said, "sure I'll do it" figuring to blow him off. A few days later he handed me a race entry and said "see ya there" Ugh, I had to do something social....

I figured since I ran a lot that I could easily "win" a 10K. Nobody ran as much as me (famous last words).

As the name of the race indicates that race is a hilly race. I wound up running it in about 49-51 minutes. I had no idea about pacing and I dragged my sorry butt to the finish line -- completely gassed. It was amazing to see all the different types of runners. There were 100s of other runners there and I got a t-shirt, a pancake breakfast. I was bummed I didn't win anything, but I suddenly realized there was more to running than just going out and jogging X miles. Needless to say my interest was piqued.

My next race was another 5K in Crystal Lake that I decided to do on a whim. I am pretty sure it was the Crystal Lake Health Bridge 5K. I wound up running it in the low 22's. What made this race memorable was that I placed in my age group and won something. There's nothing like standing in a crowd after a race wondering if you won anything and to hear your name as winning in your age division. Now I was really hooked.

Throughout 2004 and on I have raced. Up until about 2008 I was racing way more than I should and often placing in my age division, winning some sort of swag. It wasn't unusual for me to be doing a 5K or 10K nearly every weekend. I've literally raced in hundreds of races. You can see many of them on my Athlinks page. I want to say that Athlinks has recorded about 85% of my races, so there are many out there unaccounted for.

In 2009 when I turned 40, though, the age group wins started to dry up. For some reason, in Illinois, the 40 year old age division is one of the toughest. At this point, I did switch over to running distance events -- I became a half marathon junkie just as that race type exploded. I also started running 1 - 2 marathons a year... I still thoroughly enjoy the half marathon, as it is still an accomplishment yet far less demanding physically.

I think I hit my peak in 2007 and after that point, my times took a turn for the worse. It sucks to get older and while I never amounted to a huge threat to winning races, I always made a good showing for myself. I've come in second overall in a few races, but never first.

I do think my best times are behind me, but you never know. I put in WAY more miles than I did when I first started (probably twice as much) and I now have some structure to my training, but you really can't outrun Father Time.

Roughly speaking here are my PRs:

5K - 20:10
10K - 41:20
5M - 33:20
10M - 1:11
Half Marathon: 1:31
Marathon: 3:38

I still jump into races, but these days I don't race nearly as much as I used to. If the race is fairly cheap, fits into my training regime, and close by, I'll do it on a whim. I am not a big fan of "entertainment" races. Color runs, Electric Runs and Undie Runs are great introductions to people new to running, but for me, I prefer a solid road race. I do like to go to destination races though. And if there is a race in Nevada, I am game.

To commemorate 10 years of racing and nearly two decades of running, I've taken pictures of all the swag I've won. Each one has a story and a memory associated with it. Even some of the medals from 2004 I can clearly remember the course, the people there and roughly what time I got. Some are age group awards and some are simply finishers medals. But I still treasure each one of them. Hopefully someone remembers to bury me with them when my days are over....

Enjoy the photos:

Some plaques from the Wauconda-fest races

We started to put the medals in a display case....

The red / black ribbon is a 3rd place age group award at the Rockford Illinois Half Marathon. Quite a feat considering the size and depth of that race.