Conclusions of Variety A Personal Blog on my happenings and thoughts

Condor : Helping with RPGsPosted by cczernia on March 4th, 2009

A few weeks back I went to a Dungeons and Dragons meetup. While there I met a woman who was the chair for a local scifi convention called Condor. I suddenly became interested because I’ve been trying to consolidate and grow the San Diego RPG community. We currently don’t have a local gaming convention. We have a couple small things like game days at Game Town and our own game day but nothing large.

This was my chance to help grow a gaming convention. Condor is supposed to have gaming but hasn’t been able to bring in people and grow interest. I decided to go and meet the people who run gaming at Condor and see if I could help grow it over the next year.

I went and was successful. I even got to run some D&D4 for some people. I am now in contact with the heads of Condor and I hope to be able to work with them and grow the rpg/gaming and eventually turn it into a respectable gaming convention.

B-Day 09Posted by cczernia on February 23rd, 2009

Another year has gone by and I’m now 33.

My computer crashed on me last Friday. I’ve been having trouble with my network settings just disappearing. I couldn’t figure out how to bring them back so I used the restore software for a back-up I made toward the end of January. Well, the restore crashed in the middle and now the computer can’t boot. It didn’t come with a Windows CD and I never bothered to make a boot disk. Currently on the Lenevo site trying to figure out what to do when your computer dies.

On the weekend of the 15th I was up in LA at Orccon 09. It was a pretty slow con this year. Got to play in a Serenity rpg and then run Mutants and Masterminds. On Sunday I played a Star Trek rpg and then a fantasy game using a system called Spirit of the Century. Overall, a good time but I was going to run MouseGuard which no one showed up to. What was weird about no one showing up is that I had 5 out 5 people sign-up, and you could only sign-up and hour before the game started.

Work is busy this week as we prepare to launch the new Websense support site which is a redesign and reorganization. This is a project that I was basically in charge of and we are suppose to go-live on Friday.

Final FrontierPosted by cczernia on January 4th, 2009

On Friday a couple friends and I went to the Star Trek Exhibition at the Air and Space Museum at Balboa Park. It was a lot of fun and as you can see had replicas of the original Enterprise bridge and the transporter room. If also had a lot of great costumes and models. The exhibits were also in rooms next to a Next Generation hallway. It didn’t have the interactivity of the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas but was still a lot of fun.

Later that night we got some dinner then roleplayed until 3 in morning. Overall a great geek holiday!

Karaoke and ChristmasPosted by cczernia on December 30th, 2008

A few weeks back we decided to have a December birthday for Stephanie and my two friends Erik and Andy. We went to the same karaoke we place I went back in spring. It was just as much fun this time around as it was last time. The highlight for me was when I tried to sing “Jump Around” an early 90’s rap song. I was fumbling over the words as they were going too fast but Stephanie picked up the second mike and started rapping in sync with the words. Apparently she had memorized the song when she was younger.

We had a nice Christmas. On Christmas we went and saw a live performance of “Xanadu” based off the 1980 movie with Olivia Newton-John and featured lots of glitter and people on rollerskates. I was skeptical at first but it was hysterical apparently a parody of itself.

A few days after Christmas we went to see “A Chinese New Year.” It was a production of traditional Chinese singing and dancing with vibrant costumes, acrobatic stunts, and beautiful dancing. They even had mock dancing battles of the Monkey King and Mulan.

So, we went a little less traditional this year replacing Uncle Scrooge with a roller disco and the Nutcracker with girls dancing with chopsticks.

Thanksgiving 08 : PortlandPosted by cczernia on November 30th, 2008

For thanksgiving I went to Portland to visit my family. My brother and his wife live up there along with an aunt and uncle. It was a good time with dinner at my aunt and uncle’s place on Wednesday night. Thursday we had dinner at a nice restaurant. On Saturday we went to Powell’s, a huge used bookstore that was amazing. We spent 45min there and I probably could have spent another hour at least. Next time I’m bring an extra suitcase.

On Saturday my parents left and we spent the time with just my brother and his wife. My brother and I visited a few game stores and we then picked up Stephanie and had lunch at a nice French place. We then went on a tram in downtown Portland up to Oregon Health Science University.

Overall a fun trip and Portland is a beautiful city. I look forward to going up again and maybe visiting some of the mountains as we only saw Mt St Helens and Horn on the flight.

Date Night: The AquariumPosted by cczernia on November 11th, 2008

It has been a while since I posted in my blog because there has not been a lot going on. However, last weekend Stephanie took me out for a date. We went to the Birch Aquarium in La Jolla. I wanted to take pictures but my camera had died a few days before. We decided to stop at Cosco to get a new camera and some lunch but it was so crazy we just left.

We grabbed lunch elsewhere and went to the aquarium camera-less. We still had a lot of fun looking at the fishes. The next part of the plan was to go to Café Japengo, a nice Japanese restaurant that we have briefly visited for drinks when my family came down for Easter. However, we got out of the Aquarium at 4pm and the restaurant did not open until 6pm. I managed to convince Stephanie to drive down to Best Buy to get a new camera and we walked out with a 7mp Sony Cybershot.

This only managed to kill about an hour so we went to a bar next door to Café Japengo to get some drinks. The restaurant finally opened and we had a lovely meal. I was tempted by their fried rice but decided to try something new as fried rice (aka rice bucket) is reserved for my friend Jonathan.

Other than date night not a lot has been going on. Work has been fine and is mostly meeting and correspondence now. It is getting to the point where it is no longer my “new job” and now just “my job.”

More on the New Job and Gateway 08Posted by cczernia on September 26th, 2008

My new job has been going well. I started on Sept 2 and have almost finished a month. A lot of it has been getting use to corporate work style. I’m use to working in companies that have 5-20 employees. I’m now working in a company that has 500 employees at their main office and over 1200 employees world wide.

I now have a cube and don’t see many people throughout the day. Most of communication takes place through IMs, emails, or meetings. Everyone has been extremely friendly but it is still difficult to get into the corporate groove. I don’t think I have discussed anything outside of work since I have been here and have been afraid to go to any events such as an ice cream social that was held a few days ago and the coffee cup logo recycling party we had two weeks ago. Next week we are having a party to celebrate the release of the latest version of our product.

The work itself has been interesting. I helped put together a Knowledge Base for our tech alerts and have been updating the site for version 7 or our product. I’m use to having 100% control of the source files and development. Here I have minimal control. I can’t access any files to our Knowledge Base software and we use a Content Management System (CMS) called Reddot that is extremely limiting in what I can do. One nice feature of Reddot (when it works) is that I can edit a page and then submit it to a reviewer who then makes the page live.

I think it will take me another month or two to get comfortable working in this atmosphere. It seems to get better each day as I learn who people are (and am able to place faces to the name of the IMs and emails). I even scheduled and ran my first meeting today.

In other news I went to Gateway RPG con the weekend before I started working at Websense. It was a lot of fun and both games I ran (WoD Innocents, and Shadowrun) filled. Shadowrun even had an extra player. I got to play in “Gray Ranks” a game about teenage rebels in Poland during the Nazi occupation.

D&D at the library has slowed down a little. I have had to cancel three sessions due to my new job. I decided to cancel two just to get use to things and then had to stay late for v7. It has also gone down to 6 kids (down from 12 since the end of spring semester) which has been nice.

New JobPosted by cczernia on August 15th, 2008

I got a new job. Starting August 2nd I’ll be working for a company called Websense which does web filtering and security. I am excited as this is my first big corporate position. I have always worked for small businesses and wondered what it was like to work for someone big. Well, I’ll be finding out in two weeks.

I’ll be in charge of the user interface for tech support. Right now most tech support is done through phones and they want to boost the usability of their esupport including a searchable knowledge base and a chat program. I’ll be in charge of these applications from maintenance to improving the look and usability to them to coming up with whole new systems. I am excited about the work but also excited about the benefits which are a huge improvement over what I’m currently getting.

I’m excited to start but still have a lot of stuff to wrap up at my old job which had its own weirdness. I am still attached to Trio because I helped make grow and feel that I have left a part of myself in the company.

The ComedianPosted by cczernia on August 4th, 2008

Last Saturday Stephanie and I went to see Eddie Izzard. This wasn’t at a comedy club but more a huge production done at a large theater. We had great seats at the mezzanine level which is the middle level. We did not know this as we headed to the top and they sent us back down.

Eddie Izzard is known for cross dressing but during this show he played it straight. Needless to say he was hysterical with bits about mac and pc computers, wikipeida, history, language, tennis, and religion. He did a bit on religion and dinosaurs which reminded me a lot of Bill Hicks, a comedian who was popular during the early 1990s until he died in 1994. Though the subject was the same (why does the bible not cover dinosaurs) the jokes were different which I found interesting.

I was also amazed that he didn’t recycle any of his old work. The entire show was new material and I own one of his DVDs, seen two others and have a CD.

This is the first time I have ever seen a comedian live. I think I would enjoy seeing other comedians but I’m not really familiar with them. I think the only other ones I can think would be Jerry Sienfeld and Dennis Leary.

Comic Con 08Posted by cczernia on July 28th, 2008

Comiccon was a lot of fun this year as it always is. I went from Wednesday night to Saturday. I usually arrived sometime between 12-1 and left around 7pm. Some great panels were “Torchwood”, “Doctor Who”, “Joss Whedon: Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog”, “Dollhouse”, “Spaced”, and the best was “Battlestar Galactica” which was moderated by Kevin Smith.

I also attended the opening of “The Gamers: Dorkness Rising” which is a movie about roleplayers. I geeked out at this one and absolutely loved the movie.

One of my D&D teens. Kids got taste

Me and the Suicide Girls

Battlestar Galactica panel with Kevin Smith