Paradoxical Entity

Today begins my summer vacation with a couple of pals. This trip’s theme was mine: to check out the California Wine Country to compliment my wine education.  The plan is to fly into San Francisco and take day trips out to the Napa and Sonoma Regions, probably one day each.  One of my friend’s sister lives in San Fran, so we’ll hang with her or she’ll hang with us for the other days. She was going to try to finagle some tickets for us to a ball game too. 

Right away, my plans went awry.  We scheduled an early morning flight so that we could arrive in San Francisco around noonish so we’d still have a day to do something.  I got to my seat on the plane, it was the last set all the way in the back by the lavatories and flight attendents.  While the flight looked packed, all through the boarding, no one came for the other 2 seats next to me.  I thought I lucked out and could stretch out and sleep all the way.  Then a flight attendent led two little girls over. 

Apparently they were flying out to San Francisco by themselves.  They told me that they were going to stay with their grandparents for the summer.  The two kids were asian and, I guess, pre-teens, but their English was very good.  They didn’t even use any of the usual TV-inspired urban slang at all.  In addition, they were very nonchalant about traveling on their own.  Obviously this wasn’t the first time.  I was impressed by their sophistication.

They were nice girls, very personable.  But too active.  I had decided not to sleep before the flight since I’d have to leave for the airport early.  I didn’t want to oversleep or worst, try too hard to sleep and the feel like crap when I’m forced to wake up just as I do fall asleep.  I ended up babysitting the two girls.  I showed them how to use the LCD entertainment screen on the backs of the seats, I helped them with their headphones, and then they started to sing along with the music from the entertainment system.  They didn’t sound bad, but geez, they were fairly loud.  Anyway, I got no sleep.

Here are some web comic strips on Starcraft 2:

• User Friendly
• Ctrl Alt Del
• Dueling Analogs

Woot!  Check out the Starcraft 2 web site. 

Starcraft was one of my most favorite strategy games.  I devoted a significant chunk of my life to it and I wouldn’t mind allocating more.  In fact, I still haven’t completed the Broodwar expansion. The third from last compaign completely owned me. I was only able to finish it once and that was by sucking in my pride and repeatedly using the cheat code to magically have more resources points. And even then, I was only able to win due to attrition, ie the enemy ran out of resources themselves and couldn’t retailate anymore. I have never been able to duplicate this feat even with cheating. The next mission kicked my butt real quick.

One of my most memorable feats in Starcraft was the mission where Kerigan got captured by the Zerg at the end. The setting was a fully developed Zerg colony on a raised level adjacent to your starting base and the mission objective did not allow any of the Zerg structures to be destroyed. After you defeated the Protoss, the Zerg would all pour down into your base.

I loved this mission just for that final Zerg rush. I always leave a little bit of Protoss around just so I could have the time to use every last bit of resource to build up a massive defense for those final seconds. I was once almost able to totally destroy the Zerg rush before time ran out with only minor losses in my forward Pillboxes and Missle Turrets.  Man, that was sweet.

I had to ditch my colorful SBE design for my Crushpad wine label.  I used Fireworks to create it, which in turn used the Web Safe Colors palate.  Well, Web Safe Colors aren’t what real printers use apparently.  Hayley needed to replace my colors with the equivalents those from the CYM palate, but it looked completely different.  The colors looked flat and dull, or the graduated color scheme didn’t come close to what I envisioned.

I waited a while until Adobe released their new CS3 software suite and bought a copy of Illustrator CS3 to see for myself what she’s been doing.  It was as she told me.  The colors she used were the closest I could come up with too.  Even if I didn’t stay with that particular color scheme, I couldn’t get any other color combination that appealed to me.  Illustrator has a multitude of other color palates, but they all just sucked even more.  In the end, I just said “screw it” and started over.

On a side note, I was reminded of why I hate Illustrator.  It’s layout seem so chaotic that it makes my skin crawl.  I thought about designing my new version with it, but I just don’t understand it. 

I went back to using Fireworks, but decided to keep it simple and with a minimulist color scheme so it’d make the transition better. 

I’ve learned that a wine enthusist friend of mine is starting up his own winery and vineyard.  He and his brother are in the process of buying land in Walla Walla, Washington.  My friend says they plan to focus on Syrah.  Californian Syrah has been rising in popularity, but there are only a few wineries making Syrah wines in Washington state.  My friend’s aim is to become the dominant Syrah winery in Washington. 

The name they’ve selected for their venture is Rasa Vineyards.  Rasa means “essence” in Sanskrit.  They wanted to tie their heritage to their winery’s vision of it’s wine: making great wines that highlight the essance of the soil and varietal characteristics.