The ScooterBlog

Mr. Jeanneret, I’m coming for your high scores!!!

(Of course, considering his mad skills, who knows if I’ll get there!)

Both of us are participating in a contest on Short Attention Gamer, a site that many of us guys from Game Junkie have come to love. They’re doing a XBox Live Arcade contest, and the main prizes are XBox Live Vision cameras! As of the last check, Pat’s winning in 4 of the 6 games, and the other two are ones that I don’t think he much cares about (like Street Fighter 2).

My personal goal is simple … catch him in a couple of the games. He’s got a huge lead in Texas Hold ‘Em, but I don’t think that is something that I couldn’t overcome with a lot of strong single player games. I also think I can catch him in Frogger. I better, I did once play Frogger for goodness’ sake!

We’ll see how it goes. I’m afraid to look at the scoreboard shortly, but I will come back!!!

Cliche topic for today, but still so very important. Where were you five years ago? Especially at the moment I write this (8:35 AM, about when things began to move).

Me? I was sitting at my desk working for my dad in Kentucky, when I got a call from the Louisville branch of the company (there was a merger in place at the time), telling us that aplane had hit the World Trade Center. Back then, the office there didn’t have peristent Internet, and didn’t even have a TV with anything better then rabbit ears, so we were connected, but just barely. We turned on the TV (Walton, Kentucky is out in the boonies BTW) and took breaks often to watch the coverage as every terrifying moment unfolded, realizing just how spooky it was at lunch time to know that not a single plane was in the air. Walton was in the path of the airport, about 15 miles south, so you always saw about 3-4 planes in the sky.

Everyone out there worked the entire day, but I’d be lying if I said that any of us really got a whole lot done, our minds were in a thousand other places, and then driving home quick and watching the coverage for the rest of the evening on my TV. It was one of the very few nights where I can ever remember going to bed scared, because while you were pretty sure apocalypse wasn’t going to happen that night, there were so many unknowns that no one really knew what was going to happen next (as it turned out, nothing, but no one knew).

I have not had the time to really sit down and watch too much of the documentary stuff that has come out in the wake of this fifth anniversary, but just what I have heard about it all is amazing, to think that so many people did what they did so selflessly is an astounding thing … one that most are afraid may happen again, but hope never will.