Kubros Worf

I built the door prize Paul Totman gave me on Brain Freeze night! A fearsome warrior indeed, destined for my desk at work. 

Brain Freeze 2018

I just returned from Edmonton's Corporate Challenge Brain Freeze, an annual trivia contest held at Schank's sports bar. Pete, Mike, Paul and I scored 69 out of a possible 100 points, good enough for a 15th place finish out of 52 teams. Respectable, but disappointing given our third place finish two or three years ago. The first place team wound up with 80 points, a very high score for this particular event (at least in my experience).

We performed very well in history and science, moderately well in the sports and "winter" categories, and surprisingly poorly (9 out of 20 possible points) in movies and television.

Thanks to Paul, though, Pete, Mike and I came away with fun little door prizes, and it's always nice to chat with the guys, so the evening was anything but a loss. Thanks for organizing this again, Mike! 

Goolllllld

Tonight our ATCO Electric/ATCO Power trivia team earned 77 points to earn gold medals at the 2016 Corporate Challenge Team Trivia event. I don't think I've won a medal since...grade 9, maybe? If not earlier. 

I was lucky enough to be on a team with a broad knowledge base. If it had been up to me to answer the sports and leisure questions, we would have been in big trouble, for example. But I pulled my weight in the pop culture, science and Western categories. 

Cowboy Brain Freeze

Despite earning just 4 out of 20 points in the opening Sports & Leisure round, Maegan, Kristen, Arlene and I did well enough in successive rounds to score a cumulative 60 out of 100 points, good enough for 17th place out of 80 teams. 

Rejected Corporate Challenge Team Trivia Names

For the third time I'll be participating in the Edmonton Corporate Challenge Brain Freeze event. Since this year Corporate Challenge takes on a Western theme, I suggested several team names to my ATCO teammates:

The Magnificent Four
A Fistful of Trivia
A Team Called Horse
Little Big Team
Rio Saskatchewan
Electric Stagecoach
The Mild Bunch
Sober Noon
False Grit
The Team That Shot Liberty Valence
They Lost With Their Boots On

...and the winner...

The Good, the Bad, and the Trivial.

Corporate Challenge Trivia 2015

ATCO Electric Transmission tied for sixth place with 75 points, a very respectable score but not quite enough to earn Corporate Challenge points due to our narrow loss in the tiebreaker. First place was a mere 81 points; we second-guessed ourselves at least four times, and could have come in second or third if not for that. Ah well...still a pretty good run, and I was surprised to see Iain Getty on my team, who of course lived in the Main K Dungeon during our years at Lister Hall. Talk about a blast from the past! 

Brain Freeze Redux

Brain Freeze 2015

Fifth place with 78 points! Not as good as last year's third-place finish, but not bad at all. Our team, "Totco" (so named because of the two Totman brothers, Paul and Mike, and two ATCO employees, Jeff and myself) did quite well on the Literature, Sports & Leisure and Potpourri rounds; not quite as well on the Cold Stuff round. Thanks for inviting us, Mike! 

HiQ Fiasco

When I was in grade 8, my social studies teacher asked me if I wanted to be on the school's HiQ trivia team. I accepted, and our Leduc Junior High team wound up with a 2-1 record, good enough to reach the quarter finals. I still have the medal and the book we won as prizes somewhere...

My Brain Freezeth Over

Tonight I participated in the Corporate Challenge Brain Freeze again, this time with my team from ATCO Electric, the Mutant Masterminds. Sadly, we proved more mutant than mastermind - the questions tonight were far, far tougher than Monday. I'd be surprised if we scored 25 out of 100; I'll find out tomorrow. However, I think we won on style - we were the only team with personalized costumes and our own living brain in a jar. 

Brains, Brawn and Bronze

Peter Harris has organized an Intuit trivia team for Corporate Challenge for several years. This year, Dustin couldn't make it and Pete asked me to substitute for Dustin. But today Pete got sick, so Mike's brother Paul was reigned in at the last possible second. Changing things up worked out pretty well; we wound up with 72 out of 100 possible points, enough to earn third place. (The winning teams had 74 and 78 points.)

I'm ashamed that I couldn't remember Major Don West from Lost in Space and that I put Chariots of Fire in 1980 instead of 1981. (To be fair, I did a lot of "ARGH! Was it 1980 or 1981?" Should have second-guessed myself.)

Thanks for inviting me out, guys! 

Hi-Q Boo-Boo

Today Mom phoned to tell me that she saw me on television this morning, during Global Edmonton's live broadcast of the Klondike Days Parade through downtown. I'd half suspected I might appear in the coverage, because Mike Sobel hopped into the crowd an interviewed a mother and child about a metre away from me. I, of course, coolly stared into space, offhandedly observing the floats drifting by.

Mike's appearance at my side reminded me of my first encounter with the man, sometime during 1983, back when Global was still ITV. My social studies teacher, Mr. Istvanffy asked me to join the Leduc Junior High School Hi-Q team; back in the 80s, Hi-Q was ITV's answer to shows like Reach for the Top or Jeopardy...quiz shows. I agreed, and my classmates and I showed up for a series of tapings. Mike Sobel, his face unlined and his hair jet-black, was the host.

Our team did well enough to advance to the quarter-finals, which means I appeared in three episodes. During the taping of one episode, Mike started to read from one of his cue cards: "Name an orgasm which..."

The entire set burst into laughter; how could be not, being 14 or 15 years old? Even the cameraman was doubled over behind his mammoth rig. Sobel laughed too, his face flushed, and he managed to stammer out "...organism! Okay, we'd better do that again."

The second take went off without a hitch.

Our First Computer - The Amazing Atari 400

Way back in 1980, Mom and Dad presented the family with a very special Christmas gift: an Atari 400 computer! Sean and I hooked it up to the television immediately and played Galaxian and Pac-Man for hours. For the era, these were excellent recreations of the actual arcade games, with graphics and sound far superior to the home video game systems that were popular at the time. We picked up games at a pretty steady clip: Donkey Kong, Shamus, the infamous Claim Jumper, Jungle Hunt, and one of my favourites, Caverns of Kafka, a sort of Indiana Jones-style maze game with fiendish puzzles, lakes of lava, traps and so on. This game had to be loaded into the computer's memory via the Atari 410 tape drive; the software came on a cassette tape, and it took about a half hour or more before you could actually play the game. During the loading process, the computer would make horrific gasping and screeching noises as the data was read into the machine. The real fun was guessing whether or not the software would load successfully at all; it failed about half the time, usually right before completion.

A little later on we delved into the kit that came with the computer: "The Programmer," which included an Atari BASIC cartridge and a couple of reference books. I wrote a couple of simple Infocom-style adventure games and some graphics software to generate moire patterns.

The Atari 400 (and the other Atari 8-bit computers) used the familiar joysticks and paddles from the Atari 2600 video game system. The joysticks were nigh indestructible, but we did eventually wear them out thanks to hundreds of hours blasting asteroids, exploring labyrinths, shooting cowboys and so on. The replacement controllers we purchased were never quite as satisfying.

Later on I upgraded to an Atari 130XE, the last of the 8-bit Ataris, and by the time I was halfway through university I picked up a used 1040 ST, the latest and greatest Atari at the time, and the last truly successful Atari computer.

I wrote a lot of papers on those two machines, printing them on the Atari's letter-quality printer, which created a terrific cacophany whenever you needed to use it. BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG, BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG, BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG said the printer, vibrating my desk with the violence of its efforts. The end results looked very professional, though!

I also picked up my first modem when I started university - an Atari-branded 300 baud model that download plain text so slowly that it couldn't keep up with my reading speed. I used it to connect to local electronic bulletin board systems, such as the one run by the Edmonton Star Trek Club (USS Bonaventure) and Freedom BBS, operated by Ron Briscoe out of the Ron Room in the Bleak House of Blahs. Divided into virtual rooms, the bulletin boards gave geeks of the 80s and 90s places to write collaborative stories, argue over politics, share jokes, and even communicate via "private message," a primitive form of email. Most BBSes supported only one user connection at a time; I remember dialing BBSes and sometimes waiting hours for my chance to connect.

All of our Ataris still exist in Mom and Dad's basement, and they worked the last time Sean and I dug them out - probably ten years ago or so. The 400, at least, was insanely durable, working even after we ripped off the cartridge door.

I'm very grateful to Mom and Dad for introducing me to the world of computers, and I'm sure Sean feels the same way. The Ataris weren't as powerful as the Windows machines we use today, but they had charm in spades.