It's been almost a month . . .

. . . becuz how interesting is "work, sleep, eat, repeat" really?

Okay it hasn't been just that, but it hasn't really seemed like much more either. Teri's still sick much of the time, so we don't go out or anything anymore. Occasional family things that she pushes herself for, but not even always to those either. So it's pretty much we both work, she crashes on the weekends, I try to keep up with a lot of blogs that I read (see my sidebar? that's maybe half of the ones I actually follow), try to keep up with the tv shows we record, and play some mmo's in there too.

TBH, I'm a little burnt out on the mmo genre right now. I enjoy playing EQ2 when I log in, but I tend not to really log in much anymore. I'm not sure why, really, since I really do enjoy it once I'm logged in. I haven't played DDO in over 2 weeks. Warhammer's trial kept bugging out on me badly, so I ended up deleting it, but a friend who's in the trial also talked me in to reinstalling it. It's still bugging out on the graphics, but it's not doing the crash bug that requires re-patching 5 gigs of files anymore either.

In EVE I sold off my CNR and replaced it with a Tengu Tech 3 cruiser. I do more damage and have a stronger tank with it than in the CNR, plus due to the smaller signature radius and higher speed I take fewer and smaller hits anyway. I soloed the Angels Extravaganza 4 bonus room this weekend and barely dipped to 85% shields -- that was kinda nice. Even so... my corp is dead. Some people are talking about selling off their characters and starting over, others just never log in anymore, we dn't have our regular "corp night" anymore either, and.... I'm thinking it's time to leave RFI and find somewhere else to go.

I think that's part of my EQ2 problem -- my guild there is dead too, so I need to join another. I actually was chatting with a friend last week in EQ2 and he said I'm welcome to join his guild, and I think I'll take him up on it. I was in that guild before, but then it "died" and merged into another, but apparently it's been built back up.

Lotsa computer crap at work, yet no specific stories come to mind for your amusement. Sorry.

Also on the home front, the cat we got a month ago is doing well. He and the dog are getting along really well and love to play and wrestle with each other. He's almost to 4 lbs now (he was 2 lbs 4 oz when we got him) and it's all been growth, not fat. And he's got quite a bit of growing to do too. He's rambunctious and loves to both play and get pet, but is pretty careful with his claws. Only real problem is he's a little "bite-y" when he plays, but even there it's not that he's trying to bite, just that his teeth are so sharp that they hurt when he gets you with them. Mostly he's trying to "lip you" with the side of his mouth, but his little fangs are so long they get you anyway. As he grows a lot of his gray is getting more orange. It's going to be really interesting to see what his final color(s) turn out to be.

And that's it for this post. Until next time. . . .

More computer secrets

Darnitall! Who's letting out all the IT secrets?

Approaching Halloween already?

Amazing how time flies, isn't it?

Not a whole lot has really happened, though. How exciting is "work, eat, sleep, repeat?"

Granted, the new TV season's started and I've discovered that I quite enjoy Castle and Dancing with the Stars. Got the DVR set to record all the "Man vs. Food" episodes, but after Sunday's "marathon" they did, as well as the sheer number of reruns they have for it... I have 1 more epsiode and then I am wholly caught up, methinks, so I can set it to only catch new episodes. I don't know why, but I just love that show. . . . .

Dollhouse this past week was simply amazing. Too bad that the rumor mill still has the show on thin ice and expected to be canceled after 12 episodes this season :-(

Work's still work. People are so helpless that they call us to map network drives that they have the paths for, so all they have to do is type them in, but. . . nope they don't do it. Ah well -- it's job security, anyway.

On my video gaming front, I'm still playing more DDO than anything. I suppose if I actually got off my duff and joined a bigger guild in EQ2 it'd be more exciting for me -- maybe even a guild that raids. I'm home in the evenings anymore, after all. We'll see.

And we do have 1 piece of "big news." Teri's been wanting to get a cat for a long time, and we said that once we got into a place of our own (not an apartment) that we'd get one. So we did this past Saturday. Adopted a 3 month old kitten from the Humane Society. Cute little gray tabby cat. Very sweet disposition, loves to play, already litter trained (though he did have 1 accident on the 1st day), and we're thrilled to have him. We've named him "Kozmo Kitty, Lord of Kaos" but just call him Kozmo. Wooli's still a bit concerned to have him around, but he seems to like her and tries to cuddle up to her every so often -- which freaks her out and she runs off. Teri had 2 adult cats when she got Wooli, and 1 of them and Wooli didn't get along so well, so it seems she's remembering that and is thus a little leery of him yet. For his part, he did hiss and spit at her a lot the 1st day until he realized she wasn't gonna hurt him, and now he seems to think she's pretty awesome. He's settling in pretty well too, we think. He's taken a nap on my chest while I was watching TV the other day, and he's napped on Teri while she's been reading also, so he seems to like us both. Sometimes he follows me around like a little puppy, so Teri's calling him a "daddy's boy" but we'll see how that goes over time.

Yeah, with the baby due in 2 months it might be a little nuts to have also added a kitten to the family, but with luck there won't be allergies and we'll all have a grand old time. We shall see. . . .

And here we are in October. . . .

Started my new job on the last day of September. Well..... same job, different company writing the paychecks now. The joys of being a contractor!

Life's starting to settle a bit into a routine now, though Teri and I are still moving storage boxes out of the old place and into the new one on the weekends. Not all weekends are the same either, but they generally do involve laundry, cleaning, and grocery shopping.

Cable internet tech came out last Friday and found that since it was running from a splitter through a 2nd splitter (and in to an "out" part of the 2nd splitter) that it was causing a pretty severe signal degradation. He replaced the 2 splitters with a single one with more "out" prongs, and made sure that everything was on the proper prongs, and there's been no trouble with the internet since. I call that a win for the cable company.

Computer Stupidities: People calling in for help creating SHORTCUTS. Come on! That's one of the most BASIC Windows functions. People calling in asking if the file servers are down when a) we sent a site-wide email informing them that yes, they are, and b) the intranet home page has a huge red-text posting about it. People calling in asking for a 25' telephone cable to run from 1 side of the room to a new desk they want to move to, when there's a stinking jack AT the desk and we just need to have their phone number moved to the jack at the desk.

There are more, but those are the ones so egregious they're standing out in my mind.

We've caught up on Dollhouse and are enjoying that. Heroes episodes are stacking up becuz I still need to download or hulu the 1st ep of the season. I've caught up on Man v. Food now. I don't know why, but I just love that show. We've started watching Flash Forward also, becuz it had an interesting premise and it's seemed pretty well done so far. I'm still eageraly awaiting the resumption of Chuck, but that won't be until after the Olympics, apparently. Stupid NBC. . . .

My EVE news is: I completed Caldari Cruiser 5 and can now finally fly Tech 2 hulls. and if I wanted to, I could fly a Tech 3 hull in a little over an hour also. Time for me to start grinding out some ISK. . . . . But, I frankly haven't really played EVE in about 2 months. I'm not really excited about doing missions anymore, but I'm not really interested in pvp either, nor researching the market well enough to "play it" and try to make money that way, so...... I'm willing to keep playing it, but I think it's about time for me to be looking at a different corp. MY current corp is fun in that I know everyone in it IRL, but we don't really do anything in-game together anymore. I can't remember the last "corp night" operation we had. But I read a lot of EVE blogs and I know there's a lot more game out there.... it's just a matter of me going out and finding it.

In EQ2 I spent the past weekend doing the Everfrost quests on my mystic. I set him to 100% aaxp on his slider and so I got 8 AA's rather quickly. The thing that surprised me was that I thought it was simply a combat xp slider, but it turns out it's all the adventuring xp, so my character level didn't move a bit - all quest xp went toward aaxp as well. He's now fully melee spec'd and also has his full 40% boost to SoW. Add his racial 5% speed boost and he's permarunning 45% now. I kinda would like to put the next 5 points into the generic footspeed AA on the Shadow tree, but the difference from 45 to 50% runspeed isn't that great and I've got the racial +50% boost I can fire off every 5 minutes if I want. As a result, I'm going to work more on the WIS line in order to get the Ritual of Alacrity. I also worked on getting more AA on my monk also and got him to over 50 points, but I still am not sure where I want to go with that character.

In DDO I deleted all my characters except for a dual-wielding kopesh fighter. I am *loving* this character. Good AC from the full plate armor, high dps from the fighter haste enhancements and good crit multiplier from the kopeshes.... much fun! There are still other combos I want to try, but I think I'm going to focus on this fighter for a while and look at building a reserve of cash up in order to be able to twink the later alts a bit. As it is, I've been able to do about half of the "newbie island" quests on the Elite level by myself, and I'm pushing level 4 with her now and will be able to add the "weapon specialization" feat in for even more damage. Way cool, methinks. Time to start looking at grouping. . . . .

And that's about it. Nothing earth shattering but... life is pretty good and I'm enjoying my hobby.

Time flies, no?

We got moved in, but it became apparent in the next few days that I highly overstressed my back while doing it. I'm better now, though.

Past couple of weeks have really mostly been the typical "work, sleep, eat, repeat" routine. Teri's pregnancy is still kicking her butt, so most evenings she spends resting in bed, so I've been passing the time reading or watching dvd's.

We did get our cable hooked up this past Friday, including internet. The TV part's been great, but the internet part.... not so much. The guy hooked it up to his laptop to activate it and it worked fine, but when I hooked my computer up a few minutes later...... nothing. Link lights looked okay on the modem, but the nic showed solid, no flashy. Power cycled the modem, but no help. Called the cable company and their automated system did a remote reset of the router and that fixed it. Hooray!

It worked fine on Friday, but on Saturday it started going up and down a bit, especially later in the afternoon. I ran some errands and tried again and it seemed ok at first, but still was going up and down a bit into the evening. The modem would reset itself from time to time, and that seemed to help each time, but then last night it was just a no-go. Link lights looked good, but I was lucky to get the occasional packet in. Could barely load text-only blogs, never mind trying to play a game or something.

Called the cable company again and this time it routed me to an agent. I described what was going on and she indicated she could see exactly what I described to her in her activity logs -- tons of missed/dropped packets and timeouts, etc. Seems odd that that would be the case -- when it's working it's nice and zippy, so I don't think it's a wiring issue, and it's a new modem -- I watched the tech pull it out of its plastic when he set it up. Even so, she said she'll send a tech out. She could do it for tomorrow, but since Teri and I both work... Friday it is. Since the TV's working and the fall season just started, Teri and I have more than enough to keep us occupied in the evenings now, and can read when we run out of recorded programs too. Ain't DVR something?

Although, knowing me, I'll check the internet connection out each night anyway ;-)

As it was, during the times it was working I put in a lot of DDO and a little EQ2 this weekend. For DDO's soloing, I'm finding I prefer melee oriented characters, and I'm thinking that a straight-up human fighter (bonus 1st level feat, after all) seems to fill the bill best. I tried a fighter/rogue multiclass combo, but found that the dual-wielding path I took wasn't "doing it" for me. Don't know why, really. It's not like I lost a lot with that 1 rogue level, and if I were to take every 5th level as a rogue I could end up with a 16/4 fighter rogue at the end with several of the rogue skills capped out and a very respectable +19 BAB for the fighting still.

But, the idea of an Arcane Archer took me, so I made an elf fighter. From reading the descriptions on the DDO compendium it sounded like I'd need at least 1 level of ranger in order to be one, so I started level 1 as a ranger, then swapped to fighter for the additional feats and "kensai" enhancements. I'll grab level 9 as a wizard and that will then open up the Arcane Archer abilities at that time, plus the wizard spells will have some utility, so far as detecting secret doors minor AC buffs, etc. Thing is, I'm soloing right now, so while I'm doing okay at plinking at things as they run at me, I'm still forced to "sword and board" most of the time. And I'm not sure that I'm doing any more damage with the bow than a competent sorcerer or wizard would, so I'm not sure any group would want me as "ranged dps" in these low levels. Time will tell, I suppose.

Anyway.. enough rambling on that.... I tried several other classes too, deleted several, have open character slots again, etc.

Logged in to EQ2, but really it was just in order to re-attune my gear that got changed from "Lore No-Trade" with the latest update. For my lower level toons I also adjusted the new xp slider to 75% AA and only 25% toward adventuring.

Today's computer stupidity: Guy calls up and wants me to renamed a file, then put a replacement file into the folder from the desktop. no admin rights needed, the idiot just thought they would be. He didn't even TRY to do what he needed to do.

Moving Weekend

We closed on a house last Tuesday, it was recorded officially on Wednesday, and we started moving in on Wednesday night. Well.. moving our stuff in, anyway. We didn't actually spend a night there until Friday. But we love it! We've got about 80% of the stuff put away now, and my back is killing me (had a disk removed June 08 -- much better now than I was, but it's still twinge-y and tires rather rapidly). The big stuff is done, though. It's mostly just finding places for decorations and knick-knacks and such anymore.

But as a result... no gaming for me this weekend. We ordered cable, but it's not gonna be hooked up until the 25th. So.... got a long skill burning in EVE, and the rest... they'll keep. I did download DDO now that it's free to play now and ran through the early tutorial on Friday before the serious moving began, but that's it.

Today's computer stupidity: Company homepage down, giving a "not authorized" error. 1st 10 or so calls this morning: "Internet's down!"

Except of course, none had actually even TRIED to use the internet, which was working just fine, tyvm! Ay de mi!

Labor Day Weekend, 2009

I work a 4-day workweek, so I had last Friday off. Since we were going to be closing on our house here this week, we needed to go get our appliances out of my wife's house in "T or C" New Mexico, so we reserved a trailer down there, borrowed my father-in-law's truck with a towing hitch and headed on down. I-15 to Route 6 to I-70 to 191 to 491 to 64 to 550 to I-25.

You may notice that of the 700 mile trip, only about 200 of it is on the interstate. Still and all, the other roads are mostly in good repair and mostly have 65 or 70 mph speed limits, so overall it's about a 12 hour trip. If it was all on an interstate it'd probably be closer to 10, but... such is life.

Anyway, we made it there about 7pm and stopped off at our friend's house who we were staying with. took her and her husband out to La Cocina restaurant as an early thank you for letting us stay with them. Yeah, we have a house there but we stayed with friends. But that's becuz the house has renters and no spare beds or anything like that. It works out.

Saturday was bright and clear but never got much over 85 degrees, so it was quite pleasant. We got the trailer and headed for the house. The renters were actually house-sitting elsewhere, so we let ourselves in and got our washer and dryer and a few other things out and loaded inot the trailer. It took less than an hour. We looked through and figured what we'd need to look at fixing in order to have the house be saleable, and then.... back to our friends house, unhitched the trailer so we wouldn't be dragging it around the rest of the day or on Sunday, and then we took a nap. Yeah, we're boring, but we were also in BFE, NM. So sue us!

Did dinner at a local steakhouse that was pretty decent. A bit pricey, but not terrible. Visted with our friends in the evening, read a bit, and called it a night. Sunday was church where my wife got to visit a bunch of friends she hadn't seen since she moved out last year. She enjoyed the reunion and had lots of fun catching up with "everyone." Met in the afternoon with a real estate agent and walked through the house again. He gave us some names of contractors who can fix the roof, carpet the place, and repaint it. Then we went to his office and signed everything we needed to in order to hire him as our listing agent and put the house on the market come October 1 after the renters have moved out and we've had a chance to make the place look better.

Visited a few more of my wife's friends in the evening, thne back to where we were staying. Our friends there had made a lovely bbq chicken dinner for us all, so we enjoyed that. Visited for a while after, thought about watching a video, but decided that since we'd be pulling a trailer on the return trip the next day that going to bed early was a good idea. So we did.

Trip back was surprisingly quick, though. Once I got used to how the truck handled with the trailer I was able to more or less go the speed I normally would. A bit slower, but not much. took about 13 hours to get back, but we stopped in Moab for a half hour for dinner, so it was really only about 12.5 hours driving, even with the trailer. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Got back, dropped the truck and trailer off at the in-laws, picked up our dog and our car and headed home (only 10 minutes away from there).

Long day, and we were glad to be home. And my AWU 5 was set to complete in about 3 hours, so I logged in to EVE and queued up my next skill. Only took 26 days for AWU 5. About 6 for Caldari BS 4, then 34 more for Caldari BS5 and I'll be in my Golem. PLus I'll have a path paved for capital ships too, though it's gonna be a very long time before I think of training them.

We closed on our house up here yesterday, so tonight we start moving in -- drop the appliances and such in there tonight after work, then go return the trailer to Uhaul. the rest of the stuff we've got fits into a pickup easily enough (3 trips, but nothing's big) so we'll be doing that this weekend. Got the "vital" utilities set up, but still need to order cable. More for the internet than for TV, but the fall season's about to start, so it will be good to be able to watch Chuck, if nothing else.

In other news, we found out today that my company's contract is not being renewed so as of 9-30-09 I need to find new work. Rather... I need to find new work now so that once this current job ends I can move right on over. This is actually rather expected and I've been looking around for the past month or so, but anything I've seen so far has been in the neighborhood of 30-40% lower pay to start. There's a possibility that the new contract company will hire me, but even if they do it will still be about a 12% pay cut. Not really nice, but survivable, if it comes to that. Time will tell if the new company will hire me across, though. We shall see. I'll be more actively looking elsewhere too, though, and a friend of mine is a headhunter for my field so I'll see if I can enlist her services as well.

A bit unsettling, but .... life is change, right?