Wednesday, October 28, 2009

More computer secrets

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

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

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. . . .

Thursday, October 8, 2009

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.