Time, I name thee enemy mine.
Holy crap I’m tired. After working 8 hours yesterday, I had to be back at 11 last night for sever maintenance. The maintenance ran long and I was here until just a little after 4 AM. By the time I got back home and got ready for bed, it was just after 5 AM. My alarm went off at 6:30 AM and I was back here at 8.
And my butt is dragging. I just want to go home and get some sleep, but time is moving slowly today.
I was doing a random search on something this morning and stumbled across a link to a website run by an old friend… someone I haven’t seen or spoken to in about 10 years. Oddly enough, I think she lives somewhere here in the same city I do. I find myself wondering if we would still get along now or if it would be like an old high school friendship after 10 years where all you have in common any longer are memories.
I decided to do a bit of gaming last night before having to come back up to work, but I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do. I logged on Rao and just stood around for a bit. I opened his inventory to see what all I was lugging around because I find it annoying how rapidly it fills up when I’m out adventuring. Of course, my bags are full of items from incomplete quests… most so far below my level that it’s pretty sad that I’m still holding on to the stuff.
In one of the bags, looking completely neglected, I found my weakened ghoulbane. I brought up the quest to see what I had left to do and set out with the intention of finishing it off.
I jumped into The Down Below and immediately realized it had been forever since I had been down here. I couldn’t remember my way around so I had to bring up the map to find my way.
A few wrong turns and clicks later and I finally made it to the Crypt of Betrayal. I popped track and was very happy to see that the mob I needed was up… The Ire Ghast or something like that. I ran over and quickly dispatched him and then set out for The Thundering Steppes to try to find the Creator in Varsoon.
On the way, I got asked if I wanted to hit Nek3 and help with the brigand epic. I flipped a quick U-turn and it was off to Nektulos Forest.
This ended up an event of the purest humor… 6 guys roaming around not exactly sure what they are looking for. After several hours of getting frustrated, we finally all decided to consult reference materials. I shot a tell to my old guild leader on my old server who had already run this epic while others did some more reading on the net.
By fluke, desperation or net informational discovery, they finally decided that there was a book towards the entrance that he had to pick up and that, without it, he wouldn’t be able to see the pages.
He grabbed the book and the pages were flying in… until he got to page 9. He couldn’t find that one for anything and, as none of us had the quest, we weren’t any help. The result was about an hour of each of us running from the entrance courtyard through the stables and getting pummeled by the traps that drop from the ceiling. More deaths than any of us care to remember occured in this fashion.
It was getting late and it was nearly time for me to leave to come back to work. I was about to send one final question to my old friend on my old server when our brigand found the page. I’m not sure where he ended up finding it, but the discovery was announced in Ventrillo by, “Oh crap. I can’t believe it.”
I giggled.
I’m hoping that I can mainline enough caffiene to stay awake tonight. I’m planning on going straight home from work and taking a nap. I would just go straight home from work and go to bed, but tonight, something special happens. There is a guild group going to Unrest.
Yeah, maybe it’s a bad sign that my priorities are all out of whack that I would submit myself to more hours of being awake when my body desperately needs sleep, but I’ve only ever been in Unrest once and I freaking loved it. I’ve been trying to get in a group going back since then to no avail. I’m not missing this opportunity so I will be setting an alarm so I can get up and go.
The best part is that, of those going, I’m the only one who has been through the entire thing I think. I can’t wait for the reactions when we encounter all the little “surprises” along the way.
As far as I’m concerned, this is still the best zone ever.
I just wasn’t feeling it
I had another one of those nights last night where I absolutely just didn’t feel like playing. I thought I wanted to until I actually got logged on and then the desire left me.
I ended up cranking out a level on my jeweler to get him into t8, but that was it. Of course, Murphy was watching. I was knocking out writs and was just on the cusp of leveling when I ran out of adamantine clusters again.
I debated just waiting to finish it off until I could head up to KoS for some harvesting, but I finally broke down and just bought 20 clusters on the broker. One more quick writ later and I was level 70.
I spent the rest of the night studying my Microsoft book on Active Directory. I reached a point where I just had to laugh.
For people who don’t work in IT, this next part won’t mean a thing to you.
The guy who was writing this particular chapter was going on and on about how it wasn’t a good practice to actually get into the Active Directory snap in to do maintenance and that all administrators should learn to administer AD through Power Shell and/or VBS scripting. Through the 100+ page chapter, he cited example after example as to why this was the better practice.
ONE of those examples made sense. The rest sounded like a car salesman trying to sell you a vehicle that was currently on fire.
My favorites were the examples where he would say something like this:
“In order to change an object in Active Directory using Power Shell, you must first create the following lines of code.”
He would then list out 4 or 5 lines of code.
“Once those lines are created, you must input your variables into the code.”
He would re-write the same 4 or 5 lines with various bits of information added.
“Now, you must commit the changes using the following lines of code.”
More lines would follow.
“Or, if you decide to use the not-recommended and less intuitive snap in, you right click the object and click the check box.”
/scratches his head.
At the end of the chapter, it got even more funny. The chapters end with some practice questions and case scenarios. The questions asked what you would do in certain situations and would then list 4 answers. 3 of the answers had to do with Power Shell or VBS Scripting and the final answer had to do with “the cumbersome and unreliable AD snap in object.”
The answer to every single question was to use the snap in. The explanations to the answers were that Power Shell and VBS scripting were not designed to administer Active Directory, that they were cumbersome to work with, and that it was just far too easy to make errors using those methods.
Now I realize that several different people write on these books, but come on. At least compare notes. If you are going to turn a chapter into a sales pitch for another Microsoft product, at LEAST make sure the guy writing the questions is aware of it.
The sad thing is that the example the guy used that actually made sense had a MAJOR flaw in it. The example he used was working at a large university where you have new students each semester and old students leaving. The lists can get long and manually entering them one by one would just be time consuming and repetitive. He showed an example of how you could have all of that information in a spreadsheet, write a script and have the script just import it all into AD and create the accounts automatically.
The major flaw in that is that most of the universities on the planet use PeopleSoft… an application that automates the creation of AD accounts far more easily and MUCH more cleanly than automated scripting can do.
I spent a bit of time last night looking into Fan Faire again. I desperately want to go. I’ve wanted to attend a Sony Fan Faire since before it was Fan Faire… when it was strictly EQ Fan Faire. I’ve never been able to attend.
I started planning on attending this year during last year’s event. I started putting a little money back each month and ear marking it for this year. I kept my eyes on Sony’s website waiting for information on it and was hard on the stick to register when it was finally announced. I had my room, my flight, my vacation scheduled… everything. I was set to go. It was to be my first real vacation since I went to Orlando 10 years ago.
A few months back, when I had to have all the work done for a root canal and crown, I had to cancel it all… and it sucked to do. Last night, I started feeling a bit beligerant about it and said, “Screw it. I’m going. I don’t care if I have to just charge it all.”
I jumped on the web and checked pricing for the hotel, the event pass, the flight, car rental, the works. Each item on the list looked innocuous enough and I was confident that I would be in line at registration this year. I broke out the calculator to total out the damages excited to go spend a weekend with “my people” rather than watching from the sidelines for a change.
I hit the “=” button on the calculator.
If you happen to be attending Fan Faire this year, make sure you take pictures so that those of us who won’t be there can live vicariously.
By the way, if anyone needs a calculator, mine is in the dumpster. It might be reparable.
Calculators should never laugh at people who are feeling stabby.
*CLICK* … What was that?!?
Ever feel like you are under the aim of a carefully trained firing squad?
Things are crazy here today. I’ve hardly had time to sit and think… let alone do. I have so many projects up in the air and the due date for all of them is rolling around very rapidly… one within the next 24 hours. Each time I sit down and start making progress on one, some prairie dog sticks its head over my make-shift wall demanding to know the status of another one.
The worst one is the one that is closest to deadline. Tomorrow night (Thursday morning really) beginning at midnight, I have to push a software package to 7 of our production servers. I have successfully tested the major part of the push on my server test bed, but when I was going to start deploying the footprint of the application on the remaining servers in the test bed, my test domain died a cruel and terrible death. I have spent the last couple of days completely rebuilding the servers and the domain and no part of it is playing fair at the moment. I might be going into this deploy blind with my fingers tightly crossed.
I had a light game night last night. When I got home from work and thumbed on the television, Rush Hour 3 was just starting. Despite the fact that pretty much everyone on the planet has told me what a terrible movie this was, I felt compelled to watch it. Having now seen it, I can honestly say that I didn’t hate it. I would have been pissed had I paid money for it and I doubt I will ever watch it again, but it didn’t make any of my naughty bits hurt just by watching it.
Once it was over however, I had to put Rush Hour 1 in the DVD player just to restore my faith in the series. While it ran in the background, I logged into EQ2 to play around a bit.
After working my way back to Fens, I ran a couple of quests. I killed some big cats for a sarnak dude who wanted their teeth and I cured some sarnak scouts who were lying around on the ground. Afterwards I ran around clicking on pots where iksar were performing some dark rite. During the course of doing that, I came across a named cat and a named sarnak. The cat died, of course, and after only a moment of guilt, the sarnak did too. I’m supposed to be working for the sarnak, but it is their fault for not telling their named buddy that I am a greedy fuggar who will kill anything that doesn’t kill me first.
I found myself getting a bit confused and can now see one annoying thing about Fens. I spent hours working up my iksar faction for the beginning part of Fens, but now I have a quest to go out and kill them… probably ruining that faction. Maybe the negative faction hit won’t be that severe, but the whole concept of working faction up to run a quest line and then flushing that faction in the toilet to work another quest line just seemed stupid to me.
“WOOOOOOOOOOOOO you know he dead.”
D’oh! That was my favorite part of Rush Hour.
I quickly ran over and paused the movie and then logged off. I scanned back to the start of that final sequence and watched it until the end.
I thought I would start heading off to bed and study the book I’m reading on Active Directory for a bit, but something truly terrible happened.
I hit the channel guide and saw that Balls of Fury was just starting.
From the moment that movie started running previews, I snorted my contempt at such idiocy where anyone could hear me and secretly wanted to watch it. It looked just a little too damn silly to not enjoy on some childish level.
Safe within the anonymity of my apartment, I settled in to watch it.
I laughed.
A lot.
I’m so ashamed.
Figure that one out
I was feeling a bit lethargic this weekend… which seems to be turning into a weekend theme. I don’t mean that I was depressed or angry. I just find myself hitting about mid afternoon on Saturdays and losing all interest in doing much of anything.
This Saturday was no different.
What WAS different about this Saturday was that G4 was having on-going coverage of San Diego ComicCon.
I haven’t read comics for years. I quit during the “let’s put out 10,000 different covers of every single issue because people will buy it no matter how crappy the story is” heyday. I still enjoy seeing and hearing about them though.
As I’m sitting there watching, I hear them start talking about the upcoming preview of the new Star Wars animated movie about the Clone Wars.
Ooh. You have my attention.
I sat there raptly awaiting the airing because, no matter how much I despised Episode 1, 2 and 3, I am still a Star Wars fan and I will foolishly go back for further groin shots if it has the Star Wars name attached.
The moment arrived. They announced the preview was going to play now. I scooched forward on the couch and leaned expectantly towards the television…
And felt like I had time-warped back to the early 80’s and was seeing the first previews to hit the air for the animated movie Heavy Metal.
Someone explain to me how ILM… the guys who perfected CGI… who (from what I remember reading) invented PIXAR animation… the guys who pee with special effects and particle effects… how on EARTH could they do an animated movie for their flagship title and have it end up looking like something being spewed out by an old Atari 2600 console system?
The graphics were blocky. The movement was jerky. The faces looked like melted wax. SOMEtimes, not always, the mouths moved when a person was speaking.
I thought it looked like complete ass.
I guess it is only fair that Lucas Arts finish killing one of my fondest childhood memories. Episodes 1-3 only mortally wounded it.
My gaming weekend was sporatic and crazy. I crashed on the couch Friday night after work, so it was semi-late when I logged on. I had camped Ray and Rao in Kylong the night before, so I logged on and prepared to go.
I flappy-hopped to Fens and zoned over. I snuck my way out into the field to start my first quest, killed one rhino, and got invited to a group. Hell yeah!
We went to some instance off of The Mystic Lake that I had never even heard of. It was some city that you get to by swimming under water. Let me tell you… it was crazy. It was chaotic. It was dangerous and bloody.
It was a freaking blast.
It was my first time in the zone and none of the others had been far, so there was a whole lot of, “Okay. Let’s go sneak over and see what is in that room. Okay. That didn’t work. Let’s revive and try again.” I was extremely happy with how the night went.
Saturday didn’t go so well. I started out hunting in Fens and was starting to make some progress, but after an hour or so, I started getting careless. It seemed like every single pull, one of my guys got killed. I was getting very annoyed. Finally, I logged pretty much for the rest of the day.
I ended up getting back on in the early evening, but only to knock out a couple of tradeskill levels. Afterwards, I decided to go to bed early for a change.
Yesterday, I was up at 6. I needed to hit the grocery store and I will usually only do that DAMN early on a Sunday morning. I don’t like trying to maneuver a shopping cart through aisles of abandoned children who are using the can foods section to build a fort, so I try to hit it before they are awake.
I showered and dressed and raced downstairs… only to find my truck blocked in by a moving van with the driver no where to be found.
Another Sunday passes with me still not going to the store.
I ended up logged on by 7 and hardly stopped to catch my breath. I did some provo crafting first and then decided to go back to Fens. The rest of the day was spent knocking out quests there.
I remember in my old guild, people were always whining about Fens… about how much the quests sucked and how many there were. Of course, they also griped about Kunark a lot and how it is designed around soloing.
I can only take their word for the lack of group content. I haven’t been fortunate enough to be able to group just a whole lot. Most of my time is spent soloing so Kunark is kind of a great expansion for me. As for the Fens quest lines, I’ve been enjoying the hell out of them. Of course, I am one of those weird (by today’s gaming standards) gamers who reads all of the text to quests and really gets involved in the story. I don’t just rapid-fire click to get the quest and then just look to see what I have to kill.
The weekend was profitable enough. Rao gained another level to hit 74 and is just about 70% into that level now. Ray, after much hit and miss, dinged 71 and is about 30% in. They both got multiple AA’s. I knocked out tradeskill levels on my carpenter, jeweler and provisioner. The carpenter is now 73, the jeweler 69 and the provisioner 49. I expect my provisioner will likely hit 50 either tonight or tomorrow as all of the stuff I made yesterday went on the broker despite the fact that Ray and Rao needed reprovisioning. I’ll also most likely go ahead and get my jeweler to t8… although I don’t know why. I am having the worst time getting supplies for that tier.
Over the course of the weekend, I MAYBE came across 8 hard metal nodes and didn’t score a single ferrite cluster all weekend. Got another stack of loams though.
Freaking ferrite.
Not wasting my time
As yesterday afternoon slowly rolled into evening and the full impact of not getting that job sank in, I started debating with myself over what it really means. I could get angry. I could feel sorry for myself. I could shake my fist at the imaginary spectre of the guys who interviewed me and shout, “Screw you too!”
Or I could accept it and just move on.
I mean, nothing changed. Even finding that job was a fluke. I wasn’t even looking for work. I was just helping a friend and his girlfriend move some furniture and she happened to mention she had heard about this great opportunity. A few days later, I looked it up and, sure enough, it was a great opportunity, but prior to that, I wasn’t even looking around.
What did it really cost me? I spent roughly 30 minutes putting in the paperwork, took 1 day off of work, spent $100 for gasoline, spent 4 hours filling out additional paperwork, and spent $26 for a birth certificate.
I still have my job… a job that I very much enjoy with the exception of the fact that the pay sucks.
The long and short of it is that nothing has been lost… only a job that I wasn’t even looking for to begin with. No sense spending a bunch of time dwelling on it. Time to move forward.
My gaming was limited last night. I got home from work late and then just zoned out on the couch for a bit. I finally realized that my dinner was rapidly getting cold, so I ate and then walked to the computer. By this time, it was already after 8, so I knew that there wasn’t much that was going to get done. I decided to craft.
I knocked out another level on my jeweler, so he’s now 69. 1 level and 1 tier to go. When I hit 92% experience, I realized that I was down to about 7 adamantine clusters so I nearly didn’t finish the level. I wasn’t in the mood to go harvesting and I wasn’t going to pay the prices being asked on the broker, so I felt it could wait. Then I remembered the guild bank.
I have never availed myself of a guild bank in EQ or EQ2. I’m not sure why, but I just don’t feel right about it. I figured it couldn’t hurt to look though.
I opened the guild bank and there they sat… 135 adamantine clusters.
I shot a tell to one of the officers and asked if it was okay if I took them out. He laughed a bit and said, “That is what they are there for.” Despite his insistance that it wasn’t necessary, I promised to replace them this weekend after I went out harvesting again.
So with my borrowed clusters in hand, I went back to the tradeskill zone and finished off my level and then cranked out the brigand and dirge level 69 app 4 CA’s (ran out of spongy loams for the adepts).
With that done, I logged to my carpenter feeling that I had enough t8 supplies to get him another level.
I was wrong.
After busting out 9 writs, I was still about 28% short of level but I had run out of hides and ferrite. The guild bank has a stack of 200 hides, but no ferrite so I just left it alone.
I understand the reasoning behind it, but I still can’t stand the fact that the hard metals are semi-rare to harvest. It has happened every tier… for every 1 metal I harvest, I get about 10 loams. Ever since hitting t8 though, that trend has escalated even further. I am now harvesting roughly 1 metal for every 60 loams. I have only been harvesting t8 for a week and a half and I already have over 2000 loams… closer to 3000 but I rarely walk away with more than 20 ferrite on any given night.
Oh well. It’s just another grind and, like all grinds, it will end sooner or later. I’m just anxious now I guess since my carpenter is so close to being level 80 and my jeweler isn’t too far behind.
Once those two hit 80, it will be time to focus on my sage. When I go to grinding on him, I think I will stick to JUST doing him rather than focusing on 2 or more tradeskillers at once. The act of grinding multiple tradeskillers at the same time is, I think, part of what makes the process start to (forgive the expression) grind on me after a while.
Oh yeah… in the midst of tradeskilling, I ran out of time to play so Rao still didn’t ding 74. I guess that just gives me something to look forward to this evening because it certainly won’t take long to get 3%.
I hope.
