Free time? What’s that?

Sorry for the lack of posts this week.  It has been a crazy week both at work and outside of work.  I haven’t even had the time to boot up my computer at home to say nothing of playing.  I’m signed up to head to WoE with some guildies tonight, so hopefully things will calm down enough to let me do that.
 
Tomorrow, I’m supposed to go for a relatively short sprint ride with some guys after work, so I doubt that will interfere with my Friday night gaming any.  I just hope that I’m still in the mood to play once I get home.
 
It is always funny to me how when I don’t have the time to play, that’s all I want to do.  When I have all the time in the world, I have no interest in logging on.
 
I think my internal wiring is crossed.

Trimming the fat

I cancelled my second account again over the weekend.  I did it for a number of reasons.  The primary is that I am simply not playing very much any longer and, when I am playing, 2-boxing hasn’t even entered my mind.  I haven’t logged that account on for two months other than to use it to transfer lore items from toon to toon on my primary account since I couldn’t put those items in the shared bank.
 
I’m honestly not sure what is going on with me right now with regards to the game.  I spent a fairly large amount of time thinking about it over the weekend.  For the longest time, my routine was to log on a few hours after getting home from work every day and playing until I went to bed.  On weekends, I would quite literally play from the moment I woke up until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.  A couple of years ago, my play time reduced somewhat, but I was still playing a large amount of time.  It is safe to say that I spent more time online than I did anything else in my life except for working and sleeping.
 
A few months ago, my game time took a significant hit as I started to rejoin the living… taking on activities that involved being outside and around other people.  Since then, I have played less and less each week.
 
This past week, I think I logged on once… maybe twice during the week.  Those visits were only for a few minutes before logging off again.  This weekend, I started to follow what has become my routine lately.
 
For the last couple of months, I play on Friday nights from about 8 until 10.  On Saturdays, I wake up around 7 and go for a ride.  Somewhere between 10 and 11 when I get home and get cleaned up, I log on and pretty much play the rest of the day.  Sunday, I wake up around 7 and go to the grocery store.  Once I get home from the store, I log on and play for the rest of the day.
 
I started out with that routine this weekend, but things felt wrong from the start.  I logged on Friday night and almost immediately realized that I didn’t want to be online and logged off again.  I got home from my ride on Saturday, got cleaned up, and moved to the office.  I sat in the chair and stared at the computer.  In that moment, I realized that I would rather do nearly anything in the world other than log on, so I got up, went to pick up a friend, and we spent the day going to bike shops.
 
I tried to log on again Saturday evening and even made it long enough to get the 5% exp I needed to level my wizard from 78 to 79, but I did it by buying up collections because I didn’t want to play.  As soon as I had enough collections to level, I logged off.
 
Yesterday was much the same.  I logged on in the morning, realized I didn’t want to play, and logged off again.  I logged on several times throughout the day, but didn’t want to play and logged back off again.
 
I don’t know what is going on.  I think a big part is that I have a whole lot going on right now.  Most of it is of my own choosing, but it doesn’t leave a lot of time for gaming.  I have NaNo starting in a few days, I’ve started working towards my Cisco certification, I still have a few more big projects coming up at work that will require a lot of late nights, and I would honestly rather be sitting on my bike right now than sitting in the computer chair.
 
I’m sure things will settle down again and I’ll be back to playing more often and enjoying myself again, but I honestly believe that my days of playing every day and playing marathon sessions on the weekends are done for good.  I have started to remember what life is like outside of the confines of imaginary worlds and those imaginary worlds are simply less colorful and less enjoyable as a result.
 
As the chill of winter arrives, I know that I will continue to find warmth and comfort in my familiar escape… traveling through Norrath, but it is now a 3rd string hobby for me.  Ten years ago when I took my first steps into MMO’s, I never dreamed that I would still be playing 10 years later.  I also never dreamed that I would end up where I am now… feeling regret, frustration and a little bit of anger over how I let MMO’s take over.
 
You can’t make up for lost time, but you can work to keep from making the same mistake twice.  It took me 10 years (almost to the day.  My 10-year MMOversary hits this Thanksgiving) to realize that I was getting too swept up in this thing.
 
Now it is time for moderation.  I’m going to take a hit and I’m going to have to change how I play.  For the longest time, I was a raider.  Most of the time, I fell into the casual raider category, but even a casual raider has to spend a good bit of time keeping up with the level and AA curve, getting the best gear and spells they can, and learning encounters.
 
I’m not sure that my new approach will lend itself to raiding… even casually… any longer.  Time will tell on that one.  I may end up discovering that my new approach won’t even lend itself to realistically playing MMO’s and I’ll have to decide between my new loves and my old love.
 
For the first time in 10 years, I have no hesitation if it comes to that.  If I have to make a decision on how to spend my time, I’ll be thankful for the memories and all the wonderful people I met on the journey, but it will be time to hang up my adventuring boots for good.

Wow. Just wow.

I came close to begging off last night.
 
I’ve been talking for a while now about that movie, Race across the Sky.  It was only going to be a 1-time showing so I either went last night or I didn’t see it.  I really wanted to see it, but I was so freaking exhausted from work this week that I honestly didn’t think I could make it through it.  I got home from work, sat down to eat, and immediately started nodding off.  I debated 2 or 3 times calling the guys I was supposed to meet out there and telling them I wasn’t coming.
 
I finally roused myself enough to put my shoes back on and head over there.  I thought my chances of sleeping through parts of it were high, but I honestly did want to see it.
 
I had no need to worry.  For anyone who has even a passing interest in cycling, mountain biking, documentaries, or is simply a fan of Lance Armstrong, there was no possible way to sleep through this movie.
 
For me, the whole thing was pretty serendipitous. 
 
A few months ago, when I first injured my Achilles, I purchased a book called Born to Run.  The overlying premise of that book has to do with foot and body injuries and the erroneous belief system modern day medicine has put on us that running is physically bad for you.  Yeah, I know.  Any time I happen to mention that, there are a ton of people who roll their eyes and prepare to argue with me, but it is the simple truth.  I had already started to come to that conclusion when I started really digging in and researching and there is more and more evidence every year that running is not the great evil that doctors want us to believe.
 
But that is another argument for another time.
 
Early on in the book, the author starts talking about a foot race called the Leadville 100 held every year in Leadville, Colorado.  He spends a good deal of time talking about this race and bills it as the ultimate ultra marathon.  He interviews and quotes the guy who started the race and then describes the whole grueling ordeal.  It is pretty amazing.
 
After reading about it, I started thinking about how much I would love to visit there some time.  I would never be able to run it.  Even when I was healthy, in shape, and running every day, a normal marathon was often out of my reach and even on those rare occasions where I happened to finish one, it was only by the skin of my teeth that I managed to cross the finish line.  And that was in purely ideal situations and environments.  Running 4 times that far through mountain passes up and down mountains at high altitude in the cold and brutal mountain weather conditions… yeah.  Not going to happen.
 
Still, I was fascinated with the event and really wanted to go see the place where it is held.
 
Then I started getting into mountain biking.
 
Mountain biking snuck up on me.  I knew that I loved riding bikes when I was a kid and that I had experienced some measure of enjoyment from riding occasionally as an adult, but it just wasn’t something that I thought I would do with any real regularity.  I bought my mountain bike with the intention of getting into shape riding on the streets and then trying my hands at mountain biking, but I couldn’t make myself ride enough to get to where I was comfortable with the idea of hitting the trails.
 
And then a few months back, nearly 5 years after buying my bike, my co-workers talked me into trying it at our trails where I live now.
 
Since then, mountain biking has become a part of my life and a part of who I am.  I haven’t been this excited about or dedicated to a sport since I first started studying martial arts nearly 30 years ago.
 
And like I was with martial arts, I have been spending a good deal of time studying the sport… learning all I can.
 
When I initially heard about Race across the Sky, all I knew was that it was a documentary about a mountain bike race and that I wanted to see it.  Only later, when I saw the movie trailer, did I discover that it was the mountain bike version of the Leadville 100.  At that point, I knew I had to see the movie.
 
I tend to be pretty critical of movies.  I’m not sure why, but there are a lot of movies that people love that I can’t stand.  Little things will jump out at me that drive me crazy and really detract from the experience for me.  All the years I was really into martial arts, I watched every martial arts movie I could find and was disappointed by most of them.  There would be fun elements to each of them, but I would mostly get annoyed by a lot of the over-the-top visual elements that I knew were only there for the ‘ah’ appeal factor.  The only martial arts movie that ever really floored me was Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and that was more for the subtleties of the story than for the martial arts themselves.
 
Due to my annoying tendency to over think and over analyze movies to the point of making them less than enjoyable for me, I did feel some measure of trepidation walking into the auditorium last night.
 
I can sum up Race across the Sky with one word: Thunderous.  I was absolutely floored literally from the second the lights went out until they came back on again.  I wasn’t alone either.  The movie wasn’t sold out by any stretch, but there were probably 100 to 150 people there.  The movie ran just a few minutes under 2 hours and in all that time, not one person got up to so much as go to the bathroom and not one person even shifted in their seats until the lights were fully up and we were 100% sure there wasn’t anything left to see.  On the way out, complete strangers were stopping each other and asking, “Do you ride?”  The air was electric and everyone was completely blown away by what we had just watched.
 
Today, I have one question and one question only… when can I buy that on DVD?
 
I know that most people only come here to read about gaming in general and EQ2 specifically.  I apologize that so many posts lately have been about other things.  Some months ago, I launched a second blog with the intention of putting everything non-game related there and keeping this one completely about gaming.  After just a few posts, I quit posting there and started mixing posts here again.  One of the big reasons was that I couldn’t seem to focus in on a specific direction for that site and it simply seemed easier to blend the two together again.
 
Now that I have finally found the focus I was looking for in my “away from work away from game” life, I am going to restructure that second site and launch it again.  That site will focus on mountain biking specifically and fitness in general, somewhat broad strokes.  This site will go back to be only EQ2 and gaming.  Hopefully I’ll get all the restructuring done over the weekend so that the multiple personality posts will come to a stop.

And just like that…

It always amazes me the effect that ‘anticipation’ has on the mind.  It doesn’t matter if it is a vacation or a holiday or even a game release… the higher the anticipation, the higher the likelihood of some form of letdown.
 
Reality rarely lives up to anticipation because anticipation is the product of our minds and our minds are capable of endless amounts of imagination.  We have the ability to build something up in our minds to epic proportions to the point that it is literally impossible for anything to live up to what we expect.
 
Fortunately, this cuts both ways.  While we can build anticipation for something we are very much looking forward to, we can also build anticipation for something we dread.
 
For the last 6 months or so, 90% or more of my time at work has been background and preparation work to replacing our entire IT network.  This is something that I have never done before.  Once or twice in the past, I lent a hand replacing or repairing a small portion of an IT network, but this was the whole smack.  The entire thing.  And I wouldn’t be assisting… I would be doing. 
 
As things turned out, I did end up with some significant help.  The original timing was such that there wasn’t going to be anyone who had experience doing this available to make the trip here to help out so I was going to be alone in the dark hoping that a few guys across the country could manage to stay up all night trying to talk me through it over the phone.  Fortunately for me, one of the 3 guys in the entire company who actually knows how to do this had a schedule change and was able to make the trip.
 
I’m really glad that he did.
 
Going into the whole thing, I had convinced myself that I was going to screw it all up so badly that the entire network would be down and would stay down.  Somehow, I would damage or destroy the old network components so that I was unable to rollback to the old network and we would be dead in the water until we could manage to force it back up.  With experienced help on the way, my fears lessened considerably, but some were still there.
 
Things could have gone better, but they definitely could have gone worse.  There were elements to the old network that had been set up so long ago by people so long gone from the company that no one knew anything about them.  When the new network came up, a few things here and there didn’t work as they should have and we had to spend a lot of time digging around finding what was going wrong.
 
I mentioned earlier in the week (or late last week… time is running together) that my boss had advised me to pack a bag and expect to live here at the office for a week.  Things definitely weren’t that bad.  I responded saying that I thought we would have 1 long night and that everything would be fine.  Things didn’t go that well either.
 
The end result was a long day Monday working from 7:30 AM until about 8 PM.  I returned on Tuesday around 7 AM and left at 6 PM.  We returned Tuesday night to do the major part of the project… the part that had to be done during off hours.  We got here around 11 PM and I didn’t get out of here until just before 11 AM yesterday morning.  I got home around noon and grabbed a couple hours of sleep, but I was awake again at 4.  At 5, I had a conference call from home discussing what few things weren’t working properly and what still needed to be done.  I was back up here at 10:30 PM last night and left around 3 AM this morning.  I made it home by about 3:15 and was quickly asleep.  I was up again at 6 AM and back in the office at 7.
 
Everything is done and working and the boss is happy.  All that is left for me to do is clean up the mess we made of the cabling and then slog through the day in a zombie-like state.  Unfortunately, I won’t be going home tonight and going straight to bed because I want to go watch Race across the Sky.  I would skip out, but this is a 1-time showing of the movie and they won’t play it a second time.  I’ve been looking forward to and anticipating this for far too long to not go.
 
I just hope that whole ‘anticipation’ thing doesn’t surprise me in the bad way this time or I might be asleep before the movie is even half over.
 
The important thing as far as I am concerned is that my big project for the year is over and was completely successful with only 1 or 2 minor hiccups along the way.  I can now more or less breathe easy for the rest of 2009.
 
I’ll also be able to log in tomorrow night free from the shadow of dread associated with this project that clouded my gaming last weekend.

Welcome to Hell Week

I remember growing up always hearing about “Hell Week.”  When you are a child, there is a certain element of the unknown bordering on fear associated with those words.  Teachers would talk about it and parents would worry over it and all you knew was that you had better not be outside after dark.
 
“Hell Week” was, of course, the week leading up to the Friday night football game between the two local high schools.  That game almost always fell during the month of October and very close to Halloween.  I guess they figured kids were already out busting pumpkins and acting up, so might as well have it all happen at the same time.
 
What I find funny now is that back then, “Hell Week” was nothing more than harmless pranks.  The kids from one side of town would egg the houses for the kids from the other side of town.  If you ran into each other, there was some taunting and yelling, but it was mostly done for fun and before it was all over, you were all laughing and walking away.
 
These days, “Hell Week” is closer to its name.  The kids are much more violent these days.  Even when I was in high school, the worst thing that might happen is the yelling degraded into a fist fight.  These days, I hear rumors of people being shot, beaten to death, cars set on fire, and pretty much everything else you can think of.  A once friendly rivalry has developed into little more than a mob of thugs vying for shock value.
 
That isn’t what this is about though.  I’m talking about a different kind of hell week.  I’m talking about the only kind of hell week that someone of my age and in my position can have: a week of insanely long hours at work, very little free time to have fun and game, buckets of stress, and very little sleep.
 
Everything that I have been working on and working towards for the last 6 months comes to a head over the next 72 hours.  In a little over two hours from now, I jump into the company van and head to the airport to pick up an IT guy from one of the other regions.  After dropping his bags off at the hotel and grabbing some food, the fun times begin.  For the next few days, he and I will be eating, drinking, and sleeping network remediation as we try our best to take the entire regional network down and replace it with a minimum of interruption.
 
Fun times.
 
My estimation is that I will have a little bit of time to game tonight and maybe even a little time tomorrow night, but that will be it until the weekend.  No big deal since I only started playing again during the week last week… and that only for an hour or so a night.  But there is so much going on in game right now that I actually want to be playing… and I won’t be able to.
 
Oh well.  That will make it just that much sweeter when I do get back online.
 
In anticipation of the “blackout” for this week, I probably went a little overboard this weekend.
 
Without going into all the gory details, I had a personal goal of getting my wizard from 76 to 80 this weekend.  Between the OUTRAGEOUS number of client crashes and all of the derailed attempts, I didn’t make it.  Still, I got fairly close.  I am now about 10% away from 79.
 
I finally got sick of waiting to see if and when Sony was going to do something about the rampant crashes that seem to be hitting so many people and worry that if and when they do finally get it, they will only offer the solution as a random LoN booster pack loot card or for purchase through Station Cash.  After more than 20 crashes in less than 3 hours on Saturday, I finally started digging around on the web and found a fix to try.  I ran it Saturday night, but then decided to not log back on after the last crash.
 
I woke up yesterday and was on pretty much all day.  I was zoning around, spending long periods of time in our graphic-intensive guild hall (which is usually a big culprit of me crashing), logging from toon to toon, and running at a high graphics setting.  From the time I logged on yesterday morning until the time I logged off after our raid last night, I didn’t crash a single time.
 
There are a lot of things going on in game right now from all the Day of the Dead events (that I have only run on my wizard so far but that I want to run many more toons through) to the Mushroom Grottos going live again in a few days to my drive to level and gear the wizard as a possible raid toon for when we have too many bards to any number of other things.  Needless to say, I will be sneaking online as often as I can this week.
 
I doubt Wednesday will see me online at all though.  After working all day Tuesday, all night Tuesday night, and all day Wednesday, I doubt I’ll be in shape for anything outside of sleep when I finally get home Wednesday evening.  Thursday night is the 1-time showing of Race Across the Sky and I’m not missing that.
 
And speaking of that… the ride on Saturday was intense.  It started so badly.  My body felt tired and my lungs were screaming within minutes.  I thought about giving up less than 5 minutes into the ride, but I pressed on and ended up having the best ride yet.  I am definitely starting to find my comfort on the bike again.
 
I doubt I’ll have much time to post in the coming days, so I am going to make an executive decision and not even try to.  Once everything boils over and settles down, I’ll start again.  It won’t be a long break, but don’t expect anything new from me until Friday.
 
Have a good week all.