Tuesday, April 5, 2005

v2.5 - Can I get a Woot Woot!

Morning Folks,

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I am so tired right now, I don't even know if I'm really awake. Not sure why I'm so tired but I feel horrid. With that in mind, on with the Tuesday Musing of Tiredness! :)

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Yesterday was a cranky day here at the office. I had a pile of meetings that I needed to attend and one meeting that I held in order for us to get a hold on the Network Infrastructure here at the office. You know what is really interesting about the company I work for? They are an IT (Information Technology) Company and they won't even give us the technology we require to do our jobs. We're not asking for too much (I think), just laptops or desktops that were made in this century. We also require disk storage for our servers as we are running at about 85-90% capacity right now. You think we can get approval for all this stuff?

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Not long ago I went on a Reportal and Proposal writing course. It was a week long course that covered all the details of writing reports, proposals and verbally presenting them. It was a brutally embarrassing experience, but I learned quite a bit. I've put proposals together before but for some reason the proposals I have put together to get new gear around here have fallen on penny pinching deaf ears. If you don't understand things like Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery then you shouldn't be in a position to approve anything in an IT company. Alas, what more can you do? If our business collapses and we are shit on from the higher ups, you can bet I'll be taking my expertise elsewhere.

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That, of course, is another story for another day :)

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Yesterday we sat around in the mid afternoon talking about our new company. I find it amusing when I sit back and listen to the different opinions about what is going on right now. You see Mr. Asskisser who is saying that everything will work itself out in the end and we need to hold fast and be dedicated to our jobs. Then you have Mr. Quitoncewilldoitagain who is finding every single flaw in the system and is questioning every level of authority. Then there is me, sitting back in my little Cube in Cubesville watching all this unfold. In truth, I\''m waiting to see if it will come to blows. Been a long time since I saw a good fight :)

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In all honesty, I tend to lean toward the Mr. Quitoncewilldoitagain guy. The company is good at many things, but it excels in pulling the wool over our eyes. People may not realize it, but over the last few years we have lost a LOT of things that made working for this company an enjoyable experience. Sure the pay sucks, but there were many added benefits to the job that made it worth sticking with. Today, there is nothing keeping me here other than my family. If I didn't have my kids right now, I would be out of here faster than a fat kid on a Smartie(tm).

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Of course, life will go on and big corporations with a thirst for more money will always end up poking you in the ass with the policies and politics. F the F'n F'ers.

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This conversation went on for quiet a bit and I ended up leaving a little late for home yesterday. Yesterday was my son's first day back to school after the March Break (or Spring Break). Of course, the ritual for getting him to school hadn't changed :) Once he was there he loved it and came home happy. Sometimes that boy really confuses the hell out of me. Some days he can be so smart and whitty, and other days it is almost like he has thrown everything he has ever learned out the window. Of course, he does this on purpose to get his way, but Katie and I are on to his crazy tricks and catch him at it all the time. :) Mwaa haaa haaaaa the powers of Parenting. Yoda has nothing on this Force Yo.

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Didn't play a lot of World of Warcraft last night. I've been cutting back a little bit due to the nice weather and such. I am also in the process of rebuilding my server and I've run into a lot of snags in the process. All I want is a nice system with a Control Panel built in that will allow me to create hosting accounts and such. Then in turn will give these customers the ability to get online and make changes to their accounts and all that jazz. You think that should be simple on a brand new machine with a brand new build of OS. Of course it isn\''t.

Oh well, I\''ll figure it out eventually and will have one kick ass server running our business on. Really looking forward to finally sitting back and doing some web development and hosting. If things get big enough, I could easily quit this job and do that full time. That would be a dream come true.

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For the short time I did play WoW last night, I made my way to a place I hadn't been to before. It is a nicely done zone just to the East of Ashenvale (the name of the zone escapes me atm). The while zone looks similar to ancient Greece with the ruins and pillars and all that stuff. It is how I would picture ancient Greece in the fall since all the trees were fall shades of colors like red, orange, yellow, etc. As I was walking through the zone, the leaves were falling off the trees and landing on the leave covered ground. What a great display of graphical talent. I've never seen a zone like it yet and I must tip my had to the designers at Blizzard, those guys have done an AMAZING job.

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I'm making my way through this zone as I read a rumor there was a Dragonscale Leatherworking Trainer there. Luckily the very start of the zone contained a little Alliance village with a Hypgriffon (or whatever they are called) Flight Path that I could unlock to make it back there quicker next time. I began to make my way into the zone and quickly realized I was a little bit low on the level side to be there. Most of the mobs were level 47 to level 55 Elite (just the ones I saw) which other than the 47ish mobs would have killed me pretty quick. I summoned my riding tiger and began my journey into the wilds. There were all sorts of mobs in this zone. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I knew the general area the NPC was in. As I was running along one of the roads I was distracted by the scenery and fell down into a ditch of sorts. Of course I couldn't climb back out so I just ran with it. The ditch emptied out into a huge set of ruins with a LOT of high level (level 50-54) mobs. Some were casters, some were archers and the rest were all melee. I ran. :)

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Unfortunately I didn't run fast enough and ended up being dismounted in the middle of this camp. Thinking all was lost, I click on my Feign Death button and low and behold it Worked!! Usually when you try to Feign Death against high level mobs it will fail consistently. Feign Death, for those who don't know, is an ability the Hunter class can learn that will make them appear dead to everyone. Basically, I'm faking it :) Great way to lose agro from mobs.

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Ok, you can return from the edge of your seats now. :) After the mobs had dispersed I decided to get up off the ground. I noticed to my SouthWest there was a little pathway. At this point I had decided there was no way I was going to find my Dragonscale Leatherworking Trainer so I was just going to get out of there. I make my way up this little pathway. I'm expecting to get jumped by mobs at ANY second here :) I make it to the top of the pathway and I find a little camp. There is ONE NPC in the camp. I click on the NPC and low and behold "Dragonscale Leatherworking Master". WOOT! I accept her quest so I can become a Dragonscale Leatherworker with my character and I port away. The crazy thing about these quests is the amount of stuff they require you to do. Granted, it wasn't near as bad as Katie's Weaponcrafting quest she needed to do, but it was still a pain because of where I needed to get my materials. Remember those level 50-54 mobs I was talking about? :) Yeah, you know it. My quest requires me to gather 10 Dragonscales. After doing some research, I can get those dragonscales from the mobs around where I found the Dragonscale Leatherworking Master. Unfortunately, the mobs I need to kill and skin are level 55 Elites (aka level 60ish). So I ported back to Iron Forge (Dwarf Capital City) and looked on the Auction House for the items I needed. Good news, if I win all the auctions I bid on last night, I will have JUST enough materials to make everything I need AND have the 10 Dragonscales :)

{slurp} WOOT WOOT

ahhhh

I received an interesting email from my Father yesterday. This past weekend I was talking to him about World of Warcraft and how much fun the game is. He used to play Warcraft quite a bit and enjoyed the game. When he heard about this game, he told me he may take a look at it. Keep in mind my Father has never played an MMOG (Massive Multiplayer Online Game) before in his life and is used to single player games. The email I got from him yesterday was to inform me he went out and bought World of Warcraft. I gave him a quick call last night to see how he was doing with it and he had already leveled up a level 5 Human Paladin. His only complaint about the game was people constantly wanting to help him and inviting him to their groups. I laughed. I told him he needed to roll a toon on our server so we can play together. He didn't understand the concept of different servers all containing the same game until I told him it was like alternate universes with different people playing the exact same game. Once he understood that concept he agreed he would start up a character on Uldum with us. My step brother is also playing the game and is enjoying the Night Elf Druid he started. I can see him playing the game a lot more than my Father :)

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I must retire to the smoking lounge (aka outside the back door) and spark one up. Be right back :)

/afk

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Ok I'm back :)

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I revamped my musing website yesterday. You can now view all the past musings (just for you Mom)!! I had been debating on writing a whole front-end for my musings but I found a decent blog/CMS application that I was able to write my own back-end code for. So now the new site SHOULD check for new musings and add them auto-magically for me. Today is the test of course so you MAY not see today's musing in there if it doesn't work :) You can check it all out at http://ralic.fiendz.net

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Well gang, I'm going to bring things to a close for now. My boss is back today from a week long trip to Hawaii (bastard) and we are all anxiously awaiting his arrival back to work. You see we all took bets here at the office as to whether he went to Hawaii to get married to his girl friend :) He dodged the question when asked, so the assumption here is he did. We even went through the effort to send out congratulations and everything else. If he didn't get married, it will be a good joke; if he did, we were prepared.

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Have a great day gang and remember, You're only as old as you feel!

Cheers,

Al

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