44.7 :: Terror in Tera

** I realize my embedded images look like crap.  I'm trying to figure out why as they look fine in the edit screen, but somehow lose their "shape" when I publish.  I hope to have it corrected soon.**

I can't believe it's been over a month since I posted last.  Seems like it was just last week I put the last post up here and somehow 39 days went by without me noticing it.  Granted April is a busy month for me and work hasn't made it any less busier.

-slurp-

Gaming wise I've been playing a little bit of Diablo 3 and Tera Online.  My son and I started up a couple of Season 3 characters in D3 and made it to level 70 in a 2 weekends of play.  Blizzard has really changed the game a lot since I leveled my first character and I must say the experience was a lot of fun.  Of course now that we're level 70, we are going through the painful grind of Paragon levels (800 in total if I want to max out everything), running Adventure mode on various torment difficulty settings and running through rifts.  It's not as much fun as we had while leveling to 70 but it's still a good time trying difficult difficulty ratings to see how well (or badly) we do.

In my free time (what little I have) I've also been delving into the world of Tera Online.  For a game that is free-to-play (f2p) it has really done well for itself.  The character creation is simple but offers a decent variety of choices.  There are 8 classes to choose from with an additional class if you have a character over level 40 on that server.  I've only been playing for a week or so and my highest level character is an Archer class at level 36.  I also decided to try my hand at a Warrior class which I'm pleased to say is quickly catching up to my Archer.

-slurp-

Tera features some stunning graphics and the combat animations are very well done.  The targeting and movement controls are a bit different to get used you, but once you have it down you wonder how you ever managed to play click to target games (i.e. World of Warcraft) before.  Wildstar and Neverwinter have similar no-click targeting combat but Tera seems to outshine them both.

I'm uncertain what the future holds for me in the Tera universe.  So far I like what I see and I look forward to logging in when I have some free time.  Whether that will continue in the weeks to come we'll have to wait and see.

-slurp-

As I mentioned earlier, April is usually a busy month for me.  Since my past post I celebrated a birthday, my oldest son's birthday as well as my sister's birthday.  April also concluded my large project at work; a project that I have been working on for the past 15 months.  As a result of that wrap-up, I spent a lot of time getting things finalized with my development team, individual development tasks properly sized and just plain old fun.

The 15 month project may have wrapped up but my next one has already begun.  This next project isn't nearly as aggressive as the last, but it will still be a challenge to wrap up by the end of 2015.  Overall work is OK.  I have a great team of developers who (for the most part) have their heads down and do their jobs and a great management team backing me up.  In a few short months I will be "celebrating" my 10 year anniversary with this company.  Hard to believe it has been 10 years.

-slurp-

"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." -- Mark Twain

May the 4th be with you!

Cheers,

Al

v44.0: Excogitating No Stress – Day 5

Afternoon Folks,

-slurp-

This afternoon's musing is brought you to by a medium-sized Tim Horton's coffee with a single cream, and the letter Q.  It's 3PM and I'm just now able to sit and write.  What a day this has been; stress free, but very very busy.

-slurp-

I woke this morning to a massive outage with one of our systems at work.  Everyone was in a panic and things were hectic.  I strolled into work, sat down at my desk and began plugging away.  Emails, pouring over logs, checking code and all of the fun things we as developers live for.  Of course there wasn't much to be done from my end since the bulk of the problem was a mis-executed procedure on the other end which resulted in the main ticket system going down HARD.  I did notice a few issues on our side which were unrelated and promptly made a few fixes which I will need to deploy tonight.  Of course things are calm and quiet now, but the thrill of the job is still pulsing through my body; or maybe that's the hunger of a missed lunch :)

-slurp-

It's day 5 and I'm still stress free.  I haven't worried about work all week and it felt great.  I've been relaxed, smiling, laughing and enjoying my time here while being quite productive.  It's been a good week and definitely something I'm going to keep in mind in the days and weeks ahead.  Speaking of "days and weeks ahead", I have decided to add a little plugin to the site which will allow me to track my stress levels.  With each blog post, I will try to remember to add one of these so you, the reader, can see what my current stress level is at.  Hopefully this will be relatively small with my new method of dealing with stress, but there may be days when I can't contain it and the stress levels may rise.  It should look something like this:

[progpress title="Stress Level" goal="100" current="2" previous="1" label="stress"]

Hopefully that looks ok.  I haven't used this plugin before but according to the documentation, it should work just fine for what I need.

-slurp-

Well folks, work beckons and I must answer it's cruel wicked call.  I will be working well into the night tonight so wish me luck.  Don't forget that the second full moon within a single calendar month is called the Blue Moon.  More on that later.

-slurp-

Cheers,

Al

v43.9: Excogitating No Stress – Day 4

Good afternoon folks,

-slurp-

Yes, here I am sitting at my desk at 3PM drinking a coffee.  You're probably all wondering what happened to "Excogitating No Stress - Day 3" and if you read Day 2 you would know that I was off yesterday.  I had every intention to write but unfortunately I didn't find the time to sit and write anything at all.  I did, however, have a great day off and of course there was no stress since there was no work.  Today, again, I have had little to no stress in my work day.  I've been busy (very busy) and going almost non-stop all day, but I haven't stressed over it.  Even when one of the developers on my team resigned (yesterday while I was out), I still wasn't stressed about it.  I think this whole "No Stress" thing is working.

-slurp-

Well since I had no work yesterday (and no stress), and today has been pretty much stress free, I guess you could almost say my experiment has been a success.  Tomorrow will be a week and I will find some way to document my findings and publish them here.  In fact, I just gave myself a great idea for a new section on my site to keep track of stress and stress levels; keep an eye out for that to show up soon.  Tomorrow being Friday, I doubt there will be much in the way of stress happening.  Although I do have to work Friday night for a few hours, I'm sure it will be stress free and relaxing.  I will say, my frame of mind while at work has been different.  I don't let things build up and bother me like they have been.  I don't get down about the job and I greet each task with a smile.  The key to keeping your shit together while at work is prioritizing and I will definitely write more on that at a later day.  Let me just add that not everyone knows how to prioritize and those who say they do are usually doing it wrong.  There is a right way and a wrong way to prioritize and hopefully I will be able to help someone out there with my experiences and suggestions.

-slurp-

Ok folks, a shorter musing today only because of the things I need to finish up before I leave for the day.  If you are taking part in my stress free week experiment, I hope things are going just as well for you.  I would really like to hear your experiences this week and how you've been able to ward off the evil that is stress.  Until next time, remember to change your underwear every single day.  Of course if you shit your pants, you can change them more than once a day; in fact, I highly recommend it.

Cheers,

Al

v43.8: Excogitating No Stress – Day 2

Good morning folks,

-slurp-

Though technically it is morning, it is almost noon my time.  I've had a busy stress free morning this morning and have been loving every minute of it.  Yesterday turned out to be quite successful.  It started off busy, but I made a conscious decision to not feel stress over it.  I spent the majority of the morning pouring over email threads that kept me busy most of the weekend.  I believe I mentioned yesterday that I ended up spending a good chuck of my weekend working and then I was working again last night.  In fact, other than the drive from work to home, I worked from 9AM to 10:30PM straight.  It sounds stressful, but when you have a no stress attitude, it was really a walk in the park.  As a result of the extra hours over the weekend and last night, I now have no work tomorrow; nothing like a break in the middle of a no stress week to help alleviate any stress that may come.

-slurp-

Overall I'm quite happy about how things went yesterday.  Despite being busy and having lots of work to do, it was really quite care free.  I did my job, put my head down, had a few laughs with my coworkers and overall had a good day.  I had a smile on my face which (as my coworkers can attest to), is not that common these days.  You see folks, I take my job seriously and I do a god job in that.  I spend a lot of extra hours working and ensuring things are running as smoothly as possible.  I lead a team of developers and often I take on work that could otherwise be delegated in order to help alleviate some of the strain and stress on my team.  I don't mind working the extra hours because at the end of the day if the customer is happy, work is good.  We are working on a major development project right now which has a lot of eyes on it.  The team has done an amazing job pulling together and getting the project finished up and we are getting close to a finished product.  I'm happy with the way things have gone so far.  We've had some bumps in the road along the way, but we have worked through them and things are moving along.  While the team has been focused on this task, I have been trying to take care of the other things that go on in a development team such as this.  I've found myself up many nights developing, debugging and doing code reviews to ensure my days can be focused on the things that are needed.  It has been exhausting, but rewarding at the same time.  I get things done and thanks to my team, we have been successful and are perceived a success.

-slurp-

Well folks, time to get back to it.  Yesterday was a success and today is shaping up to be successful as well.  I'm excited to see how things are when I'm back in the office Thursday.  Obviously tomorrow will be "work" stress free, but I'll still do my best to write regardless.

-slurp-

I hope you are all having a nice stress free day today.  Remember to always tip when going to a restaurant.  Servers have amazing memories and if you ever plan on going back to eat at that restaurant, you may get something added to your meal you didn't order. :)

Cheers,

Al

v43.2: Fracking Friday

Howdy folks,

It's Friday!  Thankfully the gods have deemed us worthy and have allowed us to see another Friday.  If you are one of the fortunate ones to have their work week end today, I bid you a happy weekend.  If not, you can join the club with me.

Unfortunately for me, I will be working most of this weekend.  There have been a lot of things going on at work this week and as a result, I will be spending most of my weekend tied to my BlackBerry and laptop while I perform changes and monitor progress/emails.  I'm sure things will go well and come Monday all of the things I hoped to accomplish will be completed and running well.  I don't foresee any complications, but like anything in the IT industry, it can go bad real fast and end up spoiling your entire weekend.

This weekend also marks the season premier of Dexter.  I started watching Dexter after season 5 had ended.  I downloaded all of the episodes and watched them back-to-back all the way up to the end of Season 6.  If you're a Dexter fan, you're probably anticipating the season 7 premier as much as I am.  If you've never seen Dexter, I won't spoil it for you but suffice to say, it's going to be very interesting to see how this season is going to start.

-slurp-

As some of you know, Blizzard released the latest expansion to the World of Warcraft franchise this past week.  The expansion is called Mists of Pandaria and it introduces a whole new race (Pandas) to the world of Azeroth.  I wasn't really that hyped about this expansion as I was in the past ones, but I was still excited to check out some new content and see what new things were added to the game.  In typical pre-release fashion, Blizzard rolled out a bunch of the changes that were expansion independent a few weeks prior to the release date.  I was able to play around a bit with these new changes and I must say, they've done a great job.  The expansion came out Tuesday and I hadn't had a chance to login and check it out until last night (Thursday).  This marks the first time I have ever missed an expansion release; in fact, I didn't even think about it at all on Tuesday until after I got home from work and realized I couldn't login and play because I had a bunch of work to do and wasn't able to.

Last night I decided to take a bit of a break from work and ended up logging in and spending a couple of hours playing.  Blizzard introduced this new system called "Pet Battles" which is basically Pokemon using the non-combat pets you've collected over the last 7 years.  At first I was a bit sceptical about the system and how it was going to work, but after spending a few minutes learning the new interface and reading up on the FAQ, I found myself in-game going around and finding pets to kill and capture.  Basically it starts off with a quest (after you've learned how to do pet battles) which sends you away to defeat a pet.  A "pet" is simply a critter and you see them all over the place.  Some of these pets are flagged for pet battles and when you click on them, it starts the pet battle interface.  You can specify your "active" pet out of all of the pets you have and the turn-based fight will begin.  The fight ends when either your pet(s) or the other pet(s) are defeated/captured.  Yes, you can capture pets in this system and add them to your pet list.  If you come across a pet you don't already have, you can challenge it and fight it.  Once it's health is below 35%, you have an option to capture it.  In the beginning you will almost capture it every time on the first try, but later on it gets more difficult and it may take more tries to successfully capture the pet.  Pets are also of different quality (like gear); you have your common, uncommon, rare and epic type pets that are placed all over WoW.  Sometimes you may even go up against multiple pets which makes it a bit more challenging.  So far I've only ever had to fight 1 pet at a time, but I'm assuming that will change later on as my pets get higher level.

It's a fun system and very well deployed.  I can see wasting many hours of my game time playing with this feature in the near future.  If you're a World of Warcraft player, some of this will make sense to you; if not, I apologize :)

Well folks, it's time to get back to work and prepare for my work filled evening and weekend.  Remember to always ensure you look both ways before crossing the street and abide by the rules of pedestrianism (ooo, big word).  Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice.

Cheers,

Al

v41.1: Cataclysm

Howdy folks,

-slurp-

Yesterday Blizzard released their 3rd expansion to their award winning game, World of Warcraft.  The expansion is titled Cataclysm and it truly is a cataclysmic event which has taken hold of the gaming world.  Basically, the entire world as we have known it for the past 6 years has been forever changed.  Old borders have been redrawn and old enemies have been reborn.  Where there was once lush greenery there is now destruction and barren landscape; barren landscape has brought on new life.

Initially I wasn't going to pick up Cataclysm being so close to Christmas and all, but a friend who I have been gaming with for the past 5ish years wanted to buy it for me as an early Christmas present.  I'm most gracious that he did and I've been exploring all the new zones and experiencing the new races available in this expansion.  Tonight we decided to take a trip into one of the new instance to check it out.  For those who don't know what an "instance" is, it is basically a dungeon that you can go into that only contains you and your party.  Other groups can run the same instance at the same time, but they experience their own instance with their party.  Think of it as a mirror image of the same place for every group that wishes to enter it.

So far the new zones have been underwater.  I must admit I was a bit worried about underwater combat.  I used to play Dark Age of Camelot and their 3rd expansion was an underwater expansion which was done fairly nicely.  Blizzard has taken it a step above and has provided us a beautiful underwater realm to explore; I'm quite impressed.  I have only scratched the surface of this new area, but so far I'm really enjoying it.

-slurp-

Work has been fairly slow this week, of which I'm very thankful.  Work from home has given me the flexibility and time I need to assist my wife with her recovery.  I've been making the meals, changing most of the diapers and ensuring the other kiddies are taken care of and keeping out of my wife's hair.  For the most part things are going well, but I can already feel the strain of taking all these things on in addition to my regular day-to-day job.  Thankfully work has been very accommodating and understanding.

Well folks, it is getting late and I have a few things I need to do tonight before going to bed.  Saturday is the annual Christmas tree cutting event, my youngest daughter's 2nd birthday party and poker night with my sisters and their significant others.  It's going to be a very long day, but should be fun and good times.  See you all tomorrow.

Cheers,

Al

v39.5: Speechless

Howdy folks,

-slurp-

I know it doesn't happen often, but I'm speechless.  Today started like any other day, I woke early, got ready for work and drove to the office.  I arrived at work shortly after 7AM and began the usual tasks of checking email, restarting services (if needed), answering email and coding.  I do this all day long.

Today my boss' boss sends me an IM shortly after 8AM and asks me to come talk to him.  Usually I don't think anything of this since we get along well and he usually only needs to chat with me if he needs clarification on something or has some task for me to do.  I strolled over to his office, knocked on the door and walked in.  I started to worry a little bit when he asked me to close the door.  The only time he ever asks me to close the door is when we're talking about private things (work related you sick-Os) and he doesn't want to be overheard.  My first thought was I was being laid-off and would need to find another job.

Ever since I was moved to this new billing code at work I've been thinking the worst.  My boss explained to me that being put into this code would potentially be bad.  He explained the good and bad but emphasized on the bad parts because worst case scenario, I would be unemployed.

I sat down in the chair across from him and he immediately started with, "I'm sorry, but things just aren't working out...".  My heart dropped in my chest and for a split second, my entire career flashed before my eyes.  He smiled, let out a chuckle and said, "Just kidding".  You bastard!

The reason he had called me to his office was to let me know about an Employee Bonus incentive reward plan at work.  He wanted to let me know that he put my name forward to receive this reward and I was approved.  I couldn't tell initially if he was joking or not, so I went with it.  Basically, because of the hard work and good job I've been doing, I was recognized and as a result, my next pay will have a nice sized bonus on it; almost doubling my bi-weekly pay.  Now that isn't a ton of money, but it couldn't have come at a better time especially with the kids heading back to school and needing money for school supplies and other back-to-school things.  Needless to say, I was very happy with the meeting and left his office with a spring in my step.  Who would have thought such good news could come on a Tuesday?

-slurp-

Well folks, I must take off for now.  I just wanted to share the good news with everyone.

Cheers,

Al

v35.8: Yawn

Good morning folks,

-slurp-

Just wanted to fire off a quick musing today.  I haven't gotten a roll-up cup in almost a week so I think it is safe to say the contest is officially over.  I will be archiving my Roll-Up 2010 page into my Life section of the site so if you don't see it at the top of the site anymore, don't fret, it has only been archived and still available.

-slurp-

v35.1: Tap Tap Tap

Good morning folks,

-slurp-

Welcome to another wonderful Tuesday morning of fun.  I had a couple messed up dreams last night.  I won't go into them in detail but let me just say, you shouldn't flush the entire contents of your Green Bin down the toilet; it won't work, even in the dream world.

-slurp-

v34.0: Friday Failure

Good morning folks,

-slurp-

I had a really hard time dragging myself out of bed this morning.  I think the only thing that kept me going was the thought of my Tim Horton's coffee.  I hope this one is a winner!

-slurp-

v33.0: Week of Hell

Good morning folks,

-slurp-

As the title suggests, this has been a week of hell for me.  Typically the work week is fairly busy and there are a lot of things said and done that make little to no sense at all, but this week has been especially frustrating.  Maybe I'm just getting tired of what I'm doing; restless and wanting to do more with my life perhaps.

-slurp-

v31.7: Monday Moans

Good morning folks,

-slurp-

It is Monday once again.  I've arrived to work today and found my PC a little on the fritz.  For some strange reason it seems to "hang" after logging in and all I see is the corporate desktop background across my dual screens.  There is no indication anything is going on inside; it's dead Jim.

-slurp-

v31.3: Why?!

Howdy folks,

-slurp-

It has been awhile hasn't it?  Sadly I've been so busy first thing in the mornings that I haven't had much time to post.  Work has been.... work, and as such hasn't been much fun lately.  You make the best of it though and hope every day that something good will happen and things will turn around.

-slurp-

v30.2: Break from Breaking Free

Good morning folks,

-slurp-

Work has been quite busy this week and I've had very little time to think about Musing.  This week, tough a short work week, has brought many new and old challenges and as a result my mind has not been on musing, but it has been on writing.

-slurp-

Though busy this week, I was able to take a step in the right direction toward writing.  I've signed up to an online collaboration site where I can begin to write articles and exercise my writing skills; while at the same time provide some much needed help to my fellow man.  This is my "foot in the door" so-to-speak and I'm really looking forward to being contributing.

-slurp-

Where is this magical place I speak of?  As of this week I am officially a member of the eHow community, and while it is free to sign-up and get started, it isn't easy coming up with a unique "How to..." for people.  I have a lot of ideas I'd like to publish there but I need to sort things out and ensure my delivery is clean and well structured.  If you're a resident of the United States, you can even earn cash when you write for eHow, but only if you have a good "How to...".

-slurp-

This where you come in.  I'm looking for some ideas and suggestions for my first posts to the eHow community.  I'm working on a much larger project which consists of a list of "To-Dos" that need to happen first.  My first goal is to have my writing published somewhere other than here.  You see, anyone can run a blog and call their work "published"; god knows my friend Gnomie does it :)  I need to have something a little more "official" in my pocket which will help me later down the road.

-slurp-

Anyway folks, I need to run and get some work done.  We plan on heading out of town this weekend to see some Hot Air Balloons and visit with family.  Hopefully the weather is good for it.  The last year we went to the Balloon Fiesta in my home town it ended up being too windy and the Balloonists were hesitant to do any flying.  This year there is going to be an impressive lineup of Balloons to see including the Peanut guy from Planter's.  I can't wait.

Cheers,

Al

v29.2: PWSD

Good morning folks,

-slurp-

I'm suffering from PWSD this morning.  What is PWSD you ask?  Well before you go and Google it, let me tell you it isn't anything serious and I believe one in every one person suffers from this condition.

-slurp-

v29.0: What's Up With Work?

Good morning folks,

-slurp-

It has been a few days since I've written.  I was off Monday and Tuesday and as such didn't even think to write.  Yesterday I was playing catch-up in the morning and dealing with other issues during the day.  Today, however, is like any other day so here I sit writing.

-slurp-