week in review

Well, since I didn't mention anything during the week, here it is all at once. Work was "formal training." That ended up being a classroom setting, going over stuff I already knew cause I'd been working for a full week already. The other two in the class were mostly confused, cause they didn't know how stuff applied to the real world. In our after class review, I mentioned maybe giving people a day of sitting with someone before training began, but they said, "No, cause you'll pick up bad habits." Thing is, when I asked for specifics on certain procedures, the trainer said, "I'm not sure how your manager wants that to work, you should ask her or your neighbors." No big, somehow I earned a rep as the golden child of PASS, and it sounds like I'm being eyed for a move to the Process Improvement team. Rock. As long as more money's involved.

News wise, the astronauts made it back safely. Rock. I got annoyed with MPR for mentioning that one of the candidates this year has received money from Muslim groups. They didn't mention who the other guy has received money from at all. The really annoying part is that throughout the week they were almost eviscerating the other guy for bringing up the original fellow's ties to Muslim groups during debates. Quick flip of the coin there, huh? I wouldn't have minded so much if they'd pointed out the dude saying something like, "I have no ties to Muslim groups now, I was young then," or something. But they didn't. Let's get off the Islamophobia, please. In my late teens, I thought I'd seen a shift from a united nation during the end of the Cold War era to a deeply split, catty, and embittered land when we didn't have a favored enemy. I think I was wrong. America's big. We'll never agree, outside focus or not. Makes me think I should refocus on a few ideas I had about forcing party politics out of the voting floor.....

Gamewise, early in the week on EVE, one of my agents offered to build a Breacher for me. I'd been flying around in a Rifter, which is a fast, heavily gunned killing machine. The Breacher is a little slower and less versatile, and it reverses the Rifters weapon configuration, switching three guns and one missile launcher to three missile launchers and one gun. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the power grid for 3 long range launchers, so I went with one missile launcher, one short range gun and two rocket launchers, with mostly speed boosts on the back side. OMFG do I love that ship. WHOA! The Rifter is tough as nails and reliable, but overall pretty boring. My rig is set up to fly in circles, take a little beating and slowly wear down one target with missiles while chewing up another with guns, moving the guns from target to target as necessary. The Breacher just blows through guys. Especially when I pop in an EMP set up or two. Without EMP missiles, it's a bit more slow at the killing. Even so, it's a ship that requires a lot of tactics and fast reactions to keep the missiles flying. I love it. Except it's ugly.

So what did I do? Researched all the frigates and found the most missile heavy of them all. The Kestrel. Slower, but a little more versatile, than the Breacher, it's a pretty ship with ports for 4 launchers and no guns. Trouble is, it's Caldari. I'm Minmatar. So basically, I had to learn to fly all over again. That was about 4 hours of training for my avatar, but all is good, and I'm about to go hop in the Kestrel now. Hen Wen is the next name on my Prydain list, but I think I'm gonna save her for a different ship. That means the Kestrel is going to be Gwydion.

And that's all I got for the week. This weekend, I think we'll look at a couple of houses and tomorrow, we get to catch the MN Orchestra on the FREE. hoohoo.

weekend in review

So, the Pope started a holy war. The prez threatened to shut down the CIA interrogation of terrorists. Gas went down, but will prolly go back up because of the holy war and terror rising. The Vikes won, the Bears won, the Rams lost and the Packers lost. Hegs and I are gonna buy a rodeo bull and name it something like Big Hairy Scrotal Torsion.

Oh, and we had a LAN party. Good times. Nick got his first taste of BF2 online AND a LAN party. Hegs ranked up I think twice, and got numerous badges. Fun was had by all.

Right now, though, I need breakfast, so this gets cut short.

ElPrezo gets Bloody

For those of you not in my email address book......

http://my.break.com/media/view.aspx?ContentID=111184

Good stuff.

Vrock on

Last night, we fought some Vrocks. They'd invaded the town we just arrived in, we needed something to do, and the two met in the middle. John and I toe to toe with two demons. I'd say that as usual, tactics eluded us, but it's only partly true. We definitely started off with a little battlefield control, but it turns out, most demons that are worth a fuck can greater teleport at will. So no controlling their movement for us... Turns out the vrocks didn't like the mummy I gave to them all that much and pretty much ignored him, focusing on John and I. Scratch that tactic, then.

That pretty much left me with two options. Send John running for around so I could use my negative energy burst, or we both continue working in attacks of opportunity and fighting/flinging spells. We chose the latter. Had we focused on one vrock it might have done the trick, but without clear deliniations as to which bird ta'narii we were hitting, the damage got spread out.

Once again, we saw how frustrating the spell selection for dread necromancer is. Its spells that affect undead are will saves, but undead have a strong will save. Most of its other spells are fortitude saves, but most everything besides spell casters has a high fortitude save. So, at level 10, even the powerful 5th level spells have a DC of 20, which means most monsters need a 5 or less to beat the spell. Looks like my 5th level load out is gonna be greater dispel magic, 2x summon undead v, and 2x slay living, unless I know undead are involved, then swap the slay living for undeath to death. Oh well. At least there's no expense components in there, except for undeath to death. Too bad we used most of our gems for bribes last night. lol.

Overall, fun game, though.

odd nervous system

So, todays the first day at the new gig. Didn't even really care about all that until Hegs and I were standing under a tree at Renny. Then it was like, Man, What if I'm late? or SUCK? or get lost, etc. My solution. Fuck em. Who cares. If things roll bad, I pretty much need six months out of the gig before I start looking for something else. I can man that up. Why six months? Don't wanna change jobs while trying to buy a house. Surprising credit hit.

So just for the Red Pun, here's a morning work out for those of us that don't take 2 hours to do our hair:

Spend 20 minutes or so either listening to the morning news or snooze buttoning through it. The former gets the brain used to caring again and might get some more creative thoughts in the shower other than, "If I was gay, would I enjoy the act of washing my butt sexually, or it would still only be pleasant because a clean butt is a nice feeling?"

Spend a good chunk of time thinking about breakfast. Very important, cause eating at 6am, then not again til noon is gonna leave me hungray at 9am.... Without the time to think there, I'd settle for BK on the way in. Not a bad breakfast, but who wants to spend $60 a month on breakfast? Fruity Pebbles this morning, and I might have something else in a few minutes, BTW.

Hit the computer with a decent amount of time to spare, respond to emails, read blogs, read webcomics, write blog, generally do the things I used to do at work, but not get to anymore because rumor has it their stricter about internet use at the corporate office. Now, some people might say, "But you left your other gig because they were getting stupid about internet use. Now you're knowingly going into a situation that's worse?" Yes. Why? Because in the act of changing jobs, it's easier to accept that many things are different. New building, new bosses, new protocol, it's like starting over, so I can ignore the "old hand" side of my mind that says things like, "I've been here five years and reading the news on hold has never been a problem!" In reality, it's always been a problem, it's always been our policy not to, but other managers have focused on other issues during budget crises, wheras the higher ups now what productivity numbers high, and if the workload isn't there, we should find other work to do, so on and so forth. So, get that internet shit done in the morning.

Then there's the projects. With an RPG writing gig still floating in "What's our next deadline" limbo, and the CG project working to spread it's badly tiled wings, there's a lot on the table, potentially. (that's not including the other work I should be doing, like expanding the homebrew and dropping query letters to Paizo, or perusing the freelance work on various CG forums...) The fact remains that my creative burst is usually between 3am and 7am, then again between 10am and 2pm. Can't work on stuff during the latter, so why not the former. I could sleep at such times as to make the full 4 hour spread accesible, but right now, it's not necessary. *shrug*

And what if, like today, there's still 45 minutes left after all of that? Well, eat another bowl of cereal, and consider the following options: brainstorm another RPG proposal, paint some minis, start on the myriad selection of water colors I should do, or as is most likely the case, consider playing EVE or Guild Wars.....

All told, if it takes more than 3 minutes to do my hair, Wendy has a hand in it.

recharging the capacitor

Man have I been exhausted this week. Tuesday I set out determined to get my ass out of bed at 5:20am every morning. I think I did 5:45 Tuesday. Each day it got a little later, hitting 7:15 this morning. Why'd I try? Well, next week the new gig starts and I gotta leave my palace at 7:15. Sure, I could shower and eat in about 20 minutes, but I don't really like doing that. Well, I do, but I don't like leaving once that's done. I'd rather chill for a half hour or more, checking emails, do a little art, etc before I start the real day. That's why 5ish is tempting. Not sure if it'll be possible though. Certainly not if I don't learn to sleep again sometime soon. I think I forgot about three weeks ago.

Anyway, I digress. What a lackluster last day I've had. A few people have said the requisite "Stay in touch," but that's about it. I got a card, but that was supposed to be yesterday, and the dude just forgot.... *shrug* No big. It actually makes not talking to any of my coworkers that much easier, which is something I'd kind of looked forward to with a few of them.

And in case your reading this and saying, "who cares about you, talk about a game," here's my current rig in EVE online:

Bo3 Coll (the name)
Minmattar Rifter (ship type)
-High Slots-
3x 200mm Gallium Machineguns (1 w/EMP, 1 w/Proton S, 1 w/Phased something or other)
1x standard missile launcher I (w/Flamehurst missiles, cause I found em cheap in a random system. Like 0.20 isk each. Hard to pass up that deal even if I should be using the EMP missiles since I use the launcher to weaken shields until I can close with my cannons)
-Medium Slots-
Shield Booster I
1 MN afterburner
1 empty
-Low Slots-
1 standard armor repair module
1 engine/agility boost (can't remember which one)
1 nano armor hardener thing (the one that gives an 8% boost to all damage resistance)

Obviously, I still haven't decided whether to speed tank, armor tank, or shield tank. Mainly cause so far I've only bought the cannons and ammo. The rest is rat loot. I'll start running some missions soon and see which I prefer. Shield tanking is tempting since it recharges itself, but I need to hit some capacitor boosts for that. Armor tanking is the easy way to go with a Rifter I'm told, which is why I'm tempted not to do it. Actually, though I like speed tanking the most, since it also directly benefits regular travel. I just need to figure out how to do that. lol.

Regardless, I at least know I can fight off two rats with a "significant" threat level and only lose about 8% shield with the bird as is. Hopefully I'll get to run "Worlds Collide" and really test the beast against Minmi rats. That mish usuall sends me running at least once in the Slasher (named Taran).

Oh, and I need to train up the morph skill and through a jump clone in the space dock that's holding Gurgi. That's my fast little shuttle. Although, with the afterburner on the Coll, it can fly 150% faster than the Gurgi......

and the world lost a hero

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060904/ap_on_en_tv/obit_irwin

Steve Irwin took a freak occurence to the heart today. Damn stingray stabbed him. Normally, that just hurts like shit unless your old n frail or young n weak. Or if it somehow manages to stab you through the heart while you're diving. :"( I'm gonna go morn.

Septiembre Del Busy

Man. I'm looking at my calendar cause I'm bored and shirking my duties. This month's packed full of fun.

I started off this morning by getting up when Nick was just hitting the air so I could take my car in for it's 5K mile service. I forgot his radio station and didn't get to listen to him, though. :( I blame the haze of sleep.

This weekend, we may get to check out some townhome/condo action. Might not cause the realtor Wendy called was a douche. Sounds like we're heading out of town to do something this weekend too. Might try to rustle up a crowd and south to Le Seur to volunteer and help with tornado clean up. That shit hit a couple of weeks ago and they're still working. We'll wrap up the Labor Day weekend with some moving. Good times.

Wednesday we get to meet with a lender and see how much home we can afford. This will be about as much fun as drawing on the sidewalk with a piece of granite. Invisible granite. That feels like a rancid monkey nipple.

Follow that up with a Ren Fest visit the weekend after that, hopefully which Nick gets to tag along to. Wendy's dad will be here and it's a birthday celebration, but nothing says we can't bring friends. ;)

Also, on the 11th I start my new gig over in the corporate offices. See how long it takes me to either move up or move out. lol.

Don't forget Minnesotans. September 12 is the primary elections for a lot of shit, most especially gubner I think.

I'm pretty sure we're coasting after that until the 24th when we get to catch the Minnesota Orchestra for free.

Boolah's birthday falls in here somewhere, too, which means i need another birthday present (I'm way behind and just want to say I fully intend to get something for Country, my bro Justin, and my mom. I'm a bad person, I know.) I can't remember when Hegs' is. I suck.

And let's not forget the International Day of Peace on the 19th, Citizenship Day on the 17th, and Ramadan on the 24th. For the Japanese in the house, the 18th is Respect for the Aged Day. Cant' forget that one. Those Aged can be real fucks when they aint respected.

Anyone know when the lacrosse season starts? Want to try to hit the Swarm again.....