Thursday, January 22, 2004

Had some time this morning so I was poking around the web. Decided to look at other people's blogs (my other friends rather than strangers - who seem increasingly more strange as the years pass - coming from me that quite an achievement) and realized that all of them post more frequently than I do. Guess I'll have to remedy that.

Game

Galaxies continues to consume my gaming time more than it should. Running around doing stuff. As they fix more of the problems with the game more interesting things to try appear. Right now I'm working seriously on becoming a "mad scientist" as I grind with Bio-Engineer and clone animals. My color selection seems to favor reds, oranges and white and those creatures look seriously strange. If I have time I'll take some screen shots of the funnier looking ones.

And it's happened again. I have fun playing one of these games and I help people out with info and items and whatever and the group I'm with wants to "promote" me. I was offered the position of guild "elder" last night since three of them are getting tired of leading the guild and want to go have fun again. I accepted so we'll see what becomes of it. Perhaps that will curb my playing time in there. (the same sort of thing happened when I was playing Everquest about two or three years ago, I got made an officer out of the blue)

While I was big into Xbox during my vacation, my playtime on that has fallen off, initially in a buzz to get back to Galaxies but lately I'm just taking a break from gaming all together when I'm not in there.

Aaron leaves for Oklahoma and a doc job there (hoping to move into sports medicine once he gets established and they have an opening) at the end of the month so we're trying to finish Book 2 of the Witchfire trilogy before he goes. For those who know it or have played they finished the Temple of Cyriss section with a fantastic and heroic death on the part of Skeed Boombelly, Andy's trollkin sorcerer/fellcaller. I may post the death scene I wrote up in their email here sometime soon. His next character choices sound interesting but he hasn't told me what he'll pick. I suggested he try the Gun Mage but I haven't heard back from him on it.

He (Andy) did send us the final epiloge from our long running and incredibly fun Vampire campaign in email finally. Another nice thing to post but it would take a lot of sidebars to make sense to anyone who hadn't heard our stories along the way.

Work

Things have quieted down now that I'm off-oncall. It seemed like there were more remedy tickets that week than any other time I had oncall. Not a lot of pages since we've got most of the *nix machines pretty stable. However when you get there you end up with the problems being really, really strange.

I really need to get back to work on the bigbrother stuff and get the system locked down. Learn more php and get the web submission thing I'm writing finished and in place. Then policies (which when I write them these days are pretty draconic - "No you can't add a machine to bigbrother! Now step aside or I'll gut you!") and procedures then change management to get it up and working. Then I get to design the service based version of it for management and the rest of the place so they'll leave our machine based version alone when they want to know if their email is up or not.

Stuff

I bought the DVD for the sci fi TV series "Firefly" awhile back and I've been watching it. That was such a fun show. Unfortunately Fox, in their drug induced wisdom (no idea about this just casting aspertions) cancelled it after about 11 episodes. Well I went out today and discovered that a movie is in production right now. Sweet! Time for some "exciting new crime" I guess.

Fireflyfans.net is one of the websites I found for this. Let's go see if any of my old links work now.
Nope, the official Fox site looks dead, which isn't unexpected. There is another fan site.

Well enough for now. I'll try to post more frequently so folks away from here will know what I'm up to. Maybe I should bounce Jeff this so he can track the goings on of some of us he left behind!

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

I was playing Galaxies last night when the State of the Union came on. I couldn't take it too long but for those who could here's a search Lana announced on the radio yesterday morning for the State of the Union Address drinking game. Some of them sound like they would have been fun with the right group of people.

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Okay, it's been too long since I updated this. I went on vacation on the 18th of December. I drove from here out to Phoenix to see my family. Things there were good and it was great to see all the kids again. Christmas was great. Everyone loved their gifts and my sister-in-law even got me some things (two Xbox games including Jedi Academy, the Indiana Jones DVD set and 'Beers of the World').

Then two days after Christmas (I was sick on the day itself and it took a day to recover) I left Phoenix to drive up to Crested Butte to see Jeff. I went through Four Corners and let me tell you, the roads in southwestern Colorado are miserable. I don't mean they're in bad shape or weren't cleared of snow or anything like that. They're pretty damn good and only a few times were they not cleared a hundred times better than anything here in Missouri. What I mean is that they are narrow, have no guard rails and turn like a rollercoaster at Worlds of Fun!!! Everything I read said it was a one day drive (about 10 hours I figured) but I was still coming down one of the passes at midnight. If the speed limit sign said 35 I was going 25. And it was really something of a crime given the car I have now.

But I got there the next day and the place is fantastic. Words cannot describe it and he lives there all the time! I couldn't go skiing or snowboarding since I broke my pelvis (well I meant to ask the doctor but didn't have the chance) but we did take a snowmobile tour. And let me tell you that those puppies are NOT at all like a motorcycle. But eventually I got used to them and even had fun although I got stuck once, pulled a muscle in my lower back helping get it out and thought I broke it.

I got home on the 3rd of January and have been cleaning up since then. Or being lazy.