We had our official Launch Party for Warhammer Online a few weeks ago. I've been pretty busy though so I haven't had too much of an opportunity to post about it.

Mythic offered shuttle buses down to this nightclub in DC called Sequoia. Fairly nice place. Probably expensive. They had a LOT of nightclub employees walking around with fancy snack foods. It was also an open bar. I considered getting a flaming Dr Pepper, since it supposedly tastes like Dr. Pepper, but I stuck with Diet Coke the whole evening. I socialized some, but dancing, drinking and socializing ain't really my scene, so I left on the first shuttle bus back to Mythic. Overall a nice party but I'd rather have a piece of whatever it cost them to host it.

Most of the game industry people I've met seem to be gamers that also happen to be drinkers. Or maybe they were drinker's before being gamers. Typically gaming geeks aren't known to be much for such activities, but from my perspective such stereotyping is a fairly small percentage of the gaming populace. For myself, I never understood why consuming something which alters your ability to think and dulls your senses makes you enjoy the activity more.

But anyway, enough of me rambling (See Blog Title). Here's some quick pic's from the event:

Last Saturday, Oct 18, 2008, we went on another Blue Ridge Mountain drive. Last Year, we drove the Skyline Drive starting from the Front Royal (North) Entrance Station down to the Swift Run Gap Entrance Station. This time, we started where we left off and drove down Skyline Drive almost to the end. But instead of exiting Rockfish Gap (South Entrance) we drove back North and exited Swift Gap.
Here's all of the nearly 40 pictures we took.

My opinion of Sarah Palin can be summed up by John Cleese.

After some research, it turns out we didn't need an upgrade. We needed new computers... upgrading just the CPU and a graphics card wouldn't have done the trick. We needed

• New CPU
• New motherboard to support the new CPU.
• New Ram for the new motherboard.
• New graphcis card
• New P/S to support the power requirements of all this new stuff.
• New case to support the cooling requirements of all this new stuff.

With a reccomendation from a co-worker, we went to MicroCenter on Saturday. Here's what we both ended up with:

• MB:    Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R 775
• CPU:  Intel® Boxed Core 2 Duo Processor E8400 (Yes I went with Intel for a change)
• RAM: XMS2 2GB PC-8500 DDR2 Memory Kit (Two 1GB DDR2-1066 Memory Modules 
• VGA: e-GeForce GTX 260 Superclocked Edition 896MB GDDR3 PCIe 2.0
• HDD: Caviar GP 500GB IntelliPower Serial ATA-300 Hard Drive
• P/S: OZC StealthXstream 600 Watt ATX 12V Power Supply (I Think)

When we got home I started building and discovered that the P/S had a fan on the top, but our current cases didn't have a top vent, so I had to go back to the store (~25 min drive 1 way) and buy new cases, which I was thinking about buying anyway. Kinda weird for the P/S to be mounted on the bottom of the case, but whaetever.. better airflow I suppose.

• CASE: Antec Three Hundred ATX Case

For each system I kept our old optical drive and internal hard drive on a IDE channel (Which is one of the reasons I bought this MB, for its 1 IDE connection.. most MBs of this caliber only offered SATA). 

Apparently, I was unable to transfer the Windows XP serial# from Violet's old machine to the new one. It was OEM for her Dell, so I was screwed. Windows XP installed fine on my PC and I was up and running the same night. I went back to Micro Center and bought the OEM Window Vista 64bit version.

After taking forever to load the Vista 64 installer, it told me I needed a driver. OMGWTFBBQ! I struggled Sunday and Monday to install Vista 64, but at the end of it all, I couldn't reasonably do it. I tried using the motherboard drivers, copying the entire Vista install disc to a 8gb flash drive (which I had picked up at Micro Center for a mere $20.00), and using 3 different optical drives.

Since I was having this much trouble just installing the OS, imagine trying to install games and apps! So I borrowed a SATA optical drive from work and went back to Micro Center (again) and exchanged Vista 64 for Vista 32. I went home and everything installed great. Since Violet's optical drive was so old, and to save a IDE slot, I ended up buying a new SATA optical drive at The Computer Place, VA, which is right across from work. They suck. I can't comment on their customer service because they didn't have any. Most of their prices are much higher than Micro Center too. I eventually settled on a good enough optical drive and left. It installed in Violet's PC no problem and seems to work fine.

The only other issue I ran into was restoring Firefox's bookmarks. What a PAIN! I did it on Wed, 5 days after my initial installation start date. Violet was without PC for 3 days, and sporadic access for 2 more. Pretty full of suck. Thank goodness my recent bonus from work helped pay for all this :)

At some point I'll be able to play something on it.

A few weeks ago I took my car in for its annual safety inspection. It failed. Apparently my front brake pads were a bit too thin (They were).

• Inspection cost: $16.00 (State Mandated Fee)
• Repair Cost: $340.00 (Replace pads, smooth & turn rotors)
• Repair Time: Next Day
• Cost to re-inspect vehicle: $1.00

Umm. No. $340.00 to replace brake pads? Are they kidding? I 've been fortunate enough to have my [step] dad Joe show me a lot of mechanical stuff back in the day. So I choose to replace them myself. I've done it a few times before and it doesn't cost $340.00 and it doesn't take over a day.

• High Quality Brake Pads from AutoZone: $45.14
• C-Clamp from Sears which was needed to more easily recede the brake cylinder: $4.00
• Time spent to replace front brake pads (and going to Sears and back): 2-3 hours.

It's an easy job, really.. less work than than replacing a flat tire actually. I didn't rotate the rotors or whatever but they didn't really seem to need it anyway. Car's been working fine for days. I took the car back to get re-inspected and it passed. Hurray! BTW, The repair shop has free WiFi. Weird.

Today, Warhammer Online: Age of Recloning launched. This is my 3rd launch title. People have been asking me how I feel. I dunno. I don't really feel any different. I'm not especially happy, or sad, or anything. I guess I'm curious as to the impact of the game to the market and its hopeful success. I guess if I am anything I am reserved. I'm not holding my breath or anything, but I am still waiting for a month to see if the game is a true success or not. I hope it will be, and some part of me believes it will be, but I'm still a little wary of the whole ordeal. At some point I thought I might be a little anxious, but I'm really not. I don't mean to downplay the significant achievements we've all accomplished. I think we've done a great job. Maybe I'm just too tired to be overjoyed at the moment.

With the game about to launch, and all the features finally in, I get a little bit of a break. From work, that is. :)

This weekend was Violet's Birthday Extravaganza. We went shopping, ate too much food, and went to a Pagan Pride Day event. A hurricane/Tropical Storm warning kept us inside most of Saturday (Preventing us from driving 90 mins to eat at the closest Sonic). Sunday was good though.

Pagan Pride Day was fairly small. A tiny park in the middle of a small city a bit South of DC, the event featured a few live bands (Cassandra Rising was really good, Plastic Sky wants to be good one day) and only a handful of local Pagan groups, some of whom were selling stuff. There weren't really any vendors. There were some famous Pagan authors there too. I didn't know who they were, of course, but Violet seemed excited about their presence.

I must say, P.F.Chang's really goes out of their way to make a customer happy. We sat at the table and waited 8 mins for service. The waitress admitted that our particular table tended to confuse the servers as to which one of them was responsible for it. People.. if it's a reoccuring problem, then fix it. Ack. To make up for it, we got a free appetizer. Also, since it was Violet's BDay, we got a free mini-dessert. I didn't care for mine, but I'm a selective eater. Violet loved her dinner.

Most importantly, I didn't go into work this past weekend. Oh sure, I logged in remotely to check email and ensure all my stuff passed QA (it did), but by and large I spent most of my time with Violet and Drake. It's about time too.

This past week I've been working normal hours and thus coming home at a decent time. There's still a lot of work to do, but I'm not in crunch right now. All my stuff is due soon, but I should be able to finish on time without working anymore OT, hopefully. We'll see how much progress I can make this week. I got a company laptop a few weeks ago and I can VPN in and do everything that I need to do. I hooked the laptop up to the 50" Plasma HD, and it works out fairly well, only a few kinks. Hooked up to the laptop is a cordless Logitech KB and mouse.
Violet decided it would be cool to play WoW on it, so I installed it on the laptop last night and did all the patching and stuff. For some reason I had to click OK after every patch and agree to the EULA 4 times. Lame. Anyway, Violet really liked playing WoW on the big screen, even if she didn't have her preferred input device(ergonomic MS KB + rollerball mouse)

I think I mentioned previously that my XBOX 360 finally reared its ugly Red Rings of Death LEDs. A few days ago I got it back. They also included a Gold subscription card. I've plugged it in but otherwise I haven't touched it.
I haven't had time to play games or do any housework these past few weeks. I work, come home, babysit. That's about it. Drake is doing good and can walk 5 or 6 steps at a time. Usually I will fence the dogs off from the front-room + hallway and let Drake wander around. He seems pretty happy with the freedom. It also gives me a chance to watch TV or tinker around on the PC.
I've pretty much been ignoring my diet this past week. I haven't been counting points, but I have tried, in some cases, to not go too overboard. I plan to get back on the diet this week.
I barely found time last week to mow the backyard (some of the grass was 2' high). I've ignored the front yard lawn for about 2 months now. Thankfully the grass seems to have leveled off around 5" or 6" and hasn't really grown beyond that in most places.
I watched my first HD tv show the other night... Burn Notice. I really like this show. It seemed somewhat grainy though in HD, and I wasn't overly impressed. I wonder sometimes if I should have spent more money on a 1080p HD set instead of the lower rez 720p. Meh. I made the choice that I made... cest le vie.
My folks are coming into town next week. That'll be cool. Grandma hasn't seen Drake for quite a while, and Grandpa Joe has never met him. They're also apparently bringing my nephew Spencer, whom I haven't seen since he was like, 2.
Well, that was a lot more text than I thought I had to type. Ta.

Not much to say this week.. so I'll bullet point what I remember:

• I'm in crunch mode again, working 12-16 hour days.
• I updated some links on the right.
• I'm in the middle of reading Dragon Wytch.
• I finished playing the (1 gig gah!) demo of Space Siege. It's OK.
• I'm very much enjoying Delta Goodrem.
• I'm looking forward to taking a few days off after crunch and spending some time with Violet and Drake.
  

I spent the better part of the weekend suffering and recovering from food poisoning.
I have yet to pinpoint the source, but it was something I must have eaten Mid Thursday (Company lunch via Panera) late Thursday (Tony's Pizzeria) or mid Friday (Team Lunch @ Sakura).
Bottom line, it wasn't fun, I didn't get any chores done, and poor Violet had to do all the work and take care of the kid nearly the entire weekend.

A bit of a recap:
I have a 2002 Buick Rendezvous. His name is "Stanley". I bought it (used) a few years ago while in Wisconsin to alleviate the problem of getting stuck in the snow. It was the cheapest all-wheel drive available except for a Subaru Brat or two, which Violet hated. Anyway, I haven't had too many mechanical problems with it (As many owners have). My major issue came back in January when the fuel gauge stopped working. After a $100.00 diagnosis from the dealer, they determined my level sensor (I think its called) was defective, and its repair would be around $500.00. Ack. At some point I hope to order the part I need, remove the fuel tank, replace the sensor, and put everything back. One day. For now, I'm ignoring it. I keep track of fuel used via the instrument panel (DIC).

What I'm really posting about:
Last week (Sunday or so) I noticed that my car didn't start the first time. The second crank was kinda weak. The third crank was fine and I went along my merry way. Odd.

The next day I went to work and sometimes I had to crank it once or twice but otherwise I was OK. Since I worked until midnight Monday evening, I was a little nervous, but it was kinda OK. Tuesday morning it got worse. I took my Simple Start™ Vehicle Battery Booster which I had plugged in the previous night "just in case". Good thing, because come midnight Tuesday evening (Yes, I worked late again). Unfortunately it didn't work at all. Stupid thing. I had used it with some success on Violet's car last year when I had the same issue, but I always had a problem getting it to work in mine. So I'm at work with a dead battery at midnight. There were about 5 cars in the lot and one guy happened to be exiting, so I asked him for a jump. He said no. Apparently his Saturn requires a jump to be performed via the wheel well or something and that he only had 10 mins to get o where he was going. Nice guy (not). Fortunately the audio guys were working late so I asked them for a jump, which I got. (Last year's fiasco taught me to put jumper cables in my car, which I always have in the trunk now). Car started no problem and I drove home.

On Wed I took Violet's car to work, leaving her vehicle-less. After I got home, I checked the battery terminals for corrosion, but they seemed OK. The belt seemed OK. So I didn't know if it was the battery or the alternator. I assume when I bought the car it still had the original battery in it, so the battery was probably going on 6-7 years old. Still, I didn't want to chance replacing the battery and the car still not work.

Thursday I took her car to work again. My vague plan was to have my car battery tested for free at a local shop. After some discussion with some co-workers though, I decided to buy a new battery on the basis that if the alternator had been bad, I wouldn't have made it home from work the previous night. The Violet and Drake and I had a nice dinner at Ruby Tuesday and then we went to Walmart to buy a new battery. $70 bucks. Ouch.

Thursday was a very bad day for Violet, baby-stress wise. Unfortunately, I had to replace my battery so I couldn't help her out at all. Most car batteries are easy to replace. 30 mins tops. Not so with my car, of course...

Whoever designed the engine layout of the Buick Rendezvous hates mechanics. As you can see in the picture, the battery is located under a large metal support bar, the fuse box, and the windshield wiper fluid tank. Stupid... Stupid... Stupid!. Unless they think only rich people buy these kinds of cars and so just goto the dealer for simple stuff like battery replacement. I don't know how much it would have cost me for them to do it, but I didn't want to find out. I'm guessing hundreds.

So anyway, Thursday evening I spent 7 pm-10 pm replacing my car battery. Yes, a 30-min-job-for-most-other-cars took 3 [frickin] hours. Not only did I have to remove the fuse box and the metal bar, but I also spent a lot of time trying to get to the screws. There's maybe an inch or two of space which made it very difficult to remove most of the screws. Also adding to the fun were bugs. Since the sun was setting, I ended up being dinner for several mosquitoes and ants and who knows what else. I ended up putting on some bug repellent (with DEET), but I'm not sure how well I applied it, nor its effectiveness at keeping the bugs away.
So I finally removed the old battery and put in the new one. Wearing leather gloves to keep from being shocked is a good idea. I highly recommend it. There might have been some way to use the metal ratchet and connect it to the bolt that connects the wire lead to the battery terminal and not have sparks flying all over the place, but I don't know what that way might be.

I finally finished about 10pm and everything started and worked as it should. My gauges seemed ok, the radio worked.. nothing was shorted out. I drove the car to work Friday and everything seemed ok, except for 1 weird thing. Apparently I needed to re-calibrate my car's compass. To do so, I had to drive in a circle. Weird, but it worked and now I know what direction I'm traveling again. A least until the Earth's magnetic poles flip again...

After trying to gather enough people to have some friendly foam weapon combat sparring, I've decided to instead attend the local Darkon practice sessions. People actually show up to those. The family and I went Sunady, though Violet and Drake just watched as I got my ass handed to me more often than not. I'm slightly out of shape and a tiny bit rusty it appears. I did well enough for my first time though, and I was fighting opponents who have been doing this for over a decade. Besides being out of shape and out of practice, the weapons they use are slightly different (more painful, I actually got 2 bruises) and their techniques are much more agressive (light taps are discouraged). Most of the time I was fighting agaisnt experts with spears or huge body shields.
I had to borrow their weapons since mine weren't compatible with their system. My usual techniques of sword and dagger didn't help me too much agasinst these kinds of adversaries. The majority of time was quick friendly bouts with me and one guy (who happened to be the King of the country(aka group) whose practice I was attending versus two other guys. I lost a lot, but once I got rid of the dagger and switched to sword+axe or a sword+ shield, we won the vast majority of the time.
I liked it overall. we were on a rocky trail and my feet hurt due to my poor choice of shoes. I need to get some better shoes... these light slip ons ones don't work well for long walks or for sparring. Another bonus is that they practice every 2 weeks and then on off weeks they usually have a actual game. I'm not too keen on the actual game events per se(I'm not sure I care for their ruleset and game mechanics), but I think I'll attend a few more practices at least. That's what I was looking for anyway.

Signs that you shouldn't be a programmer or are a bad or mediocre programmer.
Fortunately, none of this applied to me. I guess I'm better than mediocre then. Hurray!

Once you figure it out, take the quiz: Serial Killer or Programming Language Inventor?

Well, I re-skinned my Blog (A "skin" is the look, structure, and formatting of something. It doesn't change the content of stuff like the posts or dates or links; instead, it affects the actual placement, font, color, size, etc of how that content is displayed). It turned out to be a major overhaul. On a whim 2 days ago I did a search for "Blogger Templates" and lo and behold, there's hundreds of templates out there that work with Blog Spot (which is also called Blogger.. If there's a difference, I dunno what it is.)

So I decided to re-structure my blog so I can have 2 columns (aka sidebars) of links instead of just the one. My intention is to be able to list my current stuff in one column and my all-time favorites in another column. It took 2 days (Mainly because I was distracted with Violet's and Drake's blogs... more on that later), but I am fairly happy with the results.

In the middle of doing this, Violet noticed my new blog's look (skin) and started looking for one for her own blog. Since updating our blogs over the 4th of July weekend seemed to be the thing to do, I also FINALLY updated Drake's Blog (mostly motivated by the awesome new skin I found for it). Drake's blog took me a good part of yesterday morning.

By the time I was done, Violet had found one that suited her tastes. I ended up spending most of yesterday afternoon and evening editing the XML figuring out how it was all setup and worked. I ended up making her a new, customized header image because she didn't like the one that came with her "Hobbit" themed template. I also made it wider and edited the template images to make everything fit. I think the results turned out well.

The process reminded me of what I do at work, actually. A lot of the work I do concerns the UI (User Interface) of the game, especially this late in the development cycle (I'm mostly fixing bugs and applying polish... most of my C++ code has already been written). I'll edit the XML and reload the UI, just like I was editing the blog XML and reloading the blog sites. I'll routinely add some code or change some numbers to see what changes, just like I do at work. That way I can learn how the system works and then its easy to figure out how to add, edit, or adjust things to suit my purposes. I'm certainly not saying it's the same.. it isn't(For one, our blogs don't use LUA). I'm just saying that overall, I've noticed that there were peculiar similarities.

As an alumni from the first Guildhall graduation class, the curriculum had yet to be accredited. That takes years. Well, now they are. All the alumni who only achieved a Master's certificate can now reapply and finish the degree to turn it into a Masters Degree. All work has to be done by July 2009, and it costs an additional $5,000.

For some reason they are requiring me to take a test to be accepted. Unfortunately, I don't have time right now for such things, and I applied back in April. It would have been nice to know about these things when I applied instead of a week or so before its due. Especially since I've been crunching some this week.

I'll know more Monday if they can extend the deadline for me or not.

I've been working a lot of OT putting the finishing touches on the Guild System, which has finally been announced in preparation for the Guild Beta opening soon.
Check out the Warhammer Online June Newsletter for more Guild and Banner info.

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41743

The Huband will play...

Well kind of.

While Violet and Drake have been in Nebraska visiting family, I've been working overtime, catching up on house chores, catching up on TV (I was 6 episodes behind on Desperate Housewives), and catching up on my current video games. I got Mass Effect via the EA Store, so I've been playing it over NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer. Mass Effect feels a lot like KoTOR, sans the Star Wars stuff, and adds some interesting mini-games and 3rd person shooter tactical combat. I like it pretty well.

Any idea what these things are? I have no clue, but we got a billion of them all over the place. Thankfully most bugs don't get in the house.

Earlier this week there was a tornado watch in the area. Some people apparently saw the beginnings of funnel clouds about 5 miles from where I work. I happened to be in the middle of the building on the top (8th) floor working , so I didn't notice anything, but a bunch of people around the edges witnessed a very sudden and quite massive amount of rain. So much that they couldn't see the building across the parking lot. Another few people had taken the elevator down to the ground lobby floor. As they exited the elevator, a massive wind slightly turned the revolving door at the front of the lobby in such a way that the outside air was sealed from the inside air. As a result of the massive pressure difference and wind force, the glass from the revolving door exploded. I know a few people that ended up with glass shards on their body and in their hair. No injuries though.