Venting into the Ether

Hmm. Expected a couple people who didn't to pipe up to that last post. Ah well. Seem to be simmering at a low level of frustration currently. Even with the holiday at the end of the week to shorten it, the week already feels long.


I'm getting fed up with password issues at work. When passwords get changed periodically, even after a new employee is set up, we frequently have situations where they get locked out under their new password. Repeatedly. In a practical sense, this manifests as a sudden inability to access network drives or printers. But this doesn't happen all the time to everyone who changes their password, just frequent enough to be a pain in the ass, and eventually it seems to remedy itself. As far as I've been able to tell, there aren't any scheduled tasks, scripts, or programs connecting to anything using the old passwords, so there's no reason for this that I've been able to discern. And yet it still ends up driving me nuts for two or three days as I have to repeatedly unlock a user's account. Argh!

Mention of Star Wars after last night's roleplaying got me thinking about it a bit again, though not in the most useful sense. It was brought up that it could be run in Unisystem and that there were some versions of that out there. Mostly, it makes me wonder why. Why are some of my fellow gamers here so enamored with Unisystem (and so anti-d20)? Unisystem may use a smaller die, but the "rule of one/ten" emulates a larger one and leads to more actual rolls. Active-rolled defenses increase participation in combat, but complicate and slow it down too. d20 may be prone to having a few more modifiers, but if they're on your sheet it still boils down to "roll a die and add X." About the only notable difference I see is that d20's levels give more difference between characters in most cases. Level 1 versus level 10 is pretty distinct while in Unisystem a 100-experience character may or may not be starkly superior to a starting one, depending on how points were spent. Is that difference really worth the fanaticism? Is it worth the effort of manually converting a setting to fit the system instead of using something already made?

I guess domestic tourism is down. I'm not sure I feel that, though. It seems as much a struggle as any summer to dodge tourists while out to lunch. @whee.

Saw Wanted on the weekend. Not too much to say about it that I haven't mentioned elsewhere. Felt like Fight Club mixed with the Matrix, but it wasn't as good as either in my perspective. I was a little surprised at how little speaking Angelina Jolie did, which oddly reminded me of Kung Fu Panda - strange connection. After reviews, I think I may actually want to see Wall-E at some point, and I think I'll pass on Hancock though there appeared to be some interesting ideas there underneath what sounds like a mess. I know summer is big for movies, but I'm finding an unusually high number that I'm interested in watching this year. Hellboy 2 maybe, The Dark Knight almost certainly, on top of the bunch I've already seen in recent weeks.

I've a meeting coming up with ye ol' condo association about repaired/new siding. The heavy snow did some damage and we seem to have some options. Unfortunately, they're all likely to cost. I haven't heard yet what came of the insurance claim, but I can't imagine it's all going to be covered, so I'll probably be forking over additional money in a month or two to pay my share of this. Additional expenses always suck, especially when you don't know how much to expect.

Huff. Guess that's about it for now...