Redwolf's Journal (continued)

http://daveslongbox.blogspot.com/2006/11/election-day-2006-whose-side-is-your.html Heh. Idealistically, I think I'm with Cap. Which really just means I don't consider any current option a true "win." ;)

Just 5 Emblems of Frost! So with our guild leader off visiting a couple other regulars, we were bound to be undermanned for guild time, but I hoped to do a little something, at least. We started on the raid weekly with 7 guildies and three others. By the time we cleared to Flame Leviathan, or random person had to go, and another guildmate had shown up. FL down without problems. We cleared trash and downed XT-002 for the raid weekly quest. Then someone suggested doing Molten Core, and others agreed. An old, level 60, big raid, most of us on weren't attuned. But getting so didn't prove too terribly hard. I even managed to find the way myself while a more experienced person in the zone led four others. Then we tromped around MC absolutely stomping everything. With 8 level 80's, it's really easy. And just as we were getting ready to summon Ragnaros at the end, Kyn and Elly showed up to be summonable in for the final bit. Yay! Ragnaros used to be an incredibly big deal,

I was flipping through channels to see what was on recently and caught a scene from a movie I'd seen before. I can't even say it was a good movie. Still, it got me thinking of how characters become casters, and a slightly different angle I don't think I've seen before... I think I most frequently magic in fantasy settings as either an inborn talent (only certain people have it) or result of specialized training (theoretically, anyone can learn). Sometimes there's a mix of the two, or there's the "chosen of the gods" approach. More rarely I'll see magic that's only available by pact, or something like that. What if magic were finite and bestowed? Imagine a world that is... gifted by the gods, or blessed by chance, or whatever, but you end up with X amount of people who can work real magic. A hundred. A thousand. Whatever. Probably no one knows exactly why anyone can cast at all. If a wizard dies, his magical gift flits off to a new host.

Seems I've been bombarded by a good deal of politics lately. Ugh. I hate politics. Partly, that's because the issues are usually far more complex than anyone makes them out to be. Partly, it's because it reminds me I'm nowhere near the idealist I used to be. These thoughts are probably more for my own benefit, so pardon their scattered and rambling nature if you choose to read on... The big ol' healthcare bill? I've mixed feelings, and to be honest I don't know enough of all the details to actually say what I think should have come of it. I like the idea of trying to make medical support available, and more affordable, to all Americans. That's great. It's also expensive. And the federal government is too removed from the individuals to do it perfectly, there will have to be blanket guidelines that, in certain cases, will be abusable or not as helpful as they should be. That's just sort of the way it goes. I'll just cross my fingers and ho

So while I research new computer options and compare video cards and such, I had hoped a graphics driver update might miraculously fix my problems. I didn't expect it and it didn't work. Desktop locked up again shortly after startup when I got home. Looking more closely, though, I noticed the heat sinks on one of the RAM sticks were pulling off. That could be the problem. Running it with just the other (even 1 GB), WoW seems prone to stuttering, though. Hrm...

Perhaps even "bleh," but so it goes. I remember I used to look forward to weekends. "Yay, freedom!" Now... not so much. Saturday's WoW raid was probably the highlight and even that was marred by one guild member's incessent whining until finally subbed into the raid. Due to a UFC event, our guildleader on Guild Wars wasn't to be around Sunday night, so I didn't bother with that. Maybe it's good that I got to sleep early last night, considering this was my first morning I had to get up since the time change last weekend. Feels like a waste, though.

The frost giant for Securing the Ramparts is annoyingly hard. Mostly disease juggling, I think, got us. Grrr. Didn't try Saurfang, as it was late getting to that point. Didn't get the shield one of our healers was hoping for out of ToC. Did manage to get Toravon down, and get tier gloves for someone who could use them at least. More than the usual amount of roster changes. It was okay, I'm not sure what else to say about it. It was alright by me, though I'm still frustrated by delays. Fairly on-time, considering. We got grouped up around 8:20. Noth was dead in Naxx for the weekly quest by 8:29. 8:55 - Ulduar, taking on Thorim. 9:38 - Downing Freya, with a 15 minute break called before moving on to ToC. 10:00 - Starting Twin Val'kyr in ToC. 10:27 - Downing Anub'Arak in ToC. No shield drop that was hoped for. 10:50 - Starting on ICC trash. We had some delay shuffling people here partway through to Marrowgar. 11:40 - Marrowgar down. 11:58 - Starting Dea

I replaced "my" laptop just... last month, I think it was? And then had one of my older hard drives fail in my desktop PC. Now the other old drive has been showing IO errors with some regularity. Thankfully the main system drive hasn't shown any problems. I think I've got everything backed up from the old one, so that's not a huge problem. It's also been locking up on occasion with a glitchy-looking on-screen pattern. That's not so good. I actually just swapped my keyboard and mouse over once last week to finish the WoW dungeons I was trying to do. My gut reaction was an overheating graphics card or somesuch, but this tends to happen shortly after the computer is turned on rather than after it's been running for a while. It's not happening all the time, but enough to be annoying and troubling. Video card? Maybe. RAM? Maybe. Motherboard? Well... maybe. It could be just about anything, but it's not consistent enough (and I don't have spare

I have mentioned before in the little guides I've written up, but a brief conversation last night caused me to re-study and spare a few words specifically on Hit Rating . Most of the math is available here , but it breaks down about as follows... Reducing your normal miss chance on a target to zero is typically goal number one when gearing a level 80 DPS character. It's generally the most bang for your buck. Spell hit for casters is another issue, but for those of us who hit things (hunters, rogues, warriors, paladins, etc.), the magical number against raid bosses to overcome is the 8% miss chance. If you hover over your Hit Rating in your stat boxes, it'll show you what percentage you have. "Thus, if you are a Level 80 character with a Weapon Skill of 400 and no talents increasing your chance to hit, you need a Hit Rating of 263 (8.02%) to never miss a shot against a Level 83 boss (or skull mob) with a special attack or single-wield auto-attack."* If you ha

To be perfectly fair, I'd decided I wouldn't be buying the game some time back. I've long considered myself to be a fan of Final Fantasy games. FF 2/4 and 3/6 were inspiring. FF Tactics was great. FF 7 was... greater than it should have been. It's actually one of my favorites, but I have to acknowledge that it was not really that awesome as a game. But it came at the right time and involved the right innovations to have a lot more impact than the story and characters probably deserved. FF 8 was a bit uninteresting to me, but that's a fluke, right? After all, FF 9 was a nostalgic trip of awesomeness. FF 10 was okay. FF 11, I would once have sworn, would be the only MMORPG to be able to draw me in fully - I was obviously wrong there and never even played it. FF 10-2 was meh. FF 12 seemed to have potentially, but it didn't hold me enough to actually finish it. So I guess when I think of Final Fantasy games, I tend to think back to the high points (in my opinion)

It snowed yesterday. I shoveled. Most of the new stuff has melted off by today. Blargle! Exercise, right? I'm playing through Mass Effect 2 a third time, and more slowly. Having seen a renegade path, I have to say it plays out very similarly, but with points of stark contrast. Shoving someone out of a window instead of talking him down probably won't have any major repercussions. Capturing alien technology instead of destroying it, however, could have a huge impact on the future. The game itself is pretty good, but I still find the largest impact from seeing what they carried across. Little people you may have helped or hindered in the first game showing up briefly in the second, and promise of similar in the third. That's what really makes you feel like you're having an impact on the setting. We (only being three of us in the guild on at the time) finished Guild Wars: Nightfall last night. The end fight against Abaddon is probably the closest thing I've seen t

I probably know more about using InDesign right now than I ever will, as I won't use it much and I'll surely forget several things. Still, it was neat to learn, and taught specifically in the context of the system the newsroom will be using (so there's a lot of aspects of the program we probably didn't get into). @whee. Most of the ongoing setup is in the hands of the vendors right now. Next week is "configuration setup," which will involve the heads of the newsroom rather than us IT folk. Then a week or two of testing before a couple weeks of follow-up training (some of which will probably apply to us). The new system is scheduled to go live at the end of April. Meanwhile, things will start gearing up for the advertising side of the building with further installation and setup through April and, barring changes to the schedule, various training scattered over May, June, and July. The schedule's hazier there so far, just because it's a little ways

The four hours of InCopy/InDesign training today wasn't so bad. Scrambling to prepare for it, skipping lunch, and cramming everything else going on into the remaining time of the day, however, is exhausting. I'm tired. And there's more of the same the next couple days, also with gaming tomorrow night, due to last minute schedule changes...

Morning was peaceful enough, but just before lunch the day got hectic. Crisis mode for hours, worked over an hour late, some things just keep coming... ugh. Stressed. Tired.

"... But even a dead god can dream. A god -- a real god -- is a verb. Not some old man with magic powers. It's a force. It warps reality just by being there. It doesn't have to want to. It doesn't have to think about it. It just does."

It's raining out. That's so awesome just because it's not snow! We've been able to add Toravon to our weekly raid target list, and lucked out the last couple weekends with Wintergrasp timing. Not much in the way of useful drops out of him so far, but it's more emblems and doesn't take too long. We only spent about twenty minutes finishing Toravon and Koralon (I believe it is, the flame boss). We downed XT-002 and Kologarn without much trouble, though we're still short on being able to trigger XT's hard mode. That might be a tactics issue as much as actual gearing, I'm not sure. About forty minutes in Ulduar. Twenty minutes of ICC trash up to Marrogar, about ten to Deathwhisper, then we were sidetracked with a weekly ICC quest to kill a frost giant. Yay! Sort of an extra boss and another five emblems. Getting to him was tough, and killing him would have been tougher, but I think he ended up manuevered partway into a wall and his stomp wouldn'

I've already gone on about the game in general. Aside from combat being predictable and the resource gathering aspect getting old fast, it's technically solid. I don't think I mentioned before, but I liked the hacking and bypassing minigames even though the former threw me off the first time (I expected to be using the mouse). The story's good, the characters are generally well done in voice and background. There's more to say in specific, but some friends might yet play it who haven't. So... The intro was well done, though I'm not altogether certain of the narrative point. It almost seems like Shepard was killed off in order to make a stir at game shows a year or two ago. Okay, it does throw him (or her) in with Cerberus, but that could have happened in other ways too. I am a little disappointed that they don't really play with the extreme measures of Project Lazarus after the very beginning of the game. My Shepard was wondering for some time "