Redwolf's Journal (continued)

We can celebrate getting a working VPN at work by... seeing a serious Conficker infection about 24 hours later. I f-ing hate malware, and this virus is better than most at spreading. Nevermind the login-cracking-attempts that lead to frequent lockouts. Haaaaate.

Yeah, I think I'm about done with Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality. Being a Green Mother wasn't bad, per se, but I can't claim it was good either. The plot overlap with the first four books made it predictable and the writing style feels... well... simplistic. My copy of the book actually suffers from a printing defect where one section of 32 pages is in there twice and there's a missing section that should have been there instead. The page numbers jump, and that was jarring, but after picking things up I really didn't feel like I missed anything important. I am very minorly interested in the perspectives of the incarnations of Good and Evil, but not enough to pursue those books at this time. I still feel the first novel in the series is the best. The others give different views of events, but they just don't seem to add much to the overall story in my opinion.

... did I do that? It's not often I actually go from totally clueless to "I think I fixed it" all by myself in the span of about twenty minutes at work. But once in a while, I guess it happens.

I was trying to recall how long it has been since I've ridden on the train. Maybe twenty years and change? Thanks to 's volunteering efforts, I got to enjoyed it today. Heck, we even ended up in "deluxe" seating, which is probably better than what I was in back then. Though the line is known for its round trips up to Silverton, winter trains only go up to Cascade Canyon and turn around there to head back. About 52 miles round-trip, leaves at 10 am, gets back just after 3 pm, with a little under an hour up there to stretch legs and take photos. While it used to be about supplies and mined ore, it's pretty much all about the scenery now and the classic novelty of getting to ride on an early 1900's steam train. Pretty mountains and canyons along the river that were today dusted lightly in snow. We saw moderate bits of all sorts of weather from sun to very light snow and while I woke to see whiteness outside this morning, I'm glad it wasn't deeper wint

That best describes my feeling (and mental state) of late. Work has been... not quite "frantic," but busy. With the other tech off the beginning of this week and the end of last, I've been juggling a little more than I might have otherwise. Thankfully, this hasn't led to any particularly long hours. I got called in on the weekend only once, and briefly at that. So this hasn't made things worse than usual, but there's still a lot going on. I've been mired one lovely issue complicated beyond belief. We've been planning to change our circulation software to one that uses different postal data. This was originally planned to be done at the end of this month, but due to various things I'm not even all familiar with we're not even close. So when someone pointed out that our current postal data was set to expire at the end of the month, I wasn't initially worried. "Oh, maybe the disks are running late," I thought. The support person

Stepping outside this morning, I experienced a sense of... I don't know. "Stillness" was the word that came to mind, though there was a light breeze and there were birds to be heard. I finished The Wise Man's Fear over the weekend. I don't know if I can say it was worth waiting four years for (and I hope we don't have to wait that long for part three), but it's definitely an awesome book and lives up to The Name of the Wind . Simplicity. School life. Beauty. Adventure. Emotion. All there. I found the bit with the Adem fascinating (especially when referring to how outsiders talk too much). The fae bit even had me rhyming one night (only for a few lines, but with really no effort). I get the sense that the tale being told is nearing the end of Kvothe's time at the University, though he's only left in a temporary sense within this volume. That leaves me thinking there must be a lot left to tell and makes me wonder if it can all be fit properly wit

This week, I've: - Spent more than three hours on the phone or waiting for calls regarding critical support issues. - Cursed within earshot of coworkers. - De-malwared a laptop. - Decommissioned several computers purchased in 2003 or so. - Failed to fix one laptop that seems to be suffering from hard drive issues. - Completed in inventory of all active computers at work. - Slept poorly most nights. - Probably not eaten as well as I should have. - Started reading a book. - Tried to make a birthday a little bit special.

I'll take the Clone Wars dreams of infiltrating behind enemy lines in a group of Jedi, dealing with mind-controlling, telekinetic-using, and lightsaber-wielding Sith over the real frustrations of last night anyday... It sucked bad enough when we had a print spooler process crippling one of our servers for no apparent reason. I did find some old print job files, but all indications are they were there for years, so I have no idea why they'd be causing trouble now. Then it turned out we had some sort of corruption in a PDF ad on a page, causing the whole thing to fail to process for final output. It looked okay on the screen, but that wasn't good enough. What absolutely pissed me off about the situation, however, was that it was something I could have worked around in about two minutes (plus time to open programs) a year ago. With our current system, though, 1) I'm not fully familiar with InDesign and 2) I have to struggle with and work around all the mechanisms that

Watching this coverage of the Japan earthquake makes me think back... Going to school in southern California in the 80's, I remember duck-and-cover drills. Of course, some of that was also Cold War Era fear of Soviet attack, but the earthquakes were a part of it too. Duck under your desk. Get in a doorway. When directed, exit out onto the fields in an orderly manner away from the buildings. People were commonly encouraged to keep stores of water (and this before bottled water was a common beverage item) and emergency supplies. We were told over and over that an earthquake was overdue, and could possibly split the state at the San Andreas fault. The "big one" could happen anytime. I don't remember much about making buildings more earthquake resistant, but individual preparedness was pushed even if those who really prepared for it were probably a minority. I wonder if that's still how it is, or if that mindset is a thing of the past.

Heh. I look at Guild Wars 2 , pondering GW and ArenaNet, and I think: That all looks pretty awesome on paper, but there's so many ways it could fall short in practice. I can't fully trust pre-release hype. I hope they can actually live up to all this potential Meanwhile, I look at Star Wars: The Old Republic after Bioware's treatment of KotOR and I think: Star Wars and Bioware, how can this go wrong? It's got to be awesome. But watching the videos makes me feel like this is just more of the exact same MMO gameplay that's been going on for years. I hope they don't screw up and can make this game something special. Based on previous experience, I seem to have different expectations of the two companies...

My alarm woke me this morning from a dream I don't remember. I had a moment of confusion and actual panic as I thought "It's Friday? Argh, I have to get to work!" This is a little strange considering I had plenty of time and actually ended up at work early. It was as though I was subconsciously convinced it was the weekend already or something. Then I poke around online briefly to check a few sites and see notice on Google about the Earthquake in Japan. It's been a while since I've studied the Richter Scale, but "8.9? Uhh... whoa, that's up there." This morning feels very odd...

Wurf. Tired. Work's been busy lately. There's just no downtime with looming deadlines and projects. I thought things might ease up after the new phone system is in place, but no such luck. New computers to mobilize and cope with (some software isn't fond of 64-bit systems), old systems to decommission, current stuff to inventory. Plus all the usual little daily stuff that comes up. I'm not working 10-hour days, but my days are pretty full. Perhaps our last measurable snow of the season last night (that remains to be seen), and there was a power outage in the area to accompany it. I actually still had power, but it killed my internet connection for a few hours. So I watched a couple anime episodes before finally turning in. I've been glancing at reviews and I think I may give Dragon Age II a pass, or at least pick it up later. There's naturally much comparison to the original. A story that's more political than save-the-world? Well, that's sort of a

I had a lot of concerns about whether we would have enough people, but it worked out. Magmaw went down in our first try. Omnitron Defense System went down on our third, when we adopted the rather unusual tactic of me tanking the shielded golem rather than switching to the new-activated one. Useful note: the 'trons' infamous shields only last ten seconds or so. It "forces" the target switch and makes it a pain to interrupt arcanotron, but does not remain up for the entire "phase." We took a few swings at Chimaeron, which is pretty wild as far as incoming damage and not very forgiving. We made some more serious attempts at Maloriak, struggling with interrupt timing and even running into her enrage once (and close other times). The add timing we were getting down, but it still seemed overall we were not getting in enough DPS, considering how long it was taking. I'm not sure if we should push to do more there, or start poking other bosses. There's so

Rawrgh! So having problems crop up at work that we haven't seen since... July? August? The issue plagued us through June and July, but was cleared up before September, at least. And now it's back. But it's inconsistent. So though I have a call in to support that I'm waiting on a return from (thus keeping me from doing other things like this blasted equipment inventory), I almost expect to hear "well, it worked okay for me." Grar. Ffft! There probably should be some comfort in knowing there's nothing I can directly do to fix the problem. But there isn't.

Seems word's getting out that the Firelands raid won't be in patch 4.1 . That's... interesting, though raises some other questions. I suppose it helps explain why there at two 5-man heroic dungeons coming with that patch that drop gear that's half a tier higher than current heroics. I sort of understand and agree with the sentiment that most of the player base has not been through the current tier of raids. But it begs the question of future timeline and little things like what happens with valor points. It's been said valor points will get bumped down to justice points, but if there's no new raid, there's probably no new full-tier of equipment, so current valor gear will continue to be top-of-the-line - thus no need to downgrade points. It also means 4.1 is probably not as far off as has been estimated (though it still did just recently hit the PTR, so there's some time yet). Wacky turnabout, considering 3.1 was Ulduar (a positively gargantuan raid)

Another book down, a tale of a Jedi behind enemy lines waging a guerilla war against the Sith. Pretty enjoyable, though certain details of the writing style (shifting between direct quote and narrated explanation) bug me and much of the book left me thinking "I think I want to see more Narsk." Kerra Holt is definitely more a warrior Jedi than a peacekeeper, but that's the depiction for the era some thousand years before the Clone Wars. More interesting, perhaps, is the portrayal of the Sith. I'm not sure whether to say the book is an interesting insight into some Sith philosophies, or an interesting take on them - that depends on how canon you consider Star Wars novels to be, I suppose. But the book gives a tour of three different territories held by three different Sith Lords. Seen through the eyes of a Jedi, there are certain similarities and distinctions. Different sorts of control, different sorts of fear, and hope from different quarters. From her prespective

It's hard being a small "casual" guid with aspirations toward raiding. No matter size and focus, there's generally going to develop some amount of drama, but when you're small each little bit hurts more. And when the guild isn't built around a single goal, that's more opportunities for conflict. It's been difficult of late to field a full group of 10, and we're usually on the edge of that. Oh, there have been some weeks when we had 14 or 15 present and willing to participate, but that's pretty rare. Currently... We're down one regular raider and one non-raider due mostly to finances. That's understandable and probably a good sign of priorities, I don't fault them at all, I just miss them. There's no telling how long that'll last. We're down another pretty regular raider due to computer issues, and will be until it's replaced. And we just lost one person who was a regular raider through the end of WotLK, but ha