Redwolf's Journal (continued)

I'm pretty reluctant to take time off work due to illness. For one, it's pretty rare that I'm sick beyond a bout of allergies or a cold. Today, though, is one of those days. Ugh.

It does seem to be a financial rule. Did my taxes, got my refund. Yay. 'course, after buying the new tires I've been putting off for six months, trying to find birthday presents for friends who normally don't get any (and three birthdays on the same day is kinda rough), and being warned that I may not receive a full rent amount this month I'm in a perfect position to end up right where I was before when the dust settles. Well... at least I'm not coming out behind right now.

I'm not really sure why it is, but I find myself being more analytical of storylines these days. The sad part is this means some degree less enjoyment on my part due to what I see as technical failings. A couple points have stood out in my mind lately: Internal Consistency Sometimes I say realism, but that isn't actually what I mean. I read and watch plenty of things that have no basis in reality, but I still expect an amount of believable reactions within the established framework of the story. If your supernaturally-imbued protagonist suffers a knife wound that has to be stitched when he returns to human form, that's fine. If he is later riddled with bullets and reverts without a scratch, I start asking why. If there's no answer provided, that's a strike against the story in my book. This also applies to seemingly-sudden changes in things like geography, naming conventions, or the rules of (meta)physics. And while some explanation is usually better than none...

So, a power outage killed lights through much of downtown today, not the least of which being at work. For a while, they got up one of the two circuits that services this building, but that wasn't enough to get the servers back online for everyone. Then it cut out completely again. In total, we lost about three hours (9-noon) of productive time because of this all. I've yet to hear any details as to what happened. We have lost one piece of hardware that is (thankfully) fairly easy to work around until a replacement arrives. Whee.

Not what I'd call a great day. Went through a weekend of poor sleep, so I wasn't rested to begin with. Saturday, our mail server got nailed with some trojan/rootkit that was persistent enough we ended up reinstalling everything and restoring data from backup. Today we were still dealing with repercussions - resetting passwords that didn't restore, getting off blacklists, and the like. So I wasn't surprised when called over to fix password problems with e-mail for our publisher (aka THE boss). He wasn't there, I reset the password easily enough and noticed outgoing messages that weren't sending due to back recipient addresses (among several). Without a second thought, I cleared out the bad addresses and got those underway. So I was a bit surprised when he showed up a bit later, all but red in the face, to lay into me for sending those e-mails. In retrospect, maybe I should have asked about it beforehand. I tend to assume if someone has messages sitting in their...

Too much thinking lately, not really enough to do. All things considered, though, I can't say I'm doing badly. Our Web department hasn't annoyed me too much this last week (though they still exist on a wavelength that makes it difficult to communicate) and life is plodding along. The new rules for Furryfaire that were conceptualized... uh... some time back (six months ago? Eight months ago? A year ago?) are finally seeing code. I'm trying to be positive about it, so I'll start by saying I do appreciate all the thought and effort that has gone/is going into the changes. It looks like it may curb some of the power issues we had before. That said, it's hard to be positive about it. It bothers me a little that I've a character who currently could probably go tossing buses like Superman, but after the new rules are finished - not so much. Even that, though, is just a matter of scale. Stats, skills, etc... all those numbers are going to be lower across the b...

I was going to start somewhere else, but the top bar on the page is pink. Ugh. I... dislike Valentine's Day. That aside, I feel a bit scattered of late. - I've had Star Wars on my mind to the point of browsing Wookieepedia. Done a little writing. Got caught up on the KotOR comic series. Re-installed Jedi Outcast . Got to play a little more in an online game that's been on hold quite a while - I love my droid character. He's perfect for it. Being a droid, he can be quiet much of the time and fade into the background, yet he's free to make snarky comments for comedy value. - Playing WoW still. Not great leaps and bounds of progress lately. Sorta think maybe I should take a break for a while. I'd love to see more new stuff from the expansion (the draenei starting quests quite impressed me), but my closest character is at least 10 slow levels from the the new Outland areas. - Furryfaire is in another state of flux. After months and months, there's finally...