The blog that's gotten one comment ever! Thanks mom!

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Warcraft, I just can't quit you...

...as much as sometimes I'd like to. Every time I start getting a little tired of the game, something changes, and I've got a whole new game to play. The latest expansion has taken the usual formula of questing and amped the story quite a bit, making reading the lore quite entertaining. Janie, my long time priest companion, called it quits at level 66, so I had to respec my druid as a healer, but now that I've actually healed for a few instances, I've gotten the hang of it, and the new play style has me totally hooked. As per always, WoW's support for user created interface mods ads so much more to the game. I enjoyed Lord of the Rings Online, but honestly, I think WoW has the world licked when it comes to customization. With LOTRO, you could reskin your interface. With WoW, you can completely change it, adding features that are incredibly useful. I'm not much of an MMO person, the only announced one that I even care about is The Old Republic. But I hope Bioware takes a good look at WoW, and then steals as many features as possible. Blizzard really seems to keep nailing their updates out of the park, and for casual players like me, no matter how hard we try, it's hard to get Warcraft off the brain.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Ugh.


My company is stopping matching 401k contributions. I was all happy to work for a company that actually had any 401k contributions. Take care of each other out there. Things'll get worse before they get better.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Mortal Kombat is back!

A big thanks to my old co-worker Dave, arcade collector extraordinaire, for all of his help. Dave brought his trusty voltmeter over after work last Friday to help me troubleshoot my Mortal Kombat II cabinet, which had been extremely flaky of late. We had to remove some old and already torn shielding from around the JAMMA board and the power supply, but Dave confirmed that the power supply wasn't pushing 5 volts, only 4.8, and being that low made it susceptible to power fluctuations. Luckily, a lot of arcade power supplies are adjustable, presumably to make them better able to power multiple different boards, and so Dave was able to get it back up to a nice 5 volt signal. It's been running flawlessy ever since. Glee!

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Don't let your kids go into QA

It's a thankless job. You find problems, you tell people about them. They get upset. They ask you to fix them. Most of the time, you can't, instead having to turn to the developers who wrote the code. They don't like you finding problems in their code, and adding to their workload by asking for them to fix their bugs. I know my manager appreciates what I do. Everyone else hates me a little bit. Granted, things are in a goofier state with this project than many others I've been involved with. But it would be nice to have a run of good news every so often to lessen the depression.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Best thing I've seen this morning


Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Star Wars. As retold by someone who's only seen bits and pieces. Simply awesome.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The first of many baby videos


Well, here she is. My future daughter. She was really moving around earlier in the ultrasound, before the technician started recording, but she's kinda mellowed out by this point. Judging by the size, the doctor has moved the due date out to the 12th of June. Apparently, tracking the start of periods while trying to conceive is rather crucial to determining due dates. J and I didn't have this info, and so getting an accurate date (as accurate as these things get I suppose) has been rather tricky.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

On impending fatherhood


So. I'm around five months out from being a father. Already my life is different. And that's ok. But I find myself sneaking away for moments of selfishness while I still can. Playing Warcraft for a few minutes when I had just come down to the basement to change loads of clothes. Or jumping into Gears of War any time I'm home and J isn't. I do this not because I'm an asshole (sorry for the language mom), though I am to a certain extent. I do this because I know, as much as life has changed so far, it's going to be something completely different after the baby arrives. I'm ok with this. I will remain calm and carry on. But I'll miss the old life for a while.

By no means will all gaming end. And I can honestly say, one of the things I'm looking forward to most about being a parent is that someday I'll be able to sit down with my child and play games with them. But for the next several years, if you see me, and you love me, take my child and play with them for a while, and tell me to go play a game.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

My office is apparently built on top of a hobo burial ground...



I work in the most nondescript two story building ever conceived, plopped into the middle of a strip mall parking lot. It's actually a bit depressing. And since the building looks so vague it could be anything at all, for the various people traversing the parking lot, the only way to determine that the building isn't full of pies is to wander in and check.

We've had people standing in the hall talking to themselves. Vagrants and kids ditching school avail themselves of our facilities. People smelling strongly of cigarettes wander into my office, asking to borrow the phone. It's not pleasant.

To fight off this be-bindled menace, the company changed the security setup, with the door now requiring key-card access to get in. I thought this would have solved the problem, except on a recent trip to the bathroom, I noticed a shopping cart in the hall. They're in the building!

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

My cats, let me show you them

On my way out the door this morning, I noticed my cats were acting a bit strange. They were more talkative than usual, and they kept looking at their empty food bowl and back at me. We've got an autofeeder, which just needs someone to top off the hopper every so often to keep the cats happy. Unfortunately it was empty, and we hadn't bought more cat food for a while. So I drove to two stores trying to find someplace close that was both open and sold cat food. As I completed my purchase in the pre-dawn hour, worries that I had become some sort of cat person filled my being. My only recompense is that crazy cat people probably aren't that likely to have run out of food in the first place.

Monday, January 5, 2009

So, what, I update once a month?

How was everyone's holidays? Good I hope? Mine was the usual, a series of family events, each which required preparation, the events themselves, and then cleanup. Luckily, it was followed by a week consisting of couch sitting, movie watching, and game playing.

Have you read my blog?