| My NEW(ER) Blog | ||
| I haven't been posting a ton (as usual), but I have had a newer blog for the past couple of years, and have been remiss in not linking to it here! It's at http://louziffer.rps.net/ | ||
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| World of Warcraft Beta Experience: The Beginning | ||
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It's ready! It took be well over a couple of days to put this thing together in my spare time. I hope you find that it was worth the wait. I'm already working on the next one. World of Warcraft Beta Experience: The Beginning |
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| WoW Day 1 - Raw Screenshots Up | ||
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I played WoW for a total of about two hours last night in two separate sessions. Here is a page with the raw (not captioned, no junk weeded out) screenshots I took. There are over 100 of them! From the screenshots you can see that I tried some of everything in the game - even death. My first character was rather vanilla. LouZiffer the orc warrior was easily taken from level 1 to level 5 in the two hours I spent online (much of that time I was just exploring!). So far the game is very fast paced and keeps me moving. Nothing but the fun stuff - which is what Blizzard has proven to be adept at including by the bucketful in their games. The Orc Warrior quests have mainly revolved around killing so far, as they should IMO. I've completed at least 8. They came so fast I can't remember exactly how many without my notes in front of me! My only complaint so far is that I've found the control scheme to be a little tricky. Being used to FPS and third person schemes from other games, I found getting around to be a little wonky. Occasionally I'd be facing the wrong way in a fight in the beginning, and I wasn't too adept at turning around. (It works. I'm still getting used to it though.) To be fair to Blizzard, I could change the key bindings - but I want to give the defaults a good bit of time and provide feedback if it's needed. I took a ton of notes, and have already found and submitted one bug. A more complete writeup of my experiences will follow in a couple of days. |
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| WoW Beta Begins... | ||
| I've just received my beta key and downloaded the beta install code - all 2GB of it. I'm going through the install right now, which is taking quite a bit of time. Screen shots of character creation and lots of other fun things are hopefully to come. | ||
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| New Page Design... | ||
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As you can tell, I'm working on a new page design. Unfortunately, due to the nature of PHP, I have to test my design ideas directly on the server. I could do that on a separate test page, but then my screwups wouldn't be around for the whole world to see. What kind of fun is that?! 4-4-2004 EDIT: The basic format is done. Now for some linkin'. 4-5-2004 EDIT: Woo! I got annoyed at cutenews' tendency to create links that wouldn't create a new window when clicked. With a little PHP editing, that's been solved. I'll have this site just the way I want it, OR ELSE! 4-18-2004 EDIT: Finished up the linking. Now I have a complete site again. I'll be working on the projects page now (link in upper right), which will also be hosting my WoW Beta site. |
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| WoW Beta? YES! | ||
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I have angered all of my friends in a whole new way! According to Blizzard, I've been accepted into World of Warcraft Beta Stage 2. According to Mojo, my acceptance into the beta contains even more irony than writing a song that's supposed to be about irony, yet contains none. I must agree. Why? Because other than MUDs, I've never played a MMORPG. I've also been known to announce that I REFUSE to pay a monthly fee just to play a game. In signing up, I followed the rules and submitted once. I was also completely honest about my gaming habits (much less than many due to family life) and experience (TONS of gaming experience in general - most in distant past - but ZERO MMORPG experience). I was very surprised to be selected. Am I going to be satisfied with this game? Will I be able to hop in, play 15-30 minutes, and leave yet still have a rewarding experience? What will I notice as a MMORPG novice that will seem like old hat to others, and what will truly be new? Will this game actually convince me that a monthly fee isn't a bad thing? I'll share the answers to these questions and more in a few weeks as I play through the beta. |
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| What?! No Pictures? | ||
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*sigh* About that brake pad thing... Tuesday afternoon I put the rear of the car up on jack stands and took the driver's side wheel off. I read through the manual, removed the shield that protects the rotor (the "disc" on disc brakes), and proceeded to diddle around with the parking brake cable for a couple of hours - with a break for dinner - until I figured out a way to loosen it and disconnect the parking brake (something that would take me 15 minutes or so now that I know how to do it). I took off the parking brake lever, figured out the best way to squeeze the piston back into the caliper, and turned to my final task before actually changing the pads. By this point it was dark and cold. Kaycee had been holding a light up for me to work by as I sat on my butt in the driveway and figured everything out. I looked at the manual. "Remove the slide bolts from the caliper." I looked at the bolts... and it began to feel colder. The manual didn't indicate that there's about a quarter inch clearance around one of the bolts that hold the caliper on. I can remove those bolts; However, I can't get a torque wrench in there to tighten one of them back up so it'll be safe. That's a problem! After looking and probing for about 15 minutes I decided it was time to call it a day. Yesterday I went back to the car during daylight and looked again. I couldn't find any way to safely remove that damn bolt and put it back on again using the tools I have. There was nothing more I could do but put everything back together, put the wheels back on, lower the car, refill the brake fluid reservoir, and give up. End result: I didn't end up changing the rear pads. They have lots of life left in them anyways. In this case, I have to pay someone to do it. I still recommend you get the manual for your car and see how easy it (usually) is. I'd never pay anyone to change the front pads on my car. Those are the ones that wear down fastest on mine, too. |
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| Where have you been?! | ||
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July was an interesting month. I got new job responsibilities (team lead of my team), and a not new but reliable car. The new responsibilities have been part of why I've been so damn busy. I felt our team should get out and do more, and now we find ourselves with our hands in more cookie jars at IBM than we know what to do with. We made a difference before, and we make a much larger one now. It's a good start. The car is a 1994 Lumina Euro Sedan. It came with 49000 miles on it, and I've since driven about 3000 more. My brother found it for me on eBay of all places. Stan very generously offered to trade it for my 1994 Toyota truck. I was skeptical, but in this case the book was just as good as its cover promised. I've fixed a broken visor and a door that wouldn't open from the inside, and replaced the brake lights, windshield wipers, and front brake pads. Nothing major. I also bought rear brake pads, which I'll hopefully get the time to put on soon since the original ones' indicators are squeaking annoyingly during regular driving. Now... to preach on brake pads: Please, folks! If all you need are new brake pads, just replace them yourself! New pads are CHEAP and it only takes 30-45 minutes per wheel to change them at the most. Even with buying the tools (a C-clamp, torque wrench, jack stands, and sockets) you'll probably spend less than you would at a garage. When I change my rear pads I'll take pictures. Then I'll put together a quick tutorial so you can see just how easy this is. Now that the air conditioning isn't on, I've discovered that the voltage regulator has left the building. The AC took enough power to hide it, though I did think the voltage was a little high from the start. No biggie... a $30-or-so part I can replace myself. Maybe I'll take some pics of that, too. |
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| Return to VargonMUD | ||
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First there was Muddog. In the fall of 1991 that's the MUD I first joined, and where I stayed until its untimely demise in 1994. Much of the community of Muddog moved to VargonMUD, and I moved with it. I resided there until 1998, and then dropped off the face of the earth. There were many reasons why I left mudding altogether, one of which was my inability to manage my time well. As anyone who has played on a MUD can attest to, that can become a BIG issue when it comes to mudding. I've since learned plenty on that subject what with being married, having a daughter, spending time with my friends, hosting/participating in Sunday gaming sessions, and working at a job where I help to provide technical direction and manage servers for a large chunk of IBM Global Services Internal Support in North America. The other day I was having a discussion with Aetius, Mojo, and Stone about MMORPGs. You see, I just don't tend to get into the graphical ones even though I really enjoyed MUDs. The flexibility of text and its ability to spark the imagination really can't be duplicated in a graphical environment, in my opinion. As I stated as much, and illustrated examples my brain leapt off into a tangent (as it tends to do) and I started thinking about the community I left behind. After a couple days of pondering, I decided I should either decide I'm gone for good or come back and hang out on VargonMUD every now and then. It made more sense to me to come back. Today I joined back up. My character was still there with his inventory intact... and even my condo was too. (Though the condos at muddog were better, Vargon. Honestly.) Damn I was annoying back then! My condo was loud... laughably so. I had just decided to remodel it when lo and behold, Vargon himself joined up and immediately said "Louie?". I got a warm welcome from the people I had left without any explanation five years ago. I guess I would act the same way, but I wouldn't have blamed them if they were mad. Since then I've even gotten an email from someone who saw I had connected and wanted to drop me a line to say hello. I had spent hour after hour talking with this person years back, and it was good to hear from them again. What can I say? They're good people! Feel free to hang out on VargonMUD too if you're reading this. I won't be there day and night like I used to, but I'll be there regularly. |
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| Forge of Fury Stuff | ||
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I've finally gotten around to putting my Forge of Fury summaries on here along with a few comments about each. I'm DMing this popular module for five of my friends, and we're having a lot of fun with it. I'll edit this news posting as more sessions are played. Session 1: The Beginning My notes: A good challenging beginning. I worked hard on tying this module into the previous one I DMed. Shadow and Rheanna are our two new players. They did a great job dealing with 3E (brand new to them) and figuring out the dynamics of our group. Session 2: Tragedy Strikes My notes: The much dreaded death I spoke about in a previous news posting occurs at the end of this one. I was a little surprised that the party took the fortress head-on... though they're the type to do just that. They were lucky despite losing Adoemos, though the shock of losing a party member really didn't make it seem that way. Session 3: Rising to the Challenge My notes: Not only was the party lucky, but they used great teamwork and tactics in this one. Even with bad luck they'd have been able to handle these encounters. the Casters are doing their thing, the monk is dodging like crazy, and the ranged attacks are flying. They made short work of some tough opponents. Session 4: The Dwarf Still Burns My notes: Ragath is on fire - AGAIN! He's the only character to move over from the previous module, and in THAT one he was set on fire, too. More outstanding teamwork and great tactics are used in this session. |
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| Templates Fixed | ||
| Well crap. Something screwey happened with my comment template. I've fixed it. You can read comments again. | ||
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| Dungeons and Dragons | ||
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Ah... the ultimate in nerddom. Role playing. I just finished documenting the second session of the adventure I'm GMing - The Forge of Fury. I had written and rewritten it quite a few times. It was tough, since one of the characters died (Mojo's, to be specific) and I always hate it when that happens. I especially hate it when the player is a decent RPG player and a massive critical by a monster is why they died. Mojo also happens to be a good friend though, so I think he understood. I like to go by my dice rolls and GMing as honestly as possible... and since there was a contingency for such a thing, I had very little in the way of excuses to use (in my own mind) for not allowing it to happen. I realize that I don't have to document this stuff... but I like to when I have the time available. It's as much for me as it is for anyone else. Maybe I'll start posting them on here or somewhere. |
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