And a Fine Time Was Had by All

by on December 10, 2007 at 9:24 am
Posted In: Life

Got back from my annual vacation with my parents yesterday.

The trip down went well, main problem was getting started a bit late. The chaos of the potential schedule changing on a day-by-day basis meant that I never really worked out just what I wanted to bring with me, so I was thinking of little things I ‘forgot’ all the way down. Oh, and I got lost a block from my parents. Well, not lost, I knew where I was, I knew they were close, it was just that when struggling to read the directions in the dark I missed a step.

The new place is very, very nice. It’s much larger, brand new, and they got to choose a bunch of options in the floorplan, so it’s personalized to them. One problem: the guest bedroom (which is normally an office-ish space for my Mom) is on the opposite side of the house from the guest bathroom (which is next to my Dad’s den/gaming room, which would ordinarily be a pair of bedrooms, so it actually does make sense).

A neighbor took photos of the entire process of taking the old mobile home out and putting in the new ‘manufactured home‘ (which seems to boil down to ‘post-1975 mobile home’), including a few taken from his roof, looking down at the process. Great reference, and it might be nice to get a copy of the CD he did.

Technical duties were limited this year. Figured out the TV/VCR/DVD setup, which involved examining the back of the TV and swearing at the manual, which was done entirely as guide to the remote; never once diagramming what connections the TV itself had and only in passing mentioning that the extra inputs are treated as extra channels on the last page. Set the router up physically in hopes that everything will do its job right when the DSL is finally activated. Oh, and I helped with a neighbor’s (same one as above) software difficulties. Thankfully, he had most of it figured out, I generally just had to describe what a Video CD was (he had a CD-burner but not a DVD-burner), and finding something that could play one to test (only my Dad’s computer—with Vista—completely got it).

The game room is still being set up. I helped my Dad put together a bunch of the short cheap prefab bookcases. These will be the base of the table. Since that comes a bit later, we were left to networked computer games for gaming this year. We ended up going through a couple of Age of Wonders 2 scenarios, and had great fun beating up on the computer together.

We took a small trip up to an area just north of Cherry Valley, that has lots of apple groves. We missed the end of apple season, so most of the town was closed up (very seasonal). We ate at the restaurant that was open, and had very good apple cider and pie (the main course wasn’t bad either).

On Saturday, we visited my Aunt Ruth in Fallbrook. And took a look around my old home town. It’s in much better shape than I expected. It seems that the fires were very fast ones that just burned out the underbrush and only singed the trees. There’s burned off hillsides, and trees where all the leaves are brown and dead, and untouched areas in between.

My old place wasn’t near the fires, but Smudge’s was inside the fire area. It’s perfectly fine, with a grove that didn’t exist ten years ago in the front yard. Not far away, on the south side of Mission, the entire hill is black and charred, but the little Valentine/Capra area is fine.

In between those two trips, I visited Elaina, Mike and Rowan for about a day and a half. They’re doing well. (Or at least, as well as can be.) Rowan (now 3) still remembers me from last year (mostly for puzzles and seeing Christmas lights in downtown Riverside with everyone), and is still cutely demanding in that way that only small children can manage. Still extremely bright and much taken with “Uncle James”, which does make visiting with Elaina and Mike themselves a bit harder.

The drive home went well. Got started on time, got home early. Had a lot of unpacking to do (ended up with a lot more books than I started with). It rained a lot Saturday, but was clear, if a bit damp the next day. Lots of picturesque snow-covered mountains to see. In fact, the snow line got down to about 3700 feet in the Grapevine, giving me a much closer look at snow than I’m used to. And I could see exactly where the lee-side of all the slope were.

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Well, phooey

by on November 30, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Posted In: Life

I have been getting into the habit lately of visiting my parents every year for a week or so at Thanksgiving.

My parents currently live in a mobile home. It’s an aging place, with it’s own share of problems. So, this year, they got a reverse mortgage, bought a new unit, rented a small temporary place, and had the old unit taken out, and the new one put in. This gets them a nicer, bigger place, and an increase in property value (due to the newer place now on it).

The problem is that this got squeezed into the time right before my visit. And things naturally got delayed a bit.

I am leaving for my parents tomorrow, instead of the normal Thanksgiving, and will be down there for a week.

However, while the power has finally been hooked up, and they have phone service, and they were promised DSL service this week, the last has not happened. Right now, the current promise date for DSL is about the 14th.

Considering that I was planning on using some of the free time to work on some stuff on-line… well, that’s annoying. More serious, I’ll be largely out of contact with the wider world for the week. I also wanted to hook them a bit on Goodreads, and I can’t do that either.

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Bloodfurnace

by on November 27, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Posted In: MMO

Been a while since I’ve had a fun WoW story… even though there’s been plenty of runs.

Dunain is doing well. The little curmudgeon has pretty good gear, and his damage is darn frightening. (So is his crit rate–I’m aiming at a pure DPS build to keep from drawing aggro with huge threat spikes from critical hits, and he’s running about 18% crit chance without party buffs. I think that’s at least as high as before I decided to forgo crits for steady damage, lo those many moons ago.)

We had lost one of our regular better players to job woes a while back. He’s back (at least on weekends) now, but we’re still loosing Grumbly. He’s switched his main to a Dranei Shaman who just hit 70. Blanc and Dunain helped outfit Khaaleen with brand-new gear when she hit 70, and should be doing fairly well equipment-wise.

We also ended up helping her and Kris (another high-level alt) go through Bloodfurnace, the second Outlands dungeon. In fact, we were all on high-level alts, with Khaaleen, Kris, Farmishi and Dracovii. We only had four, but two of us were seriously over-level, and Draco was moderately so.

It… was different as all of us were in different roles than our normal ones, but we were all on characters we really liked. As a protection Pallie, I was main tank, and occasionally backup healing for Khaaleen (who was also backup tank by virtue of having more damage output than I can tank for).

Everything considered, it went reasonably well. I was leading/marking, another job I’m not used to. We wiped a few times, but generally held it together through the tough fights. I also proved that I know what I’m doing as a prot pallie; I just have to figure out how to get the rest of the party to live through it.

The second boss encounter is very demanding, with four rooms opening up in sequence, keeping you in battle through the entire thing, and then springing Broggok on you as your fifth straight fight. We got through the first two waves fine, and then things started getting out of control. We had the main fight, and a single guy separated, and I’m not good enough yet to judge what really needed my attention and deal with it reliably. We got through it, but the fourth wave started doing us in. I just missed putting a shield on Khaaleen, and desperate, had to shield myself with the plan of immediately shielding Dracovii before they could get to him.

Good theory, poor execution, I just missed Draco as well, leaving me alone (Kris had been the first to die). My shield lasted long enough to heal myself, and I defeated the remaining orcs. Leaving me with 1/3 health, 1/4 mana, big abilities on cooldowns from a previous fight and wondering what to do about the boss.

The answer was, of course, take everything he could dish out while slowly wearing him down and staying out of the poison gas. Boggrok isn’t a heavy hitting boss, the main threat is these rings of poison gas that slowly expand from where he is. So I slowly backed around the room, leaving a bright green highway in front of me, and desperately kept my health healed up as best as possible.

He eventually made a very satisfying thump on the floor. He was grey on me, but he’s still a boss, and I had soloed him. And then I went and walked off the adrenalin for a couple minutes. -_-;

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The Stasis Box (redux)

by on November 18, 2007 at 11:38 am
Posted In: SFB

We were scheduled for a two-team SFB battle on Saturday, but Paul developed car trouble and couldn’t make it. That left us with three people and no plan B. After a fair bit of hunting around we decided to play “The Stasis Box” again, with the third player option.

Mark and I swapped roles, and Patch took the Klingons. I was a little aggressive in the first turn’s surveys, zooming off to the second closest asteroid cluster, and dropping off a shuttle to check the closest. Once again, I rolled poorly and took a fair amount of asteroid damage on the way in. Worse, the asteroid patch I explored turned out to conceal a mine, and I couldn’t come to a stop before moving again and detonating the mine, losing the rear shield and taking a good number of internals.

The next several turns were peaceful as everyone explored, I repaired what I could, and all the explorations turned up just more rocks. Patch eventually found a second mine, but was able to halt and creep out of its detection radius. Possible locations were running out, and it was looking like there weren’t any stasis boxes at all.

And then Mark found one. He was torn between sitting the two turns to collect it, or staying at speed and seeing who else might go for it. He chose the former, and unsurprisingly soon had a Klingon F5 in front of him, with a Fed DD further behind and to the side. The good news for him was that the asteroids were protecting him fairly well, and he only needed to get about 5 hexes to disengage.

And then as the Kzinti was getting battered to pieces, and it was becoming sure that he wouldn’t make it off, one of my shuttles found the second stasis box in the last unexplored cluster. Which meant Patch and I wanted to keep the Kzinti from getting away and beat up the other fellow to keep him from getting a win by grabbing the last one.

If I hadn’t taken that mine early on, I might have had a chance. My pass at the tractored Kzinti became a point blank pass at the Klingon. Sadly, he had phasers and disruptors, while my photons were rearming. Actually, I did have one standard load torpedo, but was too close to use it, and the mine had taken out the batteries, so I couldn’t emergency overload it so it could fire.

And once the pass was done, I had my still-crippled rear shield to the Klingon. I didn’t last much longer.

So… next time we should be doing the 2-on-2 team battle. Barring broken cars.

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The big shake up

by on October 31, 2007 at 8:23 am
Posted In: Life

Having lived in southern California for much of my life, I’m used to the ground not always entirely being steady under my feet.

After moving to the Bay Area, not so much. The steady stream of small single-jolt earthquakes I grew up with doesn’t really happen around here. But there are occasional more notable ones.

Like last night. Just about eight o’clock the house started swaying about, and continued to do so for some time, it took us a while to be sure it had stopped. Not too bad, but definitely long, and the power never flickered. I’d say by feel it’s the second most powerful earthquake I’ve felt (the biggest being Northridge).

Modern communications is a wonderful thing. Blondiewood popped onto WoW right afterwards, and we talked about the quake. Dave got a call on his cell phone from where some friends were at a restaurant and said everything was all right. The USGS site took maybe a quarter hour to come up with all the details: it was a 5.6 centered near Alum Rock, and there were a number of magnitude-1 aftershocks in the area.

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