Vacationing in Blackrock Depths

by on December 4, 2006 at 12:10 pm
Posted In: MMO

Among the other things I did while on vacation was get my computer up, running, and on the broadband. This allowed me to participate in two BRD runs with Farmishi.

It was a little odd, I almost tried to go down the corridor to say something to Smudge off-line at one point, only to realize I wasn’t in the same house as her.

Also, TeamSpeak seems to be acting up. Other people were complaining about not being able to hear Smudge, despite the fact that she was crystal clear for me. And she seemed to be having no problems with people that I couldn’t hear. It’s like everyone is on random relative volume settings to everyone else….

The first run went all the way to the back and got the Emperor. Along the way, we picked off another three Anvilrage Captains (official count: 34, Plans: 0). One death in the Lyceum, otherwise a very clean run (and my first for lighting the torches). If I remember right, we originally went in with three people, and picked up more as they logged in….

The second run didn’t go to the back. But we got lots of other things done (like Bael’Gar). Farmishi is now down to Jail Break for BRD quests. We’ve officially put BRD on ‘farm’ (or was that ‘fram’) status. Sadly, we have quite a bit to farm down there….

└ Tags: ,
 Comment 

Disclaimer

by on December 4, 2006 at 11:51 am
Posted In: Life

I would like to clarify my earlier posts to mention that tech-support was not my primary activity while visiting. ^_^; It just took more effort than anything else, so there’s a lot more to say. ^_^

Well, had a last second problem with my dad. I had updated his graphics drivers, and gotten Civ IV to a ‘workable’ state on his machine (still had some odd problems, but the terrain was no longer invisible). But, when he tried it again, it was back to it’s old shenanigans. So, for the moment, we’ve swapped games (he’s borrowing my copy of Age of Wonders, and I’m borrowing his copy of Civ). And I’m wondering whether to get him an AGP card (it’s got the slot, but is running on chipset graphics), or if I should start looking into modernizing my system (again) and give him my current GeForce 6200 card while I move on to PCI Express….

Hmm. I could see if the card currently in Utena (my previous system, and currently hanging around as a ‘backup’) would be up for Civ IV. If I do end up needing Utena, I should be able to transfer the 6200. Might be worth thinking about….

…Anyway, the weekend was spent at the home of some old friends that I haven’t seen in way too long, Elaina and Mike. And their two-year-old daughter, Rowan.

Rowan is an extremely bright and impressive two-year-old. It doesn’t hurt that she was also quite taken with her “Uncle James”. ^_^

They showed me some of Guild Wars (not bad, but I’ve got enough addictions). Talked too much WoW (which they’ve quit due to financial belt-tightening) with Mike. Showed him some of the games I brought down for my dad, and may have accidentally made another convert to A Victory Lost….

And most importantly, got somewhat back in touch. I really need to get better about emailing.

Drove back Sunday, and had a very smooth trip up. Getting everything put away was more of a challenge, as I had more stuff than when I began….

└ Tags: 
 Comment 

Post-week wrapup

by on December 1, 2006 at 2:18 pm
Posted In: Life

Well, I’ll be headed over to an old friend’s soon, wrapping up a bit over a week spent at my parents. You’ve already gotten to hear about my initial adventures. I forgot to mention that there was more tech support upcoming.

My dad’s system isn’t perfect but continues to do better. I even got it to the point where Civilization 4 runs… kinda acceptably on it. Still has all sorts of odd graphics issues, and is a little slow graphically speaking for it (that’s what you get for graphics system built into the chipset). The next job was getting my mom’s ‘new’ laptop up and running.

I say ‘new’ because she had bought it, started it, looked through the documentation, run it out of power, and had some trouble, and so put it aside for me to take care of… back in April. So, maybe, “unused” is the right word.

Powering it up gave problems. At first, it just wanted to go to a blank screen with a text-mode cursor in the upper corner. After a bit, that went away, and it did nothing at all. So, something went bad, do a system restore: insert bootable CD, put in the first recovery disk, put in the second recovery disk, complains that it can’t find a file it wants to copy. Hit “continue”. System reboots, starts the process all over again from the beginning, until it hits the exact same problem.

This starts a small crisis. Too late to return to Staples, and we’re not sure what Acer’s response will be. The eventual decision was to call Acer, see what they want to do, and get my mom’s previous system up and running again. That one had started running Norton scan disk every time it started, so I had an idea what the trouble there was….

I called Acer, which had like three different recorded messages run before it even let me at the queue. Once they were done, the phone was immediately picked up by a fellow who started by apologizing for the long hold time…. ^_^; He listened to the story, diagnosed the problem as a faulty hard-drive (likely) and told us to ship it in. He sent two emails, one was to print out and include with the laptop, which will tell them what the problem is, and the other was detailed directions on how to ship it. Pending getting the machine back (7-10 business days), Acer is getting a A (I think we’re still stuck with recovery disks that don’t work, so not an A+).

I was right about the old machine, the hard drive on that was failing fast (5-6 bad sectors found, and there were already a bunch flagged around the drive). So we bought the cheapest drive we could to replace it, an 80 GB ATA-100 (on a P-II system; I need to remember to loot this before the machine is eventually tossed). Next problem: the BIOS hangs when trying to detect the new drive. Looking up the motherboard, I find that indeed, the BIOS is too old to recognize anything over 75 GB. They do have an unfinished beta BIOS that can support that though. So, I load that on (quite smoothly), and install Win 98, and get it up and running.

Networking was a bit of a pain. I had to go hunt for the drivers for the card I used when I put it together many moons ago. (Where did I get that card? And why did I use it?) After getting that sorted out, the struggle to get it running was more protracted than it had to be: I forgot to check that I had plugged in the ethernet on the computer’s side (I just assumed I did that with all the other cables).

Anyway, up running, and can see the internet. Just run Windows Update a few times, and home free, right? Wrong. Win 98 (first edition, all I had to hand) comes with Internet Explorer 4. This breaks badly on Windows Update (good job guys), leaving me with a blank white page. Some digging gets me to the page for IE6, but that page is unreadable in IE4 (rendered in about 1 point type). I eventually, had to download the tiny web installer on my machine, use the network to drop it on the other and run it there. After that, it was simple.

And lest you think I was just down here to play tech support, I will admit to doing a bunch of other things while down here.

I did get to play a game of A Victory Lost with my dad. Didn’t go very well for me, he got around my south flank early, and I couldn’t quite pull myself out of the problem that caused, and while I was spending all my attention trying to save that, the rest of the line was crumbling.

Games-wise though, most nights were spent with Age of Wonders (which I hooked my dad on), and Civilization IV (which I tried out on my machine). So I guess we know what to get each other for Christmas….

Visited a Archeology and Paleontology museum. Yes, really. In Hemet. A new reservoir was recently built here, and while they were building it they had as much information about the valley collected as they could. It’s a small museum, but it’s very nice. I could wish for a little more on the archeology side, but that’s me.

We also went for a small trip to scenic Idyllwild. It’s nice art community/rustic tourist trap. Very pleasant and scenic.

└ Tags: 
 Comment 

Meanwhile back at the ranch….

by on November 27, 2006 at 5:03 pm
Posted In: Life

Well, I’ve been meaning to make various posts, and not doing it. Need to get over that. ^_^

Anyway, for those of you who don’t already know, I’m on vacation this week. I’m actually visiting my parents (something I don’t get a chance to do nearly as often as I’d like. It’s a bit of a working vacation, as I get to fix various computer problems around the house. Thankfully, that isn’t my day job, so it’s still something different. Number one problem was getting broadband (DSL) up and running and fixing my dad’s computer after it had been smited by one or more viruses.

The problem was that most of the things I wanted to do to work on the latter required me to be online. Being online wanted me to activate the Verizon account through Internet Explorer, which was not functioning.

…

I eventually did a non-destructive restore that certainly made things better. But IE was still wanting to bomb out after a little bit on the Verizon page (instead of not starting at all…). After a fairly frustrating half-day, I finally decided to pull out my trump card for getting online. My perfectly functional computer, which I brought with me.

We had gotten a wired/wireless router to serve the house. It warned of going through the CD before hooking it up, to the point of having a big yellow label over all the ports warning you to use the CD. So, I figured, it was going to want to look up and save some information about the internet connection before you insert it into the loop. Set up with just the broadband modem.

That worked well. IE would get hijacked to Verizon (sometimes; sometimes it would just give me a 404), for setting up the account. Well, the phone is through them also, so there’s already an account with them. When it said the proposed user name for this account was taken, I thought it might be because of that. So I tried using the pre-existing login and password, which it said didn’t match. So: tech-support call: unsatisfying, in part due to fixation on, and confusion over the connection, “Are you using a router?”, “No, but I will be,” “Let me transfer you to the router manufacturer’s tech support.”

…

Well, to clear that up, and because we were getting a signal, I decided to cut the “no but soon” out of the equation. So, insert the CD, which tells me, in excruciating detail how to insert the router into the loop. That is, all the physical re-arrangement of cables. No, ‘let me see what your connection is like’, no ‘would you like to set security on the wireless access’ (still need to do that -_-; ). They could have just put all the diagrams (nice ones), and text on a 8×5 card (in large type), and saved me worry, and them expense (or not, maybe pressing a CD is cheaper than paper now…). I appreciate that they make sure the knowledgeless will be told what to do, but that’s not the manner to do it in.

And back to Verizon. The guy kept derailing about the modem and the connection. Obviously the source of most calls, but he refused to get a clue no matter how big a verbal bludgeon I used about the nature of the problem. And he’d occasionally go off about the ‘replacement modem’ we’d gotten after the first one failed (not true, this was the first one). At the end of the call, I finally asked what I had come to suspect over the course of the conversation, “Am I correct that a login to pay a bill online has no relationship to a login for the broadband service?” “Yes.” Well, that solved that problem; pity he was incapable of bringing that up himself, despite repeated mentions of the fact that I was trying to use the pre-existing phone service login.

After that, things went smoothly (other than forcibly installing some software to my computer to change my IE preferences; at least it isn’t a program I actually use…).

So, D-Link: A-; Verizon: D-. (At least I had no hold time on tech support….)

Now I’m working on getting my mom’s computer up long enough to transfer things to a new laptop she got. (The drive is obviously going fast. Loads of new bad sectors on boot up.) My dad’s computer is actually now pretty well behaved. It looks like the restore actually took. There’s still some worrisome problems, and I’m trying to decide whether to evacuate the data files and do a full restore….

In other news, me and my dad have had fun with a partial game of A Victory Lost, and I’ve hooked him on Age of Wonders II. Still need to get him set up for Vassal. ^_^

└ Tags: 
 Comment 

Probing the Cluster

by on November 5, 2006 at 7:56 pm
Posted In: SFB

Finally got to have a game with and again after way too long. We played a general SFB scenario, Probing the WYN Cluster, where one of the surrounding major powers sends in a fleet and the WYNs try to beat it off before it recovers from the effects of the energy zone surrounding the cluster. Patch played the WYNs, me and Mark took a Klingon force in.

A very odd battle. The WYNs are decively outgunned, but the invading force is very much hamstrung. Warp power is halved for several turns, and there’s only a 1/3 chance of being able to effectively fire when you want to (with three chances during the turn). Some untimely rolls can really muck up a plan. It leads to a style of play that is very unusual for SFB.

It still being Y148 in our game universe, Patch got a pair of ‘Auxiliary Cruisers’ (converted freighters), a Klingon G2 gunboat (captured and converted by the WYN – it has an extra drone rack and slightly more solid shields than the ‘stock’ version), and a Lyran DD (also captured and converted – its their biggest ship in Y148 – it has extra power and double the disruptors of the normal version). The Klingons brought in six ships, a D7C (a command/improved version of the standard battlecruiser, and one of the best ships in space in Y148), a D5 (really ‘LD5’, a light cruiser that the Klingons only built seven of), an entire F5 squadron (three frigates, one of which is an improved ‘command’ version), and an E4. Mark took the F5 squadron, and I took the other three.

The first turn went pretty smoothly for the Klingons. We stayed together at speed 15 (which was really pushing it) and crippled one of the AxCs while taking light damage to the E4.

The second turn was another story. First of all, speed had to slow to 9 (which was still pushing it while recharging batteries and phasers), and four of our ships never managed a lock on for the entire turn. Thankfully, the two that could fire effectively were the largest two, the D7C and D5. I pressed the attack while the F5 squadron turned off to hunt shuttles, the KG2 and head towards the victory exit area. The D7C showed its worth by ADDing its way through the KG2’s mini-drone wave while it and the D5 put the hurt on the LDD. Partially, anyway. It lost a couple shields and started taking internals. Lack of power naturally kept me from being able to do a disruptor volley that would have the normal expected result of a cruiser firing on a destroyer. In return, the D5 lost the #1 shield and gave up a fair number of internals. Like the LDD, not happy, but still something to pay attention to. The D7C locked a range two tractor on the LDD, which meant it kept sensor lock on to it long enough to ram it into a drone and eliminate another shield. After a token effort, it dropped it at the end of the turn.

So turn three started with the power situation even worse. The unhurt ships were no better off, and the hurt ones (the D5 and the E4, which had taken a bit more damage) had to slow down to 6, and still weren’t doing half of what they needed. Luck with sensor lock ons was only slightly better than the turn before, with the D7C and two of the F5s managing lock ons at various points during the turn. The E4 tried to get away from the main action, get down shields away from nearby enemies and ended up hunting the KG2. Sadly, longer-range firepower still hurt, and it failed all three lock-on attempts, which doomed it (boom). However, by the end of the turn, Patch was decided that enough was enough, and disengaged to preserve his force, rather than deal with Klingons that now had a 50% chance of getting a lock on. As we were still nearly immobile (in SFB terms), it was pretty obvious that he was going to get away from us without trouble.

The wrinkle in this is that the scenario uses Standard Victory Conditions, which means that we had to fight against the disparity in BPV to make up the win. We had gotten a fair amount of the way there, especially with the bonus we get for being able to get into the cluster, but not enough. Points-wise, it’s still a Tactical victory for Patch.

It’s certainly an interesting scenario, and I’d like to play it again in few more (game) years, when the WYN start getting some Orion designs. An interesting side effect is that the first couple warp hits on attacking ships don’t hurt much – it’s just half a point of power per hit anyway. Once past the hull, and the impulse and APR hits come in, its very different. That’s where most of the discretionary power is coming from.

Anyway, we’re planning another get together in early December, and we’re going to try out Soldier Kings. Should be interesting.

└ Tags: ,
 Comment