The Move, Part I

by on December 5, 2005 at 10:26 am
Posted In: Life

Deposit: Paid
December Rent (new place): Paid
December Rent (old place): Paid
Keys: picked up and copied

Dave: Nearly moved (about one more real trip), and needs to re-assemble the component parts of his life. ^_^
Us: …still packing an insane number of boxes.

The plan is to move all the furniture this weekend. Somehow. It gets more daunting the more I think about it. Smudge will be making trips to the new place all this week with what’s been packed. We have until the 15th in the old place, so this weekend’s the only real chance we get at the big stuff.

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Email woes

by on November 30, 2005 at 9:19 am
Posted In: Life

Well, my email has been out of commission for a few days.

But that’s all fixed.

But now I can’t convince Thunderbird to *send* email, in a bizarre set of problems. I actually use our cable provider, not backbreaker to send email, so it wouldn’t even be affected by the problems. (In fact, Smudge is just fine on the same settings…)

So, Mike: To answer your question, the schedule says face-to-face SFB is set for Sat 12/17.

EDIT (12/2): Email is fixed!

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Uldaman, Again and Again

by on November 29, 2005 at 7:07 pm
Posted In: MMO

Story from a bit back, but it came up elsewhere, so you get it too. ^_^

We did a third Uldaman run a while ago. Started with me, Blanc, Blondiewood and Thermidor. Went pretty smoothly, except the mage (Thermi; lowest level character in the party), got himself splatted several times. In a pick-up group, I’d probably be annoyed with him, but I know that Thermidor Keneticus Kelvin just doesn’t know how not to be as grand, flashy, and destructive as possible. But that’s Thermi, not the player. ;^_^ This was Thermi’s second run, so we got him caught up; Dejek, rogue and third-highest level character in the guild, showed up as we went back in, and we went down to the final room of vibro-golems. That went surprisingly smoothly. It helped that the little guys were wimps; me or Dejek could almost one-shot them. Got the disks, took a fair amount of ribbing about being related to Trogs (which Dunain did not find funny; the pet, Lance, was no help: [Dunain] Lance, are you going to let them say that about me? [Lance] Mrr. <snicker>. But we were all done.

Two weeks later, in the middle of the Badlands: “You want me to go WHERE?!?”

Yeah, we missed one.

So. Surgical strike, we go in the back door, stuff the tablet in our back pockets and leave. Three characters, probably less than an hour, and a handful of deaths. There. All done in Uldaman. Again.

Since then, Malzina (my Fickle Moos character) finally got to see Ragefire Chasm, a small instance under the capital of the Orcs, while Micca [Smudge/Blanc] played bodyguard. Not bad, other than being the hate-magnet it was certainly quite a fun little run. Of course, leveling up twice (once from monsters, once from quests) didn’t hurt either.

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Moving

by on November 15, 2005 at 1:45 pm
Posted In: Life

For those who are not following Smudge‘s LJ….

A couple weeks ago, we got notice that the rent on our apartment would be going up at the end of the year. And they were trying to pressure us into a six-month lease again. So we went apartment/house hunting.

Our secret weapon? We had another friend, Dave Bryant, who was paying a bit much for the corner of a house he was occupying. So, we could look for a bigger place, and let the shared rent bring the average lower for all of us. We all know each other (Dave not only roomed with Baron at one point, but Dave regularly comes over to watch Anime with us.), so we know what we were getting into. Of course, he has his own business, so we’re looking for a place for four people and two businesses.

The househunting began.

While we had some early disappointments, it was encouraging to find a steady trickle of places that were more-or-less what we wanted, and were in our price range.

So we found a place that had it all (give or take a few square feet), and applied for a credit check. I’ve just gotten word from Smudge that we passed the check, and we now have a place to move to. It’s a corner owner’s unit in Sunnyvale. We just need to hammer out when, how and how much. By my understanding it’ll start around the beginning of December.

I’m afraid with all the money that’s going to be thrown around to do this, I’ll be lucky not to have to borrow money from somewhere, so don’t expect much (if anything) in the way of Christmas presents from me this year. Month-to-month outlay is going to get a lot better, but the short-term is horrible. I’m thinking of celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day instead. Or even celebrate Christmas by the Julian calendar (which turns it into Jan 7, 2006 Gregorian -_^), but that’s probably not enough time to have money again.

I’m also thinking of posting the new address and phone friends-locked here. It’ll be harder to loose than an email, and I might even be able to use it for ‘what’s my address again’ at some point. But if you want to see it, you have to be on my friends list, which means having a login that I can put on the list (this means YOU Mom & Dad… ^_^). Or not; I’m not sure it’s the brightest idea.

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Impressing the Natives

by on November 5, 2005 at 8:36 pm
Posted In: SFB

Well, today was another round of SFB. A three-way free-for-all generic patrol scenario. Well, not quite generic: we had a planet and moon on board for terrain. It’s interesting how something like that can focus the action, even though it doesn’t take any active part in it. Usually, the battle will go drifting off to one side or another, but in this case it keeps heading back to the area between the two bodies.

Y136

Mike James Mark
Klingon Kzinti Lyran
D6 114 CS 118 CC 143
D6 114 CS 118 DD 78
F5 72 FF 62 DD 78
Total 300 298 299

I had followed my own earlier advice and only loaded the left side disruptors, which meant that from the start my plan was to turn right (showing my left side) and try to manage some sort of decent pass… against the Lyrans, who started on that side of me. We both ended up near the moon in the last quarter of the turn. He caved in the #6 shield of a CS, I managed to tractor a DD at range two in hopes of getting good drone hits.

Alas, it was not to be, the end of the turn hit, and the 2:1 power ratio for a long-range tractor beam meant he could devote a lot more power to negative tractor than I could afford, even with a bigger ship. So I slowed down from the power I spent trying to keep it up, and he ran away from the drones. On the other hand I got a fair number of close-range shots, crippling the DD while the Lyrans pulled out of the drone-infested area. I probably should have gone with my first instinct and done a 270 turn right to pass the moon back on the same side I’d come from and present the opposite side from my down shield. Instead I went straight and then U-turned left to present the other side that way while keeping myself behind the Lyran force, which was now approaching the oncoming Klingon force.

While I showed this was a lot more ungainly than I first thought, the Lyrans and Klingons traded a couple shots but did not come to close-quarters, not doing much more than weaken both left side shields of the CC. And I received some more long-range shots into my down shield for my trouble.

The Klingons then engaged me, knocking down the #2 on the other CS and at the beginning of turn 3 volleying disruptors at the FF and mostly missing. Between turn 2 and 3, the Klingons built up a respectable drone wave which I refused to clean up and passed on to engage the Lyrans again at the end of turn 3. I probably should have used my forest of ph-3s to clean the drones and pursue the Klingons where they have shields to match my weapons (that is, almost non-existent). The Lyrans volleyed and mostly missed the FF again, but it still had to eat a full strength ESG. In return, I knocked down a shield on the CC and started doing internals there.

We had to pack it up after energy allocation on 4, but hope to continue it online. I’ve got a damaged CS, a FF that’s getting beaten up fast against Klingons who only have a couple dented shields and a Lyran force that still potent but a bit worn. I’m winning on points, but if I disengage now, it’d give them enough points to even it out. So watch updates here as I try to keep from losing it all….

An extra note, internals stayed pretty close to the the center of the chart today. We’ve had a grand total of one Torp hit and one Drone hit in all the internals so far (and I had to do that one the hard way, with the collumn F hit on 9 instead of the A hit on 3).

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