Monday, November 17, 2008

Not As Fast As I'd Like

On the week of the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, I put in over sixty hours at work, including almost 15 over the weekend.
This stage of the project involves today's scheduled upload of our raw scan results to the Department of Defense. It was intensely important that everything be fixed before that scan, because government contracts are on the line and if those go away people lose their jobs.
Next weekend, I'll be at work again doing the same thing for our Medicare environment since we have an audit starting the following Monday. Again, contracts and jobs depend on it.
Both of these environments contain impossible-to-support legacy systems which have been largely un-patched for a number of years.
In one case, the patch installer wouldn't run on the servers so we had to extract the updated files from the patch and manually put them in place on the server. We don't even know if that will make the issue go away on a scan, but we know we can have it flagged as a false positive based on file version if it comes down to it.
And the application may still run, though we hardly cared late last night.
So that takes care of last weekend and next weekend.
The following weekend I'll be at work all weekend turning off these servers forever because the project is over.
Yes. I'll be working two complete weekends on servers which will be powered off the final time on the following weekend.
I.T. Security can sometimes suck a lot.
I did have a little time to play, though, and Wrath of the Lich King is completely pretty.
Webinara ran around the snowy landscape of Northrend doing every available quest and exploring every tiny peninsula and fog-shrouded forest.
Of course, the leveling process is slow since I have been playing in short bursts.
The first character on my server to reach the new level cap of 80 did so on Saturday morning.
Webinara is still level 72.
playing is becoming a bit of a frustration because, with the new "Achievement System" every time someone in my guild does something cool I get told all about it automatically. New level? I hear about it. Awesome new dungeon completed? Yeah, I hear that too.
Meanwhile, Webinara is running around a snowy wasteland collecting ram's horns.
However, my play time has not been completely boring.
While gathering the requested horns for the Walrus people (don't ask) Webinara was attacked by a bunch of weird blue dragon things.
Not wanting to upset the fragile frozen ecosystem by killing them, Webinara chose to leave the area. Quickly.
Then, what seemed at first glance to be a gradual slope down to the beach turned out to be, in fact, a cliff.
So Webinara bravely (accidentally) leapt (plunged) to the bottom of the cliff, landing on a penguin.
But wait. This penguin was huge.
In fact, it carried the name "King Ping", and he was more than a little annoyed at Webinara's perceived attack.
While Webinara's pet gorilla went to work on the penguin, the dragon things (having navagated around the mountaintop and down the gentle slope to the beach like cowards instead of following Webinara off the cliff) caught up and continued trying to eat Webinara.
For some reason, the penguin and the dragon things died before Webinara did.
And, apparently, there was an "Achievement" connected to defeating this particular penguin.
This was announced to the guild by the computer as a "Guild First", evoking a round of congratulatory messages.
"Thanks." Webinara responded in the Guild Chat channel, "I've been tracking that penguin for hours."
Then I logged off and went to work.

1 comment:

Andrew Moore said...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But have you seen the new Trek trailer yet?