October 31, 2007

 

 

Because that's how I roll.

Official Off-Time: Day One

1. Woke up half an hour after I normally get to work.

2. Walked my kid to the bus.

3. More coffee (big manly mug).

4. Read geeky news on the interwebz.

5. Posted an in-character entry on the Revamped guild Wiki page.

6. Visited the Apple store online to gaze upon the 24" iMac in wonder at its total lack of Windows Vista.

7. Logged into World of Warcraft to do my daily quests for much-needed gold.

8. Remembered that all servers are down for weekly maintenance on Tuesday mornings.

9. Back to the Apple Online store for a while. The Macbook Pro is the fastest Windows Vista laptop.  Macintosh gets bonus points for not caring if you run Vista on their laptop at all.

10. WoW servers are still down.

11. The coffee maker is empty. Vanilla Coke Zero, For The Win.

12. I attempted to play with one of the cats.

13. The cat, bitter at having been awakened, gently warns me away by opening a 4" scratch on my forearm.

14. Why are all the Band-Aids kid-sized?

15. Holy crap. I'm still bleeding. This is the fourth paper towel.

16. Stupid cat.

17. After a surly look from her, I begin to type more quietly.

18. World of Warcraft is still being "Maintained".

19. Should my shirts be organized alphabetically by color or brand? Perhaps I'll just make more coffee. Or I would were the kitchen not so damned far.

20. Lunch. We made a game of trying to find a server without a tattoo across the small of her back. I won -- And as my prize I got to stop looking.

21. Groceries. The checker seemed somehow angry with our food, repeatedly slamming each item across the bar code reader and then tossing everything down the slope to the bagging station.

22. Back home -- In which groceries were put away and more coffee was brewed.

23. We vow to better plan the awesome for tomorrow.

24. Mmmmmm . . . . iMac.

Travel

You know, it is bad enough being a man and carrying vanilla almond exfoliating scrub without being forced to stow it in a clear ziplock bag and then flail it around an airport.

My pores cry out for attention, but they generally do it very, very quietly so as not to involve anyone -- As all crying should be.

Further, why would my laptop need to be scanned at all, much less scanned apart from my shoes as though the X-Ray could somehow irradiate them and form them into some evil footwear/Windows Vista hybrid?

The poor guy transporting a USB hard drive behind me was shuttled into a little room down a dark corridor and I never saw him again.

The important part is this: I'm home. I managed (barely) to avoid speaking all the various inappropriate comments which would have certainly had me staring at the next six months from within the confines of a bamboo cage in Guantanamo Bay, did not curse the people selling 20oz bottles of Diet Coke for $1.79 each in the little gift shops, and did not shriek in frustration at hearing the same "unattended luggage will be destroyed violently" recording for the jillionth time.

In short -- Go, me!

Late but Brief

Hey! I'm completely busy trying to cram some last-minute junk in at work before I take some time off for (relatively) good behaviour (considering).

I just wanted to share a couple of things:

1. When one's manager purposely executes a file from a suspected malicious source as a way to verify that the anti-virus solution is capable of handling viruses and other nastiness released into the wild only a few hours previous, things might very well go as badly as one would suspect.

2. In at least one software package, paying an $1800 upgrade cost for the Australian Language Pack seems to have no other function than to scan documents and replace "beer" with "Fosters". I'm not kidding.

Both of these situations leave me with the only possible response as a one-shoulder shrug and a sincere, "Good luck with that."

-G

Difficile est saturam non scribere

Casual

There were certain things for which I was prepared when we converted to Judaism over the summer.

I was prepared to give up bacon and shellfish and shellfish wrapped in bacon.

I was completely on board with Temple on Friday nights instead of religious observance on Sunday mornings.

I was ready to be saddened when some neo-nazi high school social misfits spray paint swastikas on everything they can reach and outraged when organized zealots try to push the Jews out of Israel -- These last two are nothing new at all, really.

I was totally unprepared for casual bigotry.  

So I quit my new guild in World of Warcraft, right?  The schedule was killing me and, one time, my group got actually cursed at over the Ventrilo voice server by a guy from New Zealand for just doing our freaking jobs, though his accent was cool.

Finding a new guild was pretty easy, really. I followed some friends into the one they chose. I was almost instantly in my first major dungeon raid with them, typing away on the raid chat channel and talking to them using their own Ventrilo server.

After one particularly harrowing epic boss fight, the conversation drifted towards another character in the guild, a priest, who did not heal the party as often as he could have. He was referred to as a "Jewish Healer".

Immediately, I typed "Jewish Healer? WTF?" in the raid chat channel. I got no response. Not that I expected one, really, since the group had moved on to a chaotic melee-fest with some glowing flying worm things. Evil glowing flying worm things.

I thought I caught a reference to Jew-Looting some 1337 lewts, but I was actually uncertain that I had heard it correctly and by that time it was getting pretty late so my judgement was in question.

But I let it fester anyway. That is what I do.

On Tuesday the big raid started before I got home from work, so there was no room for me to participate. I contented myself with running around one of the outdoor areas killing everything that moved and running little solo quests.

Occasionally someone in the big raid would speak out from the raid channel into the general guild chat channel and post an update.

"We just killed so-and-so and this is the loot he had . . ." type stuff.

Then, just as I was getting ready to log off Aldy the Warrior presumably did something which caused everyone to die. Another player chimed into the general guild chat with, "I demand that someone Jew-Kick Aldy or at least subtract 50,000 loot points."

I considered issuing a noble /gquit (for "Guild Quit" to voluntarily resign from a guild with the opposite /gkick for a forced resignation by another higher-ranking player) to end my association with these people. But then I decided I would first press the issue, to find out exactly what they meant and to make sure that they needed to express their bigotry openly.

"What does that mean?" I asked into the general channel. There was no response again, so I clarified.

"Please define "Jew-Kick". I've never heard that before."

Again, there was an uncomfortable silence.

I waited.

Eventually, the silence was broken when the same player replied, "A long time ago, a suggestion to /gkick a player was garbled by voice chat into something which sounded like "Jew Kick" and it kind of stuck as an inside joke."

Okay then.

Apparently, I need to be prepared for casual bigotry while simultaneously remembering that not everything should be taken personally.

That's turning out to be a lot harder than finding a decent Kosher pizza.

The Interwebz is 20/20

We recently upgraded the internet connection at home to Comcast's upper tier service. This service is defined as "Performance Plus" and includes 8Mbps down and 768kbps up.

That's pretty standard as high-end packages go, especially with cable. You can browse all you want, but putting stuff up on the internet will be substantially slower.

Comcast also has issues with P2P (like Bittorrent) and they work against that actively, going as far as putting a device in the network to simulate a disconnect request from the machines on either end. In the network security realm, this is a traditional man-in-the-middle attack and is considered (at best) as bad form.

Side note: If you want to use Bittorrent as a Comcast subscriber, set your traffic to encrypted in the client properties. The technology Comcast uses (Sandvine, apparently) doesn't do anything with encrypted traffic.

I've always hated asymmetrical traffic limitations in ISPs. If I wanted to host Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng from a server at home, I couldn't. Further, if I want to upload photos to a print processing company or even Flickr it takes far too long.

Content delivery is the basis of the new and improved web, and anyone stuck on the slow end of the pipe is at a disadvantage.

I'm hoping what I read this morning starts to change that.

Verizon is rolling out symmetrical 20Mbps up and 20Mbps down internet in a few select locations at a price that is about $5 less than we pay for our current, slower, lopsided service.

The East Coast is getting it first, but I would think that as it reaches more markets the cable and DSL providers will be forced to take another look at these policies and unleash a little more room for traffic in both directions.

I used to work at an ISP. I can tell you that there is far more bandwidth available for use than the customers ever see. When a network is put in place and before users are added to it, the available bandwidth is immediately throttled down to around 10% of capacity to allow for subscriber growth.

In this way, they can deploy internet to more and more users without major infrastructure upgrade costs. If this were not the case, there would be no way for my service to go from 1.5Mbps to 8Mbps during the course of a phone call.

Faster speeds are coming. Hopefully soon.

I have never been described as "patient", just "pretty".

It is pitch black.

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

 

More truthful words were never uttered in a video game than those, my friends.

One of the best things we brought with us on our cultural journey through the Reagan Era (after the end of Soviet Communism and leg warmers) was Zork.

There were no guild politics, no complicated loot mechanic, no server lag.

Of course, there were also no graphics, no interaction with other humans and no server. In fact, you can play the whole thing (actually a little more feature-rich version) on a single error page. If you do, try to avoid all the grue. Those things are nasty. I think.

Either way, I didn't realize how much I hated text-based adventuring until I tried looking at it through retinas burned with images of mushrooms and pointless plumbing and weird, angry, spiky, spinning turtles. "Too many words!" my brain rebels. And I agree. If I wanted words, I'd read the news instead of having it streamed to my web browser in beautifully rendered 3d majesty.

Speaking of updates, I have 3,846 Coke Reward Points burning a hole in my account. I had actually given up on ever seeing the Nintendo Wii available on the site again and decided to pick up a Nintendo DS with the intention of pulling it out of my cargo pants at every opportunity to coach my Pokemon army into global domination with cries of, "My Pokemons! Let me show you them!"

Note: Grown men sometimes play Pokemon. The latest version is more like a giant DNA experiment than a mindless series of fights between cute tiny monsters. Fortunately, there is also a series of fights between cute tiny monsters.

However, the Coke Rewards site was sold out of the DS, too. I may have a few glasses of water today in quiet rebellion.

This morning I watched Season 2, Episode 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, having completed season 1 yesterday. Through a marvel of modern technology, I'm able to watch it on my drive in to work. That guy who watches TV while driving? -- That's me.

The secret to watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer is all about having faith in Joss Whedon. Yes, they are high school students fighting evil in a small town just like Scooby Doo, but Joss Whedon makes that okay somehow. Seriously.

As a final update, Mrs. Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng is settling in to her MacBook. I've been charting the effect the machine is having. As her comfort level rises, her enjoyment of the device hugs the same curve. A separate line tracks the "Mac Smugness Factor" or MSF. Every time Windows Vista asks me if I'm sure I want to be doing the thing I'm doing on purpose, there is a spike in the MSF.

These lines will intersect eventually and she and I will stand in an empty white room to debate the benefits of both platforms. I will lose. I have no doubt.