Nutshell

So you may have noticed, I haven't had much to say here in the last few years.  So the brief overview of my geeky life:  I've stopped playing WoW, I've resumed playing City of Heroes, I've obtained a Wii (but I don't use it very much), I still enjoy tabletop RPGs, I plan on running a new BESM campaign soon, I got a new computer, I changed the OS on my old computer to a Linux distro (Linux Mint, plus dual-booting my main computer to Kubuntu alongside the Windows 7 it came with), I'm still watching anime (but not as much as I used to), I've rediscovered my love of Doctor Who, and I'm currently engaged in a game of chess over Facebook.   For any who care less about my geeky hobbies, but may be curious about my personal life in rough chronological order:  I left Onvoy, I moved from Morris to the Twin Cities, my father died (October 19, 2008), I floundered around a bit working some jobs that weren't very good fits for me,  my roommate moved to Vermont, I paid off my car, I became unemployed, I remained unemployed for far too long, and most recently (as in this week) I started a new job that I am extremely excited about.

So that's been my last three years or so in a nutshell.

Now to keep me honest, the breakdown of the Facebook chess match with my friend Joel:

             Me                   Joel
             White               Black

 1.         e4                    e5
 2.         Nf3                  Nc6
 3.         Bb5                 Bc5        (Ruy Lopez, countered by the classical (Cordel) defense)
 4.         c3                   Nf6
 5.         d4                   exd4
 6.         e5                   Ne4
 7.         O-O                dxc3
 8.         bxc3               d5
 9.         Nd4                O-O
10.        Nxc6               bxc6
11.        Bxc6               ba6
12.        Qxd5              . . .

I leave you with an amusing video found on CollegeHumor (the ending veers into NSFW territory YMMV):

What city and state please?

I find, that for me at least, it is the little things that build up over time that prove to be the most frustrating aspects of my job. Were I to enumerate the behavior of customers that really gets to me (relax beyond this one particular example, I'm not going to do such a silly thing) I'd have a list of a thousand different little insignificant peculiarities of human nature. I cannot think of a single thing that would make this hypothetical list that the majority of people who have never worked in a customer service related job (especially one conducted primarily over the phone) would not dismiss as laughably trivial.

Truthfully they wouldn't be wrong, taken out of context, in isolation, not one of these behaviors would rise above the level of minor annoyance. But when you start talking about hundreds of calls a day, five days a week, it doesn't take long for even a small percentage of calls to build up from hundreds of little irritants into one frequently encountered major annoyance. Informal chats with my coworkers lead me to believe I'm not alone in these feelings. Everyone of us has a slightly different list of things that annoys (or in a few select, and extreme cases angers) us, but the impetus for this post is a pretty universal source of aggravation (at least I believe it is among my coworkers).

Broadly defined the most common customer behavior that is guaranteed to cause me irritation is not listening. The specific example as seen in the title of this post is the directory assistance customer responding with anything but a logical answer to the question, "What city and state please?" The most common "incorrect" response to this question is the customer's desired search; I ask for city and state, and my customer responds with John Doe, or Random Business, Inc. I've lost count of the number of my coworkers who at one point in their career have mused, "just once I'd like to ask a customer what state the town of John Doe is in." There are variations to this namely answering half the question and giving either just the city or just the state as an answer. If the customer's desired listing is uncommon enough, a state will often be sufficient, on the other hand a customer looking for something like "Robert Smith" is probably going to need to provide a bit more information before a successful search can be performed.

I suspect with the other side of the coin, giving only the city, often has more to do with customers assuming the operator is located in the same state (if not the same city) as themselves and/or in the case of larger cities the customers frequently just assume the operator will know the correct state. In a case like Seattle that works out fine, the only Seattle in the United States is the one in Washington (or another example the only place in the US you'll find a San Francisco is in California). Consider however that nine different states can lay claim to a Boston, Phoenix can be found in five, there are eleven different states with a city named Dallas, seven different states have a Manhattan, and three different states have a Milwaukee (and if you count Milwaukie, OR you can bump that up to four). I could easily continue but I trust my point is clear. A note for the curious I'm basing these numbers solely off what gets recognized as a city in the directory assistance database used by my employer. A cursory search of Wikipedia gives slightly different results.

The only real cost of this behavior is the inefficiency being forced to repeat a question to a customer causes. And while those few seconds add up after a month or even a day into a not insignificant amount of time I could have spent helping an additional customer, for the offending customer the direct effect is minimal (although enough prior customers engaging in such behavior can contribute to the amount of time my current customer spent waiting for me to answer). Well that and possibly my sanity, but I question the sanity of basically anybody working for even a moderately large corporation. Alright enough complaining about unchangeable realities of my job. I now return this blog to its normal state of me ignoring the ever increasing amount of anime I've been meaning to talk about.

A Second Confession About My Job

Every time I look up a name that happens to be the same as a character from a comic book, I have to fight off the desire to do a dance of joy right on the spot. Tonight I looked up Jimmy Olsen.

I am a very big geek.

A Confession About My Job

Every time I have somebody ask me to find a number for, or I overhear some operator looking for the last name of Underhill, I have to really struggle not to suggest they try looking for the name Baggins instead.

I am a very big geek.

A few topics with nothing to do with each other

I'm going to start this post out with an accusation (and a wild accusation at that, which really is the best kind). I'm currently ill, and I completely blame my friend Paul for this fact. Allow me to present my reasoning: Saturday I felt fine, Saturday night I talked to Paul, Paul complained about having the flu, and Sunday morning I woke up sick. The kicker here is I spoke to Paul via WoW. That's right my fiendishly clever "friend" used his obviously demonically granted knowledge of the intricate series of tubes that comprise the Internet to find a way to use it to transmit a biological virus to me.

Well played Paul, well played. The next time I'm GM my retribution will be fierce, but not immediate. After all we all know that old Klingon proverb about revenge.

All joking aside, I actually do have a cold, although it's origin is almost certainly my place of employment (and serves as pretty compelling proof that I'm not washing my hands enough while I'm there). However the truth is nowhere near as amusing as my little hypothetical explanation of my illness. Ponder for a moment the havoc that would be caused if biological viruses and bacteria could actually be spread over the Internet. I find the idea both fascinating, and terrifying. Ready for it to be worse? Add to your consideration this common (and more often true than many would like to admit) little statement, "the Internet is for porn." If you care to dispute that, I direct your arguments to Avenue Q.

Rapidly shifting gears this last Friday I and my whole office received a depressing bit of news. I've talked about my work situation with friends and family, but I've never posted anything here, but back in November my company was purchased by another company. Aside from getting a new insurance provider, and a new 401(k) manager things didn't really change too drastically for my call center. I understand the buyout process was significantly more stressful for the people working at our corporate office in Minneapolis, and a number of people there did end up loosing their jobs, but my office was spared most of the stress and all of the layoffs. That was until this last Friday. A coworker of mine, a very nice lady, got the news that her position was being terminated. She took it pretty hard, and really we all did here. It's not like she was being fired for cause, she just had the bad luck of working a position that after the buyout, merger, and ultimate restructuring of my company was no longer needed.

To finish things off of a completely different (and happy) note. Episodes 4 and 5 of The Guild have been out for a while now. If you haven't already seen them, for shame, and enjoy.

Because I’ve apparently mistaken my blog for Twitter

As I sit here and admire my (and my coworkers’) handiwork I have to reflect that nothing says “competent professional” quite like a computer held together with packing tape (and just to be safe a fair amount of black electrical tape). If I ever figure out how to move pictures from my cell phone to a computer I’ll be sure to show you. . .

Playground Fun Now Coming to an Office Near You

I had planned on posting about something today. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to talk about but it was probably going to be either WoW (because both Chipple and Cominius are over 40 and I have pictures of them on their mounts), or BESM (because we gamed again on Labor Day). Instead you are getting a rare post about work.

This morning I took a call that has to rank in my top ten most ridiculous calls I’ve ever handled. I’ve mentioned before (last September in fact) that one of the things my company does is provide an after hours repair service for various telephone and cable companies. In general these companies are all pretty small (as compared to a Qwest or AT&T) and generally have a pretty limited number of exchanges that they serve. Now with the advent of local number portability things aren’t completely as cut and dry as all that, but for the most part if a caller’s exchange isn’t on the list provided to me by the phone company s/he is trying to call it is a pretty safe bet s/he is calling the wrong phone company.

So this morning I got a call from John Customer calling Fake Name Telephone Company (henceforth I’ll be calling it FNT). He told me he had no dial tone, and gave me the phone number and as soon as I heard it I knew two things, the city and state he was calling from (and FNT does indeed have customers there), and that he probably didn’t get telephone service from FNT (because his exchange was XYY instead of XYZ). Still with number portability it is possible he was a FNT customer (he would be the first one I’ve ever had for that company in that city with that exchange, but that doesn’t guarantee he was wrong), so I asked the all important “cover-my-company’s-butt” question, “and you get this phone service through FNT?” He answered yes, so I moved on. After gathering up all the relevant information and ending the call, I called up the on call technician for FNT and told him what I had. The tech responded with, “Yeah, he’s not our customer, but give me the information and I’ll check it out to be sure.”

About 30 minutes later I get second call from John Customer. He told me that he’d reported no dial tone a little bit earlier, and a tech had called him back, but the tech told him he wasn’t a customer of FNT, and John Customer knows he is a customer of FNT. That’s right John Customer didn’t believe the tech, and despite not being found by the tech on the FNT customer rolls, he knows he’s a customer. I did a quick run down in my head of my options at this point. I could try and convince the caller that no he probably isn’t a customer of FNT, I could call the tech back as say guess what that caller is back and he says he is too a customer of FNT, or I could try and slam by head through my computer’s monitor. I opted to call the tech back. I offer up the fact a reached his answering machine as proof of a benevolent God.

I, of course, made it sound as professional as I could, but the message I left on the tech’s machine still boiled down to, “am too!” John Customer called back a third time, no doubt to say, “am too plus infinity*,” but blessedly he was interrupted by the tech calling him back. Either the tech had discovered he was in fact wrong, or he was able to convince John Customer that he really wasn’t a customer of FNT, but in any event that ended the whole ridiculous exchange.

I cannot resist making this analogy, even though there is only one known reader of this blog who will fully understand and appreciate it, so Dan this is for you. This call was like Staghmar and Carthris having one of their “No U!” fights, but with private messages instead of in /gchat and naturally one of them would have to use me as an intermediary. So basically it would start with Stag sending Chipple a PM saying tell Carthris, “NO U!” I would send Carthris a PM saying, “Stag says no u.” Carthris would reply to Stag with a hardy, “NO U!” Staghmar would come back to Chipple. . . I think you get the picture. And sadly in the exchange this morning there was no Zilpah around to fop or /gkick the involved parties.

*He might also have been calling back to say, “am too, I’m rubber and you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off of me, and sticks to you!” In actuality he was probably calling back to say, “Hey the tech hasn’t called me back, and I want my phone fixed!” However I think my first two guesses are much more fun.

I leave you with this completely unrelated video that shows German women can be a little weird (but really I don't think weirdness knows either gender or international boundaries). There is nothing inherent to this video identifying the performers as German, but for further information about Lynne & Tessa try here, or here.

I guess the BESM campaign gets its turn

Consider this a fair warning. A role-player and GM is about to talk about his campaign.

I stole the setting for my BESM campaign (a year old this month) from the comic book The Path (written by Ron Marz, penciled by Bart Sears) published by defunct CrossGen Comics. The comic takes place in the world of Han-Jinn in the feudal Japanese-esque island nation of Nayado. The comic revolves around a monk named Obo-san and his companions a female samurai named Aiko, and Wulf a foreign sailor (basically a Viking) swept onto Nayado’s shores by a storm. Obo-san has a lot on his plate: his Emperor starts the comic insane and quickly becomes a demon animated corpse, his country keeps getting invaded by Shinacea (think ancient China), his brother was killed by the gods, both his Emperor and the Emperor of Shinacea want the “weapon of heaven” left behind by the god that killed his brother, and Obo-san has come to the conclusion that the only way to save Nayado is to overthrow its Emperor. If you can find the two trade paperbacks containing this story I highly recommend picking them up.

I made a number of changes to the setting. I didn’t much care for the name Todosi (Obo-san’s dead brother) so I renamed him Todosai (much better sounding IMHO). I also didn’t really care for Shinacea, so I renamed that country Li Lung. Not wanting to have to come up with a detailed account of what happened after last events depicted in the comic (Obo-san using the weapon of heaven to defeat Shinacea’s second invasion of Nayado, and then deciding to overthrow his Emperor) I decided to set my campaign about 120 years after the events of the comic. The gist of the post-comic events were Obo-san succeeds at overthrowing the Emperor, which results in further civil war as the various clans try to become the next Emperor. Obo-san decides to end the civil war by placing the late Emperor’s only surviving son on the thrown (I’m pretty sure there is a passing reference in the comics indicating the Emperor has no heirs, but it isn’t like I hadn’t already changed some details). He succeeds at doing this, but the political power of the restored Emperor is sharply curtailed, with the real power resting in the hands of Obo-san as Nayado’s first Shogun. To deal with the weapon of heaven, Obo-san breaks it up into pieces and hides them throughout Nayado. Next I married off all the main characters and chronicled 120 years worth of descendants to give me an idea of the current political climate in Nayado. Finally I decided to turn Obo-san into a Buddha like figure. I did end up downplaying and nearly completely eliminating Obo-san’s quest to show that the gods of Nayado were fakes.

With all this decided I created a time line detailing the major events of Nayado stretching from the founding of the first imperial dynasty, through the events of the comic, and beyond until the start of the campaign. I also started thinking about how to filter this setting to make it an anime style campaign, and not a fantasy campaign using an oriental setting. The fact I was planning on using BESM for my game system meant a lot of this work was already done for me. But in order to get my players in the right frame-of-mind I started thinking about what anime had inspired me to want to run this campaign, and what type of characters were found in them. InuYasha and Fushigi Yūgi proved to be the two main influences so I informed my players that demons, half-demons, and dimension traveling high school children were all viable character types. My players didn’t disappoint. Paul decided to go with a wolf hengeyōkai who was attached to one of the major samurai families (actually the family descended from Wulf). Matt chose to go with the dimension traveling student route, and I decided to make him a descendant of Obo-san. Dan (who joined the campaign a bit latter on) opted to play a samurai from one of the clans that Paul’s and Matt’s characters had recently helped (given his character’s skills with stealth it would seem he’s got a bit of ninja in him as well). Rounding out the party are two NPCs. One is a cursed exorcist named Daigyo who pretty much owes his existence to the character of Miroku from InuYasha. The other NPC is a kitsune named Tomomeko who is pretty much a copy of a NPC kitsune in a BESM campaign Matt and I played in run by our friend Tim (who was last mentioned in this blog for all the anime he showed me).

At its heart this campaign is about the characters traveling around Nayado reassembling the weapon of heaven, but a fair number of side quests have popped up. Originally this campaign should have lasted seven sessions: five sessions to get each of the five pieces of the weapon of heaven, one send-the-party-back-to-the-real-world session to break up the collecting the pieces sessions, and a final confrontation with the villain session. When Dan joined the campaign the party had already obtained 3 pieces of the weapon of heaven, and had the back-in-the-real-world session. Because I didn’t want him to go through the trouble of making a new character for just three sessions, and because I was having way more fun running the campaign then I’d had GMing in awhile, I slowed down the pace and started introducing the side quests.

A few other updates. . .

You may be wondering just what is up with all these updates? It’s actually due to a unique situation at work. I’ve been working evening shifts since Monday, and since Monday we’ve been having a hardware problem, that while it doesn’t really impact our customers, it does leave me with long periods of time during my shift were I really cannot do anything other then watch the operators work. So I’ve been filling that time with writing posts for this blog. They are getting the hardware issues sorted out, so expect this blog to return to its regular irregular status soon (if not tomorrow then Friday).

I’ve watched another five episodes of Hunter × Hunter. That just means another 52 to go plus three OVA series with another 30 episodes between them. I'm just saying it may be awhile before I have too much to say about this one yet. I’ve been introduced to the four main protagonists Gon, Leorio, Kurapika, and Killua. I’ve also been introduced to a rather interesting character named Hisoka who seems like he’ll be a recurring antagonist.

Finally I leave you with this random picture that just amuses me to no end. . .

Another first, if a dubious one

Man am I hungry. Actually while that statement is true as I type it, by the time I get around to posting this it will likely no longer be the case, as I am cooking spaghetti as I type to rectify that vary situation. However until I actually eat that spaghetti the statement stands, “man am I hungry.” I am not surprised that I am hungry, because I always get hungry when I go out drinking. I went out drinking because today one of my coworkers got married. My immediate supervisor, in fact, and since the wedding dance was held within walking distance of my house, and I wasn’t working, and she invited everyone at work who was interested, it seemed like a good idea to go. So this marks another first for this blog; I’m posting while tipsy. I’m at that lovely state where I’ve had just enough to drink, that I feel very good, but not so much that I’m going to do anything really stupid. I know this because as I was walking home I was drunk enough to think driving to Alexandria to go eat at Perkins sounded really good, but not so drunk that I didn’t immediately veto the idea as being pretty stupid (and let us not forget unsafe).

I had quite a bit of fun. This evening reminded me that I should go out more and make an effort to be more social. No offense to the people I regularly get together with for gaming, since that is in fact me going out and being social, but in addition to that I should go out and be more social in situations where there are strangers, and women present. The evening really brought home for me the fact that I have now officially been single for far too long. In what would have been an unlike me fashion I very nearly made an attempt to do something about that tonight. One of the bartenders there was very cute, and I had actually convinced myself to ask her for her phone number when alas I noticed the engagement ring. I take some solace in the fact I noticed the ring before asking her for her number, as opposed to after, but never the less but for that ring I would have taken a very big step tonight regardless of the outcome.

I did somewhat surprise myself by actually dancing at this wedding dance, which is more then I did at the wedding dances of my last two cousins who got married. I would go so far as to say I haven’t danced this much, at least this much in public, since my college days, and even then I only actually danced after I had consumed enough alcohol that I didn’t care that I was dancing. I cannot say that was the case this evening, I had only finished one drink when I started dancing tonight. I can only say that apparently when your other supervisor (as opposed to my immediate supervisor who was the bride) whom you have a small crush on suggests you join her on the dance floor your only correct answer is yes. Before anyone gets any ideas about there even being a slight possibility of an office romance in my future let me quash those thoughts by saying she’s a married woman. For that matter even if she wasn’t a married woman, the idea of dating someone I work with strikes me as being such a bad idea, that I’d never pursue it.

Well this post does in fact guarantee I will never tell anyone I work with that I have a blog. Let me end this post by saying two things. First my spaghetti was very good. Second, and in proper MasterCard commercial fashion, rum and coke at your supervisor’s wedding dance: $2.50. Being on the dance floor at the same time as your call center manager and dancing to “Baby Got Back” with her: priceless.

It was bound to come to this

When I started this blog there was one particular occurrence I was dreading. That moment has finally come. Something happened today at work that made me stop and think to myself this will make a great blog entry. And yes I’m going to post about it.

This does give me an excellent opportunity to actually write a bit about what it is I do. I debated for awhile whether or not I’d actually mention the name of the company I work for, and in the end I decided no I wouldn’t. It’s not that it is any great secret, I’m happy to tell people I know what company I work for, but given the possibility that total strangers may actually read this post (or people connected to the companies involved in what I’m going to relay) I’d rather not make identifying the players involved in anyway easy.

I work for a telecommunications company, that does an awful lot of different things relating to information technology. I, in fact, have only a vague idea of all that they do beyond my immediate (and in the scheme of things rather small) division known as Operator Services. Their corporate offices are located in Minneapolis, MN (technically I think they are in a suburb). My own little corner is a call center located in rural Minnesota near the town of Morris (where I live). I work at one of two call centers they run (the other also being located in rural Minnesota).

The first thing people tend to think when they hear call center is telemarketing. We are not, repeat not, telemarketers. We do not cold call people and try to sell them things. We are what is known as an inbound call center, basically meaning people call us. And we do basically what the name of our division says we provide operator services. Our direct customers are telephone companies (a mixture of mostly small CLECs, and ILECs) around 300 in number spread out mainly through Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota (but also Arizona, Oregon, Utah, Washington, California, and probably a few states I’m not thinking of). The two main things we do are provide directory assistance, and toll call processing (the aforementioned operator services). What this all boils down to is when customers of one of the telephone companies we serve pick up their phones and dial either 0 (or 0 + (area code) + 7 digit number) or 411 (or 1+(area code)+555+1212) they come one of the two call centers my company operates. From there the operators at the call centers either provides assistance in placing calls for the people who dialed 0, or look up a listing for the people who dialed DA.

That is the main thing (but not the only thing) my call center does. I find my job is mostly clearly described as a shift supervisor. While I am on duty I am responsible for assisting the operators with difficult calls (or callers), managing the current staffing level (which can involve taking calls myself if needed, or getting extra operators to come in if needed, or sending operators home early if they aren’t needed), and generally doing what ever needs to be done to get the center through the day. I am also responsible for ensuring the operators both know how to process the different types of calls, and that they are correctly processing the calls they receive. My actual job title is not in fact supervisor, but Lead Customer Contact Representative, and generally in house my position is informally referred to as In Charge (I guess as in my position is in charge of the floor). However if a caller asks to speak to the supervisor of one of my operators I’m the guy that gets the call (assuming I’m on duty otherwise it goes to one of the two other people who also hold my position in the call center).

So that is the crux of what I do. Now back to the whole reason for this post. Another service my call center provides is what we call After Hour Repair Service. Again our direct customers are other companies (mainly telephone and cable providers) and while they are closed if their customers are having a repair issue with their service (such as having no dial tone on their phone line) they can call in and speak to us, and we’ll take a repair report and get their problem reported to the company in question (and if needed call out a tech for repair). Most of these companies have us fax a copy of the repair ticket we create to their business office, but a few of the companies instead have us e-mail them a copy of the ticket. Now of the companies that have us e-mail them a ticket a smaller subset has us e-mail the ticket to multiple people inside their company, and of that group a even smaller subset sometimes replies to the e-mail. These replies are usually from the technicians looking into the problem, and almost always directed towards the other members of their company. I suspect they either forget that my company will also receive the message (since we are the ones who sent out the original e-mail), or more likely they just don’t care. I say I think they just don’t care because generally the reply we receive is a few words about how the problem was resolved along the lines of, “replaced cable box service restored.”

Today however when I arrived at work and checked my e-mail I found a real gem, and I quote:

"As far as I can tell, the profile he is using is borked, I couldn't find the main profile to change it globally though, so I changed his line directly to bar premium and operator, but allow everything else which is how I think the voip should be set up. I didn't call him to let him know its fixed though since this is the "data" guy and didn't want to get into an hour long conversation about dhp dll subinfrastructure disabling to increase the throughput of his bearshare filesharing or something like that… again. Also, Im assuming he was told to expect a reply Monday, so if he tries it, it should work now, and if not, who the hell makes calls out of the country? C'mon ppl, write a letter, send an email, it's probably O'Dark O'clock over there, let em sleep. Unless its Canada of course, and unless you have Moose relatives, there ain't much reason to call up there."

They only response I could think of that was appropriate was OMG and LOL. And lol I certainly did.


A few things in brief:

I enjoyed the two new anime on Adult Swim this last Saturday. Of the two I found the first episode of Trinity Blood more interesting, but I found Bleach to be cute I guess is as good a word as any. I look forward to seeing more of both. Sticking with anime I watched another episode of The Prince of Tennis on Toonami Jetstream, and still find it to be an enjoyable little diversion. I actually watched the Saiyuki movie. I liked it, really it was just like a long filler episode, and has no real effect on the ongoing plot, but it was fun. I still haven’t watched disk 5 of Tenjho Tenge, which I guess says something about my opinion of the series. I received the first disk of Saiyuki Reload in the mail at the end of last week from my anime rental service, and I look forward to watching that soon.

Going with TV as a theme (and anime) I’m considering actually canceling my cable service, because aside from Adult Swim on Saturday I don’t watch TV any more. Of course I really like watching Adult Swim on Saturdays, so I’m not sure where that leaves me.

Okay that HeroClix thing I was going to talk about. . . Back in August about the same time I received my computer I also received a Venom figure from WizKids. This figure is their send away figure for their Marvel (tm) HeroClix Sinister set. Basically each time WizKids releases a new HeroClix set if you buy what they call a brick (12 booster packs) you can fill out a form, send in the receipt, the 12 proofs-of-purchase, and pay shipping and handling and in return WizKids will send you a limited edition figure from the set that you cannot get any other way (well not directly anyway). This was all fine and dandy, and I was quite happy until near the end of August I received a letter from WizKids that said at the end of July some of the credit card information relating to certain orders of this particular promotion were compromised. The letter goes on to say the incident was quickly discovered, and there is an ongoing police investigation. The letter advises me to pay close attention to my credit card balance, and tells how to contact the police detective running the investigation if I see any suspicious activity on my card. I have been paying close attention to my credit card, and I’m happy to say there has been no suspicious activity on it, but the whole situation just makes you want to say, and I'm quoting an ex-girlfriend here, “Nerrr.”

I amused myself this weekend by ripping all of my Beatles CDs, and most of my jazz CDs onto my computer (okay so I amused myself for at most 45 minutes doing this since it takes like 3 minutes to upload a CD onto iTunes). I now have 135 Beatles songs on my computer (6.2 hours worth). I have 120 jazz songs (10.7 hours) on my computer, but I haven’t finished ripping all of my jazz CDs yet. I have 192 songs coming from anime soundtracks (10.9 hours) I have 425 songs (24 hours worth) on my computer I haven’t listened to yet. Of course that just means I haven’t listened to it in iTunes, not that I have never listened to those particular songs. In total my music library at this time has 1059 songs (2.5 days worth of music). I’ve come to realize iTunes is like the ultimate mixed tape.

City of Heroes continues to be enjoyable, and a major reason I’m not watching much TV. At this point it is probably safe to say I could devote an entire post to the game. The likelihood of me buying City of Villains is pretty high. Which means the likely hood I’m going to continue playing the game for a while is also pretty high. That of course means I’m unlikely to get into World of Warcraft anytime soon, although it remains a game I am quite interested in. That is a shame, because I have several friends who play World of Warcraft, and only one (that I know of) that plays City of Heroes. And while logging onto City of Heroes by myself is fun, logging on at the same time as my friend is a great deal more fun, so having a lot more friends I could play with is a major attraction for World of Warcraft.