Ye gods what have I done

Last night I took Chipple into Karazhan for the first time. It was in fact my first PvE raid of any type with any character ever. While I have a long way to go before I can call myself a raider, I at least have now been on a raid. It was quite fun, and I can honestly say I'd like to do it again. I'm sure upon reading this Dan will rub his hands together and cackle in a sufficiently evil manner (or possibly mutter "excellent" in a Montgomery Burns like fashion).

Our raid consisted mostly of people who had little to no experience in Karazhan (and most of the people with much Kara experience were on alts). I guess we were a bit melee heavy as in addition to our prot warrior main tank, and feral druid off tank we had two fury warriors, and ret paladin. Chipple and another frost mage were the only ranged DPS. We had a holy priest, resto shaman, and a resto druid rounding out our healing. Our holy priest was also our only significant source of crowd control. We downed Attumen the Huntsman in one go, Moroes proved to be a much harder fight, but we were victorious on our fifth attempt (and we maintained good spirits during the attempts). We made two goes at Maiden before we reached our predetermined cut off time.

Due to circumstances and lucky drops Chipple walked out of there with two pieces of epic loot. Attumen dropped the Handwrap of Flowing Thought and I was lucky enough to win the roll for it. Moroes dropped a Nethershard Girdle and the other mage passed on it (as did the holy priest) so with no one else interested - epic number two for Chipple.

Also as tradition dictates: w00t for post 90.

I don't even know where to start with this one.

I've got no words to describe this. . .

I'm not sure if I blame Rick Astley, WoW, or just the Internet culture in general.

Oh Noez! The WoW Screenshots!!

This post could also be called Fast Mounts are Fast. Seriously getting Chipple her epic flying mount made me question how I could stand to have flown anywhere before. Not that the regular flying mount you can get at level 70 isn't very nice, because it is extremely useful, but damn is it slow. Slower, in fact, than the epic ground mount you can get at level 60, but that 3rd dimension of movement is so worth it.

As mentioned above, and as depicted in the picture I've acquired an epic flier for Chipple. A Purple Riding Nether Ray to be exact, and I love it. Well worth the grind to get the required gold (and in the case of the Nether Ray the required reputation with the Sha'tari Skyguard). Although I did cheat a little bit, I raised a bit more than 4200 gold myself, and Dan was nice enough to loan me the final 1000 gold. Thank you Dan. Thank you Dan. And did I mention thank you Dan.

Aside from the loan, the other thing that really helped me earn the required gold for the epic flier was patch 2.4. This patch raised the number of daily quests that a character can do per day from 10 to 25 (and also introduced the Isle of Quel'Danas and all the new daily quests found there), which made making money in WoW significantly easier for a level 70 character (given enough play time to actually complete these quests).

With this latest WoW accomplishment achieved, I promptly set to work rebuilding my gold reserves and purchased an epic ground mount for my hunter Steinthror. So Dan is going to have to wait for at least one more day before I start building up the money to pay him back, but since he knows where I live I doubt he's too terribly worried.

Of course now I need a new WoW goal. Well I have to pay Dan back, but that's not going to take very long. It might be time to start giving some of my alts a little love, as they did get neglected a bit while I was grinding gold to pay for my flier. And there are still plenty of factions left Chipple needs to improve her reputation with. I guess my immediate goals will probably be get her exalted with the Scryers , and raise her enchanting up to 375 (currently sitting at 335).

On a WoW related note, I recently (a month or so ago) got around to founding the vanity guild I'd been wanting to since shortly after I started playing WoW. So I leave you with a picture of Raffles, Guildmaster of <Gentleman Thief>. Anyone requiring or desiring an explanation can go here.

I can't really add much to this

I ran across this little YouTube gem on the PAA forums. I think it pretty much speaks for itself.

Well BOO! the embedding on that clip has been turned off. You can still see the cats on a tread mill by going directly to YouTube, but no fancy embedding for us. I guess I could replace the video with some other video of cat(s) on a tread mill, but I've opted for a different species playing on multiple tread mills instead. (Not that I think there are many people left on the Internet who haven't already seen this, but it is still one of my personal favorites.)

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.

To Quote Homer Simpson, "Praise Jebus."

I had no real concept of just how much I use my computer right up until it stopped working yesterday. At about 6:30pm yesterday I restarted my computer, it failed to boot up, and I was rudely greeted with the following error message:

"Windows can not start. The following file is missing or corrupted \windows\system\vgaoem.fon.

You can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows setup using the original setup CD-ROM. Select R at the first screen to start repair"

Let me just say the use of the Recovery Console is not very intuitive. I mucked around trying to figure out how to fix this until about 9pm. At that time I took a break, went and got some food, and skipped off to the campus of the local university to apply some Google-fu to my problem. The Internet didn't fail me, and when I got home at about 10:30pm I was able to quickly replace the file. And when I restarted my computer - I got a dreaded Blue Screen of Death. My particular error was:

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

At this point I probably should have just gone back to campus and looked the damn error up on the Internet, but no - I like to do things the hard way. A few hours of frustrating tinkering later I came across a repair installation option in the Windows Setup. I gave it a go, and at approximately 2:30am I restarted the computer, and wonder of wonders it successfully rebooted.

Except it wasn't finding the drivers for my video card. Well no problem, I downloaded the latest drivers from the Internet, installed them, restarted my computer, and the drivers were still not found. Still not a problem, I uninstalled the drivers, grabbed the CD-ROM that came with my video card, restarted my computer, the video card was detected, I installed the drivers from the CD-ROM, I restarted my computer, and the drivers were not found. I spent another three hours trying different variations of uninstalling, and reinstalling the drivers from both the CD-ROM, and the most recent version from the Internet, and I became quite intimate with both Windows' Device Manager, and Hardware Updater. My success was sadly limited. Eventually I got the computer to stay at the screen resolution I like, once I even got the video card to run WoW, but after every restart I was back to where I started which was namely one of the following two errors showing up for my video card in the Device Manager:

This device is not configured correctly. (Code 1)

This device cannot start. (Code 10)

I finally went to bed somewhere in the neighborhood of 5:30am. I woke up again at 9:30am, and continued my fruitless attempts at successfully reinstalling the drivers for my video card. I started contemplating trying to reinstall my old video card, I also pondered the possibility of buying a new video card, and finally my line of thought centered on trying to reinstall Windows XP. I started looking up information on what would be involved with such an undertaking, which quickly evolved into a search for how I'm going to back up the files I really don't want to loose (and cannot easily replace). This finally brought my attention to the System Restore function of Windows. This seemed like a pretty good thing to try before doing something as drastic as trying to reinstall Windows, so I gave it a go, and at 1pm exactly the process was completed, and it worked. My computer lives again, my video card functions, video files once again play on my computer, WoW successfully runs, dog chase cats, cars, and bark at mailmen, and life as I know it has returned to normal.

I repeat the words of Homer Simpson, "Praise Jebus."

Sadly Familiar Behavior

Before I delve into my latest tale of my sadly predictable behavior regarding sleep, let me set the stage a bit with some background information. The weekend of Easter (I forget if it was Saturday, Sunday, or Monday) I on Chipple crafted my final piece of the Shadow's Embrace set; which was the goal I’d been focusing all of Chipple’s attention on in WoW for more than one month. Last Tuesday patch 2.4 went live. When I got home from work, I logged onto WoW, got the patch, and like basically everybody else found almost all of my mods no longer worked. I sat in front of my computer thinking to myself, “I really don’t have anything I’m trying to do with Chipple right at this second, and I don’t want to play without my mods, and I really don’t want to spend the time to update them right now.” So I logged out of WoW, and started watching some anime.

I started off with a few episodes of Pretty Cure Max Heart, but eventually moved on to starting two new series: Rental Magica, and KimiKiss ~ Pure Rouge. Rental Magica is about the escapades of a company called Astral that rents out magicians and other magically inclined individuals to people who require some supernatural assistance. As you can probably guess from the name KimiKiss is a romance anime based on a dating simulation game. After work on Wednesday I didn’t log into WoW at all instead I continued watching mostly Rental Magica, and some KimiKiss. On Thursday I finally updated my mods, and spent some time playing around on WoW. I also finished off the final four episodes of Rental Magica. This brings us to Friday my last morning shift before having the weekend off.

A brief aside here. I’m sure I’ve said this before, or at least I’ve described my sleeping habits enough that this probably won’t surprise anybody, but I stay up later than I should when I work 6:30am - 3pm shifts. Since I get up around 5:15am I should really be going to bed at 9pm, but generally I’m up until midnight. I mention this mainly to illustrate why it isn’t terribly shocking that very nearly the first thing I did upon getting home Friday was fall asleep on my couch. I woke up somewhere in the neighborhood of 8pm, and logged onto WoW and played until a bit after Midnight. I then started watching KimiKiss. I watched four or five episodes and was through 13 of the 24 episodes. It was now somewhere around 3am I did this odd combination of going to bed, but also started burning files onto DVDs. Basically I’d start a DVD burning, and go lie down on my couch where I’d fall lightly asleep, but wake up when I heard my DVD burner open up. I’d then start another disk and repeat the process. I think I was on my third disk when I finally stayed asleep through the burner opening up.

I woke up at 10:28am. I remember this because I looked at my clock, and my first thought was, “well I guess I can’t get breakfast at McDonald's today.” I’m not really sure why that was my first thought, I’ve probably eaten breakfast at McDonald's five time in the last year, so it’s not like this is something I do on a regular basis. I goofed around on an alt on WoW until about noon, got myself some lunch, and burned a few more things onto DVDs.

At about 2:40pm I left to goto Matt’s for his BESM campaign. The actual gaming portion of the evening got started sometime after 6pm. It was a really good session (not that any of them have been bad sessions, I’ve enjoyed all of them, but this one was especially fun); Dan, Paul, and I each had one really awesome idea during the course of the evening. Another aside here this time to talk about the BESM campaign. In Matt’s chaos campaign we’ve dubbed the current world we’re running around in the anime world, and we’ve picked up a magical girl NPC (which is fitting since we got a cyber-enhanced troll NPC from the Shadowrun world, and a halfling cleric NPC from the D&D world). Matt has also tossed in a few references to my last BESM campaign. Namely Obo, and the bag of never ending homework.

Originally Obo was the main character of the comic The Path, which is the comic whose setting I used for my last BESM campaign (and promptly advanced the timeline 150 years, and altered the tone well beyond anything recognizable in the original comic). My Obo started out as a Buddha like figure, but evolved into a GM device for inserting comic relief, plot hooks, and useful bits of information. Every time the PCs encountered him he was in a different guise - the head of a monastery once, a cashier another time, etc.. He was also responsible for giving Matt’s character the bag of never ending homework. Matt’s character was a high school student, and it only seemed fitting that he should have to continue his studies while running around a fantasy world collecting magical artifacts. The name is a bit of a misnomer as the bag didn’t create an endless supply of homework, but was really just an inter-dimensional link between where ever Matt’s character was at, and his school back on “earth.” Obo arranged for his class work and homework to be delivered through it, and returned to the school once Matt’s character placed the completed work back in the bag. Matt must have liked the idea, as he inflicted it upon the magical girl NPC.

The basic details of the current plot in Matt’s campaign would be our group of inter-dimensional travelers had stumbled across something utterly ancient, and alien beyond human understating buried in Antarctica on the anime world (from Matt’s descriptions of it I keep picturing a huge robotic looking thing - 20 stories tall if I recall correctly, but the theme and tone he is clearly, and successfully, portraying is Lovecraftian in nature). We were trying to get it dug out of the ice, without waking it up, and moved to the nearby inter-dimensional portal leading to its realm.

It woke up. One truly epic battle ensued. We were succeeding in destroying it, but it became apparent to us that upon its destruction it would explode with the force of, as Matt phrased it, a few nuclear bombs. Dan’s wizard had the idea to create some Portal style portals between the about to explode alien monstrosity and the inter-dimensional portal leading to its realm. So we got it out of the anime world before it exploded, but we were unable to get the inter-dimensional portal closed before the explosion happened. Fortunately we have a sentient NPC ship capable of traveling between the dimensions (we call it Bob) we could hide in, unfortunately we knew from prior experience with these things, they can hurt Bob. This is where Paul’s great idea came in. One of the magical items we picked up in the D&D world was Lyre of Building. One of the neat uses of a Lyre of Building is protecting a structure from damaging effects including such powerful effects as disintegration. Paul’s character used the Lyre of Building to reinforce Bob before the massive explosion. So instead of being thrown through inter-dimensional space-time in a heavily damaged, and unconscious Bob, we got thrown through inter-dimensional space-time in basically unharmed Bob (his sensors were fried, but easily repaired). However we were still lost, and adrift somewhere in the multiuniverse. This is where my idea came in, as I realized our magical girl’s bag of never ending homework was linked to the world we had just been blown off of. With Bob’s sensors repaired it was an easy task to follow that link back to where we started. That is were we ended the session.

Now back to my tale.

We finished up with gaming around 11pm, and proceeded to play some Super Smash Bros. Brawl until after midnight. Paul and Matt continued on after that, I played around on the Internet. Paul and I left Matt’s well after 4am (somewhere around 4:20am I think). I arrived back at my house just a few minutes after 5am. I thought to myself hey since I was thinking about breakfast at McDonald's when I woke up, I’ll stay up until 7am and actually eat breakfast there today. So I start watching KimiKiss again. I didn't just stay up until 7am, I finish the series all 11 remaining episodes. It was now around 9:30am so I went to eat my breakfast at McDonald's. And I noticed that Across the Universe was available to rent at the Redbox there. I got home a bit after 10am, and I watched Across the Universe (really, really good by the way). Once that was over it was somewhere between 12:15pm and 12:30pm and I was still feeling like watching a movie, so I put in Hott Fuzz (if you haven’t watched that, you should really put it atop your “to do” list).

Now it was roughly 3pm Sunday, and I’d been awake since 10:28am Saturday. Did I go to sleep? Nope I started watching another new anime called Kekkaishi. This is a 52 episode shōnen action series with a supernatural theme. I continued to watch it until I fell asleep sometime after 6:30pm. I woke up at about 1am. Did I go back to bed? No that would be reasonable, and intelligent, I started watching Kekkaishi again. I did this until about 8:30am - 9am Monday morning (at some point in there I did pause to watch the movie Smokin' Aces which I found to be kinda meh) when I decide that since I needed to take the movie back to the Redbox at McDonald's I might as well eat breakfast there again. I came back from breakfast and again started in on Kekkaishi. I continued this until about 1pm when I needed to get ready for work. All in all I watched the first 35 episodes of Kekkaishi (basically 14.5 hours of anime).

That is my tale of foolish behavior. A few general notes on anime. In addition to those I’ve mentioned above, I’ve finished Oh! Edo Rocket, Clannad, and Spice and Wolf. I loved all three, and with any luck I’ll have some more to say about them soon. But now I’m going to see if I cannot finish off the final episode of Rosario + Vampire before I have to leave for work today.

Baseball: Best Game Ever, or Greatest Game of all Time?

Few things make me think of spring here in Minnesota quite like late-March/early-April snow, and baseball. I like only one of those things, but got both today. Happily the Twins won their season opener, which does take some of the sting out of the snow.

My activities this last weekend will be a likely topic of a future post (hopefully tomorrow, or maybe even later tonight). Not for any particular notable event, but mostly to serve as a cautionary tale of continued foolish behavior on my part (and further evidence of my complete lack of willpower).

Gary Gygax

Gary Gygax died on Tuesday. The world is a less interesting place without him in it. I think had I ever met Mr. Gygax I'd have liked to say something like this to him:

Thank you. Thank you for D&D, and thank you for role-playing. Thank you for the hours of enjoyment this hobby has given, and will continue to give me. Well played sir, well played.

If I were feeling particularly fanboyish I'd probably have added something about how much I love the Greyhawk campaign setting.

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.