et alii*Step V.2
Saturday, February 11, 2006
"Not Whining"
Alright, I am done whining about little things like employment and possible week long jobs that will cost more than that of which is made.
Instead I'll complain about my stupid mini-itx mobo that has apparently died. See the stupid thing has stopped turning on and I do not know why. Could be the PSU actually. Could be the ATX power button's wires are loose. Could be I abused it a wee bit too much and this is what I get. I don't know. But it is really quite annoying to have this board and not be able to use it. That's why I went to the hardware store and bought a normal "momentary switch". I don't know that it will work but I can't think of a reason it wouldn't. So I'm assuming yes then. ¶ 7:30 PM 0 Comments
Friday, February 10, 2006
Yesterday's post seemed incomplete. I'm finally learning when I stop writing a post even if it's not finished I should just publish it. Or it will sit the queue for several weeks. That's happened before. So why not publish it even if not complete?
Not much else to say. Except I got a call from a job recruiter. He says he has a possible week or so contract lined up that he recommended me for. That was around 11:30 this morning. Then he said he'd call me back in 10 minutes or after lunch. Well it's 4:20pm right now and he hasn't called me back. So obviously he was just kidding. Hah-hah. Very funny. Tell someone you'll call them back then don't. I love when that happens. It never gets old, either.
Ok, you maybe thinking "why didn't you call him back". Alright that's a legit question I think. Well I'll tell you why: the recruiter calls me twice in a 10 minute time span, the contract would start on Monday in Reno (several hours drive, hotel required) and he told me I would be called back. Now it's his job, if he's really serious, to make sure someone contacts me. After all I am a client who will be working for a redicoulously low pay rate and making HIM money. I don't even know that I would make money at the end of the week given expense costs. So frankly if it's important to him let him call me.
Ok examine it further. He's the recruiter, essentially the employer. Be that very definition he has control of both the call and the entire situtation. To in charge and in control he must call the client and state what the situation and what's going on and when and to be where. No, really. I mean if it's a priority. Which I guess it isn't.
Alright I have had bad experiences with these recruiters. Sometimes it feels like I'm being "jerked around". Even I can only take so much of that. I don't like to be "jerked around" at all. I've almost gotten to the point I'm hyper sensitive to being jerked around. If he wants me he'll call me. If he don't he won't. That's about all there is. Who calls on a friday about a week contract starting the following monday anyway? What kind of notice is that anyway?
Alright, perhaps I should get over it. Perhaps this is all in my head. Perhaps I, being the one seeking employment, should feel compelled to call him back and see what if anything is going on. Or maybe my first view is right.
Update...
Alright so the guy just called. Told me the guy who requested an employee from him actually hasn't called back. So now the job will start Tuesday. You know I'm starting to have doubts here. Or perhaps my standards are too high? No I don't think so. So now I'm going to drive up to Reno, work four days, stay in a hotel and come home? Am I sure this is worth it? Is it really worth my while to do so? I mean really. At least I'll have a pay check if nothing else. Which may or may not bring me out ahead.
In other developments I purchased a new HDD a couple weeks ago and am only just now actually attempting to utilize it. Which is wierd for me really. Normally I buy something like that I'm all over it at earliest possible convenience. But not this time. Mostly I knew a whole lot of ghosting was going to be going on and I wasn't looking forward to those hours and hours of no PC use. But finally I got to it. And I was right. It's been at least two days with very little PC use.
But I'm done now. My C: drive was an aging 40 gig drive. Which is what I wanted. Easier to backup and smaller capacity HDD. Then I had a 120 gig and a 160 gig HDD making up my two categories of programs: actually program installations and games. Since I wanted to take the old mini-itx board I have had for a while and turn into an Apache/MySQL server for my room mate I decided I would use the 120 as the C: drive and the two 160s for programs and games, one for each.
So this would be tricky. I had actually made a partition on the 120 and called it G:. So when I got that first 160 I simply partitioned it as one big one and mounted it to g:\program files and move all the game folders in there. This was the easy/lazy way out solution that was worked quite well. So I took the new drive and cloned the games HDD to it. Then cloned the 120 programs HDD to the older of the two 160s. Then cloned the old 40 to the 120. Leaving me with the extra 40 gig for the server. Did any body follow that? Doubtful. Anyway it took quite while what with read errors and not letting me resize the partitions the way I wanted. I would have liked a 5.6 or so gig C: partition followed by a ~4 gig partition just for the page file. But apparently due to the size differences ghost wanted to scale the partition sizes up and wouldn't let me shrink them back down. So I finally gave up. A 15.9 gig C: drive is too big in my estimation. But I'm too cheap to buy partition magic or risk some other open source solution. Ghost just records MFT and data taking up that space on the drive anyway so it doesn't matter that much. As long as I keep shit off the C: drive.
For the server I'm having more difficulty. All the abuse I put the mini-itx board through must have hurt it some where along the line because for the life of me I can't get the optical drive to boot a windows install disc. So once again I turned my friend Ghost: used my main desktop PC that does actually boot from optical discs and installed Win2k to it. After formating and copying over some install files it was about to auto re-boot. At this time I inserted a bootable Ghost CD and ghosted the drive in that state. Then connected the drive to the mini-itx system. And, you guessed it, nothing happened. It locks up at the initial progress bar where you push F8 if you want safe mode. So now I'm kind of stuck here. ¶ 4:17 PM 0 Comments
Not much else to say. Except I got a call from a job recruiter. He says he has a possible week or so contract lined up that he recommended me for. That was around 11:30 this morning. Then he said he'd call me back in 10 minutes or after lunch. Well it's 4:20pm right now and he hasn't called me back. So obviously he was just kidding. Hah-hah. Very funny. Tell someone you'll call them back then don't. I love when that happens. It never gets old, either.
Ok, you maybe thinking "why didn't you call him back". Alright that's a legit question I think. Well I'll tell you why: the recruiter calls me twice in a 10 minute time span, the contract would start on Monday in Reno (several hours drive, hotel required) and he told me I would be called back. Now it's his job, if he's really serious, to make sure someone contacts me. After all I am a client who will be working for a redicoulously low pay rate and making HIM money. I don't even know that I would make money at the end of the week given expense costs. So frankly if it's important to him let him call me.
Ok examine it further. He's the recruiter, essentially the employer. Be that very definition he has control of both the call and the entire situtation. To in charge and in control he must call the client and state what the situation and what's going on and when and to be where. No, really. I mean if it's a priority. Which I guess it isn't.
Alright I have had bad experiences with these recruiters. Sometimes it feels like I'm being "jerked around". Even I can only take so much of that. I don't like to be "jerked around" at all. I've almost gotten to the point I'm hyper sensitive to being jerked around. If he wants me he'll call me. If he don't he won't. That's about all there is. Who calls on a friday about a week contract starting the following monday anyway? What kind of notice is that anyway?
Alright, perhaps I should get over it. Perhaps this is all in my head. Perhaps I, being the one seeking employment, should feel compelled to call him back and see what if anything is going on. Or maybe my first view is right.
Update...
Alright so the guy just called. Told me the guy who requested an employee from him actually hasn't called back. So now the job will start Tuesday. You know I'm starting to have doubts here. Or perhaps my standards are too high? No I don't think so. So now I'm going to drive up to Reno, work four days, stay in a hotel and come home? Am I sure this is worth it? Is it really worth my while to do so? I mean really. At least I'll have a pay check if nothing else. Which may or may not bring me out ahead.
In other developments I purchased a new HDD a couple weeks ago and am only just now actually attempting to utilize it. Which is wierd for me really. Normally I buy something like that I'm all over it at earliest possible convenience. But not this time. Mostly I knew a whole lot of ghosting was going to be going on and I wasn't looking forward to those hours and hours of no PC use. But finally I got to it. And I was right. It's been at least two days with very little PC use.
But I'm done now. My C: drive was an aging 40 gig drive. Which is what I wanted. Easier to backup and smaller capacity HDD. Then I had a 120 gig and a 160 gig HDD making up my two categories of programs: actually program installations and games. Since I wanted to take the old mini-itx board I have had for a while and turn into an Apache/MySQL server for my room mate I decided I would use the 120 as the C: drive and the two 160s for programs and games, one for each.
So this would be tricky. I had actually made a partition on the 120 and called it G:. So when I got that first 160 I simply partitioned it as one big one and mounted it to g:\program files and move all the game folders in there. This was the easy/lazy way out solution that was worked quite well. So I took the new drive and cloned the games HDD to it. Then cloned the 120 programs HDD to the older of the two 160s. Then cloned the old 40 to the 120. Leaving me with the extra 40 gig for the server. Did any body follow that? Doubtful. Anyway it took quite while what with read errors and not letting me resize the partitions the way I wanted. I would have liked a 5.6 or so gig C: partition followed by a ~4 gig partition just for the page file. But apparently due to the size differences ghost wanted to scale the partition sizes up and wouldn't let me shrink them back down. So I finally gave up. A 15.9 gig C: drive is too big in my estimation. But I'm too cheap to buy partition magic or risk some other open source solution. Ghost just records MFT and data taking up that space on the drive anyway so it doesn't matter that much. As long as I keep shit off the C: drive.
For the server I'm having more difficulty. All the abuse I put the mini-itx board through must have hurt it some where along the line because for the life of me I can't get the optical drive to boot a windows install disc. So once again I turned my friend Ghost: used my main desktop PC that does actually boot from optical discs and installed Win2k to it. After formating and copying over some install files it was about to auto re-boot. At this time I inserted a bootable Ghost CD and ghosted the drive in that state. Then connected the drive to the mini-itx system. And, you guessed it, nothing happened. It locks up at the initial progress bar where you push F8 if you want safe mode. So now I'm kind of stuck here. ¶ 4:17 PM 0 Comments
Thursday, February 09, 2006
"Sacredity"
Several weeks later here I am writing in my blog again. And what's happened? Oh why bother? Alright I'm back to "between jobs" right now. I had a short contract at a local company. That contract expired. So here I am, between jobs. Only for a week now I've been unemployed. I've mostly played my latest game, "Sacred Gold". This game I have several things I like and several things not so much. What I like is its' simplicity, just the joy of building of up a character quickly and easily then taking that character online for the that whole benefit. More than one comparison has been made between it and that of Diablo 2. There's even a quote to that effect from a review printed right there on the box.
Alright so what I like is the giant map that makes it seem like it just goes on forever. Exciting things yet to see. And even so it didn't drive me crazy that I couldn't yet see the rest of the plot and story. That was one of the things that would annoy be about other RPGs like KOTOR, Fallout and Planescape: Torment. This one the plot seems secondary and not terribly important. There's one primary quest, represented by a large arrow on a compass, and a series of sub-quests, also with a much small triangle for an arrow. The sub-quests are really there to provide an excuse to explore the large map and gain some extra experience.
That brings me to leveling: just fight wave after wave of enemies. Whether it's goblins, undead warriors, or enemy soldiers serving under a bad guy king. The easiest way to gain experience is run around the map collecting a large number of mobs (EQ/WoW players call these mob "trains") then turn around and take out the large all at once with any number of special abilities.
The special moves are called combat arts at least one of which are available from the start of your first character irregardless of which kind of character you choose to play. Within a few levels you encounter your first "combo master". Each special ability allows for an ability like healing, protect and dealing damage, however once this is done a short "regeneration" time. By creating a combo of two or more special abilities the character will perform each in sequence then regenerate the whole combo as if it were one ability. For instance I created a combo containing a series of auras followed by a mulit-hit. One aura buffs all my defense and attack stats, one harms all enemies in a radius around the character and one both pushes all enemies in the immediate area away while simultaneously stunning them. That one takes around 40 seconds to regenerate so I don't know use it a lot.
My favorite thing about this game is how even when my level was in the 40s I could level up rather quickly by using a combination of a potion that increases experience gained and taking out large numbers of mobs at a time. Doing this three or four times will indeed take your level up even in your 40s.
For me this easy leveling provided a distraction from the lack of plot and ubiquitous slow progress.
Of course, there are things I dislike about the game. For instance the bugs. And there are A LOT of BUGS. Maybe not quite to the level of a beta but for a game that already has two expansion packs (a free "plus" pack and the pay-for underworld expansion), has been out for years and is already in the all-in-one gold package I would expect a few less bugs or at least a few more patches to fix the actual bugs. Expectations too high?
For instance I have come across many, MANY broken quests. They simply don't work or break or the NPC in question simply decides he's going to stand in the corner and not do anything no more.
And that another thing: what's the deal with the quests? How the hell can there be so many escort missions?! How the hell can NPCs have so little hit points and cause so little damage?! What the FUCK?!
Ok there's two main categories of escort missions: those with NPCs to escort to someone and/or some place and those that end up the NPC in question is dead and you simply have to take proof back the original quest provided to complete the mission. The other kinds of missions, extremely secondary though they are, include collecting ten or fifteen of a particular item from a particular type of mob (another influence from EQ/WoW perhaps) and perhaps killing a local bear/big zombie/uber spider/whatever the hell that seems to be bothering a local NPC or towns folk.
Multi-player I have tried but not extensively. I remember taking my level 30 character and ended up getting all the way up to 37 simply by being in a group with other high level characters and then hanging out around them while they killed level 50 to 70 mobs. Of course I couldn't re-import this character back into my single player game so it didn't do me any good. ¶ 7:38 PM 0 Comments
