Ok, so I was doing this quest in WoW that was supposedly green. Well, it turns out, it should be orange.
So, I am sitting in this mine trying to protect this guy, right? So, of course, as part of this quest, random guys begin to appear in the mine shaft and try to kill the guy I am trying to protect. I was the first one they saw, so they started to pound on me, then they all died due to my mighty force. Along came the next group of guys....there were 2 mages and 2 fighters, plus one that respawned. So, I was trying to kill them all by myself as my health drained. I tried to heal myself when my health bar got halfway down, and with each hit I got from those stupid rats, my spell was put on hold for one to two seconds. As I was sitting there yelling at my character to heal, another rat respawned and I was toast.
So, I died.
Yeah, so I went back to my body so I didnt have to deal with the sickness. Even though, I failed the quest completly, those guys were still there in the mine shaft waiting for me. The guy I was supposed to proctect, was dead on the ground. Sparkling rat bodies lay all over the floor from the ones I killed previously, but didnt have the time to loot. Ok, so not only were the guys that I needed to kill before there, but there were two more rats waiting to taste the blood of a taruen. I revived, like the idiot I am, healed up, and buffed, then tried to take them all at once. Knowing full well, I should have prolly just went invisible and walked right past them, I went for the gusto and died in 4 hits. These guys were all level 20-22 and I am 26. It was stupid. Not one of them was elete either.
Stupid quest. Stupid quest indeed.
9:36CDT - Looks like the Wildebeest is offline. Probably thanks to the storms that went through last night. I'll give you an update when I get any info. 10:00CDT - My bad. I forgot to set the webserver to auto-start on bootup. It still doesn't, but it is running now. The server has been up for 12 hours.
I'm a bit late on announcing this, but yeah.. The previous post was a lame attempt at an "April Fools" joke. Some people fell for it, while others caught on right away.
I doubt I'll ever kill Skudd.com or the Wildebeest, as they're too prominent in certain areas of the web.
So yeah. That's that.
In light of various recent occurances, I have made the painful decision to remove my entire presence from the web. This includes the removal of the following:
- Skudd.com and all its entities
- The Wildebeest Network
- Stormchaser Technologies
I can no longer supply the required amount of focus in these areas, and I am forced to put an end to them.
I will follow up on this in a couple days, but until now, be prepared.
Tomorrow, since I can't really spend any time gaming due to my lack of video interface on my primary machine, I'll be working on getting all the stuff back in order on the Wildebeest.
To do:
- Build Apache 2 from source
- Build MySQL 4 from source
- Build PHP 5 from source
- Copy configuration from RPM install
If I get all that done in a reasonable amount of time, I'll get the other stuff I mentioned previously done. I have some work I need to do for the local network too, so I need to get crack-a-lackin'.
Remember that little entry a couple days ago about not getting to play my racing games? Well, here's to another interference: My video card died.
I had to patch the game to play online, which required a reboot. When I expected to see my computer's POST screen, I saw nothing. My monitor reported no signal, so I powered the tower off then back on. At this point, I saw a "Refresh Rate Out Of Range" error on my monitor. I let it go, because the drives acted as though Windows was booting. When the video mode switched to 1152x864x32@75Hz, I saw my Windows login screen.
I went ahead and logged in an started the game, but saw something really weird. The picture was all distorted and had vertical lines all across it, making the images and text nearly impossible to see. It was at this point that I called the video card "dead".
I pull the card from my system and gave it a simple visual inspection. I tried to spin the cooling fan blades, but had no such luck. As I had kind suspected, the fan locked up and the GPU overheated, causing thermal damage.
So now, I've ordered a brand new GeForce 6600GT 128MB card (stupid 128MB limit on AGP cards...), and should HOPEFULLY have it tomorrow.
I had a dream last night that I asked some girl to marry me, and she said yes. I don't know who the girl in my dream was, but I do know that it was someone that I've know for quite a while.
I know it sounds kinda cheesey and sappy and whatnot, but I have kind of a good feeling today because of that dream. It's almost a sense of comfort and happiness that I've not had before.
Ah well, I just thought I'd share that.
Oh, and by the way.. I'm still single and not really looking to date anyone right now, so this doesn't seem too likely to happen any time soon.
I don't know why I even bother anymore, specifically with racing games.
I've always been a fan of motorsports, but I have never really been able to immerse myself in it as much as I would like. Usually, it is because of money, but often it is also because everyone else in the world thinks I should be doing something else. I figured that a good way to solve this would be through the use of simulated racing, via video games.
I've tried many games, and never really had the chance to find one that was a truely realistic game. That was until my brother-in-law introduced me to GTR. GTR is very realistic in nearly every aspect, so it requires high quality controls and 100% focus. Until this past weekend, my controls for the game were sub-par, and really didn't allow me to achieve more than a casual stroll around the course at a Sunday-driving pace. The same brother-in-law who introduced me to the game passed his Microsoft Force Feedback wheel to me, since he has replaced it with the new Logitech wheel.
Monday, when I got home from their house, I plugged it in and set it up. Begin interruptions. I got phone calls, parents talking to me, etc., so I wasn't really able to do anything with the game.
Tuesday, after I got home from work, I tried again. Same deal.
Tonight I tried again, and wouldn't you know it, the same dang thing happened!
It may seem kinda irrational for me to give up based on 3 days of interference, but it goes far beyond that. I have pretty much never been able to play any racing game without being interrupted. I can recall all of 3 times that I was able to play these games without anyone calling or walking into my room to talk to me.
Now that I think about it, this goes the same for any sort of video game. It's just more noticable with racing games because they require 100% focus, whereas other games like shooters or RPGs only require as much focus as you're willing to devote to them.
...and people wonder why my gaming equipment has dust on it...
Well, remember that little part about the backups and such?
1 k1nd4 f0r607 480u7 84(k1n6 up 7h3 d47484535.
Now that I've broken that to you in a rather nasty format, I'll really tell you what I did... I forgot to backup the MySQL databases for the entire server, so any forum content, gallery content, and blogs, so all that stuff is gone. If anyone had anything on there and didn't back it up, too bad. I can't get anything of it back. Everyone knew how to make backups, so there's no excuse for any lost data.
It has come to my realization that typically, individuals who receive a substantial salary do not actually EARN it. And likewise, those who actually EARN a substantial salary do not actually receive it.
If you have been affected by either of the above generalizations and feel it is in error, I apologize.
When I got about halfway to Wildebeestville, I noticed something a bit out of the ordinary:
One of these towing one of these.
Okay, one thing I really hate about my desk being in the front office - everyone helps themselves to my stuff. I was out of the office last week, and I came back to find my candy gone, my first aid kit missing, my Sharpie marker missing, two old phone books and a bunch of junk mail spread out all over the place. Would you go to someone's cubicle or private office and do that? Of course not.
And this morning I got to work to find that someone else was logged into my computer. Come on people. Have some R-E-S-P-ECT.
I'll be out of the office next week, so I think what I'm going to do is take everything off of my desk and lock it up, and let everyone believe that I quit. I wish I could lock my workstation so that nobody could log into it. That would RULE.
Well, that post I made yesterday was pretty accurate...
Around 10:30PM, I decided to jump in the shower before I went to bed. While I was in the shower, I heard thunder and noticed that the lights were flickering. I got done in the shower, got dressed, grabbed my camera and tripod, and headed outside for a while. That "a while" turned into "an hour" quickly, and I got a few good shots of the lightning (thumbnails below).
I was standing in the doorway of the garage while I was taking the pictures, and I told myself that if it started raining on my feet, I would pack up and go back inside. Around 11:45 my feet were getting wet (from the rain, thankyouverymuch), so I came back inside and watched from the patio door. Not long after that it started hailing. Mom and Dad woke up and came out to watch, and the hail started getting bigger. Then, all of a sudden, it stopped and it was dead calm outside. I said, "this is where it gets scary," while Dad was opening the patio door. Less than 30 seconds after he opened the door, the tornado siren started going off in town.
We got the dogs down in the basement and waited a couple minutes, then Dad and I came back upstairs to look. It was still dead calm out, so we stepped out and looked at the sky.
Spotting for tornadoes at night is very dangerous and very difficult. The only way to really see anything is from the sporadic illumination of the lightning, and even then it is hard to tell because of the strobe effect. We got lucky, though...
Mom finally brought the dogs back upstairs and came out to watch the sky with us, and I just happened to spot a small funnel cloud directly over Rensselaer. We kept watching it as it progressed to the east then back to the north, until it finally dissipated.
That was pretty much the end of that storm. I told Mom and Dad that the next storm would be in the area around 5:00AM, so be prepared. I kept my laptop right by my bed with the National Weather Service radar loop loaded and set on "auto update".
Around 4:45, I was woken up by the sound of thunder and very strong wind. I rolled out of bed, opened the screen on the laptop, and saw that we were getting hit by that next storm cell. I went out to the patio door and watched for a little bit, and it was pretty cool what I saw. Basically, it was no more than wind, rain, and lightning, but it was still very cool. When the rain stopped and the wind continued, I knew the storm was over, and I went back to bed.
Today, those same storms are making their way across Ohio, Pennsylvannia, and New England. If you live in those areas and know for certain that you're going to see strong storms today, be prepared.
And now, hardcore lightning pictures:
