Updates to previous week

Yeah, I could have made this post a while ago, but it took a lull in my work to get me to post it.

Our second attempt at Karazhan was even more of a success than our first. We not only beat Moroes, but managed to down the Maiden of Virtue as well. And I got my first piece of epic lewtz, a.k.a. healing leather that I’ll rarely use.

I started consolidating Azalyn, the other FFXI account I own now, with my own. The first thing was taking his mule of random stacks of stuff that drops off monsters and sending the stuff to my own mule of random stacks of stuff that drops off monsters and taking anything that made a full stack of 12 and mailing it to the proper city’s mule to sell it on the auction house. I managed to actually fit almost everything from his mule into my own after sending the stacks to sell away, because we had mostly the same stuff. Second is going through his armor and finding anything he had that I didn’t (which there is some small amount, most of them on Azalyn proper) and selling/giving away the rest that’s duplicated. This is slower, as a lot of the gear is random stuff for low levels (sub-20) that doesn’t sell often.

I thought I had the bird outside the window problem licked. Then I was informed that there is a nest above my window that may be the reason why I’m having a problem. But then, yesterday morning I managed to actually catch the bird in the act. It’s not flying into the window and bumping it on the way to the nest like I might have thought. No, it’s just being a stupid bird and repeatedly running into the window. I can only imagine the thought process it goes through as it sees something interesting, flies into an INVISIBLE BARRIER *BONK* loses its bearings, flies back to the tree branch, blinks, then sees something interesting, flies into an INVISIBLE BARRIER *BONK*… etc. All the meantime, I’m inside wishing I had an exterior-mounted BB gun turret or something.

Overplayed non-music

Over time, I alternate between listening to the radio and listening to my CDs. I’ve been listening to the radio for a while now, which means there’s a few overplayed songs that are starting to get on my nerves. Usually when one starts playing, I have an alternative station that I switch to.

Yesterday, my number one most annoying song of the moment came on: Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl”. So I switch radio stations… and do a double take, ’cause the other station is not only playing the same song, but at almost the same spot.

I’m thinking it’s about time to start listening to CDs again.

I never know the depths of rage, frustration and directed anger until I try to update a FFXI update.

Stupid Square Enix doesn’t understand the concept of beefing up server banks to handle increased load. So now 90% of their users get a stupid POL-1160 error (“the network is busy”) another 9% start downloading but get interrupted and lose all their progress (“we don’t know how to program an updater that saves its progress”) and something like less than 1% actually get through it all and get into the game. (“We sold our souls to the devil.”)

People keep saying they should use some BitTorrent type update. It would certainly be better than this stupid system where nobody can connect because we’re all trying to connect. The last time, it took me more than 24 hours to finally get connected and back in the game. This time doesn’t look like it’s going to be any faster.

I want a fourth button next to “Network Connection Information”, “Retry” and “Exit” labeled “Stab the person at Square Enix who thinks that the current system works and since everyone keeps paying their monthly dues there’s no reason to change anything.” then one next to that that says “Move update servers to North America so the Japanese players that are currently all getting nice quick updates have to sit through this frustration that all the rest of us are feeling.”

Bad user interface to have all that text on a button, but hey, I’d hit that fourth one over and over and over and over and START THE DAMN DOWNLOAD AGAIN YOU STUPID PROGRAM I JUST WANT TO GO TO SLEEP.

The curse of Marie Callender’s

Once again, we ended up at Marie Callender’s for dinner. And once again, they were out of chicken pot pies. This makes like three or four times in a row. So I had to settle for buying the last key lime pie on the way out.

I will have my chicken pot pie, dangit!

Fanime and real life

One of the people I roomed with at fanime swiped my toothpaste. I’m not pointing any fingers, though… *evil glare*

Fanime… was. There were people complaining about a lack of programming all around me, but programming isn’t why I go to these conventions anyway. Give me the karaoke room to work in, the tabletop gaming room to wander around in, and the arcade to waste time in, and enough people I know to never walk down the hallway without seeing someone, and I’ll be happy.

But anyway, I get back to real life on Monday to find a letter from the IRS. Turns out on my 2003 taxes I didn’t file a Schedule D, so, even though I paid my taxes on my Stock Options, when E*Trade finally got around to reporting it to the IRS, the IRS got a bit confused and thought there were additional transactions they want their cut of. So this morning, I had to head down to HR Block to get it sorted out. HR Block needs the 1099, of course, so I have to dig and dig and dig through the pile of unsorted papers (which I had started doing anyway, because I knew it was coming).

After that, I headed to Men’s Wearhouse to get my suit let out a bit, but I have to get it dry cleaned first. The dry cleaners has this big “1 day service” sign out on front, and a “same day service!” sign inside. I hand him the suit, and he tells me “Friday 4pm.”

Huh. Math works differently in a dry cleaners, I guess.

I then go to Fry’s to return the HD enclosure I bought that wouldn’t boot correctly, but I managed to completely forget to bring it, so that was a wasted trip.

I then went and bought new toothpaste.

Overall, a very frustrating morning.

A very long day

Got up at 4:15 a.m. to leave at 4:45 for what Katie and I thought was a 6:00 flight but was actually a 6:30 flight. It was a good thing we had that extra half an hour, because on the shuttle from long term parking, we stopped for a good ten minutes because some lady wanted to file a complaint that she slipped and fell in the parking lot or something stupid like that that couldn’t wait because she had a 6:30 flight and of course none of the rest of us on the shuttle were in a hurry or anything so we sat at a stop while the driver was on the phone with his supervisor or something.

That’s just 5 a.m…. there’s still 20 hours of this day left.

It’s finally happened…

As some of you may know, I haven’t had the best of luck playing Magic: the Gathering lately. And by “lately” I mean for the last 9 months or so. I’ve been on a losing streak. A bad luck streak that’s turned into a belligerent sort of “giving up before I even start” type of thing. Everything has been going wrong, most of which is out of my control (yes, I’m not so ignorant that I’ll say none of it is my fault. I make mistakes).

Magic Complaining Within

Last night, as I was getting out of the shower, I glanced over just as one of my lego starwars models fell off the top of my shelf. It totally freaked me out.

FFXI complaining within

I hate Tuesdays

For the last few Tuesdays, someone has taken it upon themselves to drag a trash can from one end of the alley behind our house all the way to the other end.

Either they’re just now doing it, or I’m just now noticing it because I’ve been leaving the window open because we finally got around to being less dependent on the A/C… but either way it’s really frigging loud and it always wakes me up.

So Tuesdays suck because I never get enough sleep.

Also, last night I had a dream (or you might say a nightmare) that Nati still hadn’t left yet! The horror!

Once again, I had so many ideas driving to work about what to type into this thing, but I’ve forgotten them all.

Ants!

Someone left a salad out over the weekend, and there’s now an infestation of ants on the next row over.

Keep in mind, we’re on the third floor.

Aieeeeee.