Tag: ffxi

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Absence of posting

Just because I’m not posting doesn’t mean things aren’t happening.

  • I went down to SoCal for my cousin’s Bar Mitzvah last weekend. It’s scary that he’s 13 already, because I remember him being born. I also think I impressed him by “fixing” their TV to make the Wii work by changing it to the right input with a single button press.
  • I’m trying to lose weight again, although I haven’t introduced more exercise into the equation yet, I am back to eating less. I know it’s not enough yet, but I’m still trying to work out my routine.
  • I’m also in the process of examining my budget, after realizing that I’m probably spending more on random per-month things than I really need to. Scarily, the money I spend on FFXI each month is starting to seem like it would be better spent elsewhere. I’m also going to try to look into possibly refinancing to lock into a nice low rate, even though my ARM is going to be coming back down because it’s a 12 month moving average. My mortgage payment is about 130% of what it was when I first started, and that extra money every month really starts to hurt.
  • My room is probably the cleanest its ever been since I moved in. I’ve been working on the various regions of it, and I just managed to get my desk mostly cleared this weekend. The last few steps were amazingly noticeable — sections of carpet that hadn’t seen the light of day in years were now visible. Seeing each part by itself was already pretty amazing, once I managed to get it all done at once, I’m going to have to take pictures as historical proof.
  • My Prius didn’t get as good mileage as I thought it would have when I drove down to SoCal. I suppose it makes sense: when you’re driving at a constant speed on a flat road, a hybrid doesn’t really get much benefit. I was “only” getting 38-40 mpg on I-5. But then when I hit LA, and I was driving up and down hills, slowing down and speeding up, it went back up to 50. I was a bit afraid that I wouldn’t make it on one tank of gas (it’s a smaller tank than my last car, which could barely make it on one tank), but I managed with miles to spare.

Back to work…

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Number four

Yes, I know I’m not posting much, I promise to do real posts. I swear! I’m not just saying that and I swear this post isn’t automatically generated. To prove it:


I’m a real Dark Knight now!

Unlike the other four jobs I have at AF levels, I think Dark Knight might get put on hold at 60 while I do other things. I’m normally single-minded about the jobs I level in FFXI, so this is a new thing for me.

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An “Upgrade”

So a while back, finally gave up FFXI for good. She’d been fading out for a while, but I guess she decided it wasn’t worth paying for something she wasn’t using. I’d offered to take over the account in passing, but I guess I should have insisted more, because it faded away and I assumed someone else had taken it over.

Then a few weeks ago I found out that it had actually gone away. And since FFXI accounts do not “freeze” like WoW accounts do — if you leave them idle too long the characters cannot easily be recovered (if at all) — I poked her again. Well, that is to say poked her on my behalf.

So after some password exchange and payment switching, Uruki lives again. So now, poor Azalyn, long lost character of is going away. I’m sorry, but a character with only THF57 can’t compete with one who’s BRD75, RDM75, WHM75, BLM75, SMN71 and more. Yeah, that’s right I have a second account I’m going to use for powerleveling that’s better than my own.

So on Sunday I started the process of reconciling three accounts’ worth of gear to see what’s extra and needs to be sold. Then, just when I was done, someone mentioned “Why don’t you just use AltanaCubby?” to which I replied “What’s that?” and my mind was blown. It’s a program (that’s safe to use, people have watched its net usage) that reads your local FFXI cache and shows what items every character had in their inventory when you last logged in. And it can export a text file. So basically I could have done what I did in a fraction of the time. C’est la vie.

(I’ve realized after looking over this post that it has more commas and other random punctuation that even I normally use. I guess I’m in a non-linear frame of mind and can’t form sentences right now.)

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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.

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And now the gaming-type update

So I’m still barely playing FFXI. After following ‘s example, I’m buying up Moat Carp for my Lu Shang’s Fishing rod instead of catching them all. It gives me something to spend my gil on that feels worth it instead of minorly incremental and inefficient. Also, let his FFXI account expire, so I finally bit the bullet and transferred it over to my name and billing information. So I now own two FFXI accounts officially. I need to go about transferring my mules over to that account to aid in equipment exchange.

Our WoW guild tried Karazhan for the first time last week. For a first attempt with a less than optimal setup (three rogues ftw) we managed to down Attumen on the first try. We wiped a few times on Moroes due to crowd control issues, and that was that. We all managed to get to Friendly with The Violet Eye, so yay to new tanking ring. My gear should still be in my tanking gear unless I log in tonight and forget to swap it back. Until 2.1 hits I’m actually close to optimal bear gear. Then all of a sudden the raiding gear gets a boost and there’s better gear that I’ll never see because we don’t have 25 people to raid with and all is back to normal in the MMO world.

The Xbox fairy delivered an Xbox 360 to the house. This confused us more than made us happy, as we weren’t really expecting it and now we have to get games for it or something. So I’ll likely be getting FFXI (just because I get free gamerpoints and I don’t have to activate the account on it) and Guitar Hero 2. ‘Cause Gears of War don’t interest me. Then again, someone else in the house might buy GoW…

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Okay so yeah… almost a month, huh? Oops. Let’s see if I can remember all of the things that have happened since then.

I just bought my plane tickets and membership for Dragon*con, after skipping last year. My return flight is on a 767, which will mark the first time in a very long time I’ll be flying in an airplane with two aisles.

I hit level 70 on Werehamster, just in time to get nerfed to all heck and back. I had respecced feral for leveling with the intention of going back to restoration when I was done questing, but it seems like the guild has needed me more as a tank than as a healer. (We only have one level 70 Warrior, but at least 2 Priests and 3 Druids if I remember correctly.) I’m still playing a bit more than usual, but I’m guessing the second honeymoon will wear off once I finish all the easy solo quests, possibly once I farm up an epic flying mount.

FFXI has taken a back seat for the moment, although I’m still logging in for HNMLS and Assault/Mission stuff. The recent update actually shows that Square Enix cares about gilselling, and the recent missions have been very entertaining.

Work is chugging along. I got my contract extended the final 3 months, but after that it’ll be one year and I’ll have to find a permanent position or move on. There’s the possibility of a budget investment into the group, so I could end up staying, but in a month or two I’m going to have to start looking around again possibly.

When I got back from Indiana, there was snow on the hills here in California. This isn’t unusual, it happens maybe once every season. But what was unusual is that it stayed there for a week. Of course, here we are three weeks later and it was hot enough that I had to start opening up windows in the house. (Not hot enough to warrant A/C yet, though.)

I hate it when I’m away from the computer and I have a thought and think “I should make an LJ post about this” but then forget about it.

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So I finally took the last step to transfering hamusutaa.com from Yahoo! Domains to Dreamhost.com. This meant I could easily use their own hosting solutions for hamusutaa.com (which is my website I never update and my email). I spent a little time getting everything set up before the transfer, then got everything working as far as I can tell on the other end. Email is always a bit complicated, as there are weirdnesses with IMAP and webmail and pine and procmail and the web configuration all interacting. I can send myself email and it shows up, I just haven’t received anything on my mailing lists to see if they’re filtering right.

So if you send me an email and I don’t respond, it might be because I never got it.

Also, I have finished The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I do not own a Wii. I borrowed ‘s. Now I don’t have to rush out and be all crazy to get one because I was dying to play Zelda, I can wait until January when things are saner. Never again will I try to get “the thing that everyone wants for Christmas this year.” In. Sanity.

And in FFXI news:

My Paladin hit 75, very little buffer, and I still have some skills to cap. Except:

The last bit of sword skill I’ll ever get. And the last bit of shield is not too far behind. And of course, I have to work on all the stupid skills like Polearm, which are a very low rating for Paladin but are still there. I did get this lovely nugget, though:

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Yes, they were specifically trying for it…

Because they said us new people had it too easy with our flail-less Tiamats. So they specifically tried to make her flail with judicious use of Sneak Attack/Trick Attack.

This was also the fight I spent the entire fight staring at the wall, doing nothing but stunning Firaga IIIs. Whee. Remind me why I wanted to have Dark Knight as a viable subjob for Red Mage?

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Update of the gamey variety

So, not much has happened in real life, same old same old. I guess I cleaned my room, that’s sort of momentous for anyone who’s seen my room recently.

FFXI: I held off on saying it because I wanted to make sure it’d stick, but I’m now in an HNMLS again. They’re mostly EST folks, though, so that makes doing stuff with them haphazard. I’ve already fought Tiamat twice, though. That was certainly being tossed into the deep end. Tomorrow we’re doing Jailer of Love, so that will also be “fun” (if I can make it home in time).

WoW: I actually logged into WoW last night, I went and transferred my druid main (Werehamster) from Elune to Uldum. Now I can play with and . So of course, I’m just in there trying to get my addons and everything working, having just respecced to Feral, I get dragged to UBRS and main tank. “fun”

KoL: I don’t know if I mentioned it, but a few months ago I started playing Kingdom of Loathing. It’s good for a quick distraction while I eat lunch. I did a full run through, ascended once, and just ascended again in Hardcore. Hardcore is sort of frustrating at the start, because I have so few turns. I guess that’s a good thing, so I get done with them faster. I’m assuming it gets faster once I start getting a few Hardcore Permanent skills, because I hear tales of long-time veterans of KoL finishing HC runs in 4 days. If I can get it down to two weeks or so, I’ll be happy. Then I can try a Hardcore Oxygenarian Turtle Tamer for a Plexiglass Pith Helmet. Mmmm…. helmet.

FFXII: 12 days to go!