Everywherenet

Canceled my WoW account. And to prove it here are the screenies

I started this new MMO last night. It’s been out for a couple months and I’ve finally gotten around to getting myself an install along with a new account. All I can say is: FUN!

After playing WoW for the past few months and being increasingly frustrated (cliquey guild members, endless grinding, no time to raid, endless grinding, moron ADHD afflicted13 year old players) AoC is a refreshing change. Clearly pitched at a more mature player, the game is also beautifully presented, quite a change from WoW’s cartoony type graphics. Sweet water effects, excellent gore, detailed environments . . . it all makes for a very immersive gaming experience.

I’ve started playing a Guardian. In WoW terms, it’s a tanking class, but unlike WoW the classes don’t tend to tie you into a particular role. While WoW prot tanks are lousy at solo play, the Guardian class has elements of Fury warriors in it. Even healing classes aren’t stuck for damage. For instance a priest can contribute to either group healing or dps. Sure, they can’t do it as well as a dedicated damage class can but their solo play isn’t limited to “LFG, anything with DPS” just to complete solo missions.

My toon, Algon (named after my D&D character) is only 7th lvl but it’s a real joy playing a game that doesn’t have an auto attack option. Combat requires quick reactions and clever use of the abilities at hand. I’m still working out the best combos to use and it’s fun discovering what works and what doesn’t help so much.

I’ve managed to find a few good resources online for the class. There are the AoC official Guardian forums of course. The AoC Guardians page is steadily collecting useful information. The Age of Conan Mods site has a bunch of addons for the game and I think I’ll be looking for some class specific ones for the Guardian. Curse Gaming also has an Age of Conan section.

I’ll definitely be upgrading. WoW is designed for low end machines. AoC is definitely aimed at heavier hardware. I’m waiting for the ATi 4870×2 to come out, hopefully in the next few weeks, before lashing out on a new system. But apparently 8800GT based systems run it just fine. Quad core, 4gig of RAM, maybe a new screen . . . Ah, tis good to dream

Anyway, in summary, Age of Conan good. Buy now. NOW!!

Update: The server I’m playing on, for those interested, is Wiccana PvE server. Care bear? Maybe, but I’m new to the game and don’t want to get ticked off by some spawn camping noob with nothing better to do than grief me.

Read about the Dead Sea Effect in regards to keeping talented IT staff. I’m not sure management drones are capable of understanding the concept, at least in large organisations. Why there is this disconnect, particularly now when management positions are starting to be occupied by people who cut their teeth on “The Mythical Man Month” is the larger issue I think. How can managers still expect to drop people in a running project and expect good results? Why do managers who should’ve made it through some of the worst times in IT, continue to make these bonehaded mistakes? Particularly when there is a wealth of knowledge out there to aid them in their decision making processes.

There are two possible explanations, both of them depressing. The first is that the people who understand these concepts never made it in to the upper management echelons of large organisations where these monumental mistakes are still being made. For whatever reason they just never got there. Possibly they just got tired of telling management the same message over and over again. Or they were never allowed to give voice to their problems, instead being quietly shuffled aside, or out the door, in order to reduce fuss.

The second explanation is that they did indeed make it there, but were unable to do anything about the problems they’d found on the way up. No one cared or they just . . . gave up. Rather more depressing than the first option admittedly, this idea that they couldn’t influence anything because by the time they were in a position to do so they were so much a part of the machine that nothing ever got done.

I suppose it could happen. If you stopped believing you could make a difference. That’d be about the only thing that could impact the people I know who have the right ideas, and I’m fairly late to the IT game by comparison to some.

More on this to follow when I have time.

Well it has been a while and a lot has happened. We get the keys for the new house this Friday. I am pretty sure that everything is organised, although I hate all financial lending institutions and I suspect my headaches will go away some time Friday afternoon.

Isabella is doing very very well and is walking everywhere. With the house move we have had to locate new daycare and I have her booked into a centre close to home. I am not looking forward to her last day at the current centre as they are really wonderful people. I had to write them a letter to formally advise that she was finishing and I actually cried while I was writing.

Both J & I have been a bit sick lately, colds and stress of moving do not help the recovery and Melbourne’s terrible weather is pretty much the reason, and that is my story and I am sticking to it….

Work for me is improving, although, now I have more work that I can possibly do, so it is great to have a huge challenge on my hands.

Crossed out one more thing: We bought a new house! It was even the one we wanted in an area close to public transport, schools, shops, the works. It’s closer to the city as well so the train ride home won’t be too arduous. The first place we looked at was well out of the city in the Dandenongs. Nice place on first look, too much of it designed for someone else on the second. Oh well, continue the search. By this time I was starting to get a little nervous. Our place hadn’t been on the market long, a few people had taken a look and there were no serious offers. Even approaching the auction date for this place, there were no offers but more people through.

Our agents were great though. I’m generally suspicious of real estate agents, having been screwed over a couple times in the past. Not exactly well disposed to them would be the best way of putting it. But LJ Hooker really came through for us and delivered above what we’d hoped.

Now we have funds for the new place, removing the need to stress ourselves out with bridging loans and massive mortgages to cover both places. We start moving in about two and a half months, an event I’m really not looking forward to. We have a load of stuff to somehow fit into the new place whic, at the moment, is somewhat smaller. Hoping to change that once we move in, hence why I’ve created a new category just for home stuff. I’ll (try and) track renovations as they go on, maybe even include some before and after shots.

Like. The kitchen. Oh dear gods below, the kitchen…

I’ve edited the list in the last post and crossed a few things out. We sold the house (yippee!) and the doc is mostly done. Currently sitting in my draft folder of Outlook. I tend to rough draft stuff like this in an email so I can send it off and store it somewhere. And it makes it easier if someone wants to see a draft beforehand. No cutting and pasting.

As I write this we’re waiting on word from the vendor’s agent of a place we’re looking to buy. Don’t know if they’ll accept the offer but we can always hope. In the meantime I’ve had a look at the important things, namely ADSL2+ availability. It’s not great, cable (already in) might work better. At least the provider’s not Telstra - Optus cable doesn’t count upload in the cap and their prices are more reasonable. Bigpond “broadband” (to use the term very loosely) is a joke. Their customer service is abysmal.

Anyway, mate of mine sent me a couple links today that I thought I’d share. The first is the 10 Things I hate About Testing. It’s more like 5 now, 5 later, but you get the idea. Most of it I tend to agree with. Depending on where you work, testing can be a shit of a job. Crap requirements, moron development staff, middle management monkeys interfering with redundant processes (the TPS reports), pay nowhere near comparable with other technical personnel . . . The list goes on. If you get lucky you find a place where you only have a few gripes from the list and the rest you’re happy with. Or the gripes you get only happen now and again and the rest of the time you get in to work that’s truly satisfying.

The other article was Testers Are Idiots which neatly sums up a few of the issues I’ve had in the past. One I’d add though is the belief that developers can be at least as good as if not better testers than professional QA staff. This is not the case with the majority of devs I’ve worked with. Mainly because Read the rest of this entry »

Trying to find time to post at the moment isn’t easy. Work is flat out so very little posting time available there. Admittedly I’m stealing 5 minutes to write this now after coming across this quote

The objective of all dedicated employees is to thoroughly analyze all situations, anticipate all problems prior to their occurrence, have answers for these problems, and move swiftly to solve these problems when called upon. However, when you are up to your ass in alligators, it is difficult to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp

My dad and I were talking about it a week or so ago. He used to have a part of this quote stuck on his office door back when he was a lecturer along with a cool comic. It springs to mind now. I have a few things on my mind at the moment:

• Selling our house
• Buying a new house
• Renovating the new house
• Gaming drama - as in, “Can I actually afford the time to play?”
• Prepare a document to educate the business I work for about what it is that QA does
• Complete testing on the web front end and CMS for the project I’m currently working on
• Delegate some of the work required out to people who’ve offered to help because I know I won’t get it all done myself
• Not fall over in a heap because the stress got to me

I’m not doing too badly. Sale of the house will solve a lot of my stress in one hit. Even a solid offer in the area of what we want will help. Gaming drama can wait. I have most of the doc I need to write already done in my head (”I can’t believe you’ve worked in I.T. this long and you still don’t know what QA is…” might not be the best way to start though). The testing thing will get done. I tend to cover a lot in one hit before being distracted by something else. Such is the way I work.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this I still need to spend enough time with my wife and Little Miss. I need this time. It’s the only real cure for all of this insanity.

That said, it’s a lot of fun with this much stuff on my plate. Work is anything but dull And I have a front row seat for watching a waste of space implode. More on that later.

Last week, my Sister in Law (SIL) gave birth to a very cute little boy, Viggo Charlie B.  The only sad thing is, they are all the way over the other side of the world, in Redlands, California.  We have seen many pics and he is a cutie. (but very masculine, I would not want to offend anyone)

Isabella smiles everytime I show her a picture of Viggo on the email, mind you, she smiles at everything on the computer screen…

Better run.  I am on single parent duties this evening, as J is out.  He deserves his break, we both worked like crazy yesterday around the house.

A full year of gainful (most of the time) employment with my current employer. In that time I’ve worked on a couple of good projects that actually went out the door and were quite successful and a project that went nowhere. Through no fault of any of the devs or yours truly I hasten to add. Put it down to unrealistic expectations of a customer.

Suffice to say it’s been an interesting year. Learning about Agile in all its sometimes questionable glory, watching customers fail to grasp that, no, Agile does NOT mean that requirements are non-existent, sighing with disbelief when the concepts aren’t grasped or explained fully and the entire Agile project goes back to waterfall . . . I’ve certainly learned a lot. In terms of personal advancement it’s been a good year. Picked up a couple of new tools (Selenium and Jmeter) and become more knowledgeable about the end to end development work that goes in to producing websites. I’ve had the pleasure of working with some frightfully gifted people, as well as the frustration of having to deal with some complete and utter dipshits at various levels in the company. It’s been great watching others develop into the roles they’ve taken on - relatively green developers rise to the challenge and truly shine; managers becoming real managers, not just of the people under them but of the client and their expectations as well as leaning when and where the buck stops - and seeing product go out the door knowing that I had something to do with the fact that the damn thing works.

On another level I find it hard to get enthusiastic about it all, at least from a certain point of view. I think I know why too. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard to find at times. A cottage industry has sprung up around making images in the same vein as those miserable works of art favoured by HR drones, people who’ve had the majority of their cerebrum removed and football players. You know the ones: Winners - While most are dreaming of success, winners wake-up and work hard to achieve it. That sort of wank.

Instead of creating knuckle children, those gifted with a sense of humour, a well developed idea of irony and some moderate photoshop skills are creating the antithesis of the depths of crapulence that the motivational poster embodies. Popularised by sites like despair.com, all manner of demotivational posters have cropped up around the web. The same ideas recur in the works displayed on sites like icanhascheezburger and The Walking Dude’s collection.

A mate of mine at work shares a similar bent of humour to mine. He introduced me to cheezburger and the Walking Dude for starters and I’ve enjoyed considerable lulz as a result. Recently he took a shot of Little Miss and . . . well, motivated it I guess you’d say. Cracks me up and it’s the perfect accompaniment to the look she’s giving the camera in this shot.

Enjoy

I’ve not had a chance to post much lately. First birthday was great but it’s already been covered. Little Miss continues to grow and astound, though she’s rather sick today. C is off work following a knee op but today Little Miss is being cared for by her Nonna. Happiest little face when she sees her Nonna walk through the door; must get a pic of it next time.

Mate at work sent me this pic from icanhascheezeburger.com. Had to post it. It’d be nice to have the cats inside as she grows but unfortunately one of our neighbours is insane and hates them. /sigh Oh well.

I really need to work on my typing skills. I notice so many things that need editing after I do a quick post. Taking some time to re-read probably wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Who would have thought a birthday party for a 1 year old could be so exhausting!  I have never been so tired in all of my life, and that includes the sleep depravation when our little miss was feeding every 3 hours…

 I should not complain too much, it was a wonderful day and we had the family around and Isabella was overwhelmed by all the attention and gifts (and cake and noise and people and…..)

I haven’t got any photos with me (as I am at work, so I should be working) and I will get J to post some tonight.

On another note, we are patiently waiting for a call from the US to hear if J’s sister has had her baby yet.  She is due next week (if my brain is right) and I am excited to become an aunt again, twice in a year……..

Better go, the boss is back. 

…since I logged on to play WoW. My brother-in-law had logged on to one of his toons still in the old guild I once helped run (long ago) on the weekend. He checked the guild list and my toon name was there, last logon: 8 months ago and counting. Not long after that he /gquit and joined the guild all his other toons are in. The old guild is pretty much dead with most of the members either quitting the game or moving to another server.

I still haven’t decided what I want to do with my old toons. A friend of mine asked me if I was still using it, or another toon I have control of. The accounts aren’t paid up or anything, just sitting idle. But it didn’t feel right giving control over to someone else just yet. Not because I’m a control freak or anything, but because I’m bored silly at the moment not playing games. It’s simply something I love to do and not doing it for so long is started to get to me.

This lack of gaming is mainly due to one thing: My PC is a bit of a sorry sight. The hardware is nearly 4 years old and the Windows install is corrupted. To make matters worse I can’t find the backup install disc. The new iMac that’s now the family computer is bad for games. No DirectX support means waiting for a studio to pick a title up and convert it over. Not fun. I haven’t tried dual booting in to windows yet because a) I’d need to buy a new copy of XP SP2 and b) I don’t want to lose everything like last time I tried using Bootcamp on the Mac.

But I need to game. EVE Online didn’t do it for me. Not immediate enough. First person shooters or even 3rd person perspective like WoW is what I’m after. Or a decent RTS. Again, it’s on a Mac and it’s not easy to find something to run. WoW works, EVE Online worked, America’s Army worked (and sucked), but that’s about all at the moment. And with WoW there are, how shall I put it? Issues. My wife has the impression that I disappear in to the study and never come out. I have a different opinion but, meh, whatever. Still doesn’t stop me from entertaining the thought of playing again.

Upgrading the PC at the moment isn’t an option, especially since I shelled out $3300 for the iMac in September of last year. It’s a nice machine, all 24″ screen goodness, but I’ll never see CS:Source or Crysis running on it.

Time to either shut up about it or upgrade the salary.

This Friday is our daughter’s 1st birthday.  I think I am more excited about this than my own birthday’s at this rate.

There is nothing better than a happy smiling face when I pick her up from day care and I hope that this weekend will be filled with happy smiles, hers and mine!!!!!

My father and a few of his friends have had a quest for a number of years now: to find the undrinkable beer. This quest has sent them far and wide, to distant lands where the quality of beverage has been, to put it mildly, somewhat sub-optimal. Dad’s had beer in Egypt that was warm, and yet still drinkable.

They needn’t have looked so hard. It was right here at home all this time and I found it this afternoon. Work has a free beer fridge open to all on a Friday afternoon. So this arvo I availed myself of the opportunity and sampled a Coopers Sparkling Ale.

I’ve drunk some bad beer myself over the years (a couple of home brew jobs at uni ring some rusty bells) but this stuff is complete. And utter. Piss. I can’t think of any reason to drink this, unless you enjoy the taste of urine strained through gym socks that haven’t seen the inside of a washing machine for a good couple of years. I’m serious, this stuff is awful, and I’m someone who will happily drink VB if nothing else is offering.