Yes, I went the entire day (and I won’t get around saying that by logging on after I post this) without playing WoW, and it’s really sad that I’m pointing that out as an oddity in my recent life. What I did do was use that time and make lots of progress towards getting a functional HTPC including the big kicker for me: streaming live TV to other clients. My dad got in too late tonight for me to test it with his laptop, but that’ll be on my agenda for tomorrow night. The location of the HTPC is such that (for the time being) it has to be on our network wirelessly, but its location makes it have a very weak signal. Still, it doesn’t seem to have any issues streaming SD quality video, so as long as that works, I’m happy.
One thig that I didn’t mention yesterday was that I bought a dual-core processor for my computer, so when that arrives this next week I’ll be able to see how much of a noticeable performance boot (if any) I get. It only cost $80 so if there’s not a big jump that’s fine, but I’d rather get one now than wait for a while and possibly not be able to find one that would be compatible with this hardware.
Personal - Dallas
Ok, so I did play some WoW today, but it wasn’t nearly as much as yesterday and I accomplished very little. What can I say, I just can’t stay away from it. While I wasn’t doing that, however, I was either watching TV or doing research for one of my projects. The project in question would be the eventual HTPC I will be getting; it’s just a matter of me making up my mind on what I want first.
I’ve been thinking some about what we’re aiming for with my internship project, and I’m starting to think that we’re making it unnecessarily complex. Tomorrow I’ll work on diagramming it out some more, but I think there’s an easier way to accomplish the same end result with less work on my end. After all, if it wasn’t less work for me, I probably wouldn’t have thought of it. :)
Personal - Dallas
My WoW character started today at 19; he now lives at 23. Aside from the 1-10 run, I’m not sure now many times I’ve gained 4 levels on a single character in a day, but it hasn’t happened that often. The vast majority of my free time today was spent playing WoW, so I may just take a break from it tomorrow. Emphasis on the word “may”; I could level my character another 4 levels tomorrow.
With Ocean’s Thirteen coming out today, I’m falling behind even more on my movie list. I’m now up to 4 movies that have come out which I haven’t seen, something that hasn’t happened in a long time. My mom and I might go see one tomorrow, but otherwise it’ll just be a series of weekends catching up.
Personal - Dallas
Tonight in WoW (actually, as I’m writing this) I did my first instance. Considering I’ve had an account since the game came out, this fact is pretty amazing since you can do instances in the high teens and early 20s. Since I typically play Night Elves though, none of the really low level instances are also close to where my character starts, so I had just never bother to run across the world to do one. My first instance didn’t come alone though; I also had my first wipe tonight. A wipe is basically everyone in the party dying (typically because of too many strong monsters all deciding to attack at once). This, as you can imagine, is not a good thing.
Today we actually got our project redefined twice, so we decided to apply version numbers and call the ones today versions 5 and 6. It’s at the point where not too much else can be changed if there’s any hope of us getting a working demo done, so hopefully the changes will stop and we can get to work doing one thing. That may be a little too optimistic, but not much else can be said at this point.
Personal - Dallas
It’s weird to say that I sat in meeting all day long, but that’s basically what I did. An hour and a half meeting before lunch with about 12 different people that involved 3 presentations then another hour and a half meeting with one of those people to further discuss our idea (because they loved it so much :) ). And the result of all these meetings? The direction of our project gets changed once again, although luckily our framework can adapt without too much additional work. Definitely not something that will go towards improving my opinion on the internship.
I’ve projected out my pay from Rockwell Collins and have determined that I’ll make around $4000. I’m currently planning that $3000 of that I’ll give to my dad to invest for me, and the remaining $1000 or so I’ll use to buy toys for myself. While that is enough for a PS3, I still won’t go there. I’m thinking something along the lines of a MID/UMPC for the main purchase, but I could see myself being sucked into an iPhone if the reviews are awesome. Basically it’s buying stuff from the category of stuff that I’d like to have but generally wouldn’t buy for whatever reason (primarily price, but also those things which I know will be used far less than the amount I’d pay for them).
Personal - Dallas
My tasks (self-chosen) that I’ll be focusing on for my internship are the GUI and web service portion of the system. I’d much rather be doing this than the backend messaging system or the more embedded hardware side, but it also by default tasks me with getting the web server and everything set up for testing. Apache has a great HTTP server which is relatively easy to use, but stepping outside of that realm, you enter a bunch of projects that all appear to be interrelated yet standalone at the same time with various featured duplicated and shared amongst them. So, I think I know what I’m doing for the remainder of this week.
I guess I technically played WoW today since I did patch and log in, but I had some really strange connection issues going on which kept me from being able to do anything, so I just watched TV (and did some of the above mentioned research) tonight. I’m not going through WoW withdrawal or anything, but this is typically how I tend to start playing MMO games less and less. Time will only tell if this is the beginning of the decline of my playing time in my WoW cycle.
Personal - Dallas
The one thing that has always baffled me in regard to WoW is the fact that Blizzard has to perform maintenance on all the servers virtually every week which result in them being down for about 8 hours each Tuesday morning. I’m not arguing that they should never have to do maintenance, but I honestly can’t see 8 hours being needed for each server (and therefore doing them all in parallel) to do whatever it is they do. Whether their code is just horribly optimized or I’m missing something that necessitates this maintenance, it happens regardless, so I’m glad that it’s al least happening at a time when I wouldn’t be playing WoW anyway.
Personal - Dallas
One of my friends decided to reactivate his WoW account this weekend, and while all of his current characters are on a server that I’ve never seriously played on, I did have a Level 18 character there back from before my year plus break. Well, I log into that character, and within about 15 seconds it became extremely apparent just how much my game playing in WoW has evolved since I started. I don’t use any UI mods so most of what I do I keep constrained to the action bars the game provides by default (with one exception, I’ve recently started to enable one of the right action bars to hold self buffs and minimap features). This character had his bars arranged so horrifically that I spent 5 minutes or so just reorganizing everything so that I could play.
Since I won’t be in Austin next weekend, I’ll probably catch up on at least one of the recent movies which I’ve yet to see. Shrek the Third, Pirates, and Evan Almighty are all on my list to see, and my internship keeps me from being able to see any in the middle of the week like I typically have in summers past. Very inconvenient all around, this internship thing is. Next summer, some more planning is definitely going to be in order.
Personal - Dallas
Now that I’m 24 hours removed from being exhausted (both physically and emotionally), I can essentially make part 2 of last night’s post. As I talked about in my Twitter post, I was going to be using that service as a way to continue to provide daily updates while I was down in Austin. Well, I forgot that WordPress itself can actually be updated by email, so that was an unnecessary effort (although it does have me semi-addicted to Twitter now), and now the entire point is moot since we won’t be going.
This tends to happen with me a bunch; there’s a possible future event that I start (over) preparing for far enough in advance that something changes to make it not happen, and I’m left having made all these unnecessary preparations. It happened last year with baseball playoffs (my apartment transfer at UTD being the conflicting event), and it even happened my senior year when we lost in the first round. It’s just my nature to want to have everything planned out way ahead of time so that I can be prepared, but in cases like this, it can produce a great amount of unneeded work for me.
Personal - Dallas
That was the case at the end of the 5th when the game was tied 3-3. Well, we got our 6 outs, but unfortunately no runs materialized in that time frame. We all know what that means: EI!! It only went into one extra inning though which wasn’t in our favor, so we lost 3-4 and got eliminated. It would have been nice to go to Austin, but it makes my schedule next week a heck of a lot easier to manage. We’re talking majorly easier to manage.
Now aside from my internship, I have nothing big left on my schedule until HP Football starts. I’m not saying whether that’s a good or bad thing, but that’s the case regardless. No vacations on the horizon until my birthday (I don’t count the apparent forced trip to Iowa as a vacation), and no other events are currently planned for over the summer. Maybe slightly boring, but I’ll almost always take too little to do rather than having way too much and being forced to give some stuff up.
Personal - Dallas