New Digs

Well I'm at the new place, fully moved in, and mostly unpacked. It's very strange being all alone. Part of it I'm sure is also me just being unuse to the new place. Hopefully I'll have people visiting fairly often. It'll be better once I get internet next week so at least I feel slightly less cut off. The wi-fi here is weak and spotty. I'm thinking of picking up a wireless router so I can use the tablet around the place more easily.

That's all for now. Relaxing tonight!

Good Night and Good Luck

So this will be the last post from the Village. Twism left a message telling me that the Charter guy will be by to dissconnect things tomorrow morning so barring the stunningly bad wireless around here I'm SOL. Oh and also I'm moving too, yeah, that could affect things as well. Dunno when I will be getting teh Interweb in the new place. I will be just the last time I called the other people hadn't called to disconnect yet so couldn't set up a date to install. So prolly be intermittant for a week or so and then back to business as usual. Maybe I'll get lucky and have wireless nearby.

'Fraid I'm not gonna get to Carl's D & D game right away. I'll talk about it eventually, I promise (wait, most of you don't care do you? :D ).

Back to cleaning then crashing. Almost the entirety of my property is in the living room right now but still got dirty dishes!

Tyler's Gone

I enter after a marathon (nearly 12 hour) gaming session to find a place that feels empty. When I turn on the light I am greeted by singular brass key weathered by dozens of hands and thousands of entries. Then I remember, Tyler's gone. A little at a loss I go into the kitchen and check the cubboards. Sure enough his dishes are gone and the fridge is half empty. I plod down the hall. His room has been half empty for a week but last I saw it was still half covered in his things awaiting departure. There were still art prints on the wall. All gone. The room is bare. As bare as it was when I first saw it in December 2004 and pondered if I could talk Twism into rooming with me. Now it's empty again. Tomorrow I will clean and then the day after that I too will depart for a new place in a final flurry of activity.

I'll my him. This is the longest I've stayed in one place other then home and he's probably spent more time with me then any other person who isn't a blood relative. He's also probably the last roommate I'll have until (God willing) I find someone who'll spend the rest of my life. Odd thought isn't it?

So some of you might be curious about the fact that I mentioned a nearly 12 hour gaming session. I'll write on it tomorrow in between cleaning. I'm sure I'll want the break. Take care all.

Then it got very warm

So summer is def. here temp wise. Would have preferred a little longer in the 70s but ah well what can you do? Suppose it's hotter back home so at least I am a little farther north! Kinda jealous of London tho, they're still mid-60s and they were that when we were still mid-30s!

Saw X-Men 3 just a little bit ago. It was alright. Felt like kind of a letdown but I won't say quite why because them'd be spoilers.

This weekend must get on the ball cleaning out, etc, etc. This moving thing will not be much fun. Packed some stuff but don't really have enough bags/boxes so a lot will simply have to be loaded/unloaded as we go.

Reading Material

So finished Da Vinci Code yesterday. It was needless to say a quick read. Boy does the story jump around alot. All those short chapters and each ends on a cliff-hanger. Afterwhile it felt like "Character A pulled around corner and realized the light was red!!!!!!!" *cut* "Character B lifted the coffee mug to her mouth only to discover the coffee was cold!!!!!!!!" *cut* "Character C opened the door!!!!!!!!" *cut* "Character A breathed a sigh of relief as the light turned green before he even reached it but suddenly he noticed that this lane was turn only and he wanted to go straight!!!!!!" and so forth. I read it straight as much to make it easier to keep track of the plot (because re-reading a key part would impossible with everything so strung out) as to finish. Thought the ending was something of a letdown as well but interesting twists.

As for its fictional premise, well I'm a little stumped why it causes such a hubbub. I can poke holes in the theory and I don't even know all that much about such stuff. It's got no true support so people should read it for the entertainment and take it as such.

Now of course I am out of reading material here again. When I go home going to have to snag a bunch of books to bring up.

Ugh

Is this really happening? It rather depresses me that we have such thoughless people and that they pass as clergy.

D & D 1

So we kicked off Dani's D&D campaign today. We were a little short on people only three players for Dani. I felt bad for her because it really sucks when people say they are interested but don't show. Also I was afraid that we'd get beat down. However things started off pretty quick. We had me (aka Vor), Isaac (aka Koa), and Sean (aka Damien). Shifter, Pally-whacker extreme and a Cleric of Corellan Larethian. Isaac's knowledge of D&D is amazing as his character is extremely well twinked so the fact we were half the original party size wasn't a problem. In fact we're darn lucky (except Dani whose job is harder!) that Isaac knows his way around so well!

Anywho we started out with a quasi-intro to other teams and the organizers of this little event. The event btw is an interplanar tournament. The intro was nice I got to see many of our opponents and therefore can impersonate them. I love large groups of creatures, new forms for wild shape. We get ourselves situated in our own homebase pocket dimension. Then take off to our first event which is a mission on the material plane. The basic set up is that a ghost dragon (w00t new form!) who wants revenge on his silver dragon brother who murdered him. Without much dilly dally we manage to locate and arrive at the dragon's cave but Damien and Vor prolly didn't quite do a ton.

The next event was on Gehenna and was a bit more interesting. My corollax lasted approx 1 round before being charred. Ended up sending my grimlakin far away for safety. In the meantime as we got surrounded by two pyroclastic dragons I atempted to use the form of a diamond golemn for combat but was a little dissapointed as his really nice 60/+3 DR wasn't good enough against wyrm level dragons! So eventually did my bemusing trick of imitating my enemies (Dani didn't see this coming). It worked ok. I'm a lot harder to kill because I'm immune to element based attacks but due to my limit of being only able to go up to Huge size at the moment I could not do much damage! Koa again proved to be badass but Damien got some nice touches in with his holy longsword (nothing like dinking for holy damage regardless what DR soaks up otherwise). Also got a new 1 HD Animal Companion to replace Russ Feingold (yea my corollax was named after Democratic senators from Wisconsin and now it seems my 1 HD creature will traditionally retain the fine name of Russ and hopefully the new incarnation a pyro salamander thingy will last slightly longer!)

An interesting start, Dani's gonna have her work cut out for her. I'm highly interested in the MM3 now just for more creatures to emulate but also need to examine current MMs! Want to try to do stuff other then mirror Dani's opponents. Well next game will be in 2 weeks!

Awesome

I got 3 As, A-, and a B this semester. One of my best semesters GPA wise ever. I feel slightly smarter already!

Summer

So I've realized one thing I rather miss with school is having a set schedule. Since work only has me on call (and not even sure how that has/will sort out, might pan out to nothing) I don't really have any schedule. Hopefully it'll straighten out a bit more come the start of CIS 480-I'll go back to wishing I didn't have class again- or otherwise in general I will come up with a routine that I can follow.

I borrowed The Da Vinci Code from Al. Curious to see if it's very good. Need stuff to read. Shouldn't go and pick up any more RPG books for awhile tho. Especially since I don't actually have regular lab hours (*cries*). Ah well, restraint is good. Guess the whole theory of not buying any is pretty much by the wayside eh? Ah well, I'll hold off for awhile now. Nothing terribly pressing that I want anyhow (yea, that'd be a cop out but it works).

Anywho, that's about it for now. Dani's game starts tomorrow night. I'm excited. She's gonna use spell resistance a lot in her creatures so that'll make it a little easier for non spell casters. (Twas my complaint about her last game although honestly I just made a character who really couldn't deal a lot of damage and that was about all I had planned to do with him. We'll hope this one does a better job at bein' useful!) Granted my character can cast some divine spells bein' a druid so I shouldn't talk :D

Less then 7 months to December

Well slipped by 22 without having too bad of a day impressively enough. Can assert to the claim I have the bestest roommate ever :D

Not much to report. Twism moved a lot of his stuff out tonight so it's a little emptier here. It makes me sad. But he'll be just down the way (the bustling port of Port Edwards!).

In the meantime I have been amusing myself by reading RPG motivational posters on an RPG.net thread. Now about half of them would only make sense to gamers but some of them are just downright generically funny.

Yea anyhow. That's all for now. Denver in less then 3 months!

if (Today == 20.5) then MyAge++

This def. amuse me. Pulled off of RPG.net's forums.

Hehe

Yea, Brent made one too. I actually didn't realize that his sign wasn't real (ostensibly because I am not very bright) and found this by accident in between helping half the SOE people burn their SOE portfolios to CD this morning. Needless to say it amused me as well.

Go here if you'd like to generate your own.

In other news, now I am officially done for the spring: work and classes!

Finally Finished...Sort of

Yea, work tomorrow. Joy oh joy. Then I am done. Gonna end up helping Allison move though so that will keep me busy and hopefully getting a chance to hang out with Jamie too. Oh and meet with what would nominally be most of XA leadership for the fall. Saturday there is lunch with the CO and then more moving and Filteau/Lord Westensee's grad party. Busy busy next couple days. Prolly getting up early to help out at church too. For all the crap Sean and I give each other we do get along well and I'd like to help him out since he's basically running the show Sunday. It's a lot and I know I'd appreciate the help in his spot!

Pirate Mike gave me the Futurama commentaries and they are loads of fun. I've seen the episodes enough that I can actually piece together what is going on along with the commentaries. Def. be a nice thing for going out west.

Anyhow, that's all for now.

Pong

So a little b-day celebration for Lena involving going out to eat, margaritas, and of course beer pong. Happy Birthday to Lena now too cause it is the 17th. She's 23 now which means for 3 days or so she is actually 2 years old then me rather then one. :D

Random thing: saw a picture of Brent's fiancee and it's kinda funny but she looks about what I thought she'd look. Is that strange? Yea, that's a bit random, oh well. She looks nice and that's good. Hope Brent has found a good match.

Anyhow. Really should get to bed. Haven't studied history at all which means I need to devote a huge amount of time to it tomorrow and then actually take it. Lotsa stuff to do. Really didn't get much done today. Tonight was fun tho.

Yay

One of those moments where it feels like God may be watching over me but heard back from my new landlord and I can move in a day early so although it will still be a crazy time switching things over. Yay for that.

End of Things

Finals week always feels strange. The regular schedule is gone. Everyone is getting to leave. It's all that change and for whatever reason it never feels quite good. Not that most people aren't ready for a change. Heck I suppose even I am (resistant as I am to change). Maybe it's mostly cause suddenly things aren't so set in stone that throws me at ease. I can't say that next week I'll be in the CPS Mon at 3 and CIS332 at 10 on Tues.

All that said I am wondering if it's gonna be a lonely summer. I think this year I hung out with more people on campus then last year. Plus last summer Lars was around and Tyler was still in the house (if at random intervals). Ah well guess I'll just have to roll with it eh? Suck it up and find stuff to do.

GITS is almost done and it's getting pretty good. It sort of wallowed in the middle as they took their time developing the plot. A bunch of very casual storylines linking up. Now everything is all together and things are certainly interesting. Plus there's an android named "Frodo" (I think) who really like a lot like Legolas and I am wondering the GITS SAC Committee got a little too into LotR when they made this.

Anyhow guess I'd better attempt to tackle that Carter stuff. Ah productivity, take my mind off it's own random philosphizing!

Two Down

Two finals down, 3 to go but none til Wed night. That means I'm sort of free but not as I need to meet with Lena to do carter stuff and I have work as well. Ah life.

Found out my new apartment will prolly not be open until June 1st which is a frustrating change because now I will have to play musical furniture. Next week will be nuts, oy.

That's it for now :o

Halftime for Jose Manuel

Yea, the User Manual is complete, total, and fantastically idiotic waste of time. Really. However it's also my final so it'll get done. Really only about 36 hours left and then 358 is over. Not much else to talk about, that's all I did today. Also too fried to write much. Maybe Monday afternoon I'll get a big content burst.

Update Update: Little ice pellets assualted me enroute to Amber & Evie's. Not quite snow but sheesh, I nearly had to scrape off my car in the middle of May? Brings back memories of this.

Update: My, they do look like white and flurrieish those rain drops. :D

I'm curled up listening to Christmas music, watching it rain (and wondering if the snowline will drift a little further south) and I feel pretty good right now.

Progress

So I looked at my DPR today just to see if they had straigthened out my whole Major w/emphasis thing. They had. So when I looked at my DPR for the first time it said OK for every graduation requirement (it takes into account classes in progress or registered). That feels nice. I'm almost done. That's good too because the CIS department seems be crumbling around the students so getting out is probably a good thing.

It's nice to have some news in what has otherwise been a pretty blah week. Only one week left tho, just gotta grit the teeth and hold the course.

Engel Schläge

Not a lot to talk about. If you're bored you might find this interesting. Or not. Sort of a project of mine but gets worked on in spurts.

Not much new. Kind of suddenly want to be out of here but obviously that's not pratical.

In the meantime nothing particularily new or of interest. Sort of suffering from writer's block at the moment so hence this...

Alternative

So here's an alternative history: what if FDR instead of the whole New Deal militarized the country to help stimulate the economy during the Depression? Sort of along the lines of Nazi Germany but without the nasty Nazi stuff. Producing a large military aparatus would certainly bring the country out of its funk. Afterall it worked for the Germans and later worked for the US in actual history. The alternate thought could be that the US annexes most of Central America and the Carribean and when the Second World War breaks out is a massive military force spread across most of North America (barring Canada) and chunks of South America.

It would be a curious change of events!

Good ol' days

Played Mario Kart with Folky, Billy, and Barry. Man I miss those Tuesday nights. We'd all pile into Eric and Steiner's room and try and kick Steiner's butt. Then we'd get schooled and force him to battle pummelling each other with a multitude of bombs until it look like Hiroshima in rainbow colors. I needed that cause Friday afternoon really fused me over and that was unexpected. Still a little burnt out (oh to run away for the weekend but I have stuff that needs to get done in theory) but at least I feel better. I wish we coulda kept playing, bombs flyin' everywhere is just sheer good clean fun!

I came up with a brilliant (IMHO) use for the billions of excess dice d4-d20 sized that us gamers have. I created a game called: Dice's Revenge at work this morning. I personally think it's pretty cool. The basic rules are only a page long. I have about a page worth of optional rules tho. Prolly gonna expand on the optional stuff. Add complicated things. Yes, I am making supplements. Yes, I am kinda pathetic like that. No, you don't have to play it but I think gamer's might find it amusing. Heck for me I have a couple pounds worth of dice so I created it so I might find a use for my excess dice. I'll prolly post the rules at some point.

Did not get enough homework done today. Somehow have to do it tomorrow. I hope. Did manage to half watch the last 12 episodes of X. Think the first half was a little better actually but I've seen it all now so pretty cool that.

Anyhow Abby is comin' over and we're gonna go for a walk so I can burn off some more energy/stress and maybe vent.

Meanwhile the dice are planning their revenge!

Wemic's Crying

Tonight turned out a little different then I thought. Here's a random play of events:
Got the complete lowdown of what we are doing for CIS480 this summer. Basically determining the needs of a foundation's database and then recommending an off the shelf database geared towards foundations.
Ordered yet more books from Noble Knight, this time a couple 1st Ed Blue Planet books and one Engel book. Now I should have the full runs of both: a grand total of 3 books each. Blue Planet managed to survive to a 2nd Ed but Engel never really got off the ground in the US. Sad, I like the setting. Not sure how much the BP books will ever be used, prolly only play 2nd Ed if I ever play BP at all but part of me is very completist. No more RPG books for awhile and yes I'm aware at the start of the year I said I wouldn't get any and since then I've prolly gotten nearly a dozen. Hypocrite I most certainly am at times :(
Went to BW3s in Wausau. This was primarily a get-out-of-point/plan-this-summer-trip event. Successfully got out of Point. Did plan out our route to and from. Not terribly thrilled about return route cause it involves camping and I'm not a huge fan but realized that it won't kill me and it'll prolly build character if not give some useful basic life skills (ie helping to put up a tent, getting eaten by coyotes while the rest of the group beats it back to the CRV). So it'll prolly turn out to be a good thing if by this time we aren't ready to kill each other from proximity. Gotta keep a good attitude! (Harking back to the Air Force personnel at Keflavik in Red Storm Rising :D )
Got back, watched CSI and bummed around. Decided to throw Serenity into the tablet in my room and generate another character for Dani's game. My initial character is all good to go: Druid5/Shifter8. Yea, non gamers try and figure that out could been: Drd5/Shf8 even more confusing, eh? So for the heck of it I decide to make a character based off of a creature. I ended up picking a Wemic because they seemed pretty pimped. Went about making a 13th level character and after getting mostly done realized I had misunderstood the oh-so-not-confusing-at-all-unless-you-are-not-rocket-scientist ECL rules and made an 18th level charcter Wemic Fighter10 instead of a 13th level character who'd be a mere Fighter5. Alas, but no real loss because not my intended character to play. Plus I got to see Serenity and that's always fun.
"Tell me again about the part where Jayne gets knocked out by a 90 pound girl because that's never getting old!"

So here I am writing a very long blog entry right before I go to bed. Still feel kind of wide awake but hopefully I can read a little more of 2 Peter and that'll help ease my mind out of overdrive. Enjoy, good night, etc, etc.

PS I noticed that Mal looks scarily like Sean sometimes, you know how wrong that is?

MS, RPGs, and Other things

Yesterday the little MS Update thingy tells me I've got an update to install. This is fine. I've told it to tell me when it gets them. What's not fine is what it wanted to install. Seems MS decided to send a little thingy to test if my OS was valid or not. Yea, joy, nice to show trust by putting spyware on my comp that can "help" me register for a legal version of XP. Nice to show trust to legit users. More to the point most people who pirate are going to be aware of it and not going to install it either (well the smart ones at least). I am more scared that if this thing screws up that it'll disable my comp and make me jump through hoops as a way to "persuade" me to register my copy of XP. And yes this is a legit copy that came with my tablet but I don't trust MS programming well enough to figure that out. I also don't trust them enough to take any risks if their program decides that this is not a legit copy of XP.

So my total RPG book count has now surged past 110. That's a lot of reading material. Actually one of my goals is to surpass my Dad's library of books (no RPGs but tons of sci-fi). Slowly working my way towards it although my normal book reading has been woefully slow. I've got a backlog over a dozen books long and several of them very long non-fiction books. I love reading, I def. don't do it enough. Mostly at night before bed. Sometimes if it's really good at other times but I think more and more I have become plugged into this digital medium which is both great and utterly dreadful at the same time. Ah, I could wax philosphical on the benefits and ills of the web but I won't bore you anymore.

Time to try to polish Carter up a little bit. It was funny in class, Lena and I were done and a couple of the guys haven't started nor have they taken any notes. It still took Lena and I a good prolly 10-15 hours (over several days) total to get everything up and running right for the most part. Gonna be a lot of extra stress on these guys to turn things out right.

332 mostly complete

So since I am actually sort of done with CIS332 (amazing when you sit down how sometimes stuff just flows to you) so Tyler suggested I blog or otherwise my -2.35 readers may abandon me altogether.

Took the CRV in Monday cause the spare was going flat. Having never used it this concerned Dad and I somewhat. Unfortunately the local Honda guys couldn't find anything beyond the air being low in the tire. Their best suggestion was that someone was letting the air out of my spare. That's rather a long shot considering of all the times on your standard CRV the spare is the hardest to access. Who knows, maybe it was just a cold weather thing and it'll be good all summer. Hopefully I will never have to use it. I was mostly concerned for going to Denver.

Not a whole lot going on at the moment. Really should try and tackle the webpage for Gribble's class but cannot for the life of me come up with a good working concept for the 5th page. It would have been nice if we could have picked our subject because I don't know how to tie much into a record setting canoe race for Rett Syndrome and Leukodystrophy. I'll make up something I suspect.

I got my big old package of RPG books Monday. Was really excited: 4 Rifts books, the Silhouette core rules (Jovian Chronicles uses that rules systems) and Core Command Armory (uses Silhouette rules and basically got it to see if it had decent ships). Sort of digging through the different books now finding the fun stuff. I think by far my favorite is Rifts Underseas mostly cause it has a giant submersible aircraft carrier! It just looks fun.

Classes are done in a week and a half. I can't believe it, time really flies. I'm gonna be older and within a semester of graduating in less then a month! Yay yay! Anyhow I need to get over to County Market to resupply on milk and other essentials (milk!) so time to wrap this up.