So… that postcard I made a few days ago and wrote about here is ready to be mailed. But the printers say our address list has some bad postal codes; in particular, Canadian postal codes have had the last digit truncated. A little investigation, and I find out what’s happened. Our obviously US-centric database restricts postal codes to five characters. The salespeople have been putting the overflow in the ZIP+4 field. So I think of a simple fix: ...
Today I came in intent on rewriting my internal web apps so they didn’t use frames. See, I’ve been migrating people from the custom Visual BASIC apps to the web-based equivalents I’ve been writing, and they’ve been such a success people are starting to print them out. And sometimes they get the report, and sometimes the navigation frame. So I was going to off the navigation frame. Never got the chance. In advance of some shows coming up really soon, I was drafted to help with a few flyers and make a new postcard. ...
There’s a great discussion about how games built around the aquisition of items force certain playstyles on players on Blackguard’s blog. It’s easier to make games based on items rather than player skill. And it lets people who may not be the best twitch gamers in the world compete with those who are. Is there a way to make a game where player skill was a factor without limiting the player base? ...
Sick Friday, I was sent home to sleep it off (unpaid, of course). Instead, I loaded myself up with drugs and logged in to EQ2 to finish the Hoo’loh’s Hat quest. My last Halls of Fate run had left me with only one update to get; from the guards of the dragon deep in the Palace of the Awakening. I wondered aloud if there were any PoA groups that might be heading that way. Matteo from Legends offered me a group, and they might head that way, but on the heels of that came an invitation from a player two-boxing a berserker and a mystic. He was going to go straight there; he needed the dragon and i needed the guards, so it would work out for both of us. ...
You’d get the impression from my blog that EQ2 is the only game I play. It isn’t so. Nearly every night, it is the original EverQuest I load up when I get home from work. There’s nearly always a raid in progress; my Eastern Time guild starts hours before I get home. They usually can use another cleric. We’ve been farming the same content for over a year now. EQ’s slow decline makes it harder to progress – people are moving on to other games or real life, or switching servers to join more advanced guilds, or just cutting back from the time that being a raider requires. We made it to the Demiplane of Blood and the Theater of Blood (there’s some unhealthy obsession there on the part of the devs for blood, I think). We lost many people. Had to rebuild. A couple of times. ...
I had no idea my blog was so popular until I started getting dozens of spam comments each day. These guys would make millions with their illicit drugs if I would only let their comments through! What market pull I must have! I admit, it is tough having America’s Favorite Blog, but I bear the burden gladly. With that in mind, I went to the web site of the US Patent and Trademark Office to find out a little more about America’s Favorite things. ...
Poor Pluto. For nearly a century it had been sitting at the big table with the other planets. And did it complain? It did not. It was just happy to be here. But rather than admit potentially a dozen smaller planets to that exclusive club, the International Astronomer’s Union decided to demote Pluto to the status of a “dwarf planet”. Its crime? Having an eccentric orbit. Yeah. That’s been a felony in the Alpha Centauri system for about a million years. ...
I logged in intending to make some serious progress toward my Hoo’loh hat. And I did; I quickly found a Halls of Fate group headed by the wizard/conjurer duo with whom I’d killed the scrollbearer and escorted Hoo’loh at the beginning of the quest. Helped a lot by an EC tank and healer, we wasted the zone and got all the kill updates but one for the hat. The last one is in the Palace of the Awakened, from one of creatures guarding the green dragon. ...
You don’t really appreciate Kingdom of Sky from the top. Weird creatures, lush landscapes, people zipping about on personal clouds, quick with their business. No, to really appreciate Kingdom of Sky, you need to see it from underneath. Someone pushed me – a real good shove – right off the edge of the chain. I fell onto the side of a cliff, with flat ground a hundred feet above me and nothing but a distant chain below me. There was a chance I could let go and maybe reach the chain, if safe fall and blind luck would save me. And it did. Stranded on the chains until Escape was ready to whisk me to safety, I had a lot of chance to really get a good look. ...
Finally FINALLY done leveling Dina. I’ve caught up! Last night when I logged in, I immediately got invited to a guild Halls of Fate run. It was my first time there! Lots of nameds; unfortunately the loot was kind of meh, but the experience was good and we finished the run with me just 3% from 70! There was no way I was going to do anything besides finish this level. ...