Free Candy For Everyone

My cable modem light is blinking again. That means I have no internet connection. I’m composing this post on my laptop, connected to a kindly neighbor with an unsecure wireless network. For the last couple weeks, I’ve hardly had any internet at all. I come home and the cable modem is blinking. I watch tv and it sits there, laughing at my lack of connectivity. Ok. Maybe modems can’t laugh. But I bet it would if it could.

Whenever the lights firm up and my connection comes live, I’ve learned to drop whatever I’m doing, pause my TiVo, pick up my dinner, drop my book, whatever - just run over to the computer and use it while I can.

I mentioned earlier that I had a service appointment for next week. Which I made over a week ago. So I’ve been calling Comcast to try to get an earlier service appointment. They put in a note so they’d call me if an earlier appointment opened up. They called me last week, I called back and after a long confusing conversation, the guy told me he’d scheduled me for an appointment today between 6 and 8 pm.

I was glad to finally have an appointment, though I’m not convinced the service guy will be able to do anything, because I’m certain the problem lies outside my walls. But anyway. I left work a little early to get home by 6. I turned down an offer to go out and schmooze with some co-workers so I could be home. So I got here and sat and waited. 7:30 rolled around and I decided to call and check on where my guy was.

To my shock, they had no record of me having an appointment today. I went a little bit off the deep end here, and proceeded to rant at the customer service agent about how Comcast has the worst customer service and no respect for its customers and how it’s completely unacceptable that they treat us this way and I’ve had no internet and blah blah. She was not very helpful so I asked to speak to her supervisor. I ranted some more and was given a credit for this month’s internet cost. But that’s really all I got. That, and an increase in my blood pressure. It’s just so frustrating!

At least I still have my service appointment for next week. But I’m seriously considering ordering DSL and going with whoever gets it working first. Yargh.

Yesterday I subjected myself to the worst movie I’ve ever seen. On purpose. With advance knowledge of what I was getting myself into. No, I’m not crazy. It was all for a good laugh.

Industrial Light & Magic has been running a movie screening called “Flecks” for a while now, where they watch a bad movie and heckle at it the whole time. Since ILM and LucasArts now share a space, we’re invited to come join the fun. I decided to give it a try, since it was hyped as hugely funny.

Last night’s selection was Snakes on a Train (yes, you read that right). This gem was a direct-to-video attempt to capitalize on the buzz for Snakes on a Plane. It was low budget schlock with a ridiculous plot. But the heckling sure was good.

Plot spoilers ahead! If you have any intention of watching this wonderous(ly awful) film, stop your eyes now! Ok, I’m sure I didn’t lose any readers because you should NOT WATCH THIS THING!

The burning question on your mind is what plot device do they use to get the snakes on the train? Well, I’ll tell you! There’s a lovely Mexican lady who’s been cursed by her family because she wouldn’t marry the rich guy they wanted her to. And the curse causes her to vomit snakes! In blobs of green jello! And though they start out as small little garter snakes, over time they get bigger and bigger (and somehow get rattles) until they can eat people! Yay!

Along the way there are fun side plots like the two nice girls who decided to smuggle drugs to make some money, get caught by some guy claiming to be a Texas Ranger narcotics officer who then proceeds to take one of the girls to an empty train car and turn the movie into a porno. Don’t worry, she loses her top, but that’s about all. Because then some other guy turns up, and in a completely incomprehensible sequence of events, holds a gun to Texas Ranger’s head, pulls him into a storage car, makes him take off his shirt “So everyone can see how gay you are” and then shoots him in the mouth. I just don’t get it.

Lots of people we don’t care about die, and in the final scenes of the movie everything goes in a completely different direction and the vomiting snake woman turns into a ginormous snake that actually eats the entire train in a series of horrific CG scenes. I’m not kidding you. It’s true.

Anyways, I think the humor I have for it in hindsight might have made it all worthwhile. Maybe. But please, don’t watch it alone. You need a good group of people to make it tolerable.

I’ve been running Aynaka, my mage, through the Badlands, doing quests in preparation for Uldaman. As this is not my first time in the zone, I found myself spend some time looking at the details. There’s a little gnome fellow who gives you some quests to kill earth elementals. All well and good, but the true excitement is in paying attention to his little robo-buddy, Servo.

Servo stands next to his master, Lotwil Veriatus some of the time. But most of the time you can see him running in circles around Lotwil’s camp. When he returns to his master’s side, he has a pithy remark. And there are quite a number of them. I found myself standing and waiting to see what he was going to say next. He opened with this one:

This gem is a reference to the tv show the Six Million Dollar Man. That piqued my interest, so I stuck around.

Guessing this one is a reference to C3P0, who was well versed in over 6 million forms of communication, or something like that.

The next few aren’t that great. I do like the “doothingies” one.

And then, the best for last:

There’s still so much new to see and I’ve been playing for over a year at this point. Crazy.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a bit of a bookworm. When I’m not geeking out on technology, you’ll frequently find me with my nose buried in a book. Over the years I’ve amassed a ridiculously large collection of books, since most of my relations with libraries tend to be short-lived. I don’t know what it is, but every now and again I try getting my books from the library instead of the bookstore. It lasts for a few weeks or months, and then I’m logging onto Amazon and ordering away. It’s something of a problem.

My sister-in-law, Olivia, sent me a link to this cool new website called BookMooch which may be a solution. The idea is that I post books I want to get rid of. Other users can search for my books and “mooch” them. I send the book directly to them and get 1 point. With that 1 point I can mooch any book from anyone else. So it’s just a cool way to trade books! I listed a few books last week and have been waiting eagerly for someone to mooch one so that I could get some points and start my own mooch-mooching. But no one has yet. Please, internet people, mooch my books.

It sounds a bit like a chicken-and-egg problem, how do you get the points to mooch in the first place? You get 1/10th of a point for every book you list. So, actually, if I could just find a few more books I’m willing to part with I’d be ready to go.

I got an email update on some changes to the site a couple of days ago and it turns out the site has only be live for about 2 weeks. Looks like Olivia led me to the party early! I’m excited for the concept and hope it works out. If any of you out there do give it a try, my user name is Tara. Look at my books and mooch away.

I actually seem to have an internet connection today, so I logged on to WoW and immediately tried to hop into a battleground. I queued up for both Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch. There were many many BGs up and running, but the wait time was still at around 10 minutes. Maybe that was because I was playing on Alliance side. I haven’t tried Horde yet (since I just hit 40 with the alt I most like to BG with, I figured I should gain a few levels first).

To my surprise, Arathi Basin popped up first. I hit the button to go to the battleground and was brought to a loading screen. But then the progress bar made no progress. I was just sitting there staring at a static screen for about a minute. Then in the midst of it I heard the sound effect that plays when you can enter a battleground. Soon after that I got dropped out of the loading screen back into the game with just a text message in the chat box saying something like “Battleground instance could not be found.” But it seemed my Warsong Gulch has popped up and one of my addons auto-joined me for that while I was reading the message.

Played there for a bit, all was fine. Well. Except for the fact that I entered into a battle midstream and my side was getting creamed. But otherwise it was all normal. I was playing my priest, which can be hard without good teammates. Priests just go squish. So we quickly lost, I ended up in Stormwind which is not where I had queued myself. I queued in Darnassus. Strange, but I wanted to be in SW anyway, so ok. I immediately queued again. But take a look at this:

I was in Stormwind and the game seemed to think I was in AB. Of course, I never even managed to get into that BG at all.

A few minutes later I got into another WSG. This one was going much better. We captured a flag or two and I was doing some decent heals. It was good stuff. But then either I got booted from the battle or it went down or who knows what, because I ended up back in SW. With the deserter debuff. And it said I was still in WSG!

Definitely something strange going on here. I gave up at this point. I’ll give it a bit of time to get the kinks out. I love that you don’t have to spend the first few minutes yelling “Invite” when you enter the BG. That’s awesome. And they’ve appended the server name to everyone’s character names so you can see where everyone comes from. Very nifty. I think this will end up being a cool feature, it’s just a bit unstable for now.