Free Candy For Everyone

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I lost my iPod recently. I’d been wanting to buy a flash mp3 player for a while, since the hard drive doesn’t like it so much when you go for a run or something and shake it up. Since I’m still eagerly waiting for the next cool big iPod thing, I decided I’d get my Nano now. So I went online to the Apple website and purchased my iPod on Monday.

I just checked the package tracking and saw this as the tracking history:

Ladeeda, normal stuff, I’m thinking. But wait. “Int’l shipping release”. Um. Where’s Shenzen, CN again? Um. China? Oh.

That’s right, they ship it from China directly to an individual customer. That seems like it wouldn’t be all that cost effective to me. I’m sure glad the shipping was free, I’ll tell you that!

Anyway, it should arrive by the end of the week and I’ll no longer have to carry around this silly piles of discs to have enough music to last me through the day. I’m very much looking forward to it!

Great sadness invades the Tara household as I suffer through continual internet connectivity problems. I’ve had intermittent trouble since Comcast hooked everything up a mere week or so ago. My connection constantly disappears, I have to power cycle my cable modem all the time, and it just keeps getting worse. Today it got so bad that I couldn’t connect at all. How are you writing this post then, you ask?

Well. I removed the splitter from the cable wire. I have a 3-way splitter with one cable coming to my modem, one to the Motorola HD cable box/DVR and one to my TiVo. Every split diminishes the signal strength. And my modem doesn’t seem to like this low signal strength. At least I have a work around. But I must keep my DVRs fed with streams of TV data, so I can only log on when there’s nothing on TV I want to record. This must be fixed!

I called Comcast yesterday and the earliest service appointment I could get that was not during my work hours was September 9th. Yup. Weeks and weeks away. I might try going to the Comcast office and trading in my cable modem for a different one to see if that helps. But if it’s a signal strength issue, that ain’t gonna fix it. I might try picking up a signal amplifier type thing from RadioShack. I can’t live like this! How primitive…

Just loaded up World of Warcraft to this message:

For those that don’t like images, it says they’ll be extending the August 22 maintenance by 2 hours to apply a patch. Oh yeah, and my server and a bunch of others are going down early to do hardware stuff too. That’s good and all, but Patch 1.12 is the big news for me. If that’s what it is, and not some silly little hotfix patch. That’d be sad.

I’ve hardly kept up with what’s in this patch, I’ve been so busy with moving and the new job and everything. I guess I’ll have plenty of time to read the patch notes soon when I’m slowly downloading the patch itself! I hope.

One of the benefits of working at a big company seems to be commerce. There’s a constant murmur of item trades and sales in the background. Well, ok. That’s an exaggeration. But there does seem to be someone selling something everyday. And I’ve availed myself of this opportunity twice now. The first time was during my first few days at work. My stuff hadn’t arrived here from Massachusetts yet and I lost my iPod during a regrettable loose purse incident on a flight a few weeks ago. This means I was completely without music at work. It turns out I get grumpy when I’m in music withdrawal. But then a large bin of CDs appeared outside my office door. “For Sale!” they shouted. I purchased 7 CDs from that stack and was soon happily listening to music while I worked. Some of it wasn’t quite what I would have chosen myself, but beggars/choosers and all that.

Then today someone offered up Rockstar’s Table Tennis game for Xbox 360. This was a game that I remember scratching my head about. Why would the creators of the Grand Theft Auto dynasty make a Ping Pong game? The answer is simple: because they could, and they could do it darn well. I had a few minutes of play time during a lunch hour at my old job and had been impressed with the game. It looks fantastic and it has great attention to detail. It’s fun to play with friends, and I’m always looking to add a few titles to my meager 360 game collection. So this was perfect - I picked the game up at a low price and finally dragged my 360 out of its box and hooked the system up today.

I played for way longer than I had intended to. My hand aches a bit from gripping the controller so tightly! But they make it really easy to jump in and get going. I felt like a champ for a few matches until the computer started getting tougher. But I still managed to slaughter everything the game had to throw at me. On easy mode. With the easiest player character. But I said, “What the hell” and threw caution to the winds and jumped online with Xbox Live. With about 2 controller clicks I had a match set up. Someone joined within about 5 seconds. It was so easy. Well. The game setup was easy. My practiced opponent then proceeded to completely clobber me in no time at all. The only point I got in the entire game was one where they hit the ball and missed the table. I can maybe take some credit for that. Maybe. The really cool thing was I could then go and look at my opponent’s gamer tag and see that they had unlocked everything possible in Table Tennis. Obviously they’re gonna be a lot better than some n00b who had put in about an hour.

All in all, I’m continually impressed with the Xbox 360 online integration. They make it so easy and quick that you hardly even have to think about it. And Table Tennis is certainly a mighty good Ping Pong game.

I hit another milestone today - I got Aynaka, my mage, to level 40. I had stopped playing her for a while because I had so much else to do. My college friends started playing WoW and I started a warlock, Myrael, to play with them. Was having a great time with her, but they started getting ahead of me since they were playing one character and I was actively playing 3. I decided to load up Aynaka just to do some PvP and had so much fun that I don’t want to use my warlock anymore!

I’ve run some instances with the new group and my mage and it’s been fun. Of course, they’ve still all managed to get way past me. I think the highest level in the group is at 47. But that just means we’ll have some fun running 10-man raids with people I know pretty soon.

Anyway, I’m back to leveling Aynaka, and I hit 40 and bought my mount today. Here she is, sitting pretty in Brill on her new horsey.