Well, this weekend I discovered a problem I hadn’t really considered before – iPads are a bit heavy and rather slippery compared to a paperback. I was reading in bed and my cat decided to sit on my chest in front of the iPad, typical cat behavior. I was wiggling and twisting the iPad to keep reading when it slipped out of my right hand. My left hand still had tight hold and it almost seemed like slow motion as the iPad swung in towards my face. It crashed into my lip and I tasted blood. Within minutes my lower lip had swollen up to twice its size.

Sure, books can give you paper cuts, but watch out, the iPad can give you a fat lip.

Fast forward a few more years and I’m living in San Francisco, working in the Presidio. My commute is 10 minutes and that’s my focus.

The next job after that was at Double Fine. My commute went from 10 minutes in my car with easy parking on both ends to an all public transit route that involved 2 buses and about 15 minutes of walking for a total commute of 35 – 50 minutes, depending on luck and how many stops the buses made.

At first I thought it was unbearable. All that time swaying on a muni bus was such a waste. I had to move! But weeks turned into months and I didn’t move. I found myself getting used to the commute. There’s a muni mini game to successfully snagging a seat even on a super crowded bus. There are the amusing crazies you encounter when taking the bus home at 1 am after a particularly late night at work. And of course there are all the iPhone games I spent hours playing.

Now my commute involves a 5-10 minute walk and then about 50 minutes on a fancy bus with wifi. Some of my friends on Twitter were amazed that I considered this a good commute. But there are a few things to consider.

First, I’d consider this better than my last commute. One bus, mostly clean, no fear of getting my iPad stolen if I pull it out and decide to write a blog post. A straight shot to work, I can even take a nap if I want to!

Second thing is about priorities. When I was 21 and fresh out of college, work was my life. My biggest concern was impressing my boss and doing a great job. Ten years later, these things are still important but time has taught me that work is not the only thing. Maybe it seems like an obvious statement, but for me it took a lot of time to come around to this wisdom.

After all, I love video games and every day I was getting to make them. I was living my dream and why would I want anything else? Well, because it turns out that my dreams encompass more than the kind of code I write when I sit down at a computer every morning. I think it’s too easy to get caught up in our jobs and career advancement so that we forget about the other things we have wanted for ourselves.

For me, what I want is to continue to live in San Francisco, a beautiful city that makes me proud. Every neighborhood has a different mini culture and there are still so many places I haven’t eaten. Mmm, good food is definitely on my list of important things. I choose to commute 50 minutes each way everyday so that I can come home and see my friends, not tomorrow, but today.

I don’t live next to my office because I don’t want my office to be the center of my world anymore. My job is great and I smile at the people I get to work with everyday. But then I get to go home and think about what I’m going to do next with my day.

I’m moving tomorrow and the last month has been accompanied by the ever present mantra of ‘get rid of’! My first stop was perhaps the easiest. After ten years working on video games I had accumulated quite the collection. We’re talking original Xbox, gamecube, PSP, Gameboy Advance, and stacks and stacks of games. I took so many games to trade in that I started visiting different locations to spread the love. I included current games that I was never going to play again, but every game I added to the pile was a decision and not always an easy one.

From there it was on to the books. I have to thank my iPad for making this part easier. Ever since I went to digital books my attachment to the paper counterparts has diminished. I got rid of a couple hundred books, donated hopefully to good homes. Don’t worry, I still have hundreds of books left, I’m not that evolved yet.

Clothes I never wear, papers from so long ago I don’t know why I kept them, random knickknacks that I just don’t need, and more cat themed stuff that people gave me as gifts than any sane person should have. Friends and loved ones reading this: yes, I love cats, but No, I don’t want my home festooned with creepy cat lady stuff.

My move is tomorrow and I’m not done, I still have so much more to pack/toss. The question is am I going to learn a lesson from this and acquire less, get rid of more? I really don’t know, but I’m doing my best to enter this next apartment with as clean a start as I can.

What’s going on with me, you ask? Well the biggest piece of news is that I have left the video games industry, just shy of my ten year anniversary. Games have been my passion, my hobby, my job, and my life for a very long time now. It wasn’t losing interest in games that lead to my career shift, but a curiosity about what else is out there and what other ways I can be challenged. There are so many things I am interested in besides video game AI. Admittedly, game AI is pretty awesome, but sometimes I have a larger desire to effect my world and my destiny than being a programmer affords.

On to the destination then, where am I now, you ask? Apple! Anyone who’s followed my blog since I started it so many years ago has probably seen the occasional Apple fangirl post creep in. Somehow I went from a Windows only person to someone with piles of Macs and iDevices surrounding me. And I like it! I’ve been at Apple for a month and it was definitely the right decision for me. I do not intend to talk about Apple on this blog or my job there, I just wanted to provide some context to my new situation.

And for my blog readers and close friends, probably the biggest change is that I have quit World of Warcraft. I haven’t played in about two months and I don’t really miss it. I’ll probably give it another try when the next expansion comes out because how could I not. But the time for WoW to dominate every aspect of my life is over. Since I quit I have so much more time for reading, rock climbing, knitting, and socializing with my RL friends that I’m amazed how much longer the days feel.

Because that wasn’t enough for me to handle I’m also moving, just from one side of San Francisco to the other, but packing and getting everything ready has certainly kept me busy. The move is this Saturday and I really can’t wait for it to be done.

I still have plenty of thoughts to share on geek toys, tv, movies, my cat (I know you all can’t wait to get updates on my cat, can you?) and whatever else comes to mind. So come on back to visit and I’ll do my best to keep you entertained without resorting to orcs and night elves.

Wow, what a relief. Hard modes next!

Now to convince the bosses to drop some caster mail…

P.S. Blizzard, please fix the bug where the AOE damage that the Blood Queen does triggers shaman water shield orbs. Having to refresh my water shield every 15 seconds is a poor use of GCD.

We use World of Logs to study how we’re doing and compare our progress across weeks. I recently took a look at our healers and came up with some notes about what I consider when healing.

Here’s the log from Lady Deathwhisperer from last night (of course I chose this fight because I was the top healer, mwhaha).

1) Keep Earth Shield up!
Keep ES up all the time! Unless it’s a single tank fight and Myr is hogging all the ES glory (I’m Myr, and in your case I mean another resto shaman since I’m probably not secretly raiding with you), make sure you have ES on a tank. LDW is a good example where there are tanks on both sides. Make sure to be refreshing ES in downtimes, if it’s at 1 or 2 orbs left I tend to refresh it if I’m not doing anything else.

2) Keep Water Shield up!
If you are running low on mana you should spend a GCD refreshing your water shield if it’s down (or about to go down). In a hectic fight this might seem dangerous but having no mana is worse!

3) Riptide is awesome and should be used whenever it’s off cooldown
Even without the t10 set bonus (which gives you spell haste after riptide), Riptide procs Tidal Waves which makes your Lesser Healing Wave crit chance increase and your reg Healing Wave cast time decrease. Plus it’s an instant heal with a hot. If you’re tank healing you should be doing Riptide->LHW->LHW or HW if you have the time. On Festergut at 3 stacks I’m doing Riptide->HW->LHW and repeat on the main tank.

4) Chain Heal is pretty awesome
For a while it sucked. But they buffed how much each bounce hits for and how far it’ll jump. If it’s a stacked tank fight then I’m pretty much always chain healing the tanks (Marrowgar is a great example of this). On Saurfang I’m chain healing the tanks as well since they end up switching off and tend to both be taking dmg. When choosing between CH and LHW on the tanks I choose LHW if time is of the essence and they are really low, otherwise I usually CH if I think it’ll hop to at least one other player. Same with healing non-tanks. I always riptide the lowest raid member and will LHW if someone is really critically low, otherwise it’s usually chain heal.

5) Don’t forget your cooldowns
Nature’s Swiftness is now on a 2 min cooldown. I use it early and often in boss fights and trash. Insta-cast HW on the tank in a pinch or for a CH if the raid is taking crazy damage.
Tidal Force can be a savior too! It makes you crit which not only saves whoever you are healing but procs Ancestral Awakening and heals the lowest member of the raid too. If NS is on CD and we’re in an Oh Shit raid damage moment I hit Tidal Force.

Shaman don’t have nearly as many healing spells to figure out as priests (I know, I have one of those too). The crux of being a great shaman healer is figuring out when to use each tool and in what order since we’re so much about procs. Spamming anything mindlessly is rarely the best thing to do, for each fight we should evaluate what kind of damage players will be taking and choose the best tools to fit that situation! If anyone has questions on a particular fight, I’m happy to share my healing strats for it. Enjoy!

Writing really gets easier with practice
At the start of the month it was really hard to write my daily quota. Sitting down without a clear idea what to write was scary and intimidating. The page was blank and the thought that I could fill it with something was just immensely difficult. But by the second and third week I knew I’d get some words down, regardless of if they were amazing or not. Even when I didn’t feel like writing, I’d manage to make progress.

Writing without being self critical is essential
I’m usually an excessively meticulous fiction writer. Every word and turn of phrase is examined and studied from every angle to determine if there’s a better word choice or way to communicate the sentiment at hand. This is funny since when I write blog posts I just ramble at will and it probably comes out better than when I fret about every single detail. When you’re trying to write thousands of words a day, you can’t be worrying about each individual word. As much as it made me wring my hands, I didn’t let myself turn back and edit anything. If I used the same word five times in a single paragraph then too bad! I could break out the thesaurus on the rewrite phase, if I ever got to it.

Setting a daily goal the requires writing every day is not realistic
If you write everyday, you need to write 1667 words per day to reach the NaNoWriMo winner’s circle. I gave myself the smallest possible margin, setting my daily goal at 1700 words. Then I had a few weekends where fun social plans kept me from writing and I fell so far behind. I think setting my daily goal at 2000 or even higher would have been better, allowing me to miss more days and not requiring catchup days with such high word goals. Looking at the remaining week and realizing I need to write almost 4000 words every day just deflated me.

Pre-plotting is good!
I did some basic world building before I started writing, getting a sketch of the characters and setting of my story. I had a loose idea of a character arc but I didn’t really have a plot, and ultimately it made it hard to progress. I had a lot of fun with unexpected new characters popping up and turning the story in different directions but if I’d had a firm central plot to pull things back to I might have made it through. As it was, my story delved into chaos and I wasn’t quite sure how to get out. My main character ended up in a dark place and the central arc of my story get left by the wayside. I think even having a one paragraph plot outline would have made things better.

Bottom line, it was great. I wrote and wrote and realized that I can write. Maybe not well, and maybe I’m not going to ever let anyone read anything in this first attempt at a novel, but I’m going to do it again. And I’m going to “win.”

NaNoWriMo is a pledge to write a 50,000 word novel (or novella really) in the month of November. You can’t start writing ahead of time and it’s pencils down by the end of the month. The novel doesn’t need to be edited or polished, the point is just to get yourself to write.

How many people have “write a novel” on their to-do list? I know I do. It’s something I’ve always thought about for later. I love reading and used to be very creative. Growing up I would write stories all the time. Somewhere along the way everything got a little too serious and I haven’t made the time for it anymore. So quite probably my book will not be any good, but that’s not really the point. I want to reconnect to my creativity and do something that is far-fetched and a dream. So here goes, wish me luck.

YouTube video of Anub kill shot! No music or titles this time, I’m tired