joshuagriffis.com

So on December 14th, Hime reached Level 80. It only took me a month to grind the levels to the current level cap in WoW. W007!

There are a few things in life I am passionate about. As most of my friends can tell you, gaming is one of those passions. I game. I game hard core. If I like a series enough, I’ll even pre-order to make sure I get a copy of the game when it comes out. And in the worst case scenario, I will even go to a midnight launch party to be one of the first people to get my hands on a game.

So where am I heading with this? At midnight, Blizzard Entertainment Software is releasing their next expansion to their popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. The new title is Wraith of the Lich King. It will add content to do battle with the Lich king and his minions on the frozen continent of Northrend.

I am super excited. WoW is one the few games I have ever had a long term commitment with. In fact I have been playing the game for 2.5 years, the exact same amount of time my marriage lasted…..Ok that is both awesome and sad at the same time.

So Hime turned level 70 tonight on WoW. While she is not my first character in the game, she is my favorite and first I have gotten to level 70. Interestingly or sadly enough, it took 19 days, 6 hours, 40 minutes, and 30 seconds to get her to that level. Thankfully that time as been spread over two and a half years. \/\/007!

So I’m sitting in Port Columbus (CMH) waiting for my flight, and I decide to pull out my Mac. After checking to make sure nothing is on fire at work, I decide to hit Digg up. Here is one of the more amusing stories that is not safe for work. After blowing a half hour on digg, I decided to play WoW for a bit. After freaking out the people around me with the game noise, I decided to blog about it. And yes, I know I’m weird.

So I haven’t really blogged in a while due to some stuff we were trying to get through at work. Not much has changed. I got some new furniture (coffee and fold out sofa table). I bit the bullet and rented a garage at my complex (yeah for not having to clean my car off in the morning). I picked up a new GPS. I’ve played a ridiculous amount of WoW (Raellia is now 39). I’ve been on a couple of first dates (nothing serious as of yet). All and all pretty boring stuff.

Anyway I looking forward to my upcoming birthday and am currently trying to get people to buy gift cards so I can pick a Time Capsule to use with my Macbook Pro.  Hopefully I’ll get around to posting about the living with Macbook and also finally posting that white paper on ISA 2006 clustering and its pitfalls. Maybe….

So I picked a new Asus laptop about two weeks ago that seemed pretty cool. Until I realized it had a rather interesting problem. If you left laptop shutdown for about an hour or longer, when you went to try to turn it back you would get no video signal. Everything would be functioning, just no video on the monitor (although the LCD was obviously powered on because the back light was glowing). No big deal right, just get a hold of the manufacturer and fix the BIOS or get the system board replaced, right?Well that’s the funny thing about Asus’s tech support. In two words, they suck. Its been over a week and the bitches still haven’t responded to my email. There phone tech support left me in limbo for hours before I gave up.So I woke up this morning and said, fuck it. I grabbed my portable hard drive and laptop and headed off to work. I set the laptop and hard drive up in an open spot on my desk, and then backed up all the info I would want off the laptop.When I got home, I grabbed the box an receipt for the Asus brick, and headed back to Best Buy. Now I thought for sure I was going to have a fight, but when I opened the laptop and was able to duplicate the problem for their geek squad guy, I was offered an exchange with no restock fee. The only problem was there selection of latops with a dedicated video card left me with a choice between Sony, Toshiba, and Acer. I’ve never really heard much about Acer laptops (although there LCD monitors are ok), but I knew damn well I didn’t want anything to do with the other two brands. I made a joke with the sales guy telling him if my credit limit on my Best Buy card was about $200 higher, I’d just buy the MacBook Pro. He told that I could always inquire at customer service, the worst they could do was say no.I figured, well I’ve already had lovely luck over this replacement laptop, why not try it. 5 minutes later, The customer service associate informed me that they had upped my credit limit $1000. 10 minutes after that, I was walking out of the store with my new toy. Now being a Mac virgin, I was a little nervous about powering on the new system. I opened the box to find one of the most exquisitely packaged pieces of hardware I have ever seen. I opened up the little box that housed the instructions and software to find an extra bonus, a free upgrade to Leopard (top that Bill Gates)! I’m currently surfing the web while WoW installs on my toy.There will have to be a few compromises,. I won’t be able to play Team Fortress 2 for a little while, because Steam is windows only. There are a couple of pieces of software that will probably not work and I will have to find substitutes for them (if I really need them at all). I will never do any real hardcore PC gaming on this rig, but that’s not what I got it for. This is my e-mail/browsing/travel WoW gaming rig, and for that it fits the bill nicely.Being a long time windows user, I’d never thought I’d say these words, “My Mac just works.”Now on to WoW!

Bless me father for I have lived. Its been 13 days since my last blog session.

So I haven’t felt like blogging in a while, sue me. Anyway, here is the run down of things that have happened.

• Friday October 12th -I drove down to Southpoint, Ohio (the definition of a one horse town) for Andy and Jenny’s rehearsal dinner. I meet up with the immediate family at the hotel (Shantel, Mom, Anthony, and Ayla) and we check in. Then it dons on me that I need to pick up my Tux. Enter the following conversation:

Me: Shit I don’t know how to get there.

Shantel: You got the address?

Me: Yes.

Shantel: You want to borrow the bitch?

Me: Mmmmm….Yeah, give me the bitch.

The bitch we are referring to is her Garmin Nuvi portable GPS unit. The nickname was given by my mother who came up with the name the first time she was in the car listening to it give us directions. “The bitch told us to turn left.” I stopped trying to explain the weird quirks of my family long ago.

Anyway I get to the Tux place in back only to have to round everyone up to head over to the church. Anthony and I were in the wedding party, so we had the privledge/curse of having to put up with the most psycho wedding cordinator I have ever met. I knew it was bad when I pulled Andy’s dad, Charlie, aside and told him if he didn’t shut her up I was going to shoot her. The funny thing is Charlie is a retired State Trooper, and offered to help me take her down. Kevin, the best man and adopted son of Charlie and Gwen, is a current State Trooper and he asked to join in on the fun. Needless to say we all (no I didn’t really shoot her) made it out alive and headed over to dinner.

Texas Roadhouse on a Friday night in a small town that has next to no fine dinning establishments was packed. Add a 46 person rehearsal dinner, and you have the recipe for a blocked entrance. Its kind of funny to realize that you are standing next to a Fire Fighter (my Uncle Pat, he’s a Fire Fighter in Northern Kentucky and DJs on his free weekends for fun/money) in an entrance packed so much with people that it has to be breaking fire code. They finnaly seated us, and dinner went off more or less without a hitch.

We retried back to the hotel room where I introduced Anthony to WoW. Shantel is going to kill me for corupting her son.

• Saturday October 13th – Woke up, had breakfast, and then got suckered into to going to Walmart. At the end of the trip, my cart was full of household stuff for the new apartment thanks to mom.

We got back tot he hotel and started getting ready for the wedding. As I was putting my black vest on over my ivory shirt, I turned to look in the mirror and realized I could Cosplay as Han Solo in this outfit. After a good laugh, I finished getting ready, grabbed Anthony, and headed over to the church. The wedding and the pictures were a blur (though we did get Anthony, Michigan fan he is (I know, how can he go against his uncle/godfather like that), to help us do the O-H-I-O cheer for a picture.

We arrived at the reception, ate, drank, and were marry. There was much drinking, shot buying, cigar smoking, and general debauchery that goes on at family events. The high point of the night was the playing of a song that has become a family tradition for weddings and such, “Family Tradition” by Hank Williams Jr. During my cousin Lisa’s weddin, this tradition got slightly perverted into a drinking binge (it was BYOB and grandpa had a full 1L bottle Captain Morgans at the start of the song). This reception did not stray from that tradition.

Why do you drink?

To get drunk!

Why do you role smokes?

To get high!

Why must you live out the songs that you wrote?

To get laid!

The bottle made it around the circle one and quarter times, and was empty just as the song ended. Grandpa would later remark that the family seemed to have a few extra “additions” in the circle. Thats what happens when you break out free booze. It was a good time for all and I hope Andy and Jenny enjoyed themselves.

• Sunday October 14th – Got up and said my good byes. Drove back home and crashed. Got up and went out to dinner with Nate and Mraz. Afterwards we headed back to Mraz’s place to watch Avatar.
• Monday October 15th – First day of the insane work week from hell. Unfortunately I can’t blog about the fun juicy gossip stuff that goes on at work (either at the client site or HQ), so you’ll just have to take my word on it. Got home that night and had Mraz drive me to meet my parents at the Bob Evans in Jeffersonville (so I could get a one way moving truck the next day). He thought it was kind of humorous that we all ordered breakfast while he ordered dinner. Go fig.
• Tuesday October 16th -The wettest moving day ever. Wayne and I got drenched loading the stuff at my parents condo. I fought with an uncooperative mirror on the truck on the trip up. Unloading was a little easier with Mraz and my dad helping us at the destination. Thankfully mom took the time to unpack the kitchen for me while we setup the bedroom furniture. Wayne and I had finding the place to return the truck. Eventually everyone left and I turned in for the night.
• Wednesday October 17th – More work? Get home and find out Katy has twisted her ankle. I went and bought her a couple of huge bags of peas to ice it down. John met me at her place. I found out later they had and interesting adventure at the hospital. Read what he said and then read what she said. Its good for a laugh. I retired back to the house to meet up with an old friend. After that it was bed time.
• Thursday October 18th – Is it Friday yet?
• Friday October 19th – TGIF! Got home from work and headed over to Mraz’s place. Greg, the drunk Ukrainian, was in town for a visit. We hit up Fazolis for dinner, and then played WoW.
• Saturday October 20th – Mraz talked us into buying Team Fortress 2. I highly recommend you check out the videos for the Heavy, Solider, Engineer, and Demoman. They are hysterical, even if you don’t like video games. After that we hit up the Movie Tavern for 30 Days of Night and the fastest service I’ve ever received at the place to date. Seriously, I ordered a salad with my meal, and it was at my seat within 60 seconds of ordering it. It literally beat my drink order to the table. Now that is service.
• Sunday October 21st – More gaming and Anime viewing at Mraz’s place. So I pretty much blew any hope of getting chores done over the weekend, but I had a good time, so who cares.
• Monday October 22nd – Back to work. Someone shoot me now.
• Tuesday October 23rd- A productive day at work. A weird night. I couldn’t shake something that had started to bother me. A feeling that seems to creep up around this time of year. I’ll learn to deal with it one of these days. Katy listen to me ramble about it for a bit. Thanks! I also setup dd-wrt on my router at home. I love having the power of a business class cisco router for only $50.
• Wednesday October 24th – Another productive day at work. I also found out my boss is moving on to a new company. Good for him, he needs this kind of change in his life right now, and he deserves it. Of course that means work is going to be even more fun for me and my co-worker. I think we’ll live.

So I’ve finished this long winded post and I’m looking at a pile of boxes that I still haven’t bothered to unpack. I hate moving.