So as you’ve probably guessed from the opening, my rollercoaster relationship with that online monstrosity, which was riding high about a month ago, is once again hurtling down into “Oh-my-god-I’m-wasting-my-fucking-time”sville for the third time. This time around it comes complete with hourlong “Log on and do nothing” sessions, interspersed with the occasional 5 hour Naxx grind that makes me want to kill myself. So, having lost this fight on points twice before I can see how this is going to play out, and I’m throwing in the towel early this time, before my metaphorical boxer suffers too much brain damage.

But, much like a junkie starting out onto the straight and narrow, I found myself in desperate need of a methadone fix. First up I tried Painkiller.

Painkiller is a weird game. Imagine if Quake and Serious Sam had a love child. This would be the game the child wanted to grow up to be. It’s really fast paced, has tons of spawning enemies, and a hilarious cavalcade of weapons to mow them all down with. It seems Painkiller decided they were tired of the “2nd attack button just doing a similar attack to the 1st one” stuff that every game seems to have these days. You know…you get a rocket launcher. It fires rockets with the left mouse button and lobs grenades with the right one. Painkiller pretty much said “Fuck that,” and combined their grenade launcher with a gun that fires wooden stakes ala Von Goosewing from Count Duckula. Go check out the demo, if only for the arsenal of unbelievably ridiculous (and fun) implements of death. The whole thing is only 3 levels long, and you should play through it in about an hour (less if you’re not the ham fisted R-tard that I am), and the boss fight is pretty damn cool.

However, good and all as it was, I was not prepared to get the full version. And by “get the full version” I mean download it illegally from some torrent site. And that’s the real gauge these days, isn’t it? If I can’t be arsed stealing it, it’s probably not the game for me. Then it occurred to me…maybe the same inexplicable cosmic alignment that occasionally strikes Gabe over on Penny Arcade had affected me as well.

“Maybe that’s what I need, an RPG,” I thought, and set off in search of foul monsters to slay, gold to procure, and an insanely complex plot to ignore.

…to be continued.

That was my first mistake.

Now, let me just stop you goddamn Linux people now. Fuck off. I’m not installing Linux. If you want to preach the virtues of Ubuntu or whatever, go to some loser techie site, and do it there. I really don’t care. Really. (Editor’s Note: And if she wanted Linux on that machine, she’d install it herself.)

We finally decided that this past weekend was a good time to do the deed. So we got all set up. The first obstacle was that amount of crap on her machine. It’s an older system: a Dell Inspiron 1150, with a 30b HDD packed to the rafters with knitting patterns and Power Point slides. So, gotta get ‘em off. So, I’m transferring away and Bam. “Your estimated wait time is 2430 hours.” Right…so assuming I don’t have an entire goddamn season to spend on this, I’d need to figure out what the hell is going on. I guessed it was just misreading the file sizes, said “Whatever,” and let it tick. The whole thing took about 4 hours to backup and verify. Fair enough. Of course, once everything is backed up, Dixie pointed out, “Oh, you didn’t need to back that up.” Well…shit. What’s done is done, and it’s better to have the file and not need it, etc.

So, that went relatively smoothly. Next came the Actual Installation. “Where are the installation CDs?” After producing several CDs of applications that came with the computer, the laptop’s owner concluded she did not, in fact, have the Windows installation CDs.

Bollocks.

Right. No CDs. Well, we can order ‘em from Dell, but it’ll cost an arm and a leg, and will take forever. On top of that, it’s freaking XP Home. No, no, no…this will not do. Then it turn out that Caltech has a site license for XP. Yay! Everything is saved. What’s better, one of our friends has already burned a copy and we can yoink it. The day is saved, right?

Is it fuck. Strap yourselves in, bitches, we’ve only just begun.

The laptop refused to boot from the CD. I tried a 2nd CD that was burned, just in case. Nada. Hmm… Let’s see if it’s reading the CD at all: boot to Windows, pop in the CD, wait. The drive just spins there…trying to read. Like a newly blinded man clutching the last Harry Potter novel with a tear in his eye. Is the drive fuxxored? I pop in a DvD. “The Mummy” spins up right away and works fine. Right…I check the CD itself. Pop both of them into my (awesome) laptop. And voila! It reads. Right, so, it might be these burns. I try to recreate the CD on my system. Wrong again. The CD drive just faffs around again and doesn’t see anything.

“OK, Maybe it’ll only read CDs it makes itself,” I think. I’ve seen it before. We get the downloaded iso on the laptop, burn it to disk…and no. The drive doesn’t read shit. I take the newly burned CD out of her laptop, pop it in mine…and it works perfectly.

Let me repeat that.

I take the CD out of her system, which wrote the CD and doesn’t read it, and into mine, which reads it perfectly. That’s the equivalent of being able to [em]write[/em] Spanish, but not [em]read[/em] it. At this point my frustration was reaching the boiling point. I was about a .dll error message away from flinging the system out the window. We live on the ground floor, with vegetation all around, so the laptop would probably have been fine, but that wasn’t really on my mind at the time.

Right, so it looks like it’ll only read Official CD’s not Burns. All we have are burns. Ok…lets try the long bomb. Lets try the Bootable Flash Drive method.

After a bitchload of net surfing and forum posts, I got directed to this page. It requires that you download three files. First off, there is only one fucking place on the Internet to get these files. And it’s slow. Dog slow. Like “oh-my-god-I-could-have-fucking-written-this-program-faster-myself” slow. I eventually downloaded the files. I do what the site says and sure enough, after a few missteps, I have the prepped Flash drive (I used a 1 GB stick), and am ready to give this a try.

Success!!! We have the Windows Install. Huzzah. It’s all good now, right?

Ha ha.

So, as anyone who has done a Full XP Build can tell you, there are 2 parts to the install. The blue text-based part where you format and partition the drives and then copy the Install files to the newly pristine C Drive. Then there’s the GUI part that actually installs the OS. I will make a long story short and say it did the first part…but not the second.

So it partitioned the drive, formatted it blank…and that’s it. For those of you following along at home…at this point I had an expensive, laptop-shaped brick in front of me, and the urge to kill rising inside of me. Right, back on the Net, asking it in a variety of ways, “What the Fuck?” Where is the post that says “Hey Bob, I followed your instructions, and busted my wife’s laptop. Now I’m broke, divorced, and giving handjobs in the bathroom of the Olive Garden to pay for my Crack addiction. Any thoughts?”

Lo and behold, I did find something. Apparently there was a tick box under the formatting options that should have been pre-configured a particular way. It wasn’t. I set it up that way, and re-did from start.

10 hours, 2 gallons of sweat, and a string of curse words that would make a sailor blush later, and her laptop is up and running.

Never again.

First off, last week I was offered a free ticket to Dublin. No strings attached, just a wonderful offer from a nice woman whose computer I fixed. She had booked the ticket months ago, and had a late scheduling conflict, and offered it to me. Alas, it fell through due to the fact that a) I couldn’t get the time off work (which will be even funnier the longer you read), and b) she mistakenly told me that the flight was on Saturday whereas it was actually on the Friday. We tried to get Dixie on the flight, but at that point trying to change the date was too much of a headache, and not really viable.

The 2nd piece of info is, as some of you are aware, that my boss is batshit insane. For those of you not up to speed, here a quick update on his insanity.

8 weeks ago he fired Nicola, our Admin. Since her arrival the company had gone from a shambling wreck to a streamlined, efficient, well-run organization. Can’t be having that, now, can we?

Then, about 6 weeks ago, he comes in, bristling with energy, and calls us all together for a meeting. Starts talking about how he had a great brainwave, and how he’s figured out how to make us all rich. “I’m going to make you all independent contractors, and give you all your own territory to work. You’ll be Franchise owners.” This is met with somewhat less that universal joy. “Of course, you’ll need to pay the Franchise fee, but we can string that out over a few years. It’s ONLY $27,000.” Again, we’re all somewhat tepid. The thought of giving this guy back almost all of what he gave me last year just for the privilege of working for myself… Something doesn’t quite sit right there. Anyway, I pretty much ruled it out, figuring that if no one goes for it (And neither Eric nor Mike were interested in it either) that the whole thing would just go away. You’d think, at this point, I’d have learned my lesson.

So, fast forward to 2 weeks ago last Friday. It’s 5:47pm, we’re finishing up for the weekend, and he says “So, I think were going to go to the independent contractor model.” Well shit. I don’t want to do it. It’s a massive headache and extra tax liability. And with no increase in salary, it’s essentially a large pay cut. Just a no-go, really. So, I think about it over the weekend, and expect to talk with him about it the following work day. Nothing. Nothing the next either, and I get buried in work, and forget about it. Then out of the blue on Thursday, he fires Eric. Bang, see ya. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. “What next?” I’m thinking. Then Pay day comes around, Friday just gone. “Here…sign this. It says you’re now an Independent Contractor.”

Well… Fuck. Without even so much as a nod of approval from me, he’s gone and fucked me over. I now have to file 2 separate tax returns for the same job, and I take a massive pay hit. So, cutting a long story short (bit late for that, I guess, but how-and-ever), I sit down with him, and after it has been made perfectly clear that there is no more money forthcoming from him, and that his position on this Contractor thing is intractable, I give him my 2 weeks notice. The job is just not what I want/need, and I’m not making enough here to accept a pay cut.

This brings us forward to today.

So, the plan has been, up to now, for me to work here until Dixie’s writing her Thesis, and then I was going to come back, get new job, get a place to stay, and basically have a bunch of stuff ready for her when it’s time for her to come over. This Clusterfuck that my Boss dropped on us has kinda forced us to re-evaluate those plans. Job market is pretty sweet in Dublin right now. Seems like a lot of places are lookin’ for techs. Housing market still sucks, but it sucks here too, so that’s not big deal. So, after talking about it, Dixie figured out that I’d probably make more money there than the 2 of us make here, so…

My Flight lands April 1st at 10:40. See you guys then.

“So, Wanderer. What is this mysterious ailment you have?”

Good question faceless Voice-over guy. So, my symptoms can be broken down in 3 separate a distinct ailments

1) Wracking Cough. You know the doctor’s waiting room? That dank depressing stopover for the terminally ill? Well, you know That Guy. The guy in the corner who has the Cough of the Ages, that pretty much tells everyone else in the room that he’s one installment away from buying the farm, and yet, at the same time, manages to make everyone else feel better as at least they’re not that bad? Yeah, it’s that bad. Every one sends a wracking pain throughout my ribcage and spine. Now, I’m willing to attribute this to the, perhaps moronic, activity of sitting in one of those automatic massage chairs for over an hour. My back hasn’t really felt the same since. I think I need one of Dr. Homer’s Spinal Cans. Anyway…it sucks.

2) The Dripping Ooze. This came on a little later. I don’t think I need to go into too much description, but if you must know…ever read those DnD supplements where they try to describe the way a Gelatinous Cube moves? Or the way a Green Slime looks? Well, thanks to my newfound ailment, that’s one more thing I don’t need to exercise the old cerebellum on. Next!

3) My personal favorite, the Trots. Why would that be my favorite? Not for the runs to the bathroom. Not for the excessive Toilet Paper bill. And certainly not for wonderful feeling of having my lower intestine flushed out like a 6-year-old wringing out the last drops of his defrosted Mr. Freeze Cool-pop. (For Americans: think Go-gurt. Yes, I know it’s not the same thing, but fuck you…I’ve got an analogy going here, and I’m not breaking it now). Now, the real gem in this particular advancement of medical woes is the sense of unity my body decided to show. My respiratory system decided to pack it in, and my nasal passage decided it was a good time to hold the Ozzfest of Disgusting Slimes, so my gastro-intestinal tract, in a sense of solidarity not seen since the “He who-shall-not-be-named” incident, decided it might as well pack in it as well.

That’s gosh damned nice of it. I mean…God forbid I should get some bed rest, or drink some nice hot soup (or pizza, yeah). No, it need to be firing fluids outta both ends, or this just isn’t gonna qualify as an epic level disease.

So yeah… Being sick sucks.

[Editor’s Note: If you think you’re disgusted now, consider the plight of the person who shares a rather small house with the Plague Bearer. Also, note that although I might not be considered a font of sympathy, I did just read through all that and correct the grammar, spelling, and typos.)

Now, on the surface, it seems like the Irish system is better for you, but I’m not so sure.

Hands up the people who’ve ever been stuck on Emergency Tax! ::raises hand multiple times:: It sucks so bad. It’s always at the start of a new job when you’re totally strapped for cash, and BAM! 45% of your moolah sucked away just for having the audacity to seek new employment. Now there is tax credits, and Taxable income, and non-taxable income, but 99% of us just kinda float through it, content to let the powers that be decide how much money we can and cannot have.

Not so here in the US of A. You are Forced to pay attention to this shit. You have to know where your money is going. You have to know who it’s going to, how much is going to what, and what thing you bought that you can claim back. Yes, it’s a right royal pain in the arse, and yes, it’s a an unbelievable Stress generator (made worse by the fact that you boss doesn’t give you your W-2 until 2 weeks before the Tax deadline), but it trains you to keep your wits about you.

I don’t know which method is better, the hands-off “Big Brother” method of back home, or the “D.I.Y.” American approach. But having to be involved in ultimately being accountable for my own money has made me question a lot of thing that I have, until now, been quite content to just accepts as part of the norm. And maybe for that reason alone it’s been worth it.

Dixie and I arrive on Xmas Eve, and depart New Years Eve. Plans are pointless… it’s going to be an insane 7 days of chaos, where we try to squeeze a years worth of merriment into a week already full of Family Commitments and Pre-Arranged parties.

We’re going to be available the 24th (late afternoon, evening), the 27th (bits and pieces), the 29th (late), the 30th (early). Yup… looks like it’s going to be a cluster fuck, doesn’t it? Let’s fire off mails and arrange things like nobody’s business, because nothing says Christmas like Broken promises. (:

Ho, ho, ho-lee shit.

See ya in 10 days, Dublin.

Bring Beer.

Ever Nintendo’s stout defender, you had to listen while I laughed and poked fun at the Wiivolution at every step of its development. I laughed at the ridiculous controllers. I laughed at how gimmicky the system looked. I laughed when I saw just how little raw processing power it had when compared to the PSIII and the XBOX360. And, I nearly killed myself laughing when they renamed it to something that sounds like a common bathroom activity.

Oh, how wrong was I?

5 minutes into playing the Wii and I’ve practically given my soul to the system. The controls are intuitive, the system responsive, and the interface is slick. I’m having the time of my life, and all I’ve done is create my goddamn character.

So, I guess I should clarify that I only played Wii Sports. However, that alone… that’s enough to sell me the system. Give me Wii Sports and the promise of a Mario game at some point, and I’ll tattoo Nintendo across my forehead.

Now… convinced that purchasing a Wii is now inevitability rather then a possibility, I have a few suggestions. Feel free to print them out and send them to Santa. Every little bit helps.

1) More Wii Sports games. Don’t get me wrong. The games rocks the frikin’ house. Just bring out a Wii Sports 2. I want Football!
2) Mores games in General. The few release titles are cool, (Zelda, ffs… HOT!!!!) But nothing that really takes full advantage of the system. Red Steels has not blown me away, but I have yet to play it, so I’ll hold off.
3) I have 2 words for potential Nintendo developers. “Light” is the first, and the second is “Saber.” If you don’t believe me, pick the damn thing up. It just feels like a Lightsaber should. If there is a not a Jedi Knight Wii out by sometime next summer, I’ll be shocked, and a little disappointed.

So, there you have it. Awful name and all…. the Wii is a tiny god. Worship it!

Maybe this has happened to you too, but I found it fuckin’ unnerving. Organized to meet some people for a game of Magic (Yeah, I know… sue me), and I’m chatting with the guy who organized it, and he says “Yeah… I wasn’t sure who you were, so I googled you. You won the Irish nationals in 99′?” 

WTF? Who starts a Conversation like that? “Hi. I’m a creepy fucking stalker guy, and have run a background check on you. May I have a lock of your hair?” Okay, I’ll give the guy his props for doing his homework, but Jesus… does everyone Google everyone they meet for background dirt? Is this the done thing? Am I horribly overreacting? 

Maybe I should be flattered that someone went through the trouble of researching me, or finding out information about me. And it’s not like it was classified information, or anything. It was out there on the internets, all he did was find it. but… the ease at which he found it made me feel more then a little awkward. Obviously, I then ran a check on myself, and yes… there is page after page of tournament reports and Playtest info etc on there, and even the report I wrote myself back in 99. Man, this crap just floats around out there. 

So, my question to you, gentle public, is this: Is this the norm? Is Google used, not only as the world greatest provide of all information, but as a Life/History check? If so, I’ll defer to the general public and go back to being quietly disgusted.

Right, first off, I’m not going to apologize for not posting in ages, cause frankly, I don’t fucking care. Really, I don’t. It’s not that I have a particular dislike for the Blog’s readership (I don’t), I just always managed to not feel any obligation to post here. I’d write here when I had wanted to write something, not when you wanted to read it.

Which, the small percentage of actually intelligent ones amongst you must have figured, probably means I have something I want to talk about now. Well… aren’t you presumptuous. But, yeah, I do.

Today I watched US President Bush give his “State of the Union” Address. A thing that really has to be seen to be believed. I’ll leave the political commentary to those better equipped to comment, I was more then happy to hear him mis-pronounce Nuclear over and over. That never gets old.

Anyway, it led me to think of the Irish political system, and then of home. A Mind-set tht was not helped by the fact that shortly after we watched “In the Name of the Father”. Yikes… not so much plucking the heart strings and ripping them out and showing them to you before you die. But it led me to wondering what the hell y’all have been up to since I’ve been gone.

It’s been 4 months since I’ve been gone. In the 1/3 of a year since I’ve been gone, a lot of shit has happened. I’ve missed Gealcon and Warpcon, and will miss my first Leprecon for 9 years next month, an I find myself missing them. I’ve always had something of a love/hate relationship with Conventions. Like they say of parties, you only really enjoy the ones you don’t want to go to. I’d always wake up bright and early, eager for the opening door, only to sit around in the main hall ‘cause none of the opening games inspired me, and find myself dropping down to the CCG room after a few hours only to find out why I spent some much time trying to get out.

I remember my Very first Gaming con. Lepracon 97. Since then i’ve been at Icon, Qcon, WarpCon, Gealcon, ConFess, DominiCon, Vaticon, and… someotherfuckin’Con. Not to metion GenCon UK. Hell, i was at the Magic World Championships in Tokyo, ffs. And they all pretty much followed the same pattern. Lots of Socially dysfunctional people in too small a room, chatting up anything with breasts (Myself not included), and making jokes about “Wood for Sheep”.

Yet… there is a strange allure to the Gaming convention. The re-hashed old jokes, the familiar faces of people you met last year, the Binge Drinking. Not to mention that bizzare ritual of manhood that seem to occur when the Charity auction rolls around. But I guess… when all is said and done, I really miss the punters. So, to everyone i’ve ever trash talked in a Magic game, to everyone i’ve ever sat at an RPG table with, to anyone who ever uttered the words “Marcus Blank”, to anyone who has ever had the severe misfortune to share a commitee position with me, to everyone in Cork (Even Smithy), and to every single person who would walk up to me and say “Hi!” without me knowing their name, i say this:

I miss you guys.

Well, I can wholeheartedly say, with my hand on my heart, Fuck You!

My leaving has not been a secret. Anyone who reads this blog should be painfully aware that this has been in the pipeline for a long-old time. For the last 2-3 months, we’ve been living as if the next day we could get the nod, and things would be ready for me to set sail. So, why wait until the last day to bemoan my unavailability?

I had a going-away. It was Saturday night, at the Poker game. 24 people showed up, and I will forever be grateful, and thankful, for that show of camaraderie that night. However, if anyone who took more then a cursory glance in my direction could have determined, I was morbidly ill. The cough, hacking and general disgusting illness I was showing that night was more than a mere act to throw people off mid-hand. I was at Death’s door.

The actual nature of the disease is unknown to me. Never being one of a particularly robust immune system, I’ve tended to catch every bug which is going. And some that aren’t. As Kindermord has stated, I am “the base-line for health in gamers. If you are less well than him, you are dead!” Hard to disagree with that. So, it was with marked surprise that in the run-up to the Visa collection date, I had spent a blissful, plague-free period of my life. No sickness, no cough, no infections of the lung (or otherwise). Then, Saturday morning, I get about 3-months worth at once. Paid for in advance.

However, that was the night of the poker event, so I screwed up every last ounce of energy I had, and I went, and I played, and had one of the most enjoyable nights I’ve had in a long time.

But I paid for it. I paid dearly. My actions left me laid-up in bed for all of Sunday and most of Monday. An Inflamed Throat infection, Nausea and a Head cold unlike any in living memory, all wounds I gladly accepted for a last night out with friends.

However, this left me with a problem. I was unlikely to be fit to make the planned Wednesday morning flight at this rate. I had to rest, or miss the flight. Every day leading up to last Wednesday is a day I wished I was already in SoCal, and there was no power on earth that was keeping me from it.

So, yes. I DIDN’T have a drinking session, and yes, I DIDN’T get to say goodbye to people I’d have liked to. But…you know what. I don’t care. I did what I needed to do to get what I’ve always wanted. And what I needed to do was take it easy the night before I fly. If you want to begrudge me that, feel free. Just don’t expect me to be apologetic.

Complaints may be lodged when I get back for Christmas.