work – The Kind Healer

Another Year, Another Post

Well, 2012 was interesting to say the least.

The biggest thing? A late storm named Sandy was a real head-cracker over here, unfortunately – a visit to Hoboken today showed that some places are still rebuilding.

The second biggest? I got to shut down a 65 TB disk array that I helped bring online 6.5 years ago. Somewhat bittersweet actually, but its work so that’s all I’m saying.

In the ‘fun’ list is a new game – Guild Wars 2, an MMO. While I had promised myself that I’d never go back to online gaming after Eve, overall I’m glad that I poked my nose into this one; It’s certainly casual friendly – with the right friends anyway. The only problem I’m having now is not directly game related – Certain class play styles are not very good for my damaged wrists, so I’m experimenting with most of them to see what will work safely. At the moment I’ve found two, which is good.

My next personal project will be the next PC. Stats will go up once I’ve got it stable, but I already have the parts here. Hopefully I’ll have things working this week.

Update – Fall 2012

So, It’s just over a year since last major update, where Irene was about to visit. Well, I ended up sleeping through it. *chuckle* The only major aftermath was a couple of mice that decided to snoop around my PC down here in the basement, but I did not know about that until I came back from a Labor Day vacation. Argh.

Anyway, the rest of 2011 was reasonable, but ‘Snowtober’ (a major snowfall around Halloween) was interesting, to say the least. I was on-call during that too, and ended up on two different conference calls from home. Thankfully (and despite so many trees around the house) the Internet link has stayed up.

This year has been an interesting one so far, mostly around work. I’ve been extremely busy, and yet I’m also very happy about it (due to some of the projects I’m finally able to take care of). There’s been some down moments, as always, but I promised not to make this site about work, and that’s all I’ll say about it for now.

Of course, it is also a few days to 9/11 again. I’m beginning to detect the tension that happens around this time, but it’s not nearly as bad as last year. And someone, earlier this year, gave me some suggestions about how to cope with that – suggestions that really have helped.

Overall, an interesting year. And I’ve not even mentioned Eve Online yet (in short? – I finally left it). Probably in a later post…

Notebook Annoyances

One of the major problems I have with travel (at least out of NJ) is the need for decent connectivity to work.

Now, I would not worry as much, since – usually – I could bring a couple small items with me and just borrow someone else’s PC (preferably one with a large enough monitor, so the RDP to work will not freak out). This is what I did during last year’s trip to my father’s house, and it made the flight *so* much easier to deal with.

This time, however, its a bit different. First, its a personal preference of mine to only borrow a system from either very-long-time friends or from family, since in those cases I’m not overly worried about what they may see while I’m logged in. Second, the VPN is now checking if an anti-virus scanner is up and running on the connecting system (and only allows XP or 2K right now). And, I’ve pledged to bring at least one notebook to Mysterium in order to help with various projects on-site.

So, this is why I’m currently undergoing the hell again of a re-install of XP on the old HP notebook (2 hours and counting!). It was running Linux quite nicely (and even had Windows 7 32-bit on it for a few days), but those happy experiments were due to losing my original media. Obviously, I’ve corrected that (the replacement from HP came in yesterday), and the first part of a dual-boot with Win7 is underway.

Of course, that’s not stopping me from re-examining how I setup the hardware. The old 7200 RPM disk from the Sager got dropped in before this rebuild, and there are 2 x 1 gig memory sticks en-route. Still a ton cheaper to do that, then to price out a replacement notebook; So far, about 15% of the quote I got from Lenovo (and that was *after* a 40% ‘shared’ EPP discount). So far I expect the only caveat to be less battery life, but it was already near the 4-hour mark so making that a bit less is *not* an issue…

Hopefully the new setup will be finished by Saturday (just did reboot #5 under XP-Update *sigh*). Crossing fingers…

–TSK

Yep, I’m Still Alive…

… And can ya guess what I’ve been playing lately? ;-)

Actually, it really was Portal until a short while ago. I made the mistake of downloading the demo of Bejeweled Twist (which, a few days later, I unlocked for the full version). I now have versions of the regular HL games that work with my current monitor resolution; And with steam’s version of the Blue Shift hi-def pack enabled, even third-party mods look nicer. It’s made me wonder why I didn’t get involved with Steam sooner.

Much like Uru, actually….

I’ve heard the news of course – Seemed like every other MystBlogs post talked about it for the weekend. And I first got word of it myself last Sat, through an announcement sent through the Steam community group ‘Uru Rocks.’ Still letting the news sit with me, and seeing what followup news comes from Cyan. I may post a response via an article to GoMe, or contribute to someone else’s ‘reaction request.’ Dunno yet, but whatever I eventually say it will be mirrored here.

The more interesting news is that I’ve begun to poke about with the Mysterium Committee, to see if I can help in any capacity. More on that once I get acclimated to the idea of helping others in larger scales again (something I stopped doing when I initially got disillusioned with Second Life – mid-2006 I think).

Work, of course, has been ‘interesting’ (Financial Sector, remember?). I’m half-tempted to tear down my earlier ‘relax’ post, since that looks rather lame now, but I still have my job – which, unnervingly, means something right now. 2009 is on-track to be even more interesting (which I’ll have to stop discussing now, as we once again hit my personal ‘ethics’ line which I refuse to cross).

*sigh* Ah well, I suppose we’ll just have to see what the future brings us all, eh? Lets hope its for the better…

/salute
–TSK