I suppose I could say it’s more relevant to these reasons:

1. I don’t like smoke.
2. I don’t like the prices.
3. Always got there late or had no reason to go.

But today, I grabbed my new HD camcorder and figured I could go grab some video at the bar. Mostly cause my sister was there and I wanted to show off.

Well, I ended up trying a new drink. “Alien” they called it. Basically was a shot glass of blue curacao with a drop of Bailey’s Irish Cream. The cream forms a swirl in the curacao, so they call it an alien because of that. The bartender apparently put too much cream in the first one he made me, so he made a 2nd one on the house. Two drinks for one price is a pretty good deal. Better yet, got it during happy hour, so I paid even less for it. Was a really good drink too boot. After that, had rum & coke.. and my boss was there and bought me a refill. Ended up spending about an hour at the bar.

But that’s not the entire point of this gear. Rather, this deals with the interaction I had at the bar. A guy by the name of Joe. I’ve forgotten his last name almost as soon as I walked out the door and the details of our conversation, but it’s the fact that it’s so easy to get into a conversation with someone. Of course, I’m bad at small talk so I just discussed whatever came to mind. In particular, he seemed like an interesting individual. He was a construction worker from Kansas, somehow finding his way north to my quaint little town. Generally discussed family and a general gist of life, I suppose.

Just interesting, I suppose. We can form transient connections so easily. Human nature, perhaps? Are we a social entity? Do we need connections to survive? Life would be a lot more dull if we didn’t connect to people. I suppose you could relate it to a discussion I had a while ago about the Voice of Thought and the references to the Tower of Babel. At what point do our uniformity in language lead us to entropy and destruction?

Many questions, I suppose. But for now, I learned I can connect to random strangers. I don’t know whether I’ll always remember Joe or whether he’ll always remember me, but the possibility makes me ponder.

Next time, I’m totally going to try Bazooka Joe, Adios Motherfucker, and maybe a Barney on Acid.

I am logical. Or at least I’d like to think I am. I’ll be posting a gear about logic later, but for now, know that I typically follow the logical outcome. If A then B else C. Basic stuff.

But I do not follow order. I’m terrible at strategy games. I don’t plan ahead, which is strange for logical people. Typically you’d surmise that if they are logical and can correctly gauge a situation based on observable evidences, they should have some sort of order. I do not. I tend to make plans only to either forget them or ignore them. I’m quite adept at living without a plan.

Which is probably my downfall. I can’t plan ahead. Chess, for example, brings me amazing moves. I recall once when I was playing Chess in study hall in high school (it was considered a mind activity so the teacher allowed it) that I put my opponent in a situation he could not readily escape. My knight would either take his Queen or his King. How did I arrive at that point? I have no idea. Did I plan that? No. I just found myself in that particular situation.

As Woody Allen said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” What does that mean for me? I suppose logically it would set me into a predicament. It would mean that because I don’t follow order and plans, I miss specific deadlines to “show up” and therefore aren’t as successful as I could be.

Or it means that he was incorrect and that success should be measured not by what you have or can do, but rather how you feel about it. What good is success if you don’t feel you earned it?

Moving on, what does order mean, exactly? Order means finding a place for everything and having everything in a place. I suppose I could say that my current arrangement of my living area is ordered in such a way I can find what I need with a certain amount of effort (in layman’s terms: mess) but does that mean I need to enforce an order on it? I suppose I could say I like a definite observable degree of entropy. It makes life.. lively. Of course it also means I can’t find anything I want immediately but typically the systems I would employ to sustain some form of order fail after I fail to meet them.

I lose the order of my order, I suppose I could say. I wouldn’t really say the same about my file system. I have a pretty good idea where everything is, unlike my living space.

I suppose I could say that my work is more ordered than my life. That’s rather broad terms though and a tad of a misnomer. My “work” as it currently stands is not ordered. I work as a night shift front desk clerk at a motel. I show up 10 to 15 minutes late everyday. The other drones whom I work with do the same. There’s not much order there. There is one exception, who shows up exactly on the dot. But she also works at a bank, so I suppose that’s why.

I suppose I could say I was randomly browsing my net. I say my net in reference to my own site, not be confused with the internet, intranet, interweb, interwebs, interwebz, or any other mockery of “hypertext transfer protocol” services. I found myself at my old blog posts. Rereading them I realized I must have lost a part of me, some grain of wit, along the way. Therefore, I decided to start:

G.E.A.R.S.

Generally
Erratic
Attempts at
Reflection
System

So.. basically I’m going to attempt to define myself one gear at a time not so much to describe who I am but rather find out who I am. One of those self-discovery methods, I suppose. The fact I’m making them public is almost irrelevant. Of course I’ll be censoring specific aspects but for the most part I’ll be as honest with myself as I can be. Perhaps I can gain insight into my own workings from others who happen across this medium. I suppose you could say this is relative to some of the discussions I have had about soul and existence. One theory is that you only exist if another perceives you exist. That’s a general gist.

I’m not really doing this for any class or anything, just figured I should try to reactivate the wit I appear to have had a year or two ago.

4.0 GPA :: Two classes, but good start, I suppose.

No work on website. Been too preoccupied playing games on Facebook.

No work on other various projects I had planned at one point but never gotten started.

Haven’t really played World of Warcraft in a while. I wonder if my guild is wondering where I am. Oh well..

I may or may not be thinking about typing up some massive “love” related thing. I’m not sure.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Not entirely sure what I want to do yet, but thinking I’ll do an area map type layout for the menu and perhaps implement an AJAX style setup, similar to what Facebook uses (the whole remap href links to use anchors and AJAX calls), but at the same time keep it simplistic enough to still work if javascript is disabled. You’ll see a lot of ?section/option style links. Am slightly tempted to try more Apache htaccess rewrites but think that might cause too many issues.

As far as style goes, it’ll be plain lines as usual. Not entirely decided on a color scheme as of yet, but could use some input. I like dark colors and blue. As if you can’t tell that already.

Will update later if I get any good ideas.

1. School. I’ve enrolled in Westwood College Online for Game Software Development.
   • Since I work a night shift job, the classes being online is a great help. I can essentially spend the “dead” time at work studying and doing homework. It works out quite well, to be honest.
   • What’s nice about this field is that it also implies heavy IT work, meaning I can almost seamlessly transition between programming game engines and general IT work like C++ based applications.
2. Site remix. I figure if I’m going to be practicing code, I might as well publish my results. In a sense, I suppose that means that I could actually *use* my website for something other than my ranting. In the end I hope I can maybe even create a full fledged project someone might use on a regular basis.
   • PHP site rewrite. Perhaps make more use of class based systems and make it more uniform in terms of what sort of coding I’m using. Make it more modular than it currently is.
   • Skin remake. Redo the skins to be more streamlined. I always seem to have issues regarding the content pages, as I end up adding additional elements I hadn’t initially planned for.
   • New sections. Obviously if I publish my work online, I would need sections for them. I do like the WordPress syndication onto front page thing I’m currently doing. Not sure if I would want to pull content from other bloggers or not.

Aside from that, the other subjects I have been ranting about lately.. well, I’ll save that for another time.

As far as WoW goes, still playing my DK on Undermine. With the addition of the new raid content, I keep somewhat busy on raid nights (25 mans on Tuesday-Thursday; 10 mans randomly thru the rest).

Still working at a local motel, night shift. Actually posting from the laptop I mentioned a while ago. I could potentially go for something higher up, but not sure.

Oh, I bought a projector. The Optoma HD20 is awesome. Bought a package deal, so got a fixed frame 92″ screen. Only issues I’m having at the moment would involve the top right corner of the screen. Left, bottom, and right sides are aligned pretty much perfectly. Top right corner bends upwards. It’s kinda odd. There’s also the issue that the included ceiling mount won’t really “fit” the projector. So I have it sitting on a table and as a result I’m sitting left of the center of the screen.

But aside from that, nothing really new..

So, I guess I’ll give a run down of 11 months in verbatim:

Wrath of the Lich King: now have 3 80s (Bery, Dae, and Clexi), recently got a 2nd account for the Refer-a-Friend EXP bonus (300% is very nice), and finding how easy it is to get gold on a server you have nothing on.

Fallout 3: Wasn’t as expansive as I had thought it’d be. Guess I was still on the mindset Fallout 2 had where there’s a lot to explore and 99% of it is unique. Mob difficulty is mostly based on your level, so you can’t run into Enclave patrols until XX level.

Hardware: Upgraded main machine so I could run Fallout 3. Went with a Core 2 Duo @ ~3Ghz, 4GB RAM, WD Raptor 300GB drive, and a GTX 260. 2nd computer started having issues (was an AMD Athlon 64 X 2, I think, with a GeForce 8600 [which fried so I had to use a 6800 I had lying around]) where it wasn’t handling hard drives (Had two 1.5TB drives plus a 400GB) correctly (File system failures when the drive was fine). Put most of the parts from the first into the 2nd and rebuilt first with a Core i7 ~3.06Ghz, 6GB ram, the Raptor drive, and the GTX 260. Bought a $40 Sparkle GeForce 9400GT to use to replace the 6800 in the 2nd. 2nd runs everything fine but Direct3D is causing the card to flash black screens at me randomly. Think it’s probably the crappy card. 1st has run pretty much flawlessly since I built it.

Site: Recently got reported for spamming. Apparently a modification I had installed to one of my boards had a major security hole in it and my site was sending out massive amounts of spam email. Turned off register globals, nuked a bunch of scripts on my account, and updated the ones I decided to keep. Joys of owning domain names.

With that out of the way, I guess I’ll talk to ya’ll next year.

P.S. Birthday in 2 days.

First, I nuked and reloaded the xfir Networks forum. Mostly due to the fact it was outdated. But secondary due to the fact I’m hosting a friend of mine’s “clan” so to speak–Kaotic Gaming Inc (talented group of gamers)–and have been doing more work with PunBB. It’s a good forum software I’ve been using since Invision board went pay-only. Plus it gives me a chance to screw around with PHP again.

Thus far I’ve done simple edits–people have made modifications like a private message system and whatnot. With my board, though, I get to do more. For instance, I implemented sub-forums, a feature I had on Invision boards and on Ikonboard before that. I may go further and implement something insane like an RPG system, but I don’t know yet.

Initially I released a “RegKey” mod for PunBB–one of it’s vices is that Bot registration is at an all time high.. one of my old WoW Guild forums I was hosting apparently became a link spam haven for bots… I’ve since removed it, but it did remind me that I need to be a tad more careful. I added the reCAPTCHA system to the forums and it seems to work well… better than my initial hack due to the manner I used to generate the keys. I knew about some of the flaws in the old system but didn’t bother to fix them.

Aside from that, I got a night-shift job at a local motel. Need to earn cash flow somewhere, I suppose. The nice thing about it is that I have 4-6 hours of “dead” time where I can just pretty much slack off. I purchased a laptop off Newegg which will arrive Wednesday… and as my luck would have it, the price dropped $50 2-3 days after I buy it. Joy.

That’s my update for the last, what, 2-3 months? No, I haven’t bothered to work on the logos despite needing to, and no I haven’t worked on a 3rd skin. As far as WoW goes, Bery is my latest 70. Not sure what will happen prior to Wrath, but you never know.

PS, Fallout 3.

I may redesign the logos of both MarkONE and draeBlood since they don’t seem to be as fluid with the layout as I would have liked. Ideas would be appreciated and art skill would be even better as I seem to have lost mine.

Also modified the blog page to show the last post from both hosted blogs.

In other news, I’ve been outleveling Moltzan (Moltzanlight) and James (Jimboby) in World of Warcraft. My newest character, Clexi, is as of this moment a level 48 Gnome Rogue. Servers are down so I decided to fix the site and work on some other misc. stuff.

That’s pretty much all I have to say for the moment. I’ll eventually get around to making that 3rd skin for the site as well. Maybe. Perhaps.