Over the course of the last few months, several people have left the place I work for other if not greener pastures.  This hasn’t been a terrible thing, although it has, until recently, increased the call load for those of us still in the same place.  November-ish to February-ish, however, is a slow time of year for where I work so it hasn’t been too bad.  That time frame has come to an end, and the call load has picked up a lot for those of us still in the job I am in.  Add to that our recent taking on of another region of callers, and things are starting to get hairy.

 

The last part is particularly noteworthy, I think.  I take calls from the L.A. area and several parts of western Arizona.  (Western Arizona, in this case, includes parts of California and Washington.)  Our group has now started taking calls from the San Diego area.  However, only a few of us are taking those calls so far.  The call volume from San Diego is higher than we expected, so those taking those calls are less available for our pre-existing areas, meaning those of us not taking those calls have a yet higher workload.

 

All of the above means we are getting back-to-back calls all day long.  Monday and Tuesday were particularly grueling.  The calls Monday didn’t drop off until after nine, and Tuesday until after eight.  Yesterday was a little better in that the calls started slowing around four or five and it was down to a trickle by six or seven.  However, it was a steady trickle, so I was still getting calls every fifteen or twenty minutes when I left work at 22:30.

 

Management is looking to hire a few folks.  In fact, there are a couple of new guys going through training now.  However, the strain of the volume is enough that Overtime is being offered for the foreseeable future.  I will be getting two hours of overtime Monday through Wednesday.  I volunteered for more, and might get more at some point, but so far that’s what I have going.  I’d like to pick up some hours on Thursday and / or Saturday.  I am not fond of long hours, but, as I told my manager, overtime is tasty.  There are plane tickets to buy for trips later in the year and, well, more monitors to be had.

 

Speaking of monitors, my new monitor arrived on Tuesday.  The HDMI cable for it arrived by mail and the monitor itself came via UPS later on in the day.  It is bright and beautiful.  However, I have encountered an annoying issue with Windows with its installation.  I tried to watch a video on it last night and Windows decided my computer was going slow and put me in “Basic” color mode which isn’t as pretty and it pissed me off.

 

Let me explain a little about my setup here.  I know I have given this information before, but it’s been awhile:  I have a six-cored, near-top-of-the-line AMD CPU, sixteen gigs of RAM, and two video cards with a gig of RAM each, both capable of handling three monitors.  I am not lacking for computing power.  At one point during my frustrations yesterday, I had Task Manager running so I could monitor resources.  While the video was playing, RAM usage went up to about a third of capacity.  That left about ten gigs of RAM unused.  There are several reasons Windows 7 will switch to Basic Color mode, but the primary cause is overloading RAM, which I very much was not doing.

 

So I did a little research.  I eventually concluded (1) I cannot turn off Windows’ ability to switch to Basic Color mode and (b) this may be an issue unique to having multiple video cards in a system.  Counting the onboard video card, I have three.  One would think Microsoft would allow for such things a little better as it’s far from anything new.  I have only had two video cards for a few months, but multiple video cards have been implemented in systems for at least ten or fifteen years.

 

I have given some thought to turning off the Aero scheme altogether.  It’s pretty, but if it’s going to cause issues like this, it may not be worth it.  I don’t like the flat look and I do like the partial transparency of Aero, but it is a resource hog according to all sources.  I would think I wouldn’t need to worry about resources in my system, but apparently I do more than I previously believed.

 

In spite of my Windows issues, I have high hopes of adding monitor number six soon, and number seven at some point after that.  I may even order them together.  The OT will allow for such luxuries if it goes on long enough.  I may even get to number eight, which will be end of my monitor quest.  Number seven will be the replacement for the small monitor which was, technically, number four, so number seven will be really number six and the small monitor will be number seven even though I have had it longer.  my plan is to attach it to the wall and have it show a slide show.  Number eight, if I get that far, will be a touchscreen monitor mounted horizontally somehow instead of vertically.  I haven’t really figured that out yet; I know I don’t want it mounted normally.  I want to use it like a tablet of sorts, which means not mounted normally.  I’ll figure something out.

 

Last Saturday was the first anniversary of Danny’s death.  A year ago today was his funeral, if I remember the timeline correctly.  Everything after his death is a little blurry.  It was either Wednesday or Thursday last year, which is offset by one day this year.  (March 3 was a Wednesday last year.)  It’s hard to describe my emotions at this point.  It’s one of those things only a parent who has outlived their child through a tragedy like this can understand.

 

I played Danielf in Everquest all day Saturday.  I even went to Saturday’s raid with him, and he held up reasonably well.  I have not really played a healer before in a raid, at least not full time like I did on Saturday.  I recall bringing a boxed healer to a raid once long ago–another druid, Tristinalla, I think–but they were very weak and didn’t do much.  They mostly showed up to claim an item nobody wanted and then stayed around just for the experience.  I may at some point see if our raid leader will let me box Dan in as it was fun to have him there.

 

I also played Dan all day Sunday.  I started him on a quest Saturday and continued that on Sunday.  Monday I was back to business as usual.  His rate of gaining AA points has slowed a little, but they are still coming in faster than Boom and much faster than Shaka.  He beat the goal I set for him to reach in February, as did Boom.  Shaka fell short, but I always set lofty goals so I wasn’t terribly disappointed.  March has more days in it, but the Overtime at work is going to cut into my play time.  I could play from work during the day during the week as recently as a couple of weeks ago, but our call volume now is too high for that.

 

So that’s my week.  I didn’t think I had quite so much to say when I started writing, but there you have it.  See you tomorrow.