Yes, yes, I know.\u00a0 I have not been very good at posting this week.\u00a0 I sat down on Monday and really tried to come up with a rant, but again I failed.\u00a0 Soon, I really must return to my normal posting schedule and post rants, even if they are lame or, relatively speaking, repeats.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
On the bright side, this coming Tuesday should be a nice picture post.\u00a0 Tomorrow morning, Spiff and I are going to walk up to Memorial Park and watch the annual Balloon Classic take place.\u00a0 This means three things:\u00a0 First, we’ll be doing about ninety minutes of walking.\u00a0 B, we’ll be getting up really early to do so.\u00a0 And roman numeral iii, I will be taking pictures.\u00a0 Thus, I will have some new material for a picture post.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, it has been an eventful week.\u00a0 Saturday, I headed for work and got about three blocks before the scooter ran out of gas.\u00a0 The nearest gas station was at least seven or eight blocks away.\u00a0 I haven’t measured it; it may be as much as a mile.\u00a0 With a significant uphill push and a mild downhill glide.\u00a0 (If I were going the other way, I confess I might have a different opinion.)\u00a0 I got to the gas station, filled up the tank…and it wouldn’t start.\u00a0 I let work know I would be late or (more likely) absent.\u00a0 The battery on the scooter gave out, so I called home and had Spiff come to meet me with a screwdriver.\u00a0 I pushed the bike to a Memorial Park parking lot, as I knew I could not leave the scooter at the gas station.\u00a0 We got the battery home and charged it up.\u00a0 I went back to where I left the scooter (having given up on work by this point, by the way), hooked the battery back up, but no, it still would not start.\u00a0 Somewhere along the way I remembered that I had roadside service, as I had just signed for insurance earlier in the week which included it.\u00a0 Two guys showed up with a big pickup truck, we loaded the scooter into the back, and then we got it (and me) home.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Sunday, the scooter decided it was done throwing a tantrum and started right up the first time I tried to start it.\u00a0 But my ill weekend was not over.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Sundays are normally very quiet at work.\u00a0 I support business customers in my job, and many businesses don’t do much on Sundays so don’t require the support I provide on that day.\u00a0 I can go through all of Sunday and only receive five or six calls.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This past Sunday I received one-hundred sixty-two<\/em><\/strong> calls.\u00a0 Non-stop answering of the phone and, quite soon, saying the same thing over and over and over again:\u00a0 “There’s a big problem going on, and you are in an affected area.”\u00a0 That’s not an exact quote, but it’s close enough.\u00a0 I was taking thirty to sixty seconds per call, as were my colleagues.\u00a0 (At one point, just to make matters worse, I had only one person working with me.)\u00a0 We finally cleared the call queue about a half hour before my shift was over, by which point the problem was mostly fixed.\u00a0 I still took a few calls in that last half hour; the problem was not fully corrected until sometime Monday evening.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That’s right, the onslaught of calls continued on Monday.\u00a0 Many of the calls were coming from residential customers, as, on top of everything else, we had a call routing problem.\u00a0 That problem was still unresolved on Wednesday, but we were told they had found the source of the problem and would shortly fix it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tuesday and Wednesday’s call volumes were normal.\u00a0 Busy-ish early, quieter after about six or seven.\u00a0 We were back to a normal routine.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Due to the scooter problems on Saturday, Spiff and I did some walking on that day we did not plan on.\u00a0 I want to have two days of rest after a week of walking, so we skipped Monday.\u00a0 Tuesday through Thursday, we did our normal walk thing, but today we skipped as we are walking for ninety minutes (give or take) tomorrow.\u00a0 We’ll then take two days of rest and on Tuesday we’ll add a lap.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Enough of the real life stuff.\u00a0 In EverQuest, I have returned to working on the current expansion content.\u00a0 Dan will simply have to get his previous expansion progression done some other way or much later on.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tuesday evening I had a beneficially interesting thing happen.\u00a0 I was about to log out of EverQuest.\u00a0 I had taken Shaka to where she needed to be for the night’s raid, or at least somewhere convenient to where I expected it to be.\u00a0 I got a tell (message) from somebody I did not know, asking if I wanted a weapon from a raid they had just completed.\u00a0 Nobody in their raid needed it, and they did not want it to go to waste.\u00a0 Unlooted items vanish (“rot”) after about twenty or thirty minutes if they are not claimed by somebody.\u00a0 The weapon was a significant upgrade, so I went and got it.\u00a0 I may have eventually gotten the weapon or something like it from my new raid team, but given how new I am to the team, odds are it will be awhile before I am allowed to claim any really good loot like that.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The new weapon is awesome.\u00a0 Let me see if I can explain this:\u00a0 First, weapons are judged, naturally, by how much damage they do over a period of time.\u00a0 Each weapon has what’s called a “ratio” equal to the amount of damage divided by the weapon’s “delay”, or the amount of time between each use of it in a constant attack.\u00a0 I am honestly not sure what the time unit the delay represents, but a lower number is obviously better.\u00a0 So a weapon with a higher amount of damage may not be better if its delay is also higher.\u00a0 Most weapon upgrades will give you a fractional increase in the damage ratio; it’s a hard thing to raise.\u00a0 I gained over a full point in ratio, going from (if I remember my calculations correctly) roughly 4.6 to 5.7.\u00a0 Given that it took me eight years<\/em> to get to 4.6 on my damage ratio, that is a huge change.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then there’s the other stats on the weapon.\u00a0 Three things nearly every item in the game are measured on are hit points (health), mana (magic energy) and endurance.\u00a0 Most items, including my new weapon, have roughly the same number for all three of these attributes.\u00a0 Most upgrades are considered good if there’s a hundred point gain on these things, I gained five hundred points on them with my new weapon.\u00a0 Plus small gains on a number of other attributes over the weapon it replaced.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As I said, the weapon was an awesome thing to randomly gain like that.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Meanwhile, I am pursuing epic quests on the characters on Shaka’s account who do not already have theirs.\u00a0 This is not without difficulty, but mostly it is going smoothly.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That’s more than enough for today, for this week, for both my real and virtual worlds.\u00a0 Here’s a little poem to end the week on:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ****<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Forever and a Year<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Trials and tribulations <\/p>\n ****<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yes, yes, I know.\u00a0 I have not been very good at posting this week.\u00a0 I sat down on Monday and really tried to come up with a rant, but again I failed.\u00a0 Soon, I really must return to my normal posting schedule and post rants, even if they are lame or, relatively speaking, repeats. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":650,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions\/650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nJoys and the evils of life
\nSo much variety we know
\nIn this journey we all take
\nChallenges are met
\nSeen as pain or glory or both
\nLessons learned either way
\nSometimes forgotten in the wake
\nOf the hardship we feel
\nUntil we see a lesson which was not there
\nIt matters not
\nIt’s just life
\nGlorious, wonderful life
\nI hope to live mine
\nForever
\nAnd a year!<\/p>\n