Yup, it turns out that the Premonition of Doom was oddly correct. McClatchy recently decided to close the call center where I work. This is Bad News. See, I’ve got a good thing going here. Hourly wage of $13/hour, only 150 client PCs, an office, working Monday-Friday, really a pretty sweet gig. And in a year, that all comes to an end. So there’s an impasse. I’ve got to beef up my resume if I want a chance of landing on my feet here.

I’m not a bad candidate for a tech job. I’ve held down my share of positions, and done my work as well as any other tech. I’ve been fixing computers for over a decade now, almost seven years of that professionally. I’ve got an Associates Degree in Computer Science, and I am A+ certified. The only missing link here is the Bachelor’s Degree and a few more certs. And in a year, I think I could save some money and whip those up. I’ll just have to work hard on that, I guess. The certifications are really only a matter of the money involved. The local tech training places are really flexible with how they operate, doing online classes with as much or as little classroom instructor time as needed, so I can take one day off a week and get those done. The only obstacle there is saving up the $500 or so per class I’d need to get that done. Or there are classes through the local Tech school that could get me some classroom time and would occur at night, but would cost quite a bit more. Its the trade-off really. Then there’s that BS degree I’d need to get my foot in the door. I know I could go to University of Phoenix or ITT or some tech night school and finish a degree in a year or less depending on how my credits from my AS and other classes since then shake out. There’s the money thing again though and the loss of prestige associated with a degree from University of Phoenix.

The question is if I am going to shell out money and time, would a BS from University of Phoenix be worthwhile? Would it actually get me any jobs that not having a BS would get me? Would it eclipse the qualifications that other candidates have, or is a degree from there good only as an entrance into the Law Enforcement field? I do hear that UPhoenix is Cop College at heart. Questions, questions. I’ll have to figure something out quickly though as I’ll need to wrap this up before June of next year.

There is another option for education, and that is to return to USC and try to finish most or all of my BS in Computer Engineering or equivalent. There is another program called TSTM that stands for technical services something-something that is basically a 125 hour program for being a technician. I’ve got a whole pile of the credits for both programs, but I think that the end result would be 50-75 hours left on either ticket. That’s at least one and a half to two years to finish either and that is completely blowing the June/July ‘08 deadline to get a new damn job.

Yes, if I manage to keep everything on an even keel and make it to closing there will be a severance package. The other question is if Kristi and I can use our combined salaries to work something out until then. Yes, it is two weeks pay/year on the job so eight weeks pay, but that still cannot get me through an extra semester without a job. And that’s if I can take 15-18 hours of classes while working 8am-5pm, so that’s a non-starter. Looks like its down to certs or online college.

What I really need is a job that beats $13/hour with around 40 hours/week (or its salaried equivalent). Any excess of that will determine how flexible I am with the nights/weekends/holidays end of things. Well, any excess of that and the time between credible job offers. Eventually I am going to get pretty desperate and start selling knives door-to-door. If NCR didn’t have me blacklisted I’d reapply there, but I’m sure that turning them down last time got noted somewhere. Unless that Kyan guy was part of the department let go. Then I would be OK, maybe. I can ask the Laceys. They need to come over again, if they are free on Thursday. Give me a call, you guys!

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Well, we still have a kitten. Unsurprisingly though, I won’t be able to drop him by the pound. Kristi has a thing for cats and just can’t bear to “abandon” the little guy. I’m totally soppy about it as well, so I guess we just have four cats now. *Sigh* I can honestly say this wasn’t what I intended. I mean it is what happened, but it wasn’t what I intended. This karma thing is working out less like “Balancing the Scales” and more like “Hey, you can kick me now,” but I think that all things considered, I’d probably do the same thing again.

Hilariously, the dog seems to be getting along best with the kitten (who we have started calling Oz, based on his ocelot coloration and tendency to make a lot of noise). Nada and Shiva don’t seem to jive with him at all, and Morpheus is treating the guy like a brother more than anything. Again, the surprise here is the dog. It turns out that Emmy’s barking and chasing of the cats was more to get them to run around than anything dominance/aggression based. She’ll just walk over to the kitten, knock him over and start biting his belly (gently, play bites, nobody is getting hurt). And then the cat climbs up one of her legs and bites her. Then the cycle continues. Oddly, all of this in complete silence. Occasionally we have to say “Hey!” or give the old Dog Whisperer “Chst!” to get her to snap out of it when she starts barking. Usually when we make her lay down for a minute so that the kitten can catch his breath, he just comes right back and starts biting the dog’s ears. So everything is still wilder at the old casa.

And that’s fairly nuts when you think about it.

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Yeah, I don’t know about this Being Nice thing. It just isn’t working out as it should. I’m walking my dog, right (I walk her every morning then again when I get home from work. Kristi comes with on the second trip, she just can’t get up at 6am like the dog and I can. Can you blame her?) and on the way home I start hearing a frantic little “Mew! Mew!” I drop the dog off at my house and go back trying to find out if I have a hurt cat or something on my hands. No, there was just an unattended kitten hanging out under a car. Because it was starting to rain and I’m a soppy bastard, I scooped up the little guy and brought him home.

Here’s hoping somebody is missing their kitten and comes to pick him up shortly. We don’t need four cats an a dog, that’s just too many animals.

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With the strange premonition thing from yesterday behind me, I’m now trying to live my life in a new way. Trying to shed the cynicism that was my modus operandi previously and actually afford other people/things the dignity they deserve. I know, a big change is in the wind. And so far the Universe is not making it easy.

See, I’m driving to work and I see a large tanker truck leave the local welding supply store. This is a pretty normal occurrence but this time was different. The truck in question was copiously venting two streams of CO2. So I turn around and go to tell the guy in the store. His response “Haw haw, were you scared?” And I tell the jackass that I was trying to be helpful.

So respecting the dignity of all things and calling him a jackass. This kharma thing isn’t really working as well as I had anticipated.

Everybody I know who plays World of Warcraft (and that is almost everybody) should know about the Armory. I’ll wax rhapsodic about it at some point in the future. Who knows, right? Turns out there’s a site that allows you to embed your Armory data in a little iFrame on your webpage. It is still pretty large, and not all that full-featured, but it is still under development. Check it out I’m sure you’ll agree that it is pretty cool.

And apparently we are all starting new Horde characters. I’ve started a few paladins Horde-side and a rogue, but Kargath isn’t that great a server from the Horde perspective. See, I’ve been to all the zones in Outland and they are all pretty alliance controlled. Unless the Horde plays during the day, then there really isn’t any point to high-level Horde play on Kargath. Yes, they win in PVP all the time (except AV), but if you don’t control the world PVP in Outlands then you don’t get certain drops in the dungeons to say nothing of the vendors (and quests) in the contested areas. So we need a new server. I suggested Blood Furnace as it was new and 70% Horde but it turns out to be Central Time so no dice. Therefore we ended up on Thrall. A new server with a slight imbalance toward the Horde side. I made a Blood Elf rogue. His name is Enver. Somebody message me, we can group. So far I’m level 9, so not much grouping yet.

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Something wicked something-something. Seriously, I’m rocking the mad Premonition of Doom here. No idea why, just seems like I left the oven on or something. Here’s hoping nothing majorly bad happens in the future. That would piss me off. And royally.

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Oh yes, oh hell yes. I’ve finally managed to finish my Paladin Epic Mount quest with Calicity. So I’m finally up to 100% speed increase. And my horse has that yellow cloud effect that still makes me look silly. You can’t win them all, but this is still a win in my book. There were a few bumps in the run as I am new to this Holy Paladin thing and I think my tank was a little new to being healed by one paladin. It also highlighted how older instances are not being upgraded to allow for new abilities. We would grab aggro on one group then start tearing into them, as per usual. Then suddenly half the instance would avalanche on to us.

It turns out that the resident badass warlock, my friend Kaylee would drop Seed of Corruption on some guy and that would bleed over into the next room and just pull them all. See, the Seed basically makes people into bombs. They take some damage and when they die they blow up, damaging everything around them. This shouldn’t be happening, it shouldn’t penetrate walls and closed doors like it did. Apparently it just wasn’t tested on older content when added as a level 70 ability. The Seed is the final level warlock capstone ability that showcases the Debuff and DoT nature of the class all together in one sweet package. It is a perfectly acceptable tactic that is exactly what a 70 warlock should be doing when confronted with a group of tightly packed enemies. And it didn’t work at all like it should. This wasn’t the fault of Kaylee, this was a room in an instance that didn’t stop an effect properly.

And that highlights one of the major problems with WoW as it stands. See, before Burning Crusade WoW was two games. The first was the trek to 60. You went from zone to zone in 10-level increments (Elwyn Forest took you from 1-10, Westfall from 11-20, Redridge from 21-30, Duskwood from 31-40 and so on) doing quests and randomly killing mobs for loot and XP. You would run a dungeon but mostly when you had quests for it. Dungeon grinding, the process of running the same dungeon over and over again until the loot you want dropped was mostly for the Hardcore people. The kind of people who couldn’t get used to the idea that yes, you have the Chain of the Scarlet Crusade, but it took you 20 runs to get all that armor and you are level 45 now. You should be wearing plate.

When you hit level 60 you stop gaining XP and start on the Raid Progression where the only thing that changes is your gear. You run the same instance as long as it takes to get your Lightforge Legplates because you need them to be good enough to go on. You run Stratholme, Scholomance and Upper Blackrock Spire to get the loot to go to Molten Core and Onyxia then go on to Zul’Gurub and Blackwing Lair, then move on to Naxxramas.

Then Burning Crusade came out. Suddenly there is another ten levels of Outlands quests before you get into the progression that starts there. And the quest rewards that are easily obtainable blow Molten Core loot out of the water. They are comparable to Zul’Gurub or Blackwing stuff, to say nothing of the Five-Man gear. Stuff that can be picked up as easily as the old Strat or Scholo stuff (you can group with random people and still finish the instance, until Molten Core or higher stuff) is far and away better than Naxxramas.

This is a problem. This whole huge chunk of the game no longer is needed. You can skip the totality of the Tier 0-3 instances and never be the poorer for it. Honestly if you hit 58 and you don’t make a beeline for the Dark Portal I would almost go as far as to say you are severely misguided. The rewards in Outlands are just too good. The Gilded Crimson Chestpiece which I got from a quest that took less than 30 minutes and was completed solo, is within spitting distance of the Judgement Chestpiece that drops off of Nefarian. And in addition you get a pile of gold. That 300g I needed for my epic mount I got in less than two weeks. Just from questing and running Ramparts twice. I still need to hit Ramparts again, I still need my Light Touched Breastplate.

But yeah, they need to lower the entrance requirements on most of the Azeroth 5-man content and turn Strat and Scholo into Level 50 instances. Lower Blackrock needs to be slightly harder than Scarlet Monastery and Gnomeregon (around level 45 or so) so that Upper Blackrock can be around 55-60. Molten Core, Zul’Gurub, Blackwing Lair and Naxxramas need to stay 60. Heck, I might even buff Blackwing and Naxx up to 65 or so, or institute a Heroic version with better loot. Its a damn shame that really cool content like this is being passed by because of somewhat lazy game design.

And I need more Healing stuff. I could barely keep up with most of the bigger pulls. I’m not that great a healer yet, and I’m not sure I’m in love with my Spelldamage paladin off-spec. She’s fun, but there really isn’t a good set for her that doesn’t come from massive PVP, and I’m just not that much of a PVP fanatic. So maybe I go back to being Prot… I don’t know.

Might have to pick up some Geek Temporary Tattoos those look like fun.

Remember when I said I wanted to mess with Lego Mecha? Yeah, the Japanese are unsurprisingly good at it. Check out some guy’s EVA Unit 01 it is sketchy, of course because of the scale of the blocks, but you can see what it is supposed to be. All I need now are lots of small scale pieces with a similar color scheme to mess with. Some of those Creator sets might not be a bad buy.

Turns out that Symphony of the Night isn’t Live Arcade exclusive anymore. Kotaku has the scoop. So there’s something else for me to think about in the great 360 vs PS3 mental debate. Of course, Japanese retailer Sofmap just moved Nintendo down to the first floor and Sony up to the third, making it clear that Sony is in the back of the bus until they can start selling consoles.

And I’m excited about Windows Home Server. As a person who has run both Windows Media Center and Windows Server 2003 for a few years now, a centralized server OS that doesn’t make me spend 3 hours compiling network drivers and is also actually built with the Home Media Storage idea makes me more than a little happy. I might dust off the old Redserver and give it a fresh coat of paint (and a top).

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See, this is why I hang out with Martin. I make some half-baked half-asleep assertion about a video game and he actually makes me think about my position. Isn’t that crazy?

You make a lot of sense there. The “PS3 as Sony’s market leader” thing actually resonates pretty strongly. I mean they had the PSONE out alongside the PS2 for a while there, but who was their competition at the time? This was the infancy of the PS2, so there wasn’t an XBOX and the Gamecube was still (and always was really) a cavalcade of first party titles. So they sell a PSONE or a PS2, who cares right? Now however they are banking big on both the PS3 and on Blu-ray. One won’t really stand without the other, and with the failure of UMD movies, they can’t really afford to lose another format war. Not that they would go out of business or anything, Sony is a really huge company. I don’t think they’d like it too much if Blu-ray movies failed and the disc was good for PS3 games only.

Now if they’d put Disgaea 3 on the 360, then I’d be happy. The only way that MSoft could accomplish this though would involve kidnapping. I mean most of Nippon Ichi’s staff would probably commit ritual suicide before they developed for an American console. Nothing personal, they just won’t really associate with the Round-Eyed Devil when there’s sweet sweet Sony standing there. Why they won’t port this to the Wii though is a mystery. I’d love to use motion controls as a “mouse” with a strategy title. Man, that would be super sweet. Or just the Wii Classic controller. Either way, I’m happy. Or hell, drop it for the PSP. We don’t want to pay more for a movie with no special features (*cough*UMD*Cough*) but, I’ll be buying a PSP for Disgaea. And Tactics, and Valkyrie Profile, and Loco Roco and so on. Just not right now. I needs my savings.

There’s also some other (I don’t Speak Moon-language)SRPG coming to the PS3 that has a N1 look to it. I still don’t think I’m going to pop for a PS3 yet. It just makes me unhappy that I can’t have my cake and eat it too, is all. There are quite a few titles both Arcade and non-Arcade that tickle my fancy too much to go without a 360. Well, I still have Symphony of the Night, right? And Geometry Wars is headed for the Wii, right? Fallout 3 (my 360 Decider) is coming to the PC, 360, and PS3… They had a price drop right? I mean they lost all of those exclusives, but they are still getting the titles… Maybe I could get a PS3 instead of at 360. The price dropped, right? *sigh*

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You heard it here folks, us dungeon crawling geeks were right. See, I watched this show on the History Channel called “Cities of the Underground” last night (I know, the fun never starts). The episode was concerning Cappadocia, Turkey. I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes version of the intro. See Cappadocia lies smack dab in the middle of Turkey, which makes it the crossroads of East-West land travel in the Silk Road days. This means that whoever controls Cappadocia controls Mad Bank. So therefore as long as people have lived in Cappadocia, there wars were fought over the entire area. So the peasants (those afraid of mass burnination) hid from Crusaders, Muslims, and their neighbors. In order to hide successfully, they need what amounts to bomb shelters. Luckily, the whole place is made of incredibly porous volcanic rock covered by basalt. So perfect natural fortress material. And add to that there are underground battlefields where soldiers from various tribes fought and died trying to root out their enemies in these huge underground complexes. All of this, I may add, booby trapped to the hilt.

The end result is three hundred known underground cities and countless other underground fortresses. It has the first Christian monastery (also underground) and a large number of pagan temples carved by the vanished civilization of the Hittites. So thousands of years of history and quite a few different types of complexes.

End result: Dungeons. Tons of them. Cities for underground people, temples for pagans and Christians, tunnels under cities and undiscovered treasure troves. Yup, that’s right, D&D was completely correct.

The Kotaku says: “Fallout 3 is everything you were thinking it would be, Brooks. Also have fun with it.” Their Hands on Impressions is completely what I wanted to see. There is still some Oblivion hanging on, they say, but this is still a little over a year before release. There’s plenty of time to polish.

Also from Kotaku: “Disgaea 3 announced, and it is for the PS3.” Yeah, we need the PS3 for a semi-3d sprite based game. What’s going on here? I’ll be playing D3, that’s for sure. I haven’t missed one of these, and I’ll be buying Disgaea 2 again in order to continue on my “Perfect game” where everybody was Genius level from the start and all my equipment had unlocked specialists on it. But I’ll be damned if I buy a PS3 just for Disgaea. They had better get some pretty compelling exclusives, because I want a 360 and my girl wants a Wii.

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World of Warcraft is one my my main vices, I’ve got to say. I’m still considering a Calicity tattoo one of these days. Hell, the girl deserves it, I’ve only been playing her for two years now. And I’m going to get her to 70 come hell or high water. And no amount of nerfing will take that away. See, I’ve been a dedicated paladin for quite some time now, and that is an odd thing. I’m a rogue through and through. Last weekend in this month I’ll be going to the gun show (maybe) and picking up a set of lockpicks (maybe, and hooray for gunshow loopholes!) in order to mess around with opening closed things. I’m still looking at making a target to fart around with throwing knives as well. See, rogue. But still my WoW main is a paladin.

And things are a rollercoaster ride for us pallys. We are a hybrid class. Meaning that we can handle the three duties of Healing, Tanking and Damaging pretty interchangeably. The only problem is we get tracked into healing because, well, we have healing spells and anybody who can heal does heal. I’ve heard of rogues on raid bosses being asked to bandage because their DPS wasn’t up to snuff. That’s Damage Per Second for the slow people in the crowd. So we are the Jack-of-all-Trades, right? The only issue is each of our three trades we go about bass-ackwards. Our healing is slow and lacks both an instant cast and a heal over time. Our tanking is based on being hit and reflecting damage. Our damage was clumsy and random. So along comes Burning Crusade and patch 2.0. This is Good Times. We get access to a Heal over Time (if you are a Draenei, and why aren’t you?) and our instant cast damage spell gets a healing component (and a reduced cooldown). Our tanking gets a taunt and a pseudo-charge. Our damage gets an instant cast weapon strike. So everything is much improved.

I guess.

But then all the top-end paladin stuff goes pink. I mean I’m not one of those queer-smearers who refuse to dress their imaginary female avatar in pink, but it does kinda remove any intimidation factor that may be present, you dig? I mean check out our wonderful Crystalforge Armor. Doesn’t that just look like a Knight in Shining Armor? No. It looks like Elton John and Robocop had a hideous lovechild. Thank god for Lightbringer. Now I just have to skip straight to Black Temple and I can avoid the embarrassment of that crazy pink spandex.

Well, that’s what I thought. Then comes the new 2.2 patch. Its good fun. Paladins get a pile of changes:

Paladins:

* Blessing of Freedom cooldown increased to 25 seconds.
* Blessing of Protection: This spell can no longer be cast on others when stunned. It can only be cast on self (to break the stun) under those circumstances.
* Blessing of Kings, Light, Might, Salvation, Sanctuary and Wisdom increased to 10 minutes.
* Blessing of Sacrifice now has a 1-minute cooldown.
* Consecration will now properly hit large creatures.
* Greater Blessing of Kings, Light, Might, Salvation, Sanctuary and Wisdom increased to 30 minutes.
* Guardian’s Favor now increases duration of Blessing of Freedom by 2/4 seconds.
* Eye for an Eye: This ability can now trigger while the Paladin is sitting.
* Hammer of Wrath cast time reduced to .5 seconds, global cooldown reduced to .5 seconds.
* Illumination: Paladins will now correctly gain mana from this ability if they sit down to drink right after a healing crit, and receiving mana from this ability will no longer cause a Paladin who is sitting to stand up.
* Judgement: The Judgement spells will no longer cause triggered effects to go off twice.
* Redoubt: This ability can now trigger while the Paladin is sitting.
* Reckoning: This ability can now trigger while the Paladin is sitting.
* Righteous Defense: In some cases this ability would fail to work properly when the Paladin casting it had just been crowd controlled by a creature. That is now fixed.
* Seal of Righteousness: The tooltip for this ability has been improved. It now displays a different number for one-handed weapons and two-handed weapons, and adjusts to the speed of your current weapon. It displays a single number, rather than a range of numbers for different handedness and speeds.
* Seal of Vengeance: The damage from this ability will now stack properly when two different characters are applying Seal of Vengeance effects to a target.
* Seal of Vengeance duration increased to 15 seconds. In addition, when Seal of Vengeance strikes a target that already has 5 applications you will cause instant Holy damage.

Ten minute blessings are good. Thirty minute Greater Blessings are even better. SoV doing automatic holy damage is also cool. I may have to respec to protection. I mean all in all I’m excited about the changes on paper. But then there’s the fact that Blessing of Freedom and Blessing of Protection are both able to be dispelled. It was never a big deal because it wasn’t like people could really target them all that effectively. I mean there was a graphic, right, but it was understated. Not anymore.

Thanks for the big pink searchlight. It is much appreciated. I think I’ll start a Blood Elf Priest. Anybody need a horde-side healer? Instance healer. PvP healing is for Paladins.

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I tell ya. I try the anime-blogging thing and whew that looks like crap. I mean two rows of three I can handle, (which at 360px per picture, I’d need 1080px in screen size, which is bigger than the standard 1024. So mayhap I’ll cut it down to four per episode.) But seriously, only one per line? Not going to happen. I just need some PHP books or something. I can do this, even if all I do is pull one of these default styles apart and switch it with my stuff.

There’s always Deviantart. Hey, I could post my old gray styles there, that would be fun, right? I need a reason to justify my ancient and non-updated Deviantart Page. I don’t even do art, though I want to figure something out, right?

Happy Friday the thirteenth, by the way.

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