Life update

Wow, I suck. I need to quit letting this page go by without updates for so, so long. Lot's of stuff has happened in the past year and three months.

Let's see... milestones, milestones: the first would be the start of EverQuest II, I suppose. That was mid November 2004. Tina and I started playing at the dawn of the game's launch and were instantly hooked. Addicted, very badly, I'd say to be honest. We've had a lot of terrific times in EverQuest II, but really spent far more time than we should have playing, neglecting responsibilities and each other for more than a year now. That's a lot of what contributed to us splitting apart, really. I can't blame the game, but I definitely blame that the problems we had and didn't focus on finally reached untolerable limits as a result of spending far too much time in a pretend world. Ah, the follies of life that we learn from, eh? So, officially, ten days ago now Tina and I decided that our relationship is over and done with.

So I may be moving again... soonish. Not sure where or when. I hate moving... I hate uprooting, I hate re-adjusting, I hate leaving behind shed shells of my life and attachments asundered. I've done it far too many times. The statistics on it, I've read, are that the average American moves seven times in his/her life. I'm in the twenties, personally. I really miss Colorado and the beautiful outdoors there... the fresh mountain air and the snow. If I had to choose, I'd try to move back there, though the cost of living is exceptionally high. A great, long-term friend of mine invited me to stay with her and her boyfriend for a while if I need too. She's so great -- I hate to take advantage of a "gotta move" bail-out when I'm not sure how long I'd need to get ready to move to a more permanent place, but I just may. God bless her heart.

She also paid for an expensive trip to DisneyWorld for me and Tina to hang out with her. I hate that I couldn't pay her it all back, but I can't say I let that ruin the vacation for me. That was about a month ago now. Man, I had a blast. The ride lengths were SO short everywhere, so even though we were only there in the parks for two days, we got to do everything AND MORE than Tina and I did last year when we had four days (okay: three, it rained heavily one of those days).

I also had a close encounter with death about two months ago, right when Hurricane Katrina hit our town (great timing). I was out doing some yardwork with Tina late in the evening and must have got bitten by a mosquito. Apparently they can carry several virii and while most people (80%, statistically) have no reaction and never know they've been infected, some people (19%) have minor-flu like symptoms. Me, on the other hand, had a case that's very rare where it hit me hard. I was infected with viral meningitis, which infects the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal column. My physician said that in his twelve years of practice, he'd only seen one other case like mine. I made a full recovery within a few days, but it was very scary. At first I just started forgetting how to do things, but inside of an hour, I couldnt use my right arm anymore, I couldn't talk, etc.

But I'm fine now and none the worse off for it. Well, except maybe a tiny patch of hair on my arm that hasn't grown back in yet. First time having an I.V. in me. In fact, it was the first time for a lot of stuff at a hospital, including spending nights there, being in the I.C.U., having all kinds of tests done on me like E.E.G., C.A.T. scan, M.R.I., spinal tap, etc. They weren't able to re-grow the virus from the spinal fluids they got from the tap, so they couldn't determine the particular brand of meningitis, but it's likely that it was West Nile.

That's it for now. Will write more later as stuff progresses. Ciao!

Living life

Man I didn't mean to let this journal go for so long without an update. Oops.

Been working overtime on Eaxia Online (www.eaxia.com), pounding out some much-needed releases, fixes, and command additions. We've recently had a huge influx of new players and in the past four months, our playerbase and gameplay rate has risen 522%. Needless to say, things have been crazy busy.

Besides that, I've been on a diet recently. Those of you who don't know me, I'm a bit chubby. Got a little extra junk in my trunk. Trying to lose a good amount of weight by the end of the year. Down 15 pounds so far (in 3 weeks), so I'm pretty happy about that. Doing it Atkins style more or less... mostly just low-carbing it.

In animal life: I moved my lonely five-lined skink in with my eight anoles. He seems much happier in there. I also moved my tank to a better position (across the room) to improve both light and the noise quality (farther away from my desk). We also set up a newt tank recently with eight fire-belly newts and a eastern newt. At least 3-4 of the fire-bellies died (two crawled out, two are just missing). Damned things! But they're cute. My fancy guppy tank suffered the loss of one of the males, leaving two females and a lonely male. He just got old I think. I also moved them off my desk to the spot directly behind my desk (where the anoles were). A few weeks later, an explosion of little guppy babies filled the tiny five-and-a-half gallon tank, so that's fun.

I rebuilt my PC to Windows XP Home Edition to try it out. It was difficult to adjust to from 2000 at first, but I managed for a bit. There's a few things that really piss me off: the Explorer and Find - Files utilities are horrible, services and other control panel applets are difficult to find and use, and networking is kind of a pain. More so than 2000 anyway. And now, I.E. has this recent habit of not keeping me logged into websites anymore. So, I'll probably be switching back to Windows 2000 soon. I haven't seen any improvements in games or anything else in XP, in fact, BearShare (P2P) tends to run like shit on XP. So screw it.

Helped my mom out with some computer problems. Took about 5-6 hours in total, but apparently her husband (my step father) had so much spyware and adware that it took AdAware Pro 3 sweeps of nearly 500 total detected objects to clear it out. They should be in decent shape now, but my god... how do you let something deteriorate to that level?

Few points of interest I've stumbled across recently...

First, there's a pretty sweet Flash program someone built that lets you combine different punk-style music bits together to create your own punk songs. It's called Punk-O-Meter and you can check it out at http://2flashgames.com/f/f-548.htm. I've made seven songs so far, but here are my two favorites. Let me know what you think:

------------99960---0---553---09------------99960---0---3---3---8-------9--------------------8---2---3---2---2---2-----------8-- -2-----2---2-----------------b------------3-7-1-------------2---5---2---5-3-7-1-----a-----2---5-2-5-2-5-2-3-7-1---------------- 

88881--81--81--81--83---5-1--81--81--8889-9-9-----9----------------------------------0-0-0---0---0---0---0---------0---0---0---- -0---c-b------------------------------------7---------007-007---777-007-007-007-4-5-4------------------------------------------ 

(To play them, go to Load and paste the above, one song at a time, into the text area)

Also, I came across this in my website browsing. I was simply amazed. Nothing can prepare you for it, either: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=e9744d33e932f0de0ec1d35d23523a44&threadid=830487&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

There's more to be said... I really did put off updating for way too long... but it'll have to wait for later.

Enjoy!