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Life right now seems to be in a holding pattern for me. It’s not getting any better, but then again, it’s not getting any worse.

The heat and hunidity are starting to wane a bit. This is goos since you can breathe when you step outside of air conditing. Today is supposed to be the last bad day until next week…high of 90 and moderate humidity. The one good thing about all this heat and hunidity is that my vegetable garden is really taking off and my grass isn’t growing!

I’m still trying to play Guild Wars as much as I can. I closed last night, again tonight, and once again tomorrow night, so that gives me a good opportunity to play. I get home around 11:00pm~11:15pm, spend about 30-45 minutes with Jess, she goes to bed at midnight, and I play until I need to go to bed. The last 2 nights I have averaged 1 level per night. My Necromancer right now is about 30% through her 11th level. Right now the level cap is 20, and I expect to hit that probably within the next month at the rate I am playing. I know Joel will probably hit that level before me since he is a Guild Wars machine. He is the only guy I know that goes home on his lunch to get about a half hour of playtime in! JP is the lowest in the group now at level 9 I believe. We need to powerlevel him a bit the next time he comes online. Once we all hit end-game level (20), it’s time to search and make the best armor we can, get the best weapons, and then go on some erious raids. I will not be satisfied until I kill a dragon!! The Sons of Ramzi will be dragonslayers!!!

On a totally un-realated note, we are getting company this week. I have been informed that Jess’s father and his wife will be coming up for the first time on Sunday. Therefore, we will be cleaning all Saturday night, in an effort o hide the fact that we are lazy slobs. Then on Tuesday, Jess’s sister Brandi and her 2 kids will be coming up for the day. This will be the first trip up here for all of them, and should prove to be an interesting time. I like her family so don’t get me wrong about that, it’s just that the house still, and will probably alwyas, need a lot of work until I am really happy with it. But, we’ll just have to clean, wait, and hope everything goes well.

That’s about it for this “State of the Union” address. I’m off to get a good hour of Guild Wars in before I have to get ready for work. Later…

Here’s the scenairo…

I’m in the computer room playing Guild Wars, and Jess is on her computer in the living room playing my music library from my computer, over the network, via iTunes. Not too complicated, right? Well, here’s where the resident g33k steps in. She wanted to go online. Normally, I would just fire up the proxy server and it would be no problem. But, I had to redo the network a few weeks ago because of a faulty 5 port swicth in the living room that enabled her computer and the Xbox to be on the network.

“He had dial-up, why does he need to have his Xbox on the network?” you’re probably asking. Well, I have a modded Xbox that is running Xbox Media Center which allows me to play any media file from any computer on the network through the Xbox, onto my 27″ TV, and upmix the sound to Digital 5.1. That’s why. I can see every episode of Mad About You, and the entire first season of House thanks to that little guy and eMule. Nuff said.

So, when I built Jess’s new computer, I never even bothered with a modem because we would be getting broadband in the fall and I have the proxy server. But, when that 5 port switch went on me, the only thing I had to replace it with was my Netgear 5 port wireless router. This little guy runs my DHCP, and then runs into my Netgear 24 port switch to the rest of the network. So, as you can see this is now a problem as her computer and the Xbox are on the top tier of the network now. I think I may have a workaround for it, but I’m still not sure it will work 100%. So, rather than try and get frustrated last night (not to mentiopn losing an hour of GW play time!), I simply took my cell phone in there with my handy-dandy USB cable, hooked it up to her computer, and used my cell phone as an external modem. It was a little slow but it worked just fine for her. And the best part is, that unlike a proxy server, we each had our own connection, not sharing one wimpy dial-up connection.

Case #44352 closed.

Well, I did something today that I have been thinking about doing for a little over year now. I’ve switched my moblog from Buzznet to Textamerica. I actually created my moblog account over at Textamerica in May of 2004, but never really did anything with it. I like the way Textamerica displays the images better than Buzznet. Buzznet shrinks your images down while Textamerica keeps them at their original size. The only side-effect from all of this is that it is rather clear that my camera phone is like 2 generations behind.

Now, I won’t be getting a new phone until April 2006 because I don’t feel like paying full retail price for one, but that doesn’t mean I can’t whine about not having a new one now, does it? It’s really funny because when I first got my new new phone, I didn’t want a camera phone at all. In fact, the one I orginally bought just had a speaker phone on it. Then I thought about it some more, and returned that one a few days later for a camera phone. Now, I can’t imagine not having a camera phone. It’s so convienant to have with me to take quick, random pics.

God I’m such a gadget geek….

I was bored this morning so I made a new header for the site and decided to start a new section where I take screenshots of my desktop and post them. I’ve always liked seeing pics of other people’s desktops and what they do to them. I guess it’s about time I start throwing mine out there to be seen.

For those of you wondering why it is such an odd size, I have a dual monitor display system. My main monitor is a 19″ CTX CRT and my secondary is a 17″ IBM CRT. I actually used to have a 3 monitor display, but I only ever used the 3rd monitor for music playing purposes. Didn’t seem worth the desk real estate.

Yet, get your bathing suits out kids! Today we may set a new record high. I have no clue what the old high is, but they’re forecasting 96 degress with “opressive humidity”. Yeah….thank Christ I have the weekend off and can spend it going from the air conditioning to my parent’s pool.

As for Jess, I’m hoping she just stays cool. This past week at work has really killed her and she’s going through a bought of exhaustion. I told her that since we’re not going camping this weekend to just lay around, realx, stay cool, and get plenty of sleep. Hopefully, I’ll have my baby back sometime on Sunday so I can spend some of the weekend with her. In fact, after I told her I wanted her to take it easy, she made me take her down to Blockbuster Video and she rented not one, not two, but three DVDs for the weekend!

That’s about it for now. I’m going to try and play some Guild Wars this weekend and reach level 10 with Naomi.

Oh…almost forgot. My man JP has redone is blog over again, and has actually made a post!! Yep, it’s his first post since March! The man is on fire!!!

Not only that, but he also hooked his woman Sara up with a blog as well.

The funny thing is, he switched from Movable Type to WordPress. I have been using Wordpress now for almost 2 years now, and have been singing its praises to him. I used to use Movable Type as well, and foudnd it to be a bit combersome to lay things out. With WordPress, I can’t imagine a much easier system. I’m glad to see the boy has finally seen the light!!

Well, I’m off to stay cool and maybe play a little Guild Wars. Later…

I claened out he trucnk of my car today. You would not believe some of the weird ass shit I found in there. Old mail from about 2 years ago, old burned CDs, 2 empty bottles of windshield washer fluid, an actual film camera (don’t even remember the last time I used it!), some promo stuff from when JP worked at fye, a body pillow, a bandable Ozzy Osbourne figure, and a stainless steel mailbox. I did find an envelope, and when I opened it, I got a surprise. I have a friend who works for the union that takes care of all the local shows. If a band comes to town that we like, he usually gives me and JP his old working pass from that show. This is what I found in the envelope.

I was actually at that show!! And this was about 3 months before I even met my friend. Sweet…

The only problem I have had with the game since day one is that it does not come with a printed map. Call me old skool, but I’m used to having full color, professionally printed maps in the boxes that I can hang on the wall and reference at my leisure. They are great for planning a travle route or a night’s hunt. Don’t get me wrong, Guild Wars has a gret in-game map, but that’s the problem, it’s in-game. So, I found a rather large map the other night online (almot 2 mb JPEG file), and I printed out a 48″ x 17″ map for my wall on my laser printer. Granted, it’s not the best map, but it’ll get the job done. Here’s a pic of it on my wall.