Twev1701.net

I ended playing World of Warcarft for about 3 hours tonight. I got my level 13 with my undead warlock. Even though Joel was on a different continent, we hooked up on his TeamSpeak server and chatted the entire time. I even got to meet some of his gaming buddies. It was a pretty good time. In fact, it reminded me of playing EverQuest back in the day. In fact, it reminded me of it so much, that I looked up some old files on my hard drive from 2001. Here are some screen shots from my glory days on EverQuest.

Ahh….the glory days. I miss them.

Been a while since I’ve posted one of these.

It’s just started snowing here about 10 minutes ago. I just got off the phone with Jess at work in Stroudsburg, and she said it’s snowing down there was well, but not as hard.

Who knows how much we’ll end up getting, but let’s just hope they don’t screw up this cleanup like the did the last one!

Here we sit, awaiting another winter storm to hit us. I say “another” meaning storm #2 for the season. Although considering it took the road crews over 2 weeks to make the roads passable, it felt like one long, never ending storm.

According to The Weather Channel we’re supposed to get 3-5 inches tonight, and then another 1-2 inches tomorrow. But, when I went to bed last night @ 1:30am, they said it was only going to be 2-4. So, we still see more then what they are predicting.

As for me today, my day is going to be filled with some laundry, gaming, and Photoshop work. All in all, another nice, relaxing g33k day.

I think I’ve earned it.

I’m not sure any of you remember, but for this past Christmas I got a new processor for my computer. I bought a nice new Arctic Cooler for it, and even though it runs nice and cool, I was getting all sorts of errors. My mail program, as well as Opera and Photoshop (my life blood) would freeze and lockup randomly. Also, when I went into my BIOS, I was unable to save any changes. After doing some research, I discovered that the version of my motherboard BIOS that I was running did not support hyper-threading 100% and that was what was causing my problems. Also, even though I was running at 3gHz, it was still slow was shit. In some applications, my old Celeron 2.6gHz processor was faster than my new Pentium 4 3gHz.

But, when I built this box, I built it with out a floppy drive, something you normally need when flashing a BIOS. I looked and tried alternatives, but it looked like I needed a floppy. Well, sheer laziness kicked in and I did not feel like ripping apart another tower in the house to get a floppy drive and hook it up temporarily into my computer. In fact, I have been using Jess’s computer for the past few weeks to get all of my Photoshop work done. I think the things that annoyed me the most was my mail program. I couldn’t even select an email without it freezing up. It got so bad that I started logging into the webmail interface on my mail server and writing emails that way since it would lock up after what seemed like every other word while writing.

Anyway, tonight I finally said to hell with it all, ripped open one of my many spare towers, got out a floppy drive, hook it up in my box, grabbed a blank floppy, mad an MSDOS boot disk, and flashed the BIOS.

I really wish I had done this weeks ago. Not only and I not getting any errors or random lock ups, but my system booted in about 1/2 the time it normally was.

Damn my laziness.

Yesterday at around 6pm, I had finally had enough.

I stopped what I was doing and loaded up World of Warcraft.

I started a new character, an Undead Warlock. He reminds me a lot of the Necromancer I used to play in EverQuest. Anyway, I ended up playing him last night until level 7, which was about 5 hours.

I then came home from work tonight, made dinner, wrote out the rest of this month’s bills, and played for about another 3 1/2 hours. I’m now almost to level 9, and a pretty badass undead dude.

All day at work I was thinking about coming home and playing. That was something I used to do when I used to play EverQuest all night. Come may call that sad and pathetic, but I actually enjoy that. I walked around work today pulling merchandise for tomorrow’s installs, all the while thinking about what quests I wanted to accomplish tonight and where I wanted to go to hunt. Hell, I remember back in my heyday of EQ, that all of us that would play online every night started meeting up on Sunday afternoons to play basketball, and all the while we played, we would be talking EQ and planning our hunt. We would all gone home, grab some dinner, and then play online all night long. I really miss those days. Hell, while I was thinking about playing WoW at work today, I was thinking about how I used to play EQ for almost 6 hours every night. It was mind-boggling to figure out how I used to do that. But then I recalled some of those crazy nights.

On any normal day, I would get home form working at EB in Hazleton around 6:30-7:00pm. I would then literally load up EQ on my computer as soon as I walked in the door. As the game was booting (crappy as computer back then) I would grab something to eat and drink and bring it right to the computer. I would then log in and eat as I played. I would play until around 2am or so and then get some sleep. I had work at 9:30am usually, so I had to be up by 8:00am or so. Going to be bed at 2am, got me 6 hours sleep, which is plenty since even right now I only get about 5 hours a night. Granted, I didn’t get much else done at night, it was pretty much playing EQ all night. Hell, I can remember a night when we got a really good party going on at one of the Orc camps in the Eastern Commonlands. We literally played until the sun started to come up. I think we went to bed that night at 6am. I had work at 9:30am that day, and as I was laying in bed, all I could do was think about the game. I think I may have even gone back in and logged in again to try something out that I was thinking about. Hell, back then, I even used to have EQ dreams where I wasn’t playing in EQ, but was actually in EQ. Yes, my addiction was pretty bad. But at the same time, it was a really fun time in my life and something to this day I wouldn’t trade for anything else. Hell, even as I type this, my mind is wandering back to WoW and I have the temptation to log back in and get my level 9 before I go to bed. Technically I can do that, and I just might. But, this is the feeling that I haven’t be able to conjure yet with WoW because I haven’t had enough time to play it, and when I did get a chance, I couldn’t find a nitch. I think I found it with my Undead Warlock. Hell, I think the time I have put into the game in the past 24 hours is almost as much as I have played since I got the game on December 29th, 2006.

Some may call this little diddy about my gaming present and past pathetic and down right sad. But here is my response to those people. Everyone is obsessed or addicted to something. Whether it be food, TV, a chemical substance, or whatever. Everyone has their own vice. Mine only costs me $15 a month, and I’m not hurting myself or anyone else while partaking in it.

How many other people can say that about their vices?

EDIT: I did log back in when I got done writing this, and I gained another level and 1/2. So I’m now at level 9 1/2.
Also of interested note. My Human Warrior (1st character) is at level 13 with 15 hours and 10 minutes of play time on him. My Undead Warlock is at level 9 with 6 hours and 52 minutes of play on him. Yeah, I’m having a lot more fun with my Warlock!

I know I was whining a few weeks back about not getting any snow. Well, I’m over that now.

As I sit here and type this up, we’re in the middle of yet another snow squal. All I see out my windows right now is white. It snowed again last night, although we only got about 1/4 inch or so. Still, we’ve got about a good 16 inches left on the ground from the Valentine’s Day storm, and all of it is frozen thanks to the sleet we had. I tried clearing my driveway again yesterday and it’s useless. I even broke my shovel.

I can say without hesitation right now that I welcome spring. I can’t wait for the day when I wake up and it’s 60 degrees out and the windows are open.

But right now, that seems like it’s still a long way off.