Ramblings on a Sunday

It has been an interesting enough week for me, care to share along? Of course you do that’s why you’ve read this far already…away we go!

Purchased a Wii Fit and am surprised at how much fun it actually is though it did ‘crash’ my Wii so to speak last evening and I had to reset it. Not that this was hard to do mind you. Just bears noting.

Made Reservations to Animethon 15 for my wife and I for this August. Poor folks at the Con this year are almost all new so it’s been rough going for them. I wish them the best of luck!

Work has been soso this past week, shifts are getting filled and no ones whining overmuch. One of our Managers is on Two Weeks Vacation beginning today so that will be a welcome absence. She is a dedicated worker but when she is around stress levels are always higher because she likes to find fault. Though I am having to work 6 Days a week again for the moment I am assured this is only to cover for the Manager being absent.

In personal news I found a small place to vent my writing urges on…it is not perfect and on occasion smacks of God Modding but I myself work within the limits I have set and the others playing there are respecting that for the most part. I consider it my obligation to bring a sense of the mundane to their game whenever I am able.

And that’s all I have to say about that. Merry Sunday all!

Lifelike Spam?

I have several Messenger Clients, MSN, Yahoo (old and Vista Beta), Google Talk and of course IRC if that counts. I’m sure most of you do as well but do you ever get offline messages you could swear were real? I’m sure it’s just a totally random fluke but a few times I have gotten messages from Spammers using names and saying things that almost sound just like stuff a that the person with that name might say.

There’s still that moment of suspicion enough to keep me from doing it but the other day I got a message with a link in it from a guy name Kevin claiming he was my old High School buddy and that he and some of the others I hung out with in High School were getting together in town on the weekend to party it up. Included was a Link to what was supposed to be the hotel they were all staying at. That’s where I Red Flagged. The hotel they named is not in this town.

But damn if it wasn’t a terminator-esque impression. Every happen to you folks?

Oh and the genuinely amusing ones are the ones that use my Messenger Handle thinking it’s actually my name…NO one on my Messenger Clients calls me by my Handle, they all are on a first name basis with me. But I still get SPAM like: Hey Dredaras! “Long time no see huh? Check out this cool link I found yesterday!”

Edit: Can’t spell

Debate

Earlier today I got into a little bit of a debate…well not really a debate as such but a discussion over at my friend Yoshi’s Blog. It was about a news report and YouTube video that detailed a Marine throwing a puppy off a Cliff.

Disgusting yes, inhumane yes. I find the mans actions to be reprehensible.

That being said what I did not agree with was several Posters leaping to the conclusion that this one mans deplorable action somehow was representative of the the Marines in general. As you can well imagine many of the Posters are, like myself, animal lovers and were justifiably outraged that a human being could do something like that to a puppy.

Seeing as how my Family is directly related to the Military I am well aware that I am biased towards the Military but I just could not sit by and watch people take a one mans idiocy and turn it into hate mongering for an entire group of people. I know a great many people serving today and I can all but guarantee that every single one of them would be seriously offended by what happened and completely unable to grasp how a human being could do something like that.

You just shouldn’t take the actions of one man and brand an entire group with them, it’s unfair and I’ll speak up about it every single time.

Note: I am not providing any links to this, if anyone wants a link to it I will provide it on a ‘by-request’ basis. I just don’t feel the need to perpetuate this any further publicly.

What Irks Me - The Day Off Edition

A little backstory for the new people. Up until about 6 months ago I had been working 6 Days a week on average around 10 hours a day at the Restaurant. This led to me having essentially no life to speak of. My one day off was consumed utterly by Bill Payments, Grocery Shopping and spending time with my wife. Unlike most people I worked (and still work) Split Shifts while my wife works regular day shifts and the occasional evening.

That meant I dropped her off at work, went in to the Restaurant, came home in the afternoon for 2.5 hours then went back to work about 30 minutes before she got home. I’d get back from the Split shift around 9:30 most nights, later if it was really busy, eat dinner, do laundry and pretty much be ready for bed.

That was my life for almost 3 years. Yes the money was nice, yes my wife understood that I was sorely needed due to lack of staff at the Restaurant but none of that helped me when I took a good long look at my wife and realized I had no life. I had work and a day to catch up. That is not a life.

My friends hardly ever saw me, I missed pretty much every single get together any of them had and I worked every weekend so when I DID have some time it was on a Monday when everyone else was getting back to work themselves.

About 6 months or so ago I went to my Boss and said I could not do it any longer, the toll it was taking on me personally was just getting to be too much. Thankfully she understood and I started to get two days off. It’s been nice for the most part, having one day to do my running and another to just do whatever I felt like doing.

Now we get to my problem (sorry it took so long…) I have SO much saved up to do, books purchased along the way that I wanted to read, DVDs with the same intention, Video Games for various consoles and things of that sort. What this has led to is a bit of paralysis. I have free time and I guess too much I want to do so I end up getting to do nothing while I try to figure it out.

I used to be part of a great PBeM (Play By Email) game a long time ago but the demands of work forced me to retire from it because I could not uphold my commitments to the game. Unfortunately I also lost a valued friendship as a result of all that. I miss the participation in creating something larger and now that I have the time again I have looked around for something else to invest myself in as I did once before. Sadly I have yet to find anything that has given me the same ‘buzz’.

I’ve tried to just pick one thing and do that exclusively but it’s not as easy as it might seem. Not for me at least. So I turn to the people I have met on the Interbaun. What do you do to help you make up your mind when you have multiple things to do?

I need something to occupy my mind and videogames just can’t do that for me, nor can the Movies.

Longwinded…Sorry =/

Spring Devestation

I refuse to use such a mundane word as ‘Cleaning’ for what I have been doing these past two evenings. It just doesn’t adequately convey the disaster that is my house at this moment. In all fairness I must heap credit upon my wife for her part in this as she began the work while I was at work myself. However I pitched in as soon as I returned home and after almost 9 hours of cleaning, tossing, moving and laundry we now can almost make it to the far corner of our storage room.

Next on the agenda is drafting some of our more able bodied friends and family members to help lug an ancient (read: freaking heavy) hide-a-bed UP a flight of stairs and out the door so that it may be finally put to rest. That might take a while because to get to the hide-a-bed I have to get through the Bumper Pool table. They’ve been together for several years now and I don’t think she’s going to take it very well. Sucks to be her though because what I haven’t told her is she’s next on the chopping block.

Now once we get those two pieces of dead weight out the door it will be on to my own personal love. My Library as it were. I generally don’t throw out books when I buy them. I’ve been in this house for going on 14 years now. I read alot. Do some abstract math why dontcha? Oh and also I collected comics for about…8 years back in the day and I still have all of them.

My plan is to go book by book through the lot of them and see which ones I have read more than one time. Those can stay because they have proven they have value in a re-reading sense. All the others will get donated to the local area be it the Book Store, the Crisis Centre or whatever comes to mind. I refuse to throw a book in the garbage when it might bring someone else the same joy that I had upon first reading it.

In other news, I picked up the 20th Anniversary PSP Editions of Final Fantasy that came out before I owned a PSP and have been playing with them for a couple days now. I have to say that even with the age of the format I still get drawn into the stories of those games even though I have played them several times now.

Tomorrow Age of Conan comes out for the PC. I am on the fence about this, even though I have it Pre-Ordered. I have heard many good things about it from Beta Testers but I question my ability to get back into an MMO even if it is one for which I have long been a fan of the novels by Robert E. Howard. I stopped playing WoW when I got my Blood Elf Warlock to his Maximum Level because I am not a raider and I could see WoW slipping into the same trap as EverQuest albeit with much more grace.

Ah well I will get it, install it, patch it and try it out in the next few days to see if it is something I can enjoy despite the children that will no doubt infest it despite it’s M Rating from the ESRB. Look for a scintillating review in the near future =)

A Day in My Life

At around 8 PM last night my wife decided it would be superspiffycool if we could go to “The City” today. Some Geographical enlightenment: We live 385km away from “The City” With our fancy Canadian cars and measurements of speed that means we are just shy of 4 hours away from “The City” at the legally allowed Speed Limit.

This means we got up at 7 AM to get to our destination at 11 AM. That’s just getting to the edge of it mind you, not the additional 30 minutes of drive time through traffic to reach our goal, the WEM. Our purpose? To buy her a new PC. Our Results? $210 in Anime, $76 in Old Navy, $105 in the T&T Market, $86 at Payless and about $77 in Manga. You’ll notice no new PC on that list. She’s a fickle one she is.

Fun was had. Risked life and limb in cutting approx. 90 minutes off our travel time both there AND back again (Hobbits FTW!) whilst avoiding the lovely gentlemen of the R.C.M.P. who can only “Get Their Man” if they know their man is there to be had apparently.

Off Topic I stopped by Danalyn’s Blog to wish her a Happy Birthday on behalf of Yoshi ( I think this was a clever plot to see just how much he could irritate her…curse me for being so easy to manipulate!). She was having a lovely time explaining how dim the Geek Squad can be at times. I had many things like that happen to me when I was in the field of PC maintenance lo these many years ago before I found out I liked Cooking alot more than my old job. I wasn’t even trained in any formal sense, I used my common sense but I daresay even I might be over-qualified to work for Geek Squad based on her Post.

Editted to remove my embarrassing typographical incompetence.

April Showers…

IMAGE_006, originally uploaded by hellgate71.

bring may flowers? Yeah right!

April 22nd 2k8

IMAGE_008, originally uploaded by hellgate71.

All of this fell in approximately 32 hours, that’s my Driveway…I am standing about oh…30 feet from the end of it. Snowblowers are my friends.

New Telemaphone

Yes, that’s right. I, the man with a all the portable things that money can buy have bought a new Cell Phone. Now, let me preface this by saying I don’t need or want a phone that can play MP3’s, Surf the Net, Tell me how lost I am to within 2 inches anywhere on the globe, check email, IM or take Photos. I want a Phone that’s *gasp* a friggin PHONE!

Apparently they don’t make those any longer so I got this instead.

Which does all the things I just said I didn’t need…le sigh.

Writing

I love to write, I’d love to do it to the exclusion of many things. Professionally? I don’t think I am that good but personally, among my circle of friends I enjoy writing things for them. Most all of my friends are gamers in some form or another with original characters they play in whatever game world. I like to write stories for them involving their characters, that is my own personal passion.

That being said I do not write when people are around. I can only get into the right frame of mind when I am alone and lately that just isn’t happening at all. I find it very frustrating but there is not much I can do about it short of telling people to leave me alone so I can do it and I would never do that because it would be rude of me.

Long story..well not short I guess. I have a few ideas I want to write about and I am waiting for time to do it…but it’s looking like maybe next Tuesday before I will get the time.

I know everyone who reads this has something they love to do, games, movies, reading whatever turns  your crank. Now imagine you really want to do this thing that you love to do and something keeps preventing you from doing it. This is my life right now. Grawr!

At least I have my books to get lost in while I wait.