Bring Out Your Dead!
Not much too new in the past three weeks. I got caught up reading The Stand, playing World of Warcraft, and practicing guitar.
The Stand was good, though the first third was the best and the last third not so much. I felt the story was written into a corner and the resolution wasn’t genuine, just something to finish it off. A sense of “build-up, build-up, build-up” and then “that’s it?”.
World of Warcraft has been on-again, off-again for a while. I enjoy the game, but my Macbook’s lackluster performance as a gaming computer has really hindered it, especially since I’ve made it to the later portions of the game which are more graphics-intensive. I’ve been spec’ing a new computer for a while now, but have been waffling on which parts to use, the cost, and the wisdom of building a PC for gaming. I was trying to stay fairly cheap originally, around the $600 mark, but I kept finding that for each an additional $30 here or there that the parts where much better and would not become obsolete as quickly. It ended up being just under $1,000; part list with prices here. I finally bit the bullet last night and ordered the parts on newegg.com, but got an email later saying that my order failed payment authorization. I called Visa and was told that due the volume of orders at newegg that were made with stolen credit card numbers they now always deny authorization until they can contact the card owner. Crazy, huh? I can’t do anything about it until Monday because newegg’s customer support is only available during business hours. Seriously, Monday-Friday 9am-5pm PST for a web site?
Guitar lessons have been going better as of late. I felt I was stagnating for a while there in late November and December. I think it was because I spent too much time playing WoW and not practicing, but given my semi-sabbatical from WoW recently I’ve been spending much more time on the guitar. The fact that my left hand has become more flexible, though still not great, at making chords helps too. I’m still having issues with the mental gymnastics necessary to play, but I’m sure muscle memory and more practice will eventually get me over the hurdle of always having to piece out the scale and count notes on my hands every time I’m trying to make a triad.
I haven’t mentioned work yet because things have been going well, albeit kind of dull. I spent a large amount of time creating a whitepaper for a project at work. I can’t count the number of times I revised, re-wrote, and edited that thing. It only comes out to about four or five pages total, but I doubt a single sentence from the original draft is contained in the final draft. I wasn’t completely satisfied with the finished product due to not having enough information to write with what I felt was the proper about of detail, but I think I did the best I could given the circumstances. I’m a bit peeved because I’m also going to miss a Navy IT conference while they let a contractor attend. It would seem to me that you’d want the government guy who actually works for you long-term to attend something like that, but nobody asks me. I mostly wanted to go to learn about FISMA and hear the discussion about the Data At Rest issue because even in our small group there’s been widespread disagreement about how to interpret what is applies to. Meh, as long as this doesn’t happen when stuff like Blackhat comes up I guess I don’t care too much in the end.
