merry xmas

Merry Xmas, Christmas or whatever.

This blog is becoming my infrequently posted WoW status page. Not good, as I wanted it to be more technical in nature. I'll have to give it some thought.

Teh Wha?

I play World of Warcraft.

My son plays World of Warcraft.

And now... my daughter plays World of Warcraft. :)

Now, if I could only get my Wife to play...

After senselessly grinding turtles for two hours (I need to make some turtle armor for a quest. The armor needs *lots* of turtle scales. Turtle scales drop every... now and then. So I kill ten turtles I might get 2 scales. This means LOTS of Turtle grinding to do) I logged off Telensa and on as my level 8 Human Priest, and did some running around with my daughters level 5 Warlock. :)

woot

3 Dings

Three Dings in a row.

On Friday, I was called into my boss's office -- as I wondered what I'd done (this time), I was handed an envelope and congratulated. The envelope contained an offer to the next level at work, although the duties are pretty much identical. Fantastic! Unexpected too, as the other members of my team had told me horror tales of waiting for two or more YEARS to get promoted to Level 2.

That night, I played some WoW and dinged Level 40. I can get a mount now, which means that (after paying a LOT of money) I will be able to get a big panther to ride on (Night Elves ride panthers, everyone knows that!) and training to ride. This usually costs around 100 Gold all up -- and given I've only ever had at most 10 gold it would be a hard slog to get the cash. Luckily I'm a member of a very good guild, and I should be getting it funded for me. I will pay it back, of course, but once you hit the high levels gold just falls on you.

Then on Saturday, I turned 39. Happy birthday to me. Bleh, 365 days until 40.

Sunday -- went and played Two Headed Giant at infinity games in the city. Much funness. 2HG means a team of two share life totals and turns. Life is set to 40 to start, with a lot of side rules and special stuff. It was great fun, but when we got home, Alex said he wanted to sell all our cards -- even the top-dollar cards that we took ages to get. He only likes playing Limited (that is, when you get cards given to you and use them on the day) and not constructed (which is, you bring the deck with you and a list of the deck). Constructed lets you try to build your own designs, but the winners are often those who have four of each power card in the set -- although it certainly helps if you can play well too...

Limited (especially sealed) is in a way harder and easier -- harder, in that you have to make a deck quickly from the cards you get; easier because no one is going to have anything they didn't open (or draft). Very little chance of having four of the power rares.

Because of this emphasis on Limited, he doesn't really care about the cards we have. And since some cards are worth tens of dollars (well, some cards are worth HUNDREDS of dollars... but we don't have any of them), if we sell them it would equal money. And money is good.

I wanted to keep them, just in case. But then again, I always want to keep things just in case. Which explains the granny flat of doom, filled with boxes of crap. And, as he said, not going to constructed (or BORROWING A DECK if we did go) will mean more time to play wow. Damn the kids got me pegged!

Currently my rogue (Telansa on the Dark Iron realm) is at level 37. She's a Night Elf, a Skinner (Artisan) and Leatherworker (Artisan) although in the low 200s for Leatherwork.

Telansa is in one of the Penny Arcade affiliate guilds, being "The Cardboard Samurai", although there are merger discussions in effect for the whole guild to be absorbed into Annarchy

That would be fantastic :) we're much smaller and by joining Annarchy we would be gaining a lot, while they would be getting a few more serious long-term players.

My baby

I'm typing this on my new laptop, the Dell Inspiron 9300.

Other than the "Dell" logo prominently displayed, this is a cool machine. Playing WoW on it is nuts -- widescreen view and very clear. Wireless too (although for a gaming session I hook it into the switch with a cable).

holidays!!

Going on holidays for a couple of weeks. Now, that should be a bunch of downtime to play world of warcraft for 24x7 but instead I'll be cleaning out the granny flat and mowing the lawn at a guess. In between getting the kids up and off to school.
The wifey is off work too the first week -- this is good as it means more sleep, and bad as it means she'll be bossing me around (kidding :)... no.. I am kidding... arrgghhh) which means less playtime.

And some of the time I get off will be spent doing my Nanowrimo novel! As if!

The places you go

Okay, so I'm going through some other blogs and find a link to technorati, which is very much a big site in the blogging world. For a laugh, I search for 'marty'. Hmm... too many hits. I try "marty" and "blogspot".

And find this site (well, the actual link went to the false page -- this is in the archive now), where I'm quoted as saying:

“Funniest thing I saw was a bunch of comments on one spam/link site, that was totally irrelevant but pointed to ANOTHER spam site. The spammers are
spamming each other.”

Which is quite true, I did say it. Mea Culpa. There were other quotes too... only.. they were quoting Phillip Lenssen quoting me.

EDIT:
Okay, did some more vanity-searching on technorati, this time for "Marty Kay" (in quotes).
And found a few more links. Like this one: http://aimbright.blogspot.com/2005/09/marty-kay-made-interesting-comment-in.html

Which... is on a SPLOG! Phillip's quote of my comment is a comment on a splog site, advertising (of all things) "Automated Internet Marketing". So splog sites are botblogs.

:blink:

Banned Books in the US

Nice article, found on A View From Elsewhere, aka John Montgomery's Weblog.

This year marks the first in five in which the Harry Potter series does appear
on the annual list

I can see it now. JK Rowling, puzzling over the lack of banning attempts realises the perfect out...

"Where did I put those Harry/Ron Slash fanfics...?"

omgwtfbbq

Hmm.. long time no blog.

Briefies - getting a laptop for son. Not getting a laptop for son. Getting desktop for son, getting laptop for me. Son can't make up mind. Teenager indecisive -- film at eleven.

WoW - Rogue is level 23. no, 24. Umm.. 25 soon. Good stuff.

When we have two WoW capable pcs, son and I'll be joining a new server and ramping up two characters. Might go horde for a change. Shaman.. hmm???

Things that make me go Boom!

Which really only leaves the nuclear option. Nuclear energy is actually the best alternative to burning oil. First, it scales; it is already possible to build big nuclear power plants which produce energy on the scales required. Second, it is relatively clean; although the problem of waste disposal is a problem, it is arguably less destructive than releasing hydrocarbons produced from burning oil into the atmosphere, or damming rivers, or covering vast areas with windmills.

Fairly old blog posting linked to, but one I've read recently. And it links to a number of sources indicating that even some of the Greenies are considering it. About time. I've been spouting it for years (Probably due to an inoculation of Heinleinism at an early age) -- Nuclear power is the best choice. Simple. Yes, it is dangerous (so is Coal mining btw, and the pollution from Coal/Oil/Gas fired power plants) but as I italicised above it is waste disposal that is the main issue.

Another link of interest is this (see page 3). Interesting.

Back again.

Not much is happening currently. I was going to go to the Melbourne Grand Prix -- that is, not the car race but the Magic: The Gathering tournament. However, a good look at the funds in my bank makes this a bit of a non-event, especially since my son wants a Laptop for Xmas.

A laptop. Well, not just a laptop, he wants something gamer worthy. That makes it about $1000+ more than it would be otherwise as it needs a Radeon/Geforce mobile video card in it for a start. Add to that the 1G of RAM it will need and a decent sized HDD and you get on the pricey side.

There goes the trip to Melbourne!

Ah well... I was going to suck bad anyway. I'm not totally deluded, if I was winning tournaments here often or even just top-eighting now and then, I'd probably go. But with my current losing streak in events it really isn't worth it.

World of FishCraft

Okay, so its a guest comic on little-gamers, but its still funny.

On WoW I now have a level 29 Night-Elf Druid on the Gilneas server (he's wandering around ironforge atm... haven't played him for a while) and on Dark Iron I've got a level 17 Human Paladin.

Dark Iron is a PvP server. In a way, its THE PvP server cos that's where the PVP fans are playing. Penny Arcade fans are playing there too, with the PVPers being Horde and PAers being Alliance. PvP (the play type, not the webcomic) is different -- there's much more raiding, more likely to run into the other side. Gilneas is a PvE server, it's you vs the environment; Dark Iron is like a bunch of battles with quests inbetween.

Well, that is more true for the American players anyway. Since I'm in the +9 GMT zone, when I get on it can be pretty quiet. Good in a way, because I don't have to put up with twenty minute queues to log in (I did a week ago when I had a day off -- tried to log in and had to wait... and wait...), but I'm missing out on a lot of the other action.

Last night, I made some Flying Tiger Goggles (My Paladin Giladan is an engineer/miner), popped out a bunch of other items, smelted my whole 3 silver ores and bought some better leg armor and a belt (the old ones were crappy, the new ones not much better). I learnt a new spell and then flew off to Redridge. Since it was going to take a minute, I popped outside for a smoke. When I came back, I was dead.

There was a horde raid happening, so I joined in. Two seconds after Res I was dead. Next time took about 3 minutes, dead. Sigh. Res again, and off we go. With a pack of guys we ran after a troll mage, troll rogue and a hunter. Together they chewed us up but I found my Hammer ability (causes stun) was great. If it worked, they were stunned and everyone piled on to kill. If it didn't I had to run like hell. I also chucked some bombs into the attacks as they stun too, but most of the time missed them.

Got a whole 2 honour kills, so I was happy about that. This pvp stuff isn't too bad. Now, to make my paladin a LOT better!

brave new world

Well, just about killed my blog off. Somehow on blogger I have two blogs listed when I go into the dashboard. I thought that meant I had two blogs -- silly me.

I wanted to make a book review blog as a seperate entity, so I start making a bunch of changes and updating the blog, all the fun stuff.

Until I realised that the link... was also to martykay.blogspot.com. Which is this blog. Err...

Luckily, I was able to bounce back up to the dashboard, go into this blog instead and republish it all.

I still have the two blogs listed in the dashboard, but see not much point. There is a "delete this blog" function... but I'm too scared to use it now.

Long time no see

About time I posted an update, I think.

Just spent a little time at KaneKong at the Movies. Nice to see some honest opinions for a change.

We've had some fun (?) at work lately, what with servers falling over and the like. Ah, great times.

On the home front, I'm hopefully getting a new(er) car very soon. My old car decided to die a couple of months ago. On an automatic, there is one component that is the most complex piece of machinery: the transmission. Which makes it also the most expensive to repair. When your car decides that Reverse is the only gear worth knowing about, it isn't very pleasant to be the driver.

And since the cost of repairs is more than the value of the car, it wasn't worth doing. So instead I'm selling one of my kids to pay for a new car. Okay, so maybe not, I'll be (gulp) financing it. The finance company concerned apparently liked me enough to say "yeah, we'll lend up to $X". They didn't like the car I choose though, so now I have to find one they DO like.

Which is good, because after telling my family about the car I was looking at buying, and how it had ABS brakes, aircon, nice interior, all the other good bits all that they cared about was the colour. "Green? I don't want a GREEN car!"

wtf?

Anyway, back to work. Lunchtime? Woot!

New stuff and some links

I'll have to get the hang of this blogging thing. Update daily, perhaps? Make an effort to have more interesting information? Smaller posts? Longer posts??

Maybe some links would help?
Lee Goldberg's blog is one of my favorite places to visit, due to a few things: he doesn't hold back, he's a writer and he has some interesting posts. And a lot of fanficcers aren't his fans.

Little Gamers is a gaming related webcomic with its own style. Webcomics about gaming or game related include Penny Arcade, Ctrl-Alt-Del and quite a few others. Another couple of webcomics I read regularly are Something Positive and Megatokyo. I've been trolling through the archives on these lately and got up to date on all Little Gamers. Only a few more to go.

New stuff: not much. Done some SYSVOL replication fixing on a domain controller that was... interesting. Cleaned up the AD record for old Exchange 5.5 servers so that we can move soon to native mode Exchange 2000 Server. Trying to cope with some moron who has decided sending forged SYN Flood packets to one of our mail relays is a fun thing to do. You know, normal stuff.

Kids are great

My son had a comment to make about having a blog.

"Why do you want a blog, no one would care!"

Err.. thanks.

Given the huge numbers of hits, probably true. Okay, definitely true. As I said to him, its more for me--I've been reading other people's blogs for a while now, and thought it about time I joined in. If no one comes, fine.

Now.. if that's true, why did I add a Site meter and join Adwords?

Hmmm

EDIT: okay, killed off the Site Meter and the Adwords... Ahh..

Back again

Well... that was fun.
A week spent in Melbourne was quite fun, although it took down to the last day to find ways to get servers to rebuild. On one server it was enough to pull the fibre channel adapters, on the others we had to be careful to not load all the drivers (seemed to cause the server to go nuts detecting everything when it was rebuilt).

Anyway, while we were there we went to see "Sin City". Abso-fscking-lutely fabulous. Gritty and dark. Full of violence and humour. Buckets of blood in some scenes.

I took three books with me to Melbourne to read in taxis, between jobs, on breaks... They were Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson, The Dark Tower by Stephen King, and Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling.

I hadn't read the final installment of the Dark Tower series before, and thought it finished the tale of Roland well. I had a few issues with the ending (and no doubt many others have as well). I gave it some thought of what other ending there could have been, and really can't see a better one -- without giving the ending away, there is a hope of redemption.

The Half Blood Prince... First off, the hype was pathetic. Sure, lots of people were going to buy the next story in the tale of Harry. It was a given. But have television show excited people (most of them young) lining up outside a city bookstore to give a false frenzy... Sad. If you were one of those who had to run out and buy a copy at the "Special" price of $AUD 45, well.. I bought mine the same day for $AUD 22 at Big W. They had PALLETS of the thing. They'll be giving them away with socks or something.
Onto the book. It was great, liked it a lot. If anything, I was disappointed by something Harry does at the end of the story, when he goes all "noble" and self-sacrificing. I know WHY he does it (to protect someone he cares for) but since he does care for them, and others already know it, it isn't going to make much of a difference. Plus it's quite a different Harry to the defiant young wizard of Order of the Phoenix.

Okay, so I ran out of books.

introduction

Okay... well.. welcome to the blog. I suppose an introduction is in order.
I'm Marty, I do server wrangling for a mid-size energy company here in Australia. I work on Windows 2000 servers, Exchange server, do ActiveDirectory stuff and spend quite a bit of time bullshitting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H providing my expertise to others in the team (damn, wheres the strikethrough?)

My hobbies are playing Magic: the Gathering, computer games, writing, reading, arguing with people, downloading pron... err.. forget that one... basically doing stuff on this intarweb thing. I read a number of webcomics and other people's blogs. I haven't blogged before, although I think I did have a livejournal account at some stage.

I'll try to record at least somewhat interesting snippets in here, although can't promise anything. Some stuff might be technical, some stuff might be games related... who knows?

Pseudo-Real is a reference to two of my online aliases, going back to irc days a while ago. Real or roolmarty was one, Pseudomarty was the other. Now I'm just going with martykay to be different.

Thanks for coming. :)

marty