Server Was Down… Kind Of
My boot/backup drive in the server went down on me Wednesday night. I tried to rescue it Thursday during the day, but it gave up the ghost. Any service that required a new process to be spawned would not work. This meant that (with a low load) the web server, the mail server, and DNS continued to function. Unfortunately, ssh, pop, imap, and a few other things didn’t work at all.
I put in a replacement drive around Noon today, and the server is full operational now.
The drive that died wasn’t all that old. Time to plug it into my spare machine to see if I can figure out what went wrong with it. I’ll probably RMA the drive (it’s an 80 gigger) and get a replacement.
Lottery Dream
I had another strange dream last night. I dreamt that I was walking through a shanty-town in a large city during the Great Depression. I knew that they only way to get out of this life was to win it big in the lottery (Yes, I know. No lotteries back then, but it’s a dream dammit.) I tried buying lottery tickets with my last three dollars, but all of the shops were “sold out.” I’m not sure how you sell out of lottery tickets, but that was the case.
I ended up finding a scalper on the street selling lottery tickets. I managed to buy two tickets for my three dollars. As soon as he handed me the ticket, he ran off through a doorway. About a dozen London police (You know the ones with the tall hats, billy clubs, and loud whistles) stormed out of surrounding buildings, threw me to the ground, hand-cuffed me, and led me off to jail. They wouldn’t tell me why they had arrested me. They just kept telling me, “You know what you did!” It reminded me of my mom, actually. She would use that line quite a bit when she thought I had done something wrong. She was usually right, so I took the punishment. However, in this case, I wasn’t sure why I was being arrested.
The police hauled me out of the shanty-town, and threw me in a jail that was entirely made of ice. The walls, benches, toilet, and bars were entirely ice. It was very strange. I ended up sitting there for what felt like hours. They finally released me from jail telling me that it had all been a mistake. They apologized for what they had done, gave me my lottery tickets back, and set me free.
I started walking from my ice prison back to my home in the shanty-town, and that’s about the time that I woke up.
This Weekend
The weekend started out with diet Mountain Dew, Ciclone, and poker. I mixed the Mt. Dew and the Ciclone about a 50/50 mix and downed three 32 oz. cups over the course of the night. I was good and blitzed. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten sloppy drunk. It was a good thing. Somehow, despite being snockered, I managed to come home with $90 more than I showed up with. I knew that I was doing well, but I had no idea how well I did until the next day rolled around. I counted my money the next morning, and I had an extra $90 in my wallet. It was nice.
The rest of the weekend wasn’t as good. I spent most of it working around the house getting it ready to sell. I kept trying to watch my TiVo’d “Last Comic Standing”, but it took me four attempts to make it all the way through the hour-long show. I was even fast forwarding past all of the hubris that comes with reality shows. All I care about are the comics doing their act. Most of them were pretty good, a few were hilarious, and a couple just plain sucked.
Sunday was more work around the house, but at the end of the day, we decided to head to the movie theater to watch X-Men 3. It was an ok movie, but lots of the movie seemed to be centered around Pheonix. I know nothing about that character, and the movie’s attempt to explain her powers, abilities, back-story, and motivations were heavy-handed. Even though they spelled it out well, I still felt like something was missing. There were some good effects, some decent fights, and quite a few explosions. That always makes the movie better.
Poker Tonight
It’s been a long week. A very long week. It was made longer by the fact that my wife and I had a fight last night, and I slept in the guest room. Shit happens. We’ll get over it in a day or three. At least the bed is comfortable.
What I’m really looking forward to is a gathering of quite a few close friends to do some heavy drinking, small-time gambling, and some good companionship. It’ll be a good night. We’re playing Texas Hold ‘Em tonight with no limit, unlimited buy-in (but I only have $40 to spare), with rotating dealers… at least until someone runs out of money.
Typically, the first person out of money becomes the dealer. The second person that runs out of money becomes the bartender. Everyone that runs out of money rotates in as dealer and bartender. I won’t be too rough on the bartender. I plan on bringing some diet Mt. Dew and a bottle of Ciclone. Before the night is over, I plan on throwing away an empty bottle of Ciclone, and begging someone to drive my drunk ass home. Oh yeah. Should be a good night.
Moving Prep
One of the final steps of prepping our house for sale was to clean out our storage area. We saved every box for every computer part, electronic component, and other gadgets that we had bought over the course of the past seven years. They were all stacked in the room where our freezer, dog kennels, and air hockey table are at.
I took the day off of work in order to get it all done. I rented the smallest U-Haul truck that you can get, and filled it about halfway with all of this trash. Then I had to drive about 30 miles to the nearest landfill to dump the contents of the truck. The weather was hovering around 96 degrees all day, and the U-Haul didn’t have air conditioning even though it claimed to have it. It was a sweltering, sweaty day of work.
I managed to get the room cleared out, and took two loads to storage. The house is very nearly ready to be sold. We’re very much on target to get the house on the market next week. There are a few minor things to do, but we’ll get them knocked out over the course of the next few nights.
Life is Busy
Sorry for the lack of posting last week. Between the packing for move, trying to get the house ready for sale, cleaning the house, and hanging out with my wife’s aunt while she was in town, I didn’t have much time for anything else. Life won’t settle down anytime soon, but I’m going to try to make a more concerted effort to post here. I’m not even sure if anyone is really reading this. I’m getting a few random hits from a few IPs, but nothing significant. That’s ok. I’m mostly posting this for myself than for anyone else.
We made an offer on a new house last Thursday. The offer was verbally accepted Friday morning, and officially accepted in writing Friday night. I didn’t realize how tense I was about waiting for an answer until we got the answer. I thought I was staying cool and handling things fairly well. However, when we got the word that we got the house, I could feel a massive load of tension leave my body. It was a great feeling.
I spent all weekend cleaning, packing, and getting rid of trash. It was a good weekend of good progress. We’re shooting to have the house ready to sell on June 19th. That’s exactly a week away. I think we’ll make it there. I’m taking tomorrow off of work and renting a U-Haul to get rid of a bunch of boxes, move some furntiure to storage, and finalize things around the house. There are some touch-up spots that need to be painted. I’ll take care of them Tuesday afternoon.
You may not hear from me tomorrow, but I may take a short break and do a little blogging…. We’ll see….
House Hunting
My wife and I went out with our real estate agent to look at five houses yesterday afternoon. It was a good trip. Here’s what we found:
House #1: This house was builtin the ’70s, and it was fairly obvious. Low ceilings, wood paneled closets, and unusual floorplan. The owners had updated the decor to a more ’90s look, but they succeeded in doing was making it look like a hospital. The walls were white, the decor was off-white, the carpet was cream colored… You’re getting a picture of it, eh? The floorplan was clumsy and cluttered. They had walled in their hot tub area, but they did a shoddy job of it. We weren’t impressed at all. Since this was the first house that we looked at, we were kind of bummed out about house hunting. We just had to hold out hope that the other houses would be better.
House #2: The next house was more promising. The layout was good, and the great room was huge. It had a three car garage, a decent amount of land, but no fence. We need a fence for our dogs. The best thing about the house was that the roof was made of steel and granite. Yep. You read right. Steel and granite. 50 year warranty. Sweet. The worst thing about the house was that the master bedroom was a little small, and it shared a bathroom with one of the guest rooms. The other guest room didn’t have a bathroom nearby, so guests would have to trek across the living room in their skivvies to get to the bathroom in the morning. Not the best arrangement. Despite the bad things, we put this house on our list of possibilities.
House #3: The third house that we looked at made me vomit a little bit in my mouth. It was entirely done in a southwestern decor. I’m not talking picutures on the wall. I’m talking, painting on every surface, wallpaper, and exterior cedar coverings. It was 4700 sqaure feet, which was a little too large for us, but we still wanted to look at it. I wish we hadn’t wasted our time on the house. The best feature was a nice, large, fenced-in backyard. Yeah. That’s it. The fence was the best thing about the house. The rest of it sucked. We toured the whole house since we were already there, but I kind of wish we hadn’t wasted our time on it.
House #4: The fourth house was the diamond in the rough. Fresh paint, fresh carpet, great condition, awesome floorplan, great layout, an office with a perfect view of Pikes Peak, a large fenced-in back yard, and 6.8 acres of land. We loved the house. It’s perfect for us! I can’t wait to get into it. The garage is only 2 car, but it’s oversized with plenty of storage space. It’s only been on the market for 5 days, so we’re hoping to be able to jump in there and swoop up the house before someone else does.
House #5: The last house was the most expensive one of the lot, and it was very unimpressive. It was on 5 acres of land, with a split-rail fence around the entire thing. They had a smaller patch of a backyard fenced in with so-so looking (but expensive) wrought iron fencing. The house was hot, muggy, and uncomfortable. The layout was ok, but the carpet and decor was very ugly. We would have to spend many thousands of dollars (on top of the purchase price of the house) to get it into a state that we wanted to live in it. I wasn’t disappointed in this house because we had already found our new dream home.
UPDATE: Just got a call from my wife. Our loan officer said that we could move forward with an offer on the new house even though we don’t even have our current house on the market! We’re meeting our real estate agent tonight to go over an offer contract. We just started looking a few weeks ago, and things are moving very quickly! There’s so much work to be done in such a short period of time. Good thing my boss is a great guy and will let me use bits and pieces of my vacation and my floating holidays over the next few weeks as we get things ready for the move! I’m so excited!
From Zero to Two
Yesterday I lamented about going from two characters to zero characters in the D&D game that I play on Thursday nights. I brought my laptop with me to the game last night because I figured I’d pretty much be dead weight (pardon the pun) around the table. The cleric in the group discovered that he had a scroll of true resurrection in his equipment list. They quickly whipped that out, true-rezzed Ciramond (the evoker), and then told him to gate Holt back to Archeron with the group.
It was a good thing Holt got sent home. He was running short on arrows, and had enough time to hit the local armory to get more arrows. He wanted more bane evil arrows, but those aren’t exactly kept in stock, and he didn’t have time to custom order anything.
With the casting of two spells, the group was back together again, and ready to go. We marched down some stairs, hit a trap (symbol of hopelessness) that took out the evoker and both front-line fighters. Fortunately, my dice were with me this night. Holt was plunking arrow after arrow into azers, fire elementals, and dragonnes. The cleric’s wise use of an implosion spell took care of three very powerful enemies.
When the battle was over, the evoker made a spellcraft check and came to realize that the symbol was what was keeping all of the forgemasters prisoner and screwing with half of our party. I couldn’t dispel the symbol with dispel magic (I had already cast my greater dispelling earlier), so I turned to try to disentigrate it. It worked nicely.
One of the captured dwarven forgemasters started talking to our dwarven fighter, and we learned that they were working on a powerful scimitar of unnatural (and evil) powers. Our thief, wearing a ring of major fire elemental protection, walked into the blast furnace that they were using as a forge, and retreived the scimitar. There was a quick battle with a huge fire elemental, and the thief came out with some bumps and bruises. We decided to try to see if cold would damage the scimitar since it was obviously immune to fire. A few cold breath weapons, ice storms, and cones of cold later, we had shattered the scimitar.
This brought the attention of the she-devil that we were there to kill. We were running low on spells, low on hp, and low on desire to continue battling that day. We quickly cast a wind-walk and retreated 240 miles away to a formian hive that we had befriended. Our quick retreat threw the game master into fits because now he has to totally rework the adventure to fit the circumstances. I hope he doesn’t take out his frustration on us and kill us outright… even if he does do it, we deserve it, I think.
From Two to Zero
I play in a D&D game every Thursday night. The game is a long-running game that is well established, and I only recently joined. There were two floater characters in the group, and I managed to pick up both of them as my own. Last week we were assaulting an iron tower of a she-devil on the plane of Archeron. The motivation behind the attack was planted with the party shortly before I joined, so I’m really just along for the ride. I only have the faintest clue about why we are attacking her on her home plane, and what we expect to gain from her death.
The first character that I’m playing is the GM’s NPC, Holt. Holt is an extraordinary archer. He has all of the ranged weapon feats, and, when I hit, can really crank out the damage. He’s the third line fighter for those moments when he is required to drop the bow and stride into melee combat.
The second character that I’m playing is Ciramond. It was another guy’s character, but he dropped from the group, and the group kept him around as a pseudo-NPC type. He’s a 17th level evoker specialist with all of the appropriate feats for dealing out massive damage. He’s kind of fun to play, but most of his damage spells are area of effect. That means that when the fighters wade into the enemy ranks, Ciramond must hang back and pick and choose targets with his lesser powered spells.
Even though I didn’t create either character, I’ve been enjoying running the characters… until last week when I went from two characters to zero characters.
Ciramond was the first to go. We were fighting a Kyton (powerful devil [demon?]) and it wrapped Ciramond up in chains to the point where Ciramond was totally helpless. Just as the Kyton died, a mephit appeared behind Ciramond. Apparently, the mephit had a few levels of assassin, and shot an arrow through Ciramond’s neck. I rolled horrible for Ciramond’s fortitude save vs. death (I needed a 12, got a 4) and that marked the end of Ciramond. Fortunately, we are high enough level that a true resurrection is a possibility, but the cleric doesn’t walk around with that spell memorized. I have to wait for the party to rest for a night before I can get Ciramond back.
Shortly after Ciramond started his long dirt nap, we came across a cloud giant with his pet hydra. We were doing fairly well against the combination, but part way through the fight the giant bellowed out a word of power. Everyone made their save… except for Holt. Holt needed a 5, and I rolled a 2. sigh Holt did die, but he was banished back to his home plane, which is being ravaged by a black rain that was summoned by the she-devil that we’re trying to track down and kill.
Holt has no way to get back to where the part is at in any expedient time frame. The easiest way to get Holt back with the group is for Ciramond to cast ‘gate’ and bring Holt back to the group. The minor problem with that is that Ciramond is pushing up daisies at the moment. Looks like if the group wants their only wizard and their archer back with the group, they’ll need to true resurrect Ciramond, so he can gate Holt back to Archeron.
Tonight I get to see if that goes as planned or if I’m going to be stuck with my thumb up my ass all night.
