Tag Archives: Jo

Wireless

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Jo came over and helped me set up a Linksys gaming bridge that was sitting in his parents basement so I could see if it would work for my Xbox 360. Jo actually got this thing refurbished for about $25 and I wish I could find one for that price, but I’d prefer version 2, since the one he has version 1 doesn’t do WPA. I had to set up a virtual network on my router so that I could have WEP running to get it to work. I’m not even sure if the Linksys router I have does virtual networks or if that’s a feature that I got with DD-WRT.

It is working pretty well. I streamed a video and downloaded something. I probably should try using Netflix, because that’s probably a real test to see if it’s fast enough for me to recommend to other people. I’d already recommend it just based on the fact that it works, but I’d really like to try this one, because it actually does WEP and WPA and you don’t have to worry about which version you get. The whole reason I decided to play around with it was because I know someone who bought an Xbox 360 and eventually they are going to want to take it online, after they get a better television and some other things probably.

Columbus Trip

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Tim and I went down to Columbus this weekend, and I believe the word “finally” fits in here nicely. See the trip has kind of been being planned since November, but at that time I wanted to wait till after finals. Finals came and went, and then I believe I got sick. Then Tim’s Grandfather got sick. Then some other things happened. I guess a month and four canceled opportunities isn’t all that bad, but it seems like it was a long time coming.

I found out that in case of a snow storm I don’t want to be in Akron. Nothing makes this more apparent than driving away from Akron, and then having to come back. It seems that when driving anywhere Akron is always piled beneath a foot of snow, but every where else has snow plows that come out and clear the roads. They even put down salt. It’s amazing what you get when you don’t live in Akron.

It was nice to see Rick and Melissa. They have a roommate currently, from Alabama, who wanted to move up here for a while. She got a job working where Melissa does, and she is experiencing all the freezing rain and snow that Ohio has to offer. At least the driving doesn’t look too bad.

While we were down there they got me cymbals for the Rock Band 2 drums for Christmas. I really do think they are cool, even though I’m not entirely sure how to use them. They are easy to assemble. They seem to work flawlessly. It’s just that you sort of have to retrain yourself to use them. Awesome gift. Tim got a gift card and I have a gift for Jo in my car, but I’m not driving out there till the roads get nicer.

It was a nice trip, and I’m sure in about a month they’ll go ahead and come up here. Then it’ll be our turn again.

Thursday WoW Update

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Not a lot happening on the World of Warcraft front lately. Lot of people just not even checking in to see what’s going on. I don’t know if anyone is still playing. Well let me take that back I know some people are still playing.

Steakems hasn’t logged in quite a while, and matter of fact at the time of typing this the armory wasn’t able to bring up his character. I’m not completely sure this character still exists. I know he’s been playing though, because he was bragging on some bitcast that he got to 80 on some other server. I don’t know what’s going on with this character though.

Remana is still playing, but not so much recently. I know that this is still an active character because I get reminded that there is a deficit in funds that needs to be corrected in order for this character to get a mount. This I’m sure will be corrected sooner or later.

Grotesk was supposedly leveled a bit, and I know this because Umori told me so. On the other hand there was an apparent migraine that forced the delay of getting some time in to level Rhenzaburou and Tsugutoshi might be playing, but I don’t know. If it’s anything like how I play then I’d hardly notice, because I gain some experience and then log off and go do something else.

I’ll have to get all the names of Umori’s other characters and list them all here sometime. There are a bunch. I think there are at least 5 level 70+ characters in all.

Xandrov and Romany continue to play those characters and some other characters together, and they would have to be stupid not to since their 3x refer a friend experience credit is going to run out eventually. That means that Rombus has been put on the back burner for awhile, which is fine, since technically I have two alts that need to catch up to him.

Rombus, Romany, and Xandrov actually have their own more in depth weekly updates that you can find if you follow the Rombus link on the left hand side of the page. No credit needed for the idea, because none was given, well it was sort of given. 😉

WoW Thursday Update

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There isn’t a whole lot to say about the World of Warcraft today, except for you either have the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, or you don’t. That’s the big thing for this week, and probably the upcoming weeks, as now you can start a whole new class with the Death Knight. I’m not really sure what a Death Knight is, and that answer would probably be revealed to me if I spend more time playing the class.

The problem is Death Knights report to Arthas, who is basically the supreme evil guy in the World of Warcraft. The Death Knights are all swearing allegiance to him, and they start at level 55, and they apparently are in this to kill everyone. I don’t think it’s an Alliance vs. Horde thing so much as Blizzard not wanting to take the time to make a legitimate third team. From everything I’m seeing it should be Arthas vs. Alliance vs. Horde. It is sort of a shame they didn’t go that way.

Who has the expansion already? I know Tim and my brother waited in line for the midnight release. Dan had it shipped to him, and I only know this because he was making regular updates on Twitter concerning where the shipment was.

The reason I’ve never mentioned Dan before is simply that he doesn’t play on the same server as any of my characters. He plays Alliance, which I don’t play at all, and if I’m not mistaken he plays on a PvE server. While I’ve often considered moving to such a server to get away from the whole hours of getting ganked fun, I have yet to actually commit to that. I have more of a chance running in to him at a Jonathan Coulton concert in Cleveland.

Jo said he would be picking it up today. He had it preordered and paid off, but weighed standing in line at midnight to be far more trouble than waiting till the next day. I had to run to Wal-Mart at 5 AM in order for a certain member of the US Armed Forces to have the game last night.

Renee, Rick, and Melissa might not have picked it up, but then again they don’t have any real immediate use for it. I could include Jo into this demographic as well, but he can at least see the finish line now. None of them are necessarily close to being 70 to take advantage of the new content in that respect. They could start Death Knights, but they still have the aforementioned characters to take from whatever level they are to 70.

Expansions cause so much activity!

Thursday WoW Update

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First thing is that it doesn’t look like I’ll be adding that many names this week, but I will be soon. I guess Rick and Melissa did not start their characters on Balnazzar and while they have plans to do so in the future I don’t see it happening any time soon.

The names that I expect to have in the future are those of all the people coming back to World of Warcraft. Blizzard is reporting that 46% of the people who listed that they were quitting to play Warhammer Online are reactivating their WoW subscription. I think I mentioned that the guild we were previously in, before we started The Holiday Loggers, was PK who went from quite a few members to none. I honestly expect most, if not all, of those people to return, and then I’ll be adding them to my update.

Umori and Tsugutoshi have been playing together and they’ve been gaining a few levels. They are getting closer and closer to 70, just in time for the expansion to have to go to 80. I might get the expansion.

Remana is level 29 already, so that means that I have at least one person to pal around with my alts. I really should play them a little more often.

Basically in the upcoming weeks we will be adding more names and have more to talk about in these updates.

When Things Break

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I might have been having some trouble getting the time I wanted in the demo for Mirror’s Edge, which if you haven’t already I suggest you check this game out. The end result is that a controller might have received the brunt of this frustration with the game.

I have several broken controllers in my basement. Jo and I bought them a while ago in order to take the cases and see if we could dye, paint, or do something to change the color on a more permanent basis. I believe the final verdict was no – everything eventually rubs off. What I am left with though is a plethora of parts to cannibalize in cases like this where I need to fix something.

This was basically the first time I soldered anything. I watched Jo do the LED’s when we were changing LED’s on controllers, which was a huge success, but I only helped a little. This was different. This was a piece of hardware held on to the board by about a dozen points.

I went to a local store and bought about $20 in supplies. I needed solder, wick (which is basically this braided copper wire that is supposed to take solder off boards), a vacuum gun (you push the handle in and it sucks the solder off the board when you press the button), and a solder gun holder, since I just had the really cheap one that came with my solder gun.

That accomplished I set about my task. I started to remove the piece that broke. I put on another piece from another controller. Everything went slowly and I sort of learned how to do certain things. Put the controller back together, and sure enough the piece that I took was broken. It’s the right analog stick, so it controls in FPS games which way you look, and this piece wants to look up.

Back to the basement I take another piece from another controller, and this time it went a little faster. I was starting to get the hang of taking pieces off boards. I put the controller back together, brought it upstairs, and this time it was a success. The controller is working perfectly now. I’m glad it was that piece and not my solder job or something else, because I wouldn’t have known where to begin checking the solder.

I feel very accomplished today.

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Another Bike Ride

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I decided to take a bike ride on Saturday and Renee decided she would come along. We started in North Akron, as I always do with the kids, and we went all the way to Peninsula. I forgot my camera, because I guess I don’t associate needing the camera when I go on these trips with anyone other than the kids. I should have brought it.

This was supposed to be the first time that I’d have a tracklog of the trip. I decided, and wrote about it in another post, that I had decided to use MyMotion in order to track the trip. There is one major problem and one small problem.

The major problem is that the trip goes all over the place. You are supposed to allow for some deviation from the trip you actually took since GPS is constantly trying to figure out where you are within something in the neighborhood of 300 to 500 meters at every ping. The problem is that the trip actually went across rivers and all over the place. The distance marked is totaling 19 miles for the trip to Peninsula, when really the round trip is only 19 miles. I don’t know if this is a problem with the GPS unit or the software. Further testing is going to be necessary.

The secondary problem is that all the information, such as speed, were not recorded. Jo informed me that I was doing it wrong. I’m supposed to save the trip as a .trk file and then convert it using a web page that he linked me to. This should fix the problem with information not being retained.

I’m not going to show you the GPS data, because I really feel like it’s worthless.

The trip was a lot of fun. It was supposed to get up to 80 degrees, but to be honest it never really felt that warm. I took plenty of water bottles, but we didn’t finish them all. We saw a bunch of woolly bear caterpillars on the trail. I was supposed to look it up, but I haven’t found any information on why it would appear that they were crossing the trail. Seems really dangerous and unnecessary.

We ate at the Winking Lizard in Peninsula. It was packed, because of the college football games. We ended up walking around Peninsula while we were waiting for a seat and we saw two snakes. They were pretty cool. It’s always so weird what nature you see when you go for these trips.

I hope that I can get some clothes that will make these bike trips possible as the weather gets colder. I don’t think they close the Towpath, but I guess I should grab a pamphlet next time and find out if they have dates for that sort of thing.

Thursday WoW Update

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I said I’d bring them back, so here they are. There has been some moving around and some other things going on. Some day this section might be larger, because more people might move here. I know that Andrew and Anthony have been being prodded to at least start new characters on this server. Some day this section might be for an entirely different game, since there seems to be a lot of interest in the Warhammer game. For now this is where we are.

I’ll start with Remana who hasn’t changed a great deal since I stopped doing these updates about a month ago. I’m sure there will be a renewed interest now that I’m coming back.

Grotesk should be seeing some sort of play, but he never liked the character so it’s going to be pretty stagnant. I don’t know if I can convince him to play it anymore, but it would be nice to have a priest in the group. As part of a compromise, and since you can move characters from PvE servers to PvP now, he moved Tsugutoshi and he’ll actually play this character.

Steakems shot up to level 36, and I really thought after he passed my two alts that he was going to climb all the way to 60. Now he’s having car trouble and some other not so fun stuff is going on and I don’t know what’s going to happen with this character. I’ve even heard him say that he might be putting WoW on hold for awhile until he gets it all straightened out. Who knows. Have to wait and see I suppose.

Rombus has actually been playing ever since they convinced me not to go. I know this, because when I had that get together he was playing this character and had Tsugutoshi run him through Scarlet Monastery. I think when I stopped the updates he was only in the 20’s, so this is of course an improvement. I can actually run through the stuff he’s doing with my alts. Just as soon as I find time to be on when he is.

Well that was a heck of an update. Maybe some day I’ll figure out how to get a page going for just these updates or something. I don’t know. Lot of ideas.

Awesome Night

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I had a pretty awesome night. I had a lot of friends over, and one new person I had never met before. Her name is Kate, I think? I messaged everyone this morning to find out her name, because honestly I forgot, and it turns out nobody else remembers either. So, I’ll just call her Kate for right now, and if I’m wrong I’ll be corrected later.

On to who was here. Melissa and Rick came up from Columbus. They picked up Tim for me. Tim brought Rock Band 2 and his real guitar and amp. Andrew came over with Kate, who is a friend of his from World of Warcraft. Anthony showed up. Jo came with his laptop and assorted gadgets. Derek came with his real guitar and amp as well. Renee was here, left for bowling, and came back.

Rick and Jo tried to fix Patty’s television. I’m glad they tried, I just wish it had been successful. They also played World of Warcraft together. It seems like people pair up at these things. Everyone picks someone to do everything with.

With this many people I had to get creative with the parking. I parked Derek’s car in the driveway of the abandoned house across the street. I ended up putting Anthony’s car in the front yard. I had to pull the car into the back yard, then pull the van up into that spot, move Melissa’s car back, move the van to that spot, and then move my car back to where it was.

We all played Rock Band. That used to be the whole reason we all got together and now it’s just something else to do. I noticed Tim, Anthony, and even myself just jumping on and playing some solo when everyone else was doing something else.

Derek and Tim spent a lot of time watching Youtube and playing guitar. I guess Tim was teaching Derek some stuff. They were watching Youtube video’s of other people playing guitar. They also had some program for learning guitar on there, but I don’t really remember what it was.

Andrew and Kate left, and we all went to Chinese. It was a great idea. We all went through what Chinese sign we are on the place mat. Then we all laughed about how entirely inaccurate it was, which of course is inherently insulting. Anthony’s sign said he was “intelligent” and mine was that I was “articulate”. It’s good fun. We named the chicken on a stick “Bob”, because we don’t believe it was really chicken and Bob is the homeless guy that showed up to my door a few weeks ago and was looking for a handout. I don’t think anyone’s drink got tampered with. We all ate a ton of food and continued the party.

There was a lot of trading and the purchasing of objects. Jo bought an external CD-ROM thing from Rick, I got mobile AIM from Jo, and Andrew finally got his assorted bag of computer parts that he left at a LAN about a month ago back.

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A Full Driveway

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I had quite a few friends over last night. We all came together to play Rock Band 2. Anthony (Codex) brought Andrew (Trewr). I had to pick up Tim, so I got a chance to use the GPS on my phone. Renee was holding it and it worked like a charm. It said “destination arrived” when we were exactly in front of his house. I know that’s what it is supposed to do, but I am always surprised when things work that way. Derek came over after work.

We played Rock Band 2 almost the entire night. There are so many songs to choose from. We ended up trying to do every song that everyone had to do. Everyone has a song some where in that game that they just have to do. Derek has to do a Coheed and Cambria song. Anthony had to do a Disturbed song. I needed to do something from the early 90’s. Jo doesn’t even play and he needed us to do “Girls on Film” by Duran Duran.

It was some fun. We had plenty to eat. We had pizza, beer, and chips. I ordered the pizza using Google 411, which is a free service where you call the number and you put in the zip code where you are and then you can ask for a specific business or you can get suggestions by saying something like “pizza”. It’s pretty neat I think everyone should try it just for fun. I know that there are new home phones that are coming out that actually have a button for the Google 411.

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