"Sticky Widget"

Do I really need an excuse to the use the term stick widget? I mean, it just sounds funny. Despite this I should make it sound like some artsy, metaphorical title that has to do with this post.

Things at work are still rather busy. Though improving marginally: I sometimes get about 5 seconds in between incoming calls. There was point I didn't even get that, there was always a call waiting. Now I hear there's all these "normal people" out there that work Mon - Fri from 8:00 to 5:00 or whatever and actually take vacations during the summer. This being Memorial Day weekend and all maybe the call volume will be liter. Oh, I work on Sunday. I have today (Friday) and tomorrow off, but I work on Sunday. Then I have Monday off. So maybe the normal people will be at barbeques and camping instead of using computers and call tech support.

One thing I find annoying about tech support at apple computer: people who call trying to set up an xbox and people who complain about having to give me the serial number of the computer.

Just so you people know: I don't care if your xbox works. Really. It's made by Microsoft. It's a game console. If your airport works and your mac works with the airport that's all I'm going to help with. Otherwise fuck it. Go ask someone who gives a rat's ass. Because I don't care about your xbox. Seriously.

Also you have a computer. I'm tech support on your computer. In order to help you at all I'm going to need the serial number of your computer. While your waiting on hold there's going to be a recording that says "please have your serial number ready". That recording is *not* there for the hell of it. It means (and get this) we need your serial number. So have it ready. Is that so difficult? Do not complain about having to give me a serial number. Do not get made abut having to give me a serial number. I don't give a fuck how long you've been using macs or how many you own. I just don't care. Just have your serial number.

As mentioned in the last post I may not be at apple computer much longer. As has occured to me before sometimes I wonder if I'm cut out for tech support. At least on the phone. In fact as in other portions of my life sometimes I just want to get rid of my computer, buy a typewriter and just do writing forever. Not many ways around PCs these days. I think it'd take more effort to avoid PC use then use a PC minimally.

Then I realize this is probably irrational. I don't need to write PCs out my life forever, just find a portion of the field more suited to who I am. Whomever I am I am certainly not a very good call controlling alpha-male or whatever. At least it seems like it should be easier and more consistent then it is. But I'm sticking with it. I've stuck with it for 10 months now; why not the rest of my life? Ah yes. The widget comes home. The sticky widget.

Lately I've been playing a game in my spare time. Guild Wars to be more precise. I also have World of Warcraft. I played WoW for a couple nights then started playing Guild Wars more and more often. Now I think it's been about two weeks since I've played WoW. I bought a six month subscription to WoW while Guild Wars is free. This makes me think I should really be putting more emphasis on WoW then Guild Wars. Of course I'm also paying for PlanetSide and haven't played that once, at least not in a multiplayer capacity. I found a glitch in the tutorial and never went back to it. And never cancelled the subscription.

But where was I? Right, Guild Wars. There's three modes or versions you can play this game: role playing, Arena battles and the "Hall of Heroes". The more you level up your RP character the more powerful your Arena and Heroes characters will become. Arena and Hall characters start at the highest possible level of 20. Your RP character of course starts at 1 and slowly move up.

My all my characters are "warrior/mesmer" types. I cannot switch the characters between game types. When I level up my RP character I I'll get new skills and spells I can use. My level 20 Arena character will then have these skills and spells available.

The Arena is a team-on-team battle: teams are randomly chosen from other players waiting to play in the Arena. Sometimes you end up on a terrible team that's wiped out rather abruptly, other times you get a great team that lasts 10 matches. There's really no reward for playing in the variation, it's just quick-and-dirty fun.

The Hall of Heroes on the other hand is a little different. You enter a sort-of lobby area with other players and form or find a forming team of up to 8 players. Once ready you enter the arena. The first match is just your team versus some NPC "mobs" you have to beat. The next match is against another player team. Survive that and it's your team of 8 versus 7 other teams of 8. This is as far as any I've been on has survived so I have no idea what would be past that. In fact I was on a team that was second-to-last still alive, but we eventually got split up and all died. That was a fun match though.

So I like this guild wars. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Diablo 2. But I didn't like Diablo 2 that much. I do like guild wars. While in RP mode there are various cities where all the players congregate. These are essentially chat room lobbies on any number of servers. For instance there's ascolon city numbers 1 through 14. So if you're playing with someone you have to take note of which city your going to. You can switch of course. Just random which one you'll enter.

Once your ready to leave a city you've got the bordering zone all yourself and your team mates. You won't find other players wandering around like Ultima Online. Just your and your team versus all those creatures. Doing quests.

It does get boring after a while. Very repetitive. Kill nearest creature, grab loot, kill next creature, move to next zone, repeat. Eventually find the quest goal. Then "travel" or "warp" or whatever back to the city where you were assigned the quest for your reward of items and experience. Time for the next quest. One good thing is that you can hire on NPC henchmen and do a quest yourself if you can't find a group to travel with.

Wow, I'm really going on about Guild Wars. I should really be into WoW. I'm sure I'll start playing WoW again eventually.

Well that's all for now. From the sticky widget.  ¶ 1:53 PM 0 Comments

 

"Spontaniously Demounting"

Ya, my new HDD decided to unmount. At random. New 160 gigabyte HD that after a series of confusing rebates would cost a mere $40. If send the rebates. Probably will if it's not too late. Woop...too late.

I'm starting to wonder if my note taking at work has become my new "creative outlet". It's not like tech support note taking can be that creative. I've just noticed some of my titles are broken up and separated to summarize an issue in the fewest number of words possible. Sort of like a news paper headline. Have to be sort of creative to do that effectively.

I'm starting to think Tiger was a successful launch. Judging by the call volume. Of course, not all of the calls are on tiger. But we have been rather slammed since the first week post-tiger launch. In fact our wait times have been hovering around 20 minutes at certain times of the day. In those instances I've been going out of my way to thank customers for waiting for so long before the caller has even said anything. I'm hoping to defuse an upset caller made more so by a really long wait. So far none of these customers I tried to defuse were very upset. In fact most were rather nice.

It appears my time at apple is soon to come to an end. Couple more months and I'll be finding a new job in fact. It's time to move on anyway. This is just like in college when I took all those networking classes but didn't have a network at home to play with. With nothing play with/break/fix/experiment all this stuff is just conceptual. I don't own a Mac so I still feel a degree of separation from the very product I'm supposed to be both advocating and supporting. If I had one to play with/break/fix/experiment I would probably be much more of a fan and do my job a lot more effectively than I am. And my call resolution is already pretty high now.

In other news I saw Episode 3 last night. And today of course (predictably) I watched episode 4. Then a second time...in Spanish. Like everyone else who saw episode 3 last night...(right).

So it appears Lucas made these three new movies extremely bad B-movies on purpose as he's two movies to practice on now and no longer has an excuse for making bad movies. Not necessarily true that Episode 3 is extremely awful, just that it has what you might call weak points. On the plus side Jar-Jar doesn't have a single line in the whole thing.

Also it did in fact earn it's PG-13 rating. Hopefully this won't be a spoiler to anyone: Anikin becomes Darth Vader in this movie. And does so in a rather gruesome way. Although Anakin's first lines as Darth Vader left me a bit unnerved. But then it is a bad B-Movie. So what do ya expect?

There are of course other points of embracement. Yoda jumping up on Chewie's shoulders. Yoda taking off in a ship in fashion reminiscent of the ending of E.T. A wookie yodeling like Tarzan.

I still wish it had been made a little better. The dialog written and delivered with some degree of competence. The quality a little higher.

I didn't think about looking at what time it was through the whole thing though. If nothing else a movie can be judged by it's whether a viewer can keep attention on the movie through the whole thing and not start to lose interested think about other things.

Also keep in mind I don't even dislike bad B-movies. I still have fond memories of the B-Movie no one has heard of: Knights. But if you're going to do it that way why not go full-bore and over-the-top bad B-movie (like Knights)? Why try to make some parts like a movie you can expect to be real movie and others just plane lame?


By comparison look at the movie The Mummy. Now that's a B-movie that *knows* it's a B movie and isn't afraid to admit it. And stays consistent in that mindset all the way through movie. I loved The Mummy on so many levels.

One example of a lame line is the now famous line from the movie: "only the sith deal in absolutes" as uttered by Obi-Wan Konobi to a newly formed Darth Vader who had just said something like "you're with me or against me". That's a really bad line in fact. Because the appeal of the first movie was the absoluteness of it: the empire is 100% evil 100% of the time. In fact the opening "crawl" of the movie goes out of it's way to say "the evil galactic empire". Sounds like an absolute to me. Did Lucas just indirectly admit to being a sith? Nah.

The ending was at least partially satisfactory. Sets the stage for episode 4 to pick up where it leaves off rather effectively. And really it's not a cliff hanger/drop off for the TV series either. At least it didn't appear like this to me.

Ya, TV series. You heard about that right? Live-action TV series. No directed by Lucas at that. So maybe it'll be more serious, like the new Battlestar Galactica. Or maybe it'll be more the B-movie tradition, closer to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. Not going to have any movie series main characters of course. As long as it's not like That 70s Show in subtle references to things in the later movies I guess I'll watch it.  ¶ 10:06 PM 0 Comments