I said what I said.
Here's hoping it's the power supply.
Seems this is the week for technological issues.
Hey, I only found it this morning and I had to get to work, so I've got a lot of good chances:
(1) It mysteriously unplugged at the outlet overnight. It happens, and I have to dig around back there to check that.(2) That power outlet is bad. So I need to check that.
(3) The power cord is bad. That'll be my next check.
(4) The power supply popped a fuse. That'll be my final check.
Given a computer that went from "fully functional" to "not even a motherboard LED" overnight, I'm guessing one of these four will fix it.
Crossing my fingers.
Keep us posted.
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What year is it again?
Reviewing my colleague's content on configuring a new feature, and along comes, "In order to support this feature, you must create a new user with this specific username."
Because requiring specific usernames to make the application work correctly is SUCH a well-known best practice.
One of my favourite things to do is rummage through rooms filled with piles of abandoned objects from times past, hence why I like Fantasy RPGs so well, and also why I gave myself the job to clear out the room at work where we dump all the stuff we want out of sight.
There were some very interesting things there, some of which belonged to the Big Boss and probably shouldn't have been left lying around (chequebooks, etc ), and also a great many out of date fire extinguishers. I kind of want to take those, even though a) I wouldn't be allowed, and b) what on earth would I do with them?
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My manager continues to impress and amaze me, even until the bitter end.
She was the one who pushed me and prodded me and forced me to put out my resume and apply to other jobs, and to encourage me to get the heck out of Dodge.
And what I'm finding:
(1) The really exciting employers either can't match my salary, want me to commit too much of my life to them, or both.
(2) Reducing the potential employment pool to other megacorporations or lateral movement within my current employer, I have to ask, "Is this new position enough better to justify my move?"
So I've been bored stupid for 5 years. BUT I rarely work over 30 hours in a week, I'm never stressed, and my salary isn't nearly as low as I thought it was. (Well, OK. Rival megacorporation saw my ask and said, "Heck, yeah! We'll pay THAT in a heartbeat!", but that's another megacorporation.)
All in all, I've learned that where I am isn't so terrible. And that was an incredibly valuable lesson in and of itself.
(I'll still do the interview with the rival megacorporation because if they'll pay me 10% more for the same level of work then why not, but I'm more and more inclined to be patient and see how things work out here.)
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First new session with the GM has come and gone, and as expected, he went a wee bit too far in the other direction for me, not even asking for rolls when I felt they were appropriate, but holy cow, it was a MASSIVE improvement.
And to his delight, everyone started doing things again! Almost the entire session was NPC interactions, and even the one fight for the day ended with my cleric screaming at our guide because he kept trying to "rescue" her from danger in spite of her higher AC, hit points, and self-healing abilities. ("I am a warrior-priest! My job is to protect YOU! I am not some frail princess in need of rescuing! So you will stay behind me and trust my shield and stop trying to 'rescue' me. EVER!") It felt good.
The most hilarious part is that he threw dozens of story hooks at us to begin the campaign, grew one of them into, "If you don't take care of this an entire nation will die," and now he's frustrated that all we're doing is that quest.
Well, when your hooks are, "You need to go to the jungle to meet a guy," "Your uncle is fine but something happened in the underdark you might want to look into," "Your lifelong enemy was seen a month ago," and, "If you don't take care of this right now hundreds of thousands will die," the good-aligned PCs have a pretty obvious choice...
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I've only played a little bit of Far Cry 4 so far, but I've already found a favorite tactic. Throwing bait into a camp/outpost and let the local wildlife do the heavy lifting.
I've only played a little bit of Far Cry 4 so far, but I've already found a favorite tactic. Throwing bait into a camp/outpost and let the local wildlife do the heavy lifting.
The first outpost often can be easily freed with single shot if an elephant spawns in the pen next to the entrance (I am not sure if it spawns every time or if it's random, though).
Back from Symbaroum session.
We have reached the interior of the monastery, killed the monster, and found the religious relic... Which means the next session will probably start with either frantic negotiation or, likely failing that, ferocious fight over what we should do with the relics. They are supposedly a way to prove the god worshipped by half the party (and one of the NPCs) is false. On the other hand, we do not really care for the relic or the book that accompanies the relic (well, except the wizard, she will grab any written work with a death-grip and won't let it go unless killed and burned to ashes).
Come on, folks, we have more important things to do than handle your schism between a bunch of gods and their worshippers!
I've only played a little bit of Far Cry 4 so far, but I've already found a favorite tactic. Throwing bait into a camp/outpost and let the local wildlife do the heavy lifting.
I don't remember if you could/couldn't do that in 5, or if the enemies were handling wild animals better than Royal Army in 4...
I've only played a little bit of Far Cry 4 so far, but I've already found a favorite tactic. Throwing bait into a camp/outpost and let the local wildlife do the heavy lifting.I don't remember if you could/couldn't do that in 5, or if the enemies were handling wild animals better than Royal Army in 4...
You could but it wasn't as effective (the wildlife wasn't as quick to swarm the base).
You could but it wasn't as effective (the wildlife wasn't as quick to swarm the base).I've only played a little bit of Far Cry 4 so far, but I've already found a favorite tactic. Throwing bait into a camp/outpost and let the local wildlife do the heavy lifting.I don't remember if you could/couldn't do that in 5, or if the enemies were handling wild animals better than Royal Army in 4...
On the other hand, in 5 you had the dog that, IIRC, could enter the outpost, tag the enemies for you, and no one batted an eye.
Well, the good news is that it was easy: 124 VAC into the power supply, 0 V of any variety coming out of the power supply. The bad news is that there are no longer any brick-and-mortar electronics stores around here, so no gaming for me tonight.
Guess I'll be watching...
...Ant-Man and the Wasp.
I've never seen it, but I've heard good things.
(And for those who care, because I know I do, this was a "Thermaltake SmartPRO RGB 750W" that died after only 4 years, so I'm exceedingly unimpressed. There's a reason I stick with Corsair.)
I mentioned to a friend the other day that I needed stamps so I could mail in my mortgage payment, and they asked me incredulously "You don't pay online? You're wasting money on stamps and envelopes." My response? "Since my checking account is at a different bank than my mortgage, they charge me a $5 inconvenience fee to pay online. I'm saving money by mailing my payment."
Global Megacorporation decided to stop allowing direct deposit to multiple accounts so your paycheck had to go into a single account. The amount of grar that created staggered me: SOOOO many people have mortgages, car insurance, or even banks where you're charged a fee every month if you don't do direct deposit into it. People needed 3-4 direct deposits just to avoid fees.
I was yet again happy to be with a credit union.
Nighty.
I am going to bed as well.
It's almost 5 am. My internal clock is off again after a surprisingly long period when I was actually getting up in the morning and went to bed around midnight-ish.
I have to say my biggest complaint with Far Cry 4 is the lack of a map. At least so far. They have a "map" but as far as I can tell it's just a bunch of markers on a blank page.
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One of the complaints I've heard about Far Cry 6 is how it's not innovative enough or it doesn't really add anything to the "Far Cry experience".
As someone who has been working their way backwards through the series this winter I have to whole heartily disagree. I've found every entry innovates and expands mechanically from the last one.
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Marvel Movie Timeline #21: Ant Man and The Wasp:
After all the time I've spent complaining about movies that are so dumb that you cannot turn your brain off, along comes one that's amazingly dumb, and yet it somehow manages to skirt the line between "goofy fun" and "too stupid to be believed" well enough that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I suspect that all the local flavor helped immensely; watching the heroes traverse Sproul Plaza at U.C. Berkeley was a delight, as was the ludicrous shot of Lombard Street being relatively empty. The "two hour time window" while they had to go from San Francisco to Muir Woods and back several times was side-splittingly annoying. (As I told Impus Minor: "YOU are the writer! You can figure out what's going on in your plot, use Google Maps to get reasonable times, and suss out a reasonable total of say 8 hours. Or you can just make stuff up and have locals smacking their foreheads as the heroes spend at least 10 hours commuting during their 'two hour' window.")
Characters made stupid decisions. They did things that were so dumb as to be unbelievable. The science was embarrassingly terrible. The motivations were murky at best.
Yet I still had fun.
So somehow, they took something that should have been awful and made it work. I applaud them.
Sympathetic characters help, though I only seen Scott in the Endgame.
Hello John.
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OK, wow.
I "pretend" that I'm great at what I do, or at least I brag about it a lot.
After my manager resigned, she said, "The VP wants to know what you'd want the organizational structure to look like in order for you to stay."
I responded with, "I'll report to either one of these two, these three have to be out of my org, and here are the directors I'll accept."
In the last two days I've received three job offers from other groups and the VP just approved the org structure I requested, getting my colleague a decent raise and making him my manager.
There are few things that beat realizing just HOW appreciated you are at your job...
I have a weird issue with the new mouse.
When I start the computer, the mouse is powered down and the windows doesn't see it. When I pull it out and plug it again, it immediately starts working.
I deleted the mouse drivers and reinstalled them but it didn't help...
Hmmm.
It seems the solution was to delete only the upper mouse driver (both showing as identical HID-compliant mouse), leave the second mouse driver, and restart.
We'll see if that solution stays.
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There are instances where honest communication is hard.
"I want a divorce."
"I forgot to feed your dog for the week you were away."
"You have a tumor, and it's inoperable."
This is NOT one of those instances: Impus Major checked his email and text messages in the morning, went to school, and found that his first class had been canceled. So he hung around with some friends, checked his email, checked his texts, went to his second class, and it had been cancelled as well. With gas over $6/gallon here, he wasted about $15 and three hours of his day just to drive out and find out all his classes were canceled.
So somehow his instructors have no trouble at all assigning same-day pop quizzes online, but can't communicate class cancellations.
Really?
Hmmm.
It seems the solution was to delete only the upper mouse driver (both showing as identical HID-compliant mouse), leave the second mouse driver, and restart.
We'll see if that solution stays.
Nope. It didn't work. The mouse doesn't run until plugged again.
Old mouse checked. Runs fine.
I checked the older mouse - of the same type that I have just bought, and it worked fine.
Now I connected the new mouse and started the computer, and this time its works...
Witchcraft?
Another power down, and turning on, and the mouse still works...
Did the computer recognize the old mouse and decided that the new one is compliant enough?
Though I am not actually sure if this computer ever worked with that old Tracer Scout, or if I only used the newer Manta (aside of the wireless mouse I got with it, and stopped using because it was unwieldy, and, well, wireless).
I saw a clickbait article. I clicked it anyway. And I asked, "Don't all parents do this?"
Hard to believe that I batted 5-for-5 in random clickbait.
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NobodysHome: I read that hugging your kids is good for them.
Impus Major: Yeah, but could you not do it while yelling, "Sex exam!"?
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"Don't all parents do this?"
Before clicking: "No. No they don't. I speak from experience."
- - - - -
After clicking: "Yep, called it." 1 out of 5 for mine, I could get decently-regular hugs from my parents. Though my dad severely trimmed down how often he gave them the older I got into my teens, then relaxed back and was pretty open about giving and receiving hugs once I was an adult.
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Started playing Pathfinder again after a few weeks of ELDEN RING.
I'm running Iron Gods and it's been a pretty wacky time in book 1 from someone trying to drink space goo and being rendered mute to the party boring through a door they shouldn't straight to the end of the book.
They spent an hour talking to a Cerebric Fungus.
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Ah, well. "Klassic Komputer Geek" moment:
(1) New power supply arrived. I installed it. No changes. I did a thorough examination and noticed a "heartbeat" LED on the motherboard I hadn't seen before. So even though nothing was working, power was getting through.
(2) Being frugal, I attached the old power supply to see whether the heartbeat LED went on. It did. With a bright flash, a sizzling sound, and the smell of ozone.
Conclusion #1: Yes, the old power supply was bad.
Conclusion #2: Whether or not the old damage to the motherboard was reparable, once you smell ozone it's time to go shopping.
Except, of course, Shiro asked me what parts I needed and I told him I needed a bare minimum of motherboard, RAM, and CPU and he promptly responded, "I probably have one in my garage."
Which I'd scoff at except he upgrades his computers annually and keeps all the old parts, so his "scrap parts" are probably far superior to my old computer.
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Again, the mouse started working fine without issues when I turned on the computer.
Definitely witchcraft.
Started playing Pathfinder again after a few weeks of ELDEN RING.
I'm running Iron Gods and it's been a pretty wacky time in book 1 from someone trying to drink space goo and being rendered mute to the party boring through a door they shouldn't straight to the end of the book.
They spent an hour talking to a Cerebric Fungus.
We befriended the fungus, and ended up moving it in to the dump. My Oracle who was supposed to be the face of the party got addicted to the gas goo and ended up pretty much constantly getting the result where you smell so bad it gives you a stench aura and he ended up moving in to the dump with the fungus.
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We somehow completely missed the fungus on our playthrough, or it was in a part of the ship we didn't get to over the course of the one chapter we played. And sadly that game has been long dead for years.
EDIT: Nevermind. Having reread the journal Scint posted, we did encounter the fungus. We just killed it before we could have a conversation, and never really discovered it was that intelligent. Whoops!
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One of my players tried to kill the Cerebric Fungus when they saw it but thankfully missed because it led to a real gem of a conversation.
"What are you? What am I? Where is here? I'm hungry."
Party: "Aw it's like a baby.
Fungus: "I'm baby?"
One of my players had to mute his mic because he was laughing too hard. So now there will be a cerebric fungus wandering around that wants to become a wizard because "they're the best and want to learn all the things." And a doctor because they make lots of friends from helping people. And "Friends bring food."
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We somehow completely missed the fungus on our playthrough, or it was in a part of the ship we didn't get to over the course of the one chapter we played. And sadly that game has been long dead for years.
EDIT: Nevermind. Having reread the journal Scint posted, we did encounter the fungus. We just killed it before we could have a conversation, and never really discovered it was that intelligent. Whoops!
I'm sad I had to drop it. It just...never really worked out, being the interim campaign between Savage Tide, and all the lost planning time due to work.
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It always amuses me when animals learn a behavior for which they cannot possibly conceive of a purpose, but that gets them a reward.
Our Cranky Calico has kidney issues and was losing weight to the point that I was certain she was going to die way back in April of last year. The vet put her on steroids and I started weighing her and feeding her wet food daily.
So of course I started a routine: She would come into the dining room, I'd pick her up, put her on the scale, then once the weigh-in was complete I'd give her the wet food. She hates getting picked up.
So now whenever she gets hungry she comes into the dining room, sits down on the scale, and glares at me.
It's pretty hilarious.
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So of course I started a routine: She would come into the dining room, I'd pick her up, put her on the scale, then once the weigh-in was complete I'd give her the wet food. She hates getting picked up.
So now whenever she gets hungry she comes into the dining room, sits down on the scale, and glares at me.
It's pretty hilarious.
So many trained pet behaviors basically come down to Cargo Cultism.
"I do the thing, human gives me thing I want. Therefore it is me doing the thing that makes human give me the thing I want."
Sophie's basically the same way. She sits in front of Scint's door when she wants to go out. Granted, she also usually whines and does the tippy-tap puppy dance.
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Started playing Pathfinder again after a few weeks of ELDEN RING.
I'm running Iron Gods and it's been a pretty wacky time in book 1 from someone trying to drink space goo and being rendered mute to the party boring through a door they shouldn't straight to the end of the book.
They spent an hour talking to a Cerebric Fungus.
I like iron gods but the "Five different authors! Five different adventures! What could go wrong?!?" approach paizo uses resulted in some jarring changes in tone at points.