My Butt Is Numb

Ah, Sunday night. Relaxing at the computer, winding down before falling into bed to get some shuteye before the workweek starts… well, at least, I’m at the computer. In this case, I’m trying to wind down, take the edge off, and let the remnants of repeated adrenalin rushes fade out. It were A Good Day.

Start at the beginning… with Saturday. I got to sleep in. For me, that means getting up after 7AM. After 30-odd years of getting up between 3:30 and 6:30 AM, it’s rare that I get past 6:30. Got up, logged on – and got hit with a splitting allergy headache. Screw earthquakes and falling into the ocean… this weekend, the SoCal winds decided to try and blow things into the ocean. Better yet, my daughter’s softball team had a doubleheader. Oh, joy of joys. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching her play. But…. it’s Rec ball. That means cliques, stacked teams, a season that starts in February with maybe three practices as a team,  and players that don’t want to be there but are because Mom and Dad think that they should be.  Or what’s worse, Mom and Dad  decide that soccer, homework, and who knows what else aren’t enough to keep their child occupied. At least one girl plays two other sports. She’s a good little player, but she gets beat up playing soccer, beat up playing softball, and then beats herself up when she doesn’t make the play. Sad, sad.

When You Least Expect It…

So, like many other players in WoW, I collect stuff. Mounts, pets, achievements. My hunter has the Epic hunter set that you could only get during the pre-Wrath event, and it takes up space in his bank. Once in awhile, I’ll dust it off, and run Strat, with that set, just because. It’s cool stuff. It’s nostalgia. It’s a material timeline of my toons’ life on Azeroth.

From time to time, when I’ve not got anything going on, I go out and farm for pet drops. To date, I’ve had zero luck doing that. Without fail, nothing will drop until I’ve stopped looking for it. Strat, the Reins of the Deathcharger. Ran it a couple dozen times. On time 24, I was just killing time, and not even thinking about the Reins. Boom. It dropped.

I ran OS with Apathy, not even thinking about the mount. It dropped, and I rolled, not expecting to get it. Boom. Got it.

My Strand Crawler, out of a fishing reward. Didn’t even know it existed, and boom, it dropped.

So, last night, I’d logged in, finished patching, and dropping my off-spec to try a Frost spec, and with nothing else going on, went out to Grizzly Hills to fish up some salmon, to restock Fish Feasts. Second cast, boom!

I didn’t even realize what had happened, when congratulations started rolling in from guildies. I was like “Holy shit!” and promptly took her on a spin around the PvP island.

So, RG posted her new UI over at her blog, so I guess I’m overdue. Here’s mine:

This is during a fight. We’ve got Chatter at the bottom left, and Eavesdropper at the bottom right, with Skada just inboard from that. The bars are mostly Bartender4, for action bars, to the center left. I also use Autobar for things like food, hearths and portals, mounts, etc, because it will pop up all the available choices. That’s Autobar along the center right bottom, and to the right of my player frame just above Bartender. I use Fortress along the top for LDF compliant modes. The minimap is SexyMap, and I use Buffaloes to replace the default buff/debuff icons, and MiksScrollingBattleText. Healbot is above Eavesdropper in the lower right. I use it for decursing, and some stock spellcasting, like Slow Fall.

Raid frames are XPerl, of course. I’ve got an achievement screenshotter in there, as you can see… I think that’s the name of the addon, AchievementScreenshotter, or something like that. I use CBHViewport to compress the viewport, rather than trying to coordinate panels along the bottom. Quartz, Scorchio2, MageNuggets, DeadlyBossMods, and WittyMage all have bars floating around in there, simply because I haven’t gone through and weeded out the duplicate stuff (on my todo list).

Yeah, its’ a mess. I really need to do some cleanup.

Screenshot Grabbag

Not too much new and exciting, and I’ve been remiss on the screenshots lately, so I figured I’d go through and recap.

Last night, from Crits Classic Raid Night, the League perched atop Nefarian’s throne in Blackwing Lair, with Louweaze from Crit’s nestled in there amongst us.

Of special note, look what’s strapped across Nick’s back:

That’s Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood, sword of Anduin Lothar. Kudo’s to Hartbane, who suggested that it be rolled on, so whoever got it could have the fun of running around Ironforge with it. Nick won it with a roll of 100, then promptly stripped down to nothing but the sword, and ran around IF.  Nick is a huge lore buff, and he was tickled beyond end.

Here’s the final from the Naxx run the other day:

And ToC25 from last week:

Unfortunately, I don’t have access to screenshots from other peoples computers. I need to set my guildies up with an achievement screenshot addon, and get them added to my Dropbox so they can upload them easily.

After BWL last night, Edelestar, Tiamarie, Lightblazer, Bootters and myself queued up for a random heroic, and got Gundrak. Of the group, only Ed and I had been through on Heroic, so it was new territory. We were still feeling a bit giddy after BWL, so we didn’t exactly go in serious and at the top of our game. Our wipes were pretty much “doh!”s (like yours truly grabbing aggro), but other than that, we went through pretty easy. All in all, a good night.

Monday, Monday

Ok, so yeah, it’s another Monday, we’re a guy short, we’ve got fifteen in the call queue, and I’m still fixing customer problems from last week. See, my job started as simple “Product Support Specialist”, but it sort of evolved. Anyone who has worked for a software developer will tell you that there’s usually something of a disconnect between front line tech and developer. Developers just never seem to quite feel the same urgency the people who are dealing with the customer have.  In our case, it’s not the norm… our devs are extremely responsive. I’ve escalated a customer issue to the devs, and had them spend several hours jumping through hoops to get the issue resolved. That’s NOT the norm in the software business. As far as that goes, I can’t speak highly enough about our developers.

Where the disconnect comes, in our case, is when we find a problem that’s machine specific. The dev, on his machine, can’t reproduce the problem. And in the dev mindset, that means that the problem is on the customer machine, and therefore, not his problem. That, of course, ignores the fact that, bottom line, things aren’t working correctly. It’s one thing if I can point to a specific problem on the customer machine, and say “you need to have this fixed”. But if the cause is unknown, as far as the customer is concerned, we’re just trying to weasel out of fixing the problem, and furthermore, they are broke. “Can’t reproduce”, in this case, is of absolutely no use to me.

As far as the techs here go, I have it better than most, because I speak Developer, and I’ve done enough development, I know how to look for things that most of the other techs don’t. Further, over the first few months I was here, through a series of coincidences, I got dragged into the area of custom reporting and exporting. When the Prez/CEO found out I had installed Microsof’ts free Express version of Visual Studio on my workstation, he very sternly told me to remove it – and replace it with the Pro version that our company developers use. Little did I know that Tony is one of those guys who believes in matching talent with task, and before I knew it, I was being through custom exporter projects, and then custom reports. Over time, things have further evolved so that most database corruption issues come to me before being escalated to the devs.  One of the things that I wistfully hope to get accomplished Some Day is to do some utility programs for the other guys to run to help in diagnosing database issues.

This weekend went well. Friday, I decided that if I’m going to direct raids with my guild, I need to learn all the jobs, so I started working my DK up as a tank. Did a quest in Hellfire to get a trinket, at RG‘s suggestion, then tanked Sethekk Halls for her priest, and Elgar’s pally. It seem to go well. No one died. lol. I’ve got a long way to go, tho’. I have a bad habit in melee of right clicking my mouse for auto-attack, and of course, that makes me jump targets.

Saturday, we got the gang together, and ran H-HoL, taking down Loken after one wipe. More progress. Sunday, Edelestar, and myself got with Innarra, who has done some questing with some of us, and she graciously agreed to tank a random heroic. We got AN, and had little problem until the final boss, where we wiped. She’s never tanked it on heroic, and one of the DPSers started quizzing her about whether she was capped. She’d had some gear upgrades, and no, she hadn’t gotten her enchants on, so no, she wasn’t. He came off with a “no wonder”. Edelestar and I promptly invited him to tank if he’d like, and he said “if he had a toon that could, he would”. He then made some remarks about leaving if we wanted him to, and we corrected him on that: We didn’t ask him to leave, but if he was going to play “whine about the tank” games, we’d happily wave goodbye. He remarked about “how do you expect her to hold aggro?” and I very pointedly said “by the DPS watching their own aggro, and throttling as necessary.” Let me point out, she hadn’t lost aggro to me, and I’m constantly struggling with threat management, so she couldn’t be doing too bad.

I finished up by observing that DPS are a dime a dozen, at which point, he shut up, and I pointed out to Innarra that the trick was to get the Anub turned around, so he couldn’t pound us, and then when he submerged, run for the gate to pick up the adds. She’d missed that the first time, having issues with her camera, but second time around, she snagged them flawlessly, and we had no real problem downing Anub.

After that, we grabbed Booters, and Mysticdemon, and ran a normal, getting Old Kingdoms. It went well. A few deaths here and there, but we made it through fairly easily. After that, we decided to take them down to Upper Blackrock Spire and get the Jenkins title for those who didn’t have it. That turned into a clear of UBRS, and LBRS. Then we took a break, hoping to get on later and do something, but it was not to be… real life finally caught up. Still, it was a good day, and I’m looking forward to getting more of the guildies into the fun.

Blase’-ness is Relative

So, with schedules in disarray, and the sanity meter at work pegged well into “Complete And Utterly Crazed”, I’ve been making a point to try and get my random heroics out of the way before I go to work in the morning. Started my day yesterday with a little nibble of Pit of Saron, and today with a bit of Drak’ Theron Keep.

Ok, put the phraseology in that last sentence down to “writing style”. Now stop, back up, and pull it out of that category, and look at it. Blase’. That’s how I feel about heroics, at least up to Pit of Saron.  Drak is strictly farm, although the bear tank this morning made it interesting by sprinting through the entire instance. The time was when I would have been frantically grabbing mana on the run, and trying to keep up, to make sure my DPS was up to snuff. This morning? Meh. I was toasting bagles, smearing them with peanut butter and apple butter, and munching away, while dropping flame strikes on the mobs, via mouseclicks, not keybinds. DPS? Meh. They want DPS, slow down and let me actually get in on the fight. I was banging Skada on the boss fights, so no worries, and my gear score is such that if someone calls me out, I don’t feel I have to defend anything.

Just Another Manic Monday… Tuesday… oh hell, Monday again…

The title of (last) Monday’s post was obvious. Came in to work, and the call queue was ten deep, including a very entertaining customer that I started trading emails with on Friday. See, this guy purchased our system three years ago. Since then, he has called tech support four times. One was unrelated to the current issue. The other three calls – including Friday’s – all come on roughly his yearly anniversary of buying the product. He contacts us, claiming the clocks our system uses are suddenly chewing up batteries. He claims that it’s been going on, and he’s just now contacting us. To put this in further perspective, we have given him, free, a total of four replacements over the last two years. Meanwhile, our largest customer has over four-hundred of these units, situated all around the US, and has experienced less than a 1% failure rate.