Fist de Yuma - August 31, 2004

This and That It has been a long week, but not a great AC one. The high point has been the Olympics. I love sports of all types, and this has been an outstanding Olympics. As you know from last week's column, I lost my Internet connection for a while. I signed up for auto pay at Adelphia. For some reason, it did not take. That caused me to lose my Internet for a few hours some months ago. I paid with a credit card so there was no problem. My wife saw the credit charge, and figured that the auto pay was now working. Not wanting to pay twice, she ignored the bill. This is where Adelphia fell down. All it would have taken was a quick e-mail to make me aware of the problem. Instead, they paid a technician to disconnect the cable. They then had to pay another one to reinstall it. I lost Internet for a week, they missed getting paid for that week, and they had to eat the cost of the technicians. All that was needed was a little commutation. (They were nice enough to not charge me the reinstall, because of the auto pay glitch.) The first day of getting my Internet back was spent catching up on things. The debate group needed a lot of work. All posts go through me before anyone sees them. I have to review each post before sending them out. It is no flame and sometimes people get hot under the collar. Those I have to delete before anyone sees them. I also needed to catch up on what was going on in the world. I don't trust the main stream News much. Even Fox will not tell the entire story, but at least they try. It takes a lot of time to get all sides of the stories, so I can make my own decision on what is the truth. So I had a weeks worth of reading to catch on, all while getting as much of the Olympics as possible. When I did get on to AC, I had a lot of small items to catch up on. I had to sort loot from hunts and collect up the salvage. I will collect salvage on my players during their hunt, and then transfer it all to whatever mule is the active salvage mule at the time. He rends it all, and combines the bags. Then any collectable items are distributed to the proper mules or tradesman. The next step is to take the tinkable gear collected, and add the appropriate salvage bags. I did not find any good weapons in the last few hunts, before losing my connection, but I did find a Major strength set of leggings. I add 5 bags of steel to it (wms 8) and dyed it red. Fist de Yuma Jr is now wearing it. After that, I had three players to run through the pincer dungeons. Slowly but surely the hunting and the pincers fellows are driving the Tradesmen up there. Cliff Bowman has just hit 107. While I still have years to go, there is notable progress there. Cliff Bowman buffs to 594 (Armor) and Fist Mule two buff to 596 (Weapon). That brought me up through Thursday. Friday is always a hard day, with little AC. It started out with me getting up at 5am for my bike ride. I've hit a point where my 11-mile loop is not enough. I extended the ride to 17 miles on Wednesday, and felt great. I stayed with 11 miles on Friday, because I was short of time. My plan is to do a 20 mile ride on Monday morning. The second I got back from my ride, I had to shower and rush off with Rosa. We had to pick up her nephew for a meeting. I read a book in the waiting room while they did their thing for an hour. From there Rosa and I went to I-Hop for breakfast. After that we drove to the Marine Base to get my new computer glasses and then a little shopping before our haircut appointment. After my quick cut, I left Rosa to get her stuff down. That takes hours. I drove out to Hasting and the walked over to EB Games. I grabbed a game for my xbox that was on sale. I also took a quick stop at Stables, hoping to find a new mouse. The MS one I have has a button problem. I understand that AC takes a lot of button pushing, but this is the third mouse I've worn out. It is getting old. They did not have the one I'm looking for. I guess I will have to use the Internet. We got home with enough time for me to take a quick nap before heading out to the cigar store. We have a Friday tasting there. They supply three good cigars and a coke for 10 bucks. Most of the time there is a 10 buck+ cigar as one of the three. It is a great deal and I got to talk with some outstanding people. When I got back home, my wife's sister was there. She lives in Phoenix, so it was a surprise. I was hopping we had enough money in the banks to give her a check for the portable. We have turned in for repair after Rosa dropped it. To my surprise, she had paid the bill for us! I had the portable back a lot sooner than I expected. Rosa gave her a check to cover that. Now I needed to spend a day getting it set up. It took a few hours on Saturday to get the network and Internet set up on the portable. It has locked up twice on me, so I hope there is nothing really bad going on. Portables are such a pain to work with. When trying to get the patches, I got an error saying I have a stolen copy of Windows. I guess they put that on the system when fixing it. Now I have to reinstall Windows, as MS was no help with getting it fixed. I find MS is rather short sighted with their policy. I'll start by them calling a loyal customer a thief. A real thief would have a work around to their protection scheme. All it is doing is creating problems for legitimate owners. The worst thing is they are using security patches as their hammer. As failure to apply patches is the main source of Internet trouble, it is borderline criminal to not let people get the fixes. So I only have one day before the next column is due. I hope to have a quest today, but I'm not sure of the status. We will see. (Put off until next week.) There are times when I hate Microsoft I got an error saying that I had a bad copy of Windows when I tried to install SP2. I had heard about this but this was the first I ran into it. I had no trouble before. I'm guessing they installed another copy of Windows on the computer when it was repaired. I called MS and got someone who could barely speak English. I'm not against outsourcing, but at least find someone who can understand and speaks English. He gave me a registration number, but I had no way to input that number. Running the activation program failed; because it said I was already registered. I finally got the computer to accept re-activation, by using a utility Balash give me, but the number MS gave me did not work. I called MS again, and got put on hold for about an hour. They hung up on me, but at least they called back to apologize. Of course they could not help me without proof of ownership. As I wrote before, I don't have that darn paper work any more, so I'm stuck. What is sad is I can still use Windows. I just cannot get updates. So the computer is open to hackers, who will want to use my computer to attack the net, including Microsoft. Talk about a shorted sited policy. So I'll have to re-install Windows and pray the numbers I have will make it work. Talk about a pain. My other option is to go back to being a hacker. I left that years ago, but still have contacts. They can give me a way to break it. I would hate to fall back to old ways, but MS has kind of ticked me off. Tradesmen Someone made the point that I should use one mule for both Weapons and Armor. I agree that is the best way to optimize for XP usage. You can make a tradesman with maxed Endurance, Strength and Focus. That will mean you only have to raise a minimum of stats. Doing it the way I'm doing is a lot harder, but has several big advantages, which are; Majors, Space and Weight. My weapon tradesman is packed with weapons and salvage bags. I had to off load salvage bags I don't use much, and weapons that are on the low side, just to have any room at all. The Armor Tradesman has a different problem. He has room, but the armor weight has him at close to 300 burden. I again had to pass off any odd salvage and armor. The last is Majors placement. I have about all my Majors. I still need one for the Weapon mule is all. The pieces were not hard to fit into the tradesmen, because there are only a few needed for each mule. If the mules were combined, I would have to find or trade for different armor pieces, as they overlap. Still, I may go the one mule route in the future. It is costing me a lot more XP to get the trade skills where I want them. I'll have to raise Focus twice, at great cost. Four billion plus points once is really hard, doing it twice is insane. It all made sense when I had them chained together. Now that passup will only hit the patron, putting all the xp into one tradesman is a lot smarter now. Cliff Bowman is the likely one to make the change with. He has 70-strength, so it would only take 6 weeks to get him ready. I'll have to see how bad the Major overlap is. I'll have the 6 weeks to work that out. I'm not totally sure I want to do this yet, but that is the way I'm leaning. Congratulations to Molcavian and Sushi-Ma Both Molcavian and Sushi-Ma made 126 this week. Molcavian has been a guest writer here before. He joined Casa de Yuma a short while back. He was a server transfer, starting over on Morningthaw. From the start I saw that Molcavian was something special. He was helping others and running quests. He was also leveling faster than I had seen anyone else I have seen. In this era of 200+ level players, someone making 126 might not seem like a big deal. The key for Molcavian, is he did it totally on his own. No vassals, no anything but pure play. Molcavian is an asset to Casa de Yuma, as well as a hard working player. I'm proud that he picked us for his allegiance. Sushi-Ma joined us from another group. I don't know her well yet, but the things I do hear are all good. One thing I noted is she is a lot like Cher'okee. I can give no greater complement. The return of Jeff Jeff has returned! He got back a week ago. For now, his total focus is with his wife. I have not even seen him yet. I hope to see him playing again soon. The word I got was he will be ready to get with us in a few weeks. - Fist de Yuma