225° -- Weblog of ModemMisuser, et al.

So, back in November, we finally got that annoying bedroom wall rebuilt/re-insulated. It had been an issue since we bought the place in 2003, but we we're positive it was an insulation issue, but were pretty sure.

Anyway, we had a contractor out, got a quote ($850), and went ahead and did it. When they ripped off the old drywall, they found that, as we suspected, the old insulation had mostly settled/was non-existent. After 3 days, they were finished, and the results are wonderful!

No more freezing in there during the winter!

Sure, I haven't written in over 6 months, and if anyone's still reading, they're probably thinking "oh, I bet they failed and regained all their weight".

Well, that'd be incorrect!

I'm down over 170 pounds, and she's down around 115 pounds. Oh yes. My original weight was somewhere over 400 pounds. I'm now 222. She was a little over 300, now she's around 185. And we're still going.

I haven't written in a while (as usual), so here goes...

My wife and I have been making a concentrated effort to lose weight for the last 3 or so months. We've been doing well. I won't mention our weights, but I will say that I'm nearing 70 pounds lost, and she's nearing 50 lost.

I've been "overweight" since my early teens. I wasn't dangerously fat, nor even the fattest kid around, but I wasn't a "normal" weight by any means. As I moved into my 20s and more and more money become available to me, I ate out more and more, and gained more and more weight. I'm still definitely dangerously obese, but I've lost close to 70 pounds now and we're both committed enough that there's no danger of the weight loss stopping. :)

How did we do it? Well, it was actually...really easy. Something finally "clicked" in our minds and we just committed to it. We limit our calorie intake to around 1500 or less calories EVERY SINGLE DAY. Oh, sure, occasionally we've gone to 1800 or so but never over, and 95% of days have been under 1500. And we started exercising every single day. We had to start small; we were (and still are) VERY out of shape. Walking around the block was the first thing we did. When that become easy we made longer trips: to our office and back (1.4 mile round trip), and longer trips around our subdivision. Now we walk 2-3 circuits of our local mall each day. It's 7/8 of a mile per circuit. We also do weight work at a gym fairly often.

Our next step will be biking. We spent so far $1,800 on some very nice bikes and accessories. The bikes are Trek 7.3 FXs. We also bought trainer stands for them so we'll be able to use them indoors when the weather prevents us from using them outdoors. :)

... http://www.neriak.com/ from now on. I made that site into a general gaming weblog, so I'll be posting all the gaming related stuff there instead of here.

If you're a gamer and would like an account to post stuff there, email me at modemmisuser@gmail.com and we'll talk about it.

So, I did another (small) computer upgrade. Well, it was supposed to be small, anyway...

I got a new monitor (22" widescreen Gateway). And a new video card -- a Sapphire X1950XT card. Should have been easy, right? Ha, no.

First was my power supply. A little anemic @ 350 watts with only a single 12 volt rail @ 16 amps. Not gonna do it. So, off to Beast Buy to get a new one. Got an Antec Trio 480 watt. Should be perfect. So, replace power supply. Done.

Second, the video card install itself. When changing video cards, and especially if you're going from nVidia to ATi like I was (or vice-versa), you should remove the old video drivers. So I did that.

When I rebooted after installing the new card physically, Windows refused to boot. It would just reboot right after the XP logo. I know from experience that means Windows thinks too much hardware changed and it can't deal with life. So, what the fuck!?!?! Just a video card change? Oh, wait, my whole MOTHERBOARD is nVidia, it must have removed all the motherboard drivers instead of only the video drivers. FUCK.

Ok, repair install (note: they take FOREVER).

So, what should have been a 10 minute upgrade took 5 1/2 hours. Sigh.

And to fix my Linux installation? LOL. 5 minutes. During boot it just says "Oh yeah, your video card is different...want to install new drivers?" ... Then you install the new drivers and you're done.

But Windows is so much easier to use than Linux... RIGHT.

We also have to replace the shower in the new half of the house...sigh.

For the last 2 years or so, we had been talking vaguely of moving "soon". Soon being defined as "as soon as we could actually pull it off", which could have been 2-5 years or more.

You see, the neighborhood we moved into in 2003 had started going way downhill fast. 1/3 or so of the houses on the street were rentals, and it seemed the owners weren't keeping tabs on the renters. The street looked bad and there were quite a few "shady" type people around. Even old residents of the neighborhood (some that had been there since it was built in 1956) were saying the same thing. We only paid $85,000 for our house thankfully, so the plan was to sell it and move out before the values went way too far down.

But then a miracle happened. Seemingly overnight, everything reversed. The houses that were being rented sold to actual homeowners who moved in and cleaned the places up. The block looks great now. It's back to a nice quiet family neighborhood.

So we're planning to stay. We've got quite a lot of things we want to get done to the house now, though. Heh. We still have to solve whatever issue makes our bedroom noticeably colder than the rest of the house. We've got a hall light in the old half of the house that doesn't work, so will probably have to involve an electrician there. We certainly need to paint almost every room.

But, the payments are super low (well, it's an $85,000 house at a really good FIXED interest rate, so of course they're low...) and the values are slowly going up.

Yeah, so, heh, I'm playing WoW again. On Argent Dawn with some old friends from EQ1 and such. I moved Vendraen and Szardos over to Argent Dawn so I can avoid having to level those classes again (since I love pet classes...).

For all the bashing there is about WoW, it really is a good game. It's easy to get in and out if you don't want to (or can't) play for 8 hours in a sitting. Levelling is pretty fast (and smooth -- it scales well as you level up, without getting exponentially hard to level). And, really, the quests are (mostly) very well done and interesting, and the scary thing is... the backstory lore of the world is pretty damned interesting if you bother to look into it.

I still have my eye on LOTRO and AoC, though.

Saw a killer concert Saturday night! Maybe one of the best I've ever been to... I dunno. I've seen Rush twice, and I saw Metallica and GnR when they were touring together -- and this might have been better. I'm not sure. It was a damn good show!

The first act was Sonus Ventorium, a band from Indianapolis. They describe themselves as "Funkified Rasta Hippie Metal", and that's fairly accurate. The lead singer is a maniac -- he bounces around all over the place, it's awesome to watch. I can't really describe their sound -- you really need to hear it for yourself. I'm definitely going to buy their CD, they're very good. And they truly know how to put on a good live show. You can tell these guys have played for live audiences a lot.

Next up was I Am I, a progressive rock/metal band from here in Lafayette. They're all incredibly good musicians, especially their drummer. He's incredible! Their songs are mostly long (VERY long) instrumental pieces strong featuring the incredible drum work. The problem is they are too long. They could be cut in half or even into 1/3 and still be good -- in fact better. They also did a Rush cover that I am now going to rant about. They did "Tom Sawyer". Grrr. I LOVE Rush, they're probably still my favorite band. But I HATE Tom Sawyer. Not because it's a bad song -- it's not. But it's all most people know of Rush and it's FAR from their best work. It's overplayed, overknown, and basically...I hate it. :P Ok so they were already screwed when they decided to cover TS. But they had to fuck it up. Ohmygod, that was the worst cover job EVER. The keyboarding was an insult to the concept of keyboarding. I have no idea what that keyboardist was thinking, but his keyboard work sounded NOTHING like the keyboards in TS. NOTHING. I think a $10 Casio keyboard from K-Mart would have been better. The guitar solo portions of the song were more or less dead on, but the rest...GAH. I wanted to kill puppies. But again -- very talented band. They just need to work on their songs to either make them interesting enough to last as long as they do, or make them shorter.

They saved the best for last: Lorenguard! I can't say enough about this band -- they're absolutely incredible. They are an epic fantasy/power metal band in the vein of Hammerfall, Rhapsody, and so on. They're every bit as good as the "big guys" of the genre...maybe even better. They've been on a break for about a year because their keyboardist had (has?) Leukemia. Nasty stuff. Lesser men might have just found another keyboardist and went on -- after all these guys are talented and have real potential and I think they know it. But no, they didn't. They waited for him, and that is to be commended. The guy is a real showman too. He sat through 4 hours of all the other acts (so did most of the rest of Lorenguard) -- a real sign of professionalism for sure. Note that this show was in a very smoke-filled bar. I don't think that's the best environment for someone weakened from cancer treatment but he made it through anyway. When it came time to perform he took off the medical mask he was wearing and performed without it! In said smoke-filled bar. Their set was absolutely incredible. Their vocalist has improved by about 10000% and the sound engineer was able to really tweak the sound so you could hear the lead vocals over the booming drums. They played a couple songs off their first CD and a couple of new ones, all very very killer songs. I just can't even express in words how good their set was. I'm trying, but everything I can say will just fail to convey the power of their show. Words aren't enough.

And if all that wasn't good enough, they GIVE all this goodness away for a mere $3 per person! Insane! I'd pay a lot more. :P

There's an insane number of license-based (that is, that are based on an existing fiction or franchise) MMOs in development right now: Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Star Trek Online, Pirates of the Carribbean Online, some MMO based on Stargate, Warhammer Online. Pretty much the only MMO in development that isn't based on a license is Vanguard. It's a very odd period in the MMO world.

The only 3 games in development that are really "almost out" are LOTRO, AoC, and Vanguard. They're all slated to come out in early to mid 2007. And all 3 are very different sorts of games.

LOTRO is a standard PvE-focused fantasy MMO, with strong ties/adherence to Lord of the Rings lore and backstory. It should be a good game, and I certainly commend Turbine for sticking to their guns on the lore adherence. I've been a Lord of the Rings fan for about 30 years (my mom read the stories to me when I was very young and I've been in love with them ever since), so it should prove to be "my game". Just wish they'd toss me a beta invite. :(

Age of Conan is a strange new type of MMO. It's PvE and PvP focused, and the combat system is a little more action oriented than most MMOs. I don't think it's quite as "twitch" as DDO but it's certainly more active than most MMOs. The game is based on the lore of the Conan novels from the 1930's, and Funcom is going for a "Mature" rating. This is a good thing as then they can have more violence, blood, and nudity and suggestive themes in the game. Should be fun.

Vanguard is a PvE-focused fantasy MMO not based on any existing lore -- they made it all up. The game is meant to be a LOT more challenging than current offerings. It's got a lot of the stuff that early EQ1 had: largeish death penalty, corpse recovery required to get your gear back, more-or-less forced grouping, and so on. Despite those negative the game looks pretty interesting and as a long-time EQ1 Necro, Vanguard's necro class looks VERY interesting to me. You can "build" your pets from body parts which seems pretty damn cool.

The rest of the games in development seem pretty far off; most of them don't even have real websites up yet. It should be an interesting few years for MMOs though!

Oh yeah, you might wonder why the weblog is named 225°, too. :P Well, I've been using the name "Pazuzu" as a handle since 1985 or 1986 (BBS days FTW!). In Sumerian mythology, Pazuzu is the demon of the Southwest Winds. Southwest is 225 degrees on a compass, so... :P

I just realized that most of the people that may be coming here have no idea why the site is named "sentence ov desire". So I thought, maybe, I should explain.

A long, long time ago, before I was an Atheist, I was heavily into the occult. Mainly left-hand path type stuff. Particularly chaos magick. Back in 1993, some friends and I started an online magazine centering around these topics. We named it "Sentence ov Desire", after a term in chaos magick that refers to your statement of what you want your working to do.

The magazine came and went in and out of publication (online on BBSes first, then eventually on the Web), and when I was no longer involved in the occult, I kept the domain (don't want to ever give up a domain name, they're just too valuable). So when I wanted to start a weblog, I decided to just use this domain because 1. I had it and 2. it's different/unique/cool/whatever. :)

So that's why!

We bought a new car yesterday! Perhaps not the best possible move in our situation, given we had around $7,000 worth of negative equity in our old vehicle, but it was aging, not overly comfortable for us, and got abysmal gas mileage. The new car is a 2006.5 Kia Optima EX V6 -- fully loaded. Yeah, every option. Including the incredibly sweet 360 watt Infinity sound system. Muahahaha.

The only Kia dealership here in town, Bob Rohrman Kia, is not a dealership we thought we'd ever do business with again. Rohrman owns like 100 dealerships (no joke -- Google it; the guy owns a ton of dealerships!). So you almost can't buy a car in Lafayette without going to one of his stores. Only GM cars would allow you to escape him.

We had a prior horrible experience with the dealership. They robbed us bad on a deal. We traded in a car we owed probably $150 on (a single payment). They gave us $800 for it (probably well below black book, but we didn't know any better). ADDED THAT $800 BACK ONTO THE CONTRACT. (NOTE: they just "stole" our car!). THEN A MONTH LATER SUED US FOR $800!!! Saying we owed money on the car which we did not. Anyway.

That was around 8 years ago so we gave them another chance. We drove into the fairgrounds (they move all their cars, from all their dealerships in town, to the fairgrounds like 5-6 times every summer). Got a random salesperson named Steve Smith. We first wanted to look at a Sonata, and Steve took us out for a test drive in one, and was very non-salesy, very low key. Impressive. We left and the next day were thinking about the Optima and wanted to check it out. We went back and asked Steve for a test drive. He gave us the keys and said he had some other stuff to do, and asked if we minded going without him. I prefer that, of course, so off we went. We immediately knew we wanted the Optima.

So now down to the deal. We had a 2001 Mazda Tribute LX. NADA retail on it is $9500 or so. Black book is $7830ish. We owed $14,200 on it. We had $3,000 in cash and there's $1,000 rebate on the Optima right now. The dealer offered us $8800 on the trade, not bad really. That leaves some negative equity. So we weren't sure how the deal was going to go, and we figured the dealer was going to add some ridiculous add-ons like some will do.

Well, we were surprised. Everything was straight and above-board. No add-ons, no padding of the interest rate, and no trying to inflate sales tax. They didn't rob us! Amazing!

I finally, due to my wife's machine dying, got to upgrade my machine. I had been running an Athlon 64 3500 with a geForce 6800 card and 1 GB of RAM. That is now my wife's machine.

I now have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200 dual-core CPU, running on an MSI K9N SLI Platinum motherboard. I've got 2 GB of DDR2 RAM. The new video card is an eVGA geForce 7600GT card with 256MB of GDDR3 memory on it. This machine fucking screams! No, it's not the absolute top of the line. But it is insanely fast and I can run most games with full detail @ 1280x1024 (the native res of my monitor).

The actual upgrade process was a fucking nightmare, though. 28 hours of work. First the RAM was DOA. So had to borrow some from my office, no big deal. Ok, so, WinXP didn't like all the hardware changes, so it wouldn't just boot and re-detect like a sane, well-designed, operating system should. Nooooo, it had to fucking keep rebooting right after start of load. Ok, so, have to do a repair install. Buuuut, XP doesn't like the LILO MBR on my drive (for my Slackware Linux dual-boot). So I have to get into recovery console and fix the MBR. Then the repair install finished. Ok! Now it's time to clone my old boot drive (an ATA-133 drive) to the new drive (a much nicer SATA drive). No problem... Just takes forever. Sigh.

Anyway. Was worth it in the end but what a pain in the ass!

Like I said before, I just don't write much, or often. Sometimes I get in a mood to do it, and I do. Other times I think about doing it, then wonder if I have anything to say. I don't really have much to say this time but I feel like writing. So I am. :P

Anyway, let's see, recently... I got started on treatment for a nasty sleep disorder (severe OSA; AHI ~111) that I've been dealing with for, oh, 15 years or so. So that should be a Good Thing(tm). Haven't been doing much... Just gaming, working, watching movies, enjoying life, etc, etc. Just got invited to the Alpha stage for a killer MMORPG I can't name but has been mentioned here before. That will take up a lot of time! Also! Majorly upgraded my computer -- but that's a whole other post.

2 (or 3?) days ago the beta signups for LotR Online went live! I don't think any phase of external beta has started yet, but (obviously!) I and most of my friends are signed up and we're all waiting for that wonderful acceptance email.

Everything I read about this game gets me more and more excited! I think this will be as big or bigger than EQ for me. I put probably 400-600 DAYS of real life time over the course of 7 years into EQ, and I think this will surpass it easily! I'm even considering cancelling my other game subscriptions once/if I get into Beta. It's that big for me.

I'm about to undertake re-writing the system that drives the Amphigory site. When we first started out, 10 years ago, I wrote a custom shopping cart system in PERL. That same system still drives the site, though of course, it's gone under hundreds of changes since those days.

Now, our product line has grown so much, we need a way to streamline page generation (all the pages now are simply static HTML pages!) and allow visitors to search by various criteria. Here is where 15 years of work as a professional programmer and database developer will pay off...

Oh yeah -- the new system will be written in PHP, no more PERL for me. :P

The new trailer (it's "Trailer 3" on that page) for Lord of the Rings Online looks awesome! It's the first trailer with a lot of actual in-game footage and it really just makes me wish the game was in Beta now (and that I was in said Beta, heh).

If you watch the trailer, you'll notice one of the characters has a bird following him -- which seems to be his pet! It doesn't fight (at least not that I could tell) but who knows, maybe you can use it for scouting or something. I wonder which class it was... Must find out more info!

Ok so it's only been a week. :P I've been hellishly busy...

Anyway finally listened to Mindcrime II this morning. It's good...very good. It doesn't have nearly the same power or "punch" the original did, but I didn't really expect it to; that kind of thing only happens once in a band's career I think. It's still a very good album and definitely one any Ryche fan should pick up.

Now I've got to sort through the lyrics and unravel the story. :P

Got a new digital camera this weekend. A Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT. This is our first digital SLR and OMG it's nice!

Will post some sample shots soon!

The sequel to Queensryche's killer story album Operation: Mindcrime is out! I picked it up last night at our local non-chain record store but haven't listened to it yet. I'll get time to do that in the next few days.

They're going on tour this year too, and will be performing BOTH albums in their entirety with live actors playing the stories' characters!

I was thinking to myself, wondering why I'm so adamant about keeping my blog self-hosted rather than going with a community site like Xanga. I came to the conclusion that the main reason is control.

There's a quote, and I don't know the exact wording, or who said it, but the gist of it is:

Freedom of the press exists only for those that own a printing press.

Well, this is my printing press. No one can tell me what I can or can't say here. Sure, the community sites pretty much allow you total freedom...but what if they decided to start restricting content? They could. It's their "printing press", they control what it "prints".

But here I can say fuck shit cunt twat motherfucker cocksucker asshole fuck fuck fuck all I want. And I can say that Bush shouldn't be President. Or whateverelsethefuck I want.

So now in addition to the Warlock, and the Hunter I've been working on (now 30, and I got the white lion finally), I started an Undead mage... and love it! I may be switching to Horde permanently, I dunno. I'd miss the Hunter but hell, I can always make a Horde Hunter!

It's fun being Undead. And I got Braineater for a name! Muahhaahahahaa.

I'm not going to import all the old posts. If anyone's really curious, they're archived at http://www.sentence-ov-desire.net/Pazuzu/.

Some/most of the good/important ones are imported and that's the end of the importing!

Obviously, I've moved my blog/site to a new platform. This is b2evolution, pretty nice stuff. I shall be working on getting all my old posts imported into this -- it's a manual process, so it's going to take a while. :P