Suffice to say with moving, new role at work, and the exciting launch of Warhammer Online, I’ve been very busy. Add two trips to California into the mix and make that VERY TIRED and VERY BUSY. On top of all that, my brother just had his daughter (see Ray’s website on my links list) Rachael Elizabeth Laurence on September 13th at around noon. Very happy things went smoothly and both of the proud parents are doing fine.
In regards to work, I have my Senior Software Engineer (Charles McAuley) hired and recently I’ve been interviewing perspective candidates for Technical Support and my other Software Engineer. Interestingly enough at least 2 people (that I know of) have looked up this website and other websites I’m sure of mine and done research about me prior to the interview. I of course have nothing to hide and am open person, it’s just not something I’m used to (although I should be almost expecting it these days). I think I’ve made my decision at this point about who I want to hire for support, but I’m still working out the details with Tony and corporate (paper work).
In regards to entertainment, Warhammer has been going very well. The guild is up to around 40 members again (plus around 10 alts). The game is great and it’s really awesome to be close to all my good friends again. As always trying manage a guild of 50+ people is challenging, but also rewarding and the members appreciate how I manage things.
In regards to home life and Kerrie… well things couldn’t be better. We’re *mostly* unpacked and have caught up a little bit on the garden. Me being out of town for two weeks in the last month hasn’t helped with the house progress, but even still things have been progressing nicely. We’re enjoying the new house and really settling in well with our lives together finally.
Those are the top events in the last month or so. Will hope to start getting back into the groove of blogging again for those who keep up with my goings on. Life has been busy and I hope all my readers out there have been doing well.
This weekend I was at PAX 2008 meeting Jeff Hickman, Paul Barnett, Josh Drescher, and James Nichols from Mythic Entertainment. I got my picture with Paul and Jeff (while wearing Paul’s signature shades), signatures from Paul, Jeff, & Josh, and an “Elder Beta Tester” T-Shirt from James. I was spending so much time at the Warhammer booth showing off the game to other people at the convention that Jeff even joked “Give this guy a job”. Some of the other people who were paid to be there to demo the game were learning things from me. When Warhammer had it’s official presentation at the event, it was SOOOOO packed and overflowing that they had to cut the presentation in half and do it twice back to back “in fear of a riot” if they didn’t.
Back in June, I blogged about seeing a preview on Paul’s video blog showing the new Lord of Change model. When I met Jeff and Paul this weekend, I asked them directly about the new model. Jeff assured me that while there are still several different Lords of Change in the game there is one which is the “impressive looking one” which I believed he said was in the Lost Veil. I was rather pleased to hear about this and went on my merry way. Later on in the day I was showing some people the Inevitable City. Well upon zoning into the Inevitable City, I ran into none other than the Lord of Change. This was expected, but unexpectidly, he looked truly amazing. Just like I would expect with huge wings, 3 stories high, white robes, golden staff, and all the little details. Later on in the day I told Jeff that I saw him and was impressed. He was glad to hear that.
Speaking of glad to hear about it, I showed Paul where he could put in another “plunger of the world”, a location near the chaos starting area that he didn’t know about. He was rather pleased that I found it and said he’d get one put in.
Overall it was a fantastic event. It was kinda “meh” for me though because I was so excited about WAR and talking with people about WAR that nothing other than the concerts were really all that interesting. Spore was pretty amazing though as well as the One Ups, Johnathan Coulton, and Will Weaton. The World of Warcraft and other Blizzard BOOTHS (yes plural) made me giggle. Tabula Rasa and Guild Wars booths also had a brief visit by me.
There will be WAR starting September 14th. Oh yes and HILYMI will reign again!
Yeah yeah, call me indecisive. Now that I’m officially a manager within a global, public corporation… I think having a blog titled “O RLY, YA RLY, NO WAIH” isn’t very professional. I’ll still keep the blog’s original intention in place, this is my mental break place where I collect my thoughts. It will continue to be witty, crazy, and filled with gaming stuff. I just wanted to maintain a pseudo professional ring to it.
Between the Warhammer Beta, college, my car being broken into, changing job roles, possibly other opportunities, house hunting, preparing out household budget, moving finances, keeping my head screwed on, meeting with mortgage lenders to get pre-approved for a future home purchase, finding the PERFECT place, signing paperwork, working with a homeowner/landlord who’s not even in town, dealing with getting new teeth put in my mouth after fracturing two of them, and now packing and preparing to move by the 15th starting this weekend (wears me out just saying all that)…
Let’s just say I’ve been busy. More details forthcoming as I find the time to post.
Just got back last night from a 3 night, 4 day camping vacation over the weekend. We went to the high desert of Oregon, East of Mt. Hood. We went on a 5 mile hike, enjoyed a lot of great camping food, saw places of Oregon we’ve never seen before, rowed a raft across a VERY large reservoir, and got plenty of rest and relaxation. Kerrie took tons of pictures and I’m sure if you’re curious she’ll have them up on her blog soon. ;-) More information on the Prineville Reservoir can be found at: http://www.prinevillereservoir.com/
As a result, I haven’t blogged in a while, but now it’s time to catch up on life, the goings on in the Warhammer community, and do some gaming.
Oh yeah and on Thursday I fractured 2 of my bottom front teeth and chipped one of my top middle teeth resulting in 2 root canals and to ensure proper reconstruction of the bottom of my mouth, they did a total of 4 cap reconstuctions. Right now I have temporaries in and the perminents come in the first week of August. But hey, they took a bad situation and as a result my smile, bite, and overall mouth health will be better in the long run.
I saw this on Kerrie’s Blog and had to do it.
(click photo for credits)
The instructions to create the mosaic are:
Type your answers to each of the questions below into Flickr Search
Using only the first page, pick an image
Copy and paste each of the URLs into the mosaic maker
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name.
So I put my mind to it and got myself a Wii Fit in less than a week. I have to admit I’m pleasantly surprised with the device so far. Here is my review thus far about the features of the Wii Fit product.
Goals setting and tracking - It prevents you from setting too large of goals. For example it didn’t let me put in “I want to lose 80 lbs in the next year”. So I set a goal of 21 lbs in the next 3 months. It also “measures” your goal progress in 2 week increments. In other words, instead of focusing on 1 week long increments it’s broken into 2 week increments.
BMI, weight, and balance measurements - One could say the BMI is not accurate due to muscle/fat/bone density ratios, but it’s as accurate as it can be. Plus this is about getting fit, not becoming the next Mr. Universe. Ideally it should account for a certain amount of muscle gain based on where you are on the BMI scale and activity with the system. Balance is huge and it’s a good motivator for me. Even though I’m overweight, I carry myself well.
Motivation - The game is constantly motivating you. The animated Wii board talks to you and congratulates you in a very cute way on your progress. The personal trainers motivate you when you’re doing well or improving on your exercises. Most of all the game rewards you by unlocking more items based on your commitment to becoming fit and how well you are doing. Some exercises will unlock based on total fitness time, some exercises will unlock the more you do that one exercise, and some will unlock as you do BETTER consistently at a particular exercise. This really rewards the person who has a completionist attitude and taps into the “gamer” side of you that wants to unlock stuff. Best of all the features that are unlocked are “mii” specific. Which means I can unlock things differently than Kerrie will for example.
Yoga is very relaxing and helps you stretch at the beginning of your workout. It is very tough and works core muscle groups well, but at the same time it is VERY low impact which again is the equivalent to stretching. I like the focus on breathing in the Yoga exercises and how they present breathing to you. Right now I’m still really out of shape and can’t do a lot of the Yoga poses I have unlocked. For now I’m focusing on the 2 that I can do well and those poses are helping strengthen my knees, abs, and core.
Strengthening exercises are pretty hard for me right now. I know I’m out of shape and like Yoga I can only do two of these exercises without seriously hurting myself. I’m looking forward to the day that I can do more of these. I know some of these I can do once my knees get stronger. One in particular “combos” with yoga. Oh yeah as you unlock and master different techniques, you can unlock exercise “combos” which is really cool. For example I think one is the strengthening exercise “The Lunge” comboing into the Yoga pose “The Warrior”. They call it the Lunging Warrior (or something like that).
Aerobic exercises are really fun. Of all the exercises these are the most enjoyable to me. HoolaHoop has to be the best of all the exercises because it is not only REALLY aerobic, but it REALLY works your abs hard. Forget those days of doing sit ups! The step aerobics is really fun which is surprising because I was shying away from the Wii Fit because I thought it was a glorified step aerobics machine. The “running” I’m not too sure about… I’ll write more about that once I get the feel of it. The soccer headbutting also is a bit weird. It feels more like a balance game than an Aerobic game.
Balance is the key to a healthy lifestyle, or so they say. If the Yoga exercises are the low impact warm up, the balance games are the low impact. These games focus on pushing your tired self to the limit, testing how well you are balanced and how well you can control shifts in you balance. The only balance game I can say for sure I don’t like is the tightrope. The marbles, skiing games (yes there’s two that I’ve unlocked so far), and the “bubble in the stream” are all excellent games.
Overall the Wii Fit is fun to play and an excellent exercise. I think I’m going to set a rule that before I can sit down to play video games on my PC or console, I first have to do my 30 minute Wii Fit workout. I think it’s MORE than reasonable and VERY fun and rewarding.
June 14th was the deadline to enter the BOOM Studios Promo Code for entry into the closed Warhammer Beta. Being a loyal fan of Warhammer and Dan Abnett, I ordered the comic and had the code entered some time last month. It’s bad enough they delayed the deadline for the entries to June 14th from May 31st, but now all of us are sitting back waiting in anxious anticipation to see if we are one of the lucky 20% who are getting admitted into the beta. Thankfully, I’ve been entertaining myself with Spore, but I still can’t wait to hear news of whether I even got in or NOT.
To make productive use of my time in Spore while waiting on Warhammer, I present to you: The Lord of Change. Yes the Greater Deamon of Tzeentch himself made by yours truly.
My dad is an excellent photographer. I would call him a hobbiest, but his skill in digital and traditional photography is on a professional level. He’s been featured a couple of times in magazines and has received several awards for his photos. His best work (IMO) has to be nature (still life and active nature shots) and city scape shots, although he’s getting better and better at capturing people.
When I chose this theme for my blog I told myself that I would replace the default seashore image at the top with one that my dad has taken. So last night, after asking his permission, we looked around at his photos and cropped one appropriately for the scene you now see at the top of my blog. If you are interested in more of his work you can find him at RayLaurencePhotos.com (which is also linked to in my blogroll).
I’ve been blogging since 2005. Over the years I’ve run a personal blog, a professional blog, and some gaming blogs. I got tired of blogging in so many places that if you are a reader of my blog you know that about a month ago I merged everything “under one roof” so to speak. Now that I’ve merged so many of my different blogs into one place, I am now forced to ask myself… do I have an audience? Has the merging of my content into one blog helped or hurt my ability to advertise and get comments on some of the things I blog about?
I originally made my blog for my own memory keeping purposes, but I wonder if this has changed. Do people care about the things I’m blogging about? I’m sure my guild cares about some of the guild blogging I do, but does the general public care about some of the leadership blogging that I do or general gaming blogging. Should I blog about game reviews more? I’m not sure anymore.
So in an effort to answer the question “Do people care?”, I head out to WarhammerAlliance.Com to ask the writers out there for feedback. Maybe people do care and I just haven’t ever bothered to advertise my blog. Maybe I should. I await their comments.
So if you’re reading this. What’s your opinion of my blog and should I bother advertising it?
