Programmer, Analyst, Learner, Leader, Gamer

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I originally made my blog for my own memory keeping purposes, but I wonder if this has changed.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?

Over the last two days I’ve been busy importing my LiveJournal Blog (http://cyebrvic.livejournal.com), my Tabula Rasa Blog (http://victeonus.livejournal.com), and merging it with the concepts held within the old VictorLaurence.com. I wanted one comprehensive blog that A. supported my personal journal writing,  B. my game blogging, and C. my career portfolio. I think this new blog format will do that all in one place. Additionally it has a lot more features built into it than LiveJournal and instead of having to pay a yearly fee for multiple paid LiveJournal accounts, I’m utilizing bandwidth and server space already paid for through Dreamhost (oh and I’m experimenting with Google Adsense, forgive me if it’s annoying).

As far as my overall theme of this new site, I’m pretty happy with it. It’s simple, yet says “Oregon” all over it. It’s a bit modern, but not super modern. I think it fit’s well and I like how the date is displayed on posts. Originally I was going to go with a 2 column layout, but then went with a 3 column.

One of the new features I love about WordPress is the built in spell checker is better and the fact that I can assign single posts to multiple categories. This allows me, and my readers to read specific categories of posts they care about. For example http://www.victorlaurence.com/topic/gaming/hilymi is all posts related to Hit It Like You Mean It. I’ve spent an extensive time re-categorizing all my old posts. I still need to go through all the Warcraft ones and make sure that the ones that should and should not be classified for HILYMI as classified as such.

So today I decided to resurrect HILYMI as a Warhammer: Age of Reckoning guild. I assure you, this is NOT an April Fools joke. Don’t ask me why this came to me on a day like this but continuing frustrations about TR and seeing posts on the HILYMI forums motivated me to do it today… /shrug.

I will continue to hate Warcraft, but I miss the guild. I don’t like what Blizzard has done to the game. It is not the game for me anymore. I’m not interested in going back to Warcraft, but I’m not happy in Tabula Rasa. It’s a great game, but it’s not the kind of game I want it to be and will never be. Warhammer, now with the big budget of EA, is shaping up to be an excellent game.

25 years of Games Workshop universe complexity.
Financial backing of Electronic Arts.
Realm vs Realm game play from Dark Age of Camelot.
Instanced PVP and PVE concepts from Warcraft.
Instanced raiding. World event raids.
Truly the next generation MMO.
I pre-ordered my limited collector’s edition copy on Sunday.
 

I was talking with Krommy in AIM chat and he mentioned “Isn’t Warhammer still in Beta?”. Yes, Warhammer is due in the fall. Yes it’s quite early to be discussing the guild’s future in Warhammer, but these things take time.

Discussions take time.
Revamping the website will take time.
Finding lost brothers will take time.
Gathering our forces will take time.
Re-forming the officership will take time.
Re-writing policy will take time.These things will take time.
 

I want all of it worked out BEFORE the game starts. That way we have time to enjoy the game and have a strong clean head start in the universe. We have a lot of lost time to make up. We can start that journey now.

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Tonight was the first night I was able to spend a full night with Roland as a Guardian. We focused on completing all the assignments given to us in the Mires. Overall it seems like Roland is excited about his new Guardianship. He was particularly excited to be showing off his staff skills, bashing thax’s faces in, charging them with a rushing blow, just to beat their faces in more. Up until this point I had been leading Roland around doing the majority of the killing with my injection gun because he hadn’t been training abilities that were not guardian focused. Now that he is finally a guardian he’s destroying the Thrax and now I can sit back, relax, and keep him alive. It’s a job I do well and quite thoroughly enjoy.

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Today Roland received his Guardian certification promotion. He is fully trained in staves and starting his training in Vortex. I’m pretty excited about this news because that means we’re going to be completing missions together again. He is finally caught up to me and now we’re receiving assignments that we can complete as a team.

The officers of the Browncoats had a big meeting this evening which went late into the night concerning the future of the clan. Right now while we have plenty of folks in the clan, we’re concerned about the some of the levels of participate in our ranks. While we have plenty that are highly involved in forming squads and working with others, we have some folks who seem to lurk in the shadows. We’re going to be busy writing policy documents in the coming weeks and improving the quality of our membership over the mass quantity it is right now.

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No, I haven’t been on vacation this entire time. When I did get back from my “vacation” I had some much paperwork and other things to catch up on I haven’t had time to write in my medical log. Here’s some updates on what’s been happening since I got back. Soriathus has been doing great and is now mastering the arts of Exobilogy. He’s mastered the ability to sustain a temporary clone of himself on the battlefield which fights along side him. The closest person I can call a brother in this crazy world, Brison Roland, has been working on his commando training and tomorrow completes his certification for promotion as a full Guardian. He’s even been doing some “advanced placement” training and should have his full guardian staff certification on day-zero.

The clan has been doing really well and though we’re over 100 members, it seems like quite a few are AWOL. We’re currently tracking them all down and if they don’t shape up we’ll have to replace them. Missions, war games, and squad training has been commencing regularly every week and Kall, our Scheduling Officer has been starting to kick things into high gear. Mandros, our Recruitment Officer has been doing a fine job doing direct recruitment with individuals through various channels. The future is bright and we’re all looking forward to the new year. Hopefully every year from here out will be better than the last.

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Since I started in the AFS I’ve been studying and planning my training throughout my entire career in the AFS. I’m the type who sits down and reads books and will do cross analysis of skills training available. I’ve been working with my trainers to figure out what skills to focus my training on to leverage my natural talents. Overall I’m really enjoying my job as a Medic and I’m looking forward to working with other members of the Browncoats, sharing what I’ve learned. Sometimes they teach you hot to fire a gun, but not how to use it in an intelligent way. I think I’ve mastered the Injection Gun to a higher degree than even my teachers and I want to share that knowledge with others.

I’ve added a link to my plan of study on the right. I think my analytical skills will help others so I figured I’d share it here. I’ve been worknig with Roland to help tutor him in his training so his plan of study is there as well. Apparently my clone has been busy doing the same. Great minds think alike right? If anyone has any questions for me, feel free to comment and I’ll read it next time I’m making an entry.

Even though I was at the Saturday market off and on all weekend freezing my fingers off, I had a really awesome relaxing weekend.

It all started off Wednesday night where Kerrie and I cracked open the latest Mario game, Mario Galaxy for the Wii. She loved it and I loved the nostalgic feel of Mario 64 in this game. The controls are great, the music is classic, and the whole game feels like Mario 64 v2.0. I give it an 11 on the 10 point Win scale.

Thanksgiving and “turkey hangover day” was really great because neither of us overstuffed. I think it’s the first thanksgiving where I think I might have actually had a net loss in weight instead of gaining 3-4 pounds.

Finally the cherry on the preverbial cake came when Kerrie had her best weekend of sales ever. The cold was insane, but the sales went nuts. She ended up selling around $450 in product over the weekend. Hopefully it wasn’t just because of Turkeyday weekend and hopefully the slight tweaks to our merchandising has something to do with it.

Overall the whole 4 day weekend was full of win. Finding out that HILYMI has pretty much died last night didn’t even spoil my weekend. I just shrugged it off, sadly I was the last to know, but oh well. At least that means the vent server is 100% for the Browncoats.

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Over the last week it seems like Roland and Eaos have been busy adjusting to life on this new planet, so I’ve been exploring the Divide with Crichton. Deep into the trenches we paved our way exploring the mucky dirty pits filled with Bane and grassy plateaus filled with strange native wildlife. Occasionally we were caught off guard by a convoy of predators. One at a time we can handle pretty well but four of them can be overwhelming even with my medical skills. I had to resuscitate Crichton after she took some nearly terminal wounds on more than one occasion. We learned to listen for the high pitched squeal of their jet engines and avoid them when in packs.

I learned that the power of the Logos is important in more ways than I imagined before. It seems Logos knowledge is needed to be able to access some of their most strongly kept secrets, including a Logos that I finally was able to access the other day. It seems the Bane’s control of this planet is focused on gaining Logos information, although they don’t seem to be as receptive to the knowledge within it. Even at the Pravus research facility which we raided two weeks ago, they didn’t seem to be able to harness the power of Logos directly and instead required machines to be able to gain the information stored within it.

One of the most interesting landmarks within the Divide is the Hydro Electric Plant which generates power from the run off from Eloh Creek. I’m proud to see that even in the foreign land we’re living in, we’re learning from the mistakes we made on Earth by focusing on renewable energy like hydro electric power. It makes sense why the Bane focus their attacks at the plant, they know that if they attack our power we could be crippled. This is why when I hear of a Bane attack on the plant, I’m right there defending it.

Tactics, Logos, and lessons of the past, knowing all these things gives us power. Knowledge we can share with each other. Power we can all gain. Power to defeat the Bane.