Programmer, Analyst, Learner, Leader, Gamer

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!

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.

Got a haircut and decided to have a picnic with Kerrie today. We got some ribs, strawberries, pineapple, cornbread, and Newman’s Own Pink Lemonade and headed to a random new park on the GPS. The weather was nice and we sat under two very large trees over a park bench. The food was great and the company even greater. We weren’t at the park for long, but it was nice to completely get away from technology and life for a while. We need to do that more often. I doubt Kerrie would complain.

After the Picnic we headed to Ikeawhere we dreamed a bit more about out future house together. It was nice being able to completely skip over the couch section at Ikea since we now have that awesome leather couch we got a little while back. Kerrie got some storage cubes for her yarn shelf / bookcase thingie. Of course meatballs were had and we grabbed coffee on the way home. The rest of the day was spent reading my book and relaxing with Kerrie.

Worked further on the skit today and the hood. I worked on cleaning up stitching details on the skirt while Kerrie worked on stitching up the hood and working on the middle front layer of the skirt… err I mean manly kilt thing… yeah. Anyhow things are coming a long quite nicely, when appropriate we’re using simple looking stitching, but in other places that should be more elaborate, we’re using really complicated “magical” looking stitching with metalic gold thread. The whole thing is really coming together looking rather professional.

Now I just wish I could lose some weight… /sigh. Looking at myself on camera taking progress photos made me realize how big I really am. I need to get back on the weight loss horse.

Kerrie and I got the final bits of cloth today for my Warhammer Zealot costume. Kerrie hasn’t begun her Magus costume, because I haven’t finished helping her size her bust thingie. Both of these costumes as well as a Luigi / Daisy costume set are going to Pax 2008 with us.

The skirt part of the costume is going to be composed of three different fabrics with three different color / stitching designs including some really rad gold stitching. The hood is going to be incorporated into the shoulder design which will have feathery looking black faux-fur with two kinds of black feathers. Instead of having a completely bare chest I will be wearing a black sleeveless shirt out of a very cool breathable material (since the rest of the costume will be hot as hell). We have a really neat “belt” that we’ve designed out of a black fake leather which we will be encorporating grommets on the bottom to hang all kinds of crazy stuff like shrunken heads, skulls, bird skulls, and bunches of feathers. Along the top of the belt will be a ribboning of leather with small grommets which will then criss-cross around my chest up over the shoulder pads acting almost like a suspender but also holding down the shoulders. Oh forgot to mention we’re going to incorporate chain into the design and link the two shoulders together across the front of the neck with some chain. Finally the bracers will be made o more black leader coming to a point around my middle finger. My fingers won’t be gloved but will have the gauntlets covering half of the back of my hand. The gauntlets will also have a lot of leather strips wound around them to give them a tight look. The whole costume will come together thanks to some really cool props including a raven skull ring which I’ll be wearing on my right hand middle finger and a realistic human skull replica in my left hand.

The bottom layer of the skirt and the belt were completed today. Some more work needs to be done on both, but they’re mostly complete. Tomorrow, more work on the skirt and the hood.

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.

I got caught up in Math, got A-Red-Thread.com/Store launched, I got all my schoolwork done early so… I figured it was a good weekend for WoW. I ended up grinding a ton of PVP points, getting my belt on Thursday, my Neck on Saturday, and my Merciless Gloves on arena week reset. Now my resillience is 218 and I’m an unstoppable machine. Good times. We went back to Karazhan this weekend, killed a world dragon, and have been having a huge boon in recruitment. I’m pretty excited because it feels like the guild is coming together finally. We’re on the cusp of taking the 25-mans seriously. I’m more interested still in having 2 stable Karazhan teams. Even a month of solid Karazhan and we should be able to start doing the 25-mans regularly.