My boxes did show up yesterday… From ThinkGeek I received loopback jack and a crossover jack, both of which should prove to be quite handy. Right now I’m carrying around two different 3′ patch cables - one straight-through and one crossover. Now I should be able to get rid of the crossover cable and just carry this jack with me instead. The loopback jack, if it works the way it is supposed to, should give me a handy way of testing ports and cables when I don’t have the whole network kit and all the testing equipment with me.

I also got a WMP54G wireless NIC from NewEgg. The card installed with little trouble… The biggest problem I had was physically installing the card - Terri’s case is not the easiest PC to work in/around. Windows picked up the NIC as soon as it rebooted, the drivers installed right off the CD, and it picked up our network with no trouble. While that Zonet NIC couldn’t manage to detect or connect to our network at all, the Linksys was showing a full 5 bars. Terri tried it briefly with WoW, and spent most of the evening surfing the web and reading email - all with no trouble. She did get disconnected when our cordless phones rang, but it was a simple matter of changing the WLAN’s channel.

The final box, the one containing my rounded IDE cables, is apparently out for delivery today. With any luck I’ll have that waiting for me when I get home this evening.

Today at work I was setting up a new system for a local utility company. This PC is going to be controlling and monitoring some fairly vital machinery, so it’s got to be more reliable than your average home computer. First thing we did is install a couple extra case fans, to cool down the additional HDD’s we were going to install. Problem is, the case fans we ordered didn’t come with mounting screws…

I went to the local hardware store to pick up a bunch of mounting screws (we’re going to have two more identical PC’s to set up over the next few months) with some sample screws pulled from other case fans. I showed them to the clerk and asked for something similar. He asked what they were for, and I made the mistake of actually telling him that they were for a computer fan… He immediately told me that they don’t carry computer hardware and I’d be better off looking at Staples because they could match the exact screw for that computer (because we all know that staples stocks a huge selection of random computer screws). Having made his proclamation, he didn’t even want to show me where they kept their screws, and he certainly wouldn’t help me compare my samples with what they had in stock. Despite his best efforts, however, I did manage to find some suitable screws for the case fan.

Back at the shop, it’s now time to install the SATA RAID controller and get the HDD’s set up… It should be easy, just a simple RAID 1, nothing fancy at all. Except that I’ve never dealt with this particular RAID controller, and I’ve got no idea how it will behave. As it turns out, the controller behaves very poorly… Initially things looked ok, but the second HDD wouldn’t show up at all. Then the card decided it didn’t want to initialize and the PC wouldn’t POST. Then I got the second HDD to show up, but the first one was gone.

In the middle of trying to get this RAID controller up and running, I get a call from a Medical Office that we’ve got a contract with - their server is dead. There was a power outage of some sort, the server didn’t come back up, and they absolutely must have it working again. While I’m on the phone with the Office, the Dr. himself calls the shop from Spain wanting to know what we’re going to do to fix his server. What are we going to do? We’re going to drive an hour in heavy winds to go fix his server!

Did I mention the heavy winds? I got detoured twice on my way out to the office. There were utility crews out all over the place fixing downed power lines… I saw two big ol’ tractor-trailors tipped over on their sides beside the road. I kept getting blown all over the place. Definitely not a fun drive.

I make it to the Office just in time for them to get off the phone with their software tech. support - apparently it was just a corrupted file that their software tech. support was able to fix remotely. Now, when I hear that a server is completely down and won’t come back up, I’m thinking it just plain won’t power on. Apparently what they meant to say is that a single application was generating a single error. Oh well…back to the shop…

I get back to the shop to find that someone else has managed to get the RAID controller up and running in my absence. Yay! We get the drives formatted and install Windows, grab the basic drivers, windows updates, all that good stuff. Now we need to install an innocent looking Network Interface Card, or at least that is what the simple brown box’s label would have us believe… I open the box and the first thing I’m greeted by is a zip-lock antistatic bag with four small resistors in it. Not a good sign. Then I see the card itself…an “Allen-Bradley 1784-PKTx”…which looks absolutely nothing like any Network Interface Card I’ve ever seen. Slightly confused, I turn to the documentation to see if there might be any helpful instructions… Only to see the manual suggest that you “write your own driver” for certain operating systems. Great, they give me a handful of resistors and tell me to write my own drivers…

Luckily, it was only a matter of locating the right disc (the Utility company dropped of a whole stack of software to be loaded) and installing the software from there. The card was detected and appears to be working fine…though I still have absolutely no idea what exactly it does.

Getting very frustrated with life in general lately… It seems like most of the world has recently set out on a crusade to annoy the living hell out of me.

First we’ve got Jerry Falwell crusading against including everyone in the season’s holiday cheer. He doesn’t want retailers to be able to wish non-Christians a “Happy Holiday”. He’s threatening to sue any retailer that doesn’t use the phrase “Merry Christmas” in its holiday advertising. He feels that since “most” Americans (his words, not mine) are Christian, everyone else should just shut up and deal with it. Never mind the fact that the reason retailers are using a more generic phrase like “Happy Holidays” is specifically because of overzealous proud-to-be-whatever litigators just like him.

At work, I’ve got an especially annoying computer I’m trying to diagnose… It is randomly crashing for no good reason. Doesn’t appear to be tied to any specific piece of hardware or software. The research I’ve done on the oh-so-vague error messages I’m getting seems to point towards a memory issue, but I’ve already run several tests on the RAM - none of which reported any errors.

The house, that we’re still trying to buy, is sitting in various flavors of limbo. Something happens, a hint of progress is made, and then we just sit and wait again. Lawyers are talking to eachother, real-estate agents are consulting, phonecalls are being made… But we’re just not getting anywhere. They tell us that it’s entirely possible we’ll be moving in by Christmas, but I don’t think I believe them at this point. Oh, I have no doubt that we’ll get the house eventually…but it is taking forever.

I’ve ground to a halt for now in World of Warcraft. I just recently got to 50 and picked up my newest class-specific quest. This one’s just plain painful… First I had to kill a number of Hellboars, which were just slightly too difficult for me to solo - requiring me to go get help. Now I need to kill an assortment of Shadowsworn…which are low enough level for me to solo, but are packed together in a very crowded camp - meaning I need help with them again. Now, I don’t mind asking for help…it isn’t that I want to play by myself… But I’m irritated when I need help because the creature is one level too high, or there’s one too many creatures for me to kill. After the Shadowsworn, then I get to run through the Sunken Temple… And eventually get my choice of three unimpressive items as a reward. Yay!

And finally… While I should be getting two more boxes today, the one that I’ve specifically been waiting for is still wandering around New Jersey.

Terri and I went out to the Arathi Basin battleground for the first time this weekend…and had a terrific time stumbling our way through it.

The gameplay is definitely different from Warsong Gulch, but not so different as to be wholly alien. It’s still fairly straightforward… Capture the flags before the enemy can, and defend the flags once they’re yours. The big differences are that you don’t bring any flags back to your base, and there’s five different flags to capture & defend.

The first match was pure chaos, from my standpoint. I had absolutely no clue what was going on at all. I just followed people around and hit anything with a red name over its head. By the third (and final) match of the night I was feeling relatively confident in my understanding of the gameplay. I was responding to cries for reinforcements, watching the strategic points on the map, and generally trying to actually be useful. We won all three matches that night…though I sincerely doubt that either of us actually contributed much to those wins. We probably would have done more PvP that night…but the Alliance stopped queing up after that last match.

I also finally made it to 50 over the weekend. I say “finally”, because it seems like I’ve been trying to catch up to where I was back on Elune… But in reality, Terri and I have been leveling very quickly over here on Dalaran. I’m sure a large chunk of it is simply because we’ve got a better understanding of the gameplay - we know where the quests are, where to hunt at the various levels, how the mobs work…and the classes we’ve chosen this time around (Shaman and Warrior) complement eachother very well… But, at the same time, I think a good chunk of it is because the Horde just plain has better zones/quests. It really seems like I’m having more quests in any given location, better quest rewards, and a steadier flow of XP as I level. I know that back on Elune I’d always stall out around level 30 or so, because it suddenly became difficult to find quests that I could complete solo. This time around I’m just rolling right through it all…I still haven’t reached the point where I can’t solo the quests I’m getting.

Yesterday’s Thanksgiving/Birthday festivities went relatively well. We had enough leftover turkey to choke several elephants…but it was all very tasty. I had my mince pie, we sang Happy Birthday, we ate ourselves sick… You get the idea.

It seems very odd that I’m not at work today, despite the fact that it is Friday - Black Friday to be specific. This is the first time in the last four years or so that I have not been working retail on Black Friday. I’d originally thought that I might go up to EB just to give my old co-workers a hard time…but that just didn’t happen. We did eventually go up to the mall to pick up a movie at FYE, but I couldn’t bring myself to enter the place. The parking lot was absolutely packed - no room at all. People were everywhere! I couldn’t bring myself to actually go in there and voluntarily subject myself to that kind of insanity… So we went to Blockbuster instead, and bought a copy of Constantine used for about half what we would have paid at the mall.

I also received another Birthday box today, this one had my PDA Case in it. I’m not real thrilled about the frosted plastic look of this case…but it’s about the only thing I found that even remotely suited my needs. Most of the PDA cases I saw were big, bulky things… More like a day planner than a simple PDA case. All I really wanted was something to cover the screen and protect it from pressure/scratches in my pocket. This case is the smallest, least bulky thing I could find. We’ll see on Monday how well it works…