The Demon Werx

This is an odd but accurate title that I chose for this post… This is not for all humans, I don’t know everyone, but I feel its applicable to right now…

I met my friend Ammon a while back, we were in the same training class for work about 3 years ago. After getting out of training and ending up on the same Technical Support team we became good friends, met a lot of great people as well on that team. Ammon is a great person, quiet and seemingly shy until he gets comfortable with ya, then it’s quite apparent he’s not all that quiet anymore. Brilliant with code and computer things (I am envious of his skills, he creates where I reverse engineer and tweak).

Last week, he admitted he was envious of me. I quickly went retarded and the conversation was sidetracked then we went out to lunch, yay for BBQ! It wasn’t until I read his blog that confirmed what he was envious of.

The human condition is truly strange… we envy what we don’t have, what we could have, what we could have had, what we think we want to have, and what we really don’t want to have but still think we do. Life is going very well for the wife and I, we are in the best position we’ve ever been in, yet struggles are still there, challenges are still there. As a whole we are well, even though minute to minute it seems to be ever changing things are good… yet I still find myself envying people for all sorts of different reasons, some valid, some childish, some simply because I have come to a conclusion that is far different than the actual reality.

I envy Ammon for the man he is despite the challenges he has encountered, overcame, and is still working on overcoming. I respect him for the same reasons, many people would have given in and let go a long time ago. I’m glad I have him as a friend and hope I can be as good of a friend as he is for me. The wife and I enjoy his company, despite the fact Anubis now smells everyones breath because of him.

You need to come over for BBQ!

-Paul

*He is the reason I have my websites and working code.

Word on the streets is it that Windows is going down… as an OS they probably will not go down for a very long time simply because of market saturation and fear of moving to a different OS. I actually don’t know how it is going to play out nor am I going to make any predictions, no info means guessing, guessing = most likely wrong. (I analyze for a living and must have data to do analysis)

So… what would I be scared of? Well, nuking and paving my current big gaming machine. I don’t know what all I have installed on the machine (I know I have W o W and Call of Duty 4) and some other programs. What else I have stashed in there is a good question and that is what is making me hesitant to get the cleaning started.

What about nuking other boxes? Oh yeah, no hesitation there! I am currently in the process of cleaning up a 120 (112Gb usable) disk so I can drop Suse10.3 (OpenSuse) Linux on that machine. Why? Well first it is a stable install that actually went through just fine on my laptop (it’s an old ~900Mhz 348Mb of Ram AMD box). If I am going to learn a *nix might as well drop it on my secondary box and get some use out of it. Currently that box is my Dev and Questing box, I do some HTML work on it for my lvl19.com site and use it for wowhead info when playing wow.

It’ll be fun, I might have it installed tonight or tomorrow night.

~Paul

Things change, systems change, pages change, things change.

In the computer world on sites, systems, games, etc… things are changing all the time but why? Yes, it is inevitable and change needs to happen, but what philosophy is driving these changes?

Change to improve? or Change to test and break?

If changes are going about to improve the content or system then it is a healthy philosophy and your users will see (dependent on the quality of the change) hopefully an enriching of content on your part.

If changes are simply made to test the stability of the system, my feelings are this is not a valid or sane way to go about testing stability (Dev and QA environments = all I have to say). If it isn’t broke don’t throw code at it until it breaks, that makes No sense at all.

Change in life seems to be a little bit more complicated than on a computer… but thats another post all together.

~Paul

So today I begin my “Hell Week”… ok, so hopefully it won’t be as bad as last months call or this last weekend as my co-worker got hit hard!

In other news:
My Xbox hates me: www.360voice.com/failover

In wow I have started playing in the arenas (I quit my guild): 2v2 bewear of the anklebiters; 3v3 Run n Gun. It’s fun, I am better geared (I actually have pvp gear) than my teammates, but they are awesome and we do very well despite the gear.

At home: I love my wife, she is awesome! These last few weeks/months have been rough, we’ve been extremely busy. We need to start working on her music, which means I need to learn how to use Cubase.

I buzzed my hair the other day and confirmed a subtle fear I have had as I began to see more and more of my scalp… my hair is thinning.

So I think I’ll try rogaine out…

~Paul

It’s crazy how life can be so busy, work, play, family, challenges, problems, struggles… it can be overwhelming. It can also be sweet to look back at all the struggles and see how far we’ve come along. It may seem rough but our achievements surpass the struggles and hard times.

I need to work on balancing my time (continuously) in order to live and work, as well as update my sites on the web and continue with learning.

~Paul