Lyrics

A-Z Lyrics is a pretty cool lyric site. It's not overloaded with ads like so many other sites. Seems to be largely user edited, so it may not always be correct, but it should be good enough for anyone who's already consigned themseves to a lyrics site.

My guild seriously rules

Today, on our 4th attempt, we got Al'ar to 2% before he enraged and wiped us. We have come so far so fast. We have all of Serpentshrine Cavern (SSC) clear except for Lady Vashj. And by the end of January I expect to have SSC and Tempest Keep (TK) on farm, and making shots at Mount Hyjal. I'm very proud of our raiders. Don't tell them I said that.

A while back, when we were struggling, I asked a friend in a more advanced guild, what he thought we were missing, what we could change to possibly do better. His answer was kinda funny: "You're all too nice, you need a 'bad guy' sometimes".

He was right, we have always been too accommodating, and our members were taking advantage of almost no repercussion for poor performance. In response to this, I decided to play the bad cop. I really like it actually. If the raid doesn't seem to have enough focus, I get mean and make it know they had better perform. It's an interesting little amateur psychology experiment seeing how people react to being yelled at for performance in a video game. About 90% of the time, they start performing substantially better.

If people screw up with anything other than legitimate mistakes, I rip them apart. I was once so mean that I got a guild member to quit the guild on the spot, and about a week later, the game. In my defense, he was being superbly stupid, and nobody really liked the guy. His mistake was that he was trying to save his own life, at the cost of EVERYONE else in the raid, including himself. I definitely overreacted, and in hindsight, should have handled it differently. And I've learned from that.

But our guild is now progressing rapidly, and it feels good to make significant steps forward. We should have people in full tier 5 soon, and a few pieces of tier 6 not long afterwards.

Crazy work hours

I work from 1 am to 9:30 am, which are hours I love. Wednesday through Sunday, with Monday and Tuesday off. But it leads to some oddities.

It's really strange to drive to Beatos for lunch, and pass a few of those insane early morning joggers. Here my day is half over, and they are doing the 5 am complete-lack-of-common-sense-jog. Do they know it's 5 am? I feel an urge to purchase some inexpensive watches to hand out so they don't have to exercise at such stupid times. And it's winter! You should see them all bundled up, moreso than I've sometimes prepared for snowboarding.

Another wierd part of working these hours is my interaction with other humans. Of paramount importance is how this schedule affects World Of Warcraft (WoW). What I do is go to bed soon after work (ok, so I will usually do the PvP-daily and then go to bed). Then I get up at about 6 pm on raiding nights (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), and run an instance with the guild (BTW, we are now on Vashj!) Then, after the raid, I will try to get another 1-3 hours of sleep before work. It really feels like I'm living just to work and play WoW, which is a shame. I should just be living to play WoW. I need a "sugar mama" to facilitate my need to play WoW unhindered. Or maybe find some way to play WoW professionally, and then I can have a normal wife. Of course, I don't want a "normal" wife, I want a wife that plays. We have a few couples in our guild that play together. It's seriously full of win.

Sadly, one of my days off (Tuesday morning) is on WoW weekly maintenance. That's 7 hours, in the middle of my "day", that the servers are offline. It's seriously boring. I usually play Guild Wars or organize music or something. The real problem is that servers come back online just about the time I should be starting to sleep. "But my arena points just rolled over! I can't go to bed NOW!" This leads to miserable Wednesdays at work.

But one of the nice aspects of this life is that when I get off work, everything is open. All the stores, banks, etc. So it's really easy to get chores done, I just do them after work, and I have the entire "normal" workday to get them done. It's like potentially having every day off in that regard (if I'm willing to sacrifice sleep, which I am). And even though I work on Sunday, all I have to do is go home and put on a tie, then I'm ready for church. But often I go home and fall asleep, unintentionally or not.

All in all it's a great schedule for me. The positives outweigh the negatives, and it's uncommon which makes life interesting.

Harry Potter

Driving to work today, it was cold and the ground was misty, like a low fog was rolling through. I immediately knew what this meant.... DEMENTORS!
So that means I finally finished the Harry Potter series. Really good books, though I didn't read them, I listened to the entire series on my iPod.
My first experience with Harry Potter was from the first movie, and in hindsight, that was unfair to the series. After finishing each audiobook, I would watch it's associated movie, and they really don't do justice. Such is the case with most books converted to movie.
As good as the books are, there are lots of issues that I have with them. The first is with Harry. He's too emo. Although he's portrayed overall as being fiercely loyal, his faith in his friends and family falters too far and too often for my taste. James (his father) and Albus Dumbledore seem to bear the brunt of this more than most. There are points in the 6th book that Harry goes so far as to hate Dumbledore (even with all the failed occlumancy and other external influences aside). There were times I just wanted to slap the little punk. You can't have it both ways. You can't have a young man with amazing strength of character that later loses all faith in one of his dearest friends. I would have preferred if he dealt with his misgivings in a less "emo" way. This was just a way of trying to show that he's "human".
Rowling uses "incredulous" far too often, by the 5th book it was bugging me. She seems to have backed off the word a bit at the 7th book. I also didn't like how dreary most of the 7th book was. I know this was meant to be a dark time for the series, but it was too much. Maybe this was partly due to the change in narrator that I had for this last book. My greatest problem with the books was my own idiot fault. I kept reading Wikipedia articles to get more information about things that I had missed or misunderstood, and kept reading spoilers. So I highly recommend that nobody read anything until done with all the books.
My favorite characters were Luna, Ginny (3rd book and later), and most of all, Kreacher the house elf. I think to really appreciate this character, you would HAVE to listen the Jim Dale (the US audiobook) narration of the Order Of The Phoenix. There were times when I laughed out loud. His voice was PERFECT, and his mumblings were even better. If I had read the books, I would not have done Kreacher the justice that Jim Dale did him.
I can't say enough good things about Jim Dale's work on the audiobooks. He has a very good range, with few character voices "overlapping" in traits (the younger characters being the rare exception). For book 7, I listened to the British audiobook narrator, Stephen Fry, and was rather disappointed. Hermione sounded a bit like Ron, almost every adult female sounded the same, and Kreacher wasn't nearly as fun to listen to. I would go so far as to say that Jim Dale is probably responsible for 40% of my enjoyment of the series. Had I listened to the first audiobook narrated by Fry, I might not have gone on to the second audiobook.
So, if any of you are interested, I've got the first 6 books by Jim Dale, and book 7 by Stephen Fry, that I could get to you (all in digital formats). I'm going to try to get book 7 by Jim Dale as well. I really need to listen to Kreacher's part in that book done properly.