Here be my name...

My pirate name is:

Iron Sam Rackham

A pirate's life isn't easy; it takes a tough person. That's okay with you, though, since you a tough person. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

More pirate fun can be found here.

How long is a year?

I can't believe I've been blogging for almost a year. My first post was just a note letting everyone know that I wasn't gonna blog, I just wanted to post comments on Kirsten's and Annie's blog.
My second post was mostly a realization that you don't need to have anything significant to say in order to blog. Something that 99% of the rest of the bloggers already knew (or didn't know, but were oblivious to how boring they were/are).
Now I throw almost any random thought up here. Who cares about relevance or continuity! And you all get to take advantage of these pearls of wisdom. You're probably all thinking: "Wow, that Adam. What a great guy!" Well, you're welcome.

Surviving the end of a failed raid

A good raid can be the most rewarding and exciting part of your World Of Warcraft experience. When teamwork and skill combine in a good raid party, objectives are easily met and your entire group hearths home without resurrecting.

But when your raid group is formed on the spot by someone with less than existent leadership skills, you are in for a world of hurt. These groups are often the type formed when an area is hit by an organized opposition's raid. At this time, the need for a raid group becomes apparent, and somebody steps up and starts the group. But a defensive raid group should never change to an offensive raid group without first setting some kind of objective.

These groups get gung -ho when they route the enemy, and the group quickly becomes a train of "HK seekers". Snaking into enemy territory chasing after the tail end of the retreating enemy, soon they meet the organized resistance that's been formed at the nearest enemy town. The newly formed battle line is fiercely contested for a few minutes, but the defending enemy has the advantage of respawning guards, and every raid group formed since the conception of WoW has had that 1 (or more) guy who stirs up the guards.

At this point it's best to call a general retreat. Since that never happens with these "pick up" groups (they always think they can turn the tide back in their favor), your smartest act is to hearth out and leave with dignity.

So lets say you are one of the folks that should have left already, and now face an overwhelming number of red names. You are gonna die, accept that and prepare for it. We are gonna leave everyone else now. If you are a support class, don't feel bad, you can't help much now anyways.

Don't run down the path you came in on, everyone else is doing that, and it only serves as a focusing point for the now "HK hungry" opposition. Find a route that nobody else on your team is taking and head that way. You don't even need to be heading in the general direction of your intended retreat. Remember that we are hearthing out, so it doesn't matter if you do this 100m further away.

If you have no pursuing fan club, then hearth out and count yourself lucky. If you do have your own train, "root em if you got em". If you can't root, at least draw them as far from your main group as possible. This way you still serve a value to the rest of the team.

If you are going to get nailed, try to find some trees or hills that you can res behind after you go down. Ashenvale and Tanaris are great for this. This will give you a chance of escape if they corpse camp you. Res behind a visual obstruction, and once they see your corpse change to bones, they will run all over looking for you, but you have a head start because of the cover you took. Now just find a safe place to hearth, and end this nightmare.

Alone time

Well, I've had a lot of alone time this last week. It's not like I wasn't a hermit before everyone abandoned me, but now I really feel alone. It's kinda sad, but mostly in a "pity party" sort of way. I'll be fine, it just takes some getting used to.

A positive thing happened this week though. An friend that I met online a while back might be moving to Utah soon. She IM'd me 2 days ago and mentioned this. It's kinda wierd for me, as she is the first (and only) person that I've met and gotten to know rather well, without ever meeting in person.

I've updated my webcomics page, and I am VERY proud of the results. I set it up with expanding lists, and the process of learning this was really fun. It's my first Javascript that does anything really functional. I'm always adding new content to it, but I'm keeping it text only for as long as I can (there are 2 images used in the expanding lists though).

Possibly my favorite new (new to me) webcomic is Copper. I just love the art.

...

First is was Kevin, then Marcus, Ryan, and now Cliff. All my bro's are leaving me :(

Alien Loves Predator

Alien Loves Predator just may be my new favorite way to spend time online.

The premise is that an Alien and a Predator are roommates in NYC. Unlike the popular comics, games, and movie, they get along rather well. The bulk of the webcomic is done by superimposing pictures of toy figurines over real world photos. One of my favorites is Abe ogling a Barbie, it just captures Abe perfectly with one frame. If that's not awesome in it's own right, the creator, Bernie, is one hilarious human being (I presume he's human from the pictures of his offspring).

I'll throw a link on my webcomic page on Monday most likely.

Spam can be funny

Spamusement

Panda Attack!

Good news! I got into Panda Attack! I don't know if this is going to be enough to inspire me to put in the time to get another character up to lvl 40 and beyond.

We had a raid last night, but I had a church meeting at the same time, and I could not attend. Turns out we lost, and the Alliance beat us back to Horde territory. I can't help but think that maybe one more healer on site might have turned the tides. Wish I had been there.

PvP vs. PA

How do I decide?!!! Do I join "Panda Attack" or whatever incarnation PA decides on for the new Dark Iron server? Oh, BTW, this is all a bunch of WoW jargon. If you don't roll in Azeroth, just ignore my macho-nerd babble and head over to someone more interesting.

For everyone still with me, I'm leaning towards siding with PvP for 2 reasons: 1. I haven't played Horde nearly enough, and 2. Panda's are incredibly cool.

Tegan and Sara

Am I insane, or is Walking With A Ghost about the catchiest song ever. Tegan And Sara's website.

This video clears up that Tegan is in fact the evil twin. We should have known that from the lower lip piercing that Tegan has had for a while. I guess that's the female equivelant of the "evil twin goatee".

The new record is 3!

That's the number of consecutive times someone has called and hung up before I could answer.

You see, my phone doesn't play a "ring" to those who call me, it play's Eric Clapton's "Layla". My family and friends are used to this by now, but strangers are always caught off guard. I've found that most people just hang up and call back. Sometimes they will even hang up after that second call.

It just surprises me to no end that some of them won't stay on the phone the 4 seconds it sometimes takes for me to answer the call. Let's run through the mental dialogue that must go on: "Layla?!? This is not the normal ring that I hear when I call others! Surely there is witchcraft at work here. I must hang up NOW before I am cast into the infernal abyss!!!!" I can assure you all that there is no telecom hellfire portal to worry about. And if there was, Nortel would surely charge too much for it to become a functional part of any major providers client damnation budget.

Every now and then I'll get a new caller who hangs on the line long enough for me to answer. I've noticed that these people are a bit more kick-back than the uptights that hang up right away. I know right away that these people are cool.

Webcomics

I threw up a new page about the 3 webcomics that I regularly read. No idea if my reader-base (Kirsten and Sam) is interested at all, but there ya go!

Lisa Hannigan has the most beautiful voice in the world.

Don't beleive me? Then I'm gonna punch you in your left ear.

Arrrrgghhh! I'm a pirate!

I'm a pirate. I really am. And I don't mean a software/movie/music pirate, everybody does that. I mean I'm an actual pirate, with boats and the proper lingo, and sometimes even the lack of bathing! Here's how this came to be.

Tom, Tommy, Tommy's friend, Ryan and I went wakeboarding today on Utah Lake, and there were a good number of other boaters there chopping up the water. I told Tom that we should bring my rifle and shoot at them to get them to leave. If we did that, then we'd be real pirates. But none of us really liked the idea of going to jail, so that idea was nixed. Then Tom said we could chop up the water like they are doing to us, and we could do it very well. And although nobody dies when we do this, it's still very annoying, and very pirate-esque.

And boy did we chop up that lake. Tommy and his friend went tubing, and I turned that lake into the definition of chop! Arrrggghhh!

Battlefield 2 - another really enjoyable game

I really enjoy playing Battlefield 2. They had the ingenious idea of integrating rewards, unlocks, and goals to strive for in a multiplayer first person shooter (FPS). Now, this isn't unique to video games by any means, Ghost Recon did this years ago with "hero" unlocks, and other games have similar features.

Why I give them credit for this, is because they are the first to do so on such a large scale (MMO). And I don't mean MMO in the sense that 64 people can play on the same server, I mean large scale in the sense that tens of thousands of people have their stats recorded and ranked (here's my stats).

Right now my global score is just under 3,000. I need 11,000 for my next rank advance and weapon unlock. The benefit of the weapon unlock is obvious. But the benefit of the advancement in rank really only matters to leaders. People with higher rank will be able to take the position of commander from those whose rank is lower. I don't play commander a whole lot, I prefer forming my own squad and playing as squad leader. But as squad leader you will sometimes notice that the commander isn't doing a good job. If that's the case, I'll apply for commander at the start of the next round.

Today I got my Basic Command badge. That's not an easy one to get. I'm rather proud of this, and grateful to the group of soldiers that I was playing with today. Without their skilled work (play?), I wouldn't have gotten this.

Saturday night (really it was Sunday morning, but I hadn't gone to bed yet, so it was Saturday to me) I got my Explosive Ordinance badge, and my Basic Transport badge! I'm so happy. The Explosive Ordinance badge is acquired by getting 15 kills with explosives in one round. I had tried to get this for weeks, but was only able to get it by using a rather devious method. While playing Strike at Karkand, I spawned at the USMC southernmost base. There is almost always a HMMWV or two there. Playing as spec-ops I loaded all 5 C4 packs on the front of the jeep, and drove towards the enemy. When I would get close to a group of 2 or more enemy soldiers, I would hop out of the jeep, and hit the C4 detonator. This would send jeep chunks all over the place, killing the bad guys, and myself as well. As I was doing all this, I also earned my Basic Transport badge (24 minutes in a transport vehicle)!

Now I need only the Knife, Pistol, Helicopter, and Aviator badges to complete my full set of Basic level badges. This is exactly what makes this game so good. It's very replayable because there is always something to strive for. After the Basic badges, you can try for the Veteran badges, and then the Expert badges. There are also many commendations that you can earn. Most of them have never been earned by anyone, so nobody outside of EA really knows how to get them all.

If you're gonna be pro-choice, why not go all the way

Sweetwater Post-natal abotion clinic

I'm not gonna title this one

So I was kinda setup to meet a woman a few weeks ago. We started by e-mailing each other, and everything seemed fine. After a few days, she wanted to meet, but I gave her my cell number instead. We had quite a few e-mails, and a few phone conversations from about that Saturday to the next Tuesday (I think). Probably about 4 hours of total phone time.

In that time I got the impression that she wasn't as interested in church as I am. For anyone that doesn't know me, I'm LDS. Religion hasn't always been such a high priority to me, but in the last year or so, I've made a real effort to attend church regularly, and now I attend pretty much every Sunday. It's also worth pointing out that here in Utah, it's kinda odd for a guy to be more religious than a woman. There were other things that made me think that this wasn't gonna go anywhere, but I won't get into those items here.

In one of those phone conversations, she wanted to setup a time and place to meet. I still don't know exactly why, but I was hesitant to meet her. Maybe it had something to do with my not being impressed with her from phone conversations. She wanted me to meet her at her work, which just didn't sound fun to me. I'd rather be on neutral ground, not sitting at her work around all her co-workers, being studied and evaluated. Well, I never committed to meet her there, and in fact I slept in rather late that day, about 4pm. She wanted me to meet her at about 5, and I had work at 6. Instead of going to her work, I went to Best Buy and bought a new bluetooth earpiece (the Jabra BT800) for my Nokia 3650.

She called me at about 5:10 as I was heading home with my new toy. I felt bad when she said that she was all dolled up to meet me, so out of guilt and fear of looking like a coward, I told her to head over to my work later that night. She showed up on what must have been the busiest night in our companies history. For about a half hour she sat there bored while I worked on 240 down T1's (3 switches with 80 T1's each). Eventually she asked if she should just leave, and I told her yes.

I hate to say it for fear of being labelled "shallow", but I was not physically attracted to her. I know, I've heard all about how there's nothing wrong with thinking that, but it doesn't change how I feel about it, there's a human being at the other end of that equation. Anyway, the next day she wanted me to meet her at WalMart to help help pick something out for a friend. That was supposed to be at 12:30, but I slept in to 2pm (I work from 6pm to 2am, and I rarely goto bed before 4am).

Later that day she text messaged me, asking is I want to "persue this any further" and "c what happens". Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but the old "see what happens" line implies something romantic. I've never had a friend ask me if I want to call them later to "see what happens", so I saw this as her way of asking if I wanted to take our relationship from a friendship to dating.

I replied with this: "I don't think we should. The church is very important to me, and I don't think you and I have compatible views of our spirituality."

Maybe it was premature of me to call it off this soon, but I honestly thought that this was the best way out that didn't string her along. I put about an hour of thought into that one reply. Well this reply brought on a flurry of unpleasantness directed at me. She eventually came out with some line about how I was insulting her spirituality. This didn't come out until the next day, so I don't think this is what bothered her at first. My best guess is she felt I was rejecting her based solely on her appearance, and she wanted me to own up to that. It also had undertones of wanting to catch me being shallow, then I'd be the bad guy taking all the blame. That's what I think from a few hours of conversations (later on), but I have no discrete reason for thinking that.

After a few text messages and a few hours, I finally sent her one asking her to call me so we could talk this all out. She has a bad habit of ignoring the questions I asked in TM's, and ranting on about how horrible I am. We didn't get much resolved in the phone conversation, even after about an hour.

What bugged me probably the most is how she kept trying to vilify me with the spirituality thing. She kept saying that I insulted her by dissing on her spirituality with my first reply "The church is very important to me, and I don't think you and I have compatible views of our spirituality." Man, I don't know how I could have done better than that. To me that seems to be about the easiest let down in the history of the world. I spent some time thinking of alternatives, but this seemed to get the point across without hurting any feelings. I didn't think that I needed to include any of the other reasons for not being interested, as this, to me, seemed sufficient. After talking through all this with her, she repeatedly reiterated how horrible of a person I am for saying something so cruel.

I can understand her being a little upset that I rejected her after only a week or so, but I would have to think she deserves some liability there. When she asked if I wanted to "see what happens", if I had answered "yes", what would the next step be? Surely it would be a date. I didn't see a need for a date, I had already experienced enough of her to form a preliminary opinion of who she is. And she isn't a bad person, not by any means. But I would have to be VERY impressed with a lady to be willing to wait months or more for her to come back to the church.

And by saying "no" to her, I wasn't saying that I was unwilling to ever talk to her again. I just didn't want to "see where this goes", if you know what I mean. Had she asked if we were still gonna call and talk, I would be more than willing. I was never asked that.

Now that you've all gotten the proper and complete 1 side of the story, are any of you willing to comment? Was I out of line with my reply? I thought that my letdown was as kind as possible, but maybe my self-evaluation isn't as accurate as I think. What could I have done better here?

Adam

Fathers day, and Mothers day

My parents are cool. They are far more interesting than most.

Unless you dad is a secret agent, I probably have you beat in the "cool dad" category. He used to race dragsters professionally in the 60's, he's been in more street fights (in his youth) than any 7 other fathers, and if you need to know some fact, odds are that he knows it.

And my mom, yeah, you lose there also. She is so kind that she makes June Cleaver look like a crack addict, and she has a work ethic you just don't find anymore.

I've never had a friend meet my parents that wasn't impressed. It wasn't until just a few years ago that I realized how good I really had it. Then I look back at my grandparents, and it kinda makes sense. My father gets his keen intellect from his dad, and his spirituality from his mother. My mom was raised mostly without her father, and that was probably the best gift he could have given her. I've really only met him once, but I'd take my maternal grandmother over my maternal grandfather any day of the week. My mom's mother was kind at heart, and may have been the hardest worker I've met. You've got to be pretty tough to raise 4 kids on your own in the 50's. I'm sure that's where mom get's her work ethic from. And mom's spirituality is all her own, she has her mother to thank for part of it, but she has fought the good fight and stayed the course.

I guess I should tell them more often how much I love them.

14 Mhz

Ok, I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, wanted the new 14Mhz Futaba controller. 2048 step servo resolution, dual processors, 640x240 color screen, 14 channels, Compact Flash memory slot, customizable shoulder switches, up to 100 model memory, etc... Then I read that it's powered by Windoze CE!!!

That's all I need, my $2000 radio get's a virus and brings new meaning to the term "crash". Or maybe I can experience a .dll conflict mid flight? I think it's in the realm of possibility to experience some horrible security flaw that would allow my new transmitter to be a zombie used by spammers to flood the world with unwanted e-mails.

Ok, so none of that is gonna happen, but a lot is going to have to change before I will trust my $1500 helicopter to a Micro$oft product. Shame on you Futaba! Shame on you for thinking that all (or even most) R/C modelers are ignorant of the horrible products put out by Microsoft.

Helicopters are cool

I vividly remember when I was a kid that I wanted to live to see (and use) laser guns and spaceships. Now I think I'd settle for a turbine R/C helicopter.... and a laser gun.