Love and Hugs to you both!

Have you read the Hyperbole And A Half entries about her dogs? :)

It just makes BUILDING better because you can not worry about it being night, or an exploding creep demolishing part of your creation. ;)

I hear you tho’ – I’m in a similar place.

Besides, haters gonna hate.

I miss LJ. I miss feeling connected to people who cared about my daily life. I miss feeling that no matter the distance, friendships could survive.

It’s not that I think people don’t care all of the sudden; rather, everyone is just too busy to stay connected with people only through digital media.

I only post there every now and then looking to stir up trouble ;)

I also miss the community, and actually still check my LJ friends page a couple times a day (if anything, out of habit).

Sometimes, the noise drowns out the signal.

As stupid as it sounds, I always shook my head at people checking FB everywhere on their phone.. Yet I had it installed myself.

WoW runs OK enough on my mbpro, but Ben has a huge monitor with a top-of-the-line graphics card. So, it’s kind of hard to ignore the huge difference in performance. /shrug

Doing instances will happen, but I don’t know if it will ever become the norm. It doesn’t matter how easy they make getting into them. Doing multiple little chunks (5-10 mins) of questing here and there feels best, and the time commitment for instances only goes up over time. We shall see, though.

I actually just moved a bunch of music stuff (archived/working projects and sample libraries) to a new hard drive, so I have plenty of space for gaming (and so much buffer, too). I’m on a 4 year-old MacBook without 3D acceleration, and WoW runs fine, which seems like black magic to me.

All this disjointed rambling aside, Robyn and I are level 15 and looking forward to mounts really soon ;-)

They made queuing for instances super easy. I’m with you about liking to play solo, but now that I’ve done a bunch of random dungeons I’m kind of getting over it. And if you get grouped with a total @ss you can vote to kick. I don’t remember if that was ever a feature originally.

Unless you’re talking about endgame content, of which I have never experienced. When Katie and Bob decided to transfer to our server, I figured I would at least level one toon and try it out. Should be easier to get to 85 since they started having guild perks like extra mounted speed and xp buffs.

Ben asked me if I wanted a gaming machine. I kind of do. I mean, it would be something we could build together, plus it would free up a ton of space on my Macbook so I can actually use it for projects it was meant for. Does that sound like a commitment The Lifestyle? I mean, I don’t really play for more than an hour unless he’s playing with me. And at our level we pretty much just queue for instances because I hate Outland.

Post-Build Server Copying is the new Compiling.

In all seriousness, I’m so happy for all the good things that have come your way. You give me hope that all of my own angst won’t be for nothing either.

I was a bit let down by the end of the game, in the sense that if you have 100 speech there’s not much in the way of action. I do like how they summarize the threads of the story depending on your action.

I know the struggles of having to create the “chrome” of a project after the initial “functional” part is done. As a programmer, the chrome is often an afterthought when maybe sometimes it should be the forethought.

As far as ASP.NET, I don’t have any particular problem with it, but needing an IIS server to use it is limiting for easy non-work development. My work doesn’t require a lot of in-depth knowledge of how it works (yet), so I’m getting by all right. Using C# as the server-side language makes me feel like more of a well-rounded programmer (in that it supports non-web dev, too), but it’s more challenging in its scope. Visual Studio 2008, which I currently use, still tends to do a lot of code bloat when using built-in widgets, which is something that irks my from-scratch tendencies, even though in a higher-pressure environment is often necessary. It’s possible VS 2010/MVC is better about this, but I haven’t used it.

I still use CakePHP for my main sites (nebyoolae.com and nebyooweb.com), so when I’m doing my own development I’m mainly digging around in PHP. Both it and Ruby on an Apache stack is easier to assemble on my Mac at home. Regardless of back-end, I spend the majority of my time on the front-end, so HTML/CSS/JS cares little for what platform I’m on.

I definitely feel stretched a bit thin maintaining three different back-end technologies, and there’s no clear cut preference except for the free/open-source nicety of both PHP and Ruby. For now, I will continue to try to be knowledgeable in all until I have more experience with Ruby. Maybe then I’ll have a clearer picture of what avenue I want to pursue further.

I ask because I faced the same situation when working on side projects at home between my mac and PC.

Oh, and BTW, Happy Birthday, you old man you.

So your URL would be “blah.aspx?file=1″ and it would stream like, “blah.mp3″ out.

Not entirely sure how you’d do that with CakePHP/PHP. But I think the idea is the same.

Also, I can hardly wait for April, when I can cut back to nighttime. It’s going to be SUPER AND MAGICAL.

Also also, thank you for reminding me to make an ortho appt.

For me, that’s the prop that spins up and rolls the anxiety plane off the runway. “Should” statements… they can be really dangerous. They’re an internal judgment, causing us to question, punish, and criticize ourselves. I’ve learned to stop every “should” statement and really, really think about it.

We’re told all the time not to care what others think, but you’re right in that judgment is one of those human things that happens all the time. People do think things about us, and sometimes negative things; in my mind, if you’re a sensitive person, want to be socially/empathetically successful, and have had psyche-molding experiences with judgment, it seems natural that you’re going to care what others think. Feedback can be useful and help us grow, and we have to be open to it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But yes, when the terror of someone else’s slim perspective of our personhood really begins to disrupt everyday life, it is an issue. And a tricky one to sort out. I just think this is a cool process to read about, and it’s clear that you’re thinking through it in a thorough way. Just don’t punish yourself too much. :)

Congratulations on submitting the bug. You didn’t avoid it – you powered on through, potential judgment and all! That takes balls.

Some of your finest and funniest writings were on LJ, and it’s where I had the privilege of meeting you, and watching you go through your ups and downs, as I experienced and wrote about my own.

You’ll be missed here.

NebMooBlog (for music)
LazyInTheBlog