So where do tired heroes go when they want a good place to sit and eat?
I swear I’m not making this up…
Category: Geekery
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Hero-keteer Roll Call
Thinking about those hero portraits from last night reminded me that I have yet to mine my City of Heroes gaming for journal fodder. So here goes:
I may not have accomplished much this weekend, but I finally leveled all of my characters on the Protector server to 7 or above. For the longest time I had heroes languishing around 3, 4 and 5. No longer! Each hero has at least one Pool power and has left their starting zone for adventures in the (slightly) more dangerous parts of the world.
A player can have eight characters on a given server, and I’ve filled all eight slots on Protector (as well as a couple on Pinnacle). I know there are people who play one character almost exclusively, with an “alt” or two to relieve the boredom. I’m such a dilettante, though, that I get a kick out of playing any and all of my heroes. Why? Because I want to see what they can do! That’s the whole point, leveling up and trying out new things.
Heck, I’m already thinking that I don’t have enough different build types. I caught myself this morning wondering who I could blow out on Protector to make room for a new build… then realized “oh, duh, I can just build heroes on another server.”
So if you run into Arctic Ant, Woods Cutter, ProPaine, Rossum’s Fist, Spiny Echidna, Myne alMyne, NeutrinoStorm or Charger Man while playing on the Protector server, feel free to say hello. They’re all friendly, outgoing sorts of fellows…
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Accomplishment Preceded By Frustration
I actually accomplished something useful today. Even better, it’s something I’ve wanted since about a month after I took this job most of eight years ago: A VPN rig.
Mind you, I had to learn a whole new set of quirks… like “how to modify the default IP filters to allow the server to websurf and ping other machines,” since that box is also our SUS server and Servers Alive checker, and when you break networking those programs start to complain a wee bit. Ah well, I needed to stretch my brain a little anyway, right?
Tonight, of course, is the fun part: I get to try logging into the thing…
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Just how I wanted to spend my Friday afternoon.
The server damned near went down again, this time for the same reason as last: Someone out there thinks Mari’s site needs to be comment-spammed hard, fast and continuously. It’s not the spam itself that kills us, but rather the Perl threads and drive activity associated with the spamflooding.
I’ve taken some steps. For instance, commenting no longer takes place in a separate comment window. (There’s a geeky reason for that I won’t go into. Security through obscurity, or some-such.) We’ll see how effective they are, and for how long.
If this doesn’t work I’ll have to either turn off her comments or switch her to the comment script the rest of us are using. I’m averse to that solution mainly because she’ll lose all existing comments for good, and also because I don’t know if our comment system can survive a concerted attempt at spamming. I’m not in what you’d call a great big hurry to find out, you know?
Argh. Spammers die. Grrr.
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RIMM-job
One of our local Corporate-level managers received a computer upgrade last month, and I was eagerly awaiting the chance to pick over her old workstation. See, we’d ordered it specially configured from Dell with DVD-ROM, CD-RW, and Zip 250 drives as well as various other geegaws.
The first thing I did was spec out the CPU and other basics. After determining that with just a bit more RAM it could be a mightily useful Linux box or possibly a VPN server, I popped the case to drop in the new memory. Imagine my horror when what came out of the RAM slots weren’t the DIMMs I’m used to, but Rambus memory!
I don’t happen to have any other machines, at work or at home, that use Rambus. I doubt my employers will fork over a few hundred for replacement sticks to put into a “retired” computer. The only good news in all of this is that 128 MB is probably good enough for a single-purpose server of some sort… but I’m still terribly disappointed. So much neat equipment, so little use for it all.
Then again, I could always just shamelessly gut the thing for parts. It’s not like I’ve never done that before…
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Mind that reaper, boy.
As I’m gearing up for what I expect to be another one-pick-goes year of The Dead Pool, I decided to sign up for the Celebrity Death Beeper. Now, I’m not the most superstitious person I know, but this has to be a good sign:
Welcome to the Celebrity Death Beeper family!
You are family member #11,711.Whoah, Nelly! That’s not only a bunch of lucky numbers, but it’s also a palindrome! This must be my year.
Right? *cough, cough* Right?