The Happiest Place on Earth, part One

And so it begins. As I write this, I’m at about fifteen thousand feet in an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-700, watching the upper surface of the clouds undulate beneath me. We’re about two hours away from landing, and I only have about 75% battery life left on old Bradtop. I may yet have enough time to fulfill my life-long ambition to play Worms World Party at 30,000 feet. Dad just discovered an item in his Popular Science magazine that is, get this, a rifle scope/digital camera that takes a pictures as you pull the trigger. “Capture your prey’s last moment of life,” the tagline claims. Morbid, or what? It’s like “Bloodlust” all over again.

We’ve just arrived. Our room is obviously very new, with faux-marble counter, 1880s style headboards for the beds and a lot of Disney-related art. Our room is almost right over the monorail line leading into the parks, and we can see the new Twilight Zone Hollywood Tower from our window. Even with the door to our balcony closed, we can still hear the occasional screams. It sets the atmosphere, I tell you what. Lisa and Becky are chomping at the bit to go swimming. I’m not really a water person, so I’ll probably just sit poolside and read. I just got Thief of Lies, the sequel to the extremely good Dhampir, and I’m anxious to get going on that. Oh, and apparently I start to suck at Worms at high altitudes.

Last year, we arrived in Anaheim on Saturday and we went right into the park that same day. This year, unburdened by the desire to return to disappointing attractions such as Knott’s Berry Farm and Sea World, we got an extra day in the park and didn’t feel the need to go right on the first day. Things definitely worked out better this year. For one thing, we’re all tired, just as we were last year, but we got the chance to relax, sit by the pool, and read, instead of overwhelming ourselves with The Happiest Place on Earth right away. DSL costs a whopping $6.00 per half hour, in keeping with the price inflation here, so I’ll probably only post updates every other day. My 128mb SmartMedia card can hold 257 pictures in our 2.1 megapixel camera, and I upload them nightly, so my digital record should be quite complete. I’m going to bed now.

Brad sets mode: +tired

In slightly over 12 hours, I will be on an Alaska Airlines flight
heading, ironically, south to Orange County, California. On an
unrelated note, I am very tired.

Made with some more Ars Magica last night. I really like a lot of
things about the system, but there are a few things that irk me just a
little bit. For one thing, the suggested difficulties in the game seem
a little too low, even for beginning characters. A "difficult" task
might require a roll of 9+ on 1d10 + ability + skill, which for a new
character might be 2-11 for a rare skill like Enigmatic Wisdom, to 6-16
for a more common skill like Awareness. The end result is that
most beginning character can accomplish difficult tasks about 70% of
the time, which just seems too high to me. Maybe others will disagree.

I started using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX at work today, in my
continuing quest to find an editor that doesn't suck at modifying the
company intraweb page. My search is complicated by the fact that I know
very, very little about ASP, VBscript, or Javascript. Furthermore, the
guy who did this stuff before wrote everything in a fashion similar to
writing a novel, but only publishing it in chapter-long segments which
are then rubber-banded together in no particular order. If anyone knows
about this stuff, then consider this a big HELP NEEDED sign.

I'm bringing my laptop with me down to Disneyland, and I've been told
that we're going to have a nice phat pipe coming into our room, so
hopefully I'll be able to continue posting and answering emails on-site.

It's me, baybee...

Exchange Server Blues

Think Microsoft Exchange is your one-stop answer for a fully-integrated email, scheduling, and contact database solution? You would be wrong, my friend. Microsoft Exchange is not merely a popular server application, it is also a Dante-esque hell full of torments for the arrogant and lustful. Of course, in this case "sin" means forgetting to restart a small pile of useless processes such as "NSPI.exe" on the domain controller, and your eternal punishment is spending hours and hours on the phone or internet with the useless syncophants at MS tech support. Anybody who wants to guess what I've been doing for the past couple of days, go right ahead.


It's sad that when I finish talking about work and I can't think of a single thing I've done over the past couple of days that's both even slightly interesting and doesn't involve work or computers or anything. I'm glad that I'm just doing this to pay for school.

I'm trying for the third time to play through Arcanum. The game's setting of magic vs. technology in a Victorian age world is really cool, the character system for creation and utilization is very good, but the game is hard. Death is never far away. Still, the game is almost like a more dynamic version of Morrowind what with the tons of side-quests and huge world. Except people actually go to bed at night.

The family is starting to gear up for the big vacation to Disneyland next week. Much as I like the place, I'll just be glad to get out of my routine for awhile.