Yeouch. Last night, Penny and I finally got around to collecting a piece of furniture to increase our book storage capacity – and serve as a place to put the bedroom computer. The result is a massive desk shelf beast thing. I am guessing that the durned thing weighs something near 200 pounds. It took some serious finagling to get into our car and took a phonecall to Scott to get out of the car and into our apartment. 8pm.

That in and of itself was enough to completely wear me out. But no. It was decided that we needed to actually build the thing last night. Much effort later – and much reading of fancy picture writing (no words in the construction manual) later, we had the thing about 85% done and were completely worn out. 11pm.

Since our bedroom was a complete disaster area, we decided to go sleep in the living room – our couch folds out into what is actually quite the comfortable little bed. At least, it is normally comfortable. With me as sore as I was, sleep out there wasn’t an option. So, at 1am, I moved junk off of the bed and we relocated.

Sleeping pills + aches = I didn’t wake up until about 10-11am. Shortly after I was up and dressed, we started back in on the thing. And finally, it is done. The computer is working, sees the network and is picking up tv and radio signals correctly. But ouch. My arms are going to hurt for the next two or three days if I am guessing correctly.

Well, I was denied the promotion. So, I am going to be shifting into mostly-full-time mode at ECE for the time being while I look for other positions. I have applied for a job running the CCIT sitelicense server and a few other related things. I’m familiar with the systems, so I should have a shot at this one as well. We shall see.

There are two or three other promising positions in other departments, but they are requiring code examples and letters of interest. So I will have to take time to generate content to apply to them.

Sigh. I figured I’d waste a bit more time before heading in to work this afternoon, so I’ve been playing some more EVN. It’s rather annoying… on my Federation campaign, I am now wanted in like 4 different Fed systems. I can’t land on Earth to get my next plot mission.

My fleet had consisted of 4 pirate enterprises, one fed destroyer (carrier edition), and one pegasus for cargo capacity. I am flying a rebel issue destroyer with a trade-in of 4.5 mil – 8 main guns, 5 turrets. It’s a mean ship. However, the problem is that apparently the AI on my fleet was not the best. I am now down to two of the enterprises because I sold the destroyer and the rest got themselves blown up when they aggroed Fed navies and thus earned me a bit of infamy.

So, now I am hanging out on the remote edges of Fed space, pillaging pirate ships in the hopes that I will get enough favor back with my government that I’ll be able to land on Earth again.

I really want to be able to buy a Fed carrier. It’s annoying me that I’m so far into the campaign and they’ve not rewarded me with any tech yet. Oh well. Maybe I’ll just run guns for a bit or something to spite them.

Ok, so it’s official. I’m giving World of Warcraft another shot. Specifically, I’m giving it another shot on a normal server – not a PvP one. Not that the normal servers are strictly PvE, but they’re at least hopefully going to prove better than the gankfest that my old server has turned into.

Since my primary char on Sargeras is a lvl 53 dwarven hunter (marksman/beast), and since Elijah is creating a tauren shaman on Thunderhorn, I’ve created a troll warrior. I just hit lvl 6 and picked up those abilities and grabbed every quest available to me from both villages in Durotar – just under one hour of play time, so that’s on schedule. I will think about playing later tonight and trying to hit 10 and move to Crossroads. Possibly will look into grabbing a guild charter so we have something to sign everyone up onto for chat purposes.

It is not cool when your body decides that it will ignore the impulses of intentionally drowsificating chemicals. This happened once before – but it was early on in my treatment. So, here I am awake… and with enough sedatives in me that I really shouldn’t be able to sit upright, much less walk around and play video games and stuff. Sigh. Figures, since I need to be in to work early tomorrow (this) morning.

On the bright side, I made some more progress on one of my Escape Velocity games. I beat the Vell-os campaign like a year ago, beat the Polaris campaign this week, and have been stuck on the last Pirate mission since shortly after I beat the game for the first time. This leaves the game I was playing right now (Fed) in addition to the Auroran and Rebel campaigns before I have officialy done the whole thing. I tried the Rebel campaign once before but that file must have been deleted and my every attempt to even start on the Auroran plot line has been thwarted by the nasty evil RNG demons.

Upon reflection, my activities of this day (once I stopped singing and gagging) have been little more than yak shaving. The definitive explanation of the concept is an email to the AI Lab.

In fact, I am really quite perpetually engaged in such activities. Most hackers are, it seems. And, I would expect that most people in general find themselves in a somewhat related cycle.

The worse example of yak shaving in my life right now is the combination of mud and work. The best visual explanation of this phenomenon that I can think of for non-hackers is as a stack of cards – each with a todo item on it. I have something that I need to do, it gets placed on the table. While performing the task I either discover something that needs to be done beforehand or I am presented with another task.

Pre-reqs and more important tasks go on top of the stack, less important tasks go on the end of the stack. I can only work on the item on the top of the stack.

Using the real world example:

I need to redesign the UATV site and make the KAMP site dynamic again after it was remodeled by other people during my breakdown. The UATV redesign isn’t as important as the KAMP upgrade, so KAMP gets priority, is the top card of the two.

However, I am also quite possibly leaving ECE in the near future, so I really should be working on the Alumni server migration to OSX. This requires that I migrate old user accounts, migrate the account generation system, and add a few more features to the administrative interface. So, I need to figure out how to move the accounts over (this solves porting the generation system). Admin interface isn’t a priority, so it gets to be on the bottom of this new stack of cards before being added to the whole stack.

I also want to work on the mud. This has a lower priority than the work projects, but I am also constantly being hammered on IM and email – so the items on the mud stack keep moving around even when I’m not actively working on it.

My current long-term goal for the mud right now is the completion of my spell list, a fully realized crafting tree, and the formation of the PW guild as an organization. For complete and total satisfaction with spells, I need material components. Components require crafting recipes. These recipes require raw materials that are harvestable in different ways. For full satisfaction with recipes, I want people to be able to scribe them. Full satisfaction with magic would also imply spellbooks, which implies books. For books to work the way I like, they need to have language support.

The resultant stack looks something like this:

- alumni server planning
  - meet with tony
    - discuss overall server goal and make checklist
    - discuss default user options and settings
  - write a 'terms of service' document to refer users to
- alumni account transfer script
  - find out where passwords are stored
    OR
  - write some sort of magical transfer program that auths against the old server
- alumni account system migration
  - alumni admin interface and utilities
    - might be deprecated by osx utilities
  - password reset button
- kamp tune-up
  - figure out what to do about sports page
- uatv redesign
  - poll for ideas
  - consider new site flow
  - make change on dev copy of site
    - test dev site for reactions
    - launch new site
- rewrite crafting tree (notes)
  - change base gathered resource objects
    - consolidate all mines and plants in the game
    - introduce new materials
    - fix gemstone drop rates
  - write intermediary phase recipes
  - migrate existing system to support tiers of material difficulty
    - write new recipes for general in-game objects
- mud language support (ml)
- paper rewrite
  - scribe recipes
  - books
    - recipes and spells can go into pages of books
- make spell component ingredients farmable
  - write recipes to make usable components out of ingredients
- complete spell list
- build pw guild hall
- create books and put them in pw library
- advertise the guild's opening

And while I was writing this, my boss at engineering just pointed me at Nagios, which thing has now been added to the top of the stack :P