Well well… That was a harrowing couple of days with no computer. All worked out okay. Took in some of that fresh air stuff, not bad. Overrated though I’m sure. /kidding! Driving is fairly fun, especially when I’m gettin’ 49 mpg. Was almost a little scary running on the last block of gas (not sure how much gas to each box, but it does make one nervous’ish riding on a tank that low.) but we eventually stopped at the gas station (not without stopping for mocha frappicinos first) and filled the Prius back up.

The fan on my computer has been rather…. let’s say.. Irritating. Not to the point of quitting the use of it, but mostly in that you can’t hear the TV over the fan. I hardly pay attention to the dang tv anywho, not a decent thing on. I do appreciate the Star Trek: the next generation reruns on wgn, and totally miss the MacGyver reruns from the spike channel. (darn comcast took away a couple channels, that one included. I’m mostly okay with that though, it was horridly apparent that it was meant to be a channel for man-folk.) I bought myself the MacGyver dvd set, so if I ever do open it. (I’m one of those kind of obsessive collecting folks who may keep stuff in pristine packaging. Even though currently no plans of selling. ROFL! It’s just how I am. I’m sure I’ll unwrap it soon enough)

Anywho, yes, the original intent of this post. To mention my lack of computer for the last couple of days. My computer made a horrendous fizzle and immediately broke into a tremendous POW! My newest kitty cat was snoozing on my legs and unfortunately she did not take kindly to the noise. She actually does not take well to any noise, just about anything startles her. We get traffic by the house a ton, so she’s getting used to some, but when folks go and rev their engines as they go by, or loud booming music, She’s so ready to run. Anywho, this loud Pow, sent her scrambling, and her back claws (I swear… when she chews on them, she must be sharpening them, especially after I just trimmed them!) … her back claws left a large deep scratch above my left ankle. I’ve been using Lavendar essential oils, cuts down on infection, speeds up the healin’ a bit, and should cut down on scars. Totally smarts.

Computer totally went dark, only the monitor stated that it had “no signal”. Of course panic ensued, “what the?!” What all blew up? Is something more gonna catch fire? Unplug first… first aid later. Went to examine the computer, no flames coming from where the noise came from. Sniffed.. definitely a burnt smell to it, and no, not a delightful burnt meat smell, but now I’m getting hungry.

After that was confirmed that nothing had caught fire, called my local computer repair shop (they built this rig 4-5 years back. It was pretty uber then, and it’s still going strong, with a few fixxes here and there.) Told them what happened, and they said it was likely the power supply, which made since to me, sense you need power supplied to a computer to run it. (yes I meant to swap those words around.) Asked them if they could take care of it. Sure. No prob 45 dollars for a new one, plus labor. Cool! … okay not cool.. time to limp off for some first aid… Kleenex.. Lavendar.. And thankful it doesn’t need stitches, though it almost looked like it. /wince

So took the computer to get taken care of.  They said they could work on it really quick-like, but I didn’t get the call til 2 days later that it was done. But hey it’s good to have some time off from the computer. Got quite a bit done.

Took the car to a local teen-challenge car wash, then asked them how long they’d be available that day, so went back home and got my truck and brought it there. (Now the truck has been doing a lot of sitting around lately, between layers of sap from the pine trees, black gunk from the air (asphalt dust from all the traffice that flies by our place), and a thick layer of yellow pollen that has accumulated over the last week now. I asked them for an entire cleaning, including the roof which had some waxxed in crud, or maybe it was just sap. After they had the front end and top of the truck fairly cleaned, I opened the doors for them and asked for an interior cleaning as well. Sure no prob, they get those requests often, hince them having a vacuum available. Then Last, but DEFINITELY not least, the bed of the truck and tailgate. Has only seen a cleaning once, and I wasn’t really very effecient at it when I tried. My mother and I we tend to throw any change that we find on the ground in the trunk. No reason, just habbit. They took a pushbroom to it, and used their hose on high power and blew out the grime that was clogging it up. Thanked them multiple times over and gave them a well worth it donation.

So after all that time out the last few days, was glad to get the computer back, only come to find one of my two harddrives were not showing up. So had to get the computer back to them before they closed. Took a little fiddling, but he got it plugged in and reading correctly. So I’ve got my rig back up and running. Very thankful it was something that can be so easily fixxed, a simple replaced power supply. Phew! Now back to reality.

Whelp, it seems that brutes are the newest craze to relieve lotro downtime, and/or internet boredom. And man they are addicting to make, the character generator has so many lil guys and gal designs to pick from, and then colourations. Very fun. My first one was under Clover’s sillypinkdragon brute:
http://funkybluefairy.mybrute.com someone did me the honor of pupiling under him, always looking for more. I then made another:
http://furrygraygriffin.mybrute.com  This next one ended up kinda badly, no weapon, but he’s annoyingly agile, just not really a hard hitter and leveling slow so far.

Patience joined up with her lalalalalemon (not quite sure how many la’s… 4?) I pupiled a couple brutes under hers.
http://robsyeruncle.mybrute.com This fellahs not too shabby, nothin’ overly special, but better than my gray griffin.
http://qcontinuum.mybrute.com My Star Trek fave buddy. This one was my second, she was kinda cruddy to start with, I even beated her up a few times, hehe, she’s toughened up a bit, not a ton, her hp dropped since she earned a puppy dawgie, but he does make up for that for a little bit.

And then, One I did under myself, I can’t help it, these are addicting.
http://wargiegoodness.mybrute.com She got some herculean strength and can pack a whollop.

I was watching their advertising and noticed some other games to try out. Signed up for the dinoRPG… I do Not recommend it, that had to be world’s most boringest (pokemon wannabe) please wait 2 hours before you can do something, and the time increases as your pets/dinoz levels up. The graphics are cutesy, concept interesting. The pet battles are animated exactly like mybrutes. The turn wait… boring. Earning funds to buy more pets, harder than boring. It apparently was a foreign website at some point and now anglaisized. I hit their forums and found a few posters there who got disappointed by the WAAAIIIITING, and each of the posts were pretty much met with “if ya don’t like it, leave.” So I got a cute dino kitty Wanwan, looks like a white bobtail lynx, I guess they have a pretty cool pet randomizer too, and each day is different ones. Considerin’ purchasin’ it left me with only 1 gold piece to spare, back to earning cash. Apparently there are folks who frequent it, and have little to no problem. (only allowed one account, so multi-account work arounds are pretty much out.) Not Recommended for folks who prefer NOW games.

At level 58 in Lotro, I’ve been reluctant to log-in, yet again. I did get some Festival stuff done though, happily 2 of my alts have their dances. (cept I think one is lacking dwarf1 dance). The cosmetic flower headband for my elf’s white elven pristine armour outfit, very nice. Yet cutesie enough for my level 9 hobbit minstrel. (Whom I still have yet to ding (with the magic level up XP)). Our kinhouse has a sinister keg, so I didn’t bother picking one up for my small (locked yet again) house. The Inn League maze challenge, nice touch, to help rep. I didn’t focus on it, but did it for the double leaves. Got my farmers their flower vase recipes. And everyone their own fishslap emotes.

BTW… Spore is still fun. I’ve been gettin’ back into it. (Having issues with my past files to registering, due to 2nd hard drive confusion.) I ignored that small issue, since the game still functions, and just started over. Anywho, I believe this to be one of my shorter blogs. Although it was still a rambler, so let’s leave it at that, and thanks for stoppin’ by. /rawr

Was browsing my most recent screenshots, trying to locate where my screenshots are now stored. Had a second harddrive added… so wasn’t quite sure where Lotro stashed them now.

Anywho I found a rather entertainig bug the other night.

I fell through Middle-Earth! … and just kept falling.. rather wild. Not fast. More a floating fall, but still falling enough to flap my cloak upward. I looked upwards and snapped a few screenies. Only one without the UI on, but it’s the prettiest one, what… with the pretty sunset (or is it sunrise?) colours in the sky.

Hrm.. does not seem to have a insert image button here. Let’s try HTML mode…. http://i41.tinypic.com/16c77me.jpg There we go now… (Edit note: Removed large unsizely picture, and left link here for anyone interested. The huge size just was wrecking the rest of the page. And if I can relocate which screenshot it was, I’ll chuck it into my gallery.)

I am not sure how I was rescued, wether my F7 stuck report got answered, or if the game was programmed to do a port if you fall through the world far enough. But I ended up teleported to the Elf starting spot in Ered Luin. It only had one slight drawback afterwards, my environment became very foggy. I decided to log to fix it eventually. It was kinda neat and made some environments spooky. Dol Dinen, when you can’t see further than 25meters… yeah.. kinda spooky when not everything is gray to ya quite yet.

Well, onto another topic. We got more Snow!!! <3 <3 <3 The rain that came as well, made the snow just the right mixture of moldable snow. Now if I just had someone to pelt snowballs at. The trunk of my truck is full to the max, I even had to pack it down so I could see through the rear window. Got some KFC chicken last night, for a meal today. If there’s one day of the year, that perturbs me the most is the 25th of Dec. when it shuts down a usually very reliable establishment. We had a Dunkin’ donuts here for awhile. the only day of the year it shuts down? yep. Oh well… I still have plenty of other days to do absolutely nothing on as well. this is just another one of ‘em.

Okay, bad title probably, considering I don’t know the true game source of the beloved typo. I read the wiki article on it once, but never found it worth remembering.

Anywho, as most folks prolly know. Snow hit a good portion of us Eastern U.S. folks, but as always, I love it. Mostly ’cause I don’t hafta be anywhere. Well besides the occasional food run. Anywho. I got a giggle out of the weatherman’s blog last night, before any snow hit us. (2am and still nothin’, I was almost positive were were not goin’ to get any snow.) There were a few people who left comments, and he (prolly jokingly) said he was going to put a plow on his Prius. The next person got a laugh out of that as well, sayin’ they would love to see that.

And this brings me to my topic. Prius are not winter friendly. Getting one stuck in a foot of snowwed in driveway, can result in frustration. While usually, Rocking back and forth *reverse, drive, reverse, drive, etc* can free A vehicle, the method seems to be better at digging said Prius deeper into a slip-slide, refuse to go anywhere. (It could be user error, but I tried all different gears.) Pushing these vehicles in any gear will do nothing but put yer spine or shoulder or whatever body part you put into it, out of alignment. These things are heavy and, IMO best left home during hefty snow.

However, while I had two experiences with this. First was Last year, stuck in a driveway that I shouldn’t have even attempted, however I was pressured by a passenger/back-seat driver to park off the street. And then when we decided that this was not going to work… Backing out proved un-possible. Fortunately we were househunting in a neighbourhood and there were people in houses nearby. A lady came by in her van and popped her head out of her window and asked if we needed help… Yep… She went back to her house and came out to us with two little hand towels.

Towels? /boggle Well, this was new to me. However she explained that we just needed to get them to slip underndeath the tires and it would give us traction to get out. I didn’t time how long we spent trying to rock the car forward and backward and inch (I should say millimeter) the towel under the wheels. It took a good lengthy time, but the method did get us out.

Second time was this year. Our landlord’s boy came and plowed out our yard, not really great and clean, so there was large amounts of snow that weren’t cleared out of the way. Anywho, upon bringing my Prius home, and wanting to back up into the cleared spot, I drove into the thick of some of this plowstuff, and backing up was no longer the option it was supposed to be. “Great… stuck in my own backyard.” Anywho, it was Sand to the rescue this time. It could of been cat litter as well. But nah, we saved that for the kitties. (3) These vehicles are very heavy, not push-friendly, and only get 25 mpg in the cold. (Still 10 mpg better than my truck in 4-wheel, but it’s definitely not the 50 mpg the Prius gets come summertime.)

Lesson learned. Use the 4-wheel drive feature on my truck. It’s a lot more fun. Four wheeling has always been my winter time ritual. Why change now? <3 Lake effect winter <3

Welp, again I’m a touch distraught, panicked, and majorly bummed out, over one little Turbine thing.

My missing e-mail from Turbine that says “thank you for participating in all our beta stress tests on Caradhras. We’d like to reward everyone who participated in stress-test nights with an in-game title. Thanks for helping us break the moria server multiple times during either one of our two stress tests. (Oh you were in both? Well we only have one title, will that be okay?)”

:::dreams on:::

It seems that Turbine doesn’t know my email address to send me happy news. Yet every /bug report I submitted, they had no problem sending me a “thank you for your bug.” automated e-mail. I’m rather bummed out. I was hoping to have Mithril-Hunter on my LM main character. I haven’t found an in-game deed title to suit her, but at least I could have a special one, someone might ask me about.

I’m a pretty passive gal. I’m really no longer sure I want to pursue the issue. I just am baffled beyond belief about how they can mess up my e-mail for one thing when it has never changed. Any suggestions of who I might be able to get in contact with regarding my Mithril-Hunter code?

I felt best to not write my feelings into a forum post on the Lotro boards. I already made a pest of myself on the Moria beta boards. And y’know… I know that I was not the only one who came up missing their reward e-mails. And we already had some people reply to us, that we shouldn’t expect Turbine to reward us at all. Getting to play beta is our reward, yada yada.

Starting Forum posts is not my forte. Trolls, flamers, and angry people, I like to not infuriate. Even sarcasm can be a tad on the iffy side. If it weren’t for a certain someone’s eyerolls and “fail” replies to many a posts, I probably might not be so apprehensive. And his are pretty darn tame compared to some. (All is forgiven with LOLCat posts usually.)

Welp again, my internet is giving me a fuss.

My best leveling bud, miz Elster helped me work on my tailor quest drake hide and even got me through Book 6, for Angmar watching stone access. phew, glad to have that done.

About halfway through my character freezes up. I warned her that I was going to be cutting out once in awhile. Again I am ever thankful that Windows “Repair” network connection button fixxes this issue almost Every time I use it. (Apparently most folks it doesn’t do anything for at all.) So anyways.. I only froze up 3-4 times today. Elster was kind enough to keep watch on my dot for when it stopped.

Funny thing is, I can talk on the voice chat, and they hear me. And they even reply… I don’t hear their reply usually, until I hit the repair, then all the sudden I get their voice/reply, just later than they actually said it. It’s like voice chat buffered itself until I repaired, weird huh?

Annoying thing is, when I use Ventrillo, usually for monsterplay, Vent instantly drops me, then reconnects. Hopefully the folks on Vent can forgive me for my multiple logins… (I saw 4 Griffy’s in the vent, when I alt-tabbed out of Lotro the other night. Scary…)

I am mystified, as is every technician, comcast repair person, IT guy, computer repair go-to-guy, I’ve spoke to. I am currently subscribed to a TechGuys forum board, hoping for help. And again, they are stumped as well. I’ve pinged while having a connection, and while losing my connection, they had me do ipconfig stuff and netstats, answered everything I could.

My last hope is possible missing drivers, that might not exist on my new Windows harddrive. I’ve googled these items, and so far no particular place has them. And the places that Claim that I need them and CLAIM to have them cost money to use. According to some posts I’ve stumbled upon. Some of these certain drivers should not be gone, nor ever need downloading. (the one that comes to mind was NVIDIA Network Bus Enumerator?)

Hey Korgan. I know exactly what you mean about your internet slowing down until it slows into non-working. I had that issue once… for about a year when I first got cable modem access, back when comcast was @Home. And YES that was all due to the modem. (took them a year to decide to try and swap the modem.) This however is not modem related, we swapped out modems, two times.. 3 or 4 if you count trying out a usb modem, which btw made the service non-existant, so we went back to ethernet.)

I don’t really trust the driver scan programs I have tried. They both want me to purchase a membership for access to drivers.

If I listed out the supposed drivers that I need, could someone, who has expertise in computer building tell me if these certain are important, or if they actually exist and are not made up by these weird scan programs?

Here goes…

		Imaging device
			Creative WebCam NX Pro
		Monitors
			Plug and Play Monitor
		Network adapters
			NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller
		Ports
		Processors
			AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+
		Sound, video and game controllers
		System Devices
			NVIDIA Network Bus Enumerator
			NVIDIA nForce PCI System Management
			NVIDIA nForce3 250 AGP Host to PCI Bridge
		Universal Serial Bus controllers
		Disconnected Devices
			CanoScan
			PC Camera
			hp deskjet 940c

 

Crud.. I just wanted the text, not all the graphics… /sigh

Why am I not compelled to play Lotro. Whelp… I am. I want to get a character into the Eregion/Moria area already… but everytime I log in, I end up compelled to do other stuff. crafting on alts, gathering materials for alts. or doing quests that are long gray.

I’m addicted to doing the Festivals and non-exp stuff that they provide.

I do have all the current dances on my main loremistress character, and my lil hobbit hunter. Got some nice cosmetic outfits.

I do have my RP tag turned on for my lil hobbit hunter. She’s my little fun character. While I love playing my elf Loremaster, she’s not quite as much of a fun riot when it comes to fun roleplaying. Hobbits just are. Margaret and Bobble are a great bunch of folks to bounce around with. (I’ve not had the privledge to run around with the character Figgy. We only chitchat in tells. I don’t want to interrupt higher players in their own endeavours.)

I met Bobble way back in closed beta when we were given insta level 50 characters to test the monsterplay Ettenmoors with. at that time I rolled a human loremaster I dubbed Griffy, since most people prefer short names when in a hurry. since my main character Griffinstorm was elven, I figured to try for a change and went human. We had a few musical boogie sessions. A few drinking sessions to muddle our wits silly. Of course our good buddy “Reeses Pieces” was there too providing the drink. I never could pronounce his full name, so I’m grateful he went with the short version.

So with all that in my past history, I asked if Bobble would adopt my hobbit. So now I proudly have my title: Griffin Storm, Daughter of Bobble. While I am by no means a great hunter player, I love this character just for bouncing around and chitchatting, dancing and emoting. Hobbits got all the cuteness put into their emotes. Whilst I enjoy gaming with my loremaster the most, controlling the flow of combat, either for myself or with a group. So I don’t really know which of my characters I should really call my main. I am goofy on my elf loremaster as well, but the emotes are way lacking funness on her, and after awhile just disappointing.

I hope turbine gives us more roleplaying features. The festival dances are awesome fun, more and more emotes. Even some emotes have sound now. I’m still trying to earn some of the hidden emotes, it feels like forever. No idea how many more /cheers, /laugh, /salutes I’m in need of…

Ah well… someday perhaps. Before the end of the year? Haha… maybe… I’m doubtful but maybe. If ya see me on Elendilmir, shoot me a /cheer or 5.

/poke

Griffy /flirts with herself.

Whelp, looks like I finally get a chance to blog. Lazy me wouldn’t know how to set one up. I’m outdated on my knowledge of HTML. Nowadays it’s CSS, XML… stuff I don’t NEED to study anymore.  Now if only my internet was stable.

Funny thing about my internet, noone knows why my service is so wonky. Comcast is baffled. I’ve had 4 sets of techs come to my place. They get perfect readings from the meter. I’ve showed them that I can surf the web for a short while, but then my Internet Explorer just up and says “Can’t load the webpage”. They blame my computer, yet I take my computer to the repair shop, and they can connect to the internet fine. (My last guess is some outdated drivers that comcast does not work without. I tried some programs that could tell me what drivers were outdated. So I TRIED to update these drivers. But none of them seem to exist in a Free downloadable form.  (AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+, NVIDIA nForce Network Controller, NVIDIA Network Bus Enumerator, NVIDIA nForce PCI System Management, NVIDIA nForce3 250 AGP Host to PCI Bridge, Plug and Play Moniter.) I don’t entirely trust these online programs. They could be malicious wares for all I know. I plan on taking my computer to the repair place, one last time in hopes that THEY have these drivers, or know where I can get them. (could having a second harddrive added, and a fresh windows running on it be the cause of it? maybe it doesn’t have the drivers that my old windows does?)

I can play Lotro with this weirdness, by clicking my Network Connections “Repair” button, but I don’t like to, because there are times when I cannot “Repair” the connection AT ALL (I then get a 169. IP address, which is bad) and my character (squishy Loremaster) would be crashed out in the wild solo, with no pet when I am able to log back in.

I can’t afford major repair bills yet. Heck I don’t even have cash for half of horse. (barely over 2 gold last I checked.) Thank Turbine for at least a slow but efficient Founder’s Bree Horse. I’ve learned not to jump off a cliff without de-summoning your pet first, but the Bree Horse has saved me that horror. I can hop low cliffs with my horse, and still have my pet when I land on a couple mobs below.

It all started in October when Comcast decided they were going to be “managing” peak hour bandwidth. Heck, the second the time hit’s around 12pm noon, My connection goes buh-bye. I was running a runekeeper on Brandywine, and managed to get her to 10 without dying. I was out doing a goblin quest near Gondamon, and I had a goblin to myself, nearby a dwarf was mining a node. I put a fiery ridicule on the goblin, then everything went frozen. I alt-tabbed out my “Repair” button, clicked, went back to the game, only to move a few steps, and the goblin was then in my face, beating on me, but also froze in place, again. (Rinse repeat the repair button 3 or 4 more times.) I got a lengthier breath. The fellah who was mining must have seen my lagging out, and he ran to my rescue and managed to save my arse. When I regained some control, I was able to shout out a “Thank you!” After I saw the stream of red numbers flying off my head. I was sooooo sure that I wasn’t going to make it out alive. About 100 morale points left, and fully grateful. He replied with a “you’re welcome” then went upon his business. And then I froze up again. I decided it was time to leave the wilderness and head for a safer spot. After about 3 more repair, step, freeze, alt-tab, repair, step, freeze, alt-tab, repair. (SCream, throw keyboard onto the desk, quit lotro, and throw a tantrum on my pillow. Call comcast for my 4th appointment.)

Console games never gave me this much trouble. Maybe a playstation disk not entirely loading right, but nothing that a “reset” can’t put right. I’m losing my patience to the internet. Fortunately I bought a Nintendo DS and 5 games. (So far the most addicting has to be the Brain Age 1, Suduko puzzles.) I also bought some $10 PopCap PC games, which don’t require online stability. I’d play Spore, but all my creatures are not showing up, so certain games are gonna need a reinstall to point them to the right places.)

Well shoot! I had about 3 more paragraphs, but when I hit the save button.. apparently it did not save them. and I got my ever annoying “webpage not found” error.

So, barring that fact, how did this girl gamer do, on my first babbling blog session?