Archives – December 29, 2008
Holiday 2008 has been pretty mellow for me so far this year. Of course, we still have New Year’s Eve and New Year’s to go through, but so far, so good this year.
My boss gave us the week off from work, which was awesome. Of course since I am so far behind with work, I went in on both Monday and Tuesday though. Doh. Oh well. I was only going to go in on Monday, but my co-worker had the same idea and so did a volunteer, so I didn’t get anything done that day.
I did get quite a bit done on Tuesday, but I also spent a lot of time socializing and delivering Christmas cards to people around the building.
On Christmas Eve I went to a friend’s annual Christmas Eve dinner. It was alright. I kind of didn’t want to go as I just wanted to stay home and relax, but went anyway. I did get quite a few nice grab bag gifts out of it, so I am glad I went.
My mom and I exchanged gifts that night and I am so glad that my gift for her did arrive on Christmas Eve. I was worried since my shipping notice said it was going to get there on the following Monday, but they got it together and it got here on time! Yay!
On Christmas Day we went out for a family dinner at Shokudo restaurant near Ala Moana center. We had a relatively early reservation and I had only been there once before. I was quite surprised at how crowded the place got after we were seated. I mean it was quite a full house! The dinner was nice too. I tried not to overeat since I ate too much at the dinner the night before, but I still ate too much.
I am just glad that I had this time off this week. I got to play a lot of World of Warcraft and just chill. I should have cleaned my house, but I didn’t. Doh. Of course I also found out Sunday that my ex-neighbor’s grandkids are in town and they want to come over and play cards one night before they leave. Super. I haven’t seen these guys in almost 10 years I think. So, I should have cleaned tonight, but got sucked into watching a movie on the television instead. Doh. I mean I don’t even know if they were serious about coming over, but I think they are probably going to pay us a visit within the next week. Eep!
December 29, 2008
If it hasn’t been obvious, I’ve been neglecting my blog lately. Why? Why would I do such a thing? I blame World of Warcraft. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s one of those Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Games and it’s just awesome.
I started off playing MMORPG’s almost 10 years ago when one of my ex co-workers got me into Everquest. Now, that game was addicting. It was also a pain in the ass because it would take soooo freaking long to level up and you would lose a lot of progress whenever you died.
Anyways, I played this game for almost a year when it first came out and then stopped for a year. I then picked it up again and leveled up a warlock to the highest level at that time – level 70. I picked it up then because they released an expansion with a whole new “continent” and higher character levels. I think I leveled that warlock up to 70 in about 3 months. That was fun. But then once I hit 70, I had no idea what to do anymore since it seemed like the only thing left to do was to work on factions and that just seemed really boring.
So, I quit for about a year again and well, they released a new expansion again – Wrath of the Lich King, and I decided to pick the game up again.
Wow, it is an amazing expansion!!! I don’t know if I would recommend picking it up unless you are at least level 68 since most of the new content is geared towards those that are 70+, but damn, this is a good expansion.
When The Burning Crusade expansion came out, I don’t know, they fell a bit short in the lore/storyline department. I mean the new zones were pretty neat and hell, we got flying mounts! But, the story just wasn’t all there. There were quite a few fun bits that entailed flying bombing missions and such and thankfully things like that have been incorporated into the new expansion as well.
Blizzard made a lot of changes to the game since I last played – a lot of good changes. Now, I don’t know if a lot of these changes came about with the new expansion, or if they were slowly incorporated during the year I didn’t play though, but I am really loving this game again.
One big change is that there is now a harbor in Stormwind and you can catch boats to Darkshore or the new continent Northrend from there. I haven’t really hung out in Menethil Harbor to see if the boats there still run as well though.
Another big change is the addition of “achivements” to the game. Achievements are like little progression markers about things you have done in game – like explored zones, killed x amount of players in PvP battles, or done x amount of quests for example. They don’t really mean anything, but you do get some rewards for completing certain achievements. I recently received a special tabard just for exploring all of the zones of Northrend which was pretty cool. Of course, it now has me obsessed with exploring all of the zones so I can get a special title added to my name. Ugh, that is going to take awhile.
They have included more interact with your environment quests too. What this means is that there are quite a few quests where you need to mount certain creatures or use certain vehicles to complete quests and that is just a ton of fun!
I’ve been playing for a little over a month and have already reached level 80! Yea! I also finally saved enough gold and was able to buy my epic flying mount and flying skill to fly over the new continent. I am pretty happy about that. I am not sure how much longer I will be playing now that I’ve reached those goals though. I think the addition of achievements is a brilliant idea since it gives high level players something to strive for after they’ve reached max level. But, I know work is going to start getting crazy again, so I think I will probably only play until my monthly subscription runs out next month. Until then, I am going to try to see how many more achievements I can attain. Yay!
I wonder what the next expansion will be like?
December 29, 2008
December 26, 2008 will go down in Hawaii history as the Great Power Outage Of 2008!
That was a fun day. First of all, it was the day after Christmas, so I believe there were a lot of people in the stores looking for after Christmas sales. It all started around maybe 6pm when I started hearing all kinds of crazy thunder going on outside. I figured that there must have been a lot of lightening for there to be so much thunder, so I went out on my back patio to watch the sky. Yup, there was a lot of lightening.
I think at one point, I saw about 6 bolts of lightening near Tripler Hospital in about 5 minutes. It was crazy. I haven’t seen that much lightening in one storm since my days in Tucson. At one point, I saw one bolt come down and then all of a sudden, all of the streetlamps in my neighborhood went dark for about 30 seconds and then came back on again. More lightening continued to come down and by that time, I was pretty sure that the power was going to go out at some point, so I came back in, turned my computer off and went out on the patio again.
I then saw a bolt come down and then all of a sudden, I saw the power go out grid by grid until it reached my house. That was actually pretty neat. It was around 6:30pm, so it was already dark here. Thankfully I had my keys in my pocket and I always try to keep a flashlight on my keychain, so at least I could find a flashlight in the dark.
After the power went out, it was all just kind of wait and see what happens. From my patio, I could see that a lot of west Oahu had no power. My mom then told me that the outage appeared to be island wide. Whoa. I don’t have a portable, battery operated radio, but my mp3 player does get FM radio, so I turned it on and found out then that the outage was suspected to last about 12 hours! Holy Crap!
After that, my mom came over and gave me one of those portable radio with a crank generator which was pretty cool actually. It even had a built in lamp and flashlight. I just kept the radio on all night and would periodically crank that thing to keep it’s juice up. I also had a crank up flashlight too, which I love to have around because it also doesn’t need batteries! Yea!
So, that night was a pretty mellow night. I am just glad that I had an early dinner, so Ididn’t need to cook anything and that I had previously charged both my mp3/media player and my cell phone, so I didn’t have to worry about those running out of power that night as well.
My cat Rayne did freak out because of the darknes though. I lit a few candles, just to get some light for her and she seemed pretty content with that. She actually slept through a lot of the blackout.
I don’t know what it is though. This is the second time in 2 years that the whole island went without power like this. Granted both times were acts of nature – the first time was because the generators shut down due to an earthquake and this time the lines tripped because of lightening, but the only other times I know of when we lost power like this was because of hurricanes.
I just hope that this happening will make people realize the importance of having emergency supplies around the house – just in case. You never know what stuff like this is going to happen and it would suck to be completely unprepared.
I think our power was out for about 14 hours. I am not 100% sure since I stayed up a little late watching part of a movie on my mp3/media player and the power was on when I got up. I went outside to look around and then saw this double rainbow!
It’s a little hard to see, but it’s there. Pretty neat, eh?
December 29, 2008
