I've bitched previously and extensively and in multiple forums about my disgust at the drastic changes wrought in FFXI around the time of the Abyssea expansions. It boils down to two things, which I'll try to recap briefly. First, it became possible to gain XP at 3, 4, maybe 5 times pre-Abyssea rates. Everyone who had slogged through endless hours to grind multiple jobs to 75, hours during which their role skills were honed, now watched as a surge of incompetent nubs flooded endgame. Second, level cap r... (...more)

Personality Plus Your Result: Melancholy Melancholy - the introvert, the thinker, and the pessimist. To view further information about the Melancholy personality type, visit personalityplus.awardspace.infoPhlegmatic Choleric Sanguine Personality PlusQuiz Created on GoToQuiz... (...more)

I bought my first messenger/laptop bag ~2011-06-21. According to my LJ, this decision arose because I didn't find a suitable gym bag at Target, when I started doing the gym thing. So I went with one of Target's cheap Embark house-brand messenger bags and repurposed my backpack as a gym bag. Alas, the cheap Embark house-brand bag's shoulder strap broke last week. It was coming apart at the seams, so, no big surprise. Oh, and Target has since ceased carrying them, but from pricing on similar limited-stock in... (...more)

Windows XP will reach its "end-of-life" in April of 2014. Until then, I'm supporting a small corral of XP Home boxes in an office environment that, as a matter of security policy, have to run the screensaver after 15 minutes of idling, and when key or mouse activity brings it out of idle, the user has to unlock their session with their username and password. Some users hate this for some reason, like it's an enormous issue that they have to spend 5 seconds logging in when they come back from a break. Th... (...more)

"I don't want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it." -- Rev. Billy Graham, Parade Magazine (1981)