Friday 30 December 2005

Pic of the day: Probably the last picture from the landscape outside the Chaos Node. It still seems so strange that I'm going to leave forever. I wonder whether I will call the new place Chaos Node too? The name kinda clings to this place. Perhaps I should call my next home "Fortress of Solitude". People do indeed change, when two years pass.

Frozen paradays

So how is my day now that I don't have Internet access from home? Actually, even though Telenor surely did not mean for it to be so, it is a blessing. I have a great excuse for not spending hours playing City of Heroes, as I most likely would have done otherwise. As an officer of sorts in the supergroup Steel Justice, I was playing fairly regularly. Now I can use that time to pack. Or write journals, I guess.

I have a "mirror" of the archive on my local hard disk. I always had. My first archive server, crosswinds.net, had an irritating tendency to have more and more frequent "accidents" in which all or parts of the free accounts were wiped out, and I had to upload it all again, one file at a time. You know, if you don't want people to have free accounts, just don't offer free accounts! Don't wipe them randomly. The company started out very good, possibly the best there was, but after a death in the family of one of the founders, they took an u-turn for the worse. Not recommended. But the nice thing is that ever since, I have carefully preserved my archives at home. I have earlier versions of the archives on older computers. I am currently backing it up to an external hard disk in the background. I guess I could burn a DVD and keep it at work or something, but let's face it: If my home computer and Dreamhost go down on the same day, it is not very likely that my workplace survives. Or I. Or you.

Anyway, about the journal. What I do is write it at home as usual, using my mirror archive to read the years-ago entries. (I have made a habit of reading this before I finish my daily entry, lest my subconscious play its old prank on me by having me write on the exact same topic as one of those earlier years on the same date. Also, I still find spelling and grammar errors even after having read it several times before. I wonder how long that will go on, and how riddled with errors my entries must be when I upload them.) Since I can't upload from home now, I transfer the entries and pictures to my Pocket PC. When I have a break at my workplace, I connect the PPC to the Internet there to synchronize it, and at the same time I upload the diary. So until further notice updates will only come on workdays. The next workday will likely be January 1st, when I will stop by to roll over our database to 2006. It is either that or coming early on the 2nd, and you really don't want to compete with some of these people in coming early. There are already people there at 7, though I doubt they are very productive. I certainly wouldn't be. Getting up at 7:30 is already so early it hurts.

***

Back to games. While City of Heroes is now outside my reach, at least I have Kingdom of Paradise, the action RPG for the PSP. And let's face it, "action RPG" is not too far from a description of CoH either. In KoP, you don't get to create your own character: Both the looks and the power sets are decided for you. But you still get to patrol the highways and defeat gangs of villains by using either magic or your trusty longsword, collecting small rewards and leveling up from time to time. You even have a sidekick with you at least some of the time.

I almost never play the game at home. Admittedly this is largely because I have The Sims 2, apart from the packing and stuff. So the commuter bus ride to work is where most of the villain slaughtering takes place. Sometimes on the way home too, but just as often I use that time to nap, sleepy after the workday. The irony is that when I nap, I always wake up before we reach the final stop where I go off. When I play KoP, I may have to scramble out after discovering that the bus isn't going any further. But I'm getting better at the timing now, as long as I don't happen on a cut scene. These can be quite lengthy and there is no way to stop them except perhaps turn off the PSP.

I certainly wouldn't want to try playing it while I walk. I can actually do things like that, read or play games while walking. But the cold would do unspeakable things to my fingers if I stick them out for too long. It is only a few degrees below the freezing point, but the relentless wind makes the cold quite effective, as I found out on my birthday when I tried talking in a mobile phone. I'm not trying something like that again in the near future. Besides, killing people with a longsword as I actually walk around is not a habit I would like to acquire...