The Journal

I forgot to bring a router or switch down when I moved, even though I brought 3 computers. So I came up with a fairly ingenious solution, I disconnected my mifi from the internet, disabled it's DHCP server capability, and turned it into a plain old wireless switch. My desktop is directly connected to the internet, and then shares the internet across the wireless.

It's not as good as an actual router, mostly because it only projects the signal within the same room and you have to manually assign IP addresses and DNS server addresses, but it works and is better than wasting money buying a new router when I've got a perfectly good one at home that my wife can bring down when the rest of my household goods get moved.

Unfortunately, it's wireless only, no ethernet ports at all, but it still lets me transfer files (slowly) and use the internet on all my computers at once.

"The veal holds no uncertainty for her ... the Maker shall be her bacon and her shield..."

Apparently the chanter of the light was hungry during that particular chant.

A Very Chewed And Moist Book

(Much of this is illegible.)

Day 42: I begin to suspect that we are being manipulated, as if by some unseen hand far above us. Always, I hear the sound of clicking. Click-click. Click-click.

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My dog in Dragon Age Origins found that for me. I thought it was hilarious.

Some of the dialogs in Dragon Age Origins is really starting to bug me. I'm picking a lot of the less obvious choices now, because I already picked the obvious choice on my first playthrough, but there isn't enough branching in the dialog trees. So a lot of the responses actually assume you said the obvious thing. For example, when you meet Sten I never said I would ask the revered mother for the key, yet it still gave me the quest to do so when I walked away.

I'm really tired of seeing people post how easy Dragon Age Origins is. It's only easy when you play a mage who chooses the right build or you exploit the AI. I keep trying to play on normal difficulty (on my second playthrough no less, first was on easy difficulty) and I'm tired of getting my ass kicked by normal fights involving nothing more than a single lieutenant bandit leader and a group of normal bandits.

The lack of NPC companions doesn't help anything. There are nine NPCs you can choose from for your companions, but there are only 2 mages and mages are your healers as well as AoE DPS and crowd control. And I used both mages in my first playthough so I don't want to use them again so that I can experience the other NPCs, but my main character is a Rogue, so that leaves me with no mages at all. It wouldn't be so bad if I could use tactics or something to make up for it, but I have very few tactical options with only 4 warriors/rogues who all only hit single targets for low/moderate damage and I'm fighting up to 10 enemies that include tanks and archers. I like tough tactical fights, I don't like getting my ass kicked and having no options but to exploit the AI or to run away and skip that quest.

Also, the game is more linear than it appears on a single playthrough. There are like 4 different endings, with a couple other major choices that affect the description of what happens afterward, but a lot of other dialog choices have a lot less effect than you think they would.

After completing a 31 hour playthrough and starting on my second character, it says I've only completed about 30% of the game across all characters (I'm guessing that's measuring quests done).

On my 2nd character now, but the Dalish Elf background story is very short compared to the Dwarf Noble story, a little disappointing really. I had hoped they were all as good as that one, although I've heard good things about the City Elf story, so perhaps it's just the Dalish one that's not as in-depth.

I suppose it's realistic for as much sword fighting as you do, but your character is going to spend the entire game spattered in blood from head to toe. And it's not just blood spatter, you actually get clean occasionally and pick it back up again when you fight hand to hand, it's a nice touch. It's a little unusual because most games don't keep the blood around after the battle.

Okay, beat the game.  31+ hours on a single play through, doing very few side quests at all.  And I'm probably going to play through it AT LEAST two more times. 

I'm going to have to put this down as the best computer based Role Playing Game ever.  Period.  Which says a lot when compared to games like Fallout, Baldur's Gate II, and Planescape: Torment.  Now, not everyone is probably going to agree with that, it depends on the style of game you prefer, this has less freedom than something like Fallout.  But this has no patches, no expansions, I haven't even tried the downloadable content yet, and I think that in it's current state it has a better story than Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal and is as well polished as anything I've ever seen.

The game was so good that I don't want to even reload my save game to try a different ending, I feel like it would cheapen the experience of my first ending.  I would rather play through a whole new character to get a different ending.

ETA:  Actually, it's not the story that's so great.  It's the delivery.  It feels more like I'm reading an epic novel than playing a computer game.  They've done an amazing job of using the game to tell the story, drawing you in and making you feel a part of it.

I just want to say that if anyone is on the fence about buying Dragon Age Origins, I had some doubts about the game before I got it myself, it's worth every penny.  This will probably be the first game ever that I actually buy the downloadable content for as well.

My Dwarven Warrior fights sword and shield style, using a Fire/Ice/Lightning/Paralysis Axe for his main hand weapon.

Yeah, if you like Role Playing Games at all, Dragon Age Origins is absolutely fantastic.  Probably the best RPG since Baldur's Gate II and could even be better, I'll know more once I finish my first character.

Zevran and Wynne have some funny conversations.

Finished playing through Borderlands.  The difficulty in finding really good weapons annoys me.  I really wanted to use Shotguns but I never, ever, not once, found a shotgun that would work well.  I also had a lot of trouble finding good Assault Rifles.  You know, the two weapons my character was supposed to specialize in.

The one time I found an Orange Assault Rifle I thought I had finally hit the jackpot, until I looked at the stats and realized that it was a piece of crap and the only exceptional feature it had was magazine capacity, nearly 200 with my upgrades, but that's the least important stat of them all.

I ended up using SMGs and Assault Rifles most of the game, unfortunately my Assault Rifle was usually 10 levels lower than me and Green colored, which implies that it could have been so much more powerful if I could have found a good one. 

Also, the storyline goes from thin to incomprehensible at the end.

Yet, I kept playing all the way through to the end.  Took about 15 hours.  So that tells you that the gameplay is good enough that I just kept coming back, always looking for that elusive shotgun or rifle and just slaughtering bandits by the thousands.  I had 1,066 human kills, personally, which puts me well above mass murderer and into my own personal one man war I think.

Someone tell me if Dragon Age: Origins is worth $50, it's too new for me to get a good impression from the reviews and I don't really want to pirate it just to get an idea of how good the game is.  It has promise, but I don't have a lot of time and money to waste right now if it's not a really great game.

Quick Summary of Borderlands, at least for the first several hours and nothing I've read contradicts this:

It's a first person shooter mixed with a Diablo 2 style role playing game.  With even less story than Diablo 2, which wasn't all that strong to begin with.  It's basically, welcome to the planet, you are here to find the legendary vault that probably doesn't exist and is rumored to contain anything, go kill bandits and wildlife for hours and hours.  The game play is better than Fallout 3.

Just watched the new Star Trek again today.  The opening scene pretty easily goes down as one of my favorite scenes of all time.

I would probably start playing WoW again right now, but all I've got is my 4 year old laptop that just doesn't quite get the job done. 

A couple of my classmates have started receiving class dates for their next class.  So far all of the Signal guys don't start until June 29th.  That's 8 months after I graduate OCS.  Then it's a 4 month class.  Meaning it's a full year from the time I get commissioned to actually getting assigned to a real unit.  This is assuming my class dates are the same as theirs, not guaranteed but fairly likely.  This means 8 months of snowbirding.  Snowbirding is an Army slang term for sitting around not doing anything while you wait for the class start date.  You'll be happy to know that it's going to cost you (the taxpayer) about $32,000 for me to sit around for 8 months and not do anything productive.  However, I think I'm probably going to be quite the proficient raider in WoW by the time my OBC class actually starts, and if I've got any discipline at all I should easily be maxing out the PT test with a full 300 points.  Before I went into the field and didn't do PT for 4 weeks I was pretty damn close to maxing my push-ups and I was maxing my sit-ups.  I just need to drop about 2 minutes off my 2-mile run time to max that, which shouldn't be difficult at all with the proper training (e.g. wind sprints instead of the long distance running we do in OCS).

I should drop another 5-10 pounds too.  I'm currently working on it.  I downloaded a really good calorie tracking program to my phone that has tons of pre-programmed foods so that I don't have to manually input them every time, and allows me to add my PT as well so that on days I do things like 10 mile ruck marches it doesn't think I'm eating too much when I eat those extra 500-1000 calories.  I did a little research online and you EASILY burn 1,500-2,000 calories doing that kind of PT, especially with the 50+ lbs of gear you are carrying or wearing.

I am really tired of dealing with crap at OCS and of living 600 miles away from my wife.  Way too much bullshit and way too little real training here.

I don't think the training is much better at my next school, but most of the bullshit goes away and we get treated like responsible adults instead of children.  We're supposed to be learning to be Lieutenants, we're Senior Officer Candidates so we're supposed to practically be Lieutenants and are just being evaluated to make sure we know what we're supposed to know, the Basic Officer Candidates even have to salute us and call us sir like they do any other officer, but we are given almost no privileges and very few responsibilities.

At the next school, Signal Officer Basic Course, we'll actually be Lieutenants and the training should be more about learning how to be a Signal officer and less of the hazing and time wasting that goes on here at OCS.  Plus it's a 21 week course, compared to the 9 weeks of basic and the 12 weeks of OCS, and we don't have to live in a barracks, so I'll actually be able to get my own apartment and live there with my wife.

Bleh, back to the field.  We have approximately 3 weeks in the field, finished one week already but still two to go.  We're at the end of a 24 hour refit, a chance to take showers and do laundry, and I really don't want to go back right now.

We're close to done though.  2 weeks in the field, 1 week of academics, and 2 weeks of nothing at all.  All I have to do is get 2 GOs on my leadership evaluations, one for planning and one for execution of a squad level mission, and then pass the History II test (WW1-Present), and I'll have met pretty much all the graduation requirements.  Then it's just waiting for Elizabeth to come visit me for the Formal and the Graduation ceremony.

I haven't got my orders yet, so it's not official, but it looks like I'm going to get the new BOLC B class that replaces BOLC II and BOLC III.  OCS doesn't change, it just gets called BOLC A instead of BOLC I.  However, that means that I graduate on October 29th and will take a couple weeks leave, then drive to Augusta, Georgia (Fort Gordon) and sit around doing nothing important until my BOLC B class finally starts in March.

We picked branches yesterday.   I got Signal Corp.  I was ranked 35 in our class of 173, so every single branch was open to me when I picked, except the ones we didn't have any slots at all for like Aviation, Medical, Finance, etc.  I could have taken Engineering, even though I didn't put in a packet earlier we ended up with a couple more EN slots than we had people picked up with packets.

I'm off to either Basic Officer Leadership Course II or Officer Basic Course (aka BOLC III) next.  We're in a transitionary period and don't know yet whether we'll be the last class to take BOLC II or the first class to go straight to an extra long OBC.

OBC for Signal Corp is at Fort Gordon, Georgia and lasts 18 weeks long.  It will teach me all the technical aspects of being a signal officer, whereas up until now all my training has been general U.S. Army Officer training and not branch specific in any way (except that it's all really the basics of Infantry training).

The good news is that since I'm married I may be able to have my wife move in with me.  The Army might or might not pay for her to move there (they will once I get to a permanent unit but not for temporary training units), but they will let me live at my own residence instead of a barracks and I can put most of my stuff in Ohio into storage and my wife can come live with me while I'm there.