Return to Sargoff

As I've possibly added a few new readers since I last talked about this, I'm going to give a quick recap. I have been writing a fantasy novel that is currently titled The Lords of Sargoff. It involves magic and strange creatures and other such things. I posted the first chapter on this blog several months ago, but by now, that chapter is out of date. I had been working on this story a lot, but then life got busier, and I haven't been able to nearly as much recently. That being said, I plan on picking it up again and hopefully making large amounts of progress. But first, I'm going to take a step back.

I'm going to write out the basic history of everything, to try and get all the events and people to fit together as best as possible. The first thing I did was to create a map of the country of Sargoff. I had drawn a similar map on paper, but this time created it digitally. This is, of course, not meant to be incredibly aesthetically pleasing, but gives a good layout of where things are and where events take place. It's also not at all final, as not everything as names yet, so things are labeled as "city", "trade city", "forest", and so on. The image itself is actually quite large. :)

Anywho, I will not be posting the overall history of the story, but will start posting chapters once I start writing them again (which may be a little while). I'm pretty excited to get back to writing it.

Go Team Go!

Ah, it's good to be a Cooper sports fan right now. The Boston Red Sox just won the World Series for the second time in four years, and are set up well for the future. Once again, the ended the season with a run that included an impressive series comeback and a World Series sweep. The Rockies were playing very well, winning 21 of 22 games, but then hit the brick wall known as the Red Sox. Whooah!

The New England Patriots are undefeated and looking spectacular. Next week's game against the Indianapolis Colts should be an excellent game - the last two undefeated teams in the NFL playing each other. Don't get much better than that. (Especially if the Patriots win.)

The Ohio State Buckeyes football team is ranked #1 in the country and is coming off an impressive victory over Penn State. I don't know if they'll win out this year, and they still have Michigan left on their schedule, but I am very hopeful. Go Buckeyes!

That being said, while the Patriots are my #2 team in the NFL, the San Francisco 49ers are my personal favorite team (I'm the only Cooper with this opinion). They are 2-5 and have lost 5 games in a row. Not healthy at all. Guess the shower will have to wait another year. (That's not healthy either.) But alas, you can't have everything, can you?

So there is the potential for 3 of our teams to win championships within a 4 month period. How sweet would that be? But we shall see.

Ah, Mondays. Today the sales department is throwing some dinner for the rest of the team. So, free food for me. Yay!

LotD: Rare Bill Watterson Art. Early art from Bill Watterson, creator of one of my favorite comic strips of all time - Calvin & Hobbes.

Just Like Old Times

I went into my old job, FLS, to sign the necessary paperwork to allow me to be paid for these 2 weeks of service. It was great to see those people again that I had worked with for 2 1/2 years. I do miss them, but am happy to be here at Priority. I only hope that, when I leave this company, that I have become as good of friends with my coworkers as I did at FLS. That being said, I feel closer to the friends I made at last week's TEC weekend than I ever did to anyone at FLS. I've always believed that friendships built around God are stronger and closer.

Anyways, I have technically worked 5-10 for FLS the last 3 nights, but it's been very much un-busy. I've worked at home, as I will continue to do until I start going it at night sometime next week, and during the day next weekend. I will be working from home this weekend. Last night is our weekly Everquest night, which I originally thought I would have to skip, but due to my excessively low workload, I decided to play anyway. I had one thing come in while I was playing that was incredibly simple, and I managed to multitask and do while playing. It was very exciting. :)

I had posted this picture on Facebook too, but I decided to throw it here as well. This is the Star Wars lamp that my new place of employment had gotten for me. It emits red light and rotates. Neato huh? :) Yay for becoming a bigger dork!

LotD: The Office Collar. Weird. And uhh.. No.

More Than You Care To Know

Alright, here we go. This will not be a short blog entry. :) I'm going to blog about a lot of things that happened this weekend, some big, and some small, in no particular order.

--I had told Tim and Troy, both ATLs and very good friends of mine, that I wasn't yet to a point where I felt comfortable being an ATL myself during a weekend. So they put overall rector Aaron to up to a challenge (which he accepted); Aaron came up to me the night before the candidates arrived and said something like "Joel, we're adding another table, and they need another ATL, and they really want a male, so they're hoping you would do it." I, of course, got a little flustered and muttered some response about how it wouldn't work, but then thought it was rather funny when I found out it was a joke. So that became a running joke throughout the weekend, and appeared on several pieces of my wheat. "So you wanna be an ATL?" :)

--Thanks to Tim, I now (finally) own the Star Wars Trilogy on widescreen DVD. I, sadly, had previously only owned in on full screen VHS. And that is not acceptable. Thanks Tim!

--Doing the Cheeseburger Song with Tim and Troy was good fun. I was rather nervous to sing it with them in front of 90 or so people, but it went well.

--I accidently kicked a Stations of the Cross candle and broke it. Bad Support Adult!

--I started to move our tall ladder (10 footer), only to then realize that, sitting on the top of the ladder, had been a wire cutter. Ouch. It fell and smacked me in the face and popped out one of the lenses for my glasses. Either then or at some other point during the weekend, those glasses acquired a nice long scratch. Oh well. Is it time for Lasik yet?

--My Support Rectora is a former Everquest II player. How sweet is that?

--As we were making hug balls in the Support Room, I walked by a bunch of them laying on the floor, and said "Holy Hug Balls!" Jill Bartels thought this was particularly amusing, and it became an rather repeated phrase. Then, as we were doing our written team affirmations, she showed me what she had written on my affirmation. It said "Holy Huge Balls." :) She had added the extra "e" on purpose, to see if I would notice it. Me, being the kind of person that likes to make people laugh at every occasion, decided to repeat this phrase verbally, and the entire Support Room started laughing. Poor Jill. It was rather funny. :)

--One of the signs we put up around the church was misspelled. "CANDIDATES" was, instead, "CANDITATES." This was, of course, noticed After the weekend, and After the sign had been up. Can TEC people not spell or something? :)

--One of my responsibilities throughout the weekend was to set up the fire for the burning of the sins. This proved more difficult than it should have been. The two lighters I had weren't working, and the wind would quickly blow out matches, even when I tried to block the wind with my hands or body, or when I tried to light the matches within the bucket. The fire even went out once after I got it going. Eventually it all worked out though, even though when the candidates got there, the flame couldn't be seen from outside the bucket. But after people started throwing their papers in there, the fire grew. The bucket caught a fire. :)

--After I got the fire going, I stood there for several minutes by myself, at the foot of the cross. I've never cried at a TEC event, but I came closest this weekend. I threw my personal inventory paper into the fire there, before anyone else came out, and I really felt God's calm.

--I printed out 300 sheets at work for my wheat. Who knows if anyone actually read the whole thing, :) but you never know.

--Sitting at Agape, across from Support Rector Brandon Lecy, I randomly created with word "Wow" with my fingers and mouth (this is something my friends and I have done before), and he thought it was the funniest thing ever. It became a TEC-wide phenomenon (or something like that). I'm so proud to have influenced so many people. ;)

--Friday night, Support Adult Jennie and Support Rectora Torey stayed up a little later doing a little planning for the next day. When I got back to the male sleeping area, the lights were out, people were asleep, and I had no idea where my stuff was (the room had been moved around due to Stations of the Cross). Instead of somehow finding my stuff and not waking people up, I just went and sleep on a couch in the Support Room. Lesson: Bring a Flashlight. :)

--Overall, the weekend was amazing. The team was awesome, the leadership was amazing, and the candidates were deeply moved (that is, after all, the whole point of the weekend). God was obviously at work this weekend.

--Two sad things, though, about the future. Due to my crazy work schedule over the next couple weeks, I will not be able to make it to the TEC Reunion. :( Which kind of sucks. (Support Party Anyone?) :) Also, I won't be able to apply to TEC 70 in January, but will be applying to TEC 71 in April. I'm already pretty excited. :) And... *drumroll* I will Not be putting Support as my number one choice. It will likely be ordered as Wheat, Kitchen, Support. And no, Bauer, I do not want to be an ATL. :)

There are lots of other things I could blog about, but this blog entry is already long enough, isn't it? :) The lesson of the day... God is good, and - like our weekend verse and theme stated - we all need to catch a fire and be on fire for God in our lives.

LotD: YouTubeX. Save YouTube videos as files on your computer. Pretty handy.

Good Times

TEC 69 was an amazing weekend. I'm going to post more about it tomorrow (I wrote a whole bunch of things down to blog about, but I forgot it... d'oh). So for now, here are a few random quotes that make me smile.

"Death will save you." -Ben Hoogland

"My arms are pythons, and they will eat you alive!" -Brandon Lecy

"Jewishes don't believe in Jesus!" -Brandon Lecy

LotD: Daily Show Archives Appear Online. Ah, John Stewart is funny. And now eight years of clips from the show are downloadable for free. Sweet huh?

Oooooh Scary!

As mentioned in the post of the Mac Man, we (Tim & Dana, Tom & Katie, Megan & myself) went to ValleyFair on Saturday, or ValleyScare, as it was during their annual Halloween Haunt activities. It was good fun. In addition to the usual greatness that is ValleyFair (Wild Thing, Steel Venom, XTreme Swing, Renegade.... sweet!), they had a assortment of haunted houses, and people dressed up throughout the park who jumped out of the darkness and scared people. It was pretty fun. While I rarely get anything more than slightly startled during haunted things, my wife and other members of our party were scared relatively often and caused permanent hearing damage to those in their vicinity. I still enjoyed the haunted houses, but usually get more amusement out of the reactions of my fellow group members than I do the actual event. A young girl randomly accompanied us through one of the houses, and apparently her scream switch was stuck to on. It was impressive.

We did have one experience that I had never had before. Going up the first hill of the Wild Thing roller coaster, the coaster stopped. We were a little confused for a few moments, but my wife correctly guessed that they stopped the ride because a couple people near the front of the train had a stuffed monkey that they were holding into the air. I suppose the park employees didn't want it flying away from them and hitting some other Wild Thing passenger, or a random ValleyFair customer far below. As a member of the last seat on the ride (the best place to be on that coaster), I appreciated not getting smacked in the face by something at the ride's top speed of 74 mph.

Oddly enough, we randomly ran into a group of people we knew. Nate & Laura, and Aaron & Mariah (fellow TEC-ies) were standing in line for a haunted house when we walked by. We later ran into them again while we were eating at the Die-In (the lights for the "r" and the "v" in "drive" were not lit up). So we chatted with them for a little while. It was pretty sweet. This anomalitcal (just made that word up) occurrence has also been documented in Aaron's and Tim's blogs, and possibly a future of Nate's. It was very exciting. :)

Anyway, the TEC weekend starts tomorrow, and I'm pretty excited. I just printed out my wheat for the wheat bags (it was a lot of pages) and am roaring to go. So bring it on!

LotD: Performance Artist Implants Ear on His Arm. If you don't like things that look a little... weird, then don't click this link.

Zoom Zoom

Life has seemed a bit rushed the last couple months, from the GOP Convention website I've worked on, to the new job (and its busier schedule of the last couple weeks), to getting this ready for the upcoming TEC weekend. This is party to blame for my recent reduction in blog posts. Darnit! :)

And the next few weeks will be busier, including working a good bit at FLS (my former job) during the election time, as it gets rather busy there. So I will be working basically 2 full time jobs for a couple weeks. It will be good to see all my FLS coworkers again, plus basically getting an extra paycheck is always nice too. :)

That, of course, means that I pretty much won't have a life during that time. I'm losing 3 weeks of our weekly Everquest playing, and probably won't get any cards or StarCraft action in during that time. :( Ah, the joys of business. At least I should get lots of free food at FLS. :)

For the first time, I have experienced the joy of dual monitors. I set up the old 17 inch CRT on the new computer, and it's pretty sweet. So now I can play Everquest and online Scrabble at the same time, without minimizing any windows or turning on another computer. Isn't laziness great? :) It is also possible that I'll be getting a second monitor to go with my work computer. That dual monitor setup would end up being much more useful. But I'm not yet sure if that'll happen. Who knows.

LotD: Flying Car About to Take Off. Now that's zoom zoom.

Taking the Long Way

As I previously said I would, I started transferring all the files we wanted to keep from the older computer to the new computer. I simply copied the files over the network, but at the very beginning of one of the transfers (I split it up into several groups), I saw something rather odd. Maybe you've seen this before, but I don't think I have. See the image....

That's right. 48, 366 days and 23 hours remaining in the transfer. Whooah! That's somewhere in the area of 132.4 years, I believe. So, umm, good. My rather future descendants might be able to enjoy whatever files I was copying. :)

Hehe, well, it quickly corrected itself and transferred rather quickly. But I was happy to get screen shot of it first. I haven't had any problems with Windows Vista yet, but this doesn't give me any confidence in its ability to calculating things.

Where's my abacus?

LotD: 10 of the Narrowest Houses in the World. Just don't turn around, and you'll be fine.

Joy Hath Cometh

Well, I've had a little adventure with setting up the new computer. First, as previously posted, my heat sink did not fit correctly onto the motherboard. Small pipe-looking things in the heat sink rubbed against small plastic pieces on the mounting piece for the heat sink, not allowing the sink to be positioned straight on the processor.

I didn't want to send one of them back and get a different one, if I could help it. Soooo... I took a slightly unconventional (and non reccommended) approach and cut off the plastic pieces on the plastic mount, allowing the heat sink to sit perfectly in place. The perfect solution? Probably not. But alas, it worked. Whooah!

Then, of course, I get everything else plugged in, turn it on, but then discover another problem. The fans start to run, but as far as I can tell, nothing else does. The DVD drive has no lights and does not open. So I call my Computer Architect Tim, and after a while, we figure it out. (Evidently you can stick a 4-pin power connector into an 8-pin connector on the motherboard to give it enough power.)

Then everything worked wonderfully. I installed Windows Vista (which I've had no problems with thus far) and, of course, Everquest II, which is much more pretty with the new video card. It's wonderful.

I need to install whatever other programs I need and copy all the data from Computer #2 to the new computer, then I will quite possibly reformat that computer and install a fresh copy of Windows XP. Fun stuff, huh?

LotD: 2008 GOP Convention Report. This is the page that I designed for the wife of my former FLS coworker. I hope it ended up being what she wanted. It includes an admin tool so she can add, edit, and delete the stories (which are the focal point of the front page). I still have a couple little things to do, but it's pretty much done. And, most important, I already have the check. :)

Heat Stink

Work has been interesting. I've gone from a fairly light schedule to one that is very busy and deadline driven. Ah, the joys of the IT world, eh? At the same time, I've been working on the 2008 GOP Convention Report website for the wife of my former FLS coworker. I ran into some major snags in the editing of her blog entries, as she needed to be able to edit text richly (bold, and other such formatting, as well as inserting pictures and links). Finding a free rich text editor that would suit her needs proved tricky, as I downloaded one that didn't quite function properly. I was getting rather worried until I found one yesterday that worked perfectly. Just a couple days before the site deadline. :) Whooah!

And, of course, most of my computer parts are here. Whooah! That being said, I have run into a snag here as well. My heat sink is rather goofy (see picture). It has these little pipes on each end of it, and when I attempt to connect the heat sink to the motherboard, plastic pieces from the heat sink mount get in the way and prevent it from attaching as straight as it probably should. It wouldn't be good to have the heat sink in there crooked, so I may just have to get a new heat sink. Silly, huh? :)

Talking about silly, here I am. After posting yesterday about my blog looking funny and receiving Dan's comments about it, I redid the template. So, those who commented afterwards probably saw it just fine. I'm a mean one, aren't I? :) *evil laugh*

I also added quite a few new links to the right side. I should have waited and used them all for LotD's, but alas.

LotD: Microsoft Purchases Evil From Satan. A BBSpot classic.

Five Down, Two to Go

Ah, a week without blogging from me. How doth life continue during such hardships?

Uh, or something like that.

On Sunday, we had our first full team meeting for the next TEC weekend. I got to meet Bob for the first time (the meeting highlight of course!) and get to know the rest of the Support team. I also forced myself to push the conversation during team time, which goes completely against my shyness. Good for me. :) I felt more comfortable talking on this team than I have in the past. It probably helped that I had previously worked Support with both the team rector and rectora. I am also excited to work on the same team as the Mac Man and our mutual friend Troy. And of course, the Pink Lady. It should be a good team and an excellent weekend.

Well, five of my seven computer shipments have arrived. This includes the case and power supply (from the store of Tim), the flash drive, monitor, headphones, keyboard and mouse, motherboard, processor, and half my RAM. I'm still missing a few crucial pieces, like the hard drive, Windows, video card, and DVD drive. The video card and DVD drive were shipped a coupel days later, but hopefully everything else arrives in a fairly timely manner. However, I can already starting putting things together. Whoooahh! I just hope, of course, that everything does in fact go together and I have no major problems getting it to work. There's always something that goes wrong. :)

Also, on this blog, if you use Internet Explorer, do my links to other blogs appear way down the page on the far right side? I use Firefox, and everything looks good to me. I may just create a new template. Cause that's just silly.

LotD: Transparent Frog. Funky. But don't scientists have anything better to do with their time? :)