08:29 – Barbara’s dad is doing better than expected. Barbara and her sister are taking shifts so one of them is there with him at all times. It’s not that Dutch needs help constantly. The problem is that he’s still too weak to get up from his reclining chair or the toilet, so someone needs to be there to help him on a moment’s notice. When I talked to Barbara last night, she said he was improving fast, so we’re hoping he’ll soon no longer need 24-hour coverage.
I’m putting together a small batch of forensic science kits today. Our current stock status on those is minus one.
My MIL is home from the hospital and rehab after open-heart surgery to repair aortic valve, and it looks like Mrs. OFD will be staying with her for at least a week for the very same reasons, mobility issues and just weak. Then she apparently wants to be driven down to her winter digs in Florider, and shortly after that Mrs. OFD will be off to Orlando anyway for a gig, so it’s beginning to look, again, like I won’t see much of her until St. Patrick’s Day at this rate.
I figured it out once; we see each other maybe eight or nine months of the year. My brothers think this is wonderful.
Eight or nine months of the year? Surely not that much.
Attention Dave B!
My Level 16 Beast Mastery Hunter has a “Royal Guard Breastplate”, Level 15 Mail in her backpack. I can’t equip it. When I try I get the message “I can’t use that yet” and “you do not have the required proficiency for that item”. Is that because Hunters aren’t supposed to wear Mail? Should I just sell it? I left, and right click on it and I get no useful information that tells me if there are pre-requisites to use it.
Hunters can’t wear mail until they reach level 40. So you’re stuck with leather until then.
The icons for items you can’t use should all have a reddish tint. You’ll have to sell the Royal Guard Breastplate to a vendor since it is soulbound. Eventually you’ll pick up armor you can’t use that’s “bind on equip” that you can sell at the auction house.
I am having trouble seeing my monitors larger than 19″ 4×3. My primary monitors at home and work are 27″ samsung. The office 27″ is the awesome 275T LCD model ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001233 ) and the home 27″ is the LED home model from Sam’s Club that intermittantly cuts out on me.
I’m 52. Is seeing a large widescreen monitor just for young people with excellent vision?
After Port Arthur in 1996 we destroyed a million guns. Now they’re back:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-14/australians-own-as-many-guns-as-in-1996/4463150
Thanks Dave B, I suspected that might be the case. I just wish the error message was “You have to be Level 40 to use armor”.
One of my toons just hit Level 20 and so has a Mount. Much better but still too slow.
Lynn, what to you mean “having trouble seeing the monitor”. Do you mean that the fonts are too small, or that you can’t focus, or???
I recently changed to two wide-screen monitors, and have no trouble beyond what my generally declining eyesight always causes.
I gave WoW an intensive try over the holidays’s – got a warrior up to level 35, plus 200+ in herbalism/alchemy. It reminds me of Everquest, which we tried years ago.
I find it really irritating that you are out hunting the same critters as a zillion other people. The boss magically respawn, some guy kills it, you wait your turn, it respawns, you kill it, and the next guy is already waiting. Just too totally unrealistic; I can’t suspend my disbelief quite that much. I prefer the DDO approach, where all adventures are “instances”. You see other players wandering around the common areas, but every adventure is for you or your group alone.
The other thing I found irritating is that the quests were just too easy. I ran everything solo, and rarely had any sort of problem; but you aren’t allowed to do quests above your level. The only thing I couldn’t handle on solo were some of the bosses in the (few) instance dungeons. Those are clearly meant for groups.
Am I missing something? Or am I just being curmudgeonly?
I’m not ready to give up WoW yet, but it is trying my patience.
Since City of Heroes was my first MMORPG I measure everything else against it. It’s no contest. CoH wins hands down. The slow travel from one side of the map to the other in WoW is the big killer for me.
I have D3 and Skyrim, uninstalled. I may give them a try. Or look at Star Wars The Old Republic “WoW with light sabres” or LotR Online.
Have I ever mentioned how much I HATE NCSoft for closing down CoH? Curse their greedy souls forever.
Yes, you are missing something. You need to move your warrior to the server I’m on, and tank dungeons for the guild I’m in. Oh, wait you’re in Europe, so there might be lag issues, and you would probably log off a few hours before I log in every day.
@Dave: I certainly did miss out on the social aspects, but as you say, being in Europe would make thinks difficult. Locating a decent group here to play with would take a lot of time.
Still, what hours on what days do you typically play?
On City of Heroes I used to adjust my schedule to try to be online when the Yanks were on, so I could team up on Task Forces. On WoW I try to have a presence on an Oceania server and a North American one, so that when one is quiet the other will be busy.
And now for something completely different…
Some nuns even our host would approve of. OFD will be *really* excited:
http://www.gunsandammo.com/caption-contest/caption-contest-nuns-with-guns/
Through the week I usually play evenings, from 7 or 8 to 10 PM. On weekends, I’m generally on for a few hours each day sometime from 8AM to 10PM on Saturday, and from Noon to 8 PM Sunday. Sometimes I’m on before work or during lunch.
I was a bit tongue in cheek about moving to our server. Given what you’ve said about playing WOW, I think you’d probably make a good tank. Our guild is primarily made up of adults who don’t take the game too seriously. I think a lot of guilds would be interested in recruiting you from what you said. Your Warrior with your playing ability sounds like a natural tank for dungeons and raids. (Particularly heroic dungeons and RAIDS which are for max level players.) Also, you might try PVP.
If you go to Stormwind and post in chat that you are looking for a guild during high traffic times and what you are looking for, say a leveling guild made up of mostly adults you should get a guild invite. Especially if you say you want to tank in instances. When our guild does stuff we have no problems finding damage dealers, and the Guildmistress is a healer.
All Times US Eastern
That nun pic is real old and has been used before for similar hokey humor attempts. Some of the captions are pretty funny, though.
Various clergy in earlier times used to take a much more active role in martial and weapons-related activities.
I’ve been told to try to get on to Level 25 Guilds. Is that important?
I’ve been playing my Level 9 Paladin on Saurfang. She’s pretty hopeless, takes forever to cut down even con critters.
I am having trouble seeing in general right now. My right eye has a beginning cataract in it and a large floater that stays roughly centered. So, I can see at distance with my right eye but not up close because of the dadgum floater. The right eye just cannot focus on anything up close including computer screens.
The left eye is getting overstressed because of the right eye. I am constantly moving my head to see stuff on the right monitor with my left eye. When I swapped to the 19 inch 4×3 monitor at home recently, the stress seemed to go away.
It’s far more important to find a guild which fits your personality and play style. The perks to a level 25 guild are nice, but if you find a growing guild that fits you and your play style and isn’t level 25 yet, I’d have no problem switching.
The people that tell you a level 25 guild matters are like those who tell you the most important thing to do is to get a toon to level 90. It’s helpful, but it’s not necessary.
People who hold their fingers on the trigger (like several of those nuns) when not about to shoot, bother me. My grandfather was accidentally shot by his brother in the stomach while hunting. The brother kept his finger always on the trigger, and the gun went off at an inappropriate moment as a result. Local hospital said there was no hope for my grandfather, so my dad drove him (before the days of interstate highways) from Tiny Town straight through to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where they saved him. The brother never touched a gun again for the rest of his life.
Anyone who does that with a cocked firearm (as opposed to a double-action revolver with the hammer down) is a danger to anyone within range, and has no business handling a firearm. It’s quite easy to pull the trigger accidentally if you’re startled or even tense.
I used to hunt, and I’ve seen stuff that scared me to death. The worst was one time when we were hunting turkey and one of the guys in our group was stepping over a barbed wire fence. He put the butt of his (loaded and cocked) 12-gauge shotgun on the ground on the far side of the fence and braced himself by grasping the muzzle as if it were a walking stick as he stepped over the fence. Jesus.
My grandfather accidentally shot one of my uncles. They were climbing through a barb wire fence when the gun went off, grazing my uncle in the neck. I don’t know if he had a finger on the trigger at the time. Ironically, this incident also happened in Tiny Town.
Geez. The trigger guard is for guarding the trigger. How much sense does it make to defeat that purpose for no good reason?
Colonel Cooper’s four rules of firearm safety are easy to find; and obvious, self-explanatory and just plain common sense when you look at them. Thank you to the shade of Jeff for codifying and enunciating them.
Everyone who handles a firearm should absorb those principles until they are automatic; and everyone who teaches another about firearms should be drilling those rules into the student before, during and after everything else. You’d have to break TWO of those rules at once before an accidental or negligent discharge could hurt someone.
A firearm is a power tool that’s been made with one major purpose – action at a distance. In principle it’s no better or worse than a chainsaw. It can do less damage than the chainsaw, but can do it at a greater distance – by design. No person who cannot handle a tool safely has any business handling it at all.
What Don said; very nice and very succinct. Well done, sir!
I guess most of us have seen by now the juxtaposed pictures that went “viral” on the net recently of the young girl holding a rifle correctly and then Senator Feinstein, one of the MacBeth witches from the Left coast, the others being, of course, Barbara Boxer the Tramp, who did it in a closet with a black revolutionary type at the Marin County Courthouse back in the day, and PlasticFace Pelosi, the “devout” Roman Catholic. Feinstein has one of her claws on the trigger, of course. Dimwit bitch.
Don, “…shade of Jeff…”?
Dave, I take it you don’t like elderly female gun control types from way out west…
I never would have guessed… 🙂
Greg, the “Jeff” is:
Colonel John Dean “Jeff” Cooper, USMC (ret.) – deceased.
1920 – 2006.
Columnist, commentator, philosopher, combat and firearm educator, Renaissance man.
Bachelor’s in Political Science from Stanford, Master’s degree in History UC Riverside.
Served USMC during WW2, promoted Lt. Colonel during Korean War.
Developer and promulgator of the modern technique of handgun shooting; the concepts of numeric codes for conditions of handgun readiness; colour codes for conditions of combat mindset; and the four basic rules of gun safety.
Founding President and Honorary Lifetime Chairman of the International Practical Shooting Confederation – IPSC.
Founder of Gunsite academy.
Designer of the Bren Ten 10mm calibre handgun.
Inspiration for, and supervisor for the development of, the modern “Scout Rifle” concept.
Ave atque vale, Colonel Cooper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Jeff_Cooper
You could also do a search on “Cooper’s Corner” and “Cooper’s Commentaries” – several years of his magazine columns. They make some very interesting reading, even if you’re not particularly interested in firearms. His interests were many and varied. There used to be several mirrors of his works, monthly updates applied as they got to them. I don’t know the situation now. I downloaded them as they became available, so “I’ve got mine” (as he used to say of the Steyr-Mannlicher Scout Rifle).
Rule 2: “Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy”
Swiss soldiers travel a lot by train. They have their rifles, stocks folded, strapped to their backpacks. They toss their backpacks randomly on the seats or in the luggage racks. Muzzles are pointing everywhere.
Drives me nuts – I have rule 2 deeply ingrained…
The Australian armed services have adopted their own variation on the 5.56mm Steyr AUG – the Austeyr. I’ve handled it. It comes to the shoulder marvellously, integral optic sights are just right, points naturally, beautiful ergonomic design. Respectable gas-operated system. In so many ways it’s far superior to the M16/AR-15/M4. Once you accept the proposition that it’s okay to send a varmint round out to try and do a man’s job, it’s a magnificent design dedicated to ease of shooting.
However, take a look at a picture. It doesn’t really have a trigger guard! What it does have wraps around the entire front of the pistol grip, and the trigger that’s poking out from the front of the pistol grip. You put your entire handful of fingers in there to wrap them round the pistol grip with the unprotected trigger before you can even start to aim, let alone decide whether or not to shoot. It wouldn’t have been hard for Steyr to get it right, or for Australian Defence Industries to correct it, but oh, no! Instead they make the trigger pull around 10 pounds, losing many of the design advantages, and hope that’s good enough to prevent accidental discharges due to the deliberately-retained basic flaw of not having a trigger guard.
Makes my flesh crawl.
RE: Swiss soldiers.
Rule #2: Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy.
What makes you think the soldiers aren’t willing to destroy everything and everybody on the train?
Or is that what makes your flesh crawl?