Death of the Internet Service Provider

Monday mornings are without a doubt the worst thing to ever exist.  I sit here and am tired and worn out from the weekend, knowing I am going to have to go be passably intelligent for the next several hours.  It was a busy weekend, but unfortunately not busy in the kinds of ways I would have liked it to be.  At this point I am just hoping to survive until evening so I can crash.

Sofa is conspiring against me

Saturday was an absolute whirlwind of furniture shopping.  Sunday followed with a whirlwind of cleaning and then even more furniture shopping…  because we are inherently neurotic and could not trust our opinions from Saturday.  As of right now I have completely dismantled the gaming loft, and 20 years of console gaming is more or less neatly packed into office depot boxes.  All that is left there is to remove one set of furniture and replace it with the love seat from downstairs and a new more minimalistic entertainment center.

There are so many things urging these projects on, but not the least of them is the fact that after over a decade my ISP is closing down DSL access.  Yes you heard me right, I am still on DSL and have been in part because I was caught up in an anachronism.  I literally had my DSL service through an old fashioned Internet Service Provider, and with it came the ability to call them at any time and get a person I actually had known for decades.  Additionally I had perks like the ability to host servers, a static ip address, all things that I would no longer have in going to a less custom experience.

Death of the Internet Service Provider

While I have wanted to make the switch for years, simply because my 4 meg internet connection sucks massively in todays realm of all streaming all the time.  I have not done so because there are a lot of legacy applications that my wife and her teacher friends use that I hosted off of a home server.  Over the years my wife has moved on and is no longer using most of these, but her teacher friends still were.  Windows hosting, is both painfully priced and painfully limited in kind of access you have.  So up until now it has just been easier to host it myself.

We got an email and later a paper letter from my ISP stating that it was no longer financially feasible to continue with DSL support.  So by June 15th we will be entering the greater broadband world, as that is the day we officially lose our “artisan” internet, as I have taken to calling it.  Right now I am looking at 50 meg cable, because I sincerely doubt we need to bump all the way up to 100meg or whatever the top of the line is.  I figure 50 meg is already 12 times more bandwidth than what we previously had, so the jump up any higher is just truly unfathomable at this point.

High Definition Daze

How this need links up to the desire to fix the game loft, is that we will be having to have cable run to the upstairs.  So we might as well clean the loft and get it set up with proper cable while we are running it to my office.  Two things still need to happen out in the loft.  Firstly we need to haul out the stuff we are getting rid of, secondly we need to acquire a television and entertainment center and set them up.  Television shopping is an almost surreal experience, and this is coming from someone who understands all the numbers and settings and features.

We are not really huge television people.  I am sure this counts as blasphemy, but in our living room the largest television we own is a 32 inch 1080p from 2006ish.  While I grew up as an only child, and use the television as background noise, we consciously consume it in small doses.  We tend to record things on the DVR all week long, and then watch them as my wife grades on the weekend.  As a result, I feel ill equipped for the realities of buying a television…  I quite honestly rarely watch television in HD at all.  It doesn’t really improve any of the programming I actually watching, since I tend to be violently allergic to sports casting.

Plans within plans

Right now the plan is to upgrade the living room television, and move our old 32 inch television up to become the game loft setup.  All of this will allow us to pair down the living room to just our main sofa, which sets us up to move in the new furniture that we have yet to even purchase yet.  So as of Saturday morning, we thought we had everything figured out.  But upon a re-measure of the pieces, we were either going to not have enough room, or barely an inch of clearance on the wall it all was going on.  Essentially we were back to the drawing board.

All of Saturday we had not really been looking at the home theater components/sectionals…  that was just something that we stumbled into at the end of the day.  Once we had gotten our fill of dust in our lungs… we decided to go back out and hit a few places looking specifically at the component sectionals.  Quite honestly, I am glad we did, because it was at the second stop of the day that we found what I think will ultimately be our living room setup.  After calculating what “Recliner > Console > Recliner > Chair > Chase Lounge” would end up being space wise, we still would have roughly 8 inches on either side to spare.

Of course being as neurotic as we are… we did not accept victory, but instead spent the rest of the day going from store to store trying to break the bubble we had just built.  Fortunately, or unfortunately… depending upon your perspective we were not able to bust the deal.  So now it feels like we really do have a final plan in place, now it just comes down to ordering the furniture and planning for delivery. which also involves having the loft done as a dependency… plans within plans.

Finally some gaming

All of this added up to just not much game time at all.  By the time I made it home each evening I was extremely sluggish and worn out.  Yesterday afternoon I took an hour long cat nap, so that helped quite a bit.  By the time I made it into Rift I was almost sociable again.  I finally unlocked the daily quest content out in Ashora, and apparently you can make roughly 10 plat a day by just doing those quests.  Overall they seemed pretty easy to solo, and went fast enough.  Just involved quite a deal more travel time than the previous daily quest zones had.  I think Iron Pine Peaks has forever spoiled me with its efficiency and changing mob types.

After doing my daily quests, I had wandered over into Steppes of Infinity and began the quest chains out there, hoping they would also eventually unlock daily quests.  Round about this time we had some life bloom in the guild, as Aleriase, Marklaar and Plasmodia all logged in within thirty minute of each other.  We circled the wagons and decided to queue up for a normal dungeon.

Almost instantly we got assigned a random fifth, and were zoning into Empyrean Core.  So I am wondering if it is just a case of not having a lot of upper level dungeons, but so far at 59/60 I have done three dungeons and each of them has been the same place.  Not that I am complaining really, it is a fun dungeon and goes pretty quickly if players know the pitfalls.  I managed to pull a second one hand sword from the dungeon, so I now have a matched set of Unstable Core Shards.  Supposedly one hander and two hander dps have been normalized, and I have always preferred the look of dual wielding to two handers.

Getting back to normal

It was yet again, an awesome time hanging with the guildies.  I know there are plans for both Tuesday and Wednesday night runs, so I am looking forward to those as well.  The clock is ticking away, so I am needing to wrap this up.  Thanks for bearing with me on the recent flood of personal posts.  I made myself a promise to post about whatever was happening, regardless if it was exciting.  Lately there has just been a good deal more real life happening than gaming.  Hopefully this week things can get back to at least somewhat normal.

If you’ve made it this far in the post… I hope you all have a great Monday, or at least as good as a Monday can be.  It serves to be a busy week for me, the server move that was scheduled for Saturday night is going to have to be rescheduled for tonight.  Hopefully the rest of the week ends up better.