The Laptop Saga

I realize it is super late in the day for me to be doing my normal morning blog post…  but it’s a weekend and I also do not have anyone else here in the house with me to help me gauge what time of the day it is.  Additionally I did a ton of amazing and awesome things last night and this morning… and I can talk about absolutely none of them.  So that leaves me scrambling for things to say that do not break some NDA somewhere.  I know I am not setting this blog post up extremely well.

The Laptop Saga

When last we visited my laptop, it was having intermittent issues with the power cord.  I took the laptop to a repair guy who told me that it was most likely still the power cord… but I had just bought a shit one for cheap from amazon…  which I did.  I went through the trouble and found an OEM power supply from Asus… same model numbers and everything and it arrived on Thursday.

I have to say all day Thursday I was super pumped about going home and being able to game on the couch again.  I get the magical cord out of the box… hook it up… and the same damned thing happens.  So screw you laptop… and screw you guy that told me it was most definitely the cord.  No really I am sure he was just trying to do the least invasive thing first.  Now I have no clue what is up with my laptop… and at this point the repair guy doesn’t think it is just the power socket and would more likely be something motherboard related.

Enter New Laptop

I had been drooling over a laptop that was posted a few weeks back on Craigslist… so when it seemed like a working laptop was not imminent I decided to text the guy.  Sure enough he still had it, and I was able to talk him down in price a bit.  The laptop is a Lenovo Y500 with Dual Geforce 660 video cards in a SLI configuration.  Pretty much everything about the laptop is drool worthy, and it is a massive upgrade to both my desktop upstairs and my previous laptop.

I ran to the bank and was able to get the cash that night, and text the guy…  he said he was busy at the moment but would text me back when we were able to meet up.  We agreed upon a local QuikTrip.  Apparently he had some car trouble and was in the middle of switching out an engine… and it ended up taking far longer than he had expected.  So as a result Thursday night didn’t happen.

The Delaying Game

We had set up to meet Friday night at 4:50 at the same QuikTrip.  QT is pretty much a common craigslist meet up spot, because you can go there are 4 am.. and it will still be extremely busy… with a pretty regular police stopping by factor.  I go there just ahead of the allotted time, and wait…. and wait… watching the highway getting almost excited every time I see a car that matches his description drive by.  At 5:30 I get a series of back and forth texts saying that he is having to work a double shift, because they are super busy.

I fully understand that, stuff happens…  he was supposed to text me back whenever he could meet up.  As of 1:15 the time I am writing this… I have not heard a word.  So at this point I am pretty much assuming that the deal has fallen through.  I am having flashbacks to all the hell I went through trying to get my last laptop off craigslist (I even blogged about it) before finally saying fuck it and ordering it from amazon for full price.  I personally like not having to take the initial value hit, and we buy quite a bit of stuff off craigslist for my wife… but it always seems to go to complete shit when it is something for me.

Hopefully the guy will text back with a firm time to meet up, but at this point I am not really holding my breath.  I have looked online, and I can do pretty much what I did last time and get the same configuration from an online retailer for a bit more.  However I just hate doing that.  It feels like we have a few good purchases again, and it restores my faith in humanity… then when I want something I end up dealing with nothing but flakes.

Rift Re-Launch

I seriously hate thinking of this as a re-launch, but this term keeps getting used over and over recently.  Quite honestly however as a player it does feel like in many ways we are returning to April of 2011 and the launch of the game.  There have been some pretty significant queues on all of the servers.  Deepwood has been running around thirty minutes for Patrons, and Faeblight I have heard is around an hour and a half.  Trion has taken steps to try and alleviate this, however in their traditional “good guy fashion” they have done something to apologize to the players.

Pictured above is me riding one of the new cool mounts they added to the game with the opening of the store.  This normally goes for 1350 gems on the store, and from what I can tell has been selling pretty well.  However as an act of contrition, Trion has given every single patron a unique version of this mount… with a slightly different color pattern as a way of saying that they are sorry for the hassle of queues.  It is this kind of thing that makes me love Trion the company, and why I have stayed subscribed even when I was not actively playing the game.

If there is any company that deserves to be doing well… it is Trion.  I love supporting them because they really feel like they are one of the good guys.  As evidenced by my choice of topic yesterday, I am seeing so many players coming back to the game that I have not seen around since the original launch.  The game itself is in so much better a place than it was back then.  So hopefully a good chunk of these players will still along and chip some money in to support the game.  Based on the reports SWTOR has been doing insanely well since the F2P switch… and based on the first few days it seems like Rift has even more players.

Wrapping Up

Well like I said… so much of what I would want to talk about I cant.  So I really don’t have much else.  I am extremely ready for my wife to get home.  The house feels insanely empty without her.  My office gets super cold during the summer, as it is the first stop on the air exchange path… and has two vents.  I think this makes the cats not want to spend much time here… so without warm fuzzies to keep my company I am really just limited to my friends on mumble.  I am so ready not to be the only person in the house.  I hope you guys have a great weekend.