Posts
Late in 2013 my job situation was getting kinda weird. There was contracting funny-biz at work, on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again...yeesh.
By TG it looked ok again, contract re-awarded...but my tasking wasn't in it, apparently, and that started to go weird in Jan, on/off/on/off--bam! Not going to have a job on Feb 1. What to do?
And then for the first time ever, "Retirement" was now on the list of options. Not *quite* ready to do that (well, I AM, but it ain't quite time, need to wait about 3 years).
Changed employers very abruptly, stayed in exactly the same job slot, that's good for about 2 years it looks like, so that's now the retirement planning horizon. There are a couple of circumstances whereby it might happen sooner, but I think they're unlikely.
Personally, I can hardly wait...man I'm tired of the rat race around here. Job is more interesting than it was six months ago, but I am getting hammered by this ridiculous database we are using (I've found two seg-fault-fatal crashes in in the last two months, and the indexing isn't anything like SotA speed [a few weeks later: now we have damaged data because deletes are problematic]), and that is getting tiresome (although my next task there will be to try to do a complete replacement for the indexes, Berkeley DB Java is ~4X faster, and I think that will do the job; the C version is probably twice that speed, but I don't know about a Java interface, and I dislike horsing around with JNI).
Got plenty to do when I do retire--enough to keep me busy until I die. Rereading my books is a minimum 10-year project. Working the model railroad runs forever. Computer games never end, programming never ends. Multitude of projects on The Ranch to do, several of which are engineering experiments.
That's all probably good for 30 years, at which point I'm probably getting a bit feeble, and probably ought to just go ahead and die anyway.
It can't start too soon!
Friday, August 29, 2014
Sunday, August 24, 2014
One last time playing Dungeon Siege
One of my favoritest games. I've been through it end to end probably six times, as all four specialties. Figured I'd do one last time, try something I've wondered about since the beginning.
At about the final merchant, there's a spell called "Bomb". You have to have Combat Level 60 to use it, and You can't reach level 60 until about that point, or maybe later (ok, that makes sense), but that's really only if you have one character do ALL the work, using ONLY Combat magic.
Otherwise, you pretty much can't reach level 60 at ANYTHING.
"Bomb" is "Explosive Powder" on steroids, about 3-4X the power. I'm very fond of Explosive Powder, but since it maxes out at 70 pts, it's mostly only useful for getting the attention of an opponent from a distance to separate it from a crowd, or do some special sniping. You'd want Bomb to do the same (which it appears to), but available sooner, like maybe level 45 or so--60 is close to useless, because it's almost the end of the game before you can use it.
Mostly what you want to do is have really good summons to help you. That's the most effective way to go, because their health is be 2-3X you team.
If you do melee players, you most want to have freeze weapons. That, combined with summons is great--your team is maybe 16 players, half have freeze weapons, which means opponents basically can't hit back while you just pound them.
Also interesting: why I didn't notice this before I do not know: when you have to fight Gresh, there are those bunch of stone columns that appear out of the ground. I thought you were locked into that little space with him, but apparently that's not true, you can run back between them where you came from, or off to the right where there are lots more opponents (not a good idea). First time through I could not complete this, had to run the cheat code for invincibility. But when you can retreat safely, it become reasonably easy...I had no idea, I thought it was a locked arena.
At about the final merchant, there's a spell called "Bomb". You have to have Combat Level 60 to use it, and You can't reach level 60 until about that point, or maybe later (ok, that makes sense), but that's really only if you have one character do ALL the work, using ONLY Combat magic.
Otherwise, you pretty much can't reach level 60 at ANYTHING.
"Bomb" is "Explosive Powder" on steroids, about 3-4X the power. I'm very fond of Explosive Powder, but since it maxes out at 70 pts, it's mostly only useful for getting the attention of an opponent from a distance to separate it from a crowd, or do some special sniping. You'd want Bomb to do the same (which it appears to), but available sooner, like maybe level 45 or so--60 is close to useless, because it's almost the end of the game before you can use it.
Mostly what you want to do is have really good summons to help you. That's the most effective way to go, because their health is be 2-3X you team.
If you do melee players, you most want to have freeze weapons. That, combined with summons is great--your team is maybe 16 players, half have freeze weapons, which means opponents basically can't hit back while you just pound them.
Also interesting: why I didn't notice this before I do not know: when you have to fight Gresh, there are those bunch of stone columns that appear out of the ground. I thought you were locked into that little space with him, but apparently that's not true, you can run back between them where you came from, or off to the right where there are lots more opponents (not a good idea). First time through I could not complete this, had to run the cheat code for invincibility. But when you can retreat safely, it become reasonably easy...I had no idea, I thought it was a locked arena.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)