Ever since I’ve started working again, I’ve had (gasp!) less time for FFXI. I’ve fallen into routine, where Mondays and Thursdays I’m doing Limbus, Mondays and Fridays I’m doing Assault. Tuesdays I play Magic, so that only leaves Wednesday during the week, which I’ve been usually spending fishing for moat carp. I tried doing the bulk of my other stuff on the weekends, but it’s hard — there’s so many more people on then, because they’re all in my situation. Leveling PLD has been very hit or miss on the weekends, I can sit for hours waiting for an invite, or sometimes I get one before I even put my invite flag up. And I’m done leveling it for a while, got to 70 and have to take a break, because of the part that’s getting me depressed:
Free money?
I just got a check from UC Berkeley HR which seems to be residuals from my 403(b). Now, I’m not quite sure what this is for — I did have a 403(b) when I was an employee in the computer labs, and it says I put in X dollars and had Y gains. Then the check has Federal and State Taxes withheld, so I’m assuming the money is mine now, and I’m not obligated to roll it into something else.
So yay, free money? And by “free” I mean, 33% of it is free and 67% of it is my money that used to be mine and is mine again. Of course, the fact that it appears I got taxed on the entire check, not just the interest, lowers the amount of money that I actually gained to some pitiful year over year percentage. Overall, it seems I probably shouldn’t have bothered, but I can’t remember if there was matching or something when I was paying into this. I’m sure it would have worked out better had I stayed a government employee.
Spam…. in Stereo!
I just got the exact same spam to both my work and personal email at the exact same time. The personal one was autoforwarded from my old school account… which makes you wonder…
Why would you send a spam advertising fake college diplomas to a .edu domain email address?
Livejournal++
A little behind on the times, but I finally upgraded my LJ style to S2. I also took this moment to upgrade some of the horribly nested tables into not-so-horribly nested <div>s. The look is 99% the same, there’s a few pixels that are off, and if someone makes a very short one line post, it looks a bit different, but other than that.
The plus side is that S2 is a scripting language, so I can finally use darker background colors to correspond to people, and have the template figure out that it’s a dark background and display white text instead of black on it.
Another side effect is that my comments pages now have a style associated with them, instead of being the default. I’ll either have to get used to that, or change it back somehow.
Horsey!
So I’ve been busy at work for the most part, except when I’m stuck waiting for people to get back to me on all three of my simultaneous projects, like right now. So I guess I’ll use this time to post about AOD or something.
The benefit of being one of the last to make an LJ post on a convention is that most people already made all the cool references, so I don’t have to be witty or remember what happened. I spent most (almost all) of my time in the ConOps room. It was a much mellower con this year, especially compared to last year, where most of my energy was spent tracking down people, this time we didn’t do much other than communicate with “special ops” and handle staff check-in, parking validation, keeping track of what was stored in our room, and being a place where various people could get online and/or print stuff on the printer.
Of course, being stuck in a windowless room for so many hours, I began to lose track of time by the end of the weekend, which was a bit annoying.
For those of you who are watching Feasting on Asphalt, I watched episode two and was surprised to find Alton Brown stopped at not one, but two places in Evansville, Indiana, my mother’s hometown and where my grandmother still lives. I’ve been there once, but of course I didn’t recognize anything. My mother didn’t even recognize anything… oh well, I suppose it’s a big town.
I suppose I should get back to work.
Greetings from AOD
There be internet access in the AOD ConOps room. And it only cost $1.99 for the month because I’m an AT&T Yahoo! customer. Weird, huh?
The entire contents of my car, Rob’s car, and a few other things are all sitting in the room, and it’s me on my laptop. I am very tired from lugging things in.
I forgot to bring paper for the printer for the second con in a row. I suck.