Palegoldenrod

I’ve just returned from the ANZAC Day Dawn service at the local beach. It was a good service, as usual. At least I think it was. It was difficult to hear over the pouring rain on the umbrellas of those around me and the wind.

Despite people being packed in fairly well and almost all people having umbrellas and/or rain coats most of us still ended up with soggy shoes and soaking wet trousers. Ah well, it could have been worse

What was funny to watch was the mind games that occurred because of umbrellas. You see, if you are in close to other people and you put your umbrella up first,� the edge of your umbrella is going to be over someone’s head, and he will almost certainly be dripped on. So then he puts up his umbrella (with the edge underneath yours) and then the edge of his umbrella is near your shoulder and you get the run-off from both yours and his umbrellas.

There is also the knock-on effect, because now his umbrella is also dripping on someone else’s shoulder and so it goes on. You might try to outmanouvre him, by closing your umbrella for a short time then putting it up again (so your edge is under his and your roles are reversed, him copping the run-off from your and his umbrellas). Or you might try to lift the offending corner of his umbrella to encourage the drips to run off elsewhere, or you might blatantly push the corner of your umbrella under his, not even trying to hide your tactics.

The worst thing is that if all of the people around you put up their umbrellas and you don’t, rather than being safe from the rain you are just more likely to have them all dripping on you! But if you don’t get in first then you can’t really politely put up an umbrella in crowded company with 4 or 5 already up around you, so you are stuck.

If you are like the group of young guys who were standing near me, you might even take this opportunity to attack your friends, positioning your umbrella to deliver a cold gush directly to the neck of your best mate.

In any case, it was a strange, amusing thing to watch – umbrellas going up and down, pointed looks being passed around. Me in the middle of a sea of umbrellas but not game enough to put up my own in the press of the crowd, glad of my wet weather gear but still in soggy shoes.

When you are in game, sometimes (usually near a boss) you will find a chest, like the one shown below. When you hold your cursor over it, your cursor turns into a cog, indicating that it will take a little time to open the container. Now listen carefully n00b guys and gals, there are a few things to think of here.

If you are partied (grouped with other players)

Regardless of the loot settings that your party is using, chest opens are not governed by the Need or Greed system. Only one person can open the chest at a time, and the first person who opens the chest can take everything if they want.

When the chest is empty, it will disappear and maybe in a while respawn somewhere else, with different random contents. With that in mind –

1. Don’t even think about the chest until the mobs (monsters) nearby are all killed and you and your group are safe.
2. Don’t just walk over there and open it, even when the mobs are killed!

Type /roll (just like you type /p to start talking to your party) and hit enter. It will cause the game to roll dice for you, producing a number between 0 and 100. Your group members will do the same, and you should wait for them to do so. Once everyone has rolled, the person with the highest number will go and open the chest.

If you aren’t sure if you won the roll or if everyone has rolled, ask politely. Your group will tell you if you have won.

If you do win a chest, take whatever you like. If there is something in there that you don’t really need but you know that someone in your group could use, you can do one of 2 things: either loot it all and trade it to them (free or at cost, its up to you); or you can close the chest and leave those items in there, then let the person know about it.

When you close the chest and there is something still in there, another person can open the chest and take their turn (usually in order of the /roll). The chest will only disappear when it is empty.

If you are soloing (by yourself)

If someone else is killing monsters around the chest when you get there, then, like that age old fight over a parking space, it is theirs. If you both arrived at about the same time, then its up to you whether you want to negotiate with that person (ask if they want to roll for it, or duel maybe) or if you want to be rude and jump in before them.

So if you follow these general rules and play nice then people will love you, and nice things will happen.

Well we went on our walk on Saturday last and it went really well. I enjoyed it a lot.

We walked from Teralba to Queens Wharf in Newcastle. Well, the boys walked that far. I bailed at Dixon Park due to the biggest blister I have ever seen. But we also went on a few.. ahem .. “detours”… which added up to about 3.5 km, so I walked enough to have made it all the way there I guess Llew also had a huge blister on the top of his toe (ouch).

I think I also ended up carrying the heaviest pack because Jeremy couldn’t get his hands on his proper pack at the last minute, hehe.

Anyway, we set a cracking pace and I could only just keep up with Jeremy – I couldn’t keep up near the end of the walk when the blisters on my feet started giving me some grief. So I won’t be going to Tassie this time around. I’m a bit disappointed at that, but I think I would be more put out if I flew all the way down there and then only walked a day then caved in, lol.

We’re talking about walking another day walk or an overnighter in a month or so, which will be awesome.

Jeremy has now flown down to Tassie as of Friday night so he is on his walk – I’m interested to hear whether they can keep the pace they have set for themselves, as I’m sure it will be grueling to keep it up.

Earlier I alluded to some cool things going on, and I thought I should actually tell you about them

Some crazy friends of mine are shortly going to attempt to walk the Tasmanian Trail in 16 days. That is 480km from the Devonport to Dover (the top to the bottom on Tassie). From what I can see, the average time for it to be done in foot is around 30 days, hahaha. Now, I can’t get 16 days off work at the moment, but I can get a week, so I am going to join them. Hooray!

I’ll be joining them on the last leg of their trip, hopefully when they have tired themselves out and I am able to keep up with them a bit more easily. As a training / test to make sure I can keep up, I’ll be joining one of them on a full day hike along the most northern section of the Great North Walk tomorrow, rain, hail or shine.

It should be great – its about a 27km stroll from Teralba to Newcastle CBD, and rain is predicted. Bwahahahaha.

I’m working from home today, so I can’t go into all the details, but I’ll post at the end of the weekend letting you all know how it went and to give you some more juicy bits and pieces about the Tassie trip. Thats if this trial walk goes ok tomorrow

OK, this is one of those pages that I haven’t really fleshed out yet – I promise I will get to it soon.

The gist of it is that I am planning a massive trip, one that I expect will take me a year or two, and if I plan it right should take me to see much of the world.

I am planning slow travel. I want to stop and soak in the places I visit, not fly through them and catch the tourist sites so I can say “oh yeah, I’ve been there”. I want to know “there”. I want to�understand the people there, what it means to live there.

Mostly I’m going to play it by�ear, only really�properly planning the first month, then having rough plans for the rest. The biggest problem is going to be money. If I am very lucky I might find a place�that will let me work remotely, or pick up some remote contract work here and there around the place. I�am not rushing into this, so I’m saving for it even now to�be in a better position whtn the time comes.

I want to volunteer in many places along the way. I want to learn, maybe by WOOFing, and certainly by visiting places of religion around the world. Mostly I want to know who I am, know how to be alone, to see how much I change, to reconcile�society’s view of “success” and “happiness” with mine, and to figure out what I want from life.

Anyway, when I get some time I will flesh this page out a bit more and may put in some�Google maps showing where I am intending to go

Officially

Name: Carly Lyddiard
Location: Newcastle, Australia
Occupation: Web / Software Developer (.NET Technologies)

Social Bookmarking

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• del.icio.us profile

Unofficially

I am into a bunch of bits and pieces (and I guess probably not great at any of them, hehehe).

• playing fiddle/violin
• software development / programming
• religion, philosophy, culture
• photography
• technology / nerd culture
• the online society / open source movement
• computer games (d’oh)
• bushwalking / hiking
• travel
• reading (favourites are: biography, non-fiction, fantasy/soft sci-fi).

Favourite book(s)

Easily Dan Simmon’s Hyperion/Endymion series. Four books: Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, Rise of Endymion. Best story I have ever read, and written perfectly. I’m reading more Dan Simmons as a result.

Favourite MMOG: World of Warcraft

My current addiction! My details are below – catch up with me in game and I’ll give you an awethome pressie if you tell me how you found me.

My gaming friends are The Older Gamers (TOG), so my guild is a TOG guild called TOG Lootzors� – Horde FTW!

Characters:

So the old site looked pretty much exactly the same, but it was powered by Umbraco. Umbraco had its strengths, I admit – the ability to create custom document types and define your own fields and data types was very nice. But on the whole I found it a frustration – I couldn’t nicely view or manage comments from posts, I could only administer the site in Internet Explorer (my browsers of choice are Firefox on Windows and Safari on the Mac). Admittedly Umbraco was described as a .NET CMS, where Subtext is a .NET blogging engine. As such, it appears to suit my needs a bit better, and is a more mature product.

Anyway, I only got it up and running this morning, and I have yet to move content over and finish up. Hopefully tonight, my friends. Then I can tell you about some other cool things that are going on lately

Update – October 2007: This site is now running on Mephisto, a great Ruby on Rails blogging engine!