Lord of the Rings Online : Book 10 Release Date Announced
I’m always up for more content!
Turbine has announced that the release date for Book 10: The City of the Kings, the next free expansion for Lord of the Rings Online will be August 20th. The new expansion will feature a number of changes to monster play, as well as over 100 new quests, and the new reputation and barter systems.
Weekend recap
This weekend was the penultimate 3-day weekend of the summer before MJC returns to a 5-day, 8-hour schedule. While it’s nice to have Fridays to do whatever, I look forward to getting back to regular hours. With Fridays off, it feels like too much time elapses between the last day of work for a week and the first day of work for the next. Yeah, weird, I know.
So here’s what happened over the weekend.
Thursday night, I went down to the St. Stanislaus community center to observe the dress rehearsal for a friend’s dance recital. I had been asked to video record the performance and I wanted to get a sense of how it would look through the camera.
Friday, I got up late, played on the computer for most of the day and attended the dance recital in the evening. The dances were good and I enjoyed the show. The performance did suffer from poor lighting and there was an unnecessary intermission and WAY too much talking between dances, but these problems, rather than suggest to me that it was a failure, made me hope that these things can be fixed and improved. That can be a subtle difference but a significant one.
On Saturday, I hosted a Community Education trip to the Giants game. On my way to the school in the morning, I was rear-ended. Very little damage but it delayed me and even if it hadn’t, who enjoys being in an accident? Anyway, the weather over in San Francisco was pleasantly cool, maybe too cool, and everyone on the trip enjoyed the day despite the Giants’ loss. It did eat up the entire day and I was able to spend only a few hours in the evening playing LotRO and watching tv.
I got up early on Sunday to go do music at the morning Masses. Jody’s daughter, Hilary, and Hilary’s new husband, Christoph sang with us. With the addition of Don, we had a crowded little space up there. Then I sang with the choir for the 10:00 Mass. It wasn’t bad, actually. I think if they discontinued using the microphones, they’d sound better, so I’ll work on making that happen. Kyle asked if he could come play bassoon with me at the 11:30 Mass next Sunday so that will be pretty cool. Then there was the 11:30 Mass which went fine. It was Mike, Christy, and me. The rest of the day was spent online with Danny and Suzanne.
Some of the tv I watched this weekend: Scrubs, Eureka, Flash Gordon, Psych (I love this show! It has all these obscure 70s and 80s pop culture references that the characters acknowledge are obscure references. Just my kind of thing!), Dead Zone, and Burn Notice. You might think this is a lot of tv, and you may be right. But I tivo everything and skip the commercials so that cuts viewing time by 20% or so. Yeah, yeah. Excuses, excuses. I like tv. Sue me.
I also found time to mow and water my lawns this week.
Busy times ahead! Proceed with caution.
We are in the last throes of summer before the fall semester starts. Just 3 weeks to go! I’m looking forward to being fairly busy for a few months.
I will continue to take the water aerobics class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I haven’t exactly seen results but it can’t hurt.
Immediately following class on Tuesdays, I will rush over to Community Orchestra. I’ll be playing percussion again and maybe viola as well. We’ll see if the stuff is easy enough to fake it.
I am also enrolled in the String Orchestra. This is the class that has music that I might actually be able to play. Class meets on Wednesdays and Fridays during the day. I’ll be taking a long lunch to attend.
On Monday nights I will be taking a beginning photography class. I plan on purchasing a camera in a couple of months so I thought it would be a good idea to start to learn about depth of field and composition and shutter speed and the like.
I am switching church music practice to Wednesday evenings and I will be attending choir practice on Thursdays on the weeks I am not attending a Knights of Columbus meeting.
All of this barely leaves time for online gaming and television, which as I’ve said before, really kicks into gear in the fall. Perhaps I need a class on time management…
Gems I’ve found
Recently, I’ve spent way too much time looking for interesting blogs. I’ve spent even more time reading the ones I find. I say way too much because it can be so engaging that I end up doing little else. In the course of my meanderings, I have found a couple of posts that I want to share.
The first is from Twenty Sided, a blog that appeals to the role-playing gamer in me. There are two series of posts that I have really enjoyed reading here, DM of the Rings and a narrative of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. You should check them out. But I love this post. It makes me wish I spent more time thinking about these kinds of things. (Yeah, I’m a bit of a nerd.) If only I were so creative!
The next blog is called AdSense Tracker. It is “for the purpose of testing Google Adsense ads to see if they actually work and if they actually pay off”. The blogress is friendly and helpful and she is WAY more Web 2.0 savvy than me. She references many sites and services and a poor newbie blogger like me has trouble keeping up. But, I enjoy reading what she posts, and like I said, she’s so helpful and friendly. She recently posted a list of guidelines for good blog networking. If you are new to blogging, I suggest you read through her archives to benefit from her experience.
Enjoy and let me know what you think.
The illusion of security
Well, good news. I will not have to change departments for at least the next several months. I had a talk with my boss, the VP of Instruction, and she was totally ok with making no changes at this time. She was pretty cool and very easy to talk to about the whole thing.
So. For today and for this weekend, I feel pretty secure with my job. But as experience has shown me, that can be fleeting. I will enjoy it while it lasts and try to hold onto it as long as I can.
Where will I be working next month?
I will never understand people who can embrace change. Perhaps they are like adrenaline junkies who need to live on the edge. Change is very difficult for me. It has become easier and less something to be feared but only to the point where it is now something to be tolerated when absolutely necessary.
One of my bosses approached me last Thursday to discuss a possible change in my job. It would involve switching campuses, as well as leaving the Instruction side of the house for a Community and Economic Development position. It would allow me to go from an 11-month employee to a 12-month but apart from that, I can see no benefit to making this switch.
I can, however, identify several reasons not to want to do this. There’s the moving to the West Campus part. The West Campus has a much smaller population of students right now. It also has fewer staff and faculty. It feels more lifeless over there. The String Orchestra class is during the day and meets on the East Campus. Right now it’s easy to extend my lunch by just a little to walk over to the Music Building for class two days a week. It would take at least an extra half hour out of my day to come over from the other campus. And I have friends here on the East Campus. Not so much over there.
Another reason to not do this is that Work Force Training, where I’d be going, seems so removed from the main work of the college. It’s important, what they do. And it is about delivering instruction but it’s dealing with businesses and such that want to bring instruction to their people. I like working in the Instruction Office. It feels like a hub for the college. WFT would be like being WAY out on one of the spokes of that wheel.
I am comfortable here in this office. I know what I’m doing. I get to interact with all divisions, and with staff, faculty, and administrators. Over there, I’d get to interact with the 5 or 6 other people in my department.
So, why do it if I don’t want to? Well, I’m not sure how much of a choice I have. I need to talk with the VP of Instruction to ask her what her plan for this office is. Will I have a place here in her vision? I may have to take this other job in order to be secure in my continued employment. I hope that’s not the case but I tend to worry a bit sometimes.
Arrrgh!
Music at St. Stanislaus
I’ve mentioned before that I am a church musician. Every weekend, I am responsible for providing the music at two of the six English Masses at St. Stanislaus Parish in Modesto. I play guitar and sing on Saturday evenings at 5:30 PM and Sunday mornings at 11:30 AM. Music leaders at the other Masses are: Cathy at 7:00 AM, Mike at 8:30 AM, Kyle with the choir at 10:00 AM, and Jami and the band at the 5:30 PM Life Teen Mass.
Each of the five of us plans our own selections for music with little or no coordination between the Masses. This is not the way I would like things to be. There are two Masses every weekend that have the same music selections. I’ll let you reread the first paragraph to figure out why. There is no Music Director at the parish to provide the umbrella of direction for us. I’m told that the pastor, Fr. Arouje, has announced that he intends to hire a Music Director, so we’ll see how that goes.
Well, I just heard last night that Mike needs to take an indefinite leave of absence from leading the music at the 8:30 AM Mass. There are some people who play with Mike every week; Jodi plays piano and Joe plays guitar. But Mike’s absence leaves them with no singer. So I have proposed that Cathy, Jodi, and I get together to cooperatively plan the song selections for the four Masses we cover, and I will join the 8:30 AM group to sing (and maybe play guitar as well). At the same time, I have asked Kyle to arrange some viola parts for me so that I can join the other string players at the 10:00 AM Mass. I haven’t touched my viola in months so this will be good for me as well.
So the question is: How soon will I be exhausted with this schedule?
Stay tuned.
Relationships as a zero-sum game
I was discussing this with a new friend yesterday and she agreed that it was blog-worthy.
I have a particular way of conceptualizing my capacity for relationships. I see it as a zero-sum game. I have a finite amount of attention, energy, and interest in pursuing, improving, and maintaining relationships. If one person’s allocation of my time is to increase, that portion must come from somewhere. And if a new person is to enter my life, other relationships must be downsized in order to make room.
Here’s an illustration.
This graph shows how much of my attention is spent on the various members of the Brady family.
In discussing this imagery with friends, I have had some respond by saying that they don’t need to reduce what they have in order to add a new person to the mix. Poppycock, I say. I do think that people have differing capacities for relationships. 100% to one person is a different quantity than 100% to another.
Well, enough about that. Thanks, Stacy.
MMORPGs
For the last year and a half, I’ve been into playing Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). The first I played was City of Heroes. In CoH, you create a superhero, choosing from numerous powersets, origins, and costume designs/combinations. Then you sally forth into the game world to right all wrongs and arrest bad guys. I liked this game and played for over a year. I was part of a small group of friends that had met in-game and we always found each other to team with.
But after a time, frictions within (and the subsequent disolution of) this group as well as the limits of the game itself caused me to move on to World of Warcraft. WoW is set in a fantasy genre with dwarves, gnomes, elves, and so forth. Character creation is similar to CoH but one is far more limited in the choice of how a character looks. But WoW has more dimensions of gameplay than City of Heroes. While CoH is pretty straight forward, in WoW, there are numerous things that a player can be working on at once, e.g. questing, crafting, reputation, earning money. These are all valuable pursuits in WoW.
Some of what I don’t like about WoW is that is looks somewhat cartoonish, and the game is full of pop-culture references like an engineer named Scooty and another character named Haris Pilton. Things like this really hamper the sense of immersion that I am looking for.
A few months ago, my cousin, Danny, suggested I check out a new game, Lord of the Rings: Online. I was a bit reluctant but agreed to try it out. LOTRO is also in a fantasy genre; the land of Middle Earth created by J.R.R. Tolkien. As such, it has an incredibly rich back story and anyone familiar with the movies or better yet, the books, already has a sense of what this world is like. Game play is much like WoW, with things like crafting, combat, questing, and so forth but the world has more of a photorealistic look to it. The graphics are just beautiful.
WoW has been around for years and is highly successful. It is still fun for me. LOTRO is new. While I enjoy both games, I am enjoying LOTRO more these days.
No such thing as a dumb question? I beg to differ.
During the summer, MJC is closed on Fridays. To coincide with that, we employees move from a 5 days/8 hours schedule to a 4 days/10 hours. I hate it. At least I used to. I like the structure of going to work everyday and never knew what to do with myself on Fridays. Plus getting up early and coming home late left no time for anything in the evenings. I’ve softened my position somewhat. Now, instead of working 10 hours a day, I take 1-2 hours of vacation per day and keep a more normal schedule. I still don’t know what to do on Fridays but it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to.
Begin rant.
So tonight is the annual Summer Sonata fundraiser dinner for the MJC Foundation. It’s at a new place this year so I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes. I attended a training Wednesday evening for all of us volunteers to hear what we’re going to do and how we’ll do it. It was a difficult meeting to sit through. I don’t know if there was a single question that needed to be asked. It was like every question was carefully crafted so as not to increase our knowledge or understanding once we heard the answer. For example, consider this question. “Will the serving trays that we use be rectangular or round?” It doesn’t matter what the answer is. Knowing the shape of the tray does not help us in the slightest. But the best question was, “What if there’s an emergency situation; will someone have a phone to call 911?” I actually think the question dumbfounded the room. There will be 300 people at the event that is being held at a residence in the middle of town. Do we really need to lock down on Wednesday who will have access to a phone? I doubt there was a single person in the room that does not have a mobile phone. I just find these kind of meetings to be such a collossal waste of time.
End rant.
