Upcoming December 2007/January 2008 vacation

The long awaited vacation is coming up soon. The office closes on the 21st of December 2007 and opens on the 2nd January 2008. My bus for Namibia is leaving on the 23rd of December 2007 in the early morning. The next day is the German Christmas with my family.

During my time away, a friend of mine will look after my home business while he camps out in the crypt and awaits his night shifts. Hopefully things will run smoothly.

Busy weeks

The last couple of weeks have been far too busy and I am quite exhausted as a result. Recently I also got new costumes for my home business which cost me a fortune. My PC also died and I had to get a new one.

Due to me varnishing my kitchen door and a friend of mine being clumsy, my entire fridge smells of Terpentine. Tomorrow is my father's birthday and I am taking him out to dinner. This evening I am getting some clients and I am going to dinner at friend. I really hate it when people insist on me having to give them a specific time of arrival when I cannot even guess roughly myself due to unknowns. That really annoys me really quickly which is for me reason enough not to attend a meeting which has a flexible starting time. The more persistent some people are, the quicker I will pull out of things related to that.

Matieka 2007 report

Last weekend was the annual German carnival Matieka in Stellenbosch. I tried to attend the main event on Saturday evening, but never got to the door, since all 600 tickets were sold out by the time the event was supposed to start officially. I was even dressed for the event, just like most other people. The theme as every year was virtually unknown by most or simply ignored.

Just simply standing in the queue was an interesting experience and quite a bit of fun. Just for fun and the experience, I tried to dress as a female character, which most people in the queue did seem to recognise as a real female. One person who came with me also said that I looked the part. The outfit itself was a Supergirl costume which was open at the legs, stomach area and upper chest. The face I sorted out by using a realistic mask from Greylandfilm and a wig. To cover the rim of the mask around the eyes, I added a black eye mask. The idea was to look like a woman who wore a Supergirl costume with a bit of mystery added about what the face looks like. The end result was more or less as desired. Only one person seemed to have realised that I was not really female, the rest didn't seem to notice. Hands and legs and chest area would give that away a bit, as well as the eye rims possibly showing underneath the eye mask. The hair also looked too much like a wig.

The whole experiment served to see the response of people around me and to see what some people like or don't like about the costume, in order for me to better advise my clients who want to rent that kind of outfit or similar ones. Part of the experiment was to see just how different the response of other people is, simply by not wearing normal clothing.

The hard choice of what costume to wear

This weekend I am yet again going to the annual German carnival in Stellenbosch.

Unlike all of the previous years, I would like to wear a costume that is a bit more unique and less stereotypical. This year I was thinking of trying to wear a female outfit when combined with a realistic mask and wig. I have tried supergirl and a pirate costume, both actually fit and look quite good.

The usual costumes would be Wolverine, Superman, Batman, Jedi Knight and a few others. Most of my costumes would get too hot at such an event.

Dead PC

Yesterday I had lots of fun with my PC having a death scene. It started with a blue screen showing IRQL_NOT_EQUAL_OR_LESS error message. After the reset button, PC froze during booting. Later on the BIOS froze as well while navigating the menu. I tried to swap the RAM DIMMs and put single ones into other slots. At one point in time, the BIOS was doing a lot of quick beeps. Now that doesn't even happen anymore.

Supplier reliability issues

Lately I have become more wary of having to use local people and companies to help me do various things. The main problems being reliability and communication.

Examples:

1. A new supplier that phoned me to offer their services does not answer phone calls at different times of the day. The same applies to email enquiries. I wanted to buy something and was willing to pay for that, but now they have lost a sale since I have to yet again resort to the overseas suppliers who take longer due to shipping delays but deliver the goods.

2. Someone who was doing repairs for me seems to have lost some things that were supposed to have been repaired. Repairs that would take a few hours at most, I only ended up getting those back between two and three months later. Most of the time no communication at all when I enquired about the status.

3. A company overseas that does some manufacturing also doesn't respond to enquiries (email or telephone). I don't see how they can sell things if they operate like that.

The end result is: I am sceptical at best to give anybody some work to do and with that adding to the lack of experience and unemployment.

Spider-Man at Cape Town Book Fair 2007 at CTICC

A recent news article from the Readers Den newsletter showed the following article which was now also listed on BKE Costume Rental:

Spider-man makes an appearance at 12.00 on Sunday 17 June (Readers Den, Stand G16, Exhibition Floor ). Spider-man will hand out a selection of all ages comics - kids only! Photo opportunities with Spider-man are welcome.

Read more information about the Cape Town Book Fair.

PC troubles

Lately I have been having some weird issues with my PC and its start-up time. On Saturday, some of its system tray icons did not show up. Windows XP Professional was stuck for a long time on certain places during the start, in particular on the screen that shows system information. Months earlier I decided to rather enable the displaying of more information during the starting instead of waiting for a nondescript animation to tell me nothing.

For two days now I have been running disk checks to make sure my file system is not screwed up and causing this. The check of the biggest drive should hopefully be done when I come home from work today. Worst case scenario, I might have to re-install Windows.

Guild Wars: Why ArenaNet should have more original events

As of late, the online MMORPG game Guild Wars has started to get me bored. Add to that the stupid events that happens so rarely or the weekend stuff that I just could not be bothered about.

The Royal Ascalon Ball last weekend on 5 May 2007 was really nice, but that was not organised by ArenaNet or NCsoft. That event was organised by actual gamers. ArneaNet fortunately added some fireworks.

I have been playing Guild Wars for ten months and along came the second birthday of Guild Wars. Only the two year old characters supposedly got something nice. I have no clue what that is. The rest got el cheapo drops occasionally. Now what about the one year old characters? Don't they also get something for being around that long? What about the people whos characters turn 2 years old one day after the event finished?

The rewards on weekends are being repeated and not really something that interests me. The boardwalk games can only be played by the rich. Most players are not rich because they don't farm.

The biggest problem is getting gold to get things like armour or a a better weapon where 1 000 gold can take hours to collect or sometimes spanned over days. Then there are "small" price tags by various players for a small 40 000 gold of even 60 000. The highest that I ever had was 16 000 and that took me a really long time to collect. Getting armour that costs 1 500 gold plus materials per piece can take a long time to get. I never have any drops when I try to farm using farming builds in the popular farming areas. Paying the 1 000 gold entrance fee for Underworld is also a waste of gold for me, since the first mob can easily eliminate my party of characters.

The minipets that can be won at some events are sold by many just to make some gold, so the prices get pushed up very quickly. This makes them instantly not affordable to those that do not have them.

The point of the whole thing is: Why do so many have to stay poor and why are the official events so useless for many or most or even too expensive? The event hats have got no armour rating but people are seen using those in battle. This means they have no protection. Can we maybe get some decent gold rewards for a change or maybe an event armour that people actually want to own?

If ArenaNet doesn't come up with something better in their events soon and not fix many missing basic parts in the game, then they can expect to loose players to other companies. I have been considering something else as well due to lack of basic features but other stuff gets upgraded, including the Player versus Player (PvP) which I hate and do not play at all. That gets too much attention in my opinion.

Basic features lacking:
- Guild rankings list in the game
- Announcements viewable in the game
- Not always the same announcement about player accounts for months
- Message system like email when offline
- Resizable message window
- Hiding or shrinking the party window and the map in towns when not needed
- Where is the guild size and communication details of the guilds in an alliance? Do I have to guess how big another guild in the alliance is or who their leader is??? Why can guilds not have a bit more info about themselves? I have been with my guild for a long time and don't get a sense of identity from that due to lack of guild character (the cape and tag just don't do it).
- Weapons in different price ranges at the merchant, not just expensive
- The afflicted and Faction points to unlock a town in the Factions campaign was a really bad idea. I was in from of the portal but could not get in due to something stupid that can be gained the quickest with PvP battles which I hate. The quests for Faction points were really slow for getting very few points, the same with challenge missions.
- There is no decent spam filter for the local chat.
- Official events are mostly just plain boring. Halloween was decent, the racing was fun. St Pactricks Day was ok. The canthan new year was too tedious. The rest was just plain boring and not memorable at all. Boardwalk games just feed on gold which takes too long to get.

Free Comic book Day coming up again

This upcoming May the 5th, I will be yet again helping out in my usual clothing (Spider-Man). This will be the third time that I am helping out at the event there at the Readers Den in Claremont.

Costume washing blues

After the last MCQP costume party, I still have one or two costumes to wash which have to be washed by hand. The lack of space and the biting dog outside plus distractions makes this difficult.

I will have to rearrange some things and throw away some boxes.

New wigs have arrived. Most of them are black. I am planning to order new costumes soon and also get a couple of bunny suits for Easter.

Annual Namibia vacation

This last vacation was very relaxing with my family in Namibia.
The heat was a bit less than expected, normally it is hotter there, but the rain season had just started.
the ants (those that bite) were out in full force.