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January 2008
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25Jan

I’m still looking at you Charter Cable

See my earlier rant on Charter Cable.
Last night was another Darrianless night because Charter Cable thinks the five nines metric applies to down-time instead of uptime.

However, it appears that Charter Cable has been working overtime at being the internet’s poster child of dimness, when they deleted 14,000 customers personal e-mail accounts without a backup.

14Jan

I’m looking at you Charter Cable

I am in a static with two other players; Darrian and Ardra.

Darrian has no choice but go with Cable based internet service. Cable has always bothered me because

  1. it’s a shared connection, and
  2. it lacks reliability [in my opinion], and
  3. Cable companies provide an uplink pipe that’s smaller than the anus of a hummingbird.

For anyone with an alternative, I’m befuddled why on earth they’d pick cable.

What does this have to do with FFXI? Pretty much my numer two beef, and the fact that Darrian’s internet connection is provided by a cable internet company — Charter Cable.

Every day Darrian’s internet connection fails. Usually around 1-2 AM Central. Sometimes many hours earlier. And when it goes down, it goes down for some time. There is no outbound or inbound traffic across any port, over any protocol. Multiple calls into Charter Cable, over the course of a few months, has yielded a plethora of excuses as to why it goes down, and a promise that it’ll be fixed.

What does this really mean?

The multiple reasons Charter Cable has for their internet failing means they no f’ing idea why their internet connection goes down.  The multiple promises of the problem being fixed, when they obviously don’t have the foggiest what the problem is, just demonstrates they honestly don’t care.

If I were a network engineer for Charter Cable — what the hell am I typing?!  I couldn’t be a network engineer at Charter Cable because I take pride in my work, and actually think Internet Service Providers should, you know, provide Internet service.

Darrian’s situation isn’t the only time I’ve run across Charter Cable. I have relatives that use them, and call me be cause Charter’s tech-support is completely impotent.  Other friends use them, because they can get no other carrier, and experience similar reliability problems (sometimes stretching for days).

So last night Darrian’s connection vaporized again — right around midnight Central, and never came back. I know Darrian called up Charter Cable. I know they made another lame excuse about why they failed to provide the service their customers pay for. I know they promised that it would be fixed soon.

If ISPs were authors, Charter Cable would be those dregs of society that write-up the Sildenafil citrate spam advertisements. However, it’s completely obvious that Charter Cable aren’t the spammers that vomit out the spam itself — that would require a working Internet connection.

13Jan

When in doubt, use the Golden Rule

The “Golden Rule” is an almost universal principle of ethics. The ‘Golden Rule’ is summarized by the phrase “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Last night my mates Darrian, Ardra, and myself were all farming. There is a few things to keep in mind here:

  1. We three were the only players in this particular area for some time (maybe 45 minutes to an hour).
  2. This area is a small triangular’ish isthmus.  Small enough that 3 players at each angle can easily see one another.
  3. Unless you’re team farming (which we were) this place isn’t big enough to support more than two players.
  4. We were also using this area to XP in order to catch Darrian up.
  5. We three are extremely laid back.

After a bit of farming, another player shows up as a high level Thief.  While we didn’t appreciate someone coming in as high level job and thus distrupting our XP’ing, and we questioned this players wisdom in attempting to farm an area currently occupied by 3 players, though able to gain experience points, were able to quickly dispatch the local flora and fauna, we were none-the-less willing to share anything he could pull.

Indeed, as spawns showed up near this player, we’d all three let him have the monster he was obviously going to engage, and had clearly beat us to.  That however wasn’t enough, and quickly this player started going out of his way to pull monsters we were clearly enroute to engage.

Being the one in the group to have lowest flash point, it only took a couple of stolen monsters before I started using Provoke to return the favor.  Pretty soon things escalated into a tit-for-tat session.  It didn’t take long for all three of use to make the decision to starve this player out — which we did with a high degree of efficiency.

Things could have gone slow, but smooth for all of us had this player show the same courtesy we showed.  Instead, he had to try dominating the entire [small] area, even though we had clearly made capitulations to allow him prey he had clearly made first move on, but not claimed yet.

In the end, he had three players doing unto him as he had done unto them.

12Jan

It’s Hard To Be Humble

Last night was remarkable first and foremost because my static mate Darrian was finally allowed to stay connected for a full evening of play [thank you connectivity gods!].  This, in turn, allowed Darrian, Ardra, and myself to spend some extended time leveling.  Although I never truly forgot, this reminded me exactly why we static.

Each of us can play our role well enough on our own.  Darrian is a highly flexible player, and as a White Mage probably exceeds my own skill with the ability to adapt so that MP efficiency is always at maximum.  Ardra, likewise, has an intrinsic feel of how enmity flows and ebbs, and continues to make adjustments throughout each and every battle to maintain maximum damage without constantly stealing hate.

When we play together, our trio as a whole exceeds the sum of the parts.  Together, we are a force to be reckoned with.  Together we are riotous comedy troupe.  Together we are the incarnation of what social gaming is all about.

At one point in time, we got into the middle of a scrape that defines what Garliage Citadel is famous for — links.  Four in total to be exact.   Four links after making Chain #3.  An Incredibly Tough High-Def Beetle plus three Incredibly Tough Seige bats — which meant our Red Mage was at an extreme disadvantage trying to sleeping them because of their resistance to Dark magic.  We had no choice than to fight the entire mob simultaneously.

We should have wiped. Instead, we manage to work our way out of this spot and the whole experience was sublime.  We kept our humor.  We exercised solid tactics.  We were shining example of grace and teamwork.

I strive to be a humble person.  I understand that I’m [very] prone to making mistakes, and I take ownership them.  However, when I’m with Darrian and Ardra, humility is so hard to keep embraced.