Ooops! Sorry about that!

So lately I’ve been playing an MMO of D&D (DDO).  This is primarily because I get god awful bored in the winter since I’m an outdoors person, but also because my friend Tom plays it and it’ll be fun to connect with him regularly.  I’ve had problems with overplaying MMO’s in the past, but luckily, Emma is on it.  She’ll walk to the doorway of the room I’m in when I’m all in gamer mode and staying up too late and will meow very loudly.  I then look up and Emma stares at me disapprovingly, meows again, and then trots off to bed apparently expecting me to follow now that she’s scolded me on my sleep habits.

The Enforcer

Anyhow, I’ve been trying to get a healer up to 3rd level so I can be useful to Tom’s party, which is why I was a bit frustrated when the computer froze yesterday while I was playing it.  I cursed, tried a few more times, and ultimately it froze 5 times on me, all when I entered combat.  I grumbled, went to sleep, and ended up looking up some fixes online at work.  When I came home from soccer today, I tried a few out.  Really basic stuff, all client based (turn down the frame rate, the connection speed, engine speed, etc.)  I get in and it’s working fine for about 3 minutes, even during combat.  Unfortunately, it stalls again.  It was a different type of freeze and not something I had to hard reboot from, so I didn’t take it too bad.  I log out, and try to log back in.

Except now I can’t get into any of the servers.  Blaming myself for messing with the interface, I try to log into the DDO forums to look up fixes.

The forums are down.   So I zoom over to a different forum board and notice a post that all of the DDO servers and in fact all of the servers at Turbine Inc (which runs a handful of MMO’s and is partnered with Microsoft) are down.  And for one moment, for one split second, I thought this:

OMG!  I BROKE TURBINE’S SERVERS!

Yup.  I broke the internet.  With slider bars.  On a MMO interface program.  All you hackers out there better take a lesson from this.  Coding viruses and worms aint the way to sabotage tech companies.  You do it with radio buttons and predefined variables on a gaming client program.  (Allright, I know I didn’t break it.  Just let me have fun with my neurosis, okay?)

A Box of Stuff

So it’s late it’s late and I’m tired from moving today and yet bored, so I decide to go through some of the boxes that Hydee and I have unloaded.  I start rummaging in one box that is already open and I see a few photos of Hydee’s mom and some knitting needles and the first thing I think is, “Great.  A box of Hydee’s junk.”  Both Hydee and I tend to collect boxes of “odds and ends”, which is a polite way of saying that we’re pretty disorganized and end up with boxes of God only knows what.  I usually find tools in my boxes that, for the life of me, I can’t figure out what their original function was and that I secretly suspect never had one.

Here’s the rub though.  As I poke through this one, I realize that it’s not Hydee’s.  There’s an old driver’s license of mine, a ribbon from a 7^th grade track meet, an old game CD of mine… this is OUR junk box.  My junk mixed up with Hydee’s, and it all fits together like a Tetris game.  Love can be so many things in so many ways… passionate, sublime, sincere, tender, caring…  however, two people intermingling their mementos and having it all belong together is likely the most tangible sign of love that I have ever experienced.