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All I can say is lol...owned.  Give 'em hell Cubes!

I be raisin a mug o grog fer you today!

I knew DirecTV's HD switchover from MPEG2 to MPEG4 was coming, but I didn't expect it to happen so soon.  When I checked the listings this morning for the Sunday Ticket games I realized that none of them were listed in HD and I immediately knew what was going down.

I guess I need to call up Direct and have them swap out my old MPEG2 receiver for one of their new swanky receivers.  So I guess for the short term, I'll be forced to watch the Bucs in blurry SD.  Given how they're playing in the first quarter of today's game, I'm not missing much...

I was reading this blog post about the Bucs final cuts, and the combination of these two points made me shake my head:

• Obviously, in keeping rookie QB Josh Johnson, the Bucs have again decided to keep four quarterbacks, at least for now. Letting go of Johnson now would have exposed him to the rest of the league. Plus, practice squads won't be formed for a couple days.

• The Bucs will be particularly thin on the offensive line, where they kept just eight players. And that includes injured Davin Joseph (foot), who will miss at least several weeks after surgery. While he's out, the Bucs have just two offensive line backups: Anthony Davis and Dan Buenning.

I still don't understand Gruden's fascination with keeping four quarterbacks.  It seems like he knows that after Garcia, the rest are junk, so he'll just interchange them as they play depending on who looks the best moment.  I don't ever really remember that being successful.

And finally, good luck Michael Spurlock, you're still the man...

1. Female dog urine does not smell as pungent as male dog urine
2. The fabric covers on my couch can safely be placed in the washing machine and dryer

I didn't realize just how much I missed football until I watched the first score of the Gators' game today and cheered a bit when they punched it in.  Then I really got psyched, because I realized my one true love, Buccaneers football, kicks off next week!  That is, they should, barring a washout of New Orleans by Gustav...

Go Bucs!

By chance I was looking at my old Vanguard posts, and realized that the server mergers went down a year ago this week.  Has it really been that long?

As much angst as it caused what with people losing their names and houses, it turned out to be in the best interest of the PvE game.  There was a period of time between the mergers and the Age of Conan release (interestingly enough), where the servers had to be consolidated for the sake of the game.  Subscription numbers were pretty low near the time of the mergers, and to not take any action would have made the world seem even emptier and acquiring groups a difficult proposition, which would have caused more people to leave, thus sparking a nasty feedback loop.

The two US PVE servers, Seradon and Xeth are well populated, with lots of groups and chatter, and the community has really come together.  There's plenty activity on both servers, with several large guilds recruiting (cheers Safe Haven!), and events being organized and run weekly.  This bodes well for Vanguard, when you consider that it all occurring during the traditional summer doldrums of MMOs, when the number of players dips since everyone has other things to do than sit inside during the summer.

I have, however, read some posts by newer players complaining about the availability of groups under level 15, and yes that is still an issue, although not nearly as bad as it would have been back when there were 10+ servers.  This seems to be largely due to the fact that there are a wide variety of racial starting zones (somewhere between 6 and 8 I believe), which tends to spread players out until they start to find the more popular level spots around level 15.  Most everyone is hoping that the Isle of Dawn will help to relieve this spreading of lower characters, since it will offer new players a single zone in which to adventure.  This will hopefully make the lower levels of the game seem more populated as well as encourage lowbie grouping.

So, hindsight being 20/20, the folks on the Vanguard team made the smart choice by merging.  I'll always remember looking at the list of servers when creating Inara and Lunestra, and thinking to myself that Targonar and Woefeather sounded like interesting places to spread my roots.  So to you Targonar and Woefeather, I pour out a little!

Thirty-two minutes may not seem like a whole lot of time, but around a month ago when my new elliptical was delivered and I first jumped on, the default program was a 32 minute bellcurve that I thought I'd never hit.  Over the past few weeks I'd been bumping up the time by 2 or 4 minutes a week, and yesterday ran it for 22 minutes.  This morning I woke up decided to go for broke and give all 32 minutes a run for their money.  ~2 miles and 622 calories later, and I had made it through all 32 minutes and felt great.  Mission accomplished!

If you use amarok2/ubuntu via the neon nightly build service, you may have noticed that your collection shows up, but there are no tracks displayed.  A quick googling turned up this helpful post:

http://amarok.kde.org/forum/index.php?topic=15678.msg23480

Deleting ~.amarok-nightly and then re-scanning your collection should get you back up and running!