RETIRED WARRANT

Traffic

This morning I signed off with Laila a bit early and left for work a little early. I am glad I did because the roads and traffic were a huge mess. I made it to work on time, but just barely.

Maybe Laila had a premonition or something, but while she always tells me to have a safe drive to work, this morning she emphasized it a little more. Sure enough, as I was going down Reo Drive close to the house some knucklehead backed out into traffic without looking and then I got stuck following this idiot for several blocks while he weaved down the streets. The person did not drive even close to a straight line and must have been on a cell phone. I couldn’t tell because the truck had tinted windows.

The freeway was all backed up and no one did anything dumb, it was just slow. The gate was a little backed up since I was raining and took the gate guards a little longer to verify ID’s. I did make it on time though, even though I got drenched going from the car to the building.

Since it took me so long to get to work I was able to listen to the radio a little more and they were talking about a local court case. The verdict was announced yesterday and has managed to turn into a big deal in the news.

The case was about the poisoning of a marine by his wife so she could collect his insurance money. It was mainly a circumstantial evidence case and I think the thing that got her convicted was the lifestyle changes she demonstrated right after his death. With the death of a military member, the serviceman’s group life insurance and the military pay off the family rapidly. There is a quick payment to handle the funeral expenses, and then the rest comes soon after that.

She used the money to get breast implants and then threw several parties, entered wet t-shirt contests, and slept with many different men. All of this started happening within two weeks of his death, so it kind of seemed a bit odd.

The defense tried to do the contaminated evidence thing, and the grieving widow lost her mind thing, but it didn’t work so now she will be able to show her new boobs to her cell mate. Hopefully all the fun she had after his death will be memories enough to last her a lifetime, because her freedom and fun days are over.

I am starting to wonder about some of the members of our federation on Unification Wars. Laila was the first to notice it, but she has me thinking about it too. When we post an outpost to supply reinforcements for our federation, it is not free. We have to pay to both build and to maintain our ships. This costs me about 6-9 billion for every 45 urns or 5 minutes of game time. I can make all of that up by mining and so can Laila, but with us it is becoming a matter of principle.

Laila did a little researching yesterday and found that some federation members have been using our outpost, but have not been supplying any outpost to the other members. So in other words she has discovered some freeloaders. Also we will post the outpost for people and they will not pay attention to what level they are at. I spent a lot to put out 2 stacks at 250M yesterday and he guy got hit and was complaining about no reinforcements. A 250M stack is for a fleet of 1 billion, or a quarter of the value of the guy that is out fighting. After he complained I checked and he was down to about 750M and that put him out of range to receive reinforcements. The game is very particular in sending reinforcements so if you are out attacking you have to pay attention to your Pr and make sue you stay in range to receive reinforcements.

I think since we have many federation members we should assign everyone in the federation maybe to separate values of stacks and then between the federation members we could cover the entire range of Pr’s when someone comes out. As it is now you have to follow what someone is doing and then constantly see what they are doing to post the right amount in the stacks.

Anyway I will see what our federation leader has to say about things, since I am after all a new player.

Darn, the other staff members have to go off to a meeting so I will be babysitting and watching the class take a test. That is about as exciting as watching grass grow. I will see if I can access the power point presentation I was working on for something to do. I hope everyone has a fine day, and if you live in Southern California I hope you have a safe day and don’t get hit by any of the many reckless fools that try and drive to fast in the rain.

Stayed up late but had fun

Last night I stayed up a bit late playing Unification Wars but Laila was coming out of DP Damage Protection and we wanted to see if what we had learned would work and result in less planet loss. We had been playing all day with members of both our federation and our sister federation and felt we had learned alot.

The first thing you must do is prepare a nice stack of ships. After I get this posted I will work on a spreadsheet to calculate that for us. There are many different ships and many different ways to stack them for defense or offense. What you do is make 6 stacks of ships. Each ship will have a certain power rating and so when you select the ship type, the power rating for that stack will be the power rating of all the ships of that type that you build.

When you attack your first stack or stack A will be the ships with the highest power rating, stack B second, and so forth. When you select your stacks your stack A will be up against the opponents stack A and so on. There are many different strategies for stacking and so I will be experimenting over the next few days.

Anyway the other thing you must do is have someone from your sister federation knock you back down into DP when you are done fighting. To do this you skirmish in your most remote system to preven planet loss.

This worked out great last night and Laila only lost 800 planets instead or the usual 60,000. I should have come out of DP last night too, but instead I went to bed and figured I would go ahead and get up early and do it this morning when I would naturally through the game time come out of DP.

The game is out of Singapore and so the game time is Singapore time. I misjudged the time, woke up late, and though Laila tried her best to protect me she didn’t have anyone from our sister federation to know me back into DP so I lost 60,000 planets. So now I know that if I will be asleep or at work when coming out of DP I should instead force myself out of DP before going to bed so I don’t suffer as much losses.

After checking my game status and saying the rosary with Laila, she went to bed. She was feeling ill from eating some kind of fish soup. I don’t eat fish so I was giveing her a hard time about it.

After Laila went to bed Judy, Carlos and I went to the 9:30AM mass. When we got there it was again fairly empty but was full by the time mass was over. The entry procession was a little different today. The music started and the altar boys and the lady carrying the Bible proceeded up the aisle. The only problem was that they took off and forgot the priest and did not discover it until they got to the altar. There were quite a few giggles as they turned around and hastily went back to the entrance of the church to start over again.

Today was the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time. The first reading was Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19. The second reading was 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13. The gospel was Luke 4:21-30.

1 Corinthians was very popular in all the Protestant Churches I attended after my Mother removed us from the Catholic Church when I was about 13 years old. I was very familiar with it.

The Priest used it to try and solve a few differences that have been going on between groups in the parish. I don’t know much about what has been going on but there are many different boards and committees and there have been some disagreements.

Anyway the priest talked about faith and hope and then concentrated on love. He told us about physical love and family love, but them concentrated on love for friends and neighbors. If everyone would use love for one another than the arguments and disagreements would go away. It was a nice message.

After that we went to Jack in the Box and grabbed some breakfast sandwiches. While there, we saw some woman that was fighting with the counter lady and the manager about her breakfast order and the fact that they messed it up three times. The manager and counter were hispanic, and this lady was yelling and talking fast. I don’t think they understood what she was saying. Finally she asked for a refund and left.

We then came home and ate, and now I am getting my blog stuff taken care of and leveling up in the game. I will now work on my spreadsheet, as I have a couple of things I want to do automatically and fast.

Have a great weekend folks.

Learning the UC game

Well I think I am getting the hang of playing Unification Wars. I also am getting a better understanding of how to play the game from watching the other members of our federation.

The folks in the federation are really helpful as when I gain power and move up it allows me to supply them with more aid while they are fighting to move up. I like the way it works in that each level in the game helps out those above and below.

There is the vassal/lord relationship where the lord receives a portion of the vassal’s income in return for guidance and protection. Laila and I both used to be vassals under Danny but Laila declared independance and is now my vassal. I am still under Danny.

The other thing is the federation. Up to 20 people can be in a federation and basically we all post what is called an outpost. It was kind of hard for us to figure it out at first, like what to put in and how many, but we both are getting really good at it now. I have been posting outpost all day at various levels. Basically your fleet has a power ratio determined by how many ships and what types of ships you have built.

If you are going to attack someone or if you are being attacked you want to have a high Pr. You can also get reinforcements from your lord, vassals, and your federation. There are a few restrictions in using the outpost though so you have to know what the others are doing.

To be able to use the reinforcements in the outpost your fleet must have a Pr at least 4 times higher than that of the outpost. So what you do is you let everyone know when you are coming out of damage protection and tell them what level you are going to grow your fleet to. That way they can post the appropriate ships in the outpost for you to use.

Laila and I are both a little too new to take full advantage of it yet, but I am sure we will get better as time goes on. I have been watching my federation members and seeing how they do things. We are both at a disadvantage being miners with weak ships, but we will be changing races soon.

Anyway, I have been working on leveling up and mining when I have to. We both have our ministers leveled up to just about maximum. Ministers allow you to be more productive in whatever you are doing. Like since I am a miner I have a mining minister at level 999 which is maximum. Each level increases productivity by 5% in the case of a miner. There are tax ministers and commerce ministers.

A premium account allows you to build 8 ministers and each minister can have 4 traits. The traits in the beginning are generated at random but you can remove bad traits and train in new ones. The traits are generated randomly so sometimes you can go through quite a few points to get the ones you want.

You can also move the ministers between your systems so you can train them in different traits and all. All in all I think we have both done a good job training them and have some that actually do double duty, such as farming and tax collection.

Anyway it is fun learning the new game and I did not blow it doing anything yesterday so that was good. I will try and post things as I learn them pretty much the way we did things in blogshares when we were starting out there.

Today I took a break from the internet and went out with Judy and Carlos to get them a TV for thier bedroom. Actually Judy paid me for it so they got it themselves. She has been giving me a few dollars here and there to save for it and we got one that was on sale at Target. Also Carlos got a job at a local pizza place so they are happy about that.

Well it is time to get back to the laundry and household chores so have a great weekend.

Busy

Well, this morning, started fast and just kept on going. I worked through lunch and left later than normal. And it wasn’t that I was doing anything really super important. I ws mainly holding down the fort and answering the phone while the boys were going to meetings and stuff.

I got busy working on a project and lost track of time. Before I knew it the time had gone right on by and it was time to head for home. I sometimes do that, where I get so involved in what I am doing that I forget about everything else around me. It is when I get my best work done though and so when it is quiet and I get a chance I like to take on something I have had in my mind and get it done.

Last night another one bit the dust on “Deal or No Deal”. She did get to meet the members of her favorite band, Hanson, but she was really unlucky picking the numbers and knocked all the big ones out in the second round. She did win some money but I forgot how much she won.

After that Laila and I watched “Medium” while leveling up in Unification Wars and we also joined a Federation. I pulled another bonehead move last night just before going to bed. I built up my outpost to assist Laila should she get attacked, and then started building ships for my systems as I was going to come out from damage protection while at work. You can build defensive ships and stay in damage protection, but if you build an offensive ship you will automatically come out of it.

I was told I could build starbases, which I knew were defensive and I was told I could build fodder which I didn’t know was defensive. I must have misunderstood the person, because as soon as I made some fodder the DP went away and I was immediately attacked. Another lesson the hard way, I wish I would learn some the easy way.

Anyway I am waiting for Laila to get up so we can see what we should do next. Hopefully our new federation will help us along and give us good tips.

Well let me get this posted so I can get ready for her when she gets up. Have a great night.

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Well I guess I blew it on the playoff picks. We just got home from church and picking up lunch and I saw that Chicago is ahead 6 – 0, then they scored again while I was getting my lunch, and went ahead 9 – 0. By the time I was done eating it was Chicago 16 – New Orleans 0.

Judy, Carlos and I went to the 11 AM mass this morning and I felt bad for Judy because she had difficulty kneeling because of her back. She made it through the mass though.

Today was the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time and the readings and gospel were quite lengthy today. The first reading was Nehemiah 8:2-4a, 5-6, 8-10. The second reading was 1 Corinthians 12:12-30 and the gospel was Luke 1:1-4, 4:14-21.

While the gospel was about how every person and every position is equally important Father Khing used the mass to talk about how our parish is celebrating it’s 50th birthday. He talked about all the celebrations and activities that will be held all the way up to September which will be the birthday of the church. He did relate the birthday to the gospel towards the end, but mostly it was about the 50-year milestone of the church.

After church we got some Chinese takeout since it was later in the day. The last thing Laila said before going to bed was to remind me about spicy food so I got some noodles, broccoli beef, and something that looked really good, but when I bit into it the stuff was really spicy so I gave it to Carlos, who loves spicy food.

Wow the Saints scored a touchdown Chicago 16 – New Orleans 7. Maybe this will turn into a game.

Anyway I was giving Carlos a hard time today. He loves the show “Heroes” and he also likes “24″. The both come on at 9 PM tomorrow and so I was giving him a hard time about what we would watch. Luckily we will watch one and record the other on the DVR. Tonight will be a “Deal or No Deal” night.

Wow, Chicago 16 – New Orleans 14, this is definitely a game now. I guess I will get this posted and watch the game. Have a great day.

Ouch, a flag in the end zone for intentional grounding. A safety? Chicago 18 – New Orleans 14. This is a game now.

Update: The Saints fell apart and lost 39 to 14 so congratulations to the Chicago Bears who are going to the Super Bowl.

Playoff predictions

I am getting ready to go to church, but before I leave and before the games start I figured I would list my playoff predictions.

The Patriots will beat the Colts and The Saints will beat the Bears.

Anyway, it’s off to church and breakfast so I can get back and watch the games.

Have a great day.

The weekend

After getting a good night of sleep and sleeping in about an hour and a half extra today, after chatting with Laila, I went ahead and got the laundry done and also took Judy and Carlos to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy. After that I came home and have been trying to decipher a little more about the Unification Wars game.

I am trying to figure out how to build my planets faster as it eats up quite a bit of time to level up a system. I have pretty much abandoned mining for right now until I get my Titan system leveled up to level 20, the highest.

I was a little excited when I first got up since I was out of damage protection and could search for planets at the 100 percent rate of my scanners, you only get 30 percent when under damage protection.

The only problem is that when you build ships to search for planets it raises your power rating in the game which attracts people to attack your holdings. Once you are attacked four times you go back to damage protection mode and will be there for anywhere up to 2 days.

This morning as soon as I built up my scouts to look for planets here they came, attack, attack, attack and I wound right back into damage protection. So now it is back to building slowly again.

Since I am a newbie in the game I have not found the most efficient ways to built and remain under cover at the same time, so I guess I will continue to do everything under damage protection and just look for more efficient numbers of ships.

Yesterday I mentioned Judy had gone to the doctor after hurting her back. It will be a while before they know how bad she hurt it so they told her to take a week off work, gave her some Motrin and Vicotin, and told her to take it easy. Carlos is being really good with her and making sure she does not lift anything.

Also this morning I was still having PC problems, so after cleaning out some files that I thought were conflicting and then I took the PC down and vacuumed it out. The fans were a little dusty and that seemed to do the trick as once I got it fired up after that it has been fine.

Now I am just hoping to be all leveled up to Titan level 20 by the time Laila wakes up. I have also been really taking it easy today and trying to fight off a cold. So I have in addition to everything else been watching some good old action movies on TV. First it was Armageddon, then Duel, and now Lone Wolf McQuade.

Anyway, I hope everyone is enjoying the weekend. Luckily this game is such that I can do other things on the PC while playing the game. I just keep my moves on a timer and go to the game for my moves when the timer goes off. That way I can do some stuff for work that needs to be done and enjoy myself at the same time. So now I had better get back to the meaningful and productive stuff.

TGIF

Wow, another Friday is here, and I am really glad. I actually got up a little early this morning, even though it was still really cold out this morning. Laila and I said our prayers, did a few game moves, and then it was off to work.

I started receivers this morning and we went pretty good until about 10 AM when the pre-safety inspection was held and then we dismissed the class so they could help us get a few discrepancies taken care of.

After that we were just wrapping things up when we got news that 2 of our co-workers will be going overseas on deployment. I am starting to get a little concerned as that is going to take our manning down to where it is going to be difficult to get anything done, or any time off. I guess that remains to be seen.

When I got home there was a note from my daughter saying she was going to the doctor because she hurt her back at work yesterday. I called her cellphone, but she had it turned off or something so I will have to wait for her to get home to find out what is up.

Other than that I guess I will rest up for another week starting Monday. Have a great weekend everyone.

Good luck to Navy Folks

First off, good luck to all you Navy folks that took the Chief Petty Officer Exam today.

Yeah, today is that day of the year that they give the CPO exam. In the Navy the all enlisted people advance as far as First Class Petty Officer through the examination process. If your performance evaluations are good, if you have enough time in rate and service, and if you do well on the examination, you get advanced to the next higher rank.

When going up for Chief Petty Officer (E-7) it is a little different. You take all the same things you did to advance up through the ranks, and then if you do well on the test you are then selection board eligible. So in about April or maybe May they will announce who has made it to the selection board, and then will announce who will be advanced somewhere in July.

I had no problem advancing through the system until I went up for Chief. I kept passing the tests and had high performance marks but did not get advanced until my third time before the selection board. The selection board is a process where in addition to your test scores and performance evaluations they will look at things like your experience level, career path, and motivation.

Some of the things you do to impress the board for selection are volunteer work in the community, correspondence courses, college, and varied assignments. By varied assignments I mean different types of shore duty and different ship types.

As a Chief you are supposed to be the “go to” person in your area. The more you know about your rating the more valuable you are as a CPO and you learn this through different assignments and different commands.

Well enough on today’s Navy lesson, and again good luck to the folks that took the examination.

Last night was “Deal or No Deal” night again. I again saw the same trend I see every week. The folks get into the later rounds and due to greed wind up blowing it. I guess that is ok if you have a “came with nothing, leave with nothing” attitude, but I think most of these folks just take one step too far. They get to the later rounds with either $1 million or $750,000 and maybe one other six figure amount and they get offered something big. Then they pass that up and open up the million or $750,000 and then the end comes rapidly, as the bids keep dropping. This happens almost every show, and I have yet to see anyone win the million. At least it keeps our attention, and we all enjoy the show.

“American Idol” continues to get all those viewers and I don’t know why. Even the kids watched it upstairs until “Deal or No Deal” came on then they came downstairs. I watched “American Idol” once a long time ago, and was not very impressed. I am also now wondering what happened to “America’s Got Talent” because I thought it was getting big ratings too.

Oh well, I will never understand why the networks do what they do, or how they come up with their schedule, but then I am just the lowly viewer. At least with the DVR I can usually find something of interest either on a channel or recorded.

Anyhow, since I don’t have any broken pipes to fix of anything today, tonight I will be somewhat back to normal when I get home tonight from work. Today is kind of a wasted training day as the students are cleaning and preparing for the safety inspection that we will have next week. I was hoping to start receivers today, but it looks like that will have to wait until tomorrow. So today will be another power point day. And speaking of that I guess I had better get started.

Broken water pipe

Well the house got me again. This morning after getting up I did the regular morning routine and was all set to have a great day. I was leaving with plenty of time to spare and though I have a slight cold I was in a great mood and looking forward to going in and giving the class a test then starting the receiver area.

As I was getting into the car I heard a sound like running water coming from the side of the house so I looked over to see what was up. I thought either the kids or maybe the neighbor had left the water running. Instead what I saw was water running off the top of my garage, and it was quite a bit. I have one of those old solar water heaters installed originally as a backup to provide extra hot water. It has been broken for years and the company that installed it went out of business a long time ago. So basically it is useless, however the pipes to my regular water heater go through it. Anyway, it seems with the cold temperatures we have had one of the pipes ruptured overnight. I shut off what I thought were the valves and then called home as soon as I thought the kids would be up so I could get them to turn off the water to the house. I told them to turn on the water when they need to, and then I will cap it off when I get home.

So now I am waiting for my class to get done so I can run home and get it fixed. I am hoping I can do it myself and not have to call a plumber. I guess I will have to determine that when I get home. I just want to make sure I don’t mess up the brand new water heater that was installed a couple of months back.

Now I am just wondering what is going to be next as something big seems to happen about every three months. I also wonder what that is going to do to my water bill for this month, as this was leaking a whole lot more than the water heater when it decided to start leaking.

It is pretty ironic that here Laila is always having problems with having no water, while I am having problems with leaks and all. I guess I should just look at unloading the house onto the market, but there is no way I am ready to do that yet.

At least I know what I will be doing for the afternoon.

Anyway, that is today’s topic. Hopefully this will not be too hard or costly.

Update:

I got to take some time off today and ran home early to take care of the water pipe problem. I got really lucky, as all I had to do was rerun the cold water inlet to the hot water tank, bypassing the solar water heater thing.

I thought it was going to be some big problem but all it took was a pipe wrench and about $22 dollars for a new water inlet pipe and some fittings.

So I got lucky there. About the only thing is now I am all wet and dirty so I will have to go take a shower and clean myself up.

For once I got lucky around this money pit. Big Smile