Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Work has been pretty slow today but no worries because I don’t have a whole lot to do right now since I’ve been working like a demon this week. Scott, Jegan, and I did have a meeting about issues over the Exchange business requirements and we sent those off to the business for clarification.

Everything is finalized for the trip to Maine that Michele and I are taking this weekend. We’re flying out tonight and will be back Sunday afternoon. The forecast for tomorrow still looks promising: Sunny with a high of 40 degrees fahrenheit and a low of 20 degrees fahrenheit. I’m really hoping that we’ll see some great fall colors but fear that we’re coming a week or two too late.

Michele is probably on her way down here right now was I write this. I’m going to show her my office and then we’ll head out to the airport.

We woke up today around 6 or 6:30am and took a shower together. After we got dressed we headed downstairs to the dining area for breakfast. Another guest was already down there having coffee. The innkeeper, Nancy, brought out wonderful-tasting hot blueberry muffins. They were very good! Nancy also served us ice water and orange-juice. The main dish for breakfast was fried eggs with bacon and great-tasting hash browns.

Nancy loaned us a map and gave some suggestions on what to see today. Michele and I gathered some belongings and headed out to experience Maine. We first drove around the Wells area to view the Atlantic Ocean. Then we headed north along route 1 along the coastline. As we drove, we passed through several charming towns including Kennebunkport. Former president Bush Sr. has a vacation home in Kennebunkport. I was a little bummed at the lack of brilliant fall colors. We missed the peak season and many of the trees were brown or bare.

During our leisurely trek north, we parked alongside side the road near a beach which was normally accessible via a state park, but the park was closed for the season. We had to walk about 100 yards to reach the beach, but it was worth it. No one else was around (probably because it was closed) and we got to hang out on the beach for a little while. We didn’t stay for too long because of the very cold weather. Maine is unseasonably cold today with a high of 38 degrees Fahrenheit and a low of 20. Neither of us had gloves and despite it being sunny, we were pretty uncomfortable.

We also stopped at two other parks with beach access. The first one was actually open: ‘Two Lights State Park‘. This park was interesting because the beach was rocky with rocks that were smoothed in a way that reminded me of glacier-swept rocks I’ve seen before in Canada and Alaska.

The second park, Crescent Beach State Park, was closed so we parked at the entrance and walked about 300 yards to the beach area. The beach was pleasant but cold. Because we were out of the car for a long time and it was a little windy, we rushed back to the car. This caused a little friction with Michele who thought that we should be more romantic and slow, especially when outside on the beach. Of course I pointed out that it is literally freezing outside which only infuriated her more. Eventually we worked things out.

One other thing we wanted to see was the “Portland Light“, a famous lighthouse in Maine. It’s the same one featured on a particular brand of potato chips. We were having trouble locating it and Michele got directions from a local hotel. Once we found it, we visited that area for about 45 minutes. The site of the lighthouse is actually and old military fort built in the 1890’s. After visiting the lighthouse, we walked around the grounds for a while. There was an old shell of a mansion that is completely empty except for the original brick.

From the lighthouse we traveled into South Portland for a late lunch. We parked and walked around what I think is a historic section of Portland. We looked inside a novelty store called ‘Condom Sense‘ before deciding to have lunch at a pub called Gritty McDuffs. We both had fish & chips.

The whole South Portland area is quite touristy. The buildings are all old and there are little alleys and it’s quite quaint. Because it was getting late and we still had more to see, we didn’t’ stick around the Portland area. Instead we decided to go to the famous L.L. Bean retail store.

We had to drive north into Freeport, Maine (about 20 minutes north of Portland). Freeport is a ‘factory outlet’ town. Every store you usually see in a mall had some sort of factory outlet in Freeport. Michele really wanted to go to the L.L. Bean store for some shopping. When I travel someplace new I don’t particularly want to go to a mall (especially during precious daylight hours). I can go to several different malls in Atlanta. We shopped around for a few hours. I bought some mittens from L.L. Bean and a t-shirt from the Abercrombie & Fitch outlet store. Michele bought Makayla a shirt and herself some jeans from the Gap outlet store.

By the time we were done, it was already almost dark. We headed south on I-95 back towards Kennebunkport where we got on route 35 to look at all of the big and fancy houses. We didn’t see a whole lot other than a few large homes and the famous ‘wedding cake house‘. Our plan was to go back to the B&B, take a shower, then a short nap before we head out to dinner.

We left from dinner around 8pm and I wanted to have some good seafood in Kennebunkport. When we got there, we couldn’t find many restaurants. We drove around for almost an hour not finding anything until Michele asked me to stop at a gas station so she could ask them where a good place is. It turns out that most places close at 9pm. The ONLY place open in the immediate area is a restaurant called Federal Jacks. When we got there, some dude was standing at the door to check to see if we were 21 years old before we could enter. It had been a long day and we were tired but we tried to have a good time anyway. Michele ordered a chicken dish and I ordered the Maine Lobster. I’ve never had a whole lobster before. I was a little concerned when they brought out a plate with my food on it. The lobster was whole and complete. His little beady eyes were looking up at me and his legs were all still there and it looked ready to wake up and skitter off of my plate. The ‘meat’ wasn’t as impressive as I thought it would be and I was pretty disgusted from the whole experience. No more lobster for me.

It’s been fairly quiet at work this week, compared to the flurry of work I did last week. Part of the reason it’s been so quiet is that all I’m really tasked to do right now is the ‘Exchange Valuation’ piece of the project. And that piece is sort of in limbo while we go back & forth with the business to finalize all of the requirements.

Yesterday was the big 2002 elections. After I got home from having dinner with Michele I was glued to Fox News watching the election coverage. When I woke up with morning they were declaring the elections a big Republican win. I flipped to CNBC and all of the futures were strong. In addition to that, around 2:20pm today the fed lowered interest rates by 50 basis points. So today has been a great day for the market as well as my side investment in my Roth IRA (I’m sitting around a 40% unrealized gain right now). It’s been a very good day in regard to that.

Ever since I graduated college back in May, I’ve been meaning to work on the item_id web server (written in C# and ASP.NET) I wrote for a senior special topics n-tier architecture class. It still has no authentication whatsoever, no error handling, and no payload optimization to speak of. I was playing with the parts that DO work today, and I don’t know if it’s IIS or the application, but it wasn’t behaving very well. I would really love to get my hands dirty in this again as it was so much fun to do.

I spent the night with Michele on Friday night. Around 4:30am this morning Makayla woke up and wouldn’t go back to sleep, so Michele got up and took her to the living-room to watch a movie.

I woke up around 7:30 or so and Michele cooked a wonderful breakfast: scrambled eggs, smoked ham, and cinnamon toast. It was a hearty and good breakfast. After breakfast I drove to my apartment to take a shower and change into some different clothes. We made plans to take Makayla and drive around the north Georgia area close to Helen to view the fall foliage. Unfortunately, the forecast called for cloudy skies, but we were going to try to make the most of it.

Around 9 or 10am we finally left and drove north into Helen. From there we took the ‘Richard B Russell Scenic Highway’ and drove around, stopping at various points. The first place we stopped was an area called “Dukes Creek Falls”. We walked around there and stopped by the river for a while. Next, we stopped at the Raven Cliffs Falls trail area. We got one of the last spaces in the huge parking-lot. There we spent a while and probably hiked in about a mile, trying to scope out potential camping-spots as we would like to go back there for some camping.

The rest of the day we stopped at various scenic overlook points and took pictures. On our way back we stopped at McDonalds in Cleveland, GA for an early dinner. Michele drove back the rest of the way to Atlanta.

Back in Atlanta, I went to the store to pick up some groceries for Michele since she was cooking chili. I also bought Monsters, Inc. for Makayla to watch. After Makayla went to bed, we ate the chili and turned in early.

Over on the Sojourn3 BBS, someone created a thread for people to relate how they first found out about Sojourn. I replied with the following:

In 1994 when I was a senior in High School, a friend of mine sine junior-high named Jordan Jethwa showed me a newspaper clipping during our advanced computer science class. The article talked about these addicting online text-based games called MUDS (Multi-User Dungeons). He told me that it was like playing AD&D online with many other people live at the same time on this ‘new’ thing called the internet. Before this moment, my exposure to online games was through BBS ‘door games’. At this point in time, some of the BBS’s were ‘multi-node’ in which you could have around a dozen or so people online at the same time, and there were in effect multiplayer games, but nothing of the scope and magnitude of these ‘MUDS’.

I didn’t really think much more about this until November of 1994 when I moved with my parents from San Antonio, TX to Atlanta, GA. In Atlanta, I subscribed to a Unix-based ISP (back then, that’s pretty much the only way you could get internet access). I picked up a couple of Unix books from a computer store in Town Center mall and taught myself the basics of Unix. Because I was in a new place with no friends, I had a great deal of free time on my hands and I put most of it to learning this wonderful world of Unix. After a few weeks when I became pretty comfortable with Unix, My learning gravitated towards ‘games’ on the internet. At this time, I remember my friend Jordan telling me about these MUDS. In no time, I found some resources (through Gopher - I don’t think there was much of a world-wide-web at this point) for MUDS and tried out a few. One of the ones I logged into (Sojourn MUD) really caught my eye for the very simple reason that it was the only one that had a colorized ansi login screen. None of the others had this.

I bumbled around Sojourn (back when it was on a .edu box IIRC) through raw telnet learning my way around. It was an incredible time as the whole experience was overwhelming. I can compare it to the first time I discovered BBS’s in that it opened up a completely different world to me that had almost unlimited possibilities. Eventually, someone told me to get tintin++ (a unix mud client). This made things much easier.

Around this time (I think it was December) I moved back to Texas to live with my best friend (Craig Bedwell) to finish out my senior year of high school with all my friends. Back in San Antonio, I played Sojourn off and on a little. They had a big pwipe around January of 1995 and I rolled up a human sorcerer named ‘Noc’ which is based off of my BBS ‘alias’ of NO CARRIER. I think I eventually got up to level 21 or so before deciding that being a sorcerer wasn’t for me.

Instead, I picked a class that no one else was really playing: A half-elf bard named ‘Noke’ (again, an offshoot of ‘Noc’). I played him on and off through high school and when I moved into the dorms at the University of Texas for college, I decided that I wasn’t going to waste so much time playing the MUD. Indeed, I went a couple of months not playing at all but I found myself with a lot of free time, so I gave it another shot.

So that’s how I ended up finding Sojourn for the first time.

Things have been less-than-perfect with Michele these past couple days.

Yesterday when I mentioned to Michele that I was invited to an after-work gathering this Thursday, she (in my eyes) blew up. She accused me of letting her down, not understanding, lying to her, making her feel like I’m ‘running her over’, and deceiving her. All of this spawned from me mentioning that I was invited to an after-work gathering this Thursday. On top of this, I was supposed to be flying out of town Thursday night anyway, so it’s not like Michele and I could do anything that evening. To me, it seemed a non-issue or at least nothing to be upset about. However, Michele saw things differently and thus the contention.

The conversation didn’t go well and we decided to speak about it more about it that evening. After work, I went to Michele’s apartment so we could talk. As soon as I got there, she handed me a credit-card and said, ‘Go to Publix any buy me a flower.‘ Apparently I never heard her say that I need to make things up to her. I could tell that it wasn’t going to be a pleasant evening.

We had a lengthy discussion about all of the ‘problems’ we face. We also each completed a ‘worksheet’ that Michele created to personify our problems and feelings. In the end, we both felt that we had some serious differences and were unable to both change enough to be happy. I lost count of the number of times Michele told me that she wanted me to leave and that she wanted to break up.

Eventually, we both agreed to have a ‘cooling-off period’ in which we still talk but for the most part, stay out of each others hair. The purpose, I think, is to give us both a chance to step back from the situation and think about what we really want.

I realize that I’m recording my thoughts from this incident as I remember them and from my point of view. Undoubtedly there are several different ways to look at this and I’ve no doubt glossed over some very important points.

Today is almost all meetings, I don’t have any time to do much other than attend meetings and prepare for the next meeting:

Last night I got a nice e-mail from someone who enjoyed looking at my online photo gallery:

On the evening of December 12, 2000 I was messing around on my computer and watching the news on TV at the same time.

This time of year was a very exciting time as the 2000 presidential election was in question. The battle for the presidency between Al Gore and George W. Bush still wasn’t decided all because of Florida. The key electoral-college votes from Florida couldn’t be decided because the votes for Gore and Bush were so close that they had to be recounted. At times it was almost laughable because the news networks would show people sitting for hours on end examining paper ballots for ‘dimpled-chads’, ’swinging-chads’, and ‘pregnant-chads’, etc. There was even one point in which the ballots were all boxed up inside a Ryder truck and sent to Tallahassee. Just like the slow-paced police chase of O.J. Simpson, news helicopters were following this Ryder truck as it transported the ballots. It was silly.

Because so much was at stake, the Gore campaign sued (for some reason or another) and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Basically the decision the Supreme Court makes will ultimately decide if Gore or Bush wins the election. On the evening of December 12th around 10:30pm, the Supreme Court finally ruled in Bush’s favor.

While I was watching this breaking news, I decided to get a little creative and crafted up some crazy story about how Al Gore, not accepting defeat, hijacks the Ryder truck full of ballots and threatens to kill himself unless they change the ruling.

I’ve done something a little similar to this before on September 6, 2000 with regards to the RIAA trying to stop MP3’s. So I wrote up a spoof story, Federal judge, Janet Reno bans all use of the internet - impacting more than 400 million Americans and 700 million others worldwide.

That evening I wrote my spoof story using a story from CNN about the Ryder truck full of ballots as a template. I think I used Microsoft Word 2000 as the editor as it downloaded all of the necessary files (images, javascript?, and style sheets). So I yanked out the original story and placed in my spoof story:

Al Gore Hijacks Ryder Truck Full of Ballots

Back them, my domain was still billimek.com but such a story wouldn’t have as much dramatic effect if the URL had ‘billimek.com’ in it. Instead, I was able to craft it such that the URL for the story was:

http://www.cnn.com&story=breaking_news@1076628671/top_story/

At first (or even second) glance, the URL appears to be a valid CNN.com story.

The trick is the @. Web browsers see a ‘@’ as an identifier to represent a login username and password. In other words, the browser will treat everything before the @ as a username.

The number just after the @ is 1076628671. That number is another key part of the spoof. Back then billimek.com’s IP address was 64.44.12.191. There is a special technique to obscure IP addresses as ‘DWORD’ values.

Now billimek.com’s IP address is 206.158.52.61. The ‘dword’ equivalent is 3466474557. This can be determined for any IP address using a special tool. To make this example more concrete, http://billimek.com/jeff and http://3466474557/jeff are both the same thing (assuming billimek.com’s IP address doesn’t change).

I finished creating the spoof story around midnight on 12-12-2000 and posted the spoof link to a small #politics channel on the efnet IRC server. I figured I would give the few people chatting something funny to read. Right after that I went to bed.

At this time, I always had a bandwidth monitor running (ntop) to see what sort of bandwidth utilization my link is taking up. When I woke up around 6am the next day, the graph showed my link completely saturated. The apartment complex I live in has a T1 line wired to it for use by all of the subscribers for the entire complex. I was very worried at this because I was, all by myself, sucking up all of the available bandwidth for the entire apartment community. This wouldn’t go un-noticed and my ISP would take action against me. I also had a terminal window opened to my web server log and text was flying by as hundreds of requests were coming in for the AL Gore story.

The first thing I did was shut down the apache web server to stop the flow. I then spent about 30 minutes doing some quick analysis of the logs. Most of the requests were coming in from refers from other ‘web-based’ news sites. This meant that people were hitting my story from a link from other pages.

The next thing I saw made me really nervous. There were many hits from the turner.com domain. Turner Broadcasting (at this point in time, at least) owns CNN. To make matters worse, people from turner.com were looking at other parts of my website, including my resume. I also noticed what appeared to be a port-scan of my computer from turner.com.

I was getting really scared at this point in time as I think what I did could be considered a copyright violation, among other things. I had proprietary CNN content hosted on my computer and I represented a story as being a legitimate CNN story. At this time, I added a rule to apache to redirect any requests for the spoofed story back to cnn.com’s home page. I then turned back on the web server and went to work.

At work I was in a day-long technical design session with a few other people. I was still feeling very apprehensive about the whole thing, thinking that I was going to get in trouble. Someone asked me what was bothering me and I explained the whole situation. Everyone in the room got a great laugh out of it and assured me that probably nothing would happen.

We broke for lunch and when we came back a guy I work with told me that during lunch his wife told him people she went to lunch with were talking about this Al Gore story they heard Neil Boortz (a radio talk-show host) talking about. Apparently the word had really spread and even radio shows were talking about it.

When I got home, I did some web log analysis and it turns out that I had about 340,000 hits between midnight and 6am:

In addition, it looks like several websites ran stories on this.

One was The Register whose story was Spoofed story pokes fun at Gore.

Another story was on metafilter.org.

[H]ardOCP.com ran a blurb about the story as well.

I know there were some more news sites that linked to the story, but I can’t remember who they were anymore. Some searching on the net revealed some new info, however:

A TrustedToolbar product featuring ’spoof protection’ uses my spoof as an example of what it protects against.

A Stanford computer science professor used my spoof as a question on a homework assignment.

An MIT ‘course notes‘ references my spoofed URL under the section, ‘Confusing URLs’.

Fortunately, in the end, nothing happened to me. I think this is most likely because I acted quickly and removed it. I hate to think what would happen if Turner broadcasting decided to make an example out of me.

It’s amazing how posting the link to an obscure chat room at midnight could spread so quickly and so far in such a short amount of time.

After the unpleasant conversation with Michele last night, I’ve been having to deal with a stress-induced ‘knot’ feeling in the middle of my shoulders. I’m going to keep my phone turned off for the whole day in hopes that will reduce the stress normally brought on by the marathon phone conversations.

Tonight (actually early tomorrow) is supposed to be the great Leonids meteor shower. It’s not supposed to peak until around 4-5am in Atlanta. I’m 85% sure I’m going to wake up super early and drive out into the countryside to watch the event. It’s super clear today but I just checked the weather forecast for early tomorrow morning and it’s supposed to be mostly cloudy. Not good. Maybe I won’t go after all. Maybe I’ll just catch the highlights tomorrow.

If I DO go, my plan is to go down I-285 towards I-20 and then drive west for about 30 minutes on I-20 until I get to a remote, low-light area. Then, after it’s over whe the sun somes up around 6:30am, I’ll just head into work.

The problem is with the weather though. The mostly-cloudy high-humidity conditions with the full-moon is going to mean that so much moonlight will be refracted all over the place that I probably won’t be able to see anything at all.

How depressing.

I set my alarm for 4am yesterday morning in anticipation on getting up really early to watch the Leonids. I peeked outside the window and saw (from the bright full-moon’s reflection) that it was getting fairly cloudy. So I decided sleep was more important to watching clouds at 4:30am.

I got quite a few things accomplished at work yesterday too. As a team, we formally accepted some business requirements for what they call ‘full/partial indicator’ and we also completed our logical design of the Exchange Valuation engine.

Because I was up so late the night before, I took a nap when I got home yesterday and cooked myself some scalloped potatoes (from a box) as well as the ‘lasagna’ flavor hamburger helper (also from a box). While I ate, I did lots of research on the new ‘Granite Bay’ chipset from Intel and I watched ‘24‘.

The weather today has been absolutely awful. It’s been overcast and cold. There’s nothing I hate more than cold and grey, overcast skies. The only time I like it to be cold is when I’m outside hiking or skiing. This part of year is what I dislike about Atlanta.

Chronic fatigue disorder? I think not. I don’t know why, but I’ve been feeling more and more tired during the day. I don’t think it is a lack of sleep because I have been getting to bed around 11pm and waking up between 6am and 7am. Before, when I was in school (and working full-time, and managing a girlfriend) I seemed to operate fairly well going to bed at 1am and waking up at 6 or 7. Now I’m not doing as much and getting more sleep, but feeling more tired. What gives?

I did some research this morning and found a website titled, How to wake up with ENERGY in the morning. It lists all sorts of tips and advice to getting a restful night sleep.

I’m also trying to figure out what I need to do in order to go to the gym in the morning instead of the evening. The past two times I went to go work out in the morning, I got sick. It must be because my body wasn’t fully awake or I didn’t warm up or eat or something. The problem is that the last time I tried to work out in the morning; I waited until I was up for about an hour and had something to eat. It still didn’t help.

Work was fairly good. We made more progress on our object model, but spent over half the time debating weather or not the ticket coupon class should contain an array of coupon states, or if we should model the coupon state (and associated coupon state information) into it’s own class as an aggregate to the main coupon class. Part of our problem is that we are ‘tainted’ from our knowledge of the data model which maps things differently than we may actually use them. It’s a tough process. I think once we get the classes hammered out, things will go a lot quicker from there.

After work, I was driving north towards the doctor’s office for another round of blood work when Michele called and asked if I could come over to watch Makayla while she takes a dress to be pressed or something. I, of course, agreed and after going to the doctor’s office went straight to Michele’s house. I took care of Makayla until Michele came back. By this time it was around 7:50pm and I suggested that I head home as I had not eaten dinner yet. Michele offered to fix me dinner but I had leftovers back home anyway, so I politely declined. She got upset that I wanted to leave and when all was said and done, she slammed the door behind me. I don’t think she was happy. I’m still very confused over what ‘time apart’ is supposed to mean.

I woke up around 10:30 or 11am to Michele calling me. She wanted to know if I was willing to go with her when she went to the store. Afterwards, she could drop me off at the car dealership so I can pick up my car. We went to Rich’s in Town Center mall and she bought a wedding gift for the wedding she is going to today (I’m not going). All of the sales people we dealt with in Rich’s were very friendly and customer service was quite good. It was so good, in fact, that it made an impression on me. I guess they are doing something different than normal for the holiday season. We ate Cick-fil-A in the food court and then went to a craft store so Michele could buy some stuff to make Christmas ornaments.

After shopping, Michele dropped me off at Team Ford on Cobb parkway and I picked up my Explorer. In addition to an oil change, I took it in to have the air-conditioning looked at, as when it is on, and the car isn’t idling, there is a ‘chirping’ sound every ten seconds or so. The mechanics, however, said they could not reproduce it. I also had a problem with the trip counter not resetting when I hit the button. It turns out that you must hold in the button until it resets. Michele met me back at my place for a little while so we could talk and spend time together. Art 2pm, she left to get ready for the wedding.

After she left, I logged into Sojourn. I don’t play a whole lot anymore as I’ve done everything there is to do, but my friends and I made plans today to go in a new ‘zone’ called the Bronze Citadel. It’s a very tough high-level zone that you can only get to from Avernus. We knew it was going to be a very difficult and challenging adventure because we’ve never been there, it’s been touted as the most difficult zone besides Tiamat, and once you start, you cannot leave.

We’ve made a couple of attempts to go to the bronze citadel before, but it either got too late, or the game crashed. This time, we started just after 2pm. Because I knew what to do, and I (Nokie) was the only rogue in the group, I played a key role in the adventure. By sneaking and hiding, I was able to scour the wastelands of Avernus to locate our scavenger. Instead of having the whole group slug it out through all of the aggressive demons roaming around, I stole the disc straight from the scavenger demon and snuck back to the group. This saved a lot of time. We also got lucky and killed the hag with no problem. I think part of the success was that I was able to assassinate one of the two liches. The liches make the fight very difficult because they randomly drain a random person of all hit-points which leads them to die the first time they are hit by anything. Unfortunately after we completed this, the game crashed.

We all logged back on, determined to try again. This time around we had some trouble with the Hag as she was inside the town in the center of Avernus and was adjacent to a group of 14 demons patrolling. This makes it impossible to fight her. We had to wait until she moved away from the patrol. Once that happened, we tried to fight her, but the patrol walked in. This led most of us to get killed. Eventually we finally bagged the hag, but the whole ordeal set us back an hour or two. Finally we were able to work our way to the citadel. The citadel is surrounded by two ‘rings’ with demons patrolling the rings. The last time we were there, only about 5 or 6 demons patrolled the outer ring and only like 3 or 4 patrolled the inner ring. This time, however, eight demons patrolled the outer ring and eight also patrolled the inner ring. Either someone was playing foul, or the number is random at boot-time. Nonetheless, Corth and I coordinated the battled so we could fight a lone patrol before the others walked in. We had a few close calls but eventually got through the two rings.

The next part was the gatehouse which was guarded by a group of 12 elite demons. It was a tough fight but we also succeeded. It was up to me to disarm the trap on the door and get the group inside. We found a secret entrance down into the dungeon which I took the liberty to explore first. When we thought it was safe, the rest of the group came in. Unfortunately an squad of demons descended on us while we were locked in a room mostly unprepared. If we were to all have perished, retrieving our corpses and items would have been very difficult. Fortunately being very seasoned players, we came out victorious.

The rest of our time until the last fight was to systematically go through the inside of the citadel and pick off the patrols one at a time. The area-maker threw in an interesting twist, however. Unlike every other zone, the elite patrols in this one search out hidden people This makes it very difficult for my character to operate as I must be very quick and diligent to sneak through the place to coordinate battles.

After clearing out the citadel and solving the quest to open the vault to Bel’s planning room:

We began the fight. It was very difficult and we all died at least three times (having to come back). Fortunately by this time, we found a special room that allowed us to open gates to the other planes which allowed us to bring in reinforcements and come back when necessary.

When we finally finished, it was 2am. We only got like four items from all of this. It took longer than our trip to Tiamat and the rewards weren’t as great. Fortunately for me since I was the only rogue in the group, they felt inclined to give me the dagger we found:

It turns out that this is a really cool dagger and the ‘primary’ item from the whole Bronze Citadel zone. I really lucked out and have been having a blast with this new dagger. When in combat, it will randomly leap out of the wielders hands and fight on it’s own. It hits even harder than Nokie does and lasts quite a while. When it is done (after a variable-length of time), it will return to the owners inventory.

Before Michele left for the wedding at 2pm, she asked if I could come over this evening. I said that I was going to be doing something but I should be done by then. Obviously, I did not finished in time and at midnight she called me, every upset that I stood her up again. I explained that I didn’t call because by the time I knew I would not make it over in time, it was too late and I didn’t want to wake anyone up. Unfortunately she didn’t accept this explanation and got mad and we ended the conversation.

Yesterday and today were pretty productive at work. Today we finally finished our first pass at our data object model. The next step is to go back through the use cases and identify ‘processor’ classes to utilize the data in the data classes. Once that is done, we can wrap up with sequence diagrams and then finally code this sucker.

I decided to try playing a Tumerok Mage in Asheron’s Call 2. I can’t decide if it would be more fun to play melee, missile, or magic. I know they are all basically the same. To make matters worse, people are talking about mix-matching (like melee & missile) in the message boards.

After work today Michele called and was upset that I was not already at her place. Even though we didn’t have plans, she suggested that I should have come over anyway because I’ll be out of town for Thanksgiving. I gathered up my laundry and went over to her apartment. When I got there everything was fine and we didn’t fight or argue. Instead, we did some laundry and she reheated the food from Sunday. It seemed like the dinner tasted better reheated. I don’t know why. I sure like that beef coke roast.

Michele and I watched ‘24‘ and I left around 10:30 or so.

As I was watching the people stack up on the standby list for my 8:35pm flight (1819), I felt my chances to get on board diminish. I decided to cancel my flight listing and re-list using my last ultra-high ‘S1R’ standby priority pass. This turned out to be a wise move as I was the second-to last person to board.

When I arrived in Austin, Dad was waiting for me near the Delta ticket-counter. We drove back to his house, his and Sally’s house. The house was in a nice neighborhood and was a three-room, two-bath ranch style house.

We chatted for about thirty minutes before I went to bed in their guest bedro