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I've decided to get back into MMOs again, because I'm just that insane. I've decided to pick up one I used to play about three or four years back - Dark Age of Camelot. so, off I go to their website, and create myself an account. Then I start by downloading their installer, which is about 14MB in size.
One of the golden rules of MMOs I should know by now: the installer only installs the launcher. Once the launcher gets going, it starts installing everything else. So, since about 11am Wednesday, I've been downloading "patch" files (aka the full damn game client for DAOC). The download caused the graphics driver on my lapdog to crash about three times on Wednesday alone (my suspicion is the whole thing did the standard Windows "juggle more and more and more and more in Virtual Memory until you have to drop something" dance... and the bit which acted as the running chainsaw in the whole business was the graphics driver). First three times, it didn't get above about 12% complete. At present, it's at 85% complete, and I'm hoping this means I'll be able to get the silly thing finished overnight and maybe start up a character for the 7 day "free" trial tomorrow sometime.
Yes, it's a slow download. I suspect it's being throttled at least once along the line, if not more times. Yays.
I must be more insane than usual.
Of course, I'm also planning to head back to study this year, on the advice of my nice case manager from CRS. He's clearly decided the easiest way to get me off his case load is to shuffle me sideways into someone else's "too hard" basket, and given I'm intelligent, articulate, and clearly capable of stringing a sentence together without needing to stop and check a dictionary in the middle of things, the universities are probably the best people to deal with me. So of course I looked into university enrollment, and the first thing everyone gets pointed to here in Western Australia is the Tertiary Institutions Service Centre (TISC) who handle all the enrollment details for everyone who'd just bounced out of high school and into the tertiary education minefield. Problem is, TISC is set up to deal with high school students, rather than anyone returning to study (understandable; this is who they're going to see more of, after all). But this means they're asking questions about a person's high school education and wanting your high school results before they'll let you mention any other tertiary level study you might have undertaken. My high school records are somewhere in the filing cabinet (I think) and I can't get much more precise than that without essentially combing through about fifteen to twenty years worth of accumulated, salvaged, shuffled and re-shuffled paperwork which has been through at least five moves (two of them across the width of the continent). I've managed to find most of my other educational records (uni, TAFE, TAFE, uni) but without the high school records, I can't let TISC know about them.
It's rather like losing a chance at a job because you can't prove you've done high school English, even though you have a PhD in Literature.
What do I want to study? Well, having previously studied Politics, Education, and Professional Writing at BA level, and having done half a diploma in IT (user support), I'm thinking of heading back to pick up a BSc in IT (possibly with a double major in Games design/programming thrown in). Yes, I am a masochist, however did you guess?
One of the golden rules of MMOs I should know by now: the installer only installs the launcher. Once the launcher gets going, it starts installing everything else. So, since about 11am Wednesday, I've been downloading "patch" files (aka the full damn game client for DAOC). The download caused the graphics driver on my lapdog to crash about three times on Wednesday alone (my suspicion is the whole thing did the standard Windows "juggle more and more and more and more in Virtual Memory until you have to drop something" dance... and the bit which acted as the running chainsaw in the whole business was the graphics driver). First three times, it didn't get above about 12% complete. At present, it's at 85% complete, and I'm hoping this means I'll be able to get the silly thing finished overnight and maybe start up a character for the 7 day "free" trial tomorrow sometime.
Yes, it's a slow download. I suspect it's being throttled at least once along the line, if not more times. Yays.
I must be more insane than usual.
Of course, I'm also planning to head back to study this year, on the advice of my nice case manager from CRS. He's clearly decided the easiest way to get me off his case load is to shuffle me sideways into someone else's "too hard" basket, and given I'm intelligent, articulate, and clearly capable of stringing a sentence together without needing to stop and check a dictionary in the middle of things, the universities are probably the best people to deal with me. So of course I looked into university enrollment, and the first thing everyone gets pointed to here in Western Australia is the Tertiary Institutions Service Centre (TISC) who handle all the enrollment details for everyone who'd just bounced out of high school and into the tertiary education minefield. Problem is, TISC is set up to deal with high school students, rather than anyone returning to study (understandable; this is who they're going to see more of, after all). But this means they're asking questions about a person's high school education and wanting your high school results before they'll let you mention any other tertiary level study you might have undertaken. My high school records are somewhere in the filing cabinet (I think) and I can't get much more precise than that without essentially combing through about fifteen to twenty years worth of accumulated, salvaged, shuffled and re-shuffled paperwork which has been through at least five moves (two of them across the width of the continent). I've managed to find most of my other educational records (uni, TAFE, TAFE, uni) but without the high school records, I can't let TISC know about them.
It's rather like losing a chance at a job because you can't prove you've done high school English, even though you have a PhD in Literature.
What do I want to study? Well, having previously studied Politics, Education, and Professional Writing at BA level, and having done half a diploma in IT (user support), I'm thinking of heading back to pick up a BSc in IT (possibly with a double major in Games design/programming thrown in). Yes, I am a masochist, however did you guess?
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