Monday, March 22, 2010

I called the witch doctor…

Sometimes nothing goes right.

Friday night was Dynamis, we landed in Windurst. Fine with me. We had to low-man the zone again, having major problems getting people to show up consistently, or letting people know (through the LS forum) that they won’t. I actually had to post a possible as I was on baby watch—my sister being in labor with my latest (as it turned out) nephew. Never got the call tho’ so I stayed for the whole run. Things went well until all the NMs after the House of Death. Think it was just a matter of bad luck coupled with a shortage of thieves for pulling. I do back-up pull on bard, but without flee, shadows and perfect dodge there are limits to what I can do and my thief has a LONG way to go yet. In any event, we ran out of time so no win on zone.

So Saturday I fire up the thief to finish the level, no problem. Time to log to go see the nephew, so I try to print the email from my sister with her room number and my computer says there are no printers installed and my virus scanner says things are trying to do bad and evil things. Naturally, I try to run an update and a scan with my scanner, neither work. I start trying to open other programs randomly, I’m told I have no compatible video drivers, it can’t find whatever.dll (although doing a search shows the file right where it’s supposed to be) and all sorts of other problems. I end up going to Microsoft and find some virus sweep thing while searching on the conficker worm (which it claims is not an issue and hasn’t been since 2008). Well that gets rid of it, but nothing I have can restore my damaged registry keys, so nothing works.

Naturally, I have to reinstall everything that doesn’t have a repair option, including FFXI (I’m still not finished with that by the way). Now Final Fantasy is supposed to have a Macro recovery tool but I’ve used it before and it works for shit. Do some net searches and find that I can delve into the hard drive and copy the mcr.sys and all the mcr#.dat files and just paste them back in after the reinstall. Note that SE will never tell you this. What makes the process fun is that the file names for your various characters have no relation to the name of your character, so you have to try to remember the last time you modified macros for each so you know which set is for which character, not fun when you have 16 slots used. In addition, I bought my program almost 7 years ago and all the expansions when each 1st came out. So after the 6 hours it took to stabilize my system to the point where I could perform the uninstall/reinstall, I now had to wait for 6.5 hours (with a cable modem) of updates before I could attempt the restore. It worked, so now I just need to take down the bogus file names for future reference so I know what to back up in the future.

I logged in just long enough to set things in motion for my bard cuffs +1 which means I need to get them in before Japanese midnight so I can pick them up after. Pick them up Sunday morning and so I now own my 1st relic +1, yay! Switch to thief and decide to go level off EM/T’s with my NPC, Yufafa set to tank mode. It does not go well. Tank dies twice in 10 kills so I decide to log and rethink what I’m doing, as skill-ups are really going well, and thief/dancer we should be able to stay alive, but we can’t. I try again later, the results are a bit better (I think 15 kills before I lose tank) but I pull a tough and for whatever reason cannot hit at all except for Sneak Attacks (which are a guaranteed critical hit). At this point I call it a day since the random number generators obviously have it in for me and Yufafa.

No Dynamis tonight, probably no play at all due to the maintainance from hell SE is doing today, coupled with their refusal to bring in mirror servers to accommodate the update load. I mean, they are taking a third of the hosting servers off-line; they could at least retask them to perform the updates or something. Oh well, I’ll chat when there is something new to discuss.

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