Sorean's Virtual Home

It’s official now, I’m engaged.

Proposal Video

Onto other news.

The holidays put a damper on my updating, as did the release of The Old Republic. The game is taking up a pretty decent chunk of my spare time which is good and great and fun for holidays, but I’ll need to get back into exercise and my regular social schedule to ensure that I don’t drop all my time into this game.

The funny thing is that this time around, almost everyone I know is going healing, myself included and it’s going to make it a little difficult to ensure that we have a proper group balance, but I’m sure we can find ways of making things work. Fortunately it seems that there is a lot of flexibility in the talent trees to allow for a healer to swap over to DPS with little or no gear change. Time and more in-depth research will tell though since the game is still so new.

Christmas was pretty good, I got a Playstation Move, a few books, a nice red sweater, and a few other odds and ends that are Rider related.

Other random news, blood donation #25 just passed, they sent me a fancy new gold card. I’ll get a picture of that up at some point as well.

Current track: David Guetta – Without You ft. Usher – (Piano/Cello) Cover

For the past 9 months I’ve been part of this website devoted to answering questions about video games: http://gaming.stackexchange.com initially I had found their programming one http://stackoverflow.com/ which was related to the stuff I do for work and honestly, it’s a great resource for all of you who are also developers. Anyway I found the gaming section and have been answering questions about random games that I’ve played, Starcraft, Boarderlands, WoW, Rift, Dungeon Defenders, etc., etc.

Earning my way up to my current reputation level of 4750. Just to give you an idea, you only get 10 points for each upvote (people who think that your answer was helpful) and only 15 points if your answer is accepted as the answer by the person asking the question.

Anyway they tossed this up: http://meta.gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/3375/gaming-promotional-grant-winter-holiday-season to give away and help support people in their community. I got chosen!! So what that means is that I’ll essentially be getting my copy of TOR for free next week 🙂

/happy dance

Current Track: Ellie Goulding – Lights (Enjoy the experience)

Things haven’t really been all that exciting. Ended up 3rd/4th in dodgeball. Dropping my Thursday volleyball team to play dodgeball for another night.

Christmas shopping will be done this weekend. Can’t believe that it’s only 2 weeks away…

Going to be the first winter in this house, time to see how it fairs. So far I’ve had to re-weather strip the front door. That landing got mighty cold in the early bits of cold snaps that we’ve had so far. But we’ll see how it holds up.

Instead of a current track I want to share this with all of you:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ThePianoGuys

They are fan-freaking-tastic.

So what can I really tell to fill in the large amounts of missing information? I guess I’ll have to break it down by section.

Volleyball:
I seem to have found a tournament only team that consists of myself, my cousin, and 4 other friends. The funny thing about this team is that we only ever play together for tournaments that are held by the Calgary Sports and Social Club. We didn’t do too bad, we’re playing at the Intermediate Plus level which is just one tier down from competitive. We’ve placed 2nd and 3rd in the tournaments that we’ve played in.

We do need to play as a team more often to be honest. I takes time to build a cohesion and it seems that we just reset every time we end up playing together. It takes a game or two, but in a tournament setting, every point counts and it ends up hurting us. Ah well, it’s still a fun day spent with a pretty fun group of people.

That said, I feel that I could certainly work on getting my game up more. Drop some more weight (currently at 216) so that I can move faster and jump higher. Maybe then I can get to be really competitive. I don’t know what it is either, but I have felt that I compete at a lower competitive level now. I felt something click a few weeks ago, maybe a few months ago now, but it certainly made me view my game play differently. I feel like I play much better, but not at my maximum potential yet.

Dodgeball:
This game has ended up being a lot more fun than one would think. It makes you sweat pretty good, we play in the rec division due to a few of our players not being on the same level athletically as everyone else. But the games are still fun and we do well as a team. We’ve been improving every season and even last season we had our chance to play for first. Ended up second. This season is coming to a close pretty quickly and we’re ranked 4th so we’ll still have a shot at first.

Video games:
Starcraft 2 wise as a single player I’m ranked somewhere in the top 30% of the players world wide. 2 seasons ago I was among the top 13%. I guess it’s not too bad 😛 I defintely want to play it more, but it is just so much of a time sink to move up higher. Granted the pros get paid 50k for winning a tournament. I really would need to quit my job and focus on it if I wanted to do that. I just feel that I was born 10 years too late to do this as a job. Don’t get me wrong, players like White-Ra are 30 and still doing well in tournaments and pulling in some decent coin, but I’ll just do it as a hobby.

Dungeon Defenders is another game I’ve been playing recently with some friends as well. It’s a tower defence game that integrates a first/third person RPG interaction/elements. You protect a crystal from the monsters that spawn by building a variety of different towers, auras, barriers, and traps. There are scaling levels of difficulty and challenges. You also accumulate gear and have options to upgrade the gear as well. So there is a lot of customization available for the game. If you so feel like it, shoot me an e-mail (address in the right) with your Steam account and we can play together, the game is only 15 bucks.

Now the big news I suppose. I thought I had passed on playing The Old Republic, well I was wrong. I got into the closed beta 2 weekends ago and Bioware has me hooked. Now I’ve loved their RPGs that they’ve made, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, I even tried Jade Empire (didn’t get around to finishing that one though). The fully voiced quest interaction is phenomenal. It really gets you into the story like the Bioware RPGs do, but there are some MMO elements added in as well. Like elite mobs that you cannot solo. There are dungeons as well, called Flashpoints, that are very fun and challenging. That said though, my buddy and I were able to duo a 4 man instance with our companions.

So a few of my old WoW guildies will be joining me in this endeavour as well. I got into a friend’s guild and they had a open door policy so we’ve added about 50% to their current roster size. It’s going to be great to play with all these people again. I do miss that bit of socialization with that game. I also look forward to doing something challenging in a game that requires a group of people to do.

Social life/Random Stuff:
I gave blood for the 25th time in my life just this past weekend. Considering that I can only do this every 2 months, I can back track that I’ve been doing it consistently for at least the past 3 years… that’s quite a bit of time to be devoting to it. Like I’ve said before, I’m not doing it to get karma points, or even to brag about it, but I feel like it is something that I should be doing. I’m a healthy young man, and realistically, it’s a renewable resource. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be helping.

Had friends over a few weekends ago for Thanksgiving 2. I believe I should make this an annual occurance. It started a few years ago when a few of us friends got together for Thanksgiving because all our families are in other provinces/cities, or we all just ended up with no plans for it. Well now it’s just a group of friends getting together, potluck style, and having some good food and some great company. Crokinole was busted out, so was an old school Nintendo and some head to head Dr. Mario action. Apparently you can be a douche-bag playing that game… but I’m still the overall winner, douche-bag and all.

The house is still great, (I need to get pictures up here), but there is a few things that I need to fix. Loose floorboards, 2 bathroom fans that need to be replaced, drafty doors (which should be taken care of tomorrow). I technically own it, but it really doesn’t feel like it’s my house, like possession-wise it’s just somewhere I’m living. I do enjoy coming home to it every day, but it hasn’t really sunk in that “I own this place”. Not like the realization of the time where I got, “Holy crap, I’m buying a house”. Maybe it’s supposed to be the same feeling, but I think they should be different.

Alright, so as far as updates are concerned, I think I’m going to try to do weekly updates.

Current Track:
Usher – DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love ft. Pitbull
(This song makes me wants to dance pretty hard).

Oct 1st 2010? Really? I missed Christmas, new years, birthdays…..

Okay, well quick notes, bought a town house.
Went on an awesome canoe/portaging trip. Dodgeball team has solidified nicely, volleyball still ongoing. But I’ll start posting more soon.

As time goes on, the days disappear faster and faster. It’s weird but the days growing up seemed to pass by with such slow pace and every memory then seems ingrained in memory, and happened so long ago. Memories now seemed only to happen yesterday.

It has now been a year that I have been with a wonderful woman and I couldn’t ask for a happier life. It seems only yesterday that she walked into my life and though we’ve been together for a year I cannot imagine my life without her.

I find myself with a busy life consistently; although since I’ve stopped playing World of Warcraft a few months ago I find several spare hours during the week with nothing much to do. Times like that sort of makes me want to get back into “competitive gaming”. But there are other things I want to do and accomplish in life. As I mentioned previously, there are projects that I want to complete, but it’s now been 2 months and I haven’t started a single one of them. Mostly due to events, but I’m just not setting aside time, not scheduling things for myself and just scheduling events and things to attend. What I need to do is to start setting aside nights. Baby steps is what I need to take. I do better with set things and scheduling, what I need to do is get a new powerful laptop so I can get some of the things I want to do done in front of a TV. I sit at a desk for far too long during the week and I could use less time at a desk and more time on a couch relaxing and working at a more relaxed pace.

What has gone on in the past 2 months? I’ve spent a wonderful dinner with Chrystal atop the Calgary Tower, that place has the best calamari that I’ve ever had in my life. A wedding of a friend from University that I’ve worked with, traveled to the other side of the ocean with, and it couldn’t have made me more delighted to see him get married and been so happy. I know one day that I’ll find that too.

Halloween is a month away and I already have my costume ready. I’ll have pictures up later from a party or two that we’ll be attending.

Oh hey, I totally forgot. I bought a new car!! Everything for less than 20k, sunroof, USB mp3 player, power doors, windows, built in sub, pretty much everything you could ask for. Gonna cost me 350 a month for the next 5 years, insurance is up 60 bucks a month to 120. That’s 470 a month, I’m hoping to buying a house next spring, I got the 25k that I wanted to put as a down payment, and hopefully now I can get closer to getting a house in Calgary. It’s expensive here, and with Chrystal still in school it’s hard on 1 person’s income. However, I need to get into the housing market before it gets too high again.

Current Track: Linkin Park – Burning the skies