/cry

I’m presently trying to install a whopping 871 MB of patch goodness, due to the much-needed reformat on my PC today. I’ve not been able to play recently anyway due to the ongoing, intermittent problem that a lot of people are experiencing here where you log in and have perhaps 30 seconds before you lag out and everything freezes.  This has been happening since the patch, and the last time it happened to me I could play on alt servers, but not on the server where I had my mains.  Same problem with everyone else. Quite a few of the people posting on the forums are with British Telecom, but there are others spread all over Europe, so it’s not an ISP issue.  We’ve posted exact descriptions of the problem, traceroutes for all affected servers, descriptions of our machine configuration, lists of addons that we’ve removed or deleted to no avail, and so on…with very little response from Blizz tech support. Many, many threads on the tech support forums, with nary a blue post other than the occasional “talk to your ISP, not our problem” or the standard “delete your WTF folder and all addons” advice.  Nothing helps, and it’s extremely frustrating.

Work has not been pleasant lately, and I actually gave notice. Ok, I didn’t actually give notice, I told my team that I was planning to.  One developer has given notice and will be leaving after the holidays.  It’s not been fun.

Friday, however, we did have a sort of team-building exercise that was awesome (and perhaps healed a few wounds): doing our own lip sync videos in the office. There is one which I’ll put on YouTube after editing…I had tears streaming down the sides of my face I was laughing so hard.  Put it this way…how many CEOs of soon-to-be-famous dotcoms can you picture sitting around a table with staff, all pretending to be in a meeting, when a song from The Full Monty comes on.  Shoulders start twitching to the music and heads start bobbing, and then he really starts moving. In his seat at first, then the arms come up, and then he’s up and moving, sliding the jacket off and gyrating while all the girls edge away and then flee…it was priceless.  :)

At this moment? The beta for Pirates of the Burning Sea has just finished downloading. I’m off!  As someone with a lifelong fascination with Anne Bonny, I have SO been waiting for this.