The Fallacy With Serious Gaming Groups

Some random events have occurred recently that made me think about video games and video game groups and their success.

Generally speaking it seems gaming groups fall into 2 major categories. There are the very large groups which can number in the thousands and the very small tightly nit groups that number always under a few hundred.

Larger group dynamics are very interesting but for the interest of time and article length I am only going to look at smaller groups. In particular the topic of seriousness. You see smaller groups seem to fall into 2 main camps as well you have  the groups that seem to be very tight nit that are more or less focused on the social aspects then you have the groups that are focused on succeeding and winning.

The first group that likes to socialize generally tend to be more varied. They are harder to define but generally speaking you see a lot of inner group interaction and very flat structure and hierarchy in the group itself. Everyone tends to know everyone and the environment is very relaxed.

The second group tends to be much easier to define groups that are focused on winning tend to artificially enforce structure and hierarchy. They may have their own internal version of a chain of command. They want to appear "serious" to the outside world. They want fame.

For a second let's look at the silliness of the idea of serious gaming. At it's core gaming you do for fun sure there are those that are pro gamers at which point gaming is work for them. For most players where gaming is something you do in your leisure time you do it because you enjoy it. So what's the problem most people enjoy winning right? Well the inherent problem isn't winning it's all the layers that were put up in order to guarantee a win or further improve a win. All the bureaucratic red tape you hated at work is now in your game. This is a draining experience a lot of us go into our games to recharge to get away from thinking of work and if one group isn't offering that well why stay?

The fallacy of serious gaming groups I find is that they are awesome and everyone wants to be part of them. Another fallacy is that they manage to stay together for a long time. The reality I think from what I've observed is that serious gaming groups are boring and bureaucratic and lack the organic friendships that will form when everyone's allowed to be themselves and serious gaming groups will burn out rapidly since it's built on the foundation of the game and not the people within the group. A gaming guild or clan that is based on the game first lives as long as the game is relevant and fun they also never survive any hiatus since there's always something newer and shinier to play. However gaming groups that are at it's core about the people in them build strong friendships and bonds that cannot be broken and often carry through even after the death of the initial game.

So why is it you see these groups or guilds that are in fact super effective in game? I think like anything effectiveness and likelihood of winning competitive games is due to time spent practicing more than anything else. The more time you spend the better you are. A corollary is time spent practicing with your team the longer you and your team play together the more you're practicing and the better you will be as a team. So ironically in order to get better as a team the focus should be to make the interpersonal relationships better inside the team rather than focus on the actual skills individuals need to learn.

So in my opinion other than professional teams gaming groups and clans that do very well generally don't dwell on winning they dwell on interpersonal relationships and having fun winning will naturally happen with practice and experience. In an environment where practicing is optional ultimately people will practice more if there's more reason to come back and socializing is a large incentivizing device. So next time you try and bring a lot of bureaucracy and start building your gaming clan with military structure think about what that mean to your members you may just be losing the best and brightest within a few weeks.

The importance of intuitive interfaces

Good user interfaces aren't just for users. We programmers forget that nice intuitive interfaces actually prevent programmer error. For whatever reason GXT chooses to have the most unintuitive interface in the world take this for example.

Grid.setSelectionModel(SelectionModel m);

The selection model affects what happens when a user tries to make a selection on a grid (think excel table). The method accepts any selection model as well as null. If a programmer wanted to disable selection on the grid they would intuitively do:

Grid.setSelectionModel(null); //Sets the selection model to null (disabled)

That would be what you and I would and without any prior knowledge of the library we would think this means that the selection model is disabled when it is not provided.

Obviously this doesn't work otherwise this post would be pointless if you try the above you get a null pointer exception. So how do we disable selection at all? Will through this obscure post we find out that in order to disable selection on the grid you must first provide it with a selection model and then disable it.

SelectionModel sm = Grid.getSelelctionModel();
sm.setLocked(true);

or in a more compact way

Grid.getSelectionModel().setLocked(true);

What's the problem? Well for one you still have a selection model in the system and all selection models have to implement this "locked" mode which means disabled. You can't just disable a selection model.

But you say "It is documented when you dig through the documentation" that much is true their documentation has this to say:

setLocked

public void setLocked(boolean locked)

True to lock the selection model. When locked, all selection changes are disabled.

Parameters:

locked - true to lock

But the point is when there is such a thing as the interfaces behaving in an intuitive way. A programmer should take into consideration their fellow programmers and add convenience methods in order to give other programs an intuitive way of doing things. For example if the grid itself had a:

Grid.disableSelection(boolean disabled)

Which sole purpose is to set the selection model locked or unlocked this would be much easier to use.

GXT comments: Useless at best, Confusing at worst

See the screen shot the return value doesn't make sense as commented.

Shouldn't an outerHTML return the outerHTML and not the innerHTML?

GXT sucks moment

I was using this library called GXT at work and man does it have bugs.

Here's an example if you click on a menu button too fast your context menus never disappear.

It would appear that web developers don't have the same level of robustness as conventional developers / engineers. Then again maybe the people behind this library are just lazy.

My Opposition Letter to The CRTC regarding UBB

There are several major problems with UBB I will outline them for you below.

1. Independent ISP's already pay for the infastructure congestion is on the bell end and is not caused by the "strain
of independent ISP's" as they only get their agreed upon rate.

2. There is no free ride happening independent ISP's pay for infrastructure upgrades just like everyone else.

3. Accountable metering is needed if we go with UBB: For metered internet to be viable each house will have to get a certified meter installed of which the measurement is validated and government approved. Similar to the requirements of retail scales, gas meters, electricity meters, water meters. In the current model Bell can claim the user used X capacity and the user has no recourse as bell can claim whatever they want. This meter must be readable without requiring logging onto Bell's website (aka must not use bandwidth to check it).

4. Bell is not penalizing the "Bandwidth Hogs" the problem of capacity lies in what is known as "peak hour capacity" that is when everyone is trying to get online. Bell penalizes a 5Mbps plan more by giving them a lower cap vs a 25mbps plan. But the 5mbps users is far less likely to cause congestion because they simply cannot be as demanding as the 25mbps user.

5. UBB is a discouragement for network upgrades and continue investing. If you were Bell and you could just simply penalize your customers for using the service they paid for as a way to make your users demand less would there every be a need to upgrade your infrastructure? Nope. In fact if you knew every customer was capped at 25GB why would you even bother investing any capital at all in improving your network infrastructure? You've essentially frozen all possible future demand.

6. The tariffs don't reasonablely match the cost to produce each GB. Most of us understand there is some markup but Bell's markup model is insane. The price to deliver a GB including network upgrades done annually is less than 3 cents / GB. Yet bell turns around and charges of $2? The cost / GB would be reasonable if UBB was implemented at a rate of 5-10 cents / GB.

7. The tariff's don't reward the non-bandwidth hogs. If we have these tariff's in place what happens when you don't exceed the 25GB of allocated bandwidth? Surely bell will give you a refund or a credit for unused GB? You can carry them over to the next month right? Nope this 25GB just dissapears you don't get it back.

8. Canada already has the highest internet prices in the world. And yet we still can't keep up with our internet? The USA is already offering fiberoptic to the house while charging their customers far less. The argument that Canada needs to charge more to keep it's network running is completely fictitious.

10. Conflict of interest: Bell's own TV service isn't metered in any way. They are using UBB to effectively prevent new errants from entering the market like Netflix.

11. There is something seriously wrong when filling up 6 hard drives then overnight shipping them, and simply throwing them away will cost less than if the same data was delivered over the internet. http://www.canadiandownload.com/ is a business model that shows just how backwards our internet is.

12. Innovation will leave. Why in the world would companies that are creating new and innovative experiences on the internet stay in Canada when the Canadian public will be completely unable to utilize their services?

Windows Auto-Updaters

If anyone from Microsoft reads this I have a pretty simple feature request for Windows 8. Windows desperately needs some for of auto-update api. On my current Win7 install right now I have this situation:

Chrome: has their own updater

Firefox: has their own updater

Winamp: has their own updater

Flash: has their own updater

Digsby: has it’s own updater

iTunes: has their own updater

… etc.

 

Aside from all these programs requiring memory resident services in order to maintain the periodic update check the main annoyance is that each of these updates bug you at different times through a different interface about the programs they know about.

Since updating and patching for security flaws is a common thing in the modern application world this would be a big benefit to users of Microsoft products if there’s a centralized way of alerting the user of new changes. If it could be listed along with the standard windows update interface all the better (maybe a third party applications section).

I would submit to Microsoft directly but it doesn’t appear they have a feature request page in a casual search of the Microsoft Windows divisions site.

PS3 Firmware 3.21 Update Process Impressions

Like may people out there I was a bit disappointed when I heard that firmware 3.21’s only feature was the removal of Linux. I used it from time to time but I will admit it was not in steady use on my system for day to day operations.

That said I disagreed heavily with Sony’s underhanded approach of removing features that were obviously advertised on the side of the box my unit came in.

This is not about Sony’s update decision however there are plenty of posts on the internet about that, this is about the update process.

First off if you have another OS installed before you update you are required for format your HDD. Formatting your HDD removes all user settings, saved games, movies, music and photos you’ve loaded on. For me that’s 60GB.

I looked around for a “Just delete Other OS partition and resize” option but alas there was none.

Any sane user at this point would offload the data to a backup hard drive. So I went to the backup utility and selected backup to external HDD. This is where Sony’s lack of care for this release is made obvious the backup will take 2 hours to complete. I’m guessing since I’m in the middle of it that the restore will also take 2 hours.

4 Hours for a firmware update is by far the worst customer experience ever. I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s greatly disappointed in Sony for this.

It would’ve been possible to just wipe the OTHER OS partition and expand the main partition without losing user data. But no, Sony decided that he customer’s time is not really worth anything.

A very poor rollout Sony as much as I’m usually negative about Apple, their iphone and ipod releases are done far better. Major releases although they wipe your phone, automatically make sure everything is back the way you left it before the update is done.

In order to ease customer suffering Sony could’ve also implemented a prompt to insert an external HDD and have the user data reloaded when the update was complete. But to be honest a simple delete partition and resize main partition would have been much more effective and much faster.

Take note people this is NOT how to update consumer devices.

Dell battery Died for Good

Well after several conditioning runs today the battery decided it wasn’t going to charge anymore. After opening it up and forcing a few more manual charges the battery finally developed a failure.

Now when you plug it into the laptop instead of getting the battery status you get “Error Communicating with Battery” suggesting the SMART charging circuit is damaged. I guess it won’t hurt to keep these cells around for some other projects but I guess they are no longer good for laptop use.

It does seem suspicious that each battery lasts only slightly over a year and dell only offers a 1 year warranty on it’s battery. It’s almost as if there’s an internal timer that’s programmed to fail after a year.

If anyone else has a Dell 9400/e1705/ or XPS 1710 and would like to tell us about your battery experience feel free to comment.

Laptop battery acting up.

My Dell laptop battery is acting up again. It's giving me the 4 amber 1 green flashes suggesting temporary battery failure. Last time this was fixed with a couple of full conditioning charges.

(full discharge and charge cycles)

I'll do a few more but it is taking significantly longer to charge than discharge.

Game Developments Thoughts

I haven't updated here in a while I've recently been busy with my current employer developing a casual video game for the PC market. A lot of details are NDA so I'll try and keep that info from landing on here.

Suffice to say after several tech considerations we decided that the most appropriate platform (read not best) would be flash with action script 3.

In the last month I've been plagued with flash surprises that just astound me. For one flash is the only language that when you add an object that's already on the stage to another container that's also on the stage the original reference disappears from the first container?! This is a bit of an oversight since you will no longer be able to do instancing. Worse still there's no built in .clone operation for display objects so you'll have to start writing your own workarounds for this. Again oversight.

Performance wise we've been discovering flash isn't great for example one effect we wanted to do is a full screen lens blur. To make the CPU requirements low we decided we were just going to pre-process a blurred version of the image and alpha blend the clear version into the blurred one... Guess what full screen alpha blending with 2 images on flash is painfully slow and we had to ditch the idea, in favor of a static staged blend animation.

Progress on this project is pretty good everything is on schedule I'll be throwing in more of the art assets this week. The game is starting to finally look right moving past just a mechanical place holder and starting to take the final form of the game.

There's a lot of "what flash doesn't have this?" that I've been collecting I'm going to see if I can post some here and discuss why it feels like an oversight.

Dell Laptop Owner's Beware

If you have an Inspirion 9400/e1605 chances are you video has went on you. It's not new news anyone with an nVidia card either be Go 7800 or 7900 GS will fail. The 7900GS has a far higher failure rate with most of these cards dying from artifacts that look like lines going up and down the screen.

If Dell offers to extend your warranty DO IT! I'm already on my 4th card.

My first card was a Go 7800 by far this card lasted the longest as it worked fine in my system for the first 2 years.

Upon failing the Dell service depot did not have any of the parts in stock, so they substituted it with a Go 7900GS video card. I was happy that I got a free upgrade to a slightly faster card but unfortunately after 2 months this card failed.

The third replacement was again a 7900GS this by far was the shortest lifespan as within 1 month and 1 week it also died (you can confirm this by searching the archives).

Now I'm on my 4th card, I'm a bit disappointed that Dell replaced my last fancy Go 7900GS with the older Go 7800 which generates a lot more heat and performs weaker. That said after contacting Dell several times to get this remedied I just decided it was too much hassle and most likely this Go 7800 judging from how much heat it generates will just go up in smoke before the 1 year warranty is up anyways.

Video cards for the dell Inspiron 9400/e1705 are becoming ridiculously expensive on ebay now with prices now well into the $400 CDN range. If you were to upgrade to a 7900 GTX or a 2500M be prepared to shell out at least $500 now. That said I've heard that the 7900 GTX has much better cooling and will not go up in smoke like the Go 7800 and 7900GS.

For those that are interested I'll be sure to update the blog the next time this video card goes up in smoke, I'd also like to hear any horror stories you might have had as this is very a very common design flaw. Maybe if anyone has a solution to this it would be nice as well.

Right now I just needed to get this down for those of you wondering if you just got a lemon of a laptop. Let's just say all Inspiron 9400/e1705 are like this and you should expect to have to have your video card swapped out regularly.

Overtime

This seems to be the week that everyone works overtime. Me I'm starting my T.A. stint for the year and everyone else I know is in hyper busy mode. I hope that this rough spot subsides.

Video Games are lacking complexity

It was easier to see back in the days of Mario, and Sim city the obvious differences between PC and console games. Where console games were purely action oriented and can withstand thousands of mashes to their buttons a week, PC games lived in in the realm of offering players with a deeper smarter experience.

In today's game market I'm saddened by how little this has carried through. it would appear that as we strive to move toward accessibility where by we and reducing the complexity of today's games. Games are increasingly becoming less involved, and most games these days don't even require their players to "learn" something.

Take Team Fortress 2 for example. To make the game more accessible valve opted to remove all class based grenades. This omission removed many of the previous tacktics that abused how the game engine calculated physics in order to catapult players over walls and other obsticles. The number of weapons were also simplified for each class, each only has a primary a secondary and a meele weapon where in the past you might have creative goodies like the medic being able to infect enemy players.

A good exception to this rule is the game empires which manages to keep most of it's complexity intact from games of yester-year. Most of this I would attribute to the fact that empires unlike titles like bioshock is not a commercial product. The initial learning curve behind empires can be construed as downright frustrating but the sheer depth of the game itself continually ensures that each match feels fresh and different.

The high development costs of today's games means that it has in fact become too risky for commercial games to become so difficult that only those that put a serious effort into the game will reap the rewards of what the game has to offer. Prehaps for this reason the best games for the gamers that like complexity in the comming years will come from user created mods.

Just when I start thinking vista can't be that bad it assures me it is...

Recently I was thinking how long it would take before I cave into the peer pressure of all the computer users of the world and finally make the move to Vista. But Vista being the bastard child of operating systems it would seem constantly gives me a reminder of why it's a bad idea to give it a shot even after SP1. After reading this list I have decided that there are just too many fundemental things I can't live without mostly in the realm of customization. To put the matter simply I have always enjoyed window's philosophy of allowing the user to work as they want rather than dictating their work flow as is the Apple philosophy.

So without further adeu here's a list of features in XP that aren't in Vista that I simply can't live without. Antonnated with my comments of course.

Shell

• The File Types tab has been removed from Folder Options.
  
• It is not possible to override AutoPlay by pressing the SHIFT key

Ok I might be the only one that needs to go in and put custom file handlers in my menus every now and then but seriously your hurting all your power users by removing these two. When I'm inserting a potentially dangerous CD I used to be able to rely on holding shift to bypass auto-installs apprently this feature was too complicated to include into vista.

• [Explorer removed] the ability to customize the standard toolbar's layout and buttons.

seriously? I have completely changed my toolbar layout there's cut copy paste as part of mine as well as delete, moveto copyto... etc. Why are you going to dictate a once sized menu fits all? Are we getting Apple envy here? Trust me windows users don't like being told we have to work within the restictions of some arbitrary design descisions just because it makes our menu bars minimalistic and follows some dumb founded asthetic.

• The "Status" bar no longer shows the total space used by a folder

Provide less information to the user? Why...

• The RunAs feature in the shell has been replaced with "Run as administrator", and no longer allows alternate credentials

This wouldn't be much a problem if Administrator worked like sudo in linux. Fact is it does not too much of the RunAs is profile dependent thus not being able to shift credentials is frustrating. In a multi user system it's not unheard of to RunAs a lower privallaged user with another account just to check to see if certain software breaks. Without this it's frustrating and I would have to enter the user's accounts to fix their problems. Or worse temporarily escalate their privallages to administrator in order to perform the fix.

• Dragging and dropping a folder or file into a Win32 console window no longer pastes the path of the folder or file.

Some idiot at Microsoft forgot that people used the console still. To be honest the console they included in XP isn't all that bad... they've been trying to bury it ever since win95 but cmd.exe still has some features that can only be done there.

Network

• Can not browse a domain structure. All computers on the network are displayed in a unified list. The list can be "filtered" to display only computers from the desired domain

This totally baffles me, Flat network architecture just doesn't make sense. Everything in networking is hierarchical. Vista in all their wisdom decided to fire all their network techs and get their humanaties department to design the network view here.

Audio

• Since Windows Vista features a rewritten audio stack and does not inherit the Hardware Abstraction Layer for audio that was present under prior versions of Windows, there is no hardware acceleration of DirectSound and DirectSound3D APIs. DirectSound is emulated entirely in software. As a result, hardware acceleration and 3D spatialization utilizing DirectSound3D is no longer supported.

I decided to copy this line directly here to point out something quite serious. Too much of Vista is not so much an OS as it is a virtual machine. Hardware needs to run fast and efficiently. If my audio card has hardware direct 3D I'm not going to be happy when the supposed upgrade removes this feature. Essentially I just paid for hardware that I'll never access now. I don't think you can argue this one in any logical way not allowing hardware acceleration when previous versions of windows did is just plain stupid. This is not the same as hardware makers not porting their drivers no Vista just doesn't have support for DirectSound and might never will!

• The ability to customize the Windows startup sound has been removed.

You can't be serious about this one! I can't begin to tell you how stupid this one is, it's equivalent to all macs having the same mundane "dong" sound when they start up, many mac users have wanted to change that one. It's more excusable in that case since the sound is built into the BIOS so it's harder to change. I see no reason for any modern OS to not allow changing of the startup sound.

Startup Shutdown

• There is no progress bar indicating the hibernation status on Windows Vista

On a 2GB ram machine hibernation takes about 20-30 sec... Not having a progress bar isn't a real confidence giver.

• Although it is possible to customize the action Windows takes when the hardware Power button is pressed, it is no longer possible to set power options to ask the user every time what action to take upon pressing it (currently a make or break feature for me)

I have this on, on every XP and Linux machine, On laptops it's expecially nice to be able to just push the power button and then tell your computer to standby while other times tell it to actually shut down. It also prevents accidental shut downs due to the button being hit by accident. The only argument I can see for removing it is the same idiodic logic that apple uses. I.E. our users are too stupid to realize they need to select an option after they hit the power button.

• Sound Recorder in Windows Vista can no longer open audio files. Moreover, it cannot save in lossless (uncompressed) WAV format when run without using any switches; instead, it saves in lossy 96 kbit/s WMA format.

Sound recorder must support standard WAV. No exceptions.

So as you can see Vista has yet again gave me many more reasons not to make the switch. Some of these reasons are just aggravating other's are just plain essential and break Vista for the power users that have grown accustomed to them. For the most part though it does feel like Vista is taking away more than it's giving back. I'm not saying that XP is fantastic but, it has stood the test of time and it has been refined. However if an OS upgrade is in my horizon and the one linux machine on my desk is any indication the rest of the XP's will be migrating to the linux enviroment as Microsoft has finally gave me a reason to jump ship.

UI hall of shame McMaster MUGSI

It's not often that I run across a user interface that is as utterly useless and requires a course it itself just to work around all the glitches as McMaster's MUGSI. Also known as the student information gateway.

In reality it's more like an information gate keeper constantly keeping vital information a student needs away from them by posing clever riddles. Each logic problem can be solved by doing something completely illogical.

For example if you start on the main page and go into this sub interface the user is presented with instructions on how to access their tax form. The idea behind this riddle is to confuse and frustrate the user as if you actually read the instructions you'll be looking for non-existent items!


The correct procedure would be to close this window and navigate to the appropriate tax section on the interface previous to this popup window. Honestly this seriously belongs in the UI - Hall of shame.

No Water

My housemate just alerted me that there is no water currently in our house this probably has something to do with the construction crews outside.



Not to be picky or anything but isn't a memo suppose to be sent out before such work?

Hamilton: Unfinished

There are some things about this city that I'll never understand take this for instance.



When I first saw it I thought it was the wireframe for a sidewalk, but as weeks turned to months and months turned to years, I realized that it's suppose to look like that. Call it what you will but it will always look unfinished to me.

The EBay itch

Ever wonder why people pay more for things on EBay? The way EBay is set it it's addictive, like many other's I've placed a bid that I thought later that I didn't really need and ended up praying to be outbid (luckily the prices were usually ridiculously low so I was out bid). The clever setup of EBay makes it reflect more of a gambling web site than a place of commerce. Ebay uses the words like Win, and encourages users to feel like they've accomplished something when you've outbid someone as metal rewards and reinforcement. With Ebay money is represented by strokes of your keyboard and seldom do users actually think of money, hence unlike a real auction when the users is upping his or her bid there's no guilt felt from the wallet. In the end the users that end up paying more than retail for items on Ebay will also be the ones that regard their Ebay experience as fun, entertainment almost, and that extra cost might as well be the price of fun.

Two types of computer users.

It has recently come to my attention that there are two major types of computer users. There are the ones that prefer the all in one suites and the ones that like lightweight applications. This was brought to my attention with a discussion on Maxton vs Firefox. For those that don't know Maxton, it's a up and comming browser based on IE rendering engine but incorporating many useful tools like tabs.

Maxton's design philosophy from what I can tell is the suite design philosophy. Bundle as much useful funtionality as you possibly can into this application for the user so the user never has to customize the application or get plugins because the popular ones will be integrated in the next release. From what I've seen suite users tend to be suite users for all applications, they prefer large "full featured apps" that try their best at doing everything. They also don't mind the idea that they start off knowing only 20% or less of what the application can do. These end up being the users that will prefer the full version of messenger to gaim outlook to webmail, and don't generally go to the task manager to check how much system resources a particular application is using. A general philosophy for these users is "a good application should predict and include all the tools I need without me having to go out and get them."

Firefox's design is quite different from Maxton's. Firefox has always gained popularity over it's suite program Mozilla by remaining simple and light. Firefox doesn't try and anticipate the functionailty from it's users but rather allows each user to go out and fetch plugins to extend the set of tools Firefox has on their own. As such Firefox attracts the lightweight users, or users that hate over bundling of functionality no matter how efficiently done it might be. The design philosophy behind Firefox seems to be, provide a very strong and basic core application, then allow the users to extend it any way they might like. Users of lightweight application design philosophy might use notepad as opposed to a heavier text editor just because "It's all they need". A general philosophy to these users might be, "just give me what I want with none of the bloat".

I won't debate the merits of either of these solutions because sometimes efficient bundling can cause the package to perform as efficiently as a non-bundled application. I'm purely pointing out these two divergent groups of computer users which I find intreguing. Being in the second group I can't understand the attraction towards the suite packages, but I cannot fail to acknowledge their popularity.

Car = Money Pit

I'm dissapointed with myself recently. A self-fix turned out to be a disaster that requires an entire part replacement. That costs alot of $$$ (about 900 to be exact). This is a huge dissapointment but there comes a time when you really got to cut your losses and just bite the bullet. The store all started when I got a tiny chip on my windshield, it wasn't big enough to merit a trip to the autoglass shop but it was annoying so me with my idiot bright ideas decided to polish it out myself... Against what should've been my good judgement I went online and got myself a glass polishing kit. I thought literally how hard could it be? Big mistake that whole fiasco was, istead of repairing the tempered glass it made the whole thing worse to the point that one can argue it's a driving hazard. This is terrible, I totally love my car but I hate how it always sucks money from me, and I am to blame this time (again).

It seems that I can fix anything mechanically wrong with the car but I really should not try and replace / repair anything cosmetic cause I suck at it. I totally suck at it.... So I'm sort of set back a week, it's almost like not getting 1 week's pay will it be worth it in the end? I don't know, but I'll probably feel better once this whole thing is over with.

And on that note once the service is done I vow to myself that I won't do any car crap for the rest of the year until school starts. It's just becomming too costly and for a highway car it keeps getting stone chips or various chips from everything these damn things are too fragile. Almost makes me wish I got an old banger so I woudn't care, sometimes I think that would be ultimately cheaper.

On a side note I really should be concentrating on my Grad School stuff, but admist all this chaos I'm finding it quite hard, I really wish I can get a bit of calm so I can sort this out but that isn't going to happen and I know it so I better get on top of all this. At least I'm studying the GRE, even though it's what I would consider a slow rate right now no more than 5 or so pages of practice test a day mostly on the English sections. Really my only hope is to be able to take the GRE test by September but that also means I'll need my universities scouted out before then which I haven't been doing lately.

The most difficult part really is that work, personal liabilities (car), and school don't mix at all. What's eating up the most time is switching between these, but I intend to emerge out of this month more on top of things than last so it's time to kick my ass into shape.