Latest going ons

Where do I begin? I've had a lot of great ideas for blog entries these past few months but finding the time to enter them has been difficult to say the least. So I guess we'll start with the thing that has been eating up the majority of my time: work.

Two months ago things were going swimmingly well and then out of the blue came what is known in the industry as a strategic restructuring, a layoff. In this case it was about 25% of the workforce and despite my best hopes otherwise, several of my very good friends and colleagues were included in the cut. After all the sacrifices I'd made to get to this company and after all the 60-hour-plus work weeks, I'd begun to question whether it was still the right place for me.

Despite some tempting propositions from area recruiters who had heard the news of the mass layoffs, I decided to stay put and see if the situation would improve. Even with the loss of resources, I felt we still had the best collection of Ruby/Rails talent in the area. Within a month's time we were able to make a new post to our collective technology-oriented blog, one which happened to pertain to a project I was working on. So provided that things continue to go well and I am able to make viable contributions to our code-base, I see no reason not to stay put for the time being.

As to what takes up the next largest portion of my time, that would have to be WoW. A lot has happened since I last posted on the topic. In early June I took my then main character, a druid, over to Shu'Halo so I could game with a buddy of mine. But his interest in the game began to wane as did my interest in playing a Moonkin which is essentially a caster that can't really cast that well. This became only more obvious when I finally hit level 70 and I kept getting passed over to do instance runs in favor of mages.

As such, I decided to do a bit of research and came to the conclusion that if I really wanted to do pure DPS and have the benefit of crowd control and an aggro-dump, then I'd need to roll a mage myself. It also helped that a buddy of mine from work had a low-level warlock that he was interested in leveling. For me the change was not only in character class but also in play style. Whereas I had leveled my druid on a PvE server, this character would live on a high pop PvP server.

After dedicating several months of on-and-off play to her, my Dranei mage just recently hit level 63 and ought to be level 70 within a few weeks. By then my parents will be in town as they're visiting me for the holidays so my time online will be pretty much scotched until the new year. Hopefully in the future I will be able to juggle my time between work and WoW more effectively so that I can blog about events in my life closer to real-time.