Slinkies

Did some more with Slinker last night -- after soloing a couple missions, an invulnerability tank wanted to be sort-of-power-levelled, so we went up against Family (which inv can tank well because they do only smashing/lethal except for the bosses) and he tanked them while I killed them and a healer (I never saw her use an attack) spammed clear mind, of all things, except (oddly enough) when a mezzing boss showed up. Although she didn't make that mistake twice, and no one actually died.

I say sort-of- because I never could have taken on groups of 10-12 26s with a level 24 SR scrapper and lived. On the other hand, he'd hit them for 15, and then I'd turn around and crit for 147+147, so it wasn't like he could have killed them either.

At any rate, the tanker made his level and brought out his slightly-higher-levelled guy to sort-of-PL us in return (there were a couple times we had to save his ass; blasters are squishy against hazard-zone-sized spawns like we were taking on), getting me 3.5 bubbles in half an hour or so. Since it'd already been late when I logged on, I called it a night.

Made good progress downloading overnight, but then the updater crashed again somewhere around the 1.0G mark. When logging on to try to reset, I noticed that the servers were mostly down, and the ones that were up gave a 'wrong protocol: use newest version' error message. Apparently, the patch is going in today, but isn't yet available for download through the pre-downloader, only the post-downloader.

Quitting from the login screen did launch the post-downloader, at least.

the department of reading too much into empty managerspeak

Okay, the new Chief Financial Officer, who replaced the old CFO best known for 'taming the cost beast' and (incidentally) driving away a good percentage of the experienced personell with a series of raise, bonus and benefit cuts, just described his mission as 'Driving Shareholder Value'.

Leaving aside, for the moment, that this is pretty meaningless, its meaning if we assume it has one is kind of creepy. Why in world would it be up to the CFO to drive shareholder value? Shouldn't shareholder value be something driven by the products and services that a company provides, and thus on the backs of, say, the product groups, or maybe marketing?

If the CFO is driving shareholder value, that means that the primary focus of 'shareholder value' has to be on cutting costs, and that we've given up on actually selling more or better product.

So why advertise it in an internal publication? Are we ruling through fear now?

antici...

Right. So the post-downloader crashed again, while I was at work (not a surprise, as it always does that), probably not long before I headed home, since Earthlink hadn't shut down from inactivity yet.

So now I'm waiting for it to connect to the updater proper so I can see if the 1.1G I managed to pull down over the course of the last week was a wasted effort or not. If it was... well, I guess I'll have to lug my computer over to somebody's house with a better connection, 'cause I sure don't want to spend the next week patching too.

EDIT: It did pick up where the post-downloader had left off, so supposedly I have another 30 hours of downloading left, which means I could be playing again by Saturday morning, which is the earliest I could play after tonight anyway. Typically something goes wrong and I end up downloading 'till Saturday night, though... but on the other hand I might be able to get the patch by other means and skip the rest of the download. [shrug]