UPDATE on Life and Gaming

Hello my fellow loyal readers. (no one is reading this) Brief update from March of 2009 lol. Life Update: Without the complete timeline I will just summerize it: Layed off at ZF, went to York Tech for carpentry and electrical classes, ZF called me back to work...had to go or lose unemployment and can't pay for rent. Went back to ZF, company moved to Gaineville GA and I went too. Stayed for my one year contract and high tailed it out of GA. Moved back to Lancaster and worked at Accutrex for 6 months. Got called in for an interview at Nutramax Labs (which coincedentally is in the old ZF building). Went to Maryland to train for 6 months and a week and now am finishing up my 4th year with them. My 1st year at Nutramax was good, learned a lot of different jobs and I'm now making decent money. My life was good but coming closer to another lonely Christmas and New Years, I decided I was going to try out online dating. Funny, I know! Well, I emailed back and forth with a couple ladies and nothing really became of it. Saw a cute girl on there with Drew Brees jersey on. (I figured it was a good sign showing she liked football) I checked her proflie out and it say said something along the lines of "I don't know why anyone thinks Chuck Norris is a good actor". Thinking my chances were slim anyways, I deciced to message her about her comments on Chuck Norris. So we sort of hit it off and went on a few dates. Amost a year later, we are married. April is my wife, best friend and partner in crime. We are already through one year of marraige and she hasn't killed or left me yet, so I'm doing good to not screw it up. We have bought a townhouse together and are having a fun time making the place ours. Gaming Update: Moving to Georgia awakened my Warcraft addiction. Played a ton living down their and some Xbox 360. Moving back to South Carolina I was falling back off of World of Warcrack and jumping head first into the Star Wars The Old Republic. That game was really good to begin with, just ran out of content too fast and it just fell short and I quit that too. Diablo 3 came out on PC and we played the crap outta that game...so much fun! Tryed other MMOS like Rift and LOTRO, just didnt feel right. Halo Reach kind of help get me back to console gaming. Started back on my 360, playing with my cousin and friends online. When I started my training in Maryland, I bought a 19" LED TV and a Gears of War Xbox 360 and Skyrim...that got me through my 6 months and a week. Started to play a little less gaming while my efforts were placed looking for a lady friend. After finding out April had played some Halo 1 before, that got me jazzed again about gaming more. Since I've been with April I've been mostly playing Destiny, MCC, Halo 5, Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls and Fallout 4. Mostly Halo 5 with buddies on Saturdaysfor about 3-6 hours. I'm trying to limit my gaming hours down during the work week so I can spend more time with April. I really do like hanging out with her and watching tv, it beats most games. April still thinks I'm weird going to midnight launches and watching anime, but she is really cool and understands. Well, that's my update in nutshell. Probably post again in a few.....years? -Razor1138 OUT

Talk about a long time...

Wow, this is been a while since I have blogged anything. Guess I will have more time to blog on...well anything (if I don't get to lazy).

Big news on the home front, I was recently laid off of work last Friday. The layoffs where due to the struggling economy and low sales orders. If they aren't ordering then we can't make parts, if we don't make parts, we have people getting paid to stand around, hence the lay off.

Now there are several factors that went into the layoff. ZF had a number that needed to be laid off and it was 40. The company decided it was going to try and run the entire plant on one shift and not two. I was working on 2nd shift and started looking at the workers on both shifts. On 1st shift I had seniority over only one person in the CNC area, and there were five people on 2nd shift that hard more time on the job than I. There are only so many machines that are on the plant floor and it was getting very difficult on finding where I would fit in.

There was a plant meeting that told the emploees that they were offering severance packages to volunteers to be laid off. Volunteers get 2 weeks of pay for every year of service, plus an addional 4weeks for volunteering (1yr of Cobra insurance at ZF reg rate). If you don't volunteer you get the same as the volunteer except the extra 4 weeks and only 3 months of Cobra insurance. ZF was up front and said that if they don't get the number of volunteers that they would then have to pick people. Also, just because you volunteer didn't mean you got the package/lay off.

Personally, I was kinda scared. I was not 100% on if I'd have a spot to work at or if they would keep me. Majority of 1st shift is workers with 7+yrs of service on average, to my 5 years. My train of thought was that, if I were to volunteer for the lay off then maybe I would have the best outcome possible. If I were really needed they would reject my vol lay off, which I was hoping would happen or I'd have the best severance package availible to me.

Turns out they didn't really need me, and that's fine for now. I also found out that I can draw unemployment on top of my severence package. As much as I am not happy about lossing my job, ZF tried as hard as they could to help the lay off people. The paid for a class outside of work for the lay offs to make resumes and talk about interviews and such. The class also gets your resume and puts it into 200 jobs around the surrounding area. They didn't have to do that.

Writing this has helped me kinda vent what has been going on for the past week. That class is in another hour of me writing in this blog...maybe I'll learn something.

D&D Night

After about a 2-3 month hiatus from Dungeons and Dragons, we got the crew back together and worked our way through our final encounter. The break in between our last encounter has made all of the players some what rusty in the rules and such. There was suppose to be 4-5 more boards for the last encounter but it took us too long and we only got to 3 of them. Hopefully we will finish this encounter this Saturday or Sunday and we can start on the new Version 4 encounters.



Everyone points to the guy who is the most pissed off because Robert has the most gold:

That is an encounter sheet from 4th Edition...BADASS!


Where we left off at:

Old habbits slowly dieing

Today it has come to my attention that I might be slowly phasing out gaming. As of lately I noticed that playing, almost any type of game, has become some what boring. Maybe it's just that as the years go on, my standards for games in general have risen. Today's games are just not fun enough for me to want to buy or play them. Is it just me or am I just too picky?

GTA4 has been a great game but I can't seem to get the enthusiasm to finish it and the same goes for Call of Duty 4. I got back on World of Warcraft but after about 20 minutes I get seriously bored and log out.

I think that one of my major problems is that I get too serious when playing any game. Before the Xbox 360 came out, it was all about just playing with my buddies online and just having a blast and trash talking. This seems to have disappear from my gaming routine now-a-days. The thing that is bugging me is...I want to play but I get burnt out to fast.

Maybe I should just try to give up gaming for a full week and see where that takes me. In the meantime I will work on my blog and try to start another blog for my family. I also want to start working on small electrical project kits, info soon.

Stay Current

Lately I have been getting very social and posting on forums that normally I just read. I find that taking part in different online communities broadens your mind and train of thinking. Recently I joined a site called Twitter.com. Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? It is somewhat of a geeky trend, you can set it up on your cell phone or on an instant messaging service. When you sign up, you can follow other friends or anyone you find interesting on Twitter.

Basically you want to try and get all your friends to sign up and all follow each other. Say I was going to see a movie or was going somewhere to eat, I could tweet that "going to see Indy4 @ Manchester 9:00pm" this would be an open invite to anyone who wants to show. That's just an example, but it doesn't just have to be where your going, it can be something interesting you saw or random thought in your head.

Enough about plugging Twitter. Another thing I started getting into was Zune Social (my tag: Razor 1138) here I can share my music with other friends and they can see what I listen to and vise a versa. This helps widen my music pallet and if there is a song I think you would like I can send you a track to test.

If you read this blog try to sign up on my twitter and zune social and keep the community moving.

Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

Last night I went to see Indian Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull at the first viewing 12am. I'm not going to give any spoilers away, but I thought it was a good movie. Leaving the theater after the movie, there seem to be mixed feelings of was it good or bad. I think that some viewers were hoping for way too much. It has been like 15 years since the last Indy movie came out (don't hold it against me if I'm off) and I felt like it fit perfectly with all the other Indy movies. Sure there was a lot of over the top action...but them again, what Indian Jones movie doesn't? The George of the Jungle part was my only nit-picky part of the movie. Harrison Ford did a great job, as expected, and Shia Lebeouf also did a tremendous job. If your hoping for a boobietrap infested movie and don't like CGI, then odds are you won't like this movie. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, I plan on seeing it several more time this weekend. Next movie up on the list: Kung Fu Panda, Zohan, The Happening and The Incredible Hulk.

Indiana Jones Saturday

This Sat. my brother invited some guys over and we watch all 3 Indy videos back to back. Not really as epic as watching all LOTR's back to back, but non the less it was fun. For the most part we kinda did a Mystery Science Theater 3000 viewing. Surround sound was good, video quality was good, but the projector would sometimes loose the red component cable and it would look real green. Over all it was a success. Next meeting up should be Wed night at AMC Charlotte for the midnight viewing of Indy IV!!! BE THERE!



I chose poorly.

Go Speed Racer Go...

As in "Go Away". I recently got the privilege to go see Speed Racer today for the 1st time at our local theater fir $3. Three dollars you say? Trust me, this one was not a bargain. This movie was nothing short of crap. There might have been a handful of laughs in there but definitely not $3 worth. The first hour I found myself and another movie watcher dozing in and out of a comma. At points in Speed Racer there were just too many light blurs and flares, I felt like I was about to go into a seizure. The camera work was very crappy and the fades to the next scenes got really repetitive and old quick. The movie was too long and only got semi better near the end. If I could rate this on a 1-10 scale (10 being great) I would have to give it a 4. Wow! This score is 90% based off of the one scene where a monkey throws poo in another persons face. This is not even worth pirating off the interwebz for free...sorry?

My GTA4

Grand Theft Auto 4, or GTA4, is the fourth installment of the GTA series put out by Rockstar Games. Your character is Niko Bellic, he has come to America to enjoy the rich life and emigrate. The only problem was that he was mislead by his cousin Roman and now all of Liberty City is up for the taking.

Most anyone, who is anyone, has already played at least on of the Grand Theft Auto games. Well, I haven't! This is my very first GTA game and I have to say, it is very enjoyable. I have previously played GTA Vice City for maybe 20min or so but at the time it just wasn't my cup of tea. To be honest, I was not even planing on getting it. My buddy in California (xbl gt: N3Sto) kept hounding me about, "if you don't get this game you are gonna be missing out on a lot of", and man he was right.

At this point in time, I am at 50% and close to the end...I can feel it. GTA4 has so many things you can do in the game, from stealing cars,boats,trucks,motorcycles,and even helicopters. As you progress through the story you will meet women who you can take out on dates and make some new buddies and go grab a bite to eat and/or go to a strip club. When you make new friends, they tend to call your cell phone a lot and want to do stuff, which is usually not at a good time.

Grand Theft Auto 4 has gobs of quests and side quests to do, always leaving you something to do. If for some odd reason you get bored, you can always try to work on those weird achievements, or you could go play darts,go bowling, or even shoot some pool. The game has a stats page that lists everything you do from whats your favorite radio station you listen in cars to how many people you killed with each weapon.

I could literally go on for hours about cool things in the game, but it's getting late when I started typing this. I'd say rent it but it would be a waste, only due to the fact that in the time you rent it, you won't have enough time to do what you want. This is a MUST buy game for any Xbox360 or PS3 owner. Buy this game and I'll see you in the Cop's-n-Crooks match, Peace.

My Chief

This is to test and find out if i can post a comment with a picture in my blog.