Introducing Deoiridh D’Alembert :: Part II

OOC: In part two, Deoiridh D’Alembert writes directly to Hamish.

Part One is Here.

October 20 1719

My Dear Sir

Mister Lochartte has generously offered to write a letter that will both introduce me to your notice and vouch for my character. When you receive this letter I will be on my way to the West Indies; at present I am about to leave for France. It is with great sadness that I must confess myself recently widowed. My husband, Gustave D’Alembert, died suddenly but two months ago (has it been that long already? It seems only yesterday that I found him in his office, where he was wont to labor far into the night, that face on which I used to gaze with rapt attention stricken with the unmistakable pallor and fixity of death. . .the memory is too much, forgive me). My husband was a French merchant, who divided his business interests between here and the Continent. I confess that there are some difficulties and embarrassments surrounding the settlement of his estate (due, I hasten to add, not to any lack of integrity on my husband’s part, but which arise chiefly from the actions of a number of employees in which he trusted too liberally). Nevertheless, I believe that I will be able to satisfy all concerned parties once I have consolidated and disposed of his various assets.

Unfortunately, this will leave me with very little in the way of resources for my self; regrettably the complexities of his business enterprises preoccupied my husband to the extent that he neglected to provide as fully for my wellbeing should he predecease me as I am sure he would have wanted to. He did, however, possess several small business ventures in the West Indies, and I am journeying there to take over their administration. I imagine that you may well find this an unusual step for a woman, particularly one whom is well-born, to take. Rest assured that the perils of the journey do not frighten me, nor the prospect of encountering a variety of discomforts and vicissitudes upon my arrival. And in truth, while Inverness-shire will always be my home, the beauties of my native land hold little appeal for me any more, associated as they are, ineradicably, with the presence of my husband, and the many pleasurable times we had there together.

I do not intend at all to be a burden upon you, sir. I wish only a modest place to stay until I can put my affairs in order and make a new life for myself. Mr. Lochartte has mentioned, in the way of conversation, some of the other interests you possess in the Caribbean, and while it would be inappropriate to go into those matters in too much detail at this time, let me just suggest that should my businesses prove as profitable as I expect, then I would be more than happy to discuss how we might align our separate interests into a mutual profitability.

With anticipation and ready thanks for your kindness
I remain

Deoiridh D’Alembert
The Soldier’s Rest
Beauly
Inverness-shire

Small Steps

Over a 1,000 visitors! Small to be sure, but all things begin that way. I’m certain that at least one person is enjoying this – me . Thanks for stopping by.

Introducing Deoiridh D’Alembert :: Part I

OOC: The following is a recent application into the Highland Confederacy. I found it enjoyable and decided to post it here. Hope you enjoy. It is a bit lengthy for the internet but a good read. This is the first of three parts. It is posted here to hopefully show off that I think the Highland Confederacy has great potential. Here is an example of some great artwork from the guild as well: LINK

The following letter was recently received by the Highland Confederacy’s Master, Hamish McBane.

Hamish McBane
c/- Pascal Trouveville
The Raven’s Rest
Rue du Colonel
Martinique

My Dear Hamish

I hope that you will make allowances for the rather roundabout way that this letter has reached you. By now you will no doubt have heard of the fate of the recent abortive attempt to rouse us to arms. The people, as is their wont, called it, yet again, a “rising,” but the more truthful among us are already calling it the “little rising.” And methinks even that a grandiose term to describe the complete destruction of Eilan Donan, the fiasco at Glen Shiel. As you have so often remarked, my friend, our curse is our lack of confidence in ourselves. Here again we waited on the efforts of foreign allies, the clans sitting on their brains while we waited for the great invasion in the south that never happened. We pride ourselves on our long memories. Why then could we not learn from history? It is almost laughable that we seriously trusted our fate to the prospect of the Spanish trying to sail another Armada to our shores. Fair weather sailors, the pack of them! Had we trusted to our own arms and our own leaders, things might well have been different. Matters here are still in a very delicate state. I trust you will understand if I say that I cannot go into more detail. While I trust the contacts through whose hands this letter must pass, who knows but that they might meet with some deliberate or accidental misadventure in the course of executing their charge?

I sincerely hope that this letter finds you well as it has been long since any of us have had news of you. A letter from Captain Martin announced you safely delivered at Martinique but that was the last we heard. My friend, it seems an age since we were shooting together on Lord Dunmore’s estate and you announced to me your plan to “set up,” as you put it, in the West Indies. I trust that your little “business venture” is proceeding profitably, for all our sakes. But we are hungry for news; in the gloom that has settled over all of us here, the only light seems to come from our many brethren abroad, their words our only assurance that the spirit of liberty has not died completely. News from far away, it seems, is all we have to remind us of happier times long ago.

Enclosed you will find a sealed letter from one Deoiridh D’Alembert. While I have no knowledge of the letter’s contents, I have no doubt that the woman will do an admirable job of introducing her situation and any additional words from me in that regard would prove redundant. Nevertheless, I will presume to risk such unnecessary supplementarity; in my acquaintance with Mrs. D’Alembert I have often been struck with the reticence, so characteristic of her sex, to advance the many personal claims that so manifestly recommend her to those so fortunate to have been able to spend time with her. You will find her to possess all the usual accomplishments of her sex, to which she adds the benefits of an extensive education. And far from having the pernicious effect that education so often has on women of lesser character, her teaching has had the effect of simply improving her innate good sense while preserving her modesty and mildness. She converses as readily in French and Spanish as she does in her native tongue and possesses an uncommon level of understanding for a woman when it comes to matters of politics and business. When you add that to a level of fortitude and initiative that many men would envy, I assure you that I have no qualms about her ability to undertake the rigors of a journey to the New World; nor do I doubt that she will delight the many new friends she makes there to as great an extent as she saddens those she leaves behind.

I am sending this letter by an English courier vessel bound for Port Royal; the captain owes me more than a few favors. Madame. D’Alembert has already left Scotland to take a somewhat roundabout route to France, whence she has booked passage on a merchantman. She should be arriving toward the end of this year or the beginning of the next. I know that your resources in the West Indies are stretched thin at this point, however I hope that you will be able to provide accommodations befitting a woman of her age and state. I am confident that you will find that Madame. D’Alembert has resources and personal gifts that will more than adequately repay your investment in her.

I myself am still hopeful of being able to join you in the not too distant future. However it looks as if my employers interests may take me in to the belly of the beast, to London, of all things. At this time, of all times, every bone in my body revolts at the thought. But there may be other things that I can accomplish while I am there. At any rate, I look forward to hearing from you, even a few brief lines, confirming Deoiridh’s safe arrival. Until such time I remain,

Your obedient servant, and friend,

Duncan Lochartte

Brailton House
Beauly
Inverness-shire

Dermid Gavin :: Account of Recent Days

Dermid Gavin returns to “The Albatross” (tavern for the Highland Confederacy) after an unsuccessful week long search for strong timber. It seems that the lack of strong wood in this region will certainly be a sticking point for his craft.

*Dermid pulls up a chair and finds a small crowd gathered in The Albatross. As usual John More remains more to himself, nearly silent, as he slowly continues his work on ideas for flags and designs for the Highland Confederacy. Dermid peers over his shoulder and slowly peruses the detailed drawings.*

*Slowly lifting his tin from time to time to have a sip of whatever fills his cup this day, it is obvious that Dermid respects the good work being done for the company. Realizing that John is deep at work, he simply proceeds across the bar to the more crowded corner near the fireplace.*

I must say that I’m pleased with our company good friends. Although this land is harsh and I did just spend a full week without finding a single good tree, we have good talents among us and I have little doubt that we can be successful in this land.

*Dermid raises his tin towards the center of the table and gives a quick toast to Hamish, the founding member.*

Frozen in Time

*While Dermid remains near death in the Ivy Bush Inn, he suffers from ill-fated dreams where he is often frozen and unable to move.*

OOC: Really busy weekend in real-life but here is a screenshot from a game of freeze tag that was held recently by the Watch guild on the Windfola server. It is a good escape and I’d recommend it to anyone to try out at least 1 time if you have a nice group together of say 6 or more players. The games of tag are located in two sets of ruins located to the SE of the Festival Grounds, north and west of Bree. Be a bit careful as it is possible to fall off a cliff farther south and end up in Archet and be about 10 min away from where you were.

I’m in the process of putting together an introduction to my Landroval character with some nice screens but it will likely be Monday or Tuesday before it is up. Have a safe weekend!

The Republic of Pirates!

Recently, I’ve finished up the book “The Republic of Pirates”. It presents itself as a historical account of the rise and fall of the age of pirates that spanned the decade from 1715-1725. It has literally serveral hundred or more references and the text itself is littered with quotes from historical documents.

I think I should also set the context for this review of the book. I’m coming at it from the perspective of someone interested in Pirates of the Burning Sea who has very little other knowledge of that era outside of what Disney has provided in recent years and through my childhood adventures on that famous ride (which has always been a favorite of mine). I picked up the book to try and gain insight into that era so that I could enjoy the loosely historically based guild, The Highland Confederacy.

So now that you have a bit of context, I’m happy to say that I really enjoyed the journey. It is, for the most part, a fun tale giving great details into the life and times of 1720’s in the Caribbean. I certain it left me much better equipped to actively participate in our up and coming guild for POTBS. I liken the book to “1776″. From my perspective, I had less context to work within and therefore, the book seemed more segmented and flowed less like a story and more like historical bits and pieces. But I’m honestly not sure if that was due to the difference in context between the two subjects. Not that I’m a revolutionary expert, but history was required in school and the revolution gets more attention than pirates in middle school.

What did I learn?

I left quite shocked at the minute time frame that pirates actually existed in the Caribbean. It certainly made me thankful to be alive today and not 3 centuries ago when life must have been truly brutal for all but a rare few. Supply lines simply didn’t exist and the Caribbean was a brutally harsh environment where many men died. I was surprised to learn the scope of the pirates; going up and down the eastern seaboard of the early United States and their interactions with leaders and governments and their effects on cities as far north as Boston or Maine. The Treaty of Union and the decision over James Stuart not being given the throne seemed pivotal and directly relates to our guild background. All in all, it kept my interest and I learned quite a bit and that is something.

With respect to The Highland Confederacy, I give kudos to Hamish MacBane for establishing the charter in such a way that it ties our little guild to pirates, the French, Spanish, and English through a single event. Further, I think the slant of the guild offers great opportunity for roleplayers to have a huge variety of backgrounds that work within the framework and so I’m more excited than prior to the book. I’d recommend the book to anyone looking for a historical account of the time of pirates and I think most people interested in POTBS pre-release would find it an entertaining way to spend your days until you set sails on the high seas!

1,000,000 :: That’s a nice figure

I noticed today that WordPress now lists over 1 M blogs on their service. Simply a quick post to note the success. Thanks for the product!

The Glory of a 22 inch LCD!

Monday, I ran out and purchased a new LCD monitor. The goal was to purchase a new monitor and allow me to rotate a 17 inch 4:3 LCD home for the kid’s computer and put the old CRT into a closet to slowly die. I wasn’t quite sure whether the monitor would go at work or replace the 20 inch widescreen Dell Ultrasharp that I have had at home for probably 2 years now.

For the first time in a long time, I spontaneously purchased something. With very little research, I pretty much walked into Best Buy and took a look at the monitors and picked one. I tried to pick the one with a very good picture that was pretty cheap. I had walked through some store a couple of months ago and thought that 22 inch LCDs were the best cost point and from there, I went simply on appearance in the store and wound up with MAG Innovision 22 inch LCD for around $240. The stats on the card seemed really pretty good and so with little thought, I made the leap.

Later that night I hooked it up to my computer at home. I didn’t install drivers or anything like that. Simply unplugged the Dell and hooked up the Mag. Not a ton of difference honestly. A little bigger but the colors seemed a bit off. So I spent a couple of hours fiddling with the monitor settings and the settings on the video card. I think the picture got to be pretty darn close to the Dell but I’m not certain it ever matched up with respect to subtle colors and text.

What I did notice is the base font size is larger and, in general, a little more pleasing to me. Again, I did no research, just thought the price vs. screen size was a good deal and a quick purchase. Now that I own both and have read a little something – here is a little rundown. Both run on 1680×1050 pixels so you do NOT get any more screen real estate with the step up in size. What you do get is bigger font at that resolution.

After figuring that out, I went back and re-connected the Dell to the home computer and packed up the MAG to bring to work where I do the vast majority of my reading. So this morning, I unpacked the cables and hooked the thing up and hoped that my old system would run the monitor. First thing I noticed is that MAG does NOT include a DVI cable. I had used my Dell cable at home and so I was forced to hook it up analog style. Already, I was a little depressed after having it be demoted from home and now demoted from digital. “Perhaps I should not get in the habit of running out and spontaneously purchasing junk”, I momentarily thought to myself.

But after plugging the thing in and upping the resolution on the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, it is a MASSIVE step up from the 17 inch LCD. The real estate available for work is great and the text is crystal clear here. I’m really not sure what changed. At home, looking at the default settings and even after tweaking for a couple of hours, I wasn’t real pleased with the monitor. But here, under the florescence lights, it blows away the ViewSonic LCD that has sat here for the last 2 years. I’m doubtful that I’ll ever even hook up the digital cable – Why? It looks great so why mess with it. Plus the majority of my work is text based here so I can’t see any need for changing.

One word of warning. If you play games, make sure you have a computer and graphics card that can push all those pixels around. If you’re not running games, you can get away with hooking up a big monitor with little risk but with games, you can quickly run yourself out of your hardware.

In the last 2 days, I read a lot of reviews saying the 22 inch is the sweet-spot in the market with nice advantages like size and font readability that make it look like a winner for the next several years. I think I agree!

Landroval vs. Windfola :: LOTRO Server Decisions

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve struggled with this decision; going back to April 20th, if I run through the blog. Over the last week to week and half, I’ve mainly been on Landroval and so I think I have a decent feel for each and here is my assessment, for whatever that is worth. (Mondays – sometimes productive and other times – not so much ).

Let’s begin with Windfola. I’m not really certain why I picked the server other than it looked like a nice server in the official forum website and most, if not all people, seemed pleased with their decisions. So it seemed like a good place to look around. I found “The Watch” Kinship on the server and it is a great group of respectful and appropriate players with a great active website. So after looking around a bit, I started on Windfola with a Hobbit Burglar.

Once on the server, I was pleased with the general attitudes and behavior of the players – really a very nice server. The Shire was great! It had a slower feel and people were kind and nice. The Watch is very active and there are always plenty of players online. Honestly, I’m behind the vast majority of them in level and so I rarely traveled with any of the Kinship. Roleplay-wise, there was honestly very little. Not none and not anti-RP, but certainly not something that you would stumble upon that often in your travels. That said, I think within the Shire I was happy.

Slowly Dermid outgrew the Shire and needed to see the world and that took him into Bree. Bree is a huge town where masses of players congregate and honestly where I began to be a little frustrated. The town is large and with the masses of players, there was little to no RP. Occasionally you might catch someone playing an instrument and occasionally someone would help if you asked an in-character question about a quest rather than posting on the advice channel, but often, those in-character questions were ignored as the masses ran by. I ended up turning off the kinship channel for The Watch because it was OOC and I really don’t enjoy seeing a rolling OOC line of text. I’m in game to escape. I go to the forums for help or assistance, but that isn’t what I log onto the game to do. I just enjoy keeping that separate and being new to MMORPGs, I’m still adjusting to “what to expect”.

Next was Landroval. It is the “unofficial RP” server. I’m not sure why I avoided it in the first place. It seemed a little high on forum board drama in the pre-release days and so I stayed away. My first character was a elf. I wanted to see the introduction from an elves perspective and thought why not. The experience was pretty good but I was never happy about trying to roleplay an elf with such limited knowledge of Tolkien on “RP” server. So I momentarily went back to Windfola and hoped with the help of the LOTRO RP Haven that I would have a great time.

My first RP event really went well and there was excellent support from the Kinship. That and the fact that I really like my little hobbit burglar the best has created much confusion over the decision. But the longer I’m on Landroval, the more I’m convinced that it is a “better” fit – at least for me.

Pleasantly, I’ve found some roleplaying in just about every session on Landroval. I’m playing a man and so we begin closer to Bree in the busy Bree-land region and even there, I’ve been very pleased with the ability to speak and stay largely in character and quest and join fellowships. I’m not saying everyone is roleplaying or that it is a more respectful place than Windfola, but the odds of finding someone roleplaying are at least 3 times higher and that makes my game time more productive and enjoyable with less searching required.

I’ve built a QUIET tab where I can only see tells, emotes, says, and fellowship messages and that is generally where I sit. I’ve had good luck in finding pick-up groups without the support of a kinship and I’m planning on taking any kinship joining decision very slowly. It may be that I use LOTRO Haven for my “kinship” more than any particular guild. Time will tell.

As far as Dermid goes on the Windfola server, I’m not real sure. I have a “freeze tag” event scheduled for the kinship on Tuesday and I think it will be great. It fits in with the guild and I expect a big turnout. It may be that I play on both servers. A more guild tilted approach for Windfola and a more RP tilted approach on Landroval. I’ve enjoyed both to be honest and maybe splitting time might be reasonable until I accumulate more time and see that it stays more RP-oriented once I reach Bree on Landroval.

Today, despite all the things on Windfola that make me happy – the kinship, the active board they have, the hobbit burglar (my favorite character); I lean towards Landroval as the place where I will be happiest the longest. I guess, at heart, I enjoy pretending to be in Middle-Earth so getting there should be the goal.

iTunes and AirPorts :: First Day Success!

Over the last several weeks, we’ve done some renovation of our house and I needed a stereo solution. Here is a quick rundown of the situation.

The family room stereo runs a set of speakers for the kitchen and it is hard wired to the speakers on the back deck. Easy enough. The renovation however, added a new set of speakers in a room with no wiring. It was close enough to the kitchen that it needed to be “in-sync” with those speakers but enough of an individual room that simply cranking up the volume was acceptable. So that was the problem.

For the last few years I had my music on iTunes and I’ve had an AirPort for an upstairs TV room. It has worked great and so after some research, I set out to expand the network. I looked at various ways to try and get sound into that room without having to run wires through the house and I ended falling back to AirPorts to ship the music around the house.

The good news is I timed this move about right! I think Apple added support to play music through multiple AirPorts around January of this year. So, now the solution is I have 3 AirPorts scattered throughout the house attached to various sets of speakers. I can now either use my “main” computer to play songs OR use a laptop that has access to the song lists via “Shared Music”.

Last night we had a little party and I must say, it worked very nicely so all in all – a success. Laptop down in the kitchen area to control the music for the party. Everything wirelessly connected with no actual music on the laptop running the show.

I didn’t say it was absolutely simple, but it is very doable. Here are some of the issues:

1. - Needed to update firmware on the older AirPort. New ones are good out of the box. This allowed the multi-speaker send functionality support.
2. - Configuring AirPorts, in general, to work with my PC router was not super easy. Maybe not super hard, but I was pretty router ignorant and that fact had to be addressed to get things up and running.
3. - Still had to wire the new speakers in room to the amplifier to avoid “wireless” speakers – which I just don’t trust yet to do a decent job.
4. - Not cheap – each new AirPort is $99 and speakers and amplifiers aren’t free either, but relative to having to pay to get the rooms all hardwired into a main stereo system for the house; I came out way ahead.

If you have questions or need help, post a comment. I’ve done this and learned quite a bit and might be able to offer some quick pointers.