Back in August, I finished up .Hack//Mutation and had enjoyed it thoroughly. Since then, I’ve picked up on playing Jak II, FFXI, and La Pucelle Tactics since then. I tend to average 3-5 video games in a year, considering my pendhant for RPGs and strategy games (La Pucelle fits both categories nicely, BTW).

This means that the .Hack//Outbreak has been out for about half a year now, and I haven’t gotten around to it just yet. During the time since its release, one of my previous reports regarding my experiences with .Hack//Mutation has become a suprisingly active message board regarding that particular installment. Fully 1/5th of all comments on this website, dating back to my reinstallation of Movable Type back in August of 2002.

There were also a respectable number of posts on my .Hack//Infection entry, so as the request of one of the frequenters of those two de-facto forums, I am placing an entry here for people to discuss their experiences with Outbreak. Outbreak includes the introduction of the Sigma server. I understand that very early on you find that a number of your most useful party members are not available in the gameworld for a while. If it turns out that Mistral is unavailable, as somebody told me at work, this will force me to rework a lot of my methods ffor dealing with combat, and I’ll be fielding Gardenia a lot more.

As I mentioned, I have yet to pick up this title, so I’ll be of little use in providing tips and tricks for this one, at least not until I’ve finished up La Pucelle Tactics. I’ve found that when I pick up a new game before finishing my current one, I never get back to it…. Like Vice City. I still don’t know how that one ends. Please feel free to put up questions and advice in the Comments field here. I know there are several folks who come here for .Hack info, and I’m sure they’d appreciate it.

At times, working with my gracious employer can seem like a comedy of errors. There are procedural, management, staff, and structural issues that can seem large when you’re on the inside. Every little inconsistency and mistake is magnified by one’s proximity to the source. One such example is the day to day hassles you encounter when you’re in a room with the folks who do the maintenance and deployment work in a relatively large data center. Then in the course of digging through a frequently-viewed website, you decide to follow a “hosted at” link.

Please note that the image on the left is three years old, so it is not only possible but likely that things have been rearranged, rebuilt, moved, upgraded, and otherwise improved. The machines depicted on the left are from terminus.au, an Australian company that does network services and web design. They host the Australian Mensa Society, so I trust that this photo isn’t representative of how those folks do business or the reliablity of their service. I’m just glad I don’t spend fourty hours a week working with the poor guy that has to take care of that system.

The center image above shows that, regardless of the scruffy-looking guy in the hawaiian shirt (no, that’s not me) we have a neatly arranged series of locked cabinets to house our equipment, as well as that of our customers. This means that even if you fill up 48U of rackspace with your own sillystring mess of Cat5 and power cords, it won’t constitute an eyesore for others who may access the data center.

The image on the right is an example of the king of painstaking, possibly anal-retentive, work that our NOC folks put in to keep everything well-managed and pretty. Tidiness is a symptom of diligence, and sometimes in our daily lives we forget to appreciate such things.

In the interest of fairness, I should probably follow up on this post with some shots of my own (poor to nonexistant) cable management at home, where I have a single computer, a DSL bridge, a switch, a wireless router, a couple speakers, and a rat’s nest of associated wiring inadequately hidden behind a desk. Those is glass houses should not thrown stones, as they say.