Rant 412 / 100k ms Ping Is No Joke

There's no charge for awesomeness.






If you're a fan of CSI:Miami, here's an epic Weebl and Bob parody.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/376252









I wanted to make profiteroles (aka cream puffs) but I don't know how to make the custard filling. In the recipe it requires custard powder, but I couldn't find it in the supermarket I visited. I supposed I could use the yan4 cai4, that stuff they use for making jelly, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea. I could also use cornflour, since it's the main ingredient of custard powder anyway.

Or maybe I should try something else.










Argh! It is so difficult to make money in RoM right now! Prices are dropping for everything and people who usually buy my materials either don't need it anymore (upgraded to better stuff) or are broke like me.

Worse is that I can't gather materials very often these days. I'm anticipating a new sale on the 15th of September when the new expansion, aka Chapter 2, is released. This means I need to accumulate diamonds now, and in as large a quantity as I possibly can!









I'm now quite sure the problem lies in my network adapter. I tried using my old USB adapter but it has recently died of old age while stored in the box. After seeing the lack of response from the deceased electronic device, I was left with no choice but to test it with my Starhub USB modem.

I played RoM for half an hour using it to connect to the Internet, with my default adapter disabled. Usually in the past few days I would get 50k-80k ms ping spikes a few times everyday, but so far I haven't experienced anything beyond 2k ms.

Well 30mins isn't really long enough for me to judge, so I will continue the testing throughout this weekend.

The reason why I'm doing this after a few days since it started is because I died twice due to these lag spikes. Since I'm at the maximum level, the experience debt I get when I die is around 300k, which is huge.

Bleh...










I knew that the Mongol Empire stretched all the way to Europe, but I didn't think they fought the Egyptians too. Apparently, the Egyptian Mamluks were the first to beat the Mongols in close combat.

By using their advantage of being familiar with their home ground, the Mamluks were able to lure the Mongol army into an ambush, hence defeating the famous Mongolian light cavalries and mounted archers.

Though I've read some European history, I never thought that the Kingdom of Jerusalem were in any way connected to the Mongol Empire. But they were! Remember the movie Kingdom of Heaven? The events that this movie was based on happened only less than a century before the Mongols came!

Saladin conquered the city of Jerusalem in 1187, which was how the movie ended. The Mongol Khan Hulagu (a grandson of Genghis Khan) arrived and demanded the surrender of Cairo in 1260. At the same time, the Mongols demanded the submission of the last bit of the Kingdom of Jerusalem that was struggling to stay alive at Acre.

Suddenly, a few pieces of the gigantic puzzle is forming a larger scene. I've always read those historic stories and never once thought they would be related. Now I know many things were happening everywhere consecutively.

Another interesting bit of story is that while the Mongols here were busy losing to the Egyptians, Kublai Khan was fighting his own brother for the Khanate and eventually set up the Yuan dynasty. Also, the Seventh Crusade was happening at the same time in Europe. You know, that Crusade started by the rich French king who failed at this quest but still became a saint anyway.

I'm finally seeing that all those stories I've read are in fact parts of one really ginormous epic, greater in scale than anything we can imagine. Wonder what was happening during this period of time in the Americas. Not interested enough to check. Maybe they had just perfected their spicy chocolate drink recipe at that time.