This was a little hard to find, so I decided to post it.

1. In Word 2007, select the View ribbon

2. Select Draft View

3. Select the References ribbon

4. Click Show Notes

5. Towards the bottom of the page, between the document and the endnotes, there’s a menu, from that menu, select Endnote Separator

6. You can now change the separator and delete it entirely, if you choose
Note that you may also need to change the Endnote Continuation Separator

You can now change the view back to Print layout and the separator will be gone.

BLDGBLOG (Building Blog) has a nice article about poison ivy becoming more virulent in high carbon dioxide environments, like what we’re heading towards. I’m especially glad now that I’m immune. Unfortunately Angela is higly allergic, so I don’t know how the twins will turn out.

New service from Google announced recently called Lively. It’s been billed as a Second Life competitor, which I guess is a close description, but it doesn’t come anywhere near the functionality, yet. The main difference is that it lives inside a webpage, which is pretty cool, although right now the plugin is PC only (IE or Firefox). Installing the plugin was pretty simple, and I was able to start using it without even restarting Firefox, which was nice. Lively has crashed on me several times, however (just did it again), so things don’t look very stable, yet.

Once you login, you can create an avatar based on the ten currently available. I chose a male avatar and then started to customize it. It took several tries to get this to work, but once it started working, I was able to change everything about the appearance of my character.

Moving around the room was a bit awkward. You have to mouse over your character to get the little move icon to appear, which allows you to click and then drag it around. There isn’t a walking animation, so you just kind of float around. Also, the camera follows you, but not very well. I frequently had to stop moving in order to reposition the camera so that I could continue on my path.

There are objects that you can add to the room and move around, which makes it kind of fun. I didn’t play with them much, yet, but might later on. I’m also interested in creating my own room. There are already tons of them out there.

I should get back to work, so I can’t play any more with it right now.

I’m going to participate in service learning trip with Dickinson College again, but this time we’re going to Jamaica. We had our first meeting last week and got some details about the trip. We’re going to be working at the Ginger Hill School building a playground, painting, doing general clean-up and maintenance and playing with the kids. I have to admit, however, that I’m not real big on playing with kids. Yes, I have kids of my own, but it’s different. I went to church with Angela this past Sunday, and the pastor spoke about stepping outside of our comfort zones. I think that this trip will be a real test of how well I can step outside of my comfort zone and try to have fun with the kids down there.

It looks like I’ll be able to attend the planning meetings for this trip, which will be nice. With the Katrina trips, I pretty much just showed up for the trip and that was it. Hopefully this time I’ll be able to get to know the students a little better before we leave, which will be nice, since we’ll be spending almost two weeks together. It also sounds like the conditions will be less than optimal down there, which is a little scary. I’m not huge on “roughing it”, but I guess that goes along with the comfort zone thing, too.

I’m going to try and post some updates about the progress of the trip here as things get planned out and develop.

Just some random thoughts…

I have been starting to notice how people use different modes of communication online. We have email, instant messaging, plus some website messaging tools. For instance, I don’t know (or at least can’t find) the email address for my friend Jesse Miller, but I know that he logs into www.boardgamegeek.com on a regular basis, so when I want to tell him something, I login there and shoot him a private message.

Facebook has really changed modes of communication, too. There are people that I message on Facebook regularly, even though I know their email address. Why? I don’t know, it just seems more convenient sometimes. Their Wall-to-Wall metric is what strikes me as very odd, though. You can see people’s entire conversations happen in your stream, since wall posts are public. That makes the conversation seem more like a public action, almost like the involved parties are on a stage in front of everyone, or at least talking loud enough that everyone else in the room can hear them.

After several attempts, I finally was able to complete the Collecting History quest, although it took until 12:30am. I say several attempts because I have been in other fellowships doing Great Barrows quests, collecting chalices as I went, but something always went wrong and I didn’t get all ten that you need. It doesn’t help, of course, that multiple people needed the quest, and they are in limited supply. Last night, I was able to get the four more that I needed, however.

The night started out with me making the decision to head to the Great Barrows in the hopes of finding a group to quest with. I only had two major quests remaining in the area, Collecting History and Broken Alliance. I decided that I’d go for Collecting History, since Broken Alliance is further north, and I wanted to wait to check out Trestlebridge later on.  I couldn’t find anyone that was working on Great Barrows quests, though, but someone was forming for Broken Alliance. I went ahead and changed my plans and joined up with them. We got the quest done pretty easily and the group actually had people that wanted to work on Great Barrows quests, so we all headed down there, anyway, so things worked out for me in the end.

The group was all level 21 and 22, which was probably the lowest average level that I’ve quested with, and you could definitely tell the difference. We were dropping like flies whenever we got to an area with multiple creatures to attack. Luckily, since we were in a private instance, we regenerated inside the Great Barrows, and not in the Old Forest like normal. Creatures also didn’t regenerate, so we were able to make our way back to the group easily enough. This made it take quite a while longer, though, and before I knew it, it was after midnight. I stayed online as long as I could, but Wednesdays are long days for me (I watch the twins myself after work), but at 12:30am I had to bow out and map home to Bree.

It was a long night, but I do think it was worth it. I leveled up to 22 and completed all of the Bree quests that I had, which I think are all of them that are at my level at this point. Now I’m free to continue on to another area without leaving things hanging, like I did in Erid Luin.

time: 2h

Had a pretty good night. Was able to finish the Ruins of Cardolan quest, which I had on my plate for a while. I fellowed with a Minstrel and the first attempt failed, but then we found another player and got through it without too much difficulty the second time.

I also realized that completing the Big Problems quest doesn’t actually involve needing to defeal the level 30 elite giant that is there. He eventually just walks away, and you can run in and grab the backpack without any problems.

I’m starting to figure out the economy of the game, especially the Auction House, a little more. There are certain items which definitely catch a much better price when auctioned. For instance, I had some Rushlight Seed that sell to a vendor for 2 copper, but auctioned for 2 silver, and that was the buyout price that I set. I’ll set a higher buyout price next time and see what happens.

time: 1.5h

I jumped online and was intending to solo quest for a little while, but got together with a group doing Evil’s Final Chapter and Heading West. We didn’t have a minstrel, and almost disbanded, but the fellowship leader asked us to give him a minute, and we got a high level character (>35), instead (I can’t remember if he was a captain or a guardian, I think he was a captain, though, which is good, since they can bring someone back to life if they get defeated).

We got through the quests with only one of us getting defeated, that I noticed, which was actually pretty good. There were certainly a couple of times that we had to sit and let our health build up, but I think we actually did pretty well. This also goes to show that you don’t always need a minstrel to get through these quests, and these two are supposed to be some of the more difficult to accomplish.

I learned a very hard lesson last night, too. One of the members of the fellowship was really low on power, so I initiated a trade with him and dragged a healing potion on my side and clicked trade. This basically offers him the item for free. I had ten of the potions, so I didn’t mind giving one away. What I didn’t realize was that  when you have a stack and drag it to the trade box, IT INCLUDES THE ENTIRE STACK! I gave away all of my potions, instead of just one.  UGH! I guess that’s a good way to learn, though.

time: 2h

[Note: I skipped blogging two nights, since nothing much happened]

I finally got my Scholar profession proficient in the first level! Now I can start on the next level, which includes a bunch of scrolls that I honestly don’t understand what they do. Time to check out the forums…

Also, I used a horse for the first time. In order to get the tier 1 proficiency, I had to go from Bree to Duillond, which was quite a haul. But, fast travel to Celondim, plus using my map home back to Bree afterwards made the trip much faster.

time: 1.5h

Another good night, although it turned out to be not as productive as it could have been, at the cost of good karma…

Once again I got into a fellowship early on that was doing a large quest that I needed; Book 1, Chapter 11, which is another Great Barrows quest. We had a full contingent of folks including a minstrel, but I was one of the higher level players, as opposed to the previous night when I was the lowest. We started the quest and were doing well until we were working on the last big elite character and the minstrel got defeated. The rest of us were able to finish the quest, but she didn’t end up getting credit for it, unfortunately. I guess we were all in a good mood, since we all said that we’d find a reflecting pool to do the quest again so that she’d get credit.

One kind of cool thing that happened was that I leveled up during the quest, and during the time we were getting to the reflecting pool a couple of the fellowship members congratulated me. That was a social interaction which I hadn’t had before, and it was kind of nice.

Anway, we got through the quest again without any real problems. After we were done a few of the folks needed the Lalia quest, which I had already done, but said I’d help out with. Once we finished that, it was almost 11:00PM, so I had to go. But, like I said, it was a good night, but I spent a lot of time working on quests that I didn’t need, so it could have been a more productive night.

I was pretty excited to see what new skills I received at level 20, and there were some cool ones. Rain of Arrows is a pretty intense shot which sends multiple arrows at a target. I also received the ability to use fire, which means I can put fire oil on my arrows before I shoot them, thereby potentially igniting a target that I hit. I also have the “Desperate Flight” skill which allows me to teleport to the nearest rally point in case I’m in a really bad situation.

tim: 1.5h