Elves and aliens lurking behind your icons
Yeah, I’m posting a ton of WoW stuff this week. Don’t worry, I’ll find other stuff to talk about soon enough.
So, I was looking at a official Blizzard Entertainment desktop pic for The Burning Crusade, and I started thinking, “I wish they had one with the great graphics from the cinematic.” Then I thought, “Hey, I have QuickTime and Photoshop, what else do I need?” and I threw together a little image.
Look behind the cut for a small version
News from the Azeroth front
So far, so good on my quest for 60. I made it to 59 last night… I kept dying a lot, though; I made my best progress when I stopped trying to quest, and just stood close to home base and kept grinding monsters.
(Many of them were level 59 boars, and I was unavoidably reminded of the South Park WoW episode where they grind boars to 60.)
The experience is good, but I still wonder if my armor repair bills would be lower if I went back to Winterspring. Maybe I’ll try it for a bit tonight. I doubt I can manage a level in a single evening, even if I play for several hours, but it would be nice.
Ironforge was a ghost town last night on Uther. Even the Dranei starting area, where I fiddled around a bit, was pretty empty. I think the whole server is in Outland right now.
On the way to work…
The cat, as always, is trying to get me to stay home this morning.
I am going to attempt to reach level 60 in WoW by the end of the week. I’m at 58.5 now, and this will probably involve questing and grinding in either a) Winterspring or b) Hellfire Peninsula. The XP per monster seems to be better at option (b), but I do run the risk of virtual-30-foot level 64 monsters wandering by, noticing my little gnome, and one-shotting her. Apparently, some guy in France made level 70 in less than 30 hours from release date (apparently by tagging monsters for kill credit, and letting several friends who ‘happened’ to be standing nearby Alpha Strike the poor critter)
There were lines from “The Princess Bride” flying around the office yesterday. I think that Prince Humperdinck is one of the best villians in fantasy; he’s smart, skilled, capable, is surrounded by competent, loyal minons, and his evil plan would have worked great were it not that the good guys were even more smart, skilled, and capable. I hate it when, as is usual, the villain’s really an idiot whose plan is eventually going to fail one way or another (what was Lex Luthor’s plan in “Superman Returns” really going to net him? A continent of un-arable blackened crystal and lotsa dead bodies? Whoop-de-doo).
That’s right up there with the storytelling sin of having the hero escape the villain’s fatal challenges by blind luck and the skin of his teeth, and then having the villain declare, “Welcome, Mr. Hero! Your presence here is the final element in my master scheme!” and I immediately think “Well, what the hell were you going to do if the sharks had gotten him? Retire?” (And don’t tell me that the villain was counting on the hero surviving the deathtraps – if the hero’s that competent, then he’s still a threat to the Master Scheme.)
Another “point of view”, Luke
Everyone’s been linking to this page, and it goes quite well with my uncontrollable urge to deeply analyze the underpinnings of the Star Wars movies. The page asks: which well-known movie character was the top field agent for the Rebellion between Episodes III and IV? It may not be who you’d think!
ReindeerFlotilla
Around 2 weeks ago, something bad happened to the password storage on my 667 MHz PowerBook, and I couldn’t even log into my own account. I tried various Mac/Unix fixes for this that I found Googling, but it was a wash. (One of them claimed that a second admin account would have made it easy. raininva made sure to tease me about that, since her account is a simple user.)
Luckily, any FireWire-equipped Mac can be made to pretend it’s nothing more than an expensive external drive, and all files were easily backed up to the desktop Mac. Last week, I found time to wipe and re-install, and this morning I got around to running Software update for all the OS patches. (Busy much? You don’t know the half of it.) Hopefully, I’ll find the time soon to copy all my documents back over and re-install any vital apps. (Nice thing about a wipe – you get rid of a lot of apps you weren’t really using.)
Interestingly enough, and saving me a lot of download time to boot, the wired Ethernet port on the machine has suddenly started working again. I had suspected software issues, not hardware ones, when it failed a few months ago.
The house is freezing. We switched to electric space heaters from the hot water radiators, since the oil costs for the latter were killing our bank account. Electric heat is much cheaper, but very very localized – especially when it hit 31 Farenheit outdoors the night before.
Steve Jobs is calling
I really don’t want to sound like an Apple fanatic, but frankly the iPhone is exactly what I’ve been waiting to hang on my belt.
Putting aside the widescreen iPod thing for a moment (I have a nice video iPod, thanks), what I’ve been looking for is a handheld cell network / Internet terminal, and this thing appears to have the goods. Voice calls, voice mail, text messaging, POP3, IMAP, and HTML. I further suspect that, depending on the sophistication of the web browser in the thing, there’s a lot of potential for useful or fun Flash and JavaScript applications. Imagine being able to access the office suite Google’s supposed to be working on – from your cell phone.
Two issues for me; Cingular (I have good reasons to stick with Sprint for the moment) and $499 for the base model. Not to mention that it’s a v1.0, and we all know the fun that can happen there.
Still, this is the device that might finally get my Newton fully retired.
