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.
To Fly
Today I flew an airplane. A real one, with me and 3 other people inside. It was incredible.
There is a local flight instructor who will let people take up and fly one of his planes for an hour, for a reasonable fee. (The instructor handles the actual landing part, which I was just fine with.) Our roommate Starr thought that would be a grand birthday present for me, and after delays caused by holiday and weather, I took the Piper Warrior into the air. Hampton Roads is pretty amazing from up there; Norfolk and Virginia Beach seem like one contiguous urban area when you drive through them, but are quite discrete from 2000 feet.
Working the yoke and the rudder pedals at the same time is a little more difficult than I’d expected, though I did get compliments from the instructor relating to my basic knowledge of planes and aerodynamics. He said that even a couple hours on Microsoft Flight Simulator or the equivalent saves him a great deal of explanation during one of these “discovery flights”.
Of course, the deal is partially an attempt for the instructor to sell me $6000 worth of pilot’s license training. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like the idea, and I might do so in the future… but not right now.
Nevertheless, the idealist in me had a grand time. In 1903, the Wright Brothers made their historic flight; just over 100 years later, a Trek geek with a few bucks (or with a friend with a few) can take a plane into the sky and fulfill the dreams of thousands of his ancestors.
It’s easy to forget how surrounded we are by miracles.
IMDB Justice and the STS
Wil Wheaton is reviewing old ST: TNG episodes for a website known as TV Squad. He’s just reviewed Justice, and my trivia sense tingled; Brenda Bakke, the half-naked actress who gleefully welcomes Worf as the “Huge One”, also played Nim, the Texas Air Ranger in Gunhed.
This, of course, contributes nothing at all to your day.
Slighlty more interestingly, astronomer Phil Plait has posted that tonight’s 9:35 launch of the Space Shuttle will be visible over most of the US’ east coast. A link to a similar opportunity from ’97 suggests that Norfolk viewers might be able to see the STS reach 12 degrees over the south-southeast horizon, while Roanoke area space buffs will only see the engine glow for 5 degrees (possibly discounting intervening mountains).
(I’ll probably forget to go look, though.)
“This could mean the end of the world! … of Warcraft.”
A couple weeks ago, South Park did an episode about “World of Warcraft”. I don’t keep up with South Park, myself – in fact, this was the first episode I ever watched – but I’ll admit there was some funny stuff in it. They got the game references almost completely right. (If you’d like to see it, and haven’t, it’s all over the web, with the apparent approval of the show’s creators. There is one rather unnecessary scatological joke, unfortunately.)
Machinima.com has an article about the episode, where the show creators discuss working wth Blizzard. Among other trivia, the episode was apparently filmed in the Burning Crusade alpha-test server.
Edit: And since I’m discussing the intersection of South Park and geekdom, here’s a parody snippet that we children of the 80’s will find familiar…
