Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

I’ve considered trying out Eve online as soon as I upgrade my graphics card. However, reading Tobold’s description and Rossignol’s paean to the game convinces me that it’s not for me.

For me the social part of MMOs is akin to shopping at the mall. There are lots of other people there and that’s a key part of the experience, but my shopping experience is not really shaped by what the other shoppers do. The biggest interplay is along the lines of someone buying the last copy of a book I was going to buy. In a game setting, schemes like those described in Rossignol’s article are for people who get their kicks out of making others miserable. If you want interaction like that, go join any given real-world organization - you’ll have all the scheming you can handle and you’ll have real-world benefits if your scheme goes through.

From the comments on Tobold’s post, “The problem with any MMO where you can be a predator to other players is that someone, somewhere, is paying $12 a month to be your prey - Michael” I’m prey, not a predator so I’m going to take my $12 elsewhere.

I may check out Eve at some point, but I’m in no hurry at all to do so.

Albert Ellis looks like he might have some interesting stuff to read - we’ll see if ever I can get a login for the local library’s catalogue.

WowJutsu: World of Warcraft Guild Rankings: Andorhal is an interesting tool - it automatically shows guilds’ raiding progress. Now if only I wanted to raid…

Weekend Project: Flubber, goop, silly putty, and play dough - oh, my! - Lifehacker looks like a fun activity.

I had tried to make tortillas at home with minimal success. Maybe these would work?

Easy cooking project: Homemade tortillas: Parent Hacks
HOMEMADE TORTILLAS

1 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup water

In a large bowl, toss the flour and salt together. Make a well in the flower, add water, and mix everything together till the dough holds together. Knead briefly in the bowl, adding a bit more flour as necessary. Divide the dough into four parts, and, with a floured rolling pin, roll each out into a thin, 6-inch, uh, circle. (None of our tortillas resembled circles, and it didn’t matter). Cook in an ungreased skillet over medium heat till little brown spots appear on the tortilla. Flip and repeat. Spread with butter (and honey, jam, or savory fillings) and eat.

Kid pictures have been updated

I love to play with World of Warcraft addons. I realize that they are not necessary, but for me they make playing the game a lot more fun. Here is a partial list of the addons I use (and why).

Cartographer and Cartographer_QuestObjectives are amazing map addons. Cartographer replaces the default map with a much more configurable and informative one. One key Cartographer addon is Cartographer_QuestObjectives which keeps track of where quest objectives can be found. You can even download a premade database with a bunch of quest objectives already entered. If you prefer to discover things on your own, it will just keep track of what you’ve found.
LightHeaded is an addon I’ve only started using recently, but it’s extremely useful. Basically what it does is provide you with quest notes from WoWHead. No more tabbing out to check Thottbot!

If you use the Auction House at all, you NEED Auctioneer. It will keep track of prices for items and suggest prices for things you want to sell.

By the same people who brought you Auctioneer comes the must-have Gatherer mod for gathering professions. It keeps track of where you have found gathered items such as herbs, minerals, and treasure chests.

I really like Bagnon for inventory management. It keeps track of the items my character has and allows me to check my alts’ inventories and banks without having to switch characters.

AutoBar is very useful for simply using consumables such as potions, food, water, etc.

SendSelf is great for mailing items to alts

Gazmik Fizzwidget’s addons are all very useful for their variety of functions.

TrinityBars reminds me of the C programming language. Amazingly powerful and amazingly difficult to use. I’ve decided that I like the power enough to fight through the difficulties in actually using this button bar addon.

These are a few of the addons I use. Needless to say, my UI is a constant work in progress.

thegroup is the best guide I’ve seen for grouping in Warcraft, particularly at low levels. If you’re not sure what your class should be doing, this is very useful and concise.

The Threat Formula: Gingamok’s Rule of Thumb looks like a good way to evaluate my tanking gear.

Equivalent Threat Points (ETP)

* 1 Hit Rating = 10 ETP
* 1 Crit Rating = 4.76 ETP
* 1 Agility = 3.45 ETP
* 1 Block Value = 3.57 ETP
* 1 Strength = 4.17 ETP
* 1 Attack Power = 2.08 ETP

Llamaforu’s guide to the new rogue! looks interesting. I’ll have to try that out with my rogue.

We’re planning to buy an iPod for our trip out to Alberta. Product Roundup: FM transmitters is the best review of car radio transmitters that I’ve seen.

I’ve updated the gallery with more kid pictures. Sorry it’s been so long.

This weekend I broke down and bought the Cash Creating Guide for World of Warcraft in the hope of picking up some extra gold. I have read it through and here is my review.

Summary If you’re new to making gold in World of Warcraft and want your information in one place, this guide is pretty good. There are a number of tips for farming critters that you may not have considered. However, the guide really needs to be revised for the Burning Crusade expansion - particularly for post-Beta play. My recommendation is to go read various (free) forums and posts on making money in WoW. The slight edge this guide may give you is probably not worth the price of the guide.

Review

The PDF itself is 152 pages in length, including cover and copyright information. It was written by Luke Brown. The author has locked the PDF and appears to have used images instead of text, so you can’t copy and pate information from the guide. The text is black on a beige background, so printing it would probably take a LOT of ink. There are typos and other editing errors.

This is essentially a farming guide for players at level 60+. There are a few tips for making money with lower level characters, but not many. I would have liked to have seen a guide to making money for your first mount included. This often the first time in Warcraft where players are really looking to make some gold, so a guide for that would be very useful. The guide is quite comprehensive in its list of spots to farm and the extras that can be picked up at various farming spots.

Approximately half the guide is describes making gold in WoW prior to the Burning Crusade and the other half seems to based on his experience in making gold in the beta version of the Burning Crusade. A lot of the information in the first half will not be as useful as it was, due to the changes in what items are needed in the Burning Crusade. I suspect that at least some of it would still make you some pretty good money and it would be much easier to farm certain areas due to reduced population in Azeroth. The Burning Crusade portion is good, but could use an update to take the latest patches/post-beta changes into account.

If you’re using Auctioneer , aren’t interested in farming mobs, and are already making decent money in WoW, this guide may provide you with a few tips. However, you can easily get many of these tips just by browsing various WoW forums. The promised maps are few and far between. The black text on brown background makes it a little hard to read. There hasn’t been an update since around the time the Burning Crusade was released. At this time there are no forums for this guide.

My recommendation is to go read various (free) forums and posts on making money in WoW. The slight edge this guide may give you is probably not worth the price of the guide.

The sadist’s guide to PalAOEadins at WOW Insider looks like an interesting idea. I have two paladins around level 40, so this might be worth trying out.

EDIT: More along the same lines. The previous one is for protection specced paladins, this is for holy paladins.