Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

Building A Basic Work Bench
I wonder how hard it would be to adapt this for a computer desk? On a related note, IKEA: Real furniture kids can build is a good idea for projects for kids. Too bad we don’t have an Ikea nearby - I’d be tempted to get some furniture of the kids to build on dull days in winter.

Farming Scryer Rep - TankSpot looks like a good possibility for when my warrior gets up to 70. I have been doing similar things with my protection-specced paladin at lower levels. My paladin is my main farming character for the simple reason that she’s the next best thing to a perpertual motion machine and I love watching the mobs kill themselves. I hate caster mobs though.

Some generic raid-heal strategies « Priestly Endeavors - a WoW Blog would have been really useful when I was briefly stuck as defacto priest class lead for raiding.

The Light and How to Swing It: Pre-epic plate healing gear, part 1 - WOW Insider

35+ Spectacular and Practical Time Saving Tips - Dumb Little Man

Cool Tools: Six Great Long-Distance Bike Trails Without Cars looks like the kind of vacation I would like to take should I ever get a chance to take a vacation that isn’t pre-scheduled for me.

What to do? What to do? - WOW Insider gives good ideas for finding zones and quest givers to level with. I really like the Wowhead quest giver feature - Cartographer has some of the same functionality.

Blessing of Kings: Theorycraft vs Trial-and-Error gives a quick and dirty way of figuring out how to do more DPS. The only thing I’d add is that you should also take into account resistances - there’s no point in throwing out a high power fire spell against a fire-immune mob.

Here’s a general algorithm for doing high DPS:

1. Rank your spells from highest DPS to lowest DPS.
2. Cast the highest DPS spell.
3. If you cannot cast the highest DPS spell again (because of a cooldown), cast the next highest.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3, going down the list as necessary.

It seems very simple, but following this will provide you with a decent spell rotation for every class. It won’t be the optimum rotation, and you might have to drop a spell because it costs too much mana, or does too much threat, or has a really short range. The work comes in ranking your spells correctly. (The main trick here is that when calculating DPS for a non-burst fight, you only look at the cast-time of the spell, not the lifetime of the spell. For direct damage they’re the same thing, but not for DoTs.)

Big Bear Butt Blogger: Kitty Burst DPS and you is a good article on DPS in cat druid form.

Part I :: Basics and DPS
Part II :: Tanks
Part III :: Healers

via Egotistical Priest

Egotistical Priest talks about her Nostromo Speedpad n52. It looks like a great gadget. Maybe I’ll get two as Christmas presents for Jaimie and me.

Going inbox-zero on your paper mail - (37signals) looks interesting. I’d love to be able to scan in more office documents easily. The price tag is a little steep though.