Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

I would love to take more notes than I do.  In essence, that’s what this blog is all about - notes to myself about things I find interesting.  I write these posts so that a year from now when I’m wondering when our guild alliance first hit Karazhan, I’ll be able to look it up quickly.  Cory Doctrow compared his blog to an outboard brain.  This blog remembers things for me.

That being said, I’m always on the lookout for more note-taking tools.  There are some things I just don’t want on this blog.   It’s a semi-public place, something like setting up a flower garden on my front lawn.  Sometimes I’ll have snippets of thoughts that might develop into a good entry or that I might just want to look up later or that are simply no-one else’s business.  Thus far I haven’t managed to come up with a good place for noting these snippets.  Lifehacker has a roundup of note taking tools.

I’ve tried pen and paper, but the search capabilities suck.  Then there’s the problem of trying to read my handwriting.  Finally, I have to have the paper and pen with me when I have the idea (and not left behind on my desk).  

Some form of computer based note taking solution solves the first two problems with paper, but not the third.  However, if I use an internet solution, I can have the added advantage of accessing my notes anywhere I can access the Internet.  Given that I have rapid access to the Internet 90+% of the time that I’m awake, this seems like a good solution.  My brilliant bike ride brainwaves are still lost, but I can at least search, read, and access my notes. 

I’ve tried using a very simple personal wiki, but I spent more time fiddling with formatting than actually writing notes.  Webmail works, but I wind up with mishmash of messages in my inbox. Something about Google Notebook just doesn’t work for me, though I may give it another shot.

Of Lifehacker’s top five, this leaves me with Evernote and  Microsoft OneNote.  OneNote costs $100, which is a bit much for a tool I’m not sure I’ll like.  Thus I’m down to Evernote.  I’ll give it a shot and see if it works for me.

I don’t know if my druid will hit level 70 before Wrath comes out, let alone run Karazhan, but if I do run Karazhan, ThinkTank has The Cat From-Karazhan gear guide for me to consult.

Big Bear Butt Blogger has a very intersting post on his ideas for new content beyond WotLK. This appeals a lot to me. I would love it if there were a reason to revisit some of the older dungeons. Before reading this post I would have said that my ideal would have been to have a heroic mode for all dungeons (heroic mode would be tuned for max level). BBB’s idea is much better in that it provides a story justification for returning to the old instances. I’m not sure about the level 40 cap though - it seems rather limiting to me.

Basic guide to Affliction DPS is a good guide both to reading WoW Web Stats as an affliction warlock and to how to DPS effectively in a raid as an affliction warlock. My affliction warlock is leveling with Jaimie’s shadow priest so it’s rare that a mob lives long enough for both of us to get all our DOTs onto it.

Clive Thompson recently posted Back to the Grind in WoW — and Loving Every Tedious Minute in which he discusses World of Warcraft and grinding.  (Found via WoWInsider)

I’d define grinding as killing a given group of mobs over and over again to achieve some reward.  The in-game reason can be straightforward and short - "That guy offered me 10 silver if I kill 10 vicious piglets" or well reasoned and more abstract "If I kill one vicious piglet every 10 seconds, I can reach level umptety-one more quickly than if I run around doing quests."  The grind can also be frustrating, as you kill 100 boars, all of whom seem to be lacking their livers.   Whatever your motivation, you will spend time grinding when you play World of Warcraft.

I liked Thompson’s point that ultimately the grind is rewarding.  Whether you’re killing ten mobs or a thousand, if you put in enough time you are guaranteed to reach your goal.  As Tobold put it, "If you managed to kill that wolf at level 1 to gain your very first experience point, chances are you’ll also be able to kill that level 69 mob that makes you ding 70."  World of Warcraft guarantees you a reward at the end of the day. 

I suspect that this is one of the issues that makes the transition from leveling to endgame difficult.  There are no guaranteed rewards in endgame.  We’ve been killing Moroes for 5 months now without seeing the Mongoose enchant drop even once.  You can play arenas all day every day but if your team isn’t good enough you’re not going to get the latest and greatest PvP gear.  You can farm Kara for badges or farm honor in battlegrounds for outdated PvP gear, but that reward you want may forever be out of your reach no matter how long you play.  That’s frustrating after 70 levels of being guaranteed (most) rewards if you just play enough.

The fantastic element that explain the appeal of dungeon-clearing games to many programmers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without user requirements changing.
– Thomas L. Holaday, The Guru’s Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML (With CD-ROM)  by Ken Henderson, ISBN: The Guru’s Guide to Transact-SQL, page: 119

I’ve been doing some form of regular exercise since my early teens.  Sometimes it’s been very regular and structured, sometimes it’s been very minimal.  Why do I do it?

I don’t do it to be visibly physically fit.  Pick any of the exercise programs that I’ve tried and my before and after pictures would look much the same.  There’s only been one stretch where I did enough exercise and ate healthily enough to start to get into shape.  The problem isn’t the exercise, it’s that I eat too much and especially that I eat too much unhealthy stuff. 

I don’t do it for the rush.  My exercises tend to be fairly sedate.  I push myself, but rarely to the point of having sore muscles the day after an intense workout.  It takes me about 30 minutes to bike 5 miles, I do beginner yoga, my swim speed was never that great, I reached the third beginner level belt in martial arts, and the most I was ever able to bench press was my body weight.  At best, my improvements are incremental - nothing to get excited about.

I exercise because I feel better when I exercise than when I don’t.  If I put in roughly 20 to 40 minutes of exercise per week, I manage to counteract a lot of the negative effects of my sedentary lifestyle.  I rarely have lower back pain, I don’t have even the beginnings of carpal tunnel, I have very few headaches.  If I neglect exercising for a week or two while following my normal lifestyle, I start to suffer.  Exercise is simply one of the prices I pay for living the way I choose to live.

"His mother had often said, when you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it."
– Memory, Lois McMaster Bujold

Tor recently had a review of Microlite d20.  It looks like it could be fun.  I think the kids are old enough that they might enjoy a tabletop RPG, but I shudder at the thought of doing all the bookkeeping involved in regular d20.  I have considered D&D 4, but haven’t worked it into my budget yet (it’s behind that LCD monitor I’ve been meaning to get since March). 

I’m not sure where I would start.  I do have the last two years or so of Dungeon Magazine (amusingly enough my subscription expired with their last issue).  I bet if I dug through there I could find some adventures that would appeal to them.  If it goes well, I have the last two Adventure Paths for a more epic adventure. 

If it doesn’t work out yet, I can stick to regular card games for now.  The kids have a lot of fun playing Slap Jack - it’s simple and fast paced enough for all three.  We play the WoW card game sometimes , but it’s a bit too slow for the younger two. 

All three kids play World of Warcraft.  Pasqualle is the most serious player, but her highest level character is only about level 10.  Even makes many alts and we mock him for outfitting his hunter in an orange cloth dress. :)  Alec likes to make up new characters or go mess with his siblings’ characters.  They’ve all tried Lord of the Rings Online, but so far haven’t done too much with that.

I didn’t opt in for the beta of Wrath of the Lich King.  The biggest reason for that is that I don’t want to have all my stuff disappear at the end of the beta.  I don’t know if I could stomach leveling the same character through the same stuff twice.  Mind you, I tend to level my alts through the same content back to back, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

If I were to get into the beta, one of the things I would like best is not having a clue what the strategies are for the new bosses.  Having a whole new continent to explore that very few people have seen before would be amazing.  I would love to go where no one has gone before.  However, when Wrath of the Lich King is released I’ll still get that feeling of exploration.

It’s driving me nuts - I saw a website that would let you track World of Warcraft transfers/name changes. Basically it looked for characters with similar gear/talents/names that disappeared on one server and popped up on another. I cannot track it down. If anyone out there knows what it is, I would appreciate a link. Thank you.

Matticus provides a nice overview of the strengths and weaknesses of each of WoW’s healing classes in Assigning Healing Strategy - Part 1: Recognizing Class Strengths. This is important for for heal leads and for raid leads. I’ve raid healed on 2 of the healing classes, but it’s very helpful to have each healing class’ role in a raid laid out so neatly.

Life of a Nin has a very nice writeup On Comparing tank classes. He gives a quick overview of the pluses and minuses of each tanking class and where you would use each of the classes. For another perspective on the same subject, see WoWWikki’s Tank article and the articles for each tanking class.

Hopefully someone will do a series like this for DPS classes.

Life of a Nin had a post On Raiders and raiding which discusses summer slumps in raiding and lack of progress.  He mentions the idea of a large scale raiding alliance as a possible solution.  You stay in your guild, but raid with people from the raiding alliance at the times that work for you on the raids you want to run.  One example of this in action is Leftovers Community Raiding.  For further reading, see the WoW Insider article. 

I really like the idea, but thinking about the overhead scares me.  The loot system would have to be 100% impartial.  If you have the points or win the roll you get it.  If there is even the slightest room for favoritism the whole thing would fall apart. 

How are troublemakers handled?  In the relatively small guilds I’ve been in, there have been a number of disruptive people.  Sometimes it was just a bad night.  Sometimes it was a regular occurrence.  How do they avoid blacklisting someone for having a bad night while keeping the troublemakers from stirring things up?

It looks like Leftovers is an Alliance group on a role-playing server.  Looking at their setup tempts me to pull Flint out of retirement and give it a try.  Sadly, Flint would lose the provable distinction of having leveled on a PvP server as a holy priest.  I’m also not sure if I want to get into raiding on him again.  It’s definitely something to think about. 

Lume the Mad has a good guide to Threat Mechanics. Having at least a basic understanding of threat is vital for group play in World of Warcraft.

Wordpress 2.6 broke the bookmarklet that I use for putting up short posts. I click the Press This bookmarklet and nothing happens. It’s a little awkward to have to go to Login/Write and paste in the URL when all I want is a quick note saying “Site X has an interesting post on topic Y.” Ah well, serves me write for updating early on a feature release.

Just over a year ago (roughly June 30, 2007), Justin, Faith, Dave, Jaimie, and I rolled up toons on the Quel’dorei server to play together.  Jamie and had had our raiding guild on Andorhal fall apart and we were looking for a fresh start.  Dave and Faith were somewhat new to World of Warcraft so we figured we’d all start off at the same place and level together.  We actually stuck to that pretty much all the way to 70.  There were times when someone would pull a level or so ahead, but we stayed pretty close level-wise. 

Unfortunately, some of our schedules shifted around the time we hit 70 so we haven’t been doing as much as a group.  On the other hand, it’s been fun to pull in new people to sub for whoever can’t make it.  Shortly after hitting 70 we started raiding Karazhan with The Train.  Our latest big accomplishment was downing Gruul.  It was a lot of fun never having to look for a group to do instances with.  I suspect that if Pox Arcanum had been around when we started, we would have joined them.

I’m not sure where we’re headed from here.  Jaimie, Justin, and I have leveled alts to 70.  Dave has one most of the way there (level Dave level!).  We have the option of raiding pretty much as often as we want to.  When Wrath of the Lich King comes out, we’ll have to decide if we want to go back to leveling as a group or just scatter and gather back up at 80.  I’m hoping that we level as a group again.  Those of use who want to race to 80 have alts we can do it on.  We’ll see what happens when Wrath comes out.

Lifehacker has a post on The Best Tech Tools and Fitness Plans to Get in Shape. I’m particularly intrigued by shovelgloving. I think that it may be time for me to vary the weights part of my exercises and it looks intriguing. The one obstacle I can see is that our house (and especially our basement) has very low ceilings. If it doesn’t work out for me, I may try out the 100 pushups. Mind you it is early enough in the summer to try the Couch to 5K plan too. I love having all these possibilities to try out.

I was working late and played Brad Paisley’s "I’m gonna miss her."  It made me laugh and I told Jaimie about it.  There are people who act as if MMO players spending too much time on an activity deemed to be trivial is something new and horrifying.  At best it’s a new coat of varnish on something old.

It is pretty much a given that people will spend time on activities that others sneer at as a waste of time.  The problem comes when someone spends time and money on something to the extent of losing a greater good.  In the song, Brad Paisley chooses fishing over his girl.  For MMOs people choose to pursue virtual goods when they could easily be obtaining tangible goods with the same effort.  Why choose a lesser good over a greater one?

I see two possible answers.  First, the one who chooses wrongly is defective in some way (addict, sinner, short-term thinker).   Second, the supposed greater good isn’t actually as good as it’s advertised to be.

If we take the first case, society’s goal should be to cure the defective person so they can choose rightly.  This cure can run the gamut from attempting to gently show them the error of their ways to torture.  Where do we draw the line and live with people making bad choices?  In some ways, this view absolves the one who chooses wrongly.  It’s not their fault - they’re victims of original sin, bad brain chemistry, or a poor upbringing.

In the second case it’s simply that different people value things differently.  Is that purple sword worth the $50 you could have earned by putting in a little more overtime?  Is that big walleye worth the weekend you could have spend with your lover?    If you subscribe to an absolute value viewpoint (e.g. spending time with your sweetheart is ALWAYS better than catching that big fish), the judger can absolve themselves.  "I was perfect for her, but she was addicted to shopping" rather than admitting that maybe you weren’t perfect for her (and maybe she spent so much time shopping to avoid you). 

Given the way that I swing philosophically, I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between.  There are some things that are simply more valuable than others.  There are a lot of things whose value is relative, depending on the situation and the person doing the choosing.  How much leeway we are to be allowed in our choices is a determination made by society, which in turn has to balance stability and growth. Now we need some genius to come up with a unified theory of humanity let us decide how many addicts (and of what kinds) should be tolerated. 

"Warning: Effective immediately, everything is more complex than was previously thought. "

The List to Beat All Lists: Top 20 Productivity Lists to Rock Your Tasks is a very large list of productivity tips. I think I’ll follow the author’s advice and read through these a few at a time.

Many years ago, mp3.com was a fine place to fine free legal music. Bouncing around at random, I picked up a track called Kingsword by Heather Dale. I played it a couple of times and liked it. Jaimie liked it a lot and she played it over and over again. After a fair stretch, we still weren’t sick of it so we ordered one of Heather Dale’s CDs. Over the course of the next few years we bought the rest of her CDs and saw her live at a local show. We pre-ordered one of her CDs and have bought each one as it came out. We’ve purchased a couple of her CDs as gifts for friends and family. All because of one free song.

If you enjoy beautiful vocals and Celtic music, check out Heather Dale.

Our guild alliance went into Gruul’s lair last night for the first time and cleared the whole thing. It was a very impressive performance. High King Maulgar took us three tries (plus one premature pull). Gruul himself only took us two tries. It was amazingly smooth for our first 25 man run. This was the first time that many of the raiders had ever run anything bigger than 10 mans. About a third of the raiders had run Gruul’s before on other characters, so that helped. We had to PUG 5 people to fill out the raid and they performed their roles admirably.

The progress that has been made is incredible. When we rerolled on Quel’dorei, my goals were to get to 70, run the 5 mans and maybe hit a few heroics. Now we’ve done almost all the heroics, cleared Karazhan in a night, downed 3 of the six Zul’Aman bosses (so far), and cleared Gruul’s our first night there. Sleep Deprived and The Train have worked together admirably for over 5 months now and we’re still going strong.

I recently ran Blackrock Spire with some 55ish people from our guild alliance. We ran Upper Blackrock Spire, then Lower Blackrock Spire. It was fun to see the old place again. I have a lot of memories of running it back when 60 was the level cap.

One fine day when I was questing in Felwood on my priest, I got a whisper for a pick up group for Upper Balckrock Spire. Three pulls in and I got the first piece of my Devout set, the Devout Belt. As the only priest, it was mine!

We ran Upper Blackrock Spire many times as a guild. One of the first times we downed the end boss, Jaimie’s mage was the last one standing. We got a screenshot of the kill and Tinder soloing Drak was a guild legend.

For a sadder memory, Lower Blackrock Spire saw the death of our second guild. (We were only in the first one for a week when most of the guild switched.) In the middle of a run, just as we were pulling the giant wolves, our guild master logged on, promoted the druid in our group to GM, then logged off. A week or two later, our guild disbanded and we joined Legion of the Dragon - our first raiding guild.