My kids have been playing around with Death Knights lately. They love seeing the Naxx bosses before they were famous. 
“Look – it’s Heigan the dance guy! It’s Noth!” Mind you, if my kids grow up to be serial killers, I will doubtless be blamed for allowing them to play soulless killers at a formative age. Ah well, I’ll take my chances.
Archive for January, 2009
Twitter Recommendations
Jan 30
I haven’t used Twitter at all. This blog is about it for my social networking tools. Kevin Kelly is trying to find out what skillful Twiter writers are like. I may check out some of these recommendations and see if I can figure out the appeal.
The Edge of Reason
Jan 29
I read Melinda Snodgrass’ Edge of Reason last night. It was a good book, not a great one. This is a book where I will remember the ideas far longer than I will remember the characters.
Edge of Reason is a contemporary urban fantasy. The book opens with a police officer, Richard, saving a teenager from odd assailants. Her attackers were golems and now Richard is pulled into the twilight fight between magic and science, religion and reason.
Richard is a very well done character – his actions throughout the book mostly fit who he is. He has a fair amount of depth and the worst thing about him is that he’s maybe a bit too perfect. Nevertheless, he does make some outright stupid decisions that follow naturally from what we’ve seen of him. The rest of the characters are not as well developed, which is a bit of a disappointment.
The plot worked for me. There are occasional Ayn Rand-like philosophical discussions dropped in (though in this book it’s religion versus reason rather than Rand’s economic discursions) . I will be thinking about the points that were discussed, even though I don’t agree with them. (If you want a non-fictional treatment of approximately these same points, see Richard Dawkins’ TED talk.) The end of the book was rather abrupt. Sadly, this is another book where sequels are needed to finish the story. This annoys me.
I would recommend this book to someone looking for a fictionalized treatment of the evils of religion. If info-dumps annoy you, don’t read this. The writing is good, but the plot is left wide open so it’s probably not worth reading till the sequels come out.
Update Notifier
Jan 28
I’ve been wondering about a n extension such as this one: Update Notifier installs updated Firefox addons automatically. It’s a mild irritant to have to click through when version 2,01c of an addon is updated, so I’ll be glad to have that out of the way.
I’ve found TagScanner really useful for tagging and renaming my mp3s. It seems that everyone and every application has different standards for naming mp3s. This way I can have them all conform to one standard which makes them much easier to find.
Naxxramas Strategy
Jan 27
Too Many Alts has a fine writeup of Naxxramas Strategies. The part I really appreciate is that he talks about trash mobs. Most of the guides I’ve seen assume that trash is trivial, which is not always the case.
A Messy UI
Jan 26
I have a mod that takes screenshots whenever I kill a boss, ding, or complete and achievement. The annoying thing is that I can’t use 99.9% of these screenshots as you can’t see anything but the UI. I play on a 1024×780 screen and I’m not an addon minimalist, which makes for a very cluttered screen.
I’m hoping to buy a bigger screen soon, which should help a bit. I keep meaning to trim down my addons, but I just can’t bring myself to do without their various bells and whistles. Someday I’ll have a pretty and clean UI, but not today.
Eggnog Recipe
Jan 25
I played around with various eggnog recipes this holiday season. The best one I found was Voices from the Adamsclan – A Family Secret Revealed…. The Cooks Illustrated one was far too custardy, others were too spicy or milky. This was the closest to my ideal eggnog (though still not quite there).
Raiding as Ret
Jan 25
I raided as Ret for Friday’s run. It was fun to do a ton of DPS. The amusing thing for me was that I had one piece of instance loot – the rest was quest rewards, craftable stuff, or rep rewards. My one piece of instance loot was a leather belt from Heroic Utgarde Keep, so nothing too impressive. I still managed to pump out a respectable amount of DPS. My damage dropped through the floor when I had to DPS and raid lead, so I don’t think I’ll be doing that again.
TellMeWhen
Jan 24
Tank Like A Girl discusses TellMeWhen for keeping track of self-buffs. This might be handy for making sure that I don’t forget to keep commanding/battle shout up at all times on my warrior. NeedtoKnow looks good too, but I’m not sure that it would be much of an improvement over DotTimer.
NFB Makes Films Free Online
Jan 23
NFB Makes Films Free Online looks like yet another source for some niche films. I know my parents would probably be interested in the Bill Mason canoeing videos.
If we were staying in our current home for much longer, I would seriously consider getting a ProCom Unvented Propane Heater. We’re hoping to move out in another year and a half, so I don’t think the expense is justified. Mind you if we have another winter like this one it might be worth it. I could always move it to a shed or garage when we move – it doesn’t look as though it would be a permanent installation.
The ioSafe Solo looks like a good solution for Safe storage for your digital data. I use offsite backups at work, but the offsite isn’t that far away, so if there were a larger scale problem we would still find it hard to get our data back.
Jaimie is taking advantage of the world server is going up and down to get the Higher Learning – Achievement . Every time the server comes back up, there’s a new book spawned. Always look on the bright side of life!
I’m sometimes asked to chart stuff at work and most of the time I have no idea what kind of chart to use. This looks like a handy way to decide (or at least get started on the right track: Flowchart Decides Which Chart Style is Best for Your Data.
Why Raid?
Jan 18
It seems that loot drama is inevitable. Raid leading is a stressful thing (and the pay sucks). It seems to me that a decent raid leader, like a decent manager, is a jerk (the great ones are not, but that’s a whole other plane of skill). Right now, if I want to raid, I have to raid lead. Why raid?
The thing I like best about raiding is that it provides a chance to overcome challenges as a group. Naxxramas is easy for advanced guilds, but for us it’s a challenge. I’d say that Naxx is pretty much perfectly tuned for us right now. We are downing bosses but it’s taking us a number of tries for most of them. The fun of overcoming a challenge as a group is the reason I raid.
I don’t know where I want to go with raiding. The thought of spending the next two years raiding doesn’t sound like fun. How many times do I want to see Naxx?
This post on Making a Maker: Ultimate Starter Tool Set struck me as a good idea for a gift for the kids. I wonder if I would be more inclined to make stuff if I set up a decent workspace for it?
Damage taken
Jan 16
Gevlon talks about Damage taken in a raid situation. Checking up on this is something I need to get better at as a raid leader. The Expiration addon used to be handy for a quick report. Recount does the job but I find it more awkward to use. WoW Web Stats has beautiful reams of information, but I can’t exactly pull that out mid-fight. “Okay everyone, stop for 20 minutes while I parse, upload, and analyze the log.”
Part of the problem with low-pressure raiding is that I’m really reluctant to bug people about this kind of thing. Maybe it would help make things more fun overall though. I’m going to watch deaths, especially early deaths, and make sure the player knows what went wrong in as meek a way as I can manage. (I may play the Ony wipe video for myself though.) We’ll see how it works out.
This week I’m bringing smoke flare to Heigan to help with positioning.
I just finished watching Spencer Wells’ talk on building a family tree for all humanity. I check out the web site, Your Genetic Journey – The Genographic Project, and this seems to me to be a great gift for someone who is interested in their ancestry. Buy them the kit and they can be told about their ancestors thousands of years ago. It looks like fun and it would definitely be a unique gift. It’s a little expensive for me right now but I might save up and buy it for someone.
Dancing with Heigan
Jan 14
We ran Naxx last night and I had a blast. My favorite bit was the Heigan fight. We didn’t come anywhere close to downing Heigan (our best attempt was around 69%) but I enjoyed myself immensely.
Part of my enjoyment came simply from not screwing up. I tend to screw up on movement and positioning so it was great to do it right. Another fun bit was having the raid discuss whether I sounded more like an optometrist (“Which looks better to you, one or two? two or three?”), and aerobics instructor (“One, two, three, four. Move!”) or a music teacher (“One and two and three and four”). We had a newish healer and a different off-tank and things still went fairly smoothly. One of the main reasons I’m enjoying running Naxx so much is that it’s a challenge, but not an unbeatable one.
I expect Saturday’s run to involve a lot of wipes – we’re doing Heigan at least a couple times. If that doesn’t work, we’ll move to Instructor Razuvious or Patchwerk for a change of pace. I deliberately saved Sartharion for Saturday’s run so that those who can only show up then are still going to get some loot.
