Went and saw The Butterfly Effect on Thursday night and they absolutely rocked! The two support bands were good, but in particular I really liked the performance by the opening band Sleep Parade.
If you get a chance to see TBE on their current tour, do it! 
We got Lady Vashj down last night which was a guild first for my new guild. While this isn’t my first kill of her it was good to re-experience the learning curves a guild must endure with the encounter and being able to overcome various issues to get her down. We had been trying for about 3 days in total but some of those nights was spent clearing the bosses before her so the attempts weren’t really all that solid. Last night we went in with an abnormal strategy which actually worked quite well. In particular it was the Strider Kiting strat that was thrown out the window and instead we had the striders tanked in one spot. Striders went down very quickly, organization was superb, communication over vent was excellent. The attempt that netted us the kill was really quite impressive.
As I had suspected that we would down Vashj I was busy recording each attempt using the built in recording that is available in the native World of Warcraft Mac client. As a bit of a stuff around I thought I’d whip something up in iMovie which I conveniently have installed on my Macbook Pro. In no time at all I had a video put together. This is my very first attempt at an in game video so it is really dodgy but I enjoyed making it and will probably do more down the track to get my experience up and obviously try to get better at them. Unfortunately I wasn’t aware of how severe the video and audio degradation is when something is uploaded to youtube so the resulting youtube vid is really *really* shit when compared with the movie file that I uploaded.
Enjoy.
Filed under: World Of Warcraft
Its amusing that my last post was about the Battlemaster’s Audacity because I haven’t used that sucker in yonks.. oh wait, its been yonks since I last posted! *oops* Turns out that a lot has gone on in that time, my gear has improved a *LOT* over the past few months. Now I’ve replaced all my Frozen Shadoweave gear with several T5 items, a majority of T6 equivalent BoJ reward items, most recently Hood of Hexing and one of the best DPS caster trinkets in the game, Hex Shrunken Head, to go alongside my Darkmoon Card: Crusade!.
I’ve also switched guilds, pretty much due to the fact that the previous one were only really caring about gearing up IRL friends and ex-raiders from previous alliance guilds who were rerolling horde characters on Nagrand. There was was no real push for progression, and it showed considering we went from 3rd highest progressed horde guild on the realm to something like 7th.. At the end of the day, I got tired of helping others get new gear when the officers of the guild refused to do content that allowed me to gear up. Considering I had an almost flawless attendance and pretty much always topped the damage meters I embarked on the search for another guild. As events unfolded over the past few weeks, I ended up moving into a new guild along with the Main Tank from my old guild.
Its only been a few days so far now but these guys are certainly serious about end game content with raid stats analysed after each raid and raid members expected to explain why performance was low and how they are to improve as appropriate etc. While most would consider this really anal, I actually do like it as we don’t have people slacking off like I had in the previous guild. I recall a number of people who used to AFK on trash pulls and only put in *some* effort on boss attempts and even then it was a really half assed effort. It was then up to the hard working raiders to take up the slack and it was getting a littel too taxing over time. I’m however pretty happy with the new guild so far, and I do expect to be meeting Illidan Stormrage in the not too distant future. 
Back to the gear topic, I now have a full Tier 6 content ready shadow destruction set, an affliction counterpart (not that I’ll actually go back to affliction I don’t think) and what is starting to turn into a nice little PvP set, with almost 400 resilience too. The ~400 resilience on my PvP set is rather nice as I don’t seem to be dying as quick as I used to, but death is really inevitable considering I’m just a little clothie after all.. As one can guess from my previous comment, I’ve made the switch from affliction to the classic 0/21/40 destruction spec now that I have sufficient +hit rating and I must say its been really *really* cool. The only drawback I found is the lack of mobility that I’ve been so used to with affliction spec, but I can live with that, I just need to start working on my +haste stats. I’m exceeding my expectations on the damage meters, and able to pwn some serious ass in PvP on those wacky nights where I feel the need to do battlegrounds, or grind honor for that matter for silly PvP items needed for PvE encounters (oh why Blizzard, why?!) such as the Medallion of the Horde trinket needed for the Archimonde fight.
I’m rambling now.. forgive me ;P
On another slightly wow related topic, I love this song, but in particular the machinima movies this dude makes which include WoW models & scenery along with other games like Unreal Tournament. Enjoy.
Filed under: World Of Warcraft
I finally managed to get the last of the 75(!) Heroic Badges required for my Battlemaster’s Audacity trinket last night. Started in ZA then moved on to a Heroic SH which I hadn’t actually done before. I find that no one really wants to run Heroic SH, even tho I died for stupid reasons, the run was actually rather painless. Even did the timed event with ease. It was a guild group and we were pretty well geared so this probably had something to do with it
Filed under: World Of Warcraft
Sara and I were up in the Hunter Valley for the past couple of days and had a really good time. I do, however, think we got a little carried away as this is what we brought back.
Filed under: m.o
Its been over 3 years riding my trusty 2004 Honda CBR 600 F4i and the time finally came to upgrade. As a slightly early Christmas present to myself, I today just picked up my brand new 2007 Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade. I took a dodgy blurry pic of it after I got home, but the battery went flat in the Digital SLR and I was too lazy to recharge it and go take another photo ;P
It was a pity that the weather was so crap today or I would have been out all day riding it. I’m really *really* happy with it so far. So I think if the weather is good tomorrow I’ll be putting it through its paces
Filed under: m.o
It came up in a topic of conversation between a couple of friends and the ‘better half’ over the weekend, reguarding how long I’ve been playing World of Warcraft. I did join the game a little later than others *cough* ..
Account Created:
June 18, 2006 1:23 AM PDT
So there ya go..
Another bit of trivia; WoW will be 3 years old next week, it was released on 23/11/04
Filed under: World Of Warcraft, m.o
After many months of not being able to progress very far with my Karazhan attunement and always finding it difficult to find groups with the respective key classes I decided to change from the Suramar (US) realm to the Nagrand (Oceanic) realm so I could play with people in my own timezone.
The transfer process which I was expecting to take several days took a whole 4 minutes! The only problem however was that blizzard did some ‘changes’ and broke the authentication for what appeared to be all people who had transferred or topped up their accounts on that day so I couldn’t log in until the next evening.
I did a bit of research and found a guild that was progressing into Karazhan and put in an application. I was lucky enough for them to accept me and put into their 3rd Karazhan group that they are getting established which is great news. I’ve been itching to see and play this content of the game. Better yet, I decided to LFG for a bit and see if I could complete my attunement and get the Karazhan key and what do ya know, there were plenty of groups and I managed to get my key with almost no fuss at all!
I then went on my merry little way trying to gain reputation with various factions to obtain the Heroics keys for some dungeons so I can start getting drops needed for some tailored items and so on when I got my first invite to Karazhan! I’m certainly very pleased with this as this is what I’ve been trying hard for months to be able to do. I took some screenshots along the way.
Someone in the guild also made a really cool video which I (Adramune) can be seen briefly.
Filed under: World Of Warcraft
I bought an Apple Macbook Pro a little while ago! Now this is very significant coming from someone who has been a linux zealot for such a long time! Plain and simply though, I got tired of the instability of Transgaming’s Cedega product, which really is a modified version of wine to run your popular windows games on linux.
I have been using cedega for quite some time, and up until recently have been very *very* happy with it. As a heavy World of Warcraft user, I need to periodically use a voice communication software like Ventrillo or Teamspeak. While Teamspeak does work under linux, it is a complete pain in the ass to use while World of Warcraft under Cedega is running. Ventrillo is almost fsck’ing useless , no wait.. it IS fsck’ing useless.. *sigh*
I also started experiencing random crashes , more and more often, when playing WoW under Cedega and I could only attribute this to using it under Cedega so I finally got the shits with it to a point where I went out and bought a new 17″ Macbook Pro, one of the new ones with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU’s in it. I must say, its a freakin impressive looking machine. While it has taken a while to get used to the interface after using Fluxbox for so long, it really is quite a nice interface. There are still things that really annoy me but thats what I get for leaving a perfect (!) linux desktop (yes, if only games manufacturers would make them for linux as well as windows/mac…
So the difference in gaming persormance I bet you are asking.. well.. at first it was pretty shit.. I was really *really* disappointed considering I had spent so much on a new laptop to replace my main desktop for the sole purpose of gaming. It turns out that there was a minor World of Warcraft tweak which completely turned those performance issues around. I now get more than 100ms network latency and around 30-50 frames per second improvement over running on linux. The Macbook pro has 2 x fans which dynamically change their speeds based on how hot the CPU or GPU are and when I am in certain graphically intense locations like Netherstorm, the fans kick in to their higher speeds and its rather audiable, but when I’m in these areas I tend to have the sound/music up and don’t really notice it too much at all. When I’m not gaming, the laptop is so quiet I really can’t hear a thing at all.
I also had to pick up another new pair of Sennheiser headphones that used USB as the mac requires an amplified microphone which most microphones aren’t. So When I tried plugging in my previous sennheisers with the separate jacks it wouldn’t use the mic, and I was forced to use the one built into the laptop. While this laptop mic is quite good it caused problems when i was sitting back away from the laptop or leaning over looking at another screen/pc.
After a great deal of issues trying to get a Sennheiser PC165 from any Australian store, I ended up getting a brand new pair of Sennheiser PC166’s from amazon.com which arrived within 3 working days and saved me over $100 from buying it locally which I also was rather impressed with. The PC166’s also perform really really well and I would have to say are my current favourite set.
Filed under: m.o
We moved house a few weeks ago into an almost new town house from an older town house of around 1 MILLION years old.. (ok, I exaggerate.. it was only maybe 20 years old) so we are pretty happy. The cats are happy too ;P Not unlike a lot of other people, the owners of our previous place decided it was the right time to sell and the new owners wanted to move in. Luckily enough we knew this was coming for maybe a year before it happened so it was no great surprise.
The move itself was rather uneventful which was great. Took a few days off work to do the move which was really handy. The only problem we really had was pertaining to our ADSL relocation. This actually turned out to be good in a way as it gave me almost a week and a half with no internet access and a good excuse not to play World of Warcraft. This allowed me to catch up on downloaded TV episodes. It was quite amusing that even though I had a lot of downloaded TV episodes that I hadn’t gotten around to watching for months yet I was still ahead of the Australian Free to Air broadcasts of the same shows.. Australian TV is really quite pathetic 
… I did write a whole lot of shit about Internode and my decision to change ISP’s but I deleted it in favour of a condensed version instead. The reasons essentially came down to the following:
- Internode screwed up my relocation request causing over a week long outage
- Was connected for 2 days then suffered an 8 hour outage, on a day that I was intending to work from home *arugh*.
- Automated Internode relocation process whereby they create an alternate account (username_new) and do some kind of a switch over when told by telstra that the new location had been provisioned didn’t exactly work in the automated fashion as it was intended.. yet another Internode fuckup :\
- 3 phone calls to Internode’s support and/or accounts teams whereby the calls averaged 50 minutes of on hold music before speaking to a human.
- One of the above phone call instances involved a support person verbally promising to return my call within 1 hour but this did not happen, I had to call back and *wait* again..
- 2 of the above mentioned phonecalls started outside of their indicated peak periods so I’d hate to see the wait during their peak periods.
- Internode released new but significantly more expensive plans
- I refuse to pay more than $100 a month for internet (I’ve gone by this personal rule ever since the dial up days)
- Internode cannot provide me with ADSL2 yet other ISP’s (iinet in particular) can.
Furthermore when I tried to cancel my service there were the following issues:
- Cancellation could only be done online.
- Online account cancellation was again poorly worded where ‘not required’ fields _were_ actually required to be filled. In this instance I left contact mobile number as I *obviously* would no longer have internet access to get my mail. That and I wanted to ensure that if they contacted me it was by voice. This caused the form to fail and I had to resubmit with the additional contact details.
- After submitting the form, a week passes by and I did not receive as much as a verbal or email confirmation that my cancellation was recieved.
- Followup email to their accounts department yielded no response.
- Followup phonecall again was on hold for 30 mins (they do have a callback service which in this instance I used but didn’t get a call back for quite some time afterwards)
- The return phonecall advised that someone had just then actioned my request and sure enough 10 minutes later I could no longer gain access to my home machines remotely.
*peers up* even in point form the above is still a long list of irks that I had with them..
So.. now I wait patiently for Telstra to remove the codes from my line which will enable me to get ADSL2+ from iinet. Past experience from other guys at work indicate that this will only take a couple of days so we’ll wait and see..
Filed under: m.o