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.

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

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

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.

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.

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..

To begin, the Thursday was really quite good; Sara and I went to see John Mayer at the Sydney Entertainment Center on Thursday night. As Sara was a member of some wacky Fan Club she left early in the day to go to a sound check, to do secret squirrel things those wacky fan club weirdo’s do.. Anyway, I met up with her afterwards, and checked into the Novotel Darling Harbour and had dinner at their restaurant. The food was probably the best I had tasted in a long while and their service was impeccable, I was really quite impressed. Later we wandered down to the Entertainment Center and sat in our FRONT ROW seats! hehe, I’ve never been in a front row, at least not since I was a teenager crowd surfing in a mosh pit of some punk band.. They were Section B, Row 1, seats 1 & 2 which meant they were slightly offset from center, they were pretty remarkable seats. Sara’s hard work at getting into work nice and early, refreshing the Ticketek web page like a maniac the minutes leading up to the official time the fan club tickets went on sale obviously paid off ;P The concert was pretty good , I quite enjoyed it. Sara managed to get some decent photo’s and she is normally incapable of taking non-blurry photos, so a job well done on her part

After our stay overnight, we decided to wander off home of which I had now started mentally preparing myself to have to deal with Sara’s Windows XP machine which had a failing 80Gb disk drive. I had earlier in the week ordered a replacment 500Gb SATA drive to replace it with and it merely was supposed to be an install of WinXp on the new disk, copy what data I could over to the new disk and restore anything else from backup tape.. This however turned into an all night event! I met problem after fucking problem with the pathetic thing they call Windows XP. Ok, I know its an ageing Operating System, but surely they can have *some* support for sata controllers?! The worst part about it is that you are required to use a fucking floppy disk to do the whole F6 at installer boot type deal, point it to the floppy with the sata drivers deal .. but seriously, who the fuck uses floppy drives these days?! It turned out that all bar ONE of my floppy disks were dead and the only functional floppy drive was in my pc, which I can’t stand powering down because its Linux and doesn’t have to! The only reason it even had a floppy drive was because I no longer have the floppy blank face place to my case anymore, its just a gap filler! So anyway.. Off I go and shut down my box, switch the hardware over so I can get an OS on Sara’s new disk but no, the pathetic windows install cd would refuse to complete its initial startup unless a Parallel ATA disk drive was present on one of the IDE controllers! **ARRRUUGGHHHH!!!**

By the time I had figured out the crap deal with the ide, sata, boot sequence bullshit it had gotten late, and I had really wanted to spend a good part of my 4 days off playing World of Warcraft and levelling up my characters but as it would turn out, its day 3 of my 4 days off and I haven’t even logged in.. *sighs*

So anyway, there comes today when I finally get the sata drivers into the winxp installer , it boots and i can see an OS.. problem solved yeah? No.. I need to install drivers for wireless card or the network card to get online and get patches etc but guess what? All the USB ports will not function once the OS loads until it gets more drivers. The BIOS sees the usb keyboard, Linux sees the USB keyboard, but then the freshly installed WinXP OS starts, it can’t see shit! Given that I’m a 100% Linux person for work and at home, I’m completely shocked that Operating Systems out there *still* are unable to get things right! It has been so long since I have come across a system that has hardware that has no kernel support (aside from dodgy assed IBM server gear, but lets not go there). Sure enough I pull out an old Knoppix CD and am able to boot, get on the network, mount NTFS filesystems, rsync Sara’s data from the failing disk to the new one without *any* problem, but expect windows to do that? NoooooOooo… The last straw, as you are probably wondering from the title of this post, was all of the above combined with the inability this morning for windows to actually get to its login screen.. This was it, I had enough, I didn’t want another windows machine in this house at all!

This is about the time Sara and I start talking even more seriously about moving her to an Apple Mac. A decision was quickly made and we ended up wandering off and picking up a sexy little Apple Mac mini! It took approximately 30 mins to go between cleaning up Sara’s computer desk, removing the old hardware, unwrapping the Mac mini, gawking at it whilst taking photo’s for gallery purposes (and Arithon’s enjoyment) to having it up and running, on the wireless network and already patched to the latest patch levels!! If only I had of done this years ago, I could have allocated my time much better than spending hours and hours on end getting Sara’s Windows machines configured with all the drivers, updates, patches, security fixes, patches and service packs…

All I have heard from Sara’s computer room all evening is little squeals of excitement, and yes, I’m sure she really is still playing with the Mac mini! It really does have some sexy features, I’m really impressed with it and wouldn’t mind one myself. Apple sure have done an extremely impressive job with their Operating Systems since the days I remember playing with Eliza on some ancient Apple Mac back in High School.. The next test is to see if I can get World of Warcraft running on it and if so, I can’t see what’s stopping me from using one of them as a gaming pc in my computer room. Currently I play World of Warcraft using Transgaming’s Cedega on my Debian unstable/experimental machine, which works really well, but I’m missing certain things like apps to chat via voice with fellow team/guild members. Yes, I know TeamSpeak works under linux, and I do have it running nicely, but not everyone uses this. That and I just want one ;P

Edit: OMG, wasn’t that a rant!