Archive for February, 2005

I remember going to the bank on Thursday. Something about a network problem on Friday (although I had to check it happened Friday and not Saturday) and then I just found myself here. After getting World of Warcraft on Thursday the real world has basically been on hold for me.

At the moment I am level 15. I am not really sure what level I was this morning, I think it was 15. I should really stop thinking about it though before I get pulled back into the game. I have serious work to do that is pretty much not getting done. It is just so tempting though!

Maybe I have been on it a little too much. But there are people way ahead of me. I think. And there are so many quests to do, I need to do them all! All I tell you, I can’t just sit around. I need to kill things.

Still I don’t need WoW to enjoy life. I can just eat these cool refreshing ice pops. I’ve been on a break 10 minutes or so and gone through 7 of them so everything is under control there.

I am not on about World of Warcraft here. I actually had one of those fatality moments, almost 2 hours ago. I have been trying to get my network back online since around 18:15 when I was disconnected while partying with some great people I met on the game. I tell ya, you will never see me move so fast as when my network goes offline!

This actually happened in a different form recently when NTL suffed a network cable and left me without internet access. You can usually tell when something like this happens as I cam rushing down the stairs at light speed checking connections, resetting boxes and screaming to myself.

The end solution? Turn the router off. I usually just reset it using the reset switch but this time I had to actually go to the mains and turn it off for a minute or two to make sure that everything in it’s current memory was deleted. The problem? I am not sure although I did get a network cable unplugged error just before my laptop went offline.

Anyway it is all back online now. The Windows ME machine needs a reset before anything happens which is why I am glad I have XP on the laptops to do immediate testing. It is fixed though providing it all works when I move my primary laptop back upstairs (or just mine as the other one is my mums lol, therefore I shall move on.

It looks like Carl will get on World of Warcraft after all. His 512mb memory didn’t work, so he orded 2 x 256mb memory sticks and paid £7 for next day delivery – they didn’t work either. That really sucks! Luckily Deni stepped in and his laptop will plug the hole until Carl gets a Dell (which are like the most awesome computers ever, second only to maybe Alienware that just look cool and suck inside the box).

So we are only one day away from the launch of World of Warcraft! Huzzah, it is awesome close and I can’t wait although technically I have to. Anyway so I need something to fill the void and I beleive I have found it on Sky Mix in the form of Dr. Phil. For those in the dark, Dr. Phil is a chat show where he gives people councilling and gets them to cry live on air.

Today is a follow up from the desperate housewives episode that was on a while ago. I didn’t see it so I am kind of in the dark and Dr. Phil won’t even show the tape this time as the mother is so self distructive. So basically he has an entire show and none of the TV audience has a clue what is going on lol.

It got my thinking about different chat show topics that I want to do. There are some cool ideas although it is not quite as outragous of some of the Jenny Jones shows. Still, who can compete with the almighty Jenny?

"My daugher has two kids and she is only 7 years old"
"I’ve killed 14 people and I’m worried that I might shoplift"
"A future version of myself travelled back in time and tried to kill me"

I welcome your input on other show topics I should do, post them in the comments section below.

It occurs to me that if I watch so much TV I should be a TV critic. Of course I already claim to be a "respected TV critic" when asked why I spend some much time in front of the box but that is what being a TV critic is all about I guess – not actually being anything.

At the moment I am watching Desperate Housewives. Don’t pretend you don’t watch it because even hardcore Dawson’s Creek haters are watching this show! The reason: everyone is saying that the show has so many twists which just keeps it interesting. This is indeed true, also Gabrielle ;).

I haven’t spent that much time watching TV today as I have tried to get my work out of the way and spent much time senselessly waiting for World of Warcraft (which is only 2 days away!) although I did fit in an old Simpsons on Channel 4, Stargate SG-1 and Point Pleasant.

I need to start practising my guitar soon enough, I presume my interest will return every few months just like my work on Particle Board. Hmm, I really have got a lot of web links in here lol, oh well, yet another part of being a critic, somehow.

I have been watching the status of all the US World of Warcraft servers today. It is scheduled maintenance day so from around 2 pm until gone 4 they were all down which was a pretty scary sight. At the moment 2 of them are up. Still scary considering that there are like 100 of them.

I really hope the servers work perfectly for the European release; I want to get in 3 days of solid gaming. As it happens I have spent some time engineering the weekend for maximum gameplay. Who would have thought you could fill an entire post with that ;).

This was mainly working out where to get the game from. I decided not to pre-order, I want to go buy it in case it doesn’t arrive. Woolworths don’t know if they are going to stock it or not, they open at 9 in Crossgates. Gamestation opens at 10 although their other store in town opens at 9. They still haven’t gotten their stock though.

I need to discuss this with the rest of the gang. Carl ordered more memory (512 SDRAM) for his computer so I hope that arrives on time. It is only 3 days away now. We also need to sort out what classes and professions we are going to go for.

As for the other planning, I recon I can get my daily news sites out of the way Friday morning before I go get the game which leaves me with just Saturday and Sunday to update them. Other than that I hope to achieve pretty much solid play. I need to finish stuff like law essays in the next few days too.

I say or something as I haven’t heard anything about it. And though I have done little checking, there doesn’t seem to be a huge affect on anything other that the one site that is worrying me. So I am pretty sure they have not actually got new algorithms. But anyway, as I have mentioned before, I run an Erica Durance fan site. It used to be on the first page on Google. Now it has just gone.

I’m not just talking about slipping from the first page. It has gone from the first hundred results in Google. I checked the first 13 pages, nothing. I emailed Google to wonder if they had banned the site or something but they assured me they hadn’t.

Then again it could be to do with the keywords. I spent a lot of time making sure I didn’t mention Erica’s full name too much as I didn’t want it to appear like I was constantly spamming her name. Although I think the amount of times I just mentioned her first name may be my undoing.

Things started to go wrong like a few days ago which was about the same time I added the fan listings which is just weird. I wouldn’t mind (well I would be it would be fair) if it was just some site I had put together to draw in search engine traffic. But my site is the best Erica fan site on the internet!

I thought it was fairly good and up there but to be honest, I don’t rate the competition much at all. My site has 69 news stories, 35 pictures, 76 screen captures and 30 links to other sites in the database. It is a damn good site.

I do like Google as a search engine and I realize it is all automated. But if you have to find a balance between stopping spammers and search engine cheaters and legitimate webmasters. At the moment, depending how many keywords you have on your page determines which search engine your traffic comes from.

I was there! I didn’t get on until about 7 pm, only having an hour to go on but it was cool anyway. I was actually the third to last person to say something, “bye all! UTC rules!” and indeed the two after me were yells, so I believe I was the last person to say anything on the channels. That is just in Stormwind though, each region has its own channels.

We all partied down. You can use /dance to dance and dance we did! There were like over a hundred players in Stormwind alone I think and many where dancing. I also tried drinking too although I downed 3 bottles of weak stuff and one bottle of very strong stuff and still didn’t manage to get past tipsy.

I did a lot of screenshot taking too. Fond memories until I can get hold of the game on Friday. Hopefully everything will run smooth and by the end of the weekend I will be kick ass strong. Anyway less on that on more on how the final time played out. I was on EN Server 19 and it was closed down at around 8:05.

There was no real official countdown although at 8 there were several bell chimes. Then a notice appeared in everyones chat windows a few minutes past saying shutdown in 30 seconds. The aforementioned seconds later, the game disconnected from the server.

We partied with GMs (game masters) as well. One named Moof was a giant Tauren (yes, a horde characters although much bigger) as well as a giant chicken and cat. Those were fun times.

It was a judgment day special so there was plenty of death of course as well. There were demons running round in the entrance to Stormwind and this giant rock type creature that looked bigger than the Ancient Protectors that stalk Darnassus. It took me several deaths to run my way into Stormwind.

We were hoping to battle them but 20 of us fighting the little demon didn’t do any damage. That was a bit sucky as they should have made it so we could at least fight them if there were enough of us. All in all though, an awesome experience.

As you do, I was browsing other various blogs and checked on to see if
there were any new posts on the Dot Net Show blog. I couldn’t actually
remember what there was there last time so I am not 100% sure whether
there are new posts or not since I last visit but I think there were as
I found something interesting.

Check out this entry
about the Active Directory Federation Services episode. It was actually
posted like 3 months ago but the important thing is there is a great
picture of Robert Hess! I need to get round to updating my Robert Hess fan site, and indeed the entire 4xd.net site which I never fully finished.

I know there are a few other of the sub-sites on 4xd.net that have
broken links that need fixing due to how I build them. I can’t even
remember what I used to build them now although I also know that I need
to switch the advertising server over to the Worfolk Online ad server rather than running it on a separate one as it does currently.

I am also considering updating pLog soon which is the software behind this blog. They announced a week ago that pLog 1.0 is almost ready. I look forward to seeing what they have come up with.

Ok I have got to speak out against this – I used Opera before although I haven’t used it for ages (I never used it as my default browser). I installed it a while ago to do some testing and it does look cool but after some time spent using it, I can say that it is pretty crap to be honest.

It displays forms weird. I can make by peace with that but I am still left wondering why. Also, access keys are crazy. You hold shirt down and press Esc. Then you take your fingers off and press the access key – each time you want to use an access key. Why can’t companies produce software that does it like Mozilla? Alt + key is all we need!

Also my toolbar disappeared. I tried to drag a link onto my homepage button to make it my homepage and a load of buttons disappeared. So I restored my default toolbar and they all disappeared! I managed to fix it now but what is going on with that.

Also the adverts are getting more annoying. I mean ok, Opera might want to make a profit but how about business licensing or something? I wouldn’t mind the adverts or paying if the software was better than the free alternatives, but it just isn’t.

Humans would be much better without emotions, no ups and downs. Of course that is more obvious when you’re in a down but then again I have no doubt I would say the same thing when I am at a peak. But anyway, there is a lot of depressing stuff happening. I am actually on a break this week but for some reason it doesn’t feel like a holiday.

I have an open day at the Leeds University school of computing to go to today. I really don’t want to go; I have better things to do like crawling into a small ball on the floor. It is just so stressful, just going out to a university drains so much energy from me. I really cannot put together the energy to care.

Also I have an entire week to wait for World of Warcraft. I just want the beta to end so that the main game can come out and I can get on with playing it. I have lost much interest now that they have said the characters are going to be wiped as it is just like, what is the point you know.

I also have to book yet another driving test. I have never really been that bothered about passing, I just don’t want to have to drive anymore. I was never a real fan of it anyway so I just want to get that over with.

Plus there are loads of other things. I haven’t picked up my guitar in a week and I want to actually learn that. My websites need work as I have been so busy playing WoW. I need to do loads of work on my coursework to get the grades I need. You would think this would invoke some kind of reaction from me, but no.