I finally coughed up the US$50 to move a Lv 70 Wizard I had on the Oasis server over to Najena and joined up with Nostalgia so I get to play with all the cool people in it from time to time. I’ve been meaning to do it for sometime now but I always ended up dragging my feet. But with the US dollar going up (1.4 Singapore dollars to 1 US dollar now), it was now or never.

Having read about Tipa’s problem with having her characters transferred due to sales crates, I wisely logged in and remove them before applying for the transfer. I had not logged onto that particular character for what must be at least a thousand days, and I almost felt guilty when I logged into an active guild with people going “that’s one name I haven’t seen in a long time”. That didn’t stop me though.

I didn’t want to play another Wizard since I already have one that’s Lv 80 on the Antonia Bayle server, so I went ahead and betrayed it to a Warlock. I had consulted with Shadowgeist earlier in the day and we both thought it was better that I betrayed first so that I got the chance to learn how to properly play one during the next 10 levels, which meant that I was forced to buy new spells, instead of getting a few levels in first then betraying which would give me the benefit of using my Ad3/Master spells that I had on Wizard. The nice thing about gaining faction for Neriak (betraying from Qeynos to Neriak) prior to being accepted as a citizen is that it comes with a fat load of AA from the series of assassination quest which gives +3000 faction each, including AA from both the easy peasy names and the quest itself. Being evil has it benefits. I made about 3 points worth of AA in total.

In addition, 6 repeatables that give +5000 faction each were also necessary after completing the above mentioned quest line to bring me up to the amiable faction required. Sadly, these quests were neither fun nor rewarding. I picked one which told me to grab 10 stones and to kill a certain number of vampires along the way. The specific mobs needed for the quest, the priests, had a poor spawn and it ended up taking a lot longer than I expected it to. The next one I picked (which I stuck to for the next subsequent attempts) had me kill spiders and collect eggs. The update from the spiders were rare, and therefore it didn’t go that much faster compared to the previous quest.

I emptied my bagful of eggs into the hands of the quest giver and strolled happily into Neriak after all that is done, ready to finally settle down, but not before I got involved in some bodyguard duty, child kidnapping and trafficking, vagabond and courtesan killing and a few pieces of paperwork.

The next hour was spent eating cold refrigerated chicken pieces leftover from my earlier attempt at cooking lunch and mulling over which spells I need to be getting.

I was later invited into an Obelisk of Blight group which I was hesitant to accept because I doubt my abilities. Here I am, a Lv 70 Warlock who has no experience in the class whatsoever. I eventually accepted it anyway and nearly got the group killed when I casted Rift and didn’t realize how much further its range was compared to other AoE spells I had and ended up pulling a ton of mobs. My mix mash of Adept 1 or Apprentice IV (for those which I can’t find Ad1s for, or were just heavily overpriced. 96g for a Ad1 root? I’m not paying that!) didn’t do me very good either and placed me near the bottom of the parse almost all the time. The group must have thought I was a pretty bad player.

Overall, it was a rather productive day in terms of gaming. Also, watching Stargrace’s reaction to me being in her guild sent me grinning and giggling. It was something that I’ve been waiting for all day.

How it works is that you call their hotline, get redirected through layers of menus until you eventually get to this part where an automated recording tells you that “you might be experiencing some service disruption and we’re aware of the issue” (at least they’re honest), and finally after two minutes into the whole call, you get an option to leave your number.

So instead of hawking over and staring at the array of blinking lights until the right LED lights up, I get to lie back and read while anxiously waiting for a beep on my cellphone.

On a side note, connectivity has been restored now (hence my ability to post), but that text message never came. Maybe their SMS notification system is down too, and they ought to put another system inplace to notify me when their notification system gets restored.

Edit: I was too quick to comment, it did arrive six minutes after this got posted.

Being a spectator of sports has never interest me, even though I might enjoy the sport itself. I enjoyed playing soccer after school hours when I was in secondary school with my classmates, but I’ve only watched the World Cup once. I don’t know any of the players personally, so who cares which team wins? It doesn’t affect me in any possible way.

A favorite author of mine, Noam Chomsky, sums up how I feel towards such events well, and I couldn’t put my feelings in better words than he did. I’ve been reading Noam Chomsky since late 2006, when a book of his was recommended by President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela during a speech at the UN. The following is what he said in the book, Manufacturing Consent (online excerpt available here).

Take, say, sports — that’s another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view. For one thing because it — you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that’s of no importance. [audience laughs] That keeps them from worrying about — [applause] keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in [discussions of] sports [as opposed to political and social issues]. I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in — they have the most exotic information [more laughter] and understanding about all kind of arcane issues. And the press undoubtedly does a lot with this.

You know, I remember in high school, already I was pretty old. I suddenly asked myself at one point, why do I care if my high school team wins the football game? [laughter] I mean, I don’t know anybody on the team, you know? [audience roars] I mean, they have nothing to do with me, I mean, why I am cheering for my team? It doesn’t mean any — it doesn’t make sense. But the point is, it does make sense: it’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements — in fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism. That’s also a feature of competitive sports. I think if you look closely at these things, I think, typically, they do have functions, and that’s why energy is devoted to supporting them and creating a basis for them and advertisers are willing to pay for them and so on.

That, my friends, is truism.

Torrent Knights is now level 30

It took awhile, but we finally made it! Level 30 means more bank slots, and also access to more mounts. I’ve been considering getting Xedil a mount for sometime now, but I keep putting it off thinking that I’ll be able to work my way up the tradeskill levels and get myself an Earring of the Solstice from the tradeskill epic and have a run speed buff from that. It’s still a while away so I might go visit the stables after all.

Congratulations to you Stargrace, even though you no longer play on this server, it’s still your guild!

At the same time, when the first thing most players do after installing World of Warcraft is to look for a custom interface at one of the humongous sites dedicated to providing them, and people constantly talk about a list of “must have” addons, it becomes obvious that the default UI is sorely missing much needed features that should have been available right out of the box.

This is not a problem unique to WoW, it applies to any application that presents themselves as being extensible. The same charge has been levied at Firefox again and again - why don’t the developers look at the top five extensions people are using and incorporate them directly into their product?

First of all, I tried to update my trial account to that of a fully functional, paid account. After being firstly greeted with an invalid credit card number while trying to do so, I proceeded to try a second time, thinking that I must have mistyped some bit of information even though I’ve committed my credit card details to mind a long time ago. Nope, it did not work, but I took out my card, verified, and preceeded to try another three more times. At this point I suspected the error might be on their end and did a Google search for it.

The result is this thread here on the official WoW forums. 449 posts and 23 pages since 2007 of the same problem. Reading the users comment, I checked with my bank and there were four billing requests totaling up to a over SGD$100.

The suggested fix by one of the posters was to enter the last four digits of the card number in the zip code field, and that worked for me. Though having over $100 on hold, and me praying hard that they get released after a few days and don’t actually get charged makes me a really unhappy customer. It makes me want to dish out all the slurr for WoW I’ve always held inside me.

I’m frankly shocked at how a company that boasts a 6 million subscription figure can have such a huge problem with its billing system.

Not done yet, this is the first MMO that I’ve came across that actually takes time (up to 72 hours) for a trial account to be upgraded to a full account. It’s 3 hours and counting and having paid for my game, I’m still waiting to be given permissions to talk in the channels, to IM people, to use the broker, and so on. It should require nothing more than for a few shell scripts to run and execute and few SQL update queries the moment I hit the upgrade button. I sure hope it doesn’t have to be done manually.

To summarize, my WoW experience was great until I actually tried to get a hold of the game, which was where it took a sharp ninety degrees downturn.

The question is should I just go with Twitter and Tumblr, or should I attempt to host an equivalent of them myself? Laconica and Gelato comes to mind.

The plus side to using a hosted service such as LiveJournal or Twitter or Tumblr is that it provides an existing community to build upon and therefore allows for your content to be easily discovered by others. Whereas the positives of a self-hosted service, such as running your own Wordpress blog, or using Gelato in place of Tumblr/Twitter, is that there is a strong sense of ownership. I am in charge of my own content and not locked into any system. Sure, there is always import/export services provided by most of these services nowadays, but nothing is able to set my heart and mind at peace other than having direct access to the database itself.

I’m an indecisive person, and this doesn’t make the decision making process any easier.

Their presence is a huge disruption to my daily life. I live in a house with my parents which is just sufficient for the three of us, and having extra people over means that we need to surrender a room over to them. Due to a lack of foresight when my parents first purchased this house, there’s only two bedrooms instead of the supposed three. Therefore, after surrendering one room to them, that results with me sharing a room with my parents, an arrangement which I do not fancy.

An issue I find rude about my relatives is that they often request my presence when everyone else in the family is involved in a conversation, but they refuse to speak in a language that I can comprehend. Instead of conversing in English or Mandarin, which most of them are capable of one or both, they elect to speak in Indonesian. So there I am, not being able to participate in a conversation that I’m not allowed to leave either. Indonesian might be their must fluent language, but in any form of communication, the polite, and only logical protocol is to fallback to a language than everyone can understand, or just tear down and not have the exchange at all. Cross platform software or different versions of software are designed to do that in order to preserve compatibility. I would think as humans, we’re capable of that also, but that logic escapes my relatives.

I look forward to spending as much of my time out of my house as possible during this period of time.

A friend of mine has always joked to me that offsite backups were unnecessary to him because he spends so much time at home and if a catastrophic disaster did indeed occur, it is highly likely that he would perish too, along with all the data, therefore rendering offsite backups useless since no one would be around to claim them. The same might be true for me too.

Thirteen years into the evolution of Windows, attempting to access a damaged/dirty CD still has the chance to bring down the entire explorer.exe process. The same can happen when trying to access a network resource over Explorer that has an unstable link or loses connectivity halfway. It has been thirteen years, THIRTEEN YEARS for crying out loud! Why can’t we handle I/O errors gracefully?

To give Microsoft some credit, at least we are no longer thrown a blue screen when the floppy drive is inaccessible.