blueZhift Blog

I finally managed to login to a World of Warcraft server last night to try out my trial edition of the game. I ended up logging onto one of the role playing servers (RP) since the so called "normal" servers continued to be full and I didn’t want to get killed in 5 minutes on the player versus player (PvP) servers. I figured that I could do a little role playing if need be.

Now call me crazy, creepy, or whatever, but I’ve grown fond of playing female characters in online games, so I created a lovely female night elf warrior to play as. Since the trial is only for 14 days, I chose to start as a warrior since they tend to be pretty straight forward to play and I like to mix it up anyway. Next I just jumped into the game without reading the fine manual. I wanted to see how much I could do without RTFM first.

Cutting to the chase, I had fun! Yeah, first you have to level up in the usual slaughter the small animals sort of fashion. But, I was impressed with how well the automatic help system answered my questions as they came up in the game. And it only took a few minutes to get used to using mouse and keyboard for movement after being spoiled with a gamepad in FFXI for so long. I only played for about an hour, but I’m looking forward to going back in, after I spend some quality time with the manual.

Well, with over 4 million paying subscribers, I suppose I should have expected it, nevertheless I’m still bummed out that all of the World of Warcraft servers I try to log onto are full! After a number of installation glitches followed by the expected hour or two of downloading and patching, I was finally ready to give my trial edition of World of Warcraft a whirl.

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XI for over a year and a half now, but I hadn’t been online for a while. Upon my return, I discovered that my favorite linkshell had disbanded and feeling a bit lonely in the world, I decided to give WoW a try. But if it is always so hard to get on as it was tonight, I probably won’t be plunking down any cash for the full version any time soon. I guess at this point their holiday season marketing is a bit self-defeating.

It looks like it’s that time again…time to replace my computer monitor. The 17" ViewSonic has served me well for the past 4 years or so, but has started doing the shrinking, squiggling picture thing which is generally cured by a good hand slap on the side of the monitor (Earth technology).

Well I’m not one to spend money without a good reason, so I began to Google about for additional information that might allow me to get some more use out of the monitor. Imagine my surprise when entering the terms "monitor replacement symptoms" returned a bunch of articles about menopause and hormonal replacement therapy! Huh, I suppose the hot flashes my monitor has been having might be considered its own sort of menopause, hyuk hyuk hyuk…

It’s about three days late, but a big happy birthday to Pauline, wherever she is… Last I heard, she was a pediatrician out in California. Pauline was the first friend I made in college, and unfortunately the first one I lost. It was mostly if not all my fault, I was young, stupid about women and people in general and totally screwed up. Still, she’ll always be special to me and since her birthday comes around Thanksgiving, it’s pretty easy to be thinking of her this time of the year.

On the plus side I learned a lot from the experience. One the most important things I learned though is there are some things that cannot be fixed.

Star Trek! I love you man! Over the last two days, my love of Star Trek has reignited like a warp reactor overload thanks to Star Trek New Voyages and Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. Any fan who has knowingly not had the pleasure of experiencing these fan productions is not of the body! New Voyages, in particular, just feels so much like the Star Trek I grew up with, but with so much more, and best of all my oldest daughter just sat through the second episode with me with great interest. It isn’t easy holding her interest, so it must be good. This month’s Wired has a very good article about New Voyages too.

Kudos to all involved in these fine productions! Suddenly it feels good to be a Star Trek fan again!

After several weeks of trying and Googling, I finally got DVD movies to play on my Ubuntu box! Like some crazy voodoo, I’m not entirely sure what incantation finally got things to work, but so that others may benefit, I record it here.

Initially I had Xine-ui, totem-xine, and libdvdcss installed and I thought that was all that I needed. But whenever I tried to play one of my movie DVDs, Xine and totem would act as if they couldn’t even find libdvdcss at all.

Thinking that there was something wrong with the movie players, I decided to try VLC. That didn’t work for me either, but that may have been because I couldn’t figure out how to start it, duh. Before figuring that out I took a look at the Ubuntu Wiki’s Restricted Formats page. On that page I found more information and a link to the w32 codecs. Since I run into a lot of Windows format media files, I figured these codecs would be useful.

After installing the w32 codecs, lo and behold, I could play DVD movies in Xine and Totem! At this point I didn’t even try to figure out VLC because I was happy to finally get what I wanted!

From the above, I’m guessing that I needed both libdvdcss and w32codecs to make it all work, which had not at all been clear from everything else I had read previously, again duh. But I also wonder if VLC brought something extra to the party that sealed the deal. Eventually I may do some experimenting to find out, but for now I’ve got one more Revolutionary Girl Utena disc to finish watching!

Yesterday my lunch time walk took me to my favorite Borders. I had some coupons so I wanted to see if there was anything in that I wanted like a new installment of one of the way too many manga I’ve been reading. I didn’t find anything compelling so I headed upstairs to see if there were any interesting DVDs on the 3rd level.

Upon reaching the escalator to the DVD section, I was confronted and blocked by two youngish guys in dark suits. They informed me that Martha Stewart was doing a book signing, but they did not have room for any more people to join the event. I stupidly asked them if she was really up there even after just being told that she was, duh. One of them offered to get any DVD I wanted to buy, but since I was just browsing, I declined. Since I didn’t actually get to see Martha Stewart, I suppose that technically this isn’t a brush with fame, but heck, I just wanted to write something. Is that so wrong?

In what continues to be a major PR setback for Sony, Sony has decided to recall all of their copy protected CDs which include the now infamous rootkit. It’s kind of funny that all by themselves, Sony has managed to add the previously obscure hacker term, "rootkit", to the public lexicon.

This could not have come at a worst time for Sony with respect to promoting the Playstation 3 as Microsoft launches the Xbox 360 next week. Up until now, Sony had been fairly vocal about their next generation console in an attempt to avoid losing mindshare during the 360 launch. But since the rootkit story broke, I haven’t seen anything about the PS 3. There are already rumors that the PS 3 will not launch in the U.S. until fall 2006 at the earliest. As for Microsoft, they get the double bonus because Sony can’t hype the PS 3 during the 360 launch and Microsoft has offered software to remove the Sony rootkit from PCs. Apple gets a double bonus too because the copy protected CDs can’t install the rootkit on Macs and Sony will also have a hard time promoting sometimes iPod competitor PSP with the controversy grabbing the headlines. In short, Sony’s competitors have gotta love this!

I hope that Sony will learn a lesson from this and stop treating their customers like criminals. The real pirates will never be stopped by some rinky dink copy protection. Now Sony faces millions of dollars in costs associated with the recall and the inevitable class action lawsuits. And they have lost a lot of good will as well. I for one will think twice about any future purchases of Sony electronics and I certainly won’t be buying any Sony CDs either.

Often I feel a bit like Forest Gump. Like him, I seem to find myself in the vicinity of famous people or events with a greater frequency than average. Today on my lunch time walk, I happened to pass right by newscaster and journalist Carol Marin, who is best known in the Chicago area as the longtime anchor for NBC’s WMAQ TV station. She and co-anchor Ron Magers resigned in protest when then station management planned to add Jerry Springer as a regular commentator. This led to a station shake up and ratings tumbled that I don’t feel like they ever recovered from.

Anyway, Carol still looks pretty good! She was wearing a short skirt and these really nice boots. One thing that surprised me was how short she is. On TV she looked much taller. Her old co-anchor (who I’ve also passed on the street) isn’t much taller. As always, I kept quiet, looking just long enough to convey the message that I recognized her, but was not going to bug her. I figure that famous people have enough problems with fans, so when I encounter them like this, I don’t bother them. I guess you could say I’m a fan of Ms. Marin’s work and I guess of her too! <3

Since I started using Ubuntu Linux a few weeks ago, my Windows XP installation has fallen into a sad state of disrepair. Like many who install a Linux partition, I’ve found myself wanting to do all of my work (and fun) there. Unfortunately, there are a few tools that I must still use Windows for, such as Dreamweaver. I haven’t found a good Linux replacement for DW yet (Nvu doesn’t do the trick for me), so for serious site work I have to boot Windows. Well after losing about 20 minutes of work due to a spontaneous reboot, I was pretty pissed with Windows. So I did what many Windows users do, started scanning and cleaning like mad. Me and Norton got reaquainted and turned up one trojan along with numerous registry errors and broken shortcuts. Ugh. I really hate using Windows these days…