World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade - A Burning Sensation
patrick — Thu, 2008-02-14 01:25
A couple of years ago my co-workers talked me into playing the World of Warcraft (WoW). I really wasn't excited about this because it seemed to me it'd be yet another EverCrack (nickname for EverQuest - due to it's addictive nature like a drug).
EverQuest was tons of fun... at least at the lower levels. Just like NWNo (wikipedia entry) and UO (wikipedia entry) before it, the major selling point on EverQuest was the social aspect. Unfortunately after a certain level the social aspect in EverQuest seemed to drop off unless you were doing a major guild event. Certain places were easier to find people to group with and others very difficult. In the early days pick up groups seemed to be pretty good, but as any game progresses the quality of the average player seems to decrease.
Back to WoW... So I figured since my co-workers were all playing I'd give it a go and see just how fun WoW was. It was kind of fun in the early levels, but got kind of boring and I got frustrated with certain things. My co-workers were already levels above me and I got some help, but not a whole lot. After a while of going around in circles I gave up and went back to my other games.
Here recently I've been wanting to find a fantasy MMO (in addition to the sci-fi space MMO I've been playing). The other day I got an email to try the new expansion for WoW - The Burning Crusade. I figured sure, it'll give me a couple of days to mess around with a fantasy MMO again for free.
Ten days free trial - count them... 10 days! Once you click this button it will start your 10 day free trial and then you can download the client. Ok, so I click the button and download the small installer (maybe 1-2 meg). I start the installer which now has to download about 2.1 Gig via a torrent-like rip-off of a downloader - 16 hours to download. Great, so the first day of my 10 day trial I spend downloading the installer.
PEAR just isn't normal
patrick — Mon, 2008-02-04 17:48
While working at RCS (see Jobs, Jobs, & More Jobs - Part 1) one of the projects I ended up working on was trying to figure out a way to upload streaming video to Amazon's S3. Googling around I found several articles, but only about 3 different PHP implementations for S3 - all 3 used at least 1 PEAR library. After wasting half a day trying to find something that didn't use PEAR I started a conversation with the lead programmer. What he said revealed a lot.
Jobs, Jobs, & More Jobs - Part 2
patrick — Fri, 2008-02-01 03:13
St Joseph, Mo, Take 2, HJB, beginning of December to beginning of January -
I finally found another job that would give me the excuse to get away from the previous job. The consulting agency that had found me the job down in Tulsa had found something for me up in St Joseph, about 1.5 hours north of Kansas City. They gave me the url for the website and I wasn't sure if they were for real.
I wanted to be sure of what they wanted. It looked liked Ma & Pa had done it themselves, hired a nephew to do it, or something similar. It looked like a business reject site from the mid-90's back when nobody had any idea what they were doing. I was wondering if they handled enough business to even be able to pay me and if they were able to pay, would they?
I was told that they realized that their site was not what it needed to be and needed a complete redesign. They had a bunch of different websites and all of them needed work. They needed somebody to completely take over their websites - they wanted a webmaster
. At that point I was willing to talk with them. On the 1 hand I was kind of excited to be completely in charge and on the other hand I was kind of worried.
