Had a terrific time hunting out in Silithus tonight. I finally got around to following through on a quest that I’ve had for a few days now… Initially they sent me to Darnassus, where I talked to a very unpleasant Arch Druid. He relayed me on to one of his underlings, who then sent me along to Moonglade to talk with someone important. That person gave me a letter of introduction, and sent me to talk with someone out in Silithus. When I eventually arrived in Silithus I was given a great task – explore some Night Elf ruins that have been overrun with silithid and ghosts. Yay!

I had to kill off a number of these Night Elf ghosts…but they’d scream when they died, which stirred up the local silithid. Each time we killed a ghost we’d have to kill a couple silithid as well. Eventually we killed all the ghosts we needed, and reported back to our contact…who had a new task waiting for us.

This time he wanted us to climb up to the top of a silithid-infested tower and see what happened when we intentionally stirred up the hive. That’s right, he wanted us to intentionally see just how angry we could make the silithid. As soon as we set foot in the tower we were jumped by three silithid. It wouldn’t have been that hard a fight, but we got a couple ghost adds as well. The end result was a very challenging battle that we just barely lived through. Then we climbed to the top of the tower and tried to cause some trouble. There was a blobby looking thing that was clickable, so we clicked on it, and immediately got swarmed with tons of silithid. For every one we killed, another two took its place. We managed to kill quite a few before running back to town…only to find out that we hadn’t completed the quest.

I’ve been trying, on and off, for the last week or so to get a decent Linux distro up and running on my machine. I installed Microsoft Virtual PC a couple weeks ago, and my first thought was to try installing Linux on it. I used to have lots of fun running Linux on a spare PC here at home.

My first attempt was with SuSe Linux…which I quickly discovered is now owned by Novell, and no longer the distro I knew and loved. Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with Novell or a Novell-owned Linux distro…but it just didn’t have the same feel to it anymore.

I decided to install Gnome, since I’d always preferred it to the K Desktop Environment which is now the default in SuSe. I went looking for Ximian‘s site, because they used to produce a very comprehensive Gnome desktop. They, too, have been bought up by Novell; and are no longer quite the same beast.

My next attempt was Red Hat, which did not go terribly smoothly. I figured that Fedora Core 3 would be more stable than 4, and tried to install that first. I tried to download a DVD image…but Virtual PC wouldn’t load the image, it just kept complaining that this .iso was far larger than the 700 MB or so allowed for a CD-ROM image. And there was no way to get it to recognize the fact that it was a DVD-ROM image. So, I downloaded a series of four CD-ROM images and installed from those. It installed just fine, but getting it to boot is another thing entirely. It keeps complaining that various things are restarting too quickly. So, I am currently in the process of downloading a bunch of Fedora Core 4 images, in the vague hopes that they might actually boot.

Didn’t really get to see much of the new WoW patch yesterday… The servers weren’t up and stable until somewhere around 7:30 or 8:00 last night. What I did see, however, looked quite promising. Just about every level 60 in the guild was running through Dire Maul last night, and it sounded like they were having a great time. The chat bubbles, while looking slightly out of place in WoW, are actually quite effective. And the extra button bars are impressive, to say the least. Actually, I think “overkill” might be a better word for it. You can add up to four more bars, with 12 buttons on each bar…that’s 48 more buttons, in addition to the original 12…a grand total of 60 buttons on-screen at one time. Frankly, I don’t think my Warlock even has 60 unique skills/spells/powers.

We rented something called Ghouls over the weekend, and just got around to watching it last night. We only saw the first 15 minutes or so of it, before turning the thing off in disgust. I’ve suffered through enough horrible movies in the vague hopes that they’ll get better, I’ve learned my lesson. We turned that off after only 15 minutes and threw in another DVD from the weekend that also should have been horrible – Cube Zero – but which was surprisingly good.

Had great fun in WoW last night… Got some folks together and finally finished off that Ancient Egg quest that’s been sitting in my quest log for several levels now. Also saved Sharpbeak while we were up there. If I’d been thinking, I would have grabbed one of those hammers for ZF at the same time. After that, we went over to the Swamp of Sorrows and took a run through the Sunken Temple.

We had great fun wandering aimlessly through the Sunken Temple for over an hour. That place is not only huge, but terribly confusing. It is multi-tiered, with stairs and balconies everywhere. It was very hard to figure out where we needed to be, and even harder to get there. Eventually we made it to the right room, and used that ancient egg to stir up some dead god. That was a terrific fight…

First the ghost of Hakkar shows up – he just sits in the middle of the room and looks threatening. Then lots of critters start appearing…giant snakes, winged things, dragonkin…all apparently intent on keeping you from leaving that room alive. As you kill the winged things, they drop blood, which needs to be used to extinguish the four bonfires burning in the corners. As you extinguish each bonfire, the dead god Hakkar becomes a bit more solid, and says something menacing. Eventually you extinquish all four fires, and then have to kill Hakkar himself. It was a terrific fight, I got a good chunk of XP (finally hit 54 last night!), knocked off a couple quests in the process, and picked up some decent loot along the way. Great fun!

Looks like the big patch is going in today. There really aren’t that many class changes that are likely to affect me directly, at least not until I get around to playing my Warrior… The stuff they put in for Warlocks is all stuff that I don’t generally use much. Still, there are a number of good changes going through… A fix for the raid zone lockout bug, changing the reset timers on a couple raid zones, adding a couple more raid zones, and some UI enhancements. I am really looking forward to being able to lock my action buttons, I don’t know how many times I’ve accidentally picked a button up when I meant to perform the action. We should also be getting a couple more action button bars, which should make the sidebar mod I’m constantly using obsolete. I’m not sure if the Honor System was going in with this patch or not…but that’s another thing I’m looking forward to.

I just hope the servers are back up and relatively stable by the time I get home this afternoon.

Yesterday I went messing around with some of the settings/information for our DSL account… One of the things I did is forward all my mail from my DSL email account to my Gmail account. Originally I stopped using my Verizon mailbox because the spam was just getting to be too much. Gmail did a great job of filtering out what little spam I got, and was new enough that I didn’t even receive much in the first place. Well, last night I forwarded all my Verizon mail to Gmail, and today I saw the results of that change… 15 spam messages in one night. I’m used to seeing 1 or 2 a week at Gmail. But, because of Gmail’s great filtering, I didn’t actually have to deal with any of those 15 messages – they all just disappeared into the spam folder. Very nice.

More interesting stuff up on Blizzard’s site…

This week they’ve got some fairly detailed information about the new Honor System that should be going live before too long. The rewards for honorable kills look pretty good…but I’m not sure if I like the fact that your standing goes down over time…and you might lose the ability to use your rewards. See, your rank is based on a percentage of the total honorable kills for your whole faction… The more other people kill, the harder you have to work to gain rank. And if you stop killing, the rest of the faction passes you by, and your rank actually goes down. I don’t like that much. I guess it is good to keep people from getting entrenched at a certain rank right away and never getting dislodged… But realistically, I’ll never be able to attain any high rank – I just won’t be able to play enough.

I’m also slightly disappointed that there’s currently no penalty for a dishonorable kill. Maybe it won’t be such a problem now that there’s incentive to kill other players… But I get rather sick of having my NPCs killed.

Some very good looking patch notes up over at Blizzard. Quite a few tweaks to the various classes, though it doesn’t look like there’s anything I’ll actually feel. Some new instances, tweaks to the old ones, bug fixes, new flight paths… But what looks most promising to me is the integration of some goodies that were previously only available in mods – like additional action bars, locking your action bar buttons, and timers for your buffs. I really like that Blizzard is paying attention to the mods that people are using, and integrating the most popular options right into the game.