My boxes did show up yesterday… From ThinkGeek I received loopback jack and a crossover jack, both of which should prove to be quite handy. Right now I’m carrying around two different 3′ patch cables – one straight-through and one crossover. Now I should be able to get rid of the crossover cable and just carry this jack with me instead. The loopback jack, if it works the way it is supposed to, should give me a handy way of testing ports and cables when I don’t have the whole network kit and all the testing equipment with me.

I also got a WMP54G wireless NIC from NewEgg. The card installed with little trouble… The biggest problem I had was physically installing the card – Terri’s case is not the easiest PC to work in/around. Windows picked up the NIC as soon as it rebooted, the drivers installed right off the CD, and it picked up our network with no trouble. While that Zonet NIC couldn’t manage to detect or connect to our network at all, the Linksys was showing a full 5 bars. Terri tried it briefly with WoW, and spent most of the evening surfing the web and reading email – all with no trouble. She did get disconnected when our cordless phones rang, but it was a simple matter of changing the WLAN’s channel.

The final box, the one containing my rounded IDE cables, is apparently out for delivery today. With any luck I’ll have that waiting for me when I get home this evening.

Terri and I went out to the Arathi Basin battleground for the first time this weekend…and had a terrific time stumbling our way through it.

The gameplay is definitely different from Warsong Gulch, but not so different as to be wholly alien. It’s still fairly straightforward… Capture the flags before the enemy can, and defend the flags once they’re yours. The big differences are that you don’t bring any flags back to your base, and there’s five different flags to capture & defend.

The first match was pure chaos, from my standpoint. I had absolutely no clue what was going on at all. I just followed people around and hit anything with a red name over its head. By the third (and final) match of the night I was feeling relatively confident in my understanding of the gameplay. I was responding to cries for reinforcements, watching the strategic points on the map, and generally trying to actually be useful. We won all three matches that night…though I sincerely doubt that either of us actually contributed much to those wins. We probably would have done more PvP that night…but the Alliance stopped queing up after that last match.

I also finally made it to 50 over the weekend. I say “finally”, because it seems like I’ve been trying to catch up to where I was back on Elune… But in reality, Terri and I have been leveling very quickly over here on Dalaran. I’m sure a large chunk of it is simply because we’ve got a better understanding of the gameplay – we know where the quests are, where to hunt at the various levels, how the mobs work…and the classes we’ve chosen this time around (Shaman and Warrior) complement eachother very well… But, at the same time, I think a good chunk of it is because the Horde just plain has better zones/quests. It really seems like I’m having more quests in any given location, better quest rewards, and a steadier flow of XP as I level. I know that back on Elune I’d always stall out around level 30 or so, because it suddenly became difficult to find quests that I could complete solo. This time around I’m just rolling right through it all…I still haven’t reached the point where I can’t solo the quests I’m getting.

Yesterday’s Thanksgiving/Birthday festivities went relatively well. We had enough leftover turkey to choke several elephants…but it was all very tasty. I had my mince pie, we sang Happy Birthday, we ate ourselves sick… You get the idea.

It seems very odd that I’m not at work today, despite the fact that it is Friday – Black Friday to be specific. This is the first time in the last four years or so that I have not been working retail on Black Friday. I’d originally thought that I might go up to EB just to give my old co-workers a hard time…but that just didn’t happen. We did eventually go up to the mall to pick up a movie at FYE, but I couldn’t bring myself to enter the place. The parking lot was absolutely packed – no room at all. People were everywhere! I couldn’t bring myself to actually go in there and voluntarily subject myself to that kind of insanity… So we went to Blockbuster instead, and bought a copy of Constantine used for about half what we would have paid at the mall.

I also received another Birthday box today, this one had my PDA Case in it. I’m not real thrilled about the frosted plastic look of this case…but it’s about the only thing I found that even remotely suited my needs. Most of the PDA cases I saw were big, bulky things… More like a day planner than a simple PDA case. All I really wanted was something to cover the screen and protect it from pressure/scratches in my pocket. This case is the smallest, least bulky thing I could find. We’ll see on Monday how well it works…

The first of my boxes arrived today… This one contained the wireless stuff from NewEgg.

I ordered a DI-524 wireless router and a ZEW1601 wireless NIC. I knew the D-Link DI-524 was a pretty solid router since we use them quite a bit at work. I can’t count the number of these things that I’ve installed… I had the thing configured and installed in no time…the entire network was only down for about 5 minutes. No trouble with it at all. The laptop picked up the wireless AP just fine, good signal throughout the house.

I’ve honestly never heard of Zonet before… And the only reason I picked up the ZEW1601 is because it was absurdly cheap ($19.99 with at $12 mail-in rebate). The customer reviews on NewEgg looked relatively positive, and I figured one NIC is likely as good as another… Unfortunately, I was wrong. This NIC doesn’t work at all. It installed ok on Terri’s machine, but then it wouldn’t pick up the AP from across the room. I thought it might be some kind of odd interference, so I installed the NIC in my own computer just to test it out…about 1 foot away from the AP. My PC detected it as a “video controller” and refused to install the drivers off the CD.

So, we’re halfway towards getting rid of the ugly network cable strung along the ceiling in here… The router works terrific, and I can connect wirelessly with the laptop…but Terri’s still got that cable strung up to her PC. I’ll return the Zonet as soon as I’m able to, but in the meantime I think I’ll just run up to Staples and pick up a NIC made by someone I recognize… Maybe a WMP54G…

Slashdot | Microsoft to Open up Office Formats

I never thought this would happen… Microsoft has built much of its monopoly on closed and proprietary software. The whole reason Microsoft has such a stranglehold on the industry is because it is so hard to make 3rd party software compatible with Microsoft.

This is a terrific announcement. Hopefully this means that before too long we’ll have software from other companies that can read and write documents compatible with Microsoft’s Office format. And, hopefully, Microsoft will benefit from this. I’d love to see Microsoft sell even more copies of Office because it is compatible and inter-operable. I’d love to see Microsoft make even more money by doing the right thing.

Guardian Unlimited | Top 20 geek novels