I hit 80 on my Warlock over the weekend…

Got all sorts of new spells for him, including some that I still haven’t figured out.  Got the ability to run heroic dungeons…  Apparently you don’t need a key for heroics anymore, you just have to be 80.  Got a present from Rhonin in the mail, a little congratulatory gift for hitting 80.

I’ve still got plenty to keep me busy though.  I want to improve my faction with pretty much every group in Northrend.  And there’s tons of daily quests to facilitate that.  And there’s the daily cooking quest.  I still need to get my cooking skill up, and fishing.  I want to fish up one of those giant rats, too.  So there’s lots for me to accomplish on my Warlock still.

And then I’ll still have to get my Rogue and Death Knight up to 80 as well.

But, at this point, there’s something that I’m fairly surprised with…  I just made it to 80, fairly quickly, and I’ve still got several zones that I haven’t touched at all.  I haven’t done any quests in Zul’Drak at all.  I’ve run through an instance out in Storm Peaks, but haven’t done any quests out there.  I’m not sure how much there is to Crystalsong Forrest, but I haven’t done any quests there.  And I know I’ve still got a pile of quests to finish in Howling Fjord, if I ever decide to go back there.

It seems weird to me that I could read 80 so quickly and easily, without having to finish every single quest in the expansion.  Seems like I shouldn’t be able to skip so much content.

Still, I’m not complaining.  The fact that I’m now 80 means that I’ll get additional gold instead of experience for my quests…  Which is a great thing, because there’s plenty of expensive stuff that I want to buy.

Holy hell, it’s cold out there!

We got some substantial snow Thursday night…  Nothing terribly major, but enough to stick around for a little while.  But Friday morning I slept too late to clear any of it before going in to work.  So the driveway is still covered with snow today.

We stopped at the gas station this morning, filled up the gas can.  I figured this would be a good opportunity to try out my new snowblower.

Unfortunately, my snowblower won’t start.

I stood out there for a good half-hour trying to get it running…  The electric starter would whir and whir and whir, but the engine wouldn’t catch.  And the pull-start just wasn’t doing much of anything.  I pressed the primer…  I turned the choke…  I adjusted the throttle…  Nothing.

And after half an hour out there my fingers were going numb and I’d had enough.  But the fact remains, there’s snow on my driveway and my snowblower won’t start.  I don’t know if it’s just so cold that it’s being difficult…or if there’s actually something broken.

Slashdot | Five PC Power Myths Debunked

Turning off PCs during periods of inactivity can save companies between $25 and $75 per PC per year, according to Energy Star, savings that can add up quickly for large organizations. Yet most organizations remain behind the times on PC power management, in large part due to common misperceptions about PC power, writes InfoWorld’s Ted Samson, who outlines five PC power myths debunked in a recent report from Forrester, ranging from the energy savings of screen savers, to the energy draw of powering up, to the difficulties of issuing patches to systems in lower-power states.

The article sets out to debunk these myths…  It makes the claim that you really can save lots of money by managing your computer’s power usage…  They point out some common “misconceptions” like:

1. The power used turning my PC on negates any benefits of turning it off.
2. My screen saver is saving me energy.
3. Turning my PC on and off will reduce its performance and useful life.
4. I can’t run updates and patches for PCs in lower-power states.
5. My PC users will not tolerate any downtime for power management.

The article does a good job of addressing all those misconceptions.  And it is certainly true that a computer that is off will use less power than one that is on.  So you could certainly save some money that way.  And the article goes to great lengths to make this seem like a very appealing idea…  But they’re missing a couple important factors – which the folks on Slashdot happily point out.

The biggest problem is that you likely won’t save any money at all in the long-run.  If your employees have to wait around while their computers boot up in the morning, you’re paying them to do nothing.  If your employees have to shut their computers down in the afternoon, you’re paying them to do nothing.

Sure…  You can play with power control options…  You can have computers hibernate instead of shut down, you can schedule shutdowns, restarts, and boot-ups…  You can make sure the computers all turn themselves on before employees show up, and make sure the computers all shut themselves off in the evening…  But all of that is, for the moment, flaky and annoying.

I still have plenty of trouble waking computers from hibernation.  Sometimes it works, entirely too often it doesn’t.

There’s no way to set power options with a GPO.  You can create an initial image with all the settings you want, and use that to roll out new computers…  But if you change your mind there’s no quick and easy way to roll out changes to all the computers.  You can probably script something…

And then there’s the whole wake-on-LAN thing…which sounds nice in theory, but I haven’t had it work so well in practice.  So your IT department is going to have a more difficult time rolling out patches to the machines after hours.

The end result of all this is going to be lots of wasted time.  Time that you’re paying your employees for.  Time that will likely wind up costing you more than you’ll save on electricity bills.

Now, if wake-on-LAN and hibernation worked more like they should…  And you could push out power settings with a GPO…  Then it might be a good idea to shut machines down at night.  But as it stands right now you really are better off just leaving machines on all the time.

Slashdot | William Gibson’s AGRIPPA Recovered and Revealed

While the text of William Gibson’s elusive electronic poem AGRIPPA is widely posted around the Web, it has not been seen in its original incarnation — custom-built software designed to scroll the poem through a single play before encrypting each line with an RSA algorithm — since 1992. Today is the 16th anniversary, to the day, of the poem’s initial release. A team of scholars at the University of Maryland and UC Santa Barbara used forensic computing to restore the code from an original diskette loaned by a collector and have placed video of the complete ‘run,’ as well as never-before-seen footage from the night of AGRIPPA’s public debut in 1992, up on a Web site called the Agrippa Files. There’s also a detailed essay documenting the forensic process, plus a mess of stills, screenshots, and a copy of the disk image itself.

Very cool stuff…

At work, my job is to identify problems and fix them, hopefully without breaking anything new along the way.  Folks call us up and tell us something doesn’t work, I figure out what is broken, and I fix it.  I’m constantly trying to tell people what needs to happen in order to fix their current problem, or to avoid a new problem in the future.  But, unfortunately, entirely too many people don’t pay much attention to me.

Far too many of my conversations wind up sounding like this…

Me: We’ve updated your software.  I need to reboot the server before it’ll work again.

Customer: Ok, but before you reboot the server can you look at my software?  It doesn’t work.

Me: Yes, that’s because the server needs a reboot.

Customer: Yeah…  But this will just take a minute.  Can you look at my problem first?

Me: It won’t work until I reboot the server.

Customer: Ok, so you’ll look at my software after you reboot the server?

So…  Last night, after work, I was playing some WoW…  We wound up in a group going to a new dungeon – The Violet Hold.  I’ve never been in there, and neither had most of the follks in the group.  So it was going to be a learning experience all-around.

We walked into the dungeon and it didn’t look like much…  Basically a single room, with some scary monsters trapped in their cages.  There were some Kirin Tor mages fighting to hold back a neverending tide of dragonkin, but that was about it.  Someone talked to an NPC, the Kirin Tor left, and  the door locked behind us.

Within a few moments this instance started to look an awful lot like the Black Morass instance.  Swirling blue portals would open up, there was an on-screen announcement that there was a new portal guardian, and a neverending stream of dragonkin would start making their way towards the door.  We had a portal counter, just like in Black Morass.  We had a door health indicator, just like in Black Morass.  And someone in guildchat indicated that the instance worked basically like Black Morass.

All of which lead me to believe that we should probably go kill the portal guardian guy, to close the portal, to advance the encounter.  But nobody was moving away from the door.  Everyone just stood there killing dragonkin over and over again.

Me: We need to kill the portal guardian.

Player1: I don’t know what to do.

Player2: These guys just keep coming.

Me: We need to kill the guardian.

Player1: I’m not sure what to do in here…  Does anyone know?

Player2: Do these guys stop attacking?

Player3: Do we have to kill all of them?

Me: We have to kill the guardian.  Over there.  The big guy.

You get the idea.

We battled dragonkin for a good 15 minutes or so.  And then a second portal opened up and we really started to get overwhelmed.  Nobody was moving, nobody was listening to me, so I ran over and pulled the first portal guardian back to us just to get things moving.  We wound up wiping because everyone ran out of mana, and then health.

We came back again and people were able to leave the front door and go kill guardians…  But then we got to the first boss – some kind of big voidwalker guy.

He kicked our asses.

Someone was saying in vent that we needed to stop attacking when we saw the warning…  But I wasn’t seeing any warning.  Someone was saying somethig about killing the little voidwalkers…  But I wasn’t seeing any little voidwalkers.  From what I could see it was just Zuramat and a crapton of shadowbolts flying everywhere.

So we died.  And came back.  And made it to Zuramat again.  And died again.

And once again there was talk of warnings and little voidwalkers.  Turns out a couple of the party members had some kind of raid warning mod installed for 5-man instances, and it was telling them when it was safe to attack or not.  They didn’t realize that the rest of us weren’t seeing those warnings.  It also turns out that Zuramat periodically gives you a curse, which lets you see the little guys spamming shadowbolts, and you need to kill them when you’re cursed.

So we came back again…  And tried him again…  This time we had someone in vent telling us when to stop attacking…  But he didn’t tell us when it was safe to attack again.  And the little voidwalkers were still spamming shadowbolts everywhere.  And we died again.

That’s about the time I called it a night.  Obviously there was something about the encounter that we weren’t doing right.  And it certainly would have helped if Terri and I had the appropriate mod installed.  But the end result was that we just kept dying, and I was getting very frustrated, and we weren’t making any progress, and my gear was all breaking.  So I called it a night.

And it is probably unfair to title this post “homing stupidity” – because a lot of the problems were just plain beyond anyone’s control.  But the overall impression I had of the entire group/dungeon experience last night was “wow, this reminds me an awful lot of work.”

I mean…  I said repeatedly that we needed to kill the portal guardians, and nobody paid any attention to me.  I said repeatedly that I wasn’t getting warnings when I shouldn’t attack, and nobody paid any attention to me.  I said I couldn’t see the little voidwalkers, and nobody paid any attention to me.

Tim, over at Ctrl+Alt+Del, has a bit of a rant about MMOGs today.  Basically complaining how WoW has a stranglehold on the industry.  It’s certainly true…  Somehow WoW wound up on top of the heap, and now everyone else has a juggernaut to compete against.  The problem isn’t just that WoW has gathered up a lot of players, but also that Blizzard has an insane amount of money to throw at their product – money that nobody else can really afford to spend.

But that isn’t really the point of my post here…  Something that Tim said really caught my eye.

It frustrates me a little that, even though newer MMOs come up with great new ideas, nice new graphics, nice new everything, they still cannot manage to compete with World of Warcraft. Take Warhammer Online, for instance. I loved WAR. It wasn’t a perfect game, but what it did well, it did really well. And there was a lot of it. There was a lot to do, a lot to participate in, a lot of different ways to level.

And then you’re in there, and you see everyone doing the exact same thing, playing it the exact same way as every other MMO, grinding and rushing to max level. There was some myth circulated that “the game didn’t truly begin until level 40.” What?

So you’d be wandering through all of this available content, the Open RvR, the public quests, etc… and it would be barren. You’d maybe see another person or two once an hour or so. Sometimes you’d get a group of people into a PQ, or find some active Open RvR, and it was incredibly enjoyable… but then it’d be right back to the ghost-town.

Did you know there are dungeon instances in WAR? Most people don’t, and most people will never experience one, because the game doesn’t hand-hold you to the door with the promise of “uber loots”. They were there to be found by explorers, but even when you did find them, getting a group together for one was a challenge all on its own.

This isn’t limited no non-WoW MMOGs.  People do the exact same crap in WoW.

Folks rush to level cap just as quickly as they can…  First it was 60, then 70, now 80.  Everyone wants to hit cap as soon as possible.  They do whatever is fastes, most efficient.  They’ll grind through the same instance over and over again all day…  Or they’ll plan ahead of time exactly which quests to run in which order…  Or they’ll just farm mobs in some random place…

And then they’ll hit level cap and raid the endgame stuff for a while.  And then they’ll get bored.  And then they’ll stop logging in much.  And then the new expansion comes out and it starts all over again.

Meanwhile the rest of us are actually wandering around and seeing the sights, taking our time.  And it becomes increasingly difficult to get groups together.  Folks have already run through all the lowbie stuff and they’re looking for raid content, not 5-man dungeons.  Or they’ve already run that 5-man about a billion times and they’re sick to death of it.

I’ve spoken in guildchat about some quest or dungeon or something that I did, that struck me as amazingly fun…  And some of the level 80′s will respond that they never did it, that they skipped over that part.

And it isn’t like WotLK is just more of the same…  Blizzard has introduced some really fun new gameplay mechanics this time around.  And folks are just skipping the cool new stuff because it doesn’t fit into their master plan.

And this really is the same thing you see in any other MMOG.  If you look at EverQuest, or Dark Age of Camelot, or City of Heroes it is all the same…  Everyone is racing to the endgame, whatever that might be.

I took a bit of a break from the WoW grind last night…  I’m very nearly 78, and Terri is still 76, so I didn’t want to get too far ahead of her.  Plus all that focus on questing and leveling and progression hasn’t left me with a whole lot of time to smell the roses.  So, last night, I determined that I’d go see the sights…

I hopped on my Netherwing Drake and just started flying around.

My first stop was the Sholazar Basin.  I picked up a quest in Dalaran that asked me to go looking for Hemet Nesingwary there, so off I went.  Looks like his expedition ran into some difficulties…  He’s camped beside the wreckage of something that looks like it was once a fairly large boat.  There’s no flight path immediately available at Nesingwary’s camp, but it looks like you can run some quests to unlock one.  I didn’t bother with that, I just went sightseeing…

Sholazar Basin reminds me of Un’Goro crater – tropical, lush, mysterious.  I kept getting a very strong Jurassic Park/Land of the Lost/Center of the Earth vibe from the place…but maybe that’s just because of my recent Jules Verne kick.  I also stumbled across some new minerals to mine – Saronite.  It’s a nice change from all the Cobalt I’ve been mining, and hopefully it’ll sell for a decent price.

Next I headed off to Zul’Drak, which is apparently a giant trollish fortress/city.  The whole zone is built in that Aztec-ish style that trolls like so much.  But it’s been over-run by the scourge.  Undead everywhere.  Very dark, depressing, imposing.  I found a couple camps with flight paths and quests available…  But I didn’t really see anything that amazed me the way some of the other zones have.  It really felt like a dark version of Zul’Gurub or Zul’Aman – except without all the raid bosses.

After I was done there I headed over to Crystalsong.  As far as I can tell this zone was basically built just to house Dalaran.  It’s relatively small and there isn’t a whole lot going on here.  There’s some woods, some rivers, a bunch of Malygos’s mage hunters, some ley-lines and glowing trees…  There’s a couple quest hubs, with flight paths, but there really just isn’t much to the zone.

Next, I headed up north to the Storm Peaks.  The entire zone consists of rugged mountains punctuated with Titan construction.  I suspect that it would be virtually impossible to navigate this zone without a flying mount.  I was constantly soaring up one mountainside and then diving down the other.  The Titan buildings look very cool…  Very ornate…  Again, I was getting a strong steampunk vibe from them.

The last zone I explored was Icecrown…  This zone is dark, imposing, and creepy.  Lots of huge, spiky buildings and towering walls.  It reminded me a lot of Mordor from Lord of the Rings, except it is dark and cold instead of burning.  Again, I suspect it would be very difficult if not impossible to navigate this zone without a flying mount.  Lots of mountains, cliffs, walls, and enemy camps.  There’s also a couple gigantic flying machines in the area…  Both the Horde and the Alliance have some kind of flying quest hub in the zone.  Very cool.

Exploring all those zones got me an achievement for exploring Northrend, and a really ugly tabard.  I still need to explore Kalimdor to get the world explorer achievement though…

I also ran through Azjol-Nerub last night some folks from my guild.  The dungeon itself was pretty impressive…  It’s populated with a bunch of Nerubians, who remind me quite a bit of the Silithid, but a little more spidery than generically insectoid.  The architecture of the place was just plain horrible…  It was basically a giant hole in the ground, with remnants of actual construction here and there, and the whole thing was held together with some very insubstantial-looking spiderwebs.  I had to carefully avoid looking at the ground because it made me dizzy.  It constantly looked like I was going to plummet to my death at any moment.

I was once again surprised at the length of the dungeon…  Or, rather, the lack of length.  Every instance I’ve run through in Northrend has been very, very short.  The Nexus, Utgarde Keep, Drak’Tharon Keep…  They’re all very short.  Seems weird to me…  Hopefully the raid zones will be longer and more involved than these normal instances are.