When I first got my Droid, I attempted to add my email account here at the hospital as a “Corporate Sync” account.  It didn’t work.

I didn’t think much about it at the time.  Figured Exchange 2007 wasn’t what they meant by “Corporate Sync”…  Or maybe there was something more to configure on the server side of things…  Or maybe there was some plug-in or add-on or licensing to buy…

It wasn’t very important, and I had other things to do.  So I just added an IMAP account like I did on my BlackBerry.  My mail started showing up and I got on with my day.

I was bored last night and started playing around…  And got my Droid to talk to our Exchange 2007 server as a “Corporate Sync” account instead of IMAP.  The trick was to do a manual setup, and specify the username as the domain\username, and leave the domain field empty during setup.  Worked great.

Now that it’s a “Corporate Sync” account, instead of IMAP, it’s pulling down my email, calendar, and address book from our Exchange server.  Which is absolutely terrific.  And it is, in my opinion, the nail in BlackBerry’s coffin.

I was never able to sync my calendar or address book wirelessly on my BlackBerry.  That requires an Enterprise Server, or maybe some kind of 3rd-party solution.

If you’ve got enough BlackBerry devices in your organization I’m sure it makes sense to buy an Enterprise Server.  And I’m sure it’s handy being able to push out policies to lock down the devices.

But if you’re a smaller organization, or if you’ve only got a couple BlackBerries out there, or if you’ve got a bring-your-own-phone policy…  Getting an Enterprise Server up and running is a bit on the expensive side.

We couldn’t justify the expense here at the hospital, so folks have been plugging in to sync their BlackBerries.  Which means we’ve got to install and maintain the software on their desktops.  And it also means that their address books and calendars aren’t updating wirelessly, only when they actually plug the things into their computers.

But I was able to get my Droid to talk directly to our Exchange server with very little trouble.  And now that I know how, I can very easily throw together a PDF to document the process.  And anybody else in our organization can get a Droid and set it up to sync directly with Exchange.  With no software to install on their workstations, no additional servers required, and no additional work for us in IT.

Very, very nice.

Played my huntress again last night.  She’s out in Hellfire Peninsula now.  Seems very weird to be playing out there…

I already mentioned how it derails the whole Twilight’s Hammer narrative that’s been pervading the 1-60 grind.  Which is definitely weird.  All I’ve been hearing for 60 levels is “ZOMG we have to stop the Twilight’s Hammer cultists before they destroy the world!”  And I run through the Dark Portal…  And nobody has heard of the Twilight’s Hammer.  They’re all worried about Illidian and the Burning Legion and those Blood Elves who sabotaged the Exodar.  It’s very strange.  Very jarring.  Very noticeable.

It’s also a little strange to have a flying mount at 60.  That was one of the big, cool, awesome things in Burning Crusade…  You’d grind and grind your way up towards 70…  And when you finally got your hands on a flying mount is was absolutely awesome.  Made the game much easier.  Was very liberating.

Now you get them at 60…  And the quests in Hellfire Peninsula are much, much easier if you don’t have to run through aggro to get to the mob you’re looking for.  Very easy to fly over mountains and monsters, swoop down and kill your target, then fly off into the sunset.

Some of the quest mechanics are a little weird, too…  Like the bombing runs.  Back in Burning Crusade, they stuck you on a flying bird and gave you an item to use from your inventory.  You’d have to map a button or something, and then spam the button to drop bombs (or whatever).  These days they accomplish the same thing by putting you in a vehicle and giving you a vehicle bar with the bomb ability.  And the old Burning Crusade method seems very cumbersome and awkward.

The graphics seem a little dated.  Not as bad as the pre-Cataclysm old world…  But certainly not as good as post-Cataclysm old world, which is what I’ve been looking at for about a month now.  There’s none of the neat fog layers, or fancy lighting, or anything like that.

None of this was as noticeable when I was leveling my rogue or death knight before Wrath of the Lich King came out, because the new stuff was all added at the end of the level progression.  You played through the old stuff on your way up to 60…  And then you got the slightly newer stuff from 60 to 70…  And then you got the really new stuff after 70…  But now, with Cataclysm, you’re getting shiny new stuff right at level 1.  And the stuff you get at 60 is actually old stuff now.

Which is just plain odd, since I can clearly remember when Burning Crusade was the new hotness.  I can clearly remember staging my warlock in Nethergarde Keep the night before the expansion went live…  Eagerly waiting for the Dark Portal to become usable…  Charging through there along with a dozen or so other people, eager to take the fight to the Burning Legion on their home turf.

And now…  That’s the old stuff.  It isn’t cool anymore.  It isn’t shiny anymore.  It’s just some content to grind through on my way to 80, so that I can go do the fun stuff with my huntress.

Just hit 85 on my warlock.

I’ve completed Vashj’ir, Hyjal, and Deepholm.  I’ve done a pile of quests in Uldum, which is where I was when I dinged.  I haven’t touched the Twilight Highlands or Tol Barad yet.

If I try to queue for a random Cataclysm dungeon, there’s only two of them available – Vortex Pinacle and Stonecore.  It tells me that I have to locate the entrances to Tol’Vir, the Halls of Origination, and Grim Batol.  I’m not sure what happened to Throne of the Tides…  I thought I’d located the entrance to that dungeon, but it doesn’t show up on my list.

Needless to say, there’s still plenty for me to do on my warlock even though I’m at 85.

Honestly though…  I have very little desire to keep playing my warlock.  I’m just not happy with how he’s working these days.  I’m not sure if I’m just not in the mood for a warlock, or if the game mechanics are too different, or what…  But what I really want to do is go back to leveling my huntress.

Played with my warlock a good amount yesterday, got him up to 84.  Can probably hit 85 tonight if I try.

Can’t say I’m too happy with how my warlock is playing though…

The warlock used to be a fairly distinct class.  You were a cloth-wearing caster, but you had permanent pets to protect you.  You had some potent abilities, but you needed soul shards in order to do much of anything.  And, regardless of talent spec, you had DoTs – lots of them.

Playing a warlock used to be almost as much about inventory management as anything else.  You needed a giant soul shard bag to carry around enough shards.  You needed to be mindful of how many shards you had at any given time.  You had to remember to stock up when you were running low.  You had to decide if you were going to attempt to drain somebody’s soul, or just kill them off.

Now there are no soul shards.  Well, there’s three of them…  But they don’t take up inventory space.  And they’re hardly used for anything.  I’ve only got one or two spells that utilize them at all.  I no longer need shards to summon pets, or to create healthstones, or to summon people.  I can easily play all night long without using a single soul shard.

We’ve still got permanent pets…  But that isn’t as unique as it used to be.  Mages can now summon a permanent pet, as can death knights.  Hunters have permanent pets, but they always did…  Seems to me that shamen can summon up something as well, but it’s been too long since I played around with a shaman.

And we’ve still got DoTs…  But it’s nothing like before.  I used to have four or five DoTs up on a target at any given time.  Plus a debuff or two.  Shadowbolt didn’t do very impressive damage, but it didn’t need to.  Your pets didn’t do impressive damage, but they didn’t need to.  You’d just fire off a pile of DoTs and watch your target slowly die.

Now I’ve got just two DoTs – and I’m affliction spec.

My complaint isn’t really that other people have pets, or that I really miss having to manage my inventory, or that I want more DoTs…  My complaint is that it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between a warlock and a mage.

Played with my huntress a lot over the weekend.  Got her up to 60.  Headed off to Outland…

Seemed a little weird to be going off to fight the Burning Legion in Outland.  The whole 1-60 experience revolves around the Twilight’s Hammer cultists trying to destroy the world, and Deathwing’s return, and all that chaos.  The cultists are absolutely everywhere.  All the little regional badguys like the Defias have been replaced by cultists…  Or somehow tied into the cultists…  Every evil thing in the world is somehow related to the Twilight’s Hammer cult.

Everybody is talking about them.  The world has been ravaged by them.  All the quests revolve around them.

Even the 80+ content revolves around the Twilight’s Hammer stuff.  I’ve been playing on my warlock periodically, and he’s running around Hyjal trying to save the tree from the cultists.  Everybody is talking about Twilight’s Hammer.

But now my huntress is going to hop through the portal, leaving Azeroth teetering on the brink of destruction, and go play with some demons in Outland.

It just doesn’t seem to make much sense to me.  You’ve got a very cohesive, unified story from level 1 to 60…  And that unified story is continued after level 80…  But in-between you’ve got a 20-level vacation where you just leave those cultists behind.

Seems to me like they should have made some kind of effort to update or incorporate those expansions into the cataclysm stuff.

There’s an interesting post up on Slashdot today, musing about the new TRON: Legacy movie.

I enjoyed the movie.  No, the plot wasn’t amazing…  But the movie as a whole was enjoyable.

I’ve seen lots of criticism of the movie.  Lots of people complaining that the 3D didn’t add anything, or the plot was abysmal, or whatever.  And those are all valid complaints and folks are certainly allowed to like or dislike any movie they want.

But there’s another theme to a lot of these criticisms, that I think is best summed-up by simply quoting one of the comments made on Slashdot…

More specifically, my main issue with the OP’s point is that the movie’s anthropomorphization of the computer’s inner workings is too obviously inaccurate — anyone who knows anything about computers can easily see that it’s just a thin sheen of technobabble hastily thrown on top of a standard action movie.

Now, I’m not going to say that this guy is wrong…  It is, indeed, inaccurate to think that the bits running around inside your computer are anthropomorphic.  And it is, indeed, a thin sheen of techno-babble thrown over a standard action movie.

But I think he (and others like him) is missing the point.

No, the bits in your computer are not anthropomorphic.  There is no night club in your CPU.  You don’t have programs going out for drinks after a hard day of computing.  They don’t fall in love, have kids, grow old, or die.  That’s all part of the fantasy of the TRON universe.  Just like lightsabers and Force powers and faster-than-light travel are part of the fantasy of the Star Wars universe.

But we don’t go to a movie like TRON to experience reality as we know it.  We’re going to a movie like TRON to escape from our reality and live in some kind of fantasy for a couple of hours.

So it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to complain that the anthropomorphizing of a computer’s inner workings is inaccurate.

The problem, largely, is that people are too intimately acquainted with technology these days.

When TRON first came out back in the 80′s, computers were just starting to become mainstream.  They were just starting to show up in the classroom or the house.  Most people didn’t have a whole lot of experience with computers.

Worse, they were rather cryptic beasts…  They ran some kind of command-line system, where you had to type out obscure commands to make them do anything.  And they’d do bizarre and unpredictable things if you got the commands wrong.

Most of them also shipped with BASIC installed…  Which meant that if you really knew what you were doing you could sit down at virtually any computer and make it do all kinds of interesting things.

Computers were, in short, mystical.  Magical.  Mysterious.

It wasn’t hard to imagine that the bits inside your computer were going out for drinks after a hard day of computing.  It wasn’t hard to imagine that if you crammed enough computers together you could come up with something like TRON or the MCP or even CLU.  We didn’t know the limits of technology.  It was easy to embrace the fantasy.

These days, however, we know the limits of technology.  Our phones have more processing power than the machines that turned out the graphics for the original TRON, and we’re no closer to walking around The Grid.  There are no gladiatorial battles in our laptops.  No nightclubs in our processors.  Just electrons flying here and there to render a picture on the screen or load an email attachment.

And people seem to be far less willing to embrace any kind of fantasy.

Just look at all the folks who scream “fake!” at every video or picture posted on the web…  Yes, it’s photoshopped…  No, cats cannot talk, even in broken English…  But it’s still funny.  Relax and enjoy the show.

And that seems to be one of the problems with TRON: Legacy.  I’m seeing people complain that computers obviously don’t work that way.  Or that the world of The Grid just doesn’t make sense.

Well, no, they don’t work that way.  And maybe it doesn’t make sense.  But it looks good, and it’s fun to watch.

Relax and enjoy the show.

The holidays are finally over.  Sure, there’s still New Year’s…  But that isn’t the same.  Nobody goes on crazy shopping sprees for New Year’s.  That’s more of a private holiday…  Get together with some friends, go out drinking, party the night away.

We had to go to the grocery store yesterday, and it was wonderful.  Hardly anybody there.  Very easy to get through the store, navigate the aisles, find the stuff we were looking for, pay for it, and get out of there.

The roads weren’t jammed full of traffic either.

It was absolutely wonderful.

I’m so glad that Christmas is over.