I saw an ad for Werthers Original, available in traditional Hard and new Chewy.
Wouldn’t the chewy one not be original…?
May 2006
Monthly Archive
I learned something last friday, and I learnt it from some juvenile delinquents.
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Well, it’s been a bit over a month since I first got World of Warcraft, but almost exactly a month since I first finished downloading the updates and started playing. So, what’s to know?
In one month, I clocked up around 7 days of play time. That is, over 170 hours. In a month that only had 30 days, that’s almost 25% of the past month I have spent in WoW.
My main character, the Night Elf Druid, is now up to Level 39. I haven’t decided which specialty I will move towards: Feral looks the most fun, but Moonkin (Nature spec) form looks kinda nice too. The next big thing is the mount I can purchase at Level 40. I think the 150-odd gold I have saved up should cover it. Although upgrading spells is starting to become rather expensive too, at around 8 gold for the last batch.
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I ran out of Espresso Grind coffee last week, and, not having enough money to buy anymore, went without until the cashflow had fined up a bit. Rather than drink the posh that passes for instant coffee, I went without. And it was horrific. I didn’t really realize how badly I need a coffee in the mornings until I actually had my first coffee in some time this morning. And immediately I felt better.
So, it seems I am totally addicted to bass, um, coffee. Caffeine is something that is quite unusual in my body: I can have a coffee right before bed and yet drop right off immediately, but if I go without in the mornings, I am my normal, grumpy self. It’s not until I have the drop of Java that I become a shadow of a respectable person.
Anyway, whilst the cashflow is still looking shaky, it turned out I had enough on my Hudson’s card to grab a bag of freshly ground good stuff. And I’m sure my students will thank me.
Wed 24th May 2006
What happens when the Realms are down
Posted in the wee hours, filed under World of Warcraft.Scheduled downtime tonight on my WoW server - so rather than do anything else, I created a spreadsheet showing costs and potential profits for various items my characters can make. So now, I know the lowest price I can sell stuff for, and what items are the most profitable. And, it’s not always the more expensive items that are, percentage-wise, the most profitable. But, you do need to make and sell less of them. Which means you aren’t relying on 100 people to all be wanting a particular item, just maybe one or two.
However, it has given me a lot of ideas about where to spend time in terms of manufacturing ocer the next little while.
And, I’m not making this data available, for a couple of very good reasons. I worked very hard to input the data, and I don’t want anyone knowing what my profit margins are like, and undercutting me, or anything like that…
Someone told me today when I mentioned I had seen this film that this title is what they know James Bond as. Because, that’s what he does. Kiss, Kiss; Bang, Bang. Even with the colloquial meaning of Bang here in Australia, that’s still somewhat true.
This film nearly lost me in the opening sequences. Sure, the young magician act was magnificent, and well done, but the party was poor. It was almost like the pre-screening audiences had totally missed all of the salient points, and there was a percieved need to bring in a narrator to bring everyone up to scratch. And if it can’t be done subtly then they took the easy way out: stopping the film mid-frame, and having the narrator talk over the top. Cheap.
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…that’s Dreamz with a Z.
I went into this film with an idea in my head as to what it would be about. There has been a significant amount of advertising, and, to be honest, it looked good. With not being a real fan of the Pop Idol-type shows, but knowing more than enough about them to understand even the most in-jokes, I felt I was fully prepared for whatever the movie threw at me.
I was surprised. Whilst the film was poking fun at the popularity contests that are the current crop of New Talent shows, it went far deeper than this into it’s satire of American family and political life.
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I have my own domain name, schinckel.net, which is registered with MyDomain.com, and has several sub-domains, which are mainly shortcuts to other sites I manage. Including this one.
I also use their email forwarding service, and have it forwarded to my Gmail account. Which is pretty good, but occasionally they have a glitch, and email doesn’t get through, or is delivered late - in some cases up to a week late.
This is usually not a big issue for me, as most of my email contact is not urgent (I tend not to use it for business or work purposes), however for my partner it is a real issue. Having a reliable MX server is important for her.
I’ve also recently been accepted into the Gmail for Domains programme beta, and am going through the process of setting this up. I won’t create a tutorial - if you don’t know enough about how to do this, I’m not going to try to help you out for free, but I will detail some of the issues I have come across.
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Well, my character in World of Warcraft has made it to Level 30. Last night, after a massive 9 hour session, I finally got there.
It’s funny, but I think I’m spending more time in Azeroth than at my job…
We’ve recently gotten a heap of new iMacs (the intel ones), and I’ve been helping the IT guys set them up - including things like cloning the partitions from one machine to the rest.
We did come across an issue where the cloning seemed to fail - the way we solved this was to format the drive first. I think it was a permissions issue: because the files were write-protected, Carbon Copy Cloner failed to overwrite the settings. Which meant that they booted up looking the same, although all of the new applications were installed.
The other problem we had is that the Proxy Server settings needed to be changed. The new machines were fine - the settings were made before the cloning occurred, but the old machines still had an invalid setting.
I tried using AppleScript, but since the only way to do this is with UI scripting, which is notoriously hard to do right, and tends to break when applications are updated, or even just recompiled.
Finally, it twigged that I could just copy the preferences file from one machine to the rest. Because the file is protected, you will need Administrator rights, and you may need to move the original file out of the way first, via the Terminal.
You could also do this using ssh, which would mean that the other machines wouldn’t even need to be logged in.
And the file in question is:
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/network.plist
or something similar. I’m not at a Mac to be able to check right now.