Palegoldenrod

Athletes extol sensation of ‘iron calm’ at the limit – Japan Times 19-Nov-2006

OK, so you’ve got your characters and you’re playing every day, maybe even all day for those of you lucky enough to have that sort of free time. Your family think you’ve turned into a troll and are intent on living permanently at your computer. Your friends think you’ve been on vacation for the last six months because they haven’t seen you. The What can you do?

Here are a few strategies to help you keep your gaming to a reasonable level.

Do your other stuff FIRST!

One habit I have is that I have a list of things I need to do in an afternoon and I’ll decide to jump on WoW first “just to check my mail and auctions and say hi to my guildies”. Don’t do it. It doesn’t work. You will always get distracted and end up on some quest, or chatting, or running around trying to find another rare herb to sell on the auction because the price is way, way up.

Do your real life tasks first, go for that walk, do some gardening. WoW can wait until night time when the light of day isn’t around to enjoy. You won’t regret this.

Set time limits

Plan and decide you are only going to play. Maybe you’ll say “I’ll only play on Tuesday nights from 6-midnight and Sunday nights from 4-midnight”. Now for those of you that are heavy players, you’re thinking “OMG thats so not enough time” and those of you that don’t play will be exclaiming at the 12 hours of play a week that is planned. The reality of it is that it is actually not that heavy a schedule, and gives plenty of weekend and in-week time for non-gaming. You need to stick to your schedule! Maybe your family can help?

Use pre-paid cards

If you want to indulge and play all the time for a little while, get a prepaid card instead of subscribing. Play like a madman for three months – and then the time will end. Take a break at that point. Take a month or two off. Go outside.

Sign up and cancel your subscription straight away (so you only get a month of play)

Let your payment clear on your monthly subscription, then cancel your subscription. This way you have paid play for a month and then your account will lock. Remember, your characters, quests, gold etc is always saved so you can buy another month at any time in the future and pick up where you left off.

Socialise with gaming buddies out of the game

My gaming buddies, The Older Gamers cover many games and have an extensive and active set of forums. These are really great guys, and they catch up in real life as often as they can. If you love your guildies, socialise with them in other ways – in real life if you’re able, or emails, facebook, etc. Get to know each other outside of the game. That way when you take a break from the game you can still hang out with your friends.

Be aware of your partner, friends or family

Listen to your partner, friends or family. Ask them about your time spent gaming and don’t just listen to what they say, but how they say it as well. They are a really good indicator of whether you are playing too much. Take their advice, or you might just lose them. And if that happens, who will cook dinner for you when you are doing Kara?

Many of my friends are ex-WoWers, who are great for helping to keep my game time down. They diss me every time I mention WoW, and keep asking me how much time I have spent on it in the last week – sometimes I am ashamed of the number I mumble, and get an emphatic invitation to “Rejoin RL! L.O.L” but usually they tell me “that’s not too bad, go about your business”.

Cancel your account for good

I am planning to travel early next year and even though I could play for a little while yet, I have cancelled my account because I know I have a lot to do in the next 6 weeks and I can’t afford the distraction. I know that I can add another month on if I decide I want to play while I am travelling, but I probably won’t. Don’t be afraid to just cancel the account – you will probably enjoy the real world a lot and not want to go back

These terms are abbreviations or acronyms used in game for common phrases. They might be a bit confusing to begin with, but once you get used to them they are a handy means of quickly finding (or ignoring some of what is said in the local or trade channels.

PST – Please Send Tell

OK, this is one carried over from old skool. A “tell” is a “whisper”, e.g. /whisper, /w, /tell, /t are all the same.

LFG – Looking for Group

When you are alone and looking for a group to join (or looking to form a new group) try the Looking for Group function built into the game – this allows you to search for a group for a dungeon or a group quest (some quests recommend you take a group to complete them). I’ll talk more about this function in another post. If you have no luck there, or if you are just looking for a group for any old quest (not a dungeon or group quest) then throw out an LFG into the local chat.

The usual format is something like: LFG Dar’Khan’s Lieutenants

If someone has room for you (or someone else is also looking for a group) then they’ll either respond in the local channel or whisper you. If you’r prefer them to whisper you, tack a PST on the end, e.g. LFG Lost In Battle PST

LFM – Looking for More

If you have a few people together in a group but not enough for the quest you want to do, always use the Looking for Group function built into the game – this will automatically locate and add people to your group, ensuring they want to do the quest or dungeon you are aiming for. If this doesn’t work, you can always throw an LFM out into the local chat.

The usual format is something like: LFM Dar’Khan’s Lieutenants, or LF2M Dar’Khan’s Leiutenants (meaning you are looking for two more for the group). You might even want to indicat you are looking for a healer in particular, for example LF Healer Dar’Khan’s Lieutenants.

Make sense?

G2G or GTG – Good to Go

This is indicating that you are ready to begin whatever it is that you have planned. For example, if you say “LF Healer Dar’Khan’s Lieutenats then G2G” that means that the rest of the group is at the quest starting point and ready to begin, they just need a healer.

Don’t indicate you are G2G if you still need other people or if any members of your team still have things to do – they should all have already stocked up on any equipment/potions they need, their equipment should be repaired etc and they should either be at an area near the start of the quest (e.g. the summon stone near the dungeon) or on their way to it. If you indicate G2G and someone joins your group only to be kept waiting, odds are you are going to make them pretty pissed and they’ll leave and maybe even diss you to others (making it harder to find that healer you were after).

You may also use this if your party is waiting on you to do something (e.g. mana up, or apply enchants or pots or buffs etc). You can just tell your party “G2G” to indicate that you’ve finished up and are ready to get going.

WTS – Want to Sell

If you have an item you want to sell, jump on the trade channel and say “WTS “. Now the trick to making your item name clickable is this: rather than typing in the name of your item, type WTS and then hold down shift and click your item. The name of the item will appear in the line you are typing, and when you press enter, the line you just spoke will include a clickable link to the item details. This is called Hot Linking, and you absolutely must do this if you are selling something on the trade channel.

WTS and hot linking lets buyers quicly scan for items in the trade channel rather than having to dig through long “hey guys I want to sell this really good sword and here are its details”. That can take time and your spiel might be missed in the fast pace that is the trade channel. Be brief – use WTS and hot linking.

If you know roughly what price you want, you might say “WTS [Mug O' Hurt] 50g ono PST” which means – “Want to sell Mug O’ Hurt for 50 gold or the nearest offer, please whisper me if you would like to discuss”

WTB – Want to Buy

This is the buying side of the WTS. If you want to buy an item, use “WTB ” in the trade channel. Now because you probably don’t have the item you may not be able to hot link it. I think you might be able to if you find the item in the auction house – you can shift click it in the auction window and the hot link will appear in the chat you are typing.

Again, if you have an idea of the amount you want to spend, you might say “WTB [Mug O' Hurt] 50g PST” which means “I want to buy a Mug O’ Hurt for 50g, please whisper me to discuss”.

So there you have it. Hopefully some explanation of a few useful abbreviations and acronyms in World of Warcraft. Yay!

Those of you who know me (or used to know me) would have at some point become sick of me banging on about going overseas. I’ve been talking about it … well, forever I think, and especially wistfully since the start of this year. It is finally happening.

I’ve sorted the big preparatory things – giving work the heads up, preparing my house to be rented, rough travel plans. And early next year I am off to South America.

So the idea is to take the opportunity to leave as many things behind as possible (literally and figuratively) and travel with nothing – I don’t speak any other languages, I know one person in Chile (my cousin Dane) and I will probably be traveing alone, and I’ll have nothing but my backpack and my fiddle.

Let’s just say its been a long time coming and I’m keen to get going.

I’ve yet to organise the little things: my vaccinations (uurgh); there are some renovations that need to be completed on my house; turfing or selling the useless stuff in my house and storing those things that have sentimental value (surprisingly little I’m happy to say); buying that Round the World plane ticket (to be done when I have someone settled into the house).

I’ll keep you posted on the details as things start to become more concrete.

To make you jealous, here are some flickr pics of some places I hope to be standing in next year:

Welcome to the new Palegoldenrod!

Its a different looking site on a different host with different technologies. Here is some info about the site – which technologies it uses, where it is hosted, why I made these changes etc.

Technology

Palegoldenrod is running on Ruby on Rails, driven by MySQL.

Blog Engine – Mephisto

Mephisto is a open source blog engine project written in Ruby on Rails. Even though it is fairly young, it is very stable and gets straight into the heart of it – this has contributed to its popularity. Head over to the Mephisto site if you’d like to help contribute to this cool project.

Site Design – Zenlike by NodeThirtyThree Design

Site design, via OSWD, from Node Thirty Three Design. Some modifications had to be made to better suit both my use of the site and also Mephisto, but hopefully I have remained true to the original design.

When I get a bit more organised (stop laughing) I’ll try and release the theme for Mephisto.

Hosting

This site is proudly hosted by Dreamhost. I highly recommend Dreamhost for non-Windows hosting – I can’t say enough good things about them. Click the graphic below if you’d like to help cover my hosting costs.

What was wrong with the old site?

Well, a few things. Firstly I was bored with the old theme. Secondy the site was in .NET. While this was handy for modifications (I work with .NET often), the host was cheap and nasty and I had repeated service problems with them. I have also wanted to learn more RoR for ages now, and I see this as my opportunity.

The old site was run by SubText, an Open Source .NET blogging engine – it was great. It did the job well. SubText in no way contributed to my change of heart.

The other problem is the cost of Windows hosting. I can have unlimited domains, databases etc on Dreamhost for about $10 a month for reliable service and some cool features. I think the closest I can get to that in Windows is a VPS which has little memory (no good for our memory hungry .NET, d’oh) and for (at the moment) around $20 a month minimum. Hmmm.. not great for someone who just wants to tinker.

And for those of you who are suggesting that I host it on my own machine at home, thats not really feasible when I want to queue up some torrents / reboot my machine / play games on it etc

I’d like to try Mono, but I don’t think we can install it on Dreamhost as the mod_mono package requires a constantly running process which violates DH terms of use. Maybe they will set it up for us soon – that would be awethome. In the meantime, if you know of any .NET hosts that allow several .NET sites, several databases (even if its just SQL2005 Express) at a reasonable price, leave your comment below

Western Australian man wins World Santa Claus Championship – News.com.au 27-Nov-2007

Shaun Micallef has returned to our screens in Newstopia on SBS – I caught it for the first time last night. Its great to see him with a show again – he is a comedy god among men.

Last night’s episode wasn’t bad – “Bhutto – the B is silent but she is not”; “John Howard – he’s tough on drugs, but whats he like off them?” . A secret treasure was the collection fake ads strewn between the real ones. Even more so because some of the satirical ones were sending up the real ones that had aired shortly beforehand, hehehe. Some were very well done: “Fanta – thank you Hitler”; “Inspector Herring”, russian cop who is an actual fish, working undercover – “Hey, whats that microphone near his dorsal fin?! He’s wearing a wire!”.

If you missed last night’s episode, it turns out that SBS is providing streamed video of the entire Newstopia episode for seven days. This looks like it is a regular event – each episode is available for seven days after it screens, but isn’t downloadable (d’oh). Still, its pretty nice of them. Although if you believe Shaun, SBS will take your details, provide them to the Chinese government and you will be taken for a long stay in prison because “that’s just the sort of service SBS provides”

Enjoy.

I don’t intend to encourage you to vote for a particular party, or want to know who you vote for, or even want to tell you who I vote for. But I’d like to make two points, and offer you more information.

Voting for Small Parties

Don’t consider a vote for a small party to be a lost vote. Even though that small party may not have a chance to win a seat in government, even though your vote will end up falling back on preferences (either yours or theirs, depending what you provide on the ballot) the initial count can help to indicate the populations opinion on certain high profile matters of policy etc. You may not be able to vote in someone other than Labor or Liberal (well, its unlikely) but you can send a message. Please bear this in mind.

In addition, election funding is available to parties that receive more than 4% of the initial first preference vote. This can be a useful tool for smaller parties to continue to operate and lobby for changes in your community and in government policy.

Specifying Preferences

On the Senate Ballot, you can choose to put a 1 above the line, indicating your preference of party. If that party gets knocked out, then the party decides where your preference will go. You can, however, choose to number every single box below the line. Most Aussies probably conisder that to be too much work. I’d suggest that taking 15 minutes once every 3 or 4 years is probably not too much work at all, and that it may result in a government that you are happier with. The section below provides resources to find out more about the candidates so you can even plan your numbering before you walk in there on the day – you can get out of there much quicker and be able to place all those numbers in boxes more confidently. Its your choice.

Being Informed

I realised that I don’t know all of the parties that are available for me to vote for, and I wondered why they didn’t distribute the ballot paper for review prior to the election. How else do I know who I can research or ask questions of? Well, they sort of do. You can review the entire candidate listing (and gain access to contact information for candidates) from the website of the Australian Electoral Commission.

Resources

• Candidate / ballot listing
• List of political parties
• Where to vote

Note: some parties may not have registered in time to be officially listed e.g. I know some friends who will find candidates for the Secular Party listed on the Senate Ballot, but not mention of the Secular Party specifically. If you are looking for a particular party and can’t find them you are best to check out their website to confirm their candidates.

The Problem

Scenario: You have an ASP.NET 2.0 website in IIS 6.0 that receives both http and http requests. Some people might link to the https versions of the page, but you really want Google (and other search engines) to only crawl http versions. There are relative links in the site, so you know that as soon as Google crawls one https link it is going to pick up the whole site. So as well as https links in the Google search results, you may also now have to contend with lower rankings because Google thinks there is duplicate content on the site (it sees the page in both http and https format).

You can see that Google recommends that you have a different robots.txt file for http and https, so that Google knows not to crawl the https version of your site. But how can you get IIS to serve up different versions of robots.txt?

The rest of this article is available at KleeneCode.net, where Amos and I are now posting all of our tech posts. You can read the remainder of this article here

Hey, this sounds pretty cool

Infoworld: World of Warcraft, meet Visual Studio