Northern Spices bug fixed? Please?

Our server restarts in 10 minutes.

We are in Day 11 of Spicegate. I am still getting an Internal Bag Error when I go to buy Northern Spices.

Why is this a problem, you say? Well, Northern Spices have been unavailable for a while now, and I’m running out. I put in a ticket on Sunday, and I received a response on Wednesday, explaining that it was a known issue, and they were working on fixing it.

In the meantime, I’m blowing through Blackened Dragonfin on both my hunter (yes I use food buffs in the Icecrown dungeons) and my druid (yes I try to use a food buff in BGs, because I’m trying to make up for lack of skill with overall power). I am down to 27 spices, I use about 20 per day, and I get about six per day from daily cooking quests on my two cooks.

They’re going to run out soon… and they’re going for five gold apiece on the AH.

Here’s hoping that this restart will contain my long-awaited fix!

* * * * *

9:15 am update: Nope, it’s still not fixed.

…

WordPress wierdness…

Sometimes, WordPress does things that I don’t understand at all.

I posted my Being reasonable about heirlooms article last night, and everything was fine. I was even able to look it over in Google Reader. However, when I happened to look at the blog itself just now for an unrelated reason, the post was blank.

I’m not sure why it happened – but it did. Sometimes WordPress does weird things with my articles – this issue doesn’t stand alone. The biggest problems that I have with it are:

1. Sometimes I try to save a draft and WordPress hangs. I end up having to log out, restart Safari, restore an old save and then try to remember the revisions that I had made – and sometimes there are a lot of them. Lesson learned: use a word processor and copy the post into WordPress when it’s done.
2. Some of the formatting tools are just amazingly bad. There are no specific font parameters or numerical options for text size on the interface, and I guess that is what comes with the free WordPress toolkit. However, what really takes the cake about all of this is that sometimes it auto-formats, giving certain paragraphs bigger text than others. If I don’t preview it before I publish, I end up with a post that looks like I love using variable font sizes, which is not true! Fortunately, there is a “Remove Format” button which makes the text look even. Unfortunately, using that button removes all of my other formatting, including bold/ italics/ different colors, and I have to go through and re-do all of that before I post. Lesson learned: use a word processor, do all of your formatting in red, and then when the post is copied, “unformatted” and ready to go in WordPress, manually copy the formatting over from the word processor version… I dunno, seems like a lot of unnecessary work just to deal with a buggy interface.

Or who knows… maybe I’m the only person in the world who experiences this.

Anyway, fortunately, I was able to restore that post from an earlier save. I think everything is fine with it, but I’m not reading the whole thing over at this moment. It’s time for bed.

My apologies to anyone who attempted to read it over the last several hours and was greeted with that blank page. I’m really sorry, and kind of embarrassed.

A 4-day stretch I’m not looking forward to

/sigh

Yeah. It’s going to be very uncomfortable.

Something fishy about this site

This morning, I was using the WordPress Tag Surfer when I came across this page. The language is pretty ridiculous. It looks… fishy. However, the site had no links, other than to its one and only post.

This is the site's front page

Here is a larger screenshot of the text portion (feel free to click for a larger pic if this is still not legible on your screen):

Look familiar, WoW players?

I don’t really need to comment any further about this, do I? I mean, it seems strange that this is not an email or in-game mail, and does not direct anyone to a website to put in an account password. I just found myself incredulous when I read it – there seems to be no purpose to it. I did report it to WordPress as spam, though. First time for everything.

I’m putting a humor tag on this post, even though I was shaking my head at it more than I was laughing.

Photos from the first half of June

I haven’t posted many photos recently, so I figured I had better get in gear, empty my camera onto the computer, and see what I had.

I haven’t taken as many pictures as I would have liked. I have this habit of forgetting to take my camera with me when I walk sometimes. However, I did find a few beautiful (or interesting) pictures from the past couple of weeks.

Please click photos to see full-size versions.

* * * * *

The first two are from June 7th, when I decided to walk around the west end of town for a bit.

On Chestnut St.

Flower box

* * * * *

The next photo was taken during my walk to Central Market last Friday (June 11th).

Soldiers and Sailors Monument, Penn Square, Lancaster

Information on the Soldiers and Sailors monument can be found here.

* * * * *

There is a lot of construction going on in Lancaster right now, and on that same walk, I came across this door. It made me grin… you can see the construction workers coming down the stairs to thrash me for being a brat!

Eh... there's probably nothing of value in there anyway.

* * * * *

Finally, here is a picture of my view from the back porch today. After a couple of hazy days, today has been beautiful, with low humidity, a nice breeze, and temperatures in the mid 70s. I took this photo, and then I did about two hours of yard work.

A beautiful blue sky!

Recent links of interest

My personal output has been even lighter than usual over the past week. The main reason for this is that I am working on a long post about politics, and I’m struggling with wrapping it up. I need to write a conclusion, and I also need to think carefully about the cohesiveness of the piece before I post it, because I have a tendency to be less than concise when I write. So, there’s plenty of revision still to go with that one…

On Wednesday I made a day trip to visit with my brother and his family. It was a fun, crazy day, the only way it can be when 2-year-old twins (and a 6-month-old infant who’s teething and crawling) are involved!

I’ve also been reading a lot. Books. Yeah.

Meanwhile, here are a few highlights from the posts I’ve read over the past week or two.

Click here to read Krist Novoselic's May 4th post, "Analog Music & Cars in the Digital Age"

• Nirvana bassist / political activist Krist Novoselic has a blog on Seattle Weekly’s Reverb, where he posts twice a week on music and political issues. An avid lover of vinyl, he reviewed the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street [Super Deluxe Edition] last Friday, and yesterday he reminisced about Shocking Blue, a classic but under-appreciated band from Holland whose “Love Buzz” Nirvana recorded for their first 7″ single. Krist is an affable and very intelligent guy who absolutely loves music, and his posts are a lot of fun to read.
• John (BBB) posted a humorous idea regarding the return of CC in Cataclysm, and ReversionLFM of Looking For More made it come to life!
• Andrew of Systemic Babble wrote a great rebuttal to an article on Gamesbrief by Nicholas Lovell, who stated that Steam’s “monopoly” on PC downloads would be the downfall of the PC game industry. The discussion in the comments is very interesting as well. Additionally, he recently posted a wonderful link to The Scale of the Universe, and Friday’s post regarding the most recent developments involving Israel really resonated with me.
• Jacemora, Druid of the Moon, followed up on the idea of using a Mangle-spam rotation. Mangle vs Shred seemed to be a popular question when the changes to Mangle and the Glyph of Mangle went live with Patch 3.3.3. Many ferals, myself included, seemed to feel at the time that Shred and its positional requirement were still the best option for high damage. His verdict: Shred is indeed the way to go.
• Gordon at We Fly Spitfires wrote an immensely popular (and very funny) post this week entitled MMO or Baby? He also has a review of the WoW Remote Auction House beta, and since he posts almost every day, there’s plenty of other good stuff to check out.
• In Wednesday’s Tree of Life post, Keredria talks about Christian guilds, and mentions that she may post more on religion in WoW in the future. I hope she does, because her post was entertaining and informative.
• Finally, Dr. Tom Bibey wrote about his favorite bookstores in a manner that made me immediately want to go book and music shopping at mom-and-pop stores… again… yes, I have a problem!

Enjoy! Hopefully I’ll finish the piece I mentioned above sooner than later… or some other legit post, at least.

Random linkage, new Gravatar

New Gravatar photo

Here are some links from the past week or so that have given me food for thought:

• John, the Big Bear Butt himself, posted a massive list of book recommendations on May 14th, and it has literally (um, no pun intended?) flipped my mental “to-read” list upside down. While I’m still working on finishing up a few books myself, I’ve found myself wondering what I’m going to read down the road, other than a few suggestions from friends. This post just opened up a can of whoop-ass on my feeble reading goals. My old guild master, Secure, has been recommending the Wheel of Time series for as long as I’ve known him, and this list just made that bug in my ear buzz a little louder… Book recommendations are never bad, as far as I’m concerned!
• Kara at Vomi Mot wrote a couple of days ago about Dungeons & Dragons and Christianity. Her article is a reaction to an article by William Schnoebelen of chick.com, in which he details his experiences with D&D, along with his road through witchcraft, satanism, and finally to Christianity. While I don’t have any opinions that I feel qualified to express here, I found her response to be well thought-out.
• My friend Greg at parkinthepark has some commentary and information on Voltage Pictures’ massive lawsuit against tens of thousands of people who pirated “The Hurt Locker” online. He also sent me a link to an article on the subject by Peter Serafinowicz at Gizmodo entitled “Why I Steal Movies… Even Ones I’m In.” This is a compelling battle to watch; as fast as technology and the behaviors of users evolve (and as much as producers and publishers of various media attempt to keep up), the collective business model is adapting with an alarming lack of swiftness. Check the links for more info.
• Gordon at We Fly Spitfires has posted several items that intrigue me (doesn’t he always? LOL!). On the 14th, he posted about his new toon he created, with backstory, for Age of Conan. The next day, his topic was Should I Purchase The Half-Price LotRO Lifetime Subscription? If I had a PC, I’d be tempted myself… May 17th brought an article about racism in MMOs, and yesterday’s post concerned the subject of the death of role-playing in MMOs.
• Andrew at Systemic Babble posted a link to an Impressive 3D Optical Illusion, as well as an article about a new measure proposed in Canada’s House of Commons by Liberal MP Keith Martin that would see Canada’s government encouraging parents to prevent their children from watching TV or playing video games one night per week.
• Larísa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn has an interesting idea: what if we all stopped blogging (and reading blogs) about World of Warcraft until Cataclysm is released? She also posted today about resistance to the concept that Blizzard is a business, while Tobold has a response to Larísa’s blogging proposal.
• Keredria at Tree of Life posted an educational article on Government Structures in WoW, based on information from wowwiki. Honestly, I’m ashamed to admit that this is a subject I had really never spent much time thinking about, but some of the governments they list for certain zones are fascinating.
• Finally, Ronnie James Dio died on Sunday morning of stomach cancer. The legendary vocalist was an inspiration and hero to several generations of rock and metal musicians, and his recordings with Rainbow, Black Sabbath, Dio, and Heaven and Hell are some of the most revered and respected of all time. You can google his name and find tons of information about him, but for a long list of remembrances and tributes, check out blabbermouth.net (links to their search results for “Dio”).

There it is: I’ve laid bare some of my internet/blog-reading interests for the past week… Now maybe I can go work on a real blog post of my own at some point today!

Amusing observations from our Lich King kill

A few random, amusing, non-helpful thoughts about our Lich King kill a couple of days ago…

1. This fight has so much going on that the timers are more active than any other encounter, to my knowledge. I ended up making my window smaller for the fight so that I could keep better track of when things were about to happen without giving my eyeballs whiplash (a 27″ screen has that effect sometimes!)…

As a result, because I did not have the presence of mind to re-enlarge the window after we “died,” all of my screenshots (the achievement on kill, the class portraits, etc) are of poorer quality than usual due to the condensed resolution of the smaller window.

/slaps himself across the face. Ouch!

2. I played like crap. Well, I feel like I did anyway. My damage was where I expected it to be… However, I left a Defile close to the middle of the platform on one of our attempts. I forgot to drop the plague on a Shambling Horror once, and instead gave it to Somb, who had to go drop it off instead. But the biggest screw-ups were when attempting to kill Valkyr. There were a few times where the Valkyr made it almost too far, and I accidentally chased them to the edge and beyond. Twice. Yes, that’s right – I slipped off the edge of the platform twice while trying to kill Valkyr.

/slaps himself across the face. Ouch!

3. For some reason, I have a hellish time finding the druid-friendly positional requirement on the Valkyr. I’m either too far behind, or I’m too far underneath. Cabrona, bless his heart, keeps asking me if I’m using max camera distance, or if I’m using the top-down view… And I’m thinking, “Yes! For crying out loud, I’m using everything I can think of!” I’ve tried max camera, medium camera, top-down, 60° angle, 45° angle, and slight variations on those. Ideally, I would use Feral Charge, but we’re usually too close together when the Valkyr comes down to grab someone, and I’m not interested in making myself an inviting target by setting up eight yards away from the group.

I end up doing ok, because I can still Mangle/Rake/Maim, and being able to get 5 CP for the stun is important. I just wish I could get that positional part down so that I could Shred, but… well, there will be more attempts.

4. A couple of us got Harvest Soul during Phase 3 – I was not one of them – and on the successful attempt, when Somb did it, he commented in Vent, “dude, this is cool as shit!” It was a moment of great levity as the realization that we were getting very close to our goal was dawning on us.

As I said, just some random thoughts from our adventure.

Metallica goes Jazz

A funny video, perfect for today

Away for a few days

Yesterday, I drove up to New York state to visit with family, and I’ll be gone for about four days total. I imagine that posting will not be a priority, as there are babies involved.

However, I do have a few topics that I am working on, and some or all of them may see the light of day soon. These may include:

• Anacrusa: Argent Champion and Guardian of Cenarius progress
• I’m doing more PvP, and it has been interesting…
• Thoughts on the use of strategy guides
• Another update on Mydnas the resto/boomkin
• Screenshots of upgraded gear

There may be more, but I can’t really remember anything at the moment – I just woke up and I’m typing on a computer that’s foreign to me, so forgive me. I won’t be playing any games except for Bookworm, which I brought for my DSi, but that’s alright - it’s good to finally take some time to spend with my family.