whats the plot

i just beat quake4 (played the whole game under linux). fun!

i’ve been dual booting my gentoo box with windows vista 64 for my occasional bouts of gaming… but yesterday, i decided that despite microsoft ending it’s support for xp sometime this year, that i am better off running xp for gaming than vista. so i downgraded vista 64 to xp 32. i think i made this decision after seeing this article on slashdot.

finally, after several years, i beat xenosaga (i ordered it november 19th, 2004 – almost 3 years ago…). i just could never bring myself to finish it (then again, WoW did come out around that time in 2004) until today (finally).

and, while i hadn’t played WoW since 6/15, i’ve reactivated my account. no, not addiction, just boredom, that and some of my work colleagues playing. but hey, what else do you do when you live thousands of miles from family? go figure.

today, during blizzcon, blizzard announced a new WoW expansion, “wrath of the lich king.” i haven’t played WoW in over 1.5 months now (i canceled my account and unsubscribed to wowinsider and other WoW rss feeds so i don’t get tempted, but… i don’t know anymore… :p) hopefully insha’Allah i’ll manage to stay strong :p

blizzard put up the armory for WoW character stats – i like this a lot better than allakhazam because now i don’t manually have to run a tool to update my character stats – plus the interface is much nicer so i updated the links on the side…

that having been said, i haven’t had much of a chance to play in the past month or so… my main is still only 60 :p

oh, and i just added a gaming category to the site too for all these WoW posts

blizzard people are signing copies of burning crusade ~5 miles from my house… so very much tempted to go, but i can’t imagine waiting a day in line to get one of 4500 copies… and besides, if it takes lines from 6 am to get one of 4500 copies, it’ll be so crowded that i can’t imagine it being worth going… then again, it could be nicely ebayable… *shrugs*

my bigger debate is, “to buy it, or not to buy it…”

thanks to a friend from college (thanks dude), i got on the burning crusade beta. i transferred rad over and played some… looks uber promising, albeit rough around the edges, but i guess that’s why they’re not releasing it until mid january… man playing on a pvp server has a totally different feel than playing on an rp server

i am/was kind of surprised to see a whole bunch of random people sitting in front of frys when i went there this morning. at first, because of their dress and appearance, i thought maybe they were homeless people or something sleeping in front of the store. later in the day when i saw the same scene at another store, i realized that these were the people sleeping in front of the store to get their hands on one of the first ps3s…

was pretty amazed to find out that most new intel boards only have 1 ide slot these days… i guess ide is a thing of the past now…

*update* – some interesting articles about this whole ps3 thing. and, the smashing of a ps3 in front of those who waited in line for so long just to get one…

i was looking on ebay, where you can sell your WoW characters for an amount depending on the type of gear and money they have. so glancing at some of the previous auctions, rogues seem to go between $150 and $500, depending on how tweaked they are.

so guestimating rad to get ~$200 (i think that’s a safe guess based on his not-so-uber uberness), and estimating about 34 days of /played time on him, that’s 816 hours for about $200… which is less than a quarter per hour!!! in 1938, that was minimum wage (although that was equivalent of about $3.22 in 2005). but now, minimum wage is about $5.15, which means WoW pays less than 1/20th of the current US minimum wage.

now if we also take into account the $14.99/month fee for playing… then wow…

(source: wikipedia).

today, i closed my WoW account. for good measure, i also deleted my characters before closing the account. this way, i can be sure that i don’t go back. awesome game, but its too addicting and wastes too much time.