Archive for the ‘Computer’ Category

World of Warcraft

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

As some of you may know, I’ve been playing Blizzard’s famous MMO called World of Warcraft since November, 2004, when it first hit the shelves. During the few months before Blizzard finally released the first expansion, named The Burning Crusade, I became burnt out on the game. I had done everything I wanted to in the game, I had played both casually and as a raider, I had several level 60 characters and now I was just limping along until the expansion came out in the hopes that it would add that spark back into the game.

Fast forward to January 16th, the expansion is released by Blizzard. People, including me, wait in line at midnight for it and rush home to see the new content, new races, etc. I play the game whenever I have a moment so that I can experience all of the new stuff that came with the expansion. Unfortunately, after three weeks of playing the expansion, I come to the conclusion that besides the new races, jewel crafting profession, and continent, there really isn’t anything new and original about the game. Flying mounts aren’t really that exciting. The quests are still the same, go gather some items, kill some mobs, deliver an item, escort an NPC, and the list goes on.

After much thought, discussion with the guild I ran, and reviewing my budget I decided to shutdown my account. Due to lack of originality and no new groundbreaking features or advancements, I feel like my money can be better spent elsewhere.

Consolidation

Wednesday, October 4th, 2006

I finally consolidated my browser tabs after Google’s Reader was finally updated a few days ago. Gone is the idea of using Bloglines, hello Google Reader! With its Blogline-like presentation of feeds and its integration of Gmail so Gmail subscribers can quickly email feed articles to others without opening additional email clients, this is an Internet Junkie’s dream.

My current tabs have now been updated and my initial browser window only contains Gmail, Greader, Gcalendar, Google Spreadsheet and Writely (also owned by Google). Does anyone else see a pattern here? I can now perform all of the basic functions of the desktop online through Google’s applications. Has the browser OS (operating system) finally appeared?

My current Firefox Home Page tabs

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

If you’re using the Firefox browser, you already know that you can set the initial web sites that open when a new Firefox window is opened. My list is fairly short compared to most other junkies but here are my Home Page tabs in no particular order:

Google Mail
With +2.5gigs of email space, spam filtering and a great search engine, it is hard to find a better email client on the web. Ads are non-intrusive, text based and, although supposedly related to the email message content, can produce some pretty funny results.

Google Calendar
This junkie attempts to stay organized. A great web based calendar system, Google Calendar allows private and public calendars, individual rights and sharing, reminders and daily agenda emails, sends and tracks invitations and updates and is integrated with Googles other great web applications.

BoingBoing
As their logo states “A Directory of Wonderful Things”. A blog-type site where the editors choose user submitted news to post for their viewers.

Freshnews
A small collection of technology news site rss feeds. I may change to Bloglines in the near future, however I’m a bit undecided at the moment.

Digg
User submitted content that is voted to the front page by the user base digging the the submitted content or the content is buried without enough “diggs”.

Del.icio.us
A social network bookmark collection. The Del.icio.us front page presents recent and most popular bookmarks users are saving. Users also have the ability of storing their bookmarks on the Del.icio.us server, tagging them and searching for other bookmarks via common tags.

Instructables
A great How-To social network site. Users publish instructions on how to make things, can tag their instructions with keywords that are searchable and can be included in related groups.

Make Magazine
An excellent DIY magazine with many great projects. The web site continues the trend with a great blog of even more projects.

Flickr
A photo sharing web site that allows tagging, commenting, groups (public and private) and discussions all for free.

Frappr
A social network that allows the users to blog, upload photos, add friends, create groups and forums, and map friends or members of a group on a map.

YouTube
A video sharing web site, along the same lines of other social networking sites, allows users to upload and share videos, comment on videos, tag videos for similiar searchs, subscribe to user videos, create channels, etc.