Banking attire is very important

I've heard others talk about how they dress their mules in special outfits and thought this adds a bit of fun to that poor overworked toon. In my case a female dwarf paladin who never saw beyond level four. Fittingly for a dwarf she hasn't seen daylight outside of Ironforge in months. I started playing her in the early days of my WoW career when a friend had just started and also rolled a paladin. Myself and another friend thought we'd help him along with some companionship. However the two guys soon outstripped me in levelling and I found Dwarfs altogether too short and slow after playing a Night Elf hunter and returned swiftly to my beloved Jezrael.

Recently an enterprising individual was advertising over trade chat all of the items they had for sale including a COD delivery service. They were using a clever mod that allowed you to query different items. I promptly ordered up an outfit to dress my dwarfikins in, I present to you Serenla, Dwarven banker.
As you can see I've added rounded corners to this image. Inspired by a recent post from Aurik of /hug I decided I really wanted to learn how to treat images in this way as I think it looks really attractive. When I have a moment I'm also going to look into getting the model viewer and using masks so that I can present images within posts in the attractive way that Aurik and others do, but for a Photoshop noob like myself I was pretty excited to work out how to do rounded corners heh!

What have YOU read response

Mr Kestrel over at the Aerie has a list up responding to a question picked up by JustOneAnna of the books listed in the National Education Associations top 100. The idea is to

• Look at the list and bold those we have read.
• Italicize those we intend to read.
• Underline the books we LOVE
  

So here's my list:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (abriged)

The only reason I've read a lot of these is because I studied English Lit and University. Only four books on there rate as loved. I'm not really a fan of 'canon' literature. It's good to see a lot of modern authors on the list though.

I WoW in RL

Last Friday night Em and I got to meet up with our guild raid main tank and RL friend Mogri. We hadn't caught up in person with him since back in December so we were excited to catch up for a few beers and yes, you guessed it, a lot of in person WoW talk.

We arrived at the airport to discover his flight was delayed, gah! So to pass the time we got creative *grin*. You know how you'll see those chauffeur dudes with the signs with people's names on them waiting at the arrival point? Well we borrowed some paper and a text from the currency exchange lady and made our own sign for Em to hold standing with the group of dudes (he was wearing a suit so he fit right in). Mogri got a good laugh coming down the escalator to see Em standing there holding a sign saying 'LF1M TANK'.

Hehe

We then all went into the city to a pub and proceeded to have several drinks and lots of game talk. I was the responsible one who was driving so I didn't get shickered like Em and Mogri, but that meant I got to remind them both of the silly drunken things that were said the following Monday night on vent. Meeting up in RL with guildies is great fun. I hope I one day get to meet more of them. We're planning a trip to visit Mogri in Melbourne soon and our sneaky rogue friend Chia is coming along too so that's something we're looking forward to. And I won't be driving this time! Woohoo! Knock one back for a Drunken Badgers RL meet up, even if it's only four of us heh.

Radio Silence

So it's been pretty quiet on the western front of late. The reason for this is that I've unfortunately been pretty ill with a nasty nasty strain of gastro. It was so bad that I couldn't even face gaming for days. Yep, you know you've gotta be pretty sick when you're a gamer and the idea of even logging in makes you turn pale. Thankfully I'm now feeling much better and raring to go, which means back to work and also time to start researching ready for the DB raids first visit to Mt. Hyjal this weekend. Well assuming we get enough people signed up since it's the fourth of July weekend for those crazy Americans. I'm just glad to be feeling human again and enthused about going back to work and getting back into gaming!

Is where I level my geek-fu

Amongst the things that I love are my computer (not in an unhealthy way thanks!) and the internets. When I manage to learn something new in regards to both that makes me happy. I like learning new things period so learning something new about stuff I'm really interested in is a bonus.

I've mentioned in another post that I have been experiencing some nasty frame rate issues in 25 man raids and I'd been looking into updating my PC. I had the plan in train when Emelin's PC decided to die a nasty motherboard failure kind of death. I swear it was a plot since it meant that Emelin's PC got rebuilt and I had to spend the weekend listening to him drooling over the awesome smoothness and beautiful appearance of the game with everything cranked up whilst I dealt with staring at the floor during the Tidewalker fight with every setting down to try and deal some decent DPS.

You can be certain that Monday morning I immediately proceeded to arrange the upgrade of my PC! I am lucky enough to work in an industry where I can get my hands on hardware at a cheaper cost than retail and prevail on an awesome helpful workmate to help me rebuild my PC. I opted for an Intel Core2 Quad CPU, gigabyte motherboard with both DDR2 and DDR3 slots (for future upgradability) and 4 x 1gig sticks of DDR2 RAM. I'd recently bought a new Gigabyte nVidia GeForce 9600 GT card so I naturally hung onto this. My mate installed the hardware for me and in an absolutely unheard of unbelievable act of god was able to reboot into Windows afterward - so no reformatting/reinstall needed. Crazy! There was one small hitch however - I didn't have a spare IDE cable for my DVD burner - solution grab a new SATA one. This is where my opportunity to improve my geek-fu came in as it was the end of the day and I was to pick the burner up on my way home and install it myself and then install the motherboard drivers.

Computers are generally like cars for me - I know how to drive them, I know how to maintain them but I'm not down with the stuff 'under the hood'. For me this was the equivalent of learning how to do an oil change - not rocket science but not something I was familiar with. So now I know the difference between IDE and SATA cables and would feel comfortable installing something like this again. Yay me! I can also happily report that after a few bumps I got my baby up and running again and was able to log into WoW, crank all the settings and enjoy frame rates of around 90 in Shatt. Of course the real test will be this weekend in TK. Fingers crossed!

Can I just say that, although I will always consider game mechanics more important than shiny graphics in a game, warcraft looks really gorgeous when you can see all the nice graphical touches. Yay! Shiny!

The other area where I was able to level my geek-fu was with a little CSS. I think I've mentioned before that I work with a bunch of web-designers and that, plus having my own blog, is causing a little design-fu to rub off on me which is great. I was able to use this power for the good by helping Grizz with some small formatting changes on his wordpress blog. All hail the power of Firebug!

Warcraft in your world

We had a new developer start at work yesterday, as a project manager I was very happy to have a new coder starting as we have a metric sh1t load of work on, however what really made my day? I hadn't had a real conversation with the new person yet beyond 'hello' until we both found ourselves in the kitchen. Her first words to me? "We downed Lady Vashj this weekend."

Squeeee!

Yes that's right. I'm now working with another girl who plays Warcraft! That is all win right there and I look forward to her joining the rest of us in our regular kitchen WoW rantings. She's also officially the most progressed out of those of us at work who play having downed Vashj and the first three bosses in Mt. Hyjal with her raid. You can be sure I'll be quizzing her on how her raid handles those d@mn striders *grin*.

Journey of a UI part two: getting your raid on

Here is part two of my 'journey of a UI' series. Part one showed examples of how the default UI changes over time as you level and start participating in more complex activities such as instances. In this post I'm going to look at the UI when default components are no longer being used.

I didn't really start serious raiding until after TBC came out as I've mentioned before. I was running with a regular pick up group for ZG, MC and AQ20 prior and had some interface mods in play at the time. That said I'm going to skip past that period (mainly because I don't have any screen shots >.>) to discuss my interface as it stood a few weeks ago. In essence it was pretty similar back then anyway - I just changed the mods I used in some cases due to lack of support or a new and better (imo) alternative being introduced.

Compared to the screenshots of my previous post the UI has changed a lot, and has become a lot more cluttered. I like to have a lot of information available at a glance rather than having to hit a key to display a panel with the information or even mouse over an object on screen.

When I decided to change my UI I wanted to retain the amount of information I am able to access but with a much cleaner layout. I also wanted to decrease the memory footprint of my mods if possible too.

So here are the before and after shots:

Before

After

The area of the UI that has changed the most is the bottom of the screen. I wanted to streamline the look of my UI and keep all the frames and etc grouped together. This serves two purposes. My eye has less distance to travel across the screen for certain pieces of information and I've created a clear separation between the 'Heads up display' and the area of the screen where the game action is taking place.

Many people also like to move their toon frame and focus/target frame to sit at the top of the bottom panel. This means your eye needs to do even less work to keep track of important information like your health/mana and that of your target. I may well make this change in the future. As it is I have purposely only changed the location of key items bit by bit to allow myself time to get used to new locations and therefore 'eye patterns' of these elements.

The distance that your eye has to move over the screen to pick up information and the time it takes is something considered key by PVPers in particular. Anything that will give you an edge as regards reaction times in PVP shouldn't be overlooked. Megan from Out of Mana has written a great post on the role of UI layout in PVP.

This same thinking can also be applied to website design which is something I'm involved in as part of my RL job. When working on a site redesign it's important that you don't change the layout of key features so much that regular users become confused about where they are located. The site should look different but still be familiar enough to navigate easily. The other related and important consideration is that like items should be grouped together logically and in a clear hierarchy. The faster and more easily a user can locate and use elements of your site the more enjoyable their experience and the higher their satisfaction.

One of the most powerful aspects of Warcraft is the ability to customise the UI to suit your individuality - whether it be playstyle or sense of style. Interestingly although there are myriads of disaster custom UIs out there where people have gone crazy with colour, custom artwork, unit frames and informational elements resulting in a complete mess, those people seeking to achieve the most 'usable' layout often seem to arrive at similiar results.

An important consideration in UI layout is playstyle. Do you click or use hotkeys? Some users of hotkeys have them so well memorised that their UI is extremely minimal with very few items on the screen. It's also possible to set up action bar bindings to change which action bar appears depending on what action is taking place in game - such as PVP combat, PVE combat or out of combat. I haven't set this up myself. Clickers seem to tend towards having larger action bar buttons (more click space of course) and how they arrange these buttons will be influenced by the role they play. For instance a healer who is a clicker may have their action buttons arranged right next to the party or raid unit frames so that their mouse has the smallest distance to travel.

I'd love to be able to gather lots of examples of people's UIs and information about their play style and role to further explore this topic. For now I think this post has become long enough, and so in the next post I'll discuss the mods I use. Since I use so many that discussion may well get split into a couple of posts too.

I promised myself I would never blog about RL

And I really am determined to avoid it. Although I confess I just love reading TJ's blog about the truly strange and amusing (perhaps more to us than her) things that seem to occur to her on an almost daily basis.

That said, I did the LJ thing a few years back and before that kept written journals for a long time. And frankly nothing incredibly interesting really happens in my life.

But I want to apologise for my lack of posts and that means a reference to me the player behind the boingy eared night elf.

So I say sorry to the 2 or 3 of you who read this blog but RL has been a little crazy of late with work getting busier, a mother in hospital (she'll be fine) a fuller social calendar than usual (it's festival season here and there is theatre and live music to be seen!)and of course my Warcraft with raiding, arena, PVP and alt levelling taking up my time.

I have a plethora of different screenshots and a list of blog topics in hand and hope to get back to some more regular posting soon.

Will you blog about this song?

Yes. I couldn't resist.

Anyone who works in an industry that deals with the interwebs or just keeps across the happenings throughout the series of tubes should find this hilarious.

I give to you Here Comes Another Bubble v1.1

WoW Life Balance

In the corporate landscape an oft thrown about phrase is 'Work Life Balance' which is a buzz phrase (rather than word I guess) for talking about providing a working culture that values and supports the achievement of balancing work responsibilities with other responsibilities in life. In my somewhat cynical experience this most often refers to flexibility for people with children since this seems to be the most quantifiable and valued alternative responsibility from work. I guess I am being a bit cyncial since carers leave, annual leave and sick leave are also part of the work life balance equasion, as well as, in some industries, rostered days off. Note: I'm talking from an Australian perspective here, I have no idea how this breaks down in other countries.

Regardless, what I want to talk about in today's post is WoW Life Balance. There's definitely a need for it and in my opinion by balancing your WoW life with other activities in 'RL' you will derive more enjoyment from the game itself. I remember being a kid and getting denied the constant diet of lollies and chocolate that I craved and thinking that when I grew up I'd eat them all the time. The thing is though, if you have something you love all the time it begins to pall. Maybe not straight away but eventually you'll never want to see it again. Case in point: A long time ago in a galaxy far far away I used to work in a biscuit factory baking and packing biscuits. Really yummy ones. At least until I ate so many of them that I got to the point of never wanting one to pass my lips again. I still see them for sale in cafe's today and shudder.

I think MMOs are just like those yummy biscuits. You play all the time and the fun aspect is slowly leeched away resulting in burn out. Having said that, by other peoples standards I probably play WoW a lot. Definitely my non-gaming friends think my amount of game time is weird. I would argue however that they may very possibly spend the same amount of time slouched in front of the TV. It's a value thing, it's a subjective thing. Gaming a lot is seen in quite a negative light by general society I guess whereas the amount of TV people watch is not seen in the same way. The thing to consider is that 50 or whatever years ago when TV first hit the scene I'm sure spending a lot of time watching it was viewed unfavourably as compared to... to... whatever people did before then... um... sing-alongs round the piano maybe? I personally would much rather actively choose what I do rather than put up with whatever trash is on TV. In my view, TV is a passive activity, gaming is not. It's also not really a social activity whereas I'd argue MMO gaming definitely is.

So how much WoW is too much? I don't think I'm qualified to really answer that question. I play almost every week night and every weekend. I raid 3 instances a week plus Arena, BGs and farming. I think it comes down to the question: what are you forgoing to play WoW.

Last night I didn't play though, I caught up with a friend I haven't seen in a little while and spent the evening hanging out with her. Subsequently I'm really looking forward to the Kara run tonight.

My Dad always said it and it's true - moderation in everything.

There is such a thing as RL

Sometimes it's a good thing to 'un-plug'. Well so I've heard anyway. No wait, seriously real life really does need to take precedence to WoW life and I like to think that I maintain a decent balance. I mean I hold down a full time job and have friends that I don't only interact with via the interwebs so that counts right? We won't talk about the 'job pays for WoW subscription motivation' ok? Perhaps my friends would disagree with my statement about balance. Yeah I play everyday and spend most of the weekend playing but I'm not even hardcore! Personally I'd much prefer to play WoW than go out and get schickered every weekend. Then again I'm not adverse to the odd night of debauchery either!

This weekend the manbeast and I are going away to the family shack with his parents and sister and her partner. It's the first time we've been to the shack in several years and I know his parents are looking forward to us all spending time together. Is it ok to admit that we're a little saddened to be missing our regular Gruul's and ZA raids?

I bet the Dragonspine Trophy drops again this week too!