Well, happy Holidays to everybody.

I maxed Engineering this morning (Those last 9 points only took 500 Gold), and I am now working on weapon skills so as to push back working on Fishing. One of these days I’ll even start running instances again and finish several of the group quests I’ve got laying around. Ah well, its all good. Hopefully I’ll save up 30 Gold soon so I can purchase the training to build my helicopters. Then its all up to saving up the materials cost for that thing.

I know I said I’d talk about helm gems last week, but I don’t know. I need to write up something about Outlands caster trinkets as well, so that should be fun. Then I need to watch that last episode of Top Gear and the newest Bleach. Lots to do, lots to do.

And Martin, I’m really lazy. I’ll rough up some entries either in my head or on paper or in Wordpress, then I’ll just let them sit until I feel like proofreading them. Then I’ll batch dump a bunch of them all at once. I need to stop being lazy about them, but that’s one of the most innocuous things I’m lazy about. I need to (1.) Start working out more, (2.) Practice my Kendo more, (3.) Go back to studying my Japanese, and (4.) Go back to studying Network +, then I can start thinking about being less lazy webpage-wise. But that’s just that. And lunch Saturday? Kristi is off (Her family is in town) so I’ll tell her she can have a family day all her own. I’ll call you.

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Whoo hoo! I’ve got a new job! I start Thursday thanks to my squeaky clean background (this is a big thank you to never getting caught). So yeah, I’m now a helpdesk guy with MSA, that should be cool.

Also I’ve now surpassed all other paladins in Serenity on Warcrafter. My Gear Score is now an impressive 765, moving me into Blue territory and eclipsing the previous number one paladin, whose score is something like 740. So that’s great. I’ve accomplished that by doing two things: completing the Khorium Ward I mentioned before and running Heroic Ramparts. The Khorium was more than enough to replace my existing belt/pants/boots, it was just hard as hell to get a hand on because apparently people just don’t farm for the plans on Kargath. Too bad too, as it is the only reason a paladin would ever level blacksmithing (Sorry Martin, maybe they’ll add some kickass spellpower gear for Blacksmiths in Wrath, or a Shield Spec for armorsmiths with some spellpower shields). Anyhow, khorium ward == good crafted gear. If you are a Holy Paladin, go get it.

Then it was time for some dungeon running. I put in for Shadow Labyrinth, because it isn’t Heroic (just Level 70) so with my quest and crafted blues I shouldn’t be under-geared for it. Nobody wanted a healer though, so I widened my net. I put in for Heroic Ramparts and Heroic Blood Furnace. I’ve run both before so I know what I’m getting in to, just that everything would be ten times harder. Ramparts chimed in first, thank God. Its the first dungeon in Outlands so it should be the easiest heroic, right? I died so often I had to enter the instance and then run back to town to repair before continuing at one point. Our tank was good, but as a Druid he’s annoying to heal. Being a bear he can’t equip shields, so there is no shield block to fall back on. He has HUGE amounts of HP, but he loses them quickly. This is annoying. Our major hangups are two pulls: one of the first few with the roving wolf patrols and the one with all the casters at the top of the ramp. The wolf thing is just us being sloppy and not grabbing patrols before we get started on the thing, so that wasn’t really a failing of the group, just overconfidence. The casters are hell on wheels though. The bear couldn’t really scoop them all up so everybody is getting damaged, and the bolts they were throwing are of course magic so they aren’t mitigated by armor. I tried my Shadow Resist aura, but it seemed like every third time we’d either take too much damage for me to heal through or somebody would get feared into another group which I REALLY couldn’t handle. But after shear force of will we won though.

Then it was boss time. Gargolmar was a pushover. He died like a punk even without hella CC for his cronies. He was a footnote, the guys on the ramp were way harder than him anyday. The big demon was a pain. He killed us a few times. Spreading out was helpful, and the fact that my shield cleansed his AOE Nuke thing was more than helpful. He went down eventually though and I got my Justice Bearer Pauldrons and I won the roll for the Primal Nether. I had to D/C after multiple attempts at the final boss, because he was hard and wrecking my face. Also I had a mad case of Fiancee Aggro.

I got my Justicebringer 2000 Specs made though and those will see me probably through to Wrath. Unless I start running post-Kara raids with Serenity. I mean they are as good if not better than t5 headpiece, so that’s gravy. I socketed them as well, but that’s a topic for another time. Maybe tomorrow or something.

I’ve also got my schematic for the Healing Potion Injector so I’ve only got two more things on my list for auctions. One is the schematic for the Mana Potion Injector and the other is Charlotte’s Ivy to complete my Twin Stars set. I’ve managed to get Lola’s Eve from some random mob in Netherstorm and I liked the ring too much to sell it for a ton of gold. My opinion will likely change as soon as I’ve bought the neck item and the schematic, then its time to save up money for the 5k Gold riding skill. And for materials to get the last nine points to max engineering.

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This should come as no surprise, I love tweaking things. I change and modify stuff at the slightest provocation, just because I can. So the infinitely extensible nature of WoW really appeals to me. Heck, I might try my hand at making my own if I can figure out Warcraft Add-on Studio. As of now, there are really two big downloads if you want to make a kickass custom WoW setup. First is a good compilation. You can pick one you like, but I’m a huge fan of Sewell’s UI. I’m not as in love with the Unit Frames (the parts that show you, your target, and your party) as I was in 3.0 as I really liked the portrait view, but the overall layout is more dense information wise than 3.0. The stuff isn’t as spread out, so it is easier to work with my buttons and my party without moving my eyes all around, something essential in a good healer. So if I feel like it, I might import the configs for PitBull from 3.0 to 4.0 and move the things around. Just to see if I can.

So you’ve made major changes to your UI. That’s great. Now we assume that you aren’t the character that created the compilation so parts will be non-optimal for you. The Sewell’s one I linked to is great but he obviously doesn’t play a pet class. The bar there is Chinatown, it just isn’t workable. So you have to move that around if you are going to do anything with a pet. Then you’ll need to grab some add-ons that work with your class. If you are a holy paladin, or hell, any paladin at all, go get Clique. It lets you set up behaviors to happen on mouse-click. Right now, Shift+Click works healing, Ctrl+Click works situational blessings (Freedom, Sacrifice, and Protection) and Alt+Click rocks my Divine Favor. The beauty of this is I really don’t have to hunt all over to take care of business. I just hover my mouse over the portrait of my healing target and Shift+Left for a Holy Light or Shift+Right for Flash of Light. This basically makes main healing anything cake. There really isn’t thought involved anymore. You get the Sewell’s compilation from before it estimates incoming heals so you don’t even need to guess if you’ll be overhealing, just cancel if you need to change spells. And the UI update moves your party all together at the bottom of the screen so your mouse isn’t even moving all that far.

Just go get Sewell’s and Clique. If you’re a paladin that is. Otherwise mayhaps the Clique thing isn’t all that needed. But seriously, anybody who heals should give them a try.

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Apparently they like what they see, because I’ve got an interview tomorrow. It must have been my swank suit with the blue tie. Sadly, I won’t be able to wear most of that again, because who wants to look like That Guy. You know the one. The guy with shabby taste and just one tie. Hopefully I can find something that won’t look too much like crap with a blue shirt. There are times I really wish I hadn’t let my wingman talk me into this blue shirt. Or that I had picked up a white one as well. I don’t think a solid black suit would look all that good with a black shirt. I’m not in the Mafia.

Well, we have a yellow tie, shouldn’t look too bad. Off to Lexington, here’s hoping I don’t spazz like I did in front of Blue Cross.

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Well, that was silly. It turns out “Whenever a person is in Columbia to interview you” also means “We’ll call you at 8am, and ask if you’re down for an interview in an hour.” That’s what we call service with a smile. I’m really impressed with this company. Plus, the interviewer was also named Brooks, and that’s a mark of quality. I don’t think I was too crazy sounding so I should be hearing back from them shortly. Fingers crossed.

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That’s hacking in the MIT sense of improving via tinkering, not the ZeRo KeWl sense of “hacking the Gibson.” I’ve recently started messing with Firefox’s userchrome.css file, changing what is displayed and how. It turns out this part of Firefox is incredibly powerful if it is less than intuitive/easy to get to. There is an add-on though, ChromEdit Plus, that makes editing the file easy, if it doesn’t make it readily apparent what it can do. On that front, productivity site Lifehacker has a bit of a primer on what editing this file can do for you. Before I start talking about what I do with this thing, I’ll assume you’ve already consolidated Firefox’s chrome. Getting rid of an extra menu bar is always good.

None of this is particularly needed, Firefox is already the best browser out there, and polishing it is nearly the most unnecessary thing you’ll do all day. Its fun though, which is what I’m up to. The first thing we want to do is hide buttons you aren’t using: the back when there is nothing to go back to, the forward when there is nothing forward and stop when nothing is loading. Refresh will stay where it is, there is no need to mess with it. Also ditch the hourglass next to the search bar (you just hit enter by now) and the throbber next to the search box. There’s already a status readout at the bottom of the screen, and it shows more than “A page is loading right now.” You accomplish this by pasting the following lines into your userchrome file.

/* Remove Forward button when there’s nothing to go Forward to */
#forward-button[disabled=”true”] { display: none; }

/* Remove Back button when there’s nothing to go Back to */
#back-button[disabled=”true”] { display: none; }

/* Remove Stop button when there’s nothing to Stop */
#stop-button[disabled=”true”] { display: none; }

/*Remove magnifying glass button from search box*/
.search-go-button-stack { display: none !important; }

/* Eliminate the throbber and its annoying movement: */
#throbber-box { display: none !important; }

Then we get fancy. Lets make the tabs you aren’t using faded out unless you hover over them, then they will be slightly faded. Fancy.

/*:::::::::::::: Inactive & Hovered Tabs Opacity ::::::::::::::*/

#content tab:not([selected=”true”])
{-moz-opacity: 0.5 !important;}

#content tab:not([selected=”true”]):hover
{-moz-opacity: 0.75 !important;}

Now we hide the menu items unless we are hovering over them. Who needs “File” just taking up space?

/*::::::::::::::Invisible Menubar::::::::::::

How to use it: Move all your Navigation Toolbar items (back/forward buttons, address bar, search bar etc. from the navigation toolbar to the Menu Bar, either on the right side or left side of the Menu Items. Now past this code in userChrome.css and restart your browser. You will no longer see the menu items. Now hover at the right/left edge of the menu bar (whichever side the menu items were on) and the menu items will appear. You can now hide the navigation bar and save vertical space
::::::::::::::*/

#menubar-items {
padding-left: 5px !important;
}

#menubar-items > #main-menubar {
margin-left: -9000px !important;
}

#menubar-items:hover > #main-menubar {
margin-left: 0 !important;
}

#menubar-items:hover {background-image: none !important; padding-left:0 !important;}

Finally we get rid of the Edit and Help menus. You use your keys for edit stuff (Copy/paste) and who needs Help, right?

/* Remove the Edit and Help menus
Id’s for all toplevel menus:
file-menu, edit-menu, view-menu, go-menu, bookmarks-menu, tools-menu, helpMenu */
#helpMenu, #edit-menu { display: none !important; }

There is one that I don’t recommend, and that is Auto-hiding your bookmarks. Give it a shot and let me know if it annoys you as much as it annoys me. It would be one thing if it overlapped the page, but whenever your mouse wanders over the bottom of your menu bar, the whole page jumps downward. And it turns out you hover over the hidden bar more often that you might think. I would call it headache inducing that the very best.

At the end of all this, you have one bar with your bookmarks on it, and one bar that is (usually) just your address bar and the search box. This is not recommended for laptops with touchpads or tabletPCs. The Hover mechanic is hard to use with either of those. Honestly I’d love to hide the search box as well, but that might be too much.

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I talked to a local headhunter called Tek Systems about jobs, and they think that they might have something for me. A local company called Medical Services of America needs Helpdesk people, and its a permanent position. So here’s hoping. I need to interview with Tek and then with MSA and if that works out I’ll have a new job. Kristi would be overjoyed.

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I talk about World of Warcraft quite a lot. I understand that. Too bad, it is most of what I do, my hobby if you will. I spend quite a bit of my time theorycrafting (the act or process of planning “stuff” in WoW) and so connection to stats and gear profiles is pretty important. It used to be all I really went for was what is a Talent calculator so I could mess with talent builds, but after a while that is just so much masturbation. What I mean to say is that changing around talent points in and of itself won’t tell you anything about gameplay. Yes, it will let you know if you have enough points to create a build you want, but this is unimportant if the build is not useful. I was able to tell that the paladin buffs from 2.3 weren’t just applied at random: there is a plan there. In 2.3 they expanded two talents one in the Retribution tree and one in the Protection tree to give enhanced utility to both the ability and to the tree itself. Retribution’s main weakness was lack of threat reduction (active or passive) and Protection’s main weakness was lack of stamina compared to other tank classes. So the next-to-last talents in each tree were buffed to make way for Threat Reduction in Ret and Stamina in Prot passively and alongside the talent’s previous abilities. There were complaints because, well, people always complain. The Stam in Prot was on a talent nobody took (so in effect adding 5 points to protection talent builds) and the threat reduction in Ret was not on the talent that synergized with two handed weapons, so it was somehow less than it could be.

I punched up Wowhead’s paladin talent calculator though and saw the purpose there. You can click on the little 70 there and get the ceiling updated to the 80 level cap available in Wrath. If these two talents weren’t where they are now, then non-heavy builds could access the new talents. I think Ret with passive 10% extra stam or Holy with 35% threat reduction would be even more blantantly OP than we are now.

So that’s an example of what I can do with a talent calculator. Admittedly small potatoes when you are trying to really get your theorycrafting on. I’m a bit odd when it comes to planning stuff out, ask me someday and I’ll dig up my incredibly obsessive “family trees” I created for Disgaea 2. They’ll blow your mind. Thankfully, I found Warcrafter.net here’s an example: Calicity. You get gear, talents and stats all on one page. This also feeds into Damage per Second (DPS) and Heals per Second (HPS) calculations relative to gear and abilities. And for icing on the cake you get a Gear Score so you can effectively measure your epeen against anybody. As well you can click on the “sandbox” tab on the right and change gear/enchants/gems around to check the impact that any changes would make to your stats/dps/hps. You can also mess with talents and any changes will run through to stats. The only things it lacks are reputation stats and the ability to generate a forum signature. The first is more essential than the second, especially with the reputation grind phase of the game I’m entering now.

Yes, my gear score is in the mid 600’s at the moment but I’m drinking milk.

Current goals: Get all three pieces of the Khorium Ward. That should hold me until I start filling in Purple Judgment. Plus, I think that the parts are good enough to justify decent enchants. Spellthread on the legs and Vitality on the boots sort of decent enchants.

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I’m not saying that my sudden surge of free time has let me devote more time to WoW (There is a lot of house cleaning going on), but there does seem to be a lot of time spent on Azeroth recently. That’s not a bad thing. I’m still sending out hundreds of resumes to anybody who wants to take a look, and a bunch of people who don’t (probably). Cali finally has artisan Riding skill and the Ebon Gryphon to go with it. I tell you, the whole flying mount thing changes the game greatly. I’ve still got to grind Engineering up to 350 to be able to make my helicopter, so I figured I would take the shortcut and get the bird for now. The choppa will come later. Rest assured, as soon as I save up the 5000G for the Master Riding Skill, it’s on.

I’ve wrapped up quests everywhere except Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley (excepting some thorny group quests) I’m flight-camping the Gronn in Blade’s Edge waiting for kills so I can jump in and make off with the things they drop. It was especially nice of Blizz to make sure that they drop a thing on the ground loot-able by anybody passing by. I’ve “helped” horde groups complete one of the quests just to get a chance at the Grimoire that the one warlock drops. I put help in quotes back there because I can’t heal them and my DPS as a holy paladin is… not that impressive. Mid 300’s when I’m buffed. I can see why people only bring us to instances for the heals. It makes good sense, we are hella healers.

Hopefully over the next few days I’ll be able to wrap up non-group quests in Netherstorm and over the next few weeks I’ll clear out the rest of the solo-able quests elsewhere in Outlands. I want to run Heroics before I start a new job, and I predict that will take less than 2 weeks. I’m confident that way. If I believe it, I can achieve it. Nobody ever succeeded by thinking poorly of themselves.

Wish me luck. Purple Judgment drops so seldom.

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So I’ve lost my job. That was particularly annoying. I go in, my boss says: “What are your open projects?” and I tell him. Then an hour later he says: “What overtime have you worked in the last few weeks?” and I tell him. Then two hours later he says: “You annoyed a rep on the floor, you are out on your ass.” No attempt at arbitration no asking for my side in this. Seriously annoying. And right when the last paychecks of the year are going out. I’m not saying that they are cutting all possible costs before they start moving assets to the Philippines, but… wait, that is what I’m saying. Screw that place and screw its $13 an hour.

Now to just emphasize the downsizing/outsourcing angle when I talk to new job people. Ah well, I’ve got money saved and I’m meaning to catch up on my People’s Court. If anybody knows anybody who’s hiring, give me a buzz. I’ll be more than happy to take some temp stuff while I’m looking. Hell, if you want to pay me to format your hard drive, I can do that.

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