Netflix: Video Nectar from the Gods

My newly discovered obsession with Doctor Who has forced me to take a drastic measure, I decided to try out Netflix. Really it was the only sane thing to do. I could, either buy season 2 - 4, (I hate season 1; please see previous post for clarification) rent all of them, both a tax on my limited income or just get Netflix and watch them when I could, which appears to be just about every waking hour since I signed up for Netflix.

Now my wife had to be convinced that spending an extra $10.00 a month on movies since we already get HBO was worth it. Well actually, I did it and then told her I was doing it after the fact. However, since getting Netflix, she has seen the light, I mean the advantage, of having it, mostly because they have a lot of really old really bad horror movies available for disc delivery or instant watching and those are the things she loves the most.

The best feature has to be the instant viewing of movies and television shows. It is a fact that they have more movies for home disc delievery, but there is a modest amount of shows that you can watch instantly on your PC, Wii, PS3 or Xbox 360, which is great because I have all of them. The only rub is that because they signed an exclusive with Microsoft, the Wii and PS3 require a disc to run their movie software, which isn't much of a hassle since they will send you the disc free when you sign up.

If you watch a lot of movies or have missed a lot of television shows that you'd have to go out and rent the discs anyway, then spending $10.00 a month is a pretty good deal. I also managed to stream 2 movies from different viewers without much signal lose at all. This way, I can watch Doctor Who on the computer while my wife watches Jekyl on the Wii.

I would recommend this service to anyone who travels and has a laptop or just loves to stay at home on a rainy day and watch movies.

I'd hit that!

The newest result of my alt-o-holic crazy has been leveling my shadow priest, Gwinaveer. Over the course of a few weekends, I was able to level her up through the Outland areas and she is now muddling around in Northrend. I will say that my recommendation for leveling between 60 and 70 is battlegrounds and heirloom gear. Alterac Valley is fantastic for experience. I managed just about 7k xp on every major NPC kill not to mention the xp acquired from honor kills. I know a lot of people will tell you doing random dungeons is the way to go, and that does help, but I managed to go up 4 levels in one weekend of battleground fun and that was without rested XP.

After managing to reach 70, I decided to pick up a cheap flying mount and see what Northrend had for me. Well, I soon discovered that a normal flying mount isn't the way to see Northrend. The pace is excruciatingly slow. I decided after a few days of trying to fly around in slow motion that I really needed to get my epic flying skill. I'm sure I wouldn't have wanted to push forward with this expensive endeavor if I already didn't have several 80's with epic flying and dragon mounts.

I decided that taking one of my 80's around to do daily's for gold just wasn't something I wanted to do. I just seemed like to much work. I'm sure people will disagree and recommend a plethora of quests that are not only interesting but will also give my extra gold for completing them, but I just wasn't interested in questing. So, I dusted off my 80 Tankadin and proceeded to farm ore in Ice Crown. I cleared out my bags, to make room and proceeded to map all the nods. My luck was just unbelievable. I set out on a Saturday early afternoon and by the end of 2hours of mining had over 2 stacks of titanium and about 12 stacks of saronite ore, not to mention all the eternals that you get as bonus items from mining. Now, I'm doing this on a toon that's really not seen any action in over a year. He has about a 5.4k gearscore which isn't too shabby, but I wear no PvP gear when I farm and I prefer to stay in my protection spec which makes me almost invulnerable to most mobs I might encounter while farming ore.

I bring all that up because the real fun, the truly exciting time I have been having is that I've been crushing a lot of horde while mining. Now other than the bit of leveling I have done with my shadow priest, I'm more of a casual pvper. I don't look for a fight and I usually try to go for the fast easy kills. For some reason, the horde ore farmers on my server aren't geared for pvp, nor do they even put up a fight and I have been consistatly kicking their asses. I suspect that a large majority are bots, because they don't put up much of a fight, nor do they even try to defend themselves. I have had several try to run away, but a quick hammer usually stops that from happening. They also seem to be desperate for the ore, because while I'm actually mining it they jump down and try to do the same, without even trying to do damage to me. They probably think that people on my server are scared of horde and that I would run away by they mere presents, but they quickly learn that is not the case. Fighting them is very close to shooting fish in a barrel with a grenade launcher. I've been mining for two plus weeks and in all that time, I've had about 2o confrontations, I've only died once and that was more or less a tie...(protection warriors are just as nasty as protection paladins, thank gawd for ardent defender. lol) I also tend to see the same horde players over and over, so I'm positive they must be bots of some sort. On occassions, like the protection warrior mentioned above, I have had to actually work at staying alive, but thats maybe less than 1% of the encounters.

The good news is that I gathered and sold enough ore to acquire the money for my epic flying also known as the Artisan Riding skill and purchase a Swift Gryphon. It makes getting around Northrend so much easier. I also used a bit of that money to advance my tailoring and enchanting, which are probably some of the more expensive trade skills to level up. I still run around collecting ore with my Paladin in the hopes of doing more battles with the bots of World of Warcraft. I'm pretty certain they are bots because if I was getting the thrashed around by a Paladin over and over again, I'd go hunt for ore elsewhere. I'm not a person to scare easily but I know that you can only beat you head against the wall for so long before you need to look for a new wall.

I believe that a lot of my recent plethoria of pvp victories and the abundance of good ore to sell is due in large part to a lot of people taking a break from the game. When I reached 80 with my first toon, you couldn't walk around Ice Crown without getting jumped by a horde. Recently, the Alliance has even managed to win a few Wintergrasps, back to back in one week, which must mean the horde have gone on vacation for a while. Oh, I'm sure when Cataclysm hits, we'll see an increase in Horde kicking the crap out of Alliance, but for now, the break is very nice.

I hate you Gamestop!

So almost 2 weeks ago, I decided to put some money down on a new Xbox 360 pre order through Gamestop. The lady told me that I could expect my new Xbox no later than July 9th, however, she informed me that they get shipments every week and that I would probably be getting mine before July 9th.

So, after a week, I called them up and asked what the status was on my pre order. Apparently, the day I put MY money down on the new Xbox was the last day they were taking pre orders and my pre order was one of the last ones to they would be filling. Now, I sure as I was handing over my cash the lady behind the counter new this, but failed to inform me that I would be one of the last to be getting my pre order filled. Because if I had known, I would have held on to my cash and used it to purchase the new Xbox at Target or Best Buy, which in the last two weeks I've seen tons of. (Sorry I know ending a sentence on a preposition is bad, but Gamestop made me do it!)

Now I wait. The bad part is that I'm heading out of town for the rest of the week and I'm sure that my shipment will arrive, they will call me and tell me I have till the end of the day to pick it up and when I don't they will end up selling it out from under me. Oh, I have informed them that I was headed out of town, that I still wanted the unit and they graciously wrote my name down on a piece of paper, but I'm sure that when I show up next Monday, which will be after July 9th, they won't have a unit for me. Shame on me for being a trusting soul. Yes, I could have my wife pick it up, but I also want to trade in my old unit and getting that worked out with the little woman ain't going to be smooth as glass, so its just better for me to handle it assuming they even have a unit for me on Monday and they will let me trade my old one in.

I hate you Gamestop!

The Doctor is back!

Back in 2005, I was pretty excited when BBC America and Scifi channel announced they would be broadcasting the BBC reboot of the Doctor Who series. I only slightly remember seeing a few episodes with Tom Baker back in the day in my younger days on PBS. Nothing that I could remember specifically, but I'd heard great things the original series from other friends and bloggers and since it was a reboot, I thought why not get in on the ground floor.

I soon discovered that I liked the concept of a rebooted Doctor Who. The only problem was that I did not like the actor, Christopher Eccleston, in that role. Maybe he didn't have the right humor or he seemed a bit too serious at times, but I just wasn't about to give up another year of my viewing time to a show whose main character didn't interest me. I was aware that they had replaced him, but I was so disappointed in what they had tried to do with Mr. Eccleston that I had not reason to invest my time with David Tennant.

Well, I have to say, that was a huge mistake.

Recently, I'd had the pleasure of watching a bit of Doctor Who on BBC America, actually they had a marathon of sorts during the recent July 4th weekend. They showed a few hours of Doctor Who. The marathon episodes spanned the course of several seasons, eventually ending with an episode from the latest season with Matt Smith as the Doctor. I have to say that I regret not giving Mr. Tennant a chance to impress me, because after viewing 3 of his episodes during July 4th, I was saying to myself, this is the Doctor. He was funny, strange, whimsical and at times a complete angry pain in the ass, but not so's you noticed. I truly think that he was the Doctor they had envisioned when they set out to reboot the series. That being said, I think that Matt Smith is an excellent replacement. His acting paired with Steven Moffat's writing, he created my other favorite British shows, Couplings, is just awesome. The Doctor's helper is Karen Gillan, who is funny, very smart, brave and a bit more flirtatious than other Doctor companions, which is something new I think for someone in that role. Course, I've only seen the first 3 episodes from season 5, 2 of which I had to download straight away from iTunes after viewing the marathon.

I have gone Doctor Who crazy. At lunch today I decided to hit Best Buy up for a few more episodes from the David Tennant stack, including the one where he changes into Matt Smith, which I've not seen yet. I also decided to sign up for Netflix so I could stream all the earlier seasons, with the exception of season 1 which I will just write off as a bad experience all around. I'm sure that others will disagree, but I'm just happy to have rediscovered Doctor Who. I look forward to what the rest of season 5 will provide and hope that season 6 will be just as great.

I just wanted to spread the word that if you've never given Doctor Who a shot, check out the episode "Blink". If you don't get hooked by watching that one, you never will.

Yelling Never Works!

Microsoft announced at the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo their new take on their old Xbox 360 console called the Xbox 360 Slim. It would be smaller in stature and have a sleek black shiny finish. The system would incorporate WiFi, a 250gig hard drive, a whisper quiet mod and be equipped with ample ventilation to prevent any overheating, which was a problem with the old Xbox 360.

But this post isn't about that. It's about my recent conversation with those heathens at the Microsoft Xbox 360 support and how they basically don't get it.

I had been tossing around the idea of picking up one of those new "Slim" units. I was running out of space for saved games and my disc drive would make tons of noise when it was spinning. As it turned out, I wasn't very off the mark because not long after the thought of upgrading hit me, my machine started to take a turn for the worse. In 2009 I had an issue with the machine not reading discs. I had owned the unit for over a year and decided to get it repaired. Well, as it turned out, my warranty ran out about 1 week before I needed it. I had to have my Xbox so out came the credit card. Three weeks and $100.00 plus shipping and I had my repaired unit back in my little hands.

Then in January of this year, I had the exact same issue, the machine wouldn't read a disc in the drive. I knew immediately this was an issue. I did not hesitate to ship the unit back to Microsoft, this time under warranty to get it repaired. It arrived back 3 weeks later with a 3 month extended warranty, which apparently I either forgot about or didn't get notification on because I thought it was another full year since it was the exact same issue which they seemed to have failed at repairing the first time.

Well, as luck would have it, recently after having thoughts of abandoning my old unit started to rise, the disc drive started to fail again. This time only 6 months had passed. So I decided to call up Xbox support and see if they would repair it for free since it had only been a mere 6 months since the its last visit to the doctor. Besides, it was the the exact same issue so they should at least honor their work and try to bring some life back into my old Xbox. Especially since I wanted to trade it in at Gamestop for a new unit... shhh... it might hear me.

Alas, that was not the case. I even did that thing that all men do when they aren't happy about a call that goes against them, I raised my voice and shrilled at the poor lady on the phone about how unfair this was and how I couldn't understand why this same unit would fail in the exact same way 3 times in less than 2 years. I told her to bump this call up the line to someone that could actually help me since all she was doing was cock blocking me from my free repair.

Now, just so you don't think too ill of me I did some thinking while I waited. I'd calmed down a bit and realized the cold hard truth of the situation. No tact I took would actually work on these cold hearted people. If I wanted my Xbox fixed, I'd have to pull out the credit card and make the magic happen that way. Course I did try one last plea with the person next on the corporate ladder of denial. It too didn't work and I was reduced to telling her that their failure to fix my machine properly the last time didn't speak well of their product nor did it speak well of those chained to work benches in the bowels of Microsoft repairing broken Xboxs. Normally I'd just refer to them as untrained monkeys but i thought I'd keep her in the dark about the truth, that's me, Mr sensitive.

I hung up the phone. I didn't pull out the magic make things happen card. I had resigned myself to the fact that investing any additional money into my sweet old machine would be better served buy just getting a new machine.

Since they seem to be in high demand and the supply very limited, I had to plunk down some money to reserve one at Gamestop. Some would say screw Xbox. Don't get a new system. But I've got a ton of Xbox games, lots of friends that I like to play with on Xbox live and I can't quit all that. I have decided that this will be it for me and Microsoft. If they do release a new console system that surpasses the 360 I won't be getting it. I've had a Sony PS3 for over 2 years now and not once have I had an issue with it. I watch lots of Blu Ray movies and play a good number of games without so much as a small hiccup. If Sony can do it, why can't Microsoft? Look at the Wii. It gets abused a ton with controllers getting tossed into TVs and ceiling fans. I haven't heard of it Red Ringing or the disc drive crapping out.

Is it because Microsoft is an American company? Is it true that Americans produce inferior products that fail more often than they succeed? I guess I should ask Steve Jobs that question, huh?

How to Win at Pugs and Gearscore

This pretty much covers all my grips!

The Long Dark Time...

...before Cataclysm drops, or is it?

Recently, a couple of my World of Warcraft friends decided to create a new guild. One that would work towards recruiting people, but not the top elite. We wanted players that were interested in progression, wanted to improve their status and wanted to do it in a semi casual friendly guild.

We were pretty successful in recruiting about 5 additional people to help with our 10 man raids. We had just started working out a schedule when a slight snag hit. In the midst of our recruiting process, we also wanted to test out prospective candidates. So on a few occasions we would form a pug raid, for say Onyxia or Vault, just to see how they preformed. Well, during a Onyxia 10 man, we had issues. Not with anyone in particular, I'm sure everyone has been there, some players just don't work well with others. So, after failing a few times, the raid started to disband and during that, some exchanges took place with our guild leader and someone from another guild. That person got very graphic in the exchange and well, he got reported. That seemed to take care of the issue, except the next day after the event, our guild name got changed.

It seems that "Hardcore Pwnography" is just too offensive as a guild name and got banned. I just don't get it. How do we get banned when every day I see some pretty graphic character names running around Dalaran? Not to mention the multiple number of rude names I've seen while using the LFG tool.

The real grip about the entire affair is that Blizzard won't even tell you, they just change the name to something non harmful, like Oakstout's guild, and then, even after opening a ticket, they won't let you change it to something non offensive. You don't even get the chance to make it right. So, in order to fix the issue, everyone had to leave the banned guild and form a new guild, all the while hoping that members would see the guild message of the day explaining why everyone left the old guild. Officers had to constantly try and catch players online in order to get them into the new guild. Which made our week of recruitment kind of a problem. But luckily we've managed to gather everyone up into the fold of our new guild.

Having gotten that little obstacle out of the way, we decided to get our new recruits and some raiding newbies together to try taking on some 10 man content. First task was to do the weekly raid, to kill Noth the Plaguebringer from Naxxramas. No problem there, even after picking up a non guildie hunter to finish out our 1o for the raid. We then moved on to try 10 man Trial of the Crusader, which went better than expected, since some members hadn't seen much of that content. We did wipe a few times, but we still managed to learn from the mistakes and eventually took down Anub. Several guildie's got some decent upgrades while a good many of us only needed badges and practice. We then successfully took down Onyxia in our premade 10 man and then slaughtered 2 bosses in VoA before we called it a night.

The guild goal is to do Ice Crown. A lofty goal, probably, but after our successful night out, not something out of our grasp. Next week, we are going to get our feet wet and see how we do against the first few bosses in ICC. Who knows, we may just come away with very nice prizes, which is my hope.

On a personal level, I did pretty good at my first attempt at raid healing. I need to not stand in the fire and learn where I need to run when I have certain debuffs like the poison from Acid Maw. I do have a lot of raid knowledge but only from a tank's point of view, which is very very different from a healers. But even though I didn't do great at healing, I do know that I can make adjustments and should perform much better on my next outing.

I don't plan to be back tanking anytime soon. Healing probably will be my preferred class for some time, even after Cataclysm is released. It is so challenging and that is what I want from my MMO these days. I'm not saying that tanking isn't hard, but once a fight is learned, it pretty much stays the same. The only factors that can change a fight for a tank are the DPS and if they behave, then its the same old same old. But with healing, its never the same. You don't know how much damage will be dealt out to the tank or dps. You never know when someone is going to have a bad night and get stuck in the fire or not know how to get a debuff off. It's is never a dull moment, which is just fine for me. I'm tired of easy mod.

As you can see, things are going very well. Things have picked up. Raiding prospects have somewhat improved and I'm having a great time with friends. I just hope Cataclysm doesn't screw all that up.