gushue.net

I finally got around to setting up a Tax-Free Savings Account. I probably should have done that last year when they were first offered. Oh well.

I got bored this weekend, and finally got my hunter to level 80. And jumped right into some heroics. Here’s some proof about how gear isn’t everything – I have crap gear, yet did more dps than the warrior, and not too far below the ret pally. Both of which had quite better gear than I did. The screenshot is from a full heroic DTK run.

It makes me happy when I outdps people in better gear than me :)

In less than 15 minutes, I went from reading an article on Jello Biafra, heading to Wikipedia to check something on Faith No More, and a few tabs in Firefox later I’m reading things on the Seven Year’s War, and things that happened around that time. Then I realized what I had actually been reading in the first place.

• http://thequietus.com/articles/02543-jello-biafra-of-the-dead-kennedys-interview
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaithNoMore
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleofMogadishu_(1993)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MohamedFarrahAidid
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpecialActivitiesDivision
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconventional_warfare
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Army
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intolerable_Acts
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SevenYears’War
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Country

Quite the progression of reading…

On another note, I seem to be lacking an option to disable Markdown – which is awesome, but those Wikipedia links added some pointless italics in there. I’m sure I used to be able to turn it off on a post-by-post basis.

Since I’ve been too lazy to post much of anything lately and I’m not in the mood for any sort of paragraphs, I’ll at least put a few things in point form :)

• I finally levelled my druid in WoW to 80, and Boomkin dps is awesome.
• I got bored a couple of weeks ago, made a third WoW account (and reactivated my second one) with Recruit-A-Friend, and power levelled/granted levels to get something like 6-8 characters to 60. I’m not quite sure on the exact number, my mind has melted from the instance grinding. At least my death knight got Deathcharger’s Reins out of it.
• My hours are changing at work starting today, shifting two hours earlier. So I’ll be starting at 9pm and getting off at 5am. Good for work stuff, maybe not so good for RL stuff :( I’ve actually been doing things in the evenings before work lately. This is only for the two people that work out back in the warehouse, not the rest of the night crew.
• Trying out Windows 7 on both of my computers currently, seeing if I think it might actually be worth paying for this time. Initial impressions are good, I really like how the file sharing works with the homegroup stuff. It’s about time, I’ve always had issues sharing things on my network here. Probably partly caused by different versions of Windows on most of the computers.
• Finally picked up a new hard drive for my gaming computer – no more crappy old 120gb IDE drive that I had lying around, now I have a fast 1TB SATA drive in there.
• Holidays are over for this year, that sucks.
• Hurricane Bill was a disappointment. It barely even rained. Of course, the other side of the province might have disagreed.

I don’t know if there was more I had in mind, but I’m tired. Off to bed!

Oooh, I randomly came across a page telling me that there will be some Iron Maiden MASTER tracks in Rock Band pretty soon! That’s awesome, I’ll have to hook up my 360 to my router just to download those :) (I haven’t had it online since building my newest computer, I ran out of ports on my router).

From ironmaiden.com

• Aces High (live) – Flight 666 (2009)
• 2 Minutes to Midnight – Powerslave (1984)
• The Trooper – Piece of Mind (1983)
• Wasted Years – Somewhere in Time (1986)
• The Number of the Beast – The Number of the Beast (1982)
• Run to the Hills – The Number of the Beast (1982)
• Can I Play With Madness – Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988)
• The Clairvoyant – Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988)
• Powerslave – Powerslave (1984)
• Fear of the Dark (live) – Flight 666 (2009)
• Hallowed Be Thy Name (live) – Flight 666 (2009)
• Iron Maiden (live) – Flight 666 (2009)

Will be available Tuesday, June 9th.

For some reason this morning I decided to renew my EverQuest II account and check out how things have changed. I’ve done that a few times since I quit playing it a few years ago, but never stayed past that one month at a time. I did play the game for the first 9 months or so, starting on release day. I levelled a Wizard up to 45 (Provisioner level 50 – max level was 50 at the time), and switched to World of Warcraft mostly because of video card issues at the time, and my backup card just couldn’t handle EQ2.

I was hoping to log in after downloading/patching the game this afternoon, but for some reason the download just stopped part way through just after I went to bed. Oh well, maybe it’ll be done by the time I get home from work in the morning.

The game does seem to be much more solo-friendly than it was at release – that’s partly why I stopped playing. I wasn’t much into grouping back then, so it was hard to actually level after a certain point. Apparently it’s much easier now. And this feature from the newest expansion is sure to help future alts: “All of your characters will now receive a 10% experience bonus for each character at the maximum level. (Up to 50% max)”. WoW should have that… well, at least if it wasn’t so boring, I’d care.

My new computer had almost all of the new parts it needed to be complete, and I did have some spare parts around to make it usable for now. But here’s what I’ll probably be getting at some point soon to make this a really nice gaming system.

• Arctic Cooling Accelero XTREME GTX 280 video card cooling
• G.Skill TITAN 128GB SSD – I was considering a Velociraptor, but if I’m already spending that much, why not go SSD and get even faster times and much less noise (well, NO noise)?
• Logitech G19 keyboard (or a new G15, though I don’t like the amber backlighting)
• Logitech G7 laser cordless mouse (maybe… I really want to test out some mice in my hand before deciding)
• Probably a Blu-Ray drive of some sort. Might as well, since my monitor can do proper 1080p and my TV doesn’t.

Right now, I can barely hear my computer at all. Except when playing a game, the video card fans are noticable. But that might be partly because everything else is so quiet. At the moment my digital cable PVR is the loudest thing here, being louder than both of my computers combined. Of course, I’m not counting my Xbox 360 here – that thing is fucking loud.

So, my profit sharing cheque was in my bank account for maybe 15 minutes before I ordered these parts for my new computer:

• Gigabyte EP45-UD3R motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHZ Yorkfield 1333FSB 12MB
• EVGA E-GEFORCE GTX 260 Core 216 SC 55NM
• G.SKILL F2-8500CL5D-4GBPK PC2-8500 4GB 2X2GB DDR2-1066
• Scythe Orochi 10 Heatpipe CPU Heatsink (this thing weighs 3 pounds!)
• Antec NSK 4480B II Mini Tower Case

I’m missing a new hard drive, DVD-R, keyboard and mouse – but I’ll use some spare stuff I have around until I get new ones. Should be nice for just gaming :)

I just ordered myself a Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP 24″ widescreen monitor. Mmm, shiny.

Thinking about building a new system for gaming… other than a monitor/keyboard/mouse, am I missing anything important? (will update later with actual parts I am considering)

• Motherboard
• Hard drive
• CPU
• Video card
• Memory
• Case
• CPU HSF

Seems like there is something I’m missing, but I’m not sure.

Just thought of a couple more things:

• Keyboard
• DVD drive (or probably a Blu-Ray drive for one of my systems)