Shouzer

So I’ve been thinking of playing World of Warcraft. Yes, this is an idiotic notion, considering I enjoy my life. But I wanted to share a review of the game I read this morning. I wonder if this is how all your writing starts to look once you become trapped in the game…

Pros: fun, addictive, yes, its a good thing, awsome graphics, fun, realistic if we lived in a world with night elves and such,
Cons: NONE, RAN OUT OF ROOM FOR PROS, ppl have personality, there nice and you can talk to them, dis/enable language filter

“and acts as a second life.you wont need friends if youi have WoW friends, they have personality, its fun to talk to ppl cause its not all game like in runescape.you can do quests wich widly vary, unless there the first quests.if you dont like quests and just want to lvl, you can just talk to ppl, its fun, and then grind, wich is killing monsters a little lower lvl then you for max exp.there are also dungeons, with hard bosses that drop items that will make you want more,if they idnt, it be boring.the graphics are awsome, best iv ever seen, and theres alot of detail.plus, if you wanna have fun, you can just spend alot of money on beer and kegs, the screen will look wavy and move with your camera.but watch out!if you fight you will get knocked back and fall to the ground.The language filter is disablable,lol, so you can see words like ***** and know what ppl are talking about.the guilds you can stay in, be promoted, have fun, kick anoying ppl, and have guild events.if you dont like these then you can just pk, or player kill, in many of the battlegrounds, if its in an enemy city, its not a battleground, its a raid.If there was a smoker who got WoW, hed quit.remember.WoW, saving lifes everyday.and all words in cons thing arent cons…wasnt enough room for all pros.sry for riting so much.”

World of Warcraft… Better than a nicotine patch.

I caught this article a couple days ago, and I found it to be a pretty good read. It points out, among other things, that more music is being sold than ever before. CD sales are down, and the record labels’ profits are shrinking. But more music is actually being sold.

I’d encourage everybody to read the article–it’s fairly short at just two pages. The main impression it left me with, though, is an upsetting impression of how long and how much the record labels have been ripping us off…

With EMI and Sony now releasing mp3s without DRM through Amazon’s mp3 store, it looks like they’re finally starting to learn. It makes me wonder just who else is ripping us off, too.

Road construction up here in Washington (at least around Seattle) is absolutely horrible. I don’t know who thought it up, but they shouldn’t be allowed to step foot behind a car if they think it’s fine.

Basically, they shutdown a lane or two while they’re doing work, which makes absolute sense–I imagine you don’t want the workers dodging traffic. I get that much. That part I’m cool. So far we’re good. But then, then, when they call it a day, they just cover the part of the road they were working on with steel sheets and put up a sign that says “Bump”.

Sound reasonable? Yeah, it might, until you realize that these are no ordinary steel sheets. They’re like fucking eighteen inches tall! Honestly these things might be tough to walk over, much less drive a car over. I swear I’m going to pop my tires one of these times.

And really, when you can see them, it’s not an issue. However, the roads here are pretty hilly, and I think they go out of their way to only do work right on the summits of these mini-mountains. It’s like they’re playing some kind of game with me, except that I don’t get to say, “No thank you”, and it hurts.

If this is how they do road construction most places around the country, they need to take a page out of Illinois’ methods. And geez, believe me when I say that’s horrible, too. Gotta repave a quarter mile of highway, do ya? Well… I don’t know, I figure that’ll take about a year and a half. Yeah, at least.

In my opinion, the point of a console is that every one is supposed to be the same. That way, game developers don’t have to worry about different possible configurations like they do on PC. That’s the power of a console–it’s easier to develop and optimize for.

That’s no longer the case now that there’s a 360 Premium, 360 Basic, 360 Arcade, 360 Elite, PS3 20gb, 40gb, 60gb, 80gb, etc. The different PS3s vary more than just by hard drive size, too. Some support full PS2 compability, some just a bit, and some not at all. Some have built-in WiFi, some don’t. It goes on and on.

Really, the Wii is the only console left that is a true console. There’s only one version out there. They all play the same games. They all do the same things. They all have the same hardware. Oh my, how smart…

Take the quiz at GlassBooth. For the second time in 4 years, I’m closely aligned with John Edwards. Here are my top 5.

1. 84% John Edwards
2. 80% Barak Obama
3. 76% Hillary Clinton
4. 71% Dennis Kucinich
5. 64% John McCain

Those were followed by Mike Gravel, Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Rudy Guliani, and Duncan Hunter.

I happened to catch this article on Engadget about Sony adding it’s music catalog to Amazon mp3. It’s amazing to me how quickly all the major studios have come around on drm-free downloads after EMI showed that it was perfectly sane.

EMI couldn’t have put drm-free mp3s on iTunes anymore than a year ago. I don’t actually remember when it was, but seriously… After such a long-fought “battle” against college students, you’d think one of these companies would have jumped to this conclusion a little earlier.

As far as I’m concerned, DRM of all forms is anti-consumer. It’s not pro-copyright or anything like that, it’s just plain old anti-consumer. Bought the first couple seasons of The Office on iTunes? Too fucking bad, you’re going to have to get the next couple on Amazon Unbox, and you’ll have to watch them on different devices. Fuck that shit. You know what that’s going to do? That’s going to make me more likely to pirate it. That’s the only way I have any guarantee that it won’t quit working at some point.

Well, I’m once again really late writing about this, but I had a nice Christmas holiday season. The office decided to give us the week off between Christmas and New Year’s so I went traveling. My parents and sister were here for the first part of that. They came to Bangkok to visit for a week and a half. We decided to spend Christmas and the weekend preceeding it on Phi Phi island. It’s a dreamy tropical island with a great beach. Actually, The Beach was filmed on location there, though it was on the unihabited Phi Phi island quite near the bigger one we were on. I did a little scuba diving and mostly laid on the beach all day.

The beach we were on was amazing in that was shallow and sandy for several hundred meters out. As the tide went out, the water would drop, and it would change colors throughout the day like a blue sunset. By mid-day, it was ankle-deep pretty far out, and on one day, I decided I needed some swimming to cool off. I moved out trying to find some deep water to swim in.

On the way out, I got tired of walking, so I decided to swim, even though the water was too shallow to really warrant it. As I was swimming out, I accidentally kicked what I thought was a rock. Turns out, it was a sea urchin. I pulled my foot out of the water to find half a dozen 4 inch needles sticking out of my big toe. I can only describe this experience as painful. I limped/swam/walked back up to the beach, screaming under water along the way to seek assistance from my father and sister. It can sure be handy having relatives in the medical field, that’s for sure. Of course, neither of them had much experience dealing with this sort of injury as it doesn’t occur often in southern Illinois.

They take me back to the hotel, and talk to the owner while I go to clean it in the shower. The owner, a rather dramatic fellow, insisted that I go to the hospital, “You go to hospital, NOW. Sea urchin very poisonous. You foot swell VERY big.” I needed my passport, so my sister ran back to the room to get it while the owner instructed an employee to take us to the hospital.

There are two important things you need to know at this point. 1) There are no cars on Phi Phi, people walk every where as it is a small island. 2) Thai people do not ever get in a hurry.

We are walking to this hospital, and the lady taking us is moving incredibly leisurely. I’m walking far faster than her, and I have a bunch of needles sticking out of my toe. Along the way, she runs into a friend who joins us on our stroll to the hospital.

When we finally arrive at this hospital, the nurse instructs me to sit on a table. She pokes at my foot a bit with some tweezers, and then declares, “I no take off.” I am freaking out a bit at this point at the thought of my toe being removed from my body to stop the poison. However, what she really meant was that she wasn’t going to remove the needles. She treated it the toe with ammonia to dissolve the calcium needles and it basically took care of itself. It turned out to be a pretty minor inconvenience as I was still able to go diving the day after this happened.

After my parent left, I went up to Chiang Mai, but nothing too exciting happened so I doubt that I’ll be posting about it.

As much as I’d like to root for the AFC West team in the playoffs to do well once the Broncos are out, I just can’t do it when it’s the Chargers. As much as I’d like to root for LT to win a championship, I just can’t do it when his QB is Philip Rivers.

There’s just something about Philip Rivers that makes me hate him. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s a horrible QB, and he doesn’t seem to realize it. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s always whining about something. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s always yelling at his team, even though he makes more mistakes than anybody else out there. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s ridiculously arrogant, and I can’t stand that from good players, much less players who I wouldn’t want as backups.

Don’t even get me started on Merriman. The guy cheats, everybody makes a stink for a couple weeks, and then nobody seems to care anymore. Everybody still thinks he’s the shit. Sorry, I don’t think it’s that hard when you cheat. And yeah, that goes for the Patriots, too. Bitterness? Certainly. Fortunately for me, that doesn’t make it any less true.

Tom Brady just doesn’t impress me. Is he a good QB? Certainly. Is he one of the better QBs in the league? Of course. Is he the greatest that’s ever played? Not even close.  (Well, that’s an overstatement, but I’m trying to make a point).

It’s fairly obvious to me, as it should be to anybody who watches the Pats play, that there’s three big reasons Tom Brady’s numbers are as good as they are. A) Wes Welker B) Randy Moss C) 10 seconds every time he drops back with the ball.

I mean, for real… find me a QB who’s decent to begin with, give him two excellent playmakers and 15 seconds to find a receiver, and I guarantee you he’ll look amazing, too. If anything, Brady’s been much, much less impressive this year than in years past. When they played the Dolphins early in the season and blew them out of the water, Tom Brady made nothing but bad decisions. It didn’t matter, though, because Randy Moss jumped up out of triple coverage and came down with every stupid pass.

Put me in the NFL, give me 20 seconds whenever I drop back, and I’ll at least look as good as Rex Grossman. Sure, that’s not saying a whole lot, but I don’t consider myself NFL talent.

I don’t even care about the Packers. I’ve been rooting for them this year, simple because I love Brett Favre. I just don’t see how you can’t like the guy. He throws an 80-yard TD against the Broncos in overtime, and it doesn’t even really upset me. Now that’s saying something.

I honestly thought the Packers were finished today against the Seahawks when Ryan Grant decided to fumble twice in the first 1:09. But Favre brought them back, and the Packers ended up winning a blowout. I can’t help but hope that the Packers end up upsetting the Pats in the Super Bowl, and that Favre retires on top.

The funny thing is, though, that Favre probably wouldn’t retire even then. Before this year, I thought he was crazy, and he needed to just give it up. He’s definitely brought me around since then, though.

I’ve talked about this before, and it looks like it’ll soon become a reality. It’s amazing to me the things this (notice I’m very careful not to say our) government will do in the name of security.

Jefferson said, “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” That’s something I agree with rather strongly. I’ve been to the airport a fair bit lately either dropping people off or flying myself, and it’s pretty shitty that whoever is flying has to go and wait at the gate by themselves. Surely there’s got to be a better way to ensure security than how they currently do it.

As I’m sure you’re all aware, I’ll almost positively (can’t ever too too sure) be voting for a Democratic presidential candidate in the next election. However, I’ve got to say that I hope that candidate isn’t Hilary Clinton. I can’t stand her. She’s never said a single thing that didn’t seem politically motivated. I have a feeling she’d do about as much good as another Republican president would.

I still think it’s ironic. Republicans are for small government, but our government has gotten bigger. Hell, we added an entirely new department (Homeland Security). Republicans are for fiscal responsibility, and yet we’ve got a monstrous deficit, despite Clinton putting us on track to be out of debt within the next couple years. Republicans are pro-life, but Roe vs Wade wasn’t challenged, much less overturned. What expectations could have persuaded one to vote Republican that have been seen through to fruition?

I finally got the pictures my friend took on our trip to Vietnam. I found myself exhausted with the idea of traveling after this trip. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was the people there that really tired me so much. They were quite rude to me on several occasions, but then, to be fair, they have a good reason for disliking Americans. I did some traveling in Thailand over my Christmas break, and it was much more relaxing. More on that to come in the next few days. I only feel like writing one post today, especially since I’m now using internet cafes. My laptop perished earlier this week. I’m looking for creative ways to destroy it if anyone has any suggestions.

Vietnam