Last Sunday I woke up and did my weekend routine of walking stright to my pc and logging into WoW to discover that suddenly my performance had dropped dramatically. It was quite disconcerting after buying a new video card just a week or two before and I instantly set out to find out what was causing it.

This would normally be where I detail the lengthy and arduous process whereby I failed to discover what it was involving multiple reformats only to have it miraculously begin to perform well again, but I'll skip all that this time because there's just too much and I plain can't be bothered typing it all out.

It was Questhelper, the addon that takes all of the work out of questing in WoW showing you where to go and telling you what to do for nearly every single quest in the game, and suffice to say I have a few message boards to visit to retract some comments I made and deliver some apologies.

PC problems bring the worst out in me.

PS: If you run Questhelper, type in "/qh perf 25%" to see an immediate performance increase in WoW.

I really love the frenzy people work themselves up to over the Securom DRM system found in many games these days. To my knowledge Securom is a PC only thing and some of the games using it are Bioshock, Mass Effect, Spore and most recently Grand Theft Auto IV.

The main complaint for the inclusion of Securom is that it can be used to limit the number of times you may install a game without having to make a telephone call somewhere to be authorised. The first time I heard about this developers were limiting the number of 'free' installs to 3 and I agreed completely that limiting the number of times I reinstall a game is ridiculous when I had paid for it. This is especially the case when you consider that the very reason this is implemented is to combat piracy and such a limit would not exist in a pirated version.

Grand Theft Auto IV has done the right thing and done away with the limit altogether but that hasn't stopped the securom haters from declaring a boycott again. I believe the problem is now the simple existence of Securom which once installed is incredibly difficult to remove without a complete hard disk wipe.

Now that there is no limit on the number of installs I think they're wasting their breath. The last complaint I had is gone and I don't see the problem with a software developer wanting to protect their property if doing so is unobtrusive and doesn't hinder me as a paying customer.

Not that I'm going to buy GTA IV, hell no. I'll probably download it from a torrent site and try it out, but it isn't really my style of game. See? Piracy doesn't always mean a lost sale because I never would have bought it anyway.

For todays lesson: everything I described above is actually software theft, not piracy. Software piracy entails selling stolen software, theft is only the use of it. I prefer pirate though, because it sounds more exotic than thievery.

I recently began the process of renewing my visa and work permit, something that must be done annually, and have experienced so many head-shaking moments in a single day that it would be impossible for one blog post to contain them.

I was surprised to find that most of the immigration staff for the business section at the Suan Plu office don't speak english and have been complaining about the fact to everyone at work. One of our staff told me that I shouldn't complain because "Our King said all Thai's should speak Thai", to which I responded "Does he know everything? Would you jump off a bridge if he said to?".

I instantly regretted saying it, because obviously I would expect all Thai's to speak Thai, but Immigration is a place where nearly every customer is foreign and as English one of the main languages spoken around the world I would have thought they would have more than two or three staff who could barely speak english.

My abrupt response was also a result of my irritation at Thai's using any of the Kings words as an excuse or defense for something stupid. The blind and absolute devotion of Thai's to the king is admirable but I don't see how it could possibly be healthy for any free-thinking individuals or benefit society at all. Not to say that it doesn't, I just can't imagine how it would. After all, I don't know everything.

The other thing that got me really frustrated was Immigration policy, namely changes to it.

Staff at my office put a lot of work into preparing the paperwork for my visa renewal, constantly referring to documents from Immigration and their website to know what they needed to prepare. Unbeknownst to them there had been a policy change at Immigration which meant I would need a lot more documents than they had prepared. The idiocy is that the notification of the change was only available on the desk of Immigration staff at their office so they were basically saying they wanted everyone who visits them to waste one day (the minimum amount of time required to do anything at Immigration).

At least our staff got angry about this too, so I wasn't alone on this one.