I was filming the game for my brother and his wife but it was so hard to concentrate on filming that half of the video is probably going to feature the sky or my feet because I’d constantly forgot to point the camera at where the ball was. When our goal keeper blocked the kick that won them the game the family/spectators on our side exploded into elated cheers. It’s weird, I don’t recall hearing the family and friends of the opposition at all during the game.

After that it was off to have a barbie at my brothers place for lunch, which made me feel drowsy so I went home and had a nap. Upon waking I discovered that I had gotten sunburnt watching the soccer – and no one else had :(

Oui continued Friday’s raid and managed to get up to the Lich King, insisting on asking me lore questions, but didn’t manage to kill him.

How incredbile is it that I’m yet to meet the company dick-head? Everyone seems so friendly while being focused focused on the job and they don’t micromanage at all, which I love. I don’t know what will come of the fact that they’re all a bunch of piss-pots though. The company products are varied and I will post about them another time.

My internet connection has returned to normal (after harrassing AAPT) and I’m resubbed to WoW but I’ve barely had a moment in the past two weeks to even log on because last weekend I went and did a course with Learn to Trade so that I can trade on the foreign exchange. I’m not really trading at the moment, just practising on a demo account for when I feel confident enough to use my real money. I’m doing this to hopefully free myself from the shackles of regular Sydney life, namely so that I can accelerate any plans andbreak the shackles of slavery I am forced to endure.

Oui is pining for WoW too, reducing himself to logging into my account because he misses it so much. He is really miserable because of his job so I told him that if he really hates it so much just quit and find something else. He’d rather find something else and then quit though.

We’re planning to go to Melbourne and hang with guildies and friends for Blizzcon and are booking the tickets tonight courtesy of Oui’s recalcitrance to spending money. I’m really looking forward to it especially as it’s been years since we’ve seen some of them (the others we’ve never actually met). It will actually be Oui’s birthday while we’re down there and since we already bought a Wii that has killed my idea for what to get him. I’ll have to be creative.

If there is one thing that I usually want to know it is events on my calendar and little did I know that it is indeed possible to pull your calendar data out of the armory into calendar software such as Outlook or Google Calendar. This was such a huge revelation to me that I absolutely had to write about it here.

After logging into the armory and loading up the desired character, visit the calendar and you will see the following:

Clicking on it will display the screen where you can select the types of events you want to appear on the calendar feed and it is also possible to add the events of your other characters (a maximum of 5).

After selecting the options you desire and copying the feed address to your clipboard, you can then follow the instructions on the Calendar Feed FAQ for how to add to either Outlook or Google Calendar.

The beauty of it is that because it’s a feed it will be automatically updated, so once added it will always be as up-to-date as the armory calendar (which I assume is very up-to-date since it is possible to accept or decline invitations through it).

Unfortunately this probably won’t work for anyone thinking of setting this up on their office PC if they already can’t access the armory, but I’d be happy to hear if it does.

Is there convenient, time-saving thing you know about that you’d like to share? Let me know!

I am Loremaster

When succesive raids have failed, the only remaining option is penguins.

While I’m on the topic of Texturas, they are an amazing product that I never knew about which allows you to some quite creative things with food that as a food consumer I always took for granted. No more though!

Anyway, the display of recipes is all done using the magic and power of the Views module for Drupal. Quite amazing really and perhaps I will come back to this post when my brother isn’t waiting for me in WoW to detail exactly how I did it.

Fight!

I know a couple guildies I’m certain will have already jumped on this. Addicts, I tell you! Now if only I could get Oui to say yes…

First and foremost, message boards are inherently weak when it comes to presenting content. They are structured in such a way that you must navigate to sub-forums to access any content and even then only the subject/title of the content is provided without any preview or short blurb from the content to assist the user in assessing it’s value (everyone knows that forum subjects are notoriously useless when it comes to assessing the value of any post). So the content is buried inside the forums with no indication of its value available without direct evaluation.

Secondly, most people are content consumers (readers), not content creators (writers). Ever hear/see guildies being encouraged to visit the forums? Many guilds struggle to get members to create an account on their forums, let alone visit or even write anything on them.

If you examine any forums you will see a pattern where a select group of people create threads and a seperate group of people respond/comment to them, this being true of any message boards, so using this knowledge the ideal situation would be to allow only people who create content to do so, and everyone else access to comment on existing content.

Obviously working backwards from a system where everyone already has access to create content isn’t ideal and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you enjoy creating drama, because people don’t tend to take losing something well (even if it was something they never used or intended to use). What I’m actually suggesting is that these things be considered in the beginning when setting everything up; that users be given appropriate permissions from the outset.

While message boards may seem the best option for such a system, WordPress, Drupal, or another CMS would be better, especially in their ability to present content at the top level in a manner in which content value can be more readily assessed.

There are sites that do a lot of work to give guilds the tools they need to operate as they’d like, but these third-party sites can only do so much with what has been made available. Blizzard are unprecedented in the amount of information they have exposed to third parties for WoW, but even then they can only go so far before hitting a brick wall. Third-party sites such as Guild Launch are left to cobble together functionality leaving their users with quite a bit of manual work.

I’ve always thought it would be great if Blizzard extended their support of guilds to a web interface that included CMS features like I’ve described. One that could integrate with the game, the armory, the calendar, everything. They say they will be doing ‘something’ for guild in the upcoming expansion and I dream that such a thing will occur but I’m not holding my breath.