I’m a moment of weakness, I started playing WoW again. A new patch, a new expansion and voip features drew me in like a swirling vortex of infinite monthly expenses. I resisted for 3 months, a whole quarter year (in boozehound terms). All of my things were still there, frozen in time and restored instantly from some mega-SAN storage unit once a card verification engine gave me a “1″.

My rows in a massive character database probably did something like this:

update player_table set account_status=”active” where player_id=”chris”;

Of course, “Chris” would be a login name or whatever. And I’m sure Blizzard has a crazy SAN/cluster setup that does 100x the work and complexity that I think of. Their job board is very appealing for someone as me who likes to think about how this monstrosity operates. Of course, heading to the West Coast on a whim would upheave habits and ruts. But that doesn’t kill the job posting at Blizzard for a SAN Administrator.

It’s extremely overwhelming to be in the throws again, not knowing what has changed and having a flood of aggravation & memory instantly jogged. I feel like rip-van-winkle and everyone is riding on hoverboards. As far as content, I am a newbie again with so little free-time compared to the people running around in front of me. I think I never want to be resurrected if such technology is devised, I would be constantly be lagging.

Company of Heroes is crashing on my non-stop. I haven’t found a fix. Synergy is also giving me problems. You can read about that on my other neglected tech-only blog (sigh, no … wait… no apologies).

I sent my Xbox 360 packing in a box today. The repair process has started. I feel comforted by the few tens of blogs that actually documented the shipping process. I don’t know if I’ll be surprised if someone has a site about how to throw up poisoned food properly.

The nostromo has an update coming in November. It’s plenty shiny and the “quick keys” is a welcomed improvement. I only used mine for CS and WoW and even then I found it an equal to the standard keyboard. It helps with stress, comfort and has “hover car future svelt” but I put it away. Just as my recall to the MMO, I’ll give it another shot.

The keys on the N52 were a bit slow and changing something familiar is always hard. It took me weeks and weeks to get my system down and the software did a good enough job of making this intrusion easy to manage.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Someone tell Alex Albreicht “hey I knew you and I listen to you podcast”, I’m sick of trying to contact him. Kthx.