The patch for updating the current version of World of WarCraft (3.0.9) to version 3.1.0 is behemoth.

Originally, I think it was 555 megabytes - over half a gigabyte.

At the moment, the infatigable Blizzard Background Downloader is reporting the patch is 714 MB. That is almost three quarters of a gigabyte - too much to fit on a CD-R!

My downloadd rate is only ten kilobytes per second so this is taking an epic amount of download time.

I remember when my first storage system for my first personal computer, an Apple II - was a cassette drive, the first online storage device I bought for it - a floppy disk drive - held only 113 kilobytes, and the mass storage hard disk drives of the time had a capacity of only 5 megabytes.

So it is with that perspective that I regard the size of this patch with a bit of shock and a lot of impatience.

I just want it to be done. Toward that end I finally turned the auto sleep mode on my computer completely off last night before I went to bed. I figured the thing would finally be finished when I got up.

Nope. It still had 20 megabytes to go!

Size aside, this sounds like it will be a big improvement in may ways for World of WarCraft players.

One of the players I respect a lot for his ability, friendliness, helpfulness, and skill recently mentioned he spends a mind-boggling sum of gold every day on re-specing his Druid to do diifferent rolls on dungeon runs.

For people like him the new dual-specing feature - which will purportedly cost a one-time 1,000 golds fee per character - is going to be a financial godsend.

He is having no problem now accumulating vast sums of gold. When this change goes into effect, I can barely imagnie how much gold he will be accumulating each week but it will be a lot.

Level 80 characters changed the WoW economy. Items for low level characters that are crafted or dropped, ordinary greens, sell for a lot of money. The most mundane robe can sell for almost a gold. Decent weapons for characters in their teen levels can sell for multiple golds.

Something like once a month, I will run a low-level instance on one of my characters so I can get the combat skills of that character up to or close to maximum. If you do not do that then I think your PvP capability will suffer some. Lately, I do care about PvP a lot at times. So, I do these runs to sharpen my characters skill and learn some new things about how to play it with the latest abilities it has.

I selll the greens I pick up from those runs in the auction house (AH) afterwareds. After all, they are too low-level for me but other players have characters that can find them very useful.

The greens seem to be selling for about twice as much as I am used to these days. If the item is a good fit for a popular class then it can sell for lots more, even if it is not extraordinary. The ceiling for how much more seems to be, shall we say, somewhat elastic.

I created an new character this month on the home realm of a guy I met in Alterac Valley BG who has kind of the same approach to WoW I do: mostly PvE with spates of PvP when necessary, in order to get nice armor to make it easier to go up in levels.

I just intended to make the character a conduit to use as a point-of-contact. However, I figured what the hey, I might as well give it a couple professions so it could earn some gold, buy some armor from time to time, and level it just a little.

I picked herbalism (if you will forgive the pun) and mining. Barely did the mining, did lots of herbalism.

Without really setting out to "farm gold" in only a week I had 70 golds. The principle things that let me do this I thik were:

1. Do not do crafting professions - just gathering professions.
2. Start using the bank in your nearest capital city right away.
3. Get 5 bags equipped on your character as fast as possible and keep upgrading them as early as possible.
4. If people invite you to run an instance and you are not planning to log off soon - go on that run.
5. Keep the cloth you pick up if you possibly can.
6. Roll Greed instead of Pass by default - unless of course you feel another character should wind up with it.
7. Auction the greens you do not want to use yourself after your run, pricing high any items that seem are extra desirable.
8. Auction the cloth too. If the market seems glutted for a particular kind of cloth, hold on to it a while in your bank or overnight on your character.
9. Auction low-level gear, telling the auction house to accept bids for 24 hours not 48. Low-level characters rise quickly, so in 48 hours the character that could be at least bidding on your item will likely be too high to use it.
10. Buy recipes that you know are really good and/or inconvenient to obtain and sell them in the auction house. If you are making a run to get them for your own character, you might as well grab a couple to sell for a profit.

The overall guiding principle in pricing items profitably in the AH for me is this: imagine the buyer as someone who has a level 80 character with lots of gold, not much time, and has a desire to level a new character as quickly/easily as possible so it can be used in BGs or end game PvE - and be fun.

A secondary principle is cater to Collectors.

hose are people with crafting professions (Cooking, especially) that just have to have every recipe that exists.

For some reason that is probably related to this, one of the lowest level Cooking recipes sells for several gold - orders of magnitude more than it coststo buy from a vendor.

I have no idea why this is. The cooked food has minimal effect and buyers in AH pay orders of magnitude more than the item is worth. The only reasonable actions on their part would be to ignore the item because it has no special utility in advancing their character's Cooking skill level or its survial - or if they must have it, just run out and get it from the vendor themselves.

It is a mystery but one I cater to once in a while.

There are some slighly higher level foods that people pay very good gold in order to get Cooking recipes to make them. I sold a handful of one handy recipe for 12 golds each. There were a combination of good reasons to buy it in AH and pay a premium for it but I thought 12 golds was a bit much.

Still, who am I to judge? Level 80 quests pay five golds and up, including the daily quests. If some player with an 80 wants to take the golds he earns from doing 2 quests to buy a nice recipe for his alt then that is his choice. And nobody would be questioning it if he spent the money that alt earned by doing quests on the same recipe.

It is a big relative difference when you look at it one way but about the same when you look at it the other. My guess is that there are players who have played the game so long that gold is not an obstacle to them anymore.

When this 3.1 patch goes live, some those guys are going to have fifty to hundreds of golds more to spend every day if they are not inclined to spend more than they already have.

My guess is that this will rock the world of Warcraft even more. That gold is going to go somewhere. They are going to do something with it.

One possibility is the emergence of uber twink guilds that are principly bankrolled by one player - an uber rich GM. It is sort of one of the ultimate social things to do and WoW is a social MMO game, after all. If these super rich guys were not social, I do not think they woulld be super rich.

I have found that creating a new character on a new server, leveling it quickly through a burst of levels, and accumulating a nice amount of gold from nothing in a short time is not so hard for an experienced player. Indeed, it is a hundred times easier than creating/leveling their first main was. Especially, if they follow the principles I listed above. Principles they will probably naturally adhere to anyway out of experience, knowledge, instinct, and desire.

I suspect that within a couple of months of WoW 3.1 going live that this is going to be even more true and that some of these brand spanking new characters of experienced players will be welcomed into uber twink guiids. From nothing to a killer character in weeks if not days.

Just a thought.

JJ Abrams new Star Trek fillm looks like it is going to be a really good movie. I will probably go see it sometime this summer.

I just watched the HD version of the trailer for it and it seemed really good. I totally enjoyed every episode of his hit Alias TV series and I liked some of the episodes of his Lost TV series a lot - though I never quite got into that series as much as the former.

It is sad that Gene Roddenberry is no longer with us but it is terrific that modern producers and directors can sometimes leap right into that juggernaught of a story and continue it as it was meant to be continued.

My highest level character, a horde undead warlock, got cold weather flying and reached level 80 last week. It was lucky enough to run some heroic instances then - mostly with guildmates. And it learned a lot of new level 415 and 420+ leatherworking patterns!

Color me happy! :)

One disappointment I suffered a few days ago was that I noticed that Horde had suddenly stopped winning the Alterac Valley level 51-60 bracket battleground. This went on for a couple of days.

Finally, it hit me that the inconceivable had happened and horde was reliably losing AV BG.

So, I made lemonade out of lemons and switched from doing AV on my horde rogue to doing it with my alliance hunter and warlock. Suddenly, I was getting a steady streamm of wins Saturday night - over and over. Won all but one Sunday morning too.

This was unusually terrific because I had a Daily BG quest I had been holding onto for agest to win AV BG one one or both of those alliance characters. Plus, I had a lot of AV-specific quests I wanted to do that were contingent on Alliance either winning the BG, capping (capturing) some strategic places, or - at the very least - not losing really, really quickly!

Until now, trust me - those things were not ever happening. So, last night I was one very happy camper - or BGer as the case was - when I went to bed.

I gained faction reputation with both my alliance warlock and hunter. Both alliance characters got higher level AV BG trinkets, making them more robust in the BG and when doing PvE. I got some silvers. And my hunter got one very wonderful polearm that has an incredible twenty something Agility on it. I skilled polearms up from nothing last night so I could use it in BG. Even not meleeing with it, it still gives my shooting and my pet better performance.

All in all, my characters got better overnight - literally!

The cause of our alliance lucky streak was that hordes were not showing up in their usual numbers for some reason Saturday and perhaps Friday as well. That tipped things toward alliance's favor since they had 2 men in the 40 man BG for every 1 man the horde had. At least for a while.

Initially, horde guys probably got discouraged from playing as much as usual since they seemed to be on a temporary losing streak - tipping things even further in the Alliance's favor.

However, Sunday morning there started to be a little bounce back. Horde guys eventually did start streaming into the BG in complementary numbers to that of the Alliance. That was probably because horde side collectively realized they were losing simply because they weren't showing up!

In the meantime though, one thing had changed. That bracket of alliance characters had geared up, feasting on their two days winning streak of marks and honor points and quest rewards. That enabled them to get really nice gear to compete in the AV BG much stronger than they had before.

Gear is not everything but if you know what you are doing then it really helps you a lot. I think the Alliance knew what it was doing but it just was at a material disadvantage - even though it has vastly superior numbers of players in my battlegroup.

So it will be interesting to see how things develop. At the higher levels, Horde pretty much always loses AV - with Alliance victorius. If the situation continues indefinitely, Horde might find it incredibly difficult to gear up on the AV gear.

Another great boon befell my Alliance characters last night and this afternoon in the form of bags.

My discipline spec priest is my herbalist. He had not fully stocked his bank with bags and he was using the pathetic 12-slot herb bag because I could not afford the going rate in the AH for the bigger ones.

His gulldmaseter suddenly declared that he had a bunch of the largest side of herbalist bags and he wanted to give them away. I asked if I could have a couple and he said sure and a couple minutes later told me he had put some in the gulld bank for me. I equipped one on my character and one in the bank. I also put a 14-slot Runecloth bag in my priest's bank, giving him plenty of breathing room for the first time this year and maybe even last year!

So now, I will be able to quest and farm alchemy materials with my priest. Some will probably find their way into our guild bank as useful potions and elixirs or raw materials for other guild members' inscription crafting activities. Others will go to support my characters leveling by making them fall down less in battle, essentially - and being used in their armor crafting some.

The other big surprise came this afternoon. Two of my alliance characters are in a different guild. The guildmaster of that guild sent slightly over a hundred golds, combined - to my two characters in her guild. I am hoping this is not a sign she is leaving the game or disbanding the guild soon. It might just mean she had a winfall and wanted to share the wealth.

In any case, it enabled me to buy 1 more bag slot for one of them and I put a medium-sized bag - a 12-slot bag, that I had been holding onto for a while, in one of her bag slots at the bank. It had basically too much stuff to do anything so this solved that problem.

Another stroke of good luck was when an alliance guildmate asked if I could help with transfering some gear she had from one faction to antoher. I was happy to help her. We have helped each other many times in the past since she first started playing the game a couple of years ago.

She tipped me a number of golds and helped me transfer some items of mine as well. Now, my alliance paladin has a very nice level 49 "blue" shield with a +7 Stamina enchant added onto it by my horde enchanter. Needless to say, she is going to be very tough in one more level (she is 48 at the moment).

I also transfered some other gear and a couple terrific blacksmithing patterns to her. I am so looking forward to getting her to level 49 now, equipping that shield - and then leveling her to 51 so she can participate in the Alterac Valley battleground. There she can pick up a really great "blue" mace and perhaps an even better shield - we shall see.

As you can tell, a few random turns of good luck just made a huge difference for my characters on the alliance side. The horde side characters I play have been steadily progressing but not really accumulating enough wealth to spin much of it back to the alliance characters.

Happy days for the Alliance!

I pretty much expected that WoW 3.1 would go live today since the download became available a few days ago and this was scheduled to be a long server maintenance day. In fact, it was, it took an extra couple of hours, even.

However, WoW Server Realm Status page indicates all of the srvers are back up and the current Patch Notes page says that 3.0.9 is the current patch.

So maybe we will see 3.1 go live later in the week.

Interesting. Maybe I will play WoW some after dinner after all.

I am pretty impressed with the improvements CNET has made with the Gamespot, Movietome, and TV.com websites since I last really used them, which was a few months ago.

Now they seem a lot more reliable and much more attractive/functional than they did before.

Hmmm.... I just noticed that the whole kit and kaboodle now seems to be owned by CBS Interactive. When did that happen? Oh, well - computers are the future and CBS is a big media company. I guess it makes sense. Seems like a nice turning point.

I had a firewall confirguration problem which arose from my belated upgrade from Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.5. It prevented my WoW 3.1 patch from downloading. That is sort of understandable.

What is not understandable is that neither WoW nor the OS pointed it out to me!

Eventually, I discovred the problem on my own and after a number of tries, finally solved it.

It would not hurt Blizzard to tell you up front that your firewall settings are not correct and what to do to fix it. I mean, an operating system does not exactly keep a secret from applications what the version number is for the OS. Checking a firewall is not that hard. After all, Blizzard has the code that is using it - so all they have to do is try a piece of it.

What kind of burns me up is I won't be able to play WoW tonight if WoW 3.1 actually goes live today. Last time I checked, the 555 MB download was not even 2/3 done and I started last night.

I have a bunch of things I want to get done this month. So this hiccup kinda sucks.

Here is what i'm planning on this month:

1. Help a nice guildmate level up from 74 toward 80.
2. Level my shadow priest from 44 to 50 so he can raise his skill above 300 for Alchemy and Enchanting professions.
3. Get a runed Arcanite and Feliron rod made for my shadow priest to use for his enchanting.
4. Get my level 59 undead rogue tons of marks for Alterac Valley, Arathi Basin, and Warsong Gulch so it can redeem them at level 60 for excellent epics and nice blues.
5. Spend 5 minutes a day on my new Inscriber, learning a new minor inscription recipe each day.
6. Hand out armor kits to my friends over and over, since they upgrade their armor regularly.
7. Level my main to level 80. Imeediately after that happens, I want to start turning in Heavy Leather in order to obtain the high level Leatherworking recipes from the guy in front of the Leatherworking shop in Dalaran.

Yeah, leveling my main to 80 is my lowest priority because: a) it is so easy, b) obligation to help character(s) of my friend is substantial, c) getting Northrend greens I cannot D/E over and over is very aggrivating, d) having access to high level potions would be very nice.

Unfortunately, it looks like not even the 5 minute minor inscription research is going to get attended to today. The way the patch download is crawling along, I will be lucky if I can get onto WoW before breakfast tomorrow morning.

I watched Houes and Heroes last night.

Both of them were pretty good episodes.

Heroes was about a big roundup of all the mutants. House was about a kitty of death who would go to sleep next to patients who were about to die.

I also watched an episode of Stargate: Atlantis that I had recorded recently. It was pretty good. Kind of surprised to see Samantha character wearing substantiallly less makeup than she usually does.

Was kind of a surprise late in the episode when she had to have her boots removed because of a broken leg - and she was wearing pink toenail polish! :P

First time in ages I have watched a few hours TV in one evening.

I have rented a storage unit for ages. I kept feeling like giving it up but I was concerned I would not have anyplace to put the stuff that was in there.

This year I threw out a bunch of things at my house that I did not need anymore. I also put some boards up in the attic so i could store some things up there.

Today, I got the last of my things out of there and ended my rental there.

That means more money staying in my pocket each month. One less thing on my to do list.

Finally got a review of something I watched posted. It was a show I watcehd about 4 months ago but only saw the first part of. :?

Been cleaning up a lot this week and am throwing out and deleting stuff that I do not really need. Since I had already watched most of it, I figured out how the story would end.

One more thing I have been able to get rid of this week. :)

I like this site but I have only an occaisional TV viewer for the past several years. I think I average less than one show a week now.

I come to the site maybe once or twice a season nowadays.

When I first joined, I used to visit it a lot to blog, to get a feel for social web sites and practice using them - and of course to learn about and commemorate certain TV series or episodes. And keep track of which ones I had watched over the year and rate them.

Now that I am sil an active user but a very infrequent one, I find myself "over-subscribed" to inforamtion. I am tracking too many things and too many people to get much out of the Updates feature. It is just too much to read in a short time. And really, that is what the feature is for - let you read a select set of things really quickly.

So, I cut 90% of the people I track on TV.com and Gamespot.com this morning. Now, I am down to just tracking 3 or 4.

If you got a message that I am no longer trackng you, please do not take this as any kind of a negative response to anything you have done or said lately. It is just me, trying to cut my list of people I track down to a really bare minimum in one fell swoop.