I decided to take a long break from World of Warcraft and decided I would like to do it this month.

Two issues arose that needed looking into.

1. My subscription still has some months left on it.
2. My characters took some time, effort, planning by to set up and help from other players - especially GMs

So, I did not want to waste the money for the remaining period of my subscription AND lose all my characters.

I did some research.

I found a useful page on the World of Warcraft support web site that tells you how to cancel your account. It partly explains how to do that.

Here is that page:

In a nutshell what happens immediately is that:

a.) Your credit card information is removed/forgotten from your account

b.) You lose ability to log into any Forums on the website because authentication on web site stops working as soon as you cancel

c.) You can still access your characters in the game right through the day before your auto-renewal date.

What the page fails to explain is what happens to your characters once the auto-rewnewal date is reached and you have cancelled your account. People who have been playing or a year or two - or perhaps a lot less - really want to know that.

So I called Blizzard World of Warcraft technical support and posed my questions. Mostly, they were good news. Note these are not exact quotes, I am just conveying the gist of the information in a FAQ-like format.

Q: Are my characters deleted when I cancel my account or when my subscripton runs out?

A: No. All the characters for the account are preserved. Blizzard has accounts with all the characters owned by that account still around that date back to when WoW first came out. Auto-deletion of characters does not occur.

Q: Will items my characters posses in ther bank, bank bags, being worn, or held in equipped bags be deleted?

A: No. All those items are kept intact just like the characters themselves.

Q: How do I restart my account when I am ready to begin playing again with those same chararacters I had before?

A: There are two ways. One you use if your subscription has ended in the last 90 days, the other if it has been more than 90 days. (a) Go through process of creating a new account on web site but make sure that you use BOTH the same user name and password as before, (b) Use the Scroll of Resurrection feature. [I forget which you do in which case but it is probably obvious when you are on the web site. -johnnysofware]

Q: Will the contents of the Inbox for each character be preserved and still be there when I renew again.

A: All ingame mail is subject to the 29-day auto-deletion feature regardless of whether the account subscription has ended or not.

So there you have it. When you are really busy with other things or just tired of playing WoW you can take a long - even really, really long break from the game - and then pick up where you left off at some distant date in the future.

Your characters and their items will be kept intact. Whatever mail they had in their mailbox is still going to expire subject to the 29-day auto-deltion feature. So it behooves you to bank, bag, vendor, auction, give away, or disenchant any items attached to emails in your email box.

As part of your account cancellation planning process, you probably want to include time to respond to emalis you have received from other characters, respond if necessary, and delete them. If you have a very full inbox, they could be hiding some messages. You can only see 100 or so messages at a time.

Something that just occured to me is Bliizzard does some weird, miscellaneous stuff from time to time. A good example of this is the times they have made a drastiic change to the talent tree of a class. They might completely reset your talent points. This makes your character totally forrget what people refer to as your character's spec or build. I remember vividly when this happened to my Shaman class character in early or mid-2008. Lucky for me, he was specialized pure Enhancement talents so it only took a few minute to get his talent tree rebuilt.

You can view and then print your talent tree out from Blizzard's wowarmory.com web site and even some other web sites. You probably want to do this before you cancel your account. The longer you are away, the greater the possibility of this happening. I have a hunch that when WoLK comes out in 2008 or 2009, this could happen to some classes.

The only other loose to address is your social connection to other players in the game. I am not a GM and have never contemplated being one so I will not address the extra issues GMs face. I will just touch upon things regular players might contemplate doing before they leave and having happened when they return to the game in the future.

Chances are, as far as most or all of your characters go - you are in a guild and you have a few friends you talk to regularly outside of your guilld.

To prepare for your eventual return, and avoiid anhoying them even if you probably will never return, it would be a good jesture to inform the GM and maybe a couple other people in your guild of your intentions to not renew your account and absent yourself from the game. Ditto your closest friends in the game who are not in your guild.

If you have anything you want to read or print that is in the Forums, you better do that before you cancel your account too.

That is it. Assuming there is nothing special about your situation like you are a GM, have a permanent spot in a raid group you need to relinquish back to your fellow raiders, and you are not holding any items for anyone - you are ready to cancel your account.

Resuming the game is the next thing you will face, if you choose to do so someday. I have already covered the mechanics of getting your account reactivated - and with it, your old, familiar characters.

What you need to be prepared for is maybe a little culture shock upon your return. Though I have not cancelled my account yet, here are some things I think you can expact based on my experiences over time while playing the game.

• Guilds disband from time to time which effectively boots all members from guild. Many guilds have a practice of kicking out any characters who have not logged in for a certain number of months - I have heard things like 1, 2, 3, 6, 12 months. So be prepared to be guildless upon your return.
• Your GM or favorite guild officers might have left your guild. It behooves you to write their names down before you cancel your account. That way when/if you return, you have likely contacts to get back into your old guild - or into their new guild - if you really liked them.
• Your old friends may be gone upon your return. If so, the names of their characters will be removed from your characters' Contacts lists. It probably behooves you to write your best friends' characters' names down before you cancel your account. That way, if they are gone when you return but later return, you can add them again. To do that, you have to check periodically - and to do that, you have to be able to know their exact spelling of those character names.

Hope this little tutorial helps people.

I saw an episode of the HBO series True Blood at Yahoo's TV web site earlier this week.

It was pretty good.

Since the Buffy and Angel TV series both ended several years ago, there have not been many new shows to step in and fill the void in the niche these 2 series created.

There was a broadcast network TV seriies briefly called something like "Twilight". There was a year or two of a TV series named "Blade" which was based on the movie series of the same name.

Then there is this True Blood series. I guess it first came out a couple of years ago. It seemed like it was pretty well done.

Anyone else like it? Please leave a comment if you do.

For years, there has been a site on the web called del.icio.us where anyone could get an account and save their bookmarks.

The advantages of this are huge. Many people have two or three computers at their family's houes. The old one, the new one, and perhaps a laptop.

Some workers need to have 2 computers to do their job. Different operating system or different application requirements is a common reason.

Whenever such folks are on a different computer than the one they regularly use, they are posed with two problems. The bulk of their bookmars are not available in their browser and any new bookmarks they save on their alternate computer will not be avaiable when they switch back to their regular one.

One solution would be to save them to the web. That is where the pages are coming from 99% of the time anyway.

Some people did not like the idea of all their web page URLs being publiically available. They could include account infomration in the URL itself. The pages themselves could contain personal information they did not want to disclose or be associated with.

When Yahoo bought the service they added the option to make any bookmark private. They made a few other changes. For the most part, they left the service alone.

Some new features were added but not not a huge number. In the past year, very few nwe features were added.

This week a couple of changes were rolled out.

The URL for the site has gone from http://del.icio.us/ to the far easier to remember http://www.delicious.com/ - no weird period positions to remember anymore. Yay!

Also, the appearance of the site has dramatically changed.

Another welcome change is performance. The site seemed pretty fast this past year. However, according to Yahoo, it was creaking under the strain of so many users and needed an overhaul to make it more efficient. That change too has been included in this new rollout.

Go to the site yourself and read more about What's New !

I just heard about the ad - the John McCain ad irritates many in Hollywood - last night.

One is hard pressed to find even a couple similarities between Barack Obma and Paris Hilton.

Lets compare the two:

1. One grew up the son of a midwestern academian of modest means with a passion for understanding other cultures. The other grew the granddaughter of a billionaire who wrote her out of his will due to her passion for partying culture.
2. One taught law in a US university for a decade. The other spent weeks in jail for drinking & driving after half a decade of being in the public eye foor wild partying.
3. One spent hiis youth in projects to help the public. The other spends her youth vying for the attention of the public and promised to do something to help people after she was released from jail.
4. One has middle-income background just like most Americans. The other is an offspring of the family that created the Hilton hotel chain empire.
5. One traveled recently to Europe to speak to throngs of hundreds of thousands of people. The other frequently went to Europe to get intoxicated.

Weapons of mass destruction (WoMD) such as "biological weapons" were one of the major reasons for going into Iraq following the 9/11 Islamic muslim airline hijackings/murders.

Americans were frightened at the time the Iraq invasion was announced due to waves of letters containing deadly anthrax sent to offices of media organizations. A nurse in the northeastern US died of anthrax during the same period.

In 2003, the widow of Florida victim Robert Stevens sued the US Government for lax security at Fort Detrick. Her lawyers surmised the biological material used in the attacks must have come from there. Their suit made the claim that the anthax was stolen from a biological weapons research lab located on that base.

What us Americans learned in the news today was a lot more shocking. Today's headlines included Anthrax 'suspect' is found dead and U.S. scientist in anthrax case reportedly kills himself.

Five people died in the deadly 2001 biological weapon attacks targeting people in offices of US national media organizations and offices of two US Senators.

The United States Senators targeted were both Democrats . No Republicans were attacked.

The Senators were Senate Majority leader Tom Daschel and Senate Judiciary Committee lead Patrick Leahy. In retrospect, given the events that have unfolded in the past 6-7 years, it does not look like these targets were chosen completely at random. This looks like genuine assassination attempts intended to effect a slight change in power.

We Americans were all convinced by certain politicians and their political appointees that these attack came from a foreign power and that it could only have come with the sinister complicity of some nation's government.

A year or two later, we were told maybe it was not weapons grade anthrax spores at all, and it might not have required a national government's lab to manufacturer.

At this point, it is hard to tell whether the first or the second statement was the untrue one. It would probably be interesting to know if the second finding came from the accused, while he was working for authorities to help catch "the killer".

Certainly, both statements cannot be true. The first statement was repeated over and over again without any qualification. The second statement was basically a retraction, rescinding the first.

The anthrax attacks were labeled a case of terrorism by the federal government.

Wild accusations flew around the globe toward Iraq.

A Burger King worker in Geramany who has been thoroughly discredited as a chronic liar by US investigative journalsim sleuths and the UN was the single source of information the US had implicating Iraq. His information indiicating WoMDs were being created in a factory in Iraq was found to be a complete fabrication.

Further, he made the claims as part of a number of false statements he made to German immigration authorties while trying to get immigration and work permits to enter Iraq. At the time, he was a fugitive from justiice in Iraq for dishonest business practices and allegedly stealing expensive video equipment from an employer.

The UN WoMD investigator, upon learning that all the claims of WoMDs existing in Iraq at the time came from one indivdual decided to investigate the individual.

What they found was the building could not have been used as "the source" described. Construction after he was employed there blocked the loading bays he claimed had been used later on to load/unload materials. This was clearly shown in satellite photos and anyone else with access to satellite photos could have easily spotted this.

The former boss who fired him - who he incidentally claimed was working in Iraq as a WoMD monger - in fact was working abroad during the time period of the accustation. The boss's son, accused of being an international WoMD vendor - was simply a normal 16 year old boy.

Even more telling, the boss had terminated the "source" for submitting incorrect documents. Invoices or somethign like that, as I recall.

Nevertheless, the gun was jumped and Americans were scared by politicians eager to invade Iraq

The US sent Colin Powell to rattle the US with the now debunked claims of the Burger King worker. The UN, for the most part did not buy it

That is why the UN did not commit troops to invade Iraq. The invasion was organized, initiated, and mostly manned and staffed by the US military. Or rather contractors and the US military.

The biggest contractor used at the time was Dick Cheney's company, a branch of which has been divested and know goes by the name KBR (Kellog, Brown, and Root)

That company stands accused of botching a drugging/rape perpetrated upon an american contractor and numerous electricutions of US service personel in Iraq who died while taking showers.

So, back to the present. Now, we learn that a US biological weapons scientist working at Fort Detrick, Maryland was about to be charged with the deadly anthrax attacks - and his dead body has just been discovered. It has the appearance of a suicide by overdose of painkillers. Prescription Tylenol with codeine, to be precise.

It is interesting that he was not kidnapped but instead was going to be charged in a criminal court. He was not tortured but escorted by his family and police from his work site. He was not waterboarded and thrown naked on a frigiid floor - or forced to sleep in a room with the lights always burning.

Instead, he was transfered to a mental health facility for a week because he was suffering from depression. This is the complete opposite of what we were assured was necessary in terrorism cases! And in fact, this is a real, live, actual case of terrorism.

No torture, no waterboarding for the man allegedly behind the Anthrax attacks that killed 5 Americans, contaminated countless other people - and entire US Postal Service Buildings. Not to mention a US Senate building.

Further, he was allowed to take his own life when he was set free, without guarded superviion. Think about that! Now, we the American people - our court system - cannot question this man. His dead victims and the survivors of his attack cannot make their statements in court during his trial. Evidence against him cannot be presented at a court of law for the sake of prosecuting him.

This was one of the biggest terrorist attacks of 2001! Multiple lives were lost in a number of states, many people wree exposed to deadly contamination and had to take potentially dangerous antibiotic drugs, and facilities were made unusual for a lengthy period of time while decontamination procedures could be carried out.

Look at what happened to Iraq. False allegations of WoMDs which have been soundly disproven by some officials and the more energetic parts of the media for years.

As for "invading" Fort Detrick, the US cannot send its military to invade it - or the whole state of Maryland - because the miliitary is already running the base. The base that employed the individual thought to be responsible, and the base from which it appears the individual obtained the deadly anthrax spores is already occupied by the US military. It is their base!

To paraphrase based on a quote from early in the last century, "We have met the source of the WoMD, and we are they".

Hopefully, the news revelations this week will improve the qualiity of future investigations when the resources of the US military are usurped to attack and kill Americans. It should not take the invasion of a foreign country to solve what is a simple - though deadly - case of of misconduct by someone supposedly assisting the federal government's military.

In fact, as we have seen - such an invasion does not solve the mystery. It merely delays justice where justice is due and keeps a dangerous criminal at large.

We would like to see such a crime not reoccur. When it does occur, we would like to not be be so exploited for political power and profit at the public's expense.

The dead man who now stands accused of the anthrax attacks did not end his alleged involvement in the crimes after committing them. He was even later paid again by the US government as a scientific expert to investigate them! In retrospect, they could have chosen a better, more impartial expert.

Today, a Friday, McCain's claims of his party's expertise on matters of terrorism and WoMDs are likely to be muted. They certainly ring hollow enough.

Later in the summer, when memory of who was responsible for the 2001 anthrax WoMDs attacks on America fades they will no doubt start up again.

Please try to remember a few months who was behind these horrible attacks. Try to find a little compassion for those it turns out were not in any way responsible for them - and their victims. They do deserve compensation for what they suffered.

The Florida victim's widow, for one, deserves full compensation for her loss of a loved one in these attacks. And some moments of quiet reflection by all Americans. Because now we know that we are all a little bit responsible.

The next time a politician tries to scare you into hating and fearing some group, just remember who The Real Killer was. Think about that. The truth matters.

When the high definition, digital television compatible TiVo DVRs were first announced, they wree really expensive. About $799, if memory serves correctly.

Welll, now you can buy a TiVo that does this stuff for only $299.

You hae to buy the service too. That can be paid monthly - or as a 1-year, 3-year, or lifetime subscription plan.

The one and 3 year plans seem the most attractive. With the lifetime you have to worry about whether your unit will break or the TiVo service will be discontinued.

If you are going for the 3-year plan though, you should at least consider the lifetime plan. It onlycosts $100 (one third) more than the 3-year plan. So, you can think of it as a 4-year plan, based on the price, that hopefully will not end.

US FDA discovered the same strain of Salmonella that killed one American this year and sickened over a thousand others at a farm in Nuevo Leon, Mexico.

At this particular Mexican farm, FDA discovered the bacteria in both a pepper grown on the farm and the irrigation water used at the farm.

Shortly before this discovery, the FDA found the same bacteria on a jalapeno pepper that was grown at a different Mexican farm in a Texas warehouse.

Montezuma's Revenge: Traveller's Diarrhea affects American travellers to Mexico that everyone is familiar with the colloquial name. Coworkers and relatives of mine have been afflicted with it before when traveling o Mexico on vacation.

This tends to explain one way that such a high amount of Salmonella infected food made it into the USA and infected so many people. If the crops were being grown with salmonella infected water in Mexico and then shipped up to the US that could explain the extraordinarily high number of Americans that got infected.

US law requires that the "country of origin" be displayed on produce imported into the USA from other countries.

However, due to lax consumer protection enforcement this has not been the case in many years.

With this latest public health incident, perhaps placing the required labels on food will allow the consumers and market forces help turn around the declining safety of food sold in the US.

Without such labeling, consumers can not make a natural shift towards safer products while a particular region works out acute or chronic issues with food safety.

In the future, maybe inspecting farms irrigation water before the fact will help protect conosumer's health and industries' revenue. In this case that could have prevented a whole nationwide epidemic in the US.

In this fragile economy, some restaurants may feel the pinch this crisis created this summer. At least one well known restaurant chain has declared bankruptcy recently. Coffee houses are closing hundreds of stores nationwide.

It is not unthinkable, especially after Chi-Chi's going out of business the last time this happened - that Mexican food restaurant chains could be hard hit again. At leaet until proactive testing/protection practices are in place to protect the public.

Some social web sites are only slightly social. Their main function is to help you organize stuff - your schedule, your thoughts, your posessions, and your experiences.

However, I joioned one recently that is a pretty nice social network. It let me get back in communication with people I had lost touch with over a decade and a half ago.

These were people I used to see practically every day. Some weeks, I did see some of them every day!

it is not unusual to find a program that is useful or fun to use. However, this particular web site I am actually grateful too.

Tuesday, the day before yesterday, when the World of Warcraft patch came out, I bought a half dozen of the newlly introduced level 30 mounts.

Ever since I started playing World of Warcraft over a year ago, buying a mount required your character be level 40 or above.

Reaching level 40 takes a long time. It reqiures patience and a lot of effort.

One reason it requires patience is that it takes a lot of time to get from one place to another and you have to do a lot of running about in many zones once your level gets to be up around 30.

Getting from once point to another can also be trickier when you are on foot as opposed to riding something. Creatures seem less likely to attack you when you are riding than when you are walking. Plus, you can more easily get away from them if you are traveling at mount speed rather than running speed. So getting thru crowds of outdoor monsters just became a lot easier for every 30 something WoW character with some money to spend!

A lot of my characters, almost half, had been stuck at level 30-something for ages.

In general, a character in its upper thirities is pretty nice. I operate my characters in teams. Their professions support each other's activities by supplying them what they need to craft items or do their adventuring.

Characters ability to progress upward in their profession is stopped at skill level 225 until they reach level 35. This prevents alternate characters from being transformed into uber twinks simply by getting them to a profession skill level of 375 poiints while they are still level 19 or 29. That would make battlegrounds unplayable by main characters.

Consequently, wanted to get that one character to level 35 ASAP. When the patch came out, I gained a couple levels for him over the next couple of days. I noticed it is far easier and less time consuming now. In other words, it is a lot more fun!

My 30-something characters with mining and herbalism professions are going to be a lot more productive now. This in turn contributes an ability to progress faster and produce more with their crafting professions. I use crafterd items a lot when playing. So this will be a huge boost to my game play for a lot of my characters, even some above level 40.

One thing that was really strange was doing a level 30-39 battle ground this week, following the 2.4.3 patch's release. Most of the characters in there already had mounts. Players wasted no time in buying their new mounts, juding from the battleground!

I already had one druid voice to me disappointment that players could buy mounts 10 levels sooner. He, like I, has a druid in its thirties. He had twinked it at level 39 - as I had been planing to do wth my druid.

Druids werre kings of Arathi Basin and especially Waroong Gulch battlerground. They could change into their Travel form and run faster than anything else in the battleground. They made excellent flag carriers. They could also speed to the defense of a flag or flag carrieir faster than anyone else.

At level 40, that advantage would disappear.

Now , it has disappeared at level 30.

I guess I am a little bit sad about that. However, in giving up one small advantage in just one aspect of the game - I have gained a big advantage in so many others.

On the Balance, if you will forgive the pun, I am very happy.

I looked at the mailbox that holds the recent spam in my email program. It shows I received about six hundred spam messages to my Yahoo email account.

I think I am going to have to retire from using that as my main email address anymore.

It is one of the oldest email addresses I have and I used it quite a bit. Back when I started using it, spam was quite unusual. Now I receive a couple dozen spams a day on this address.

I trusted companies, organizations, and maybe even the Internet community with that address. Obviously, that trust has been egregiously violated.

Yahoo seems to be struggling to find its way. Though it is not highly likely at this point, they could go down the road someday to bankruptcy or being acquired by another company - one like Microsoft, maybe.

In any case, looks like I will have a lot of work cut out for me. Once I pick a new address, I will have to configure various web sites I use to start using the new email address. I will have to send the new address to friends and relatives - and tell them to stop using the old one.

I have not gone through this before. Looks like I have no chioce now.

It is too bad the CAN-SPAM law was so ineffective. I saw the amount of SPAM I received double immediately after that law went into effect. The level of spam hsa remained high. The law did more to protect spammers than to protect email consumers.

I hope things get better in the future. The horrible sitation with Internet email needs to be turned around.