capsizedsailer sent me this one.

So I attended BlizzCon last weekend. My brother and I thought it would be a fun thing to do and give us a chance to hang out together which we haven't done for a long long time. So even though I work for GameSpot I went to BlizzCon as a civilian. I packed my PS2 so we could play some Guitar Hero face-off matches at the hotel during non-con hours. It turns out I packed everything required to play Guitar Hero except the power cord. You know, that one that's straight on one side and round on the other? The one that's very specific to the PS2? Ya, I forgot that. I jumped online and found an EB Games within three miles that carried extra power cables. After purchasing the power cable we attempted to hook up the PS2 to the in-room television. The TVs at this particular hotel (Anabella) were so locked down you couldn't use the auxiliary inputs. They were right there on the back but the TV wouldn't actually display anything from it. So determining who the best Guitar Hero player is in the family will have to wait until another time. The first night we checked Ebay to see what people were selling their Goody Bags for. Ready for this? Five hundred dollars! That was about the average asking price on the first night. Most of that is for the in-game Murloc suit. Codes for the Murloc suit itself were going for approximately $400. We thought about making a nice profit for about half a second. Then we decided we wanted the Murloc suit for our own characters. The animations for the Murloc suit are actually quite funny. But you can't enter combat with the suit on. You revert to your normal form if you try that. Day One: The rumors of Wrath of the Lich King had been going around for a couple of days already and seemed pretty solid. When the BlizzCon opened at 9:00 -- two hours prior to the opening keynote at 11:00 -- the big signs, T-shirts and the official program featuring detailed info on Wrath of the Lich King seemed to pretty much seal deal. At 11:00 Wrath of the Lich King was officially announced. The thing is, I haven't even played the content in the first expansion yet. I just learned what tiered armor sets were last weekend. There's still so much content that's readily available now that I haven't played yet but it nice to know there's even more on the way. I'm really looking forward to playing a Death Knight -- a good Death Knight of course. The panel discussions were interesting. The main things I took away from the panels is this: Blizzard acknowledges that Warlocks dominate in small-team PvP situations but tend not as much in larger teams. They don't want to nerf Warlacks to balance small-team PvP at the expense of the Warlock's usefulness on larger teams. Engineering is the selfish profession. They want to add more items which can be used by non-engineers. Rogues are the kings (and queens) of DPS. Even the Death Knight won't out DPS a rogue. People like to complain about their chosen class. One dude who plays a healer actually asked, "Are you going to do anything to make being a healer more fun?" Umm... right. Blizzard originally planned on making every Warcraft III unit it's own class but that idea was canned when it turned out there would be too much overlap between many of the classes. Keeper on the lore, Chris Metzen, likes to rub his forehead a lot as if he's dealing with a headache or something. Oh, and he's for the Horde. Blizzard president Mike Morhaine likes to pause for applause a lot. Even when it's not really happening. That's not to say the crowd was unimpressed with anything he said. It's just that not every sentence is deserving of cheers. John Cash (formerly of id Software) is the lead developer on WoW. I knew he was working for Blizzard but I didn't know he was the head techie on WoW. Killer were giving out these huge "K"-logo things on a chain if you enter a contest by writing a slogan for them. They were about the size of a car's hood ornament. But a little bigger. My brother got one. Easily, the coolest swag of the show. Illidan looks shorter in real life. It seemed like the majority of the crowd as BlizzCon were Horde players. Wanting to learn about the history of the Orcs and the Horde my brother and I went to Wikipedia to get the condensed version of the lore. In the middle of very serious story items is this non-sequitur. "Murlocs kill several-thousand unsuspecting passerbys". Okay, you had to be there but oh, how we laughed.

In UNIX there's a command called 'crontab'. You use it to schedule programs to run automatically at whatever interval you tell them to. There's a few options you can give to control its behavior. For example, 'crontab -e' will bring up an editor so you can modify the current crontab file. Did you also know 'crontab -r' will remove the crontab file for the current user with no questions asked? If you want to be prompted before removing a crontab file you have to say 'crontab -ri'. Now, I don't know about you but if I took the time to type the 'i' to begin with I'm naturally going follow that up with a 'Y' response. This is the opposite behavior of the 'rm' command which will prompt you unless you specifically use '-f' to suppress the "Are you sure?" prompt. But what really gets me about the 'crontab' command is that 'e' (edit) and 'r' (remove) are right next to each other on the keyboard!

Yaaa... you know? I'm just not a big fan. I find them kind of annoying actually. Especially, that "Teenagers" song.

It's happening. And I actually think it may be awesome.

Forget about all that stuff I said before about 1004 being the most I've ever critted for. With no changes to my character from the previous entry I got this the next evening.

Level 51 Warrior : Protection Specced : Battle Stance My Heroic Strikes get somewhere between 150 - 200. My Executes hover in the 400 range. This was truly amazing. I'm sure there's a bunch of people who can comment, "Dude, that's nothing!" but for me, last night, this was a glorious moment.

Hey, I haven't written anything about the iPhone yet. So in order to be a little more like everyone else on the internet here's my take on the iPhone. I haven't seen it yet so I don't have a take on it. I don't know if it's going to be cool or not. The ads and videos sure make it look cool. But since I haven't actually used one or even seen anyone I know with one I can't make any kind of informed analysis about whether it's truly the killer device it's played up to be. For the record, I really hope it is. Over time Apple will address the issue of 3rd party applications. Yes, it's kind of disappointing that only Apple-made apps will be on the iPhone but with enough consumer/developer demand they'll eventually release a proper SDK and make it a reality. It's just a matter of time. I don't have a Treo so I can't speak to the quality of apps for Windows-based smart phones but I'm willing to bet a good sum of money the out-of-the-box apps on the iPhone are an order of awesomeness better than those for existing smart-phones. But I'm no expert on mobile devices so don't listen to me. I just know that Apple knows how to make awesome software. See OS X and iLife. I'm giving them good odds that awesomeness will translate to a mobile device quite well. Aside: About the default green grass background in the next version of OS X. I didn't like it at first but I'm starting to warm up to the idea. I mean, everyone else in the world is doing abstract swooshy patterns for backgrounds now. See Vista and most Dell monitor pics. Apple has to do something to stand out from the crowd. Anyway, back to iPhone. As someone who carries an iPod and cell phone (Motorola RAZR) in the same pocket, the idea of having those two things in one device is very appealing. When we eventually see a 40+ GB version of an iPhone, I'll seriously consider getting one. But I'm patient. I can wait. :)

Today was "Take Your Kids To Work" day at CNET. I brought my whole family. The first half of the day was pretty challenging as Tyler seemed to be in a bad mood. Riccardo from Gamespot brought in a Wii and, with suggestions from the kids, created the ugliest Mii I've ever seen. Then some of the kids played Wii Tennis. We also checked out the podcast recording studio as well as CNET TV's studio. As I mentioned previously, Tyler was in somewhat of a bad mood throughout all of this. It also didn't help that during lunch they served little burritos with hot salsa. Tyler took a bite and after a few seconds stuck out his tongue and started crying loudly. We gave him some cold water, love and a quesadilla which calmed him down. After lunch Emily took Jillian home for her nap while Tyler stayed with me for the remainder of the day's activities. The second half of the day definitely went much better. We did chocolate tasting with the folks from CHOW. One of the samples was bittersweet chocolate which Tyler declared "yucky". Then we took pictures of stuff with the folks from Webshots. But the highlight of the day came when the folks from Tree Frog Treks (not affiliated with CNET) came in to share some of their animals with the kids. The cool thing is that they let some of their turtles and one Burmese Python roam freely throughout the room. Tyler was in love with the python and followed it around everywhere petting it. Every once in a while it would crawl into a corner under a chair at which point the handler would come over to pick it up and carry its head while the kids all got to pitch in and carry its body. Tyler was right there to help out every time the python needed carrying. He also got to hold a smaller snake and a frog all by himself (not at the same time, mind you). This was easily Tyler's favorite part of the day. We capped off the day with the movie Flushed Away. Want to know which gags got the biggest laughs from the kids? ... Crotch hits.

Cool! For the longest time setting my browser to use a minimum font size of 11px would cause the navigation menu on GS to wrap around to a second line. So when I started working here I had to drop my minimum font size down to 10px. Not any more! With the changes we've made to the navigation var I can now re-up my minimum font size to 11px and save my eyes a little bit of strain. I joke a lot about Web 2.0 application using large font sizes but I actualy do like being able to read text without my face being 2-inches away from my monitor.