Continual Development

Well you may have noticed the new page listed above titled Visitors. I came across a plugin which takes your IP and assigns it to an address based on a public lookup list. I thought it would provide an interesting view as to where people are reading this blog from.

Things have calmed down more at work, in fact I get to raid tonight.

Every now and then something comes up that is important and you have to step aside from your routine and get it done. Last night was one of those nights. If I wanted to make the business happy, I’d have to work and not play wow. Normally this should be a no-brainer decision. However I don’t like letting people down, Wednesday nights are one of my raid nights. I informed the raid leader, let some other people know and tried to find a replacement. Then removed myself from my playtime PC, because otherwise I would have been constantly asking for updates.

Today at work, I felt like the extra time I put in accomplished something, that it was appreciated and therefor was worth it. Warcraft is fun, I’ve made many friends there, but every now and then I need to remind myself that work comes first, then comes fun.

Side note: Even with starting a little late, and some people in new roles they still almost cleared Naxx-10 in a single night. Good work guys!

Tonight we tackle the dreaded Lag Beast. Reports as to the effectiveness of the patch (3.0.8) varies. Beware 25-man Naxx we’re coming to rip you apart.

I provide Software Quality Assurance – more about why I do what I do, and why will be in a future post.

So, at work I’ve spent the past couple years working on a particular product off and on as releases were issued. When I took the project over there were no test scripts. There were packets of screenshots with no real notation. I set about to build what I thought was a very efficient manner of testing what was represented in those screenshots.

It turns out however, that I have been operating under a mistaken belief. Over the past two weeks I have learned that ‘the business’ wants something else/other than what I’ve been doing, it just took till now to actually communicate it. This is going to essentially force a reboot around all that work I had already done, lead to some headaches and frustration. However, I feel I now know what they are looking for. I don’t know if they realize I’m going to give them exactly what they want.

Four not eight. Now before some of you get all upset, there is no reason to assume that our President won’t be replaced in four years. There is the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, two wars draining our resources, many other issues home and abroad we all have to pay attention to.

It’s a tall order to fill, and although I hope and pray that this administration can make changes and improve our overall situation, I won’t pretend that if he doesn’t he will be replaced.

Political statements on this blog will not be common. I do not believe that a single label can declare someone’s mindset on all things. I do intend to express my opinion when things happen I don’t agree with, or seem to be ignored by the media.

But for now, it’s the first day of something new. The same something new that we have every 4 or 8 years here in the good old USA.

So one day, I was asked by this guy, “Why do you like healing?”

My initial response, “I like healing because, that’s it just because.” After thinking about it more, I was able to give an actual real answer.

I mean I always liked healing. In the World of Warcraft when you get down to it DPS basically is a fixed rotation of spells or effects.  It’s decent, but a slip up and I’ve lost 200 dps, a lag spike and I’ve sat there doing nothing.

As a healer there is instant reward to your actions. You know right away that you had an impact the green bar fills up the person isn’t dead. The Damage Dealer won’t know their true impact on the fight till long after the fight is done and someone has measured the logs. If the boss died, did it die quick enough? Does it need to die quicker?

How do you measure the success of a healer in wow?
1.) People don’t die
2.) Healer isn’t mana starved

How do you measure the success of a damage dealer?
1.) Boss dies
2.) You don’t have mana left over
3.) Your dps has to clime steadily as you get new gear

There is another thing I like about being a healer

As long as I’m doing #1 and #2 I can also do #3 from the damage dealers list.  Doing damage as a healer impacts your mana so that adds in a level of difficulty that I have full control over.  Not the random chance of any number of things  affecting my total DPS as a Damage Dealer.

With the recent addition of yet another Damage Dealer class to Warcraft, there are even less healers to go around.

Be kind those remaining few who walk this path, for without them, we’d all be dead.

So for those of you who play, why do you, do what you do, in Warcraft?

This site has gone through many changes over the years.

At first it was a repository for information for a game. Then it was going to become a place for theorycrafting for the World of Warcraft. Now, well it’s a general location for posts comments etc.

The internet is a powerful place. The more people add their thoughts and views to it, the better it becomes. It allows views and ideas to spread to places they would have never reached before. The more the world communicates, the closer it becomes. The closer we get to a day and age where we can eliminate some of the issues that divide us, and allow mankind to grow to the next stage of it’s development.

I’ll talk about so many different things here there isn’t much of a point in declaring a specific topic.

This place will be in continual development, even it’s name may change as I come closer and closer to the idea I had one day during work.