No Time to Say Hello, Goodbye!

General, Site 7 comments.

Every had one of those days when you just wanted to crawl under a cover and hope that it ends soon?  That’s been my day today.  Within the last twelve hours, I’ve:

• Dealt with a sick ferret who’d rather claw out his own mouth than take his medication,
• Wrangled with the downloader to get the final part of the current patch,
• Experienced the fun of not going past the character loading screen despite being told that I was in the game, and
• Found myself unable to access the administrative portion of my website.

The final part is what really threw me for a loop.  I’m not quite sure what happened or why — and I apologize for any inconveniences that you may have experienced during that time — but every time I attempted to log into the site I encountered a “Not Found” error.  You can follow my woes on the WordPress forums in the thread “Admin files — including wp-login.php — suddenly ‘Not Found’ in 2.6.2.”  Hopefully my experiences will help someone suffering from the same problem.

That said, I was feeling a bit morose this evening despite being able to finally log into World of Warcraft.  However, something happened shortly afterward that set me into gales of laughter.

Know of the achievement To All The Squirrels I’ve Loved Before?  It reads:

Show the critters of Azeroth how much you /love them.

• Squirrel
• Steam Frog
• Borean Frog
• Cat
• Chicken
• Cow
• Crab
• Deer
• Ewe
• Fawn Frog
• Gazelle
• Hare
• Parrot
• Rabbit
• Ram
• Sheep
• Skunk
• Swine
• Toad
• Prairie Dog

The significant other was trying to complete this quest. Finding that /hug and /kiss had failed to garner even a smidgen of completion, he had just started mindlessly slaughtering every critter that he came across, starting with a defenseless little rabbit.  Imagine my surprise — and laughter! — when I read the achievement description and information him that the correct was to complete the achievement was to /love each of them!

That somehow made everything much easier to handle!

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Where in the World is Cynra?

Site 8 comments.

So, right now, at this very instant, I should be on a plane headed west for the Big Move.  Yes, moving day is today and I’m a bit frantic and overwhelmed and tired right now.  And while I’d love to tell the tale of the nice gentleman who made a herculean effort in depositing the container at the bottom of the hill but managed instead to slip-and-slide his way down the driveway tires screeching and smoke filling the air, I did promise myself that I would attempt to make this corner of Airee.net be as much related to World of Warcraft as possible.

And if I’ve managed to keep stories of my ferrets out of this site, I’m pretty sure that I possess an admirable amount of self-control.

While I’ll be at my new residence this evening, my belongings — including my beloved PC — will be trailing behind at a much slower pace.  In fact, the container containing all of my worldly possessions¹ most likely won’t reach Washington until next Friday at the very earliest which should make things pretty interesting.  So between my somewhat hectic schedule thanks to events surrounding the Big Move and the fact that my computer will be packed away in a container as it crosses the United States², I probably won’t be very active on this site for the next week or so.  I will, however, make an attempt to abscond someone else’s computer when the opportunity arises.

A number of posts that were sitting in my drafts folder will be going live in my absence.  It saves me the hassle of frantically writing something when I do have access to a computer again; instead, I can focus on all of your wonderful comments³ and reading all of the awesome new posts backlogged on my feed reader.

Hey, my reputation of being one of the most prolific commenters in this blogosphere may very well be at stake!

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Wherein Cynra Enters the 21st Century

Site 9 comments.

Let me preface this post by stating that there is no way that I could ever be called a technophobe¹: I’m an engineer in a technology-driven industry, I’ve been dabbling with webdesign for well over a decade now, I’m a longtime gamer, and getting my hands on some of the newest gadgets around delight me to no end.  However this apparently doesn’t make me immune from seeking low-tech solutions to everyday situations.

For months I’m been visiting numerous blogs in the World of Warcraft blogosphere.  I’d visit the often wonderful sites, read all of the content there, take notes[1.  I'm not exagerating.  You'd be surprised to see how many damned notes I have on rogues right now!], and then comment.  Day after day, I’d go one by one through the sites, hoping that they were updated so that I could see new ideas, new thoughts, and new awesomeness.  However, doing this over the course of months and stumbling across sites that weren’t updated frequently or ultimately became neglected meant that I would be spending more time looking for updated sites than I did reading the new content.

This was clearly not acceptable.

The solution?  I finally downloaded and installed a feedreader, specifically Sage for Firefox.  At this point I can optimistically say that I am raptuously struck by the awesomeness of feedreaders.²  After spending almost a half hour trying to figure out how to add feeds — apparently it’s not as easy as just clicking a link or bookmarking a site — I found myself with a veritable agglomeration of some of the best World of Warcraft blogs around.  No longer do I need to visit sites multiple times during the week to see if they’ve been updated; now with the click of a single button I can easily see which sites have been updated and which have grown complacent.

I do this all in my drive to be one of the most — if not the most — proliffic commenters of the World of Warcraft blogosphere.  Really, it’s the only way that I actively contribute to the community!

There are a couple of things that I learned while gleefully re-visiting all of those sites yesterday to add them to Sage:

1. Make sure that your site has a feed. A couple of sites didn’t seem to have feeds, which was disappointing.  However, I found that staple blog hosts like Wordpress and Blogger have feeds already set up so that I could easily manually add the feed even if it wasn’t listed on the site.
2. If you have a feed, make the link visible! This was a big issue for a lot of sites.  For example, I spent a good ten to fifteen minutes trying to find the link for The Egotistical Priest’s feed because I knew that I wanted to have the site added.  Hiding it down at the bottom of the page really isn’t acceptable; put it up top, make it easy to find, and using one of the universally recognized symbols will help people like me a lot.  I found that people who were hosted on Blogger overwhelmingly had layouts that hid the links to the sites’ feeds at the bottom of the page with the smallest font possibly ever envisioned.
3. Open up commenting. I find it disappointing to stumble across sites that only allow you to comment if you have a Wordpress/Blogger/Google account.  I have none of the aforementioned and I really have no interest in ever getting one.  Many sites allow the use of Open ID and I can fall back on my account for AIM, but is it really that awful to let visitors to comment and leave behind their names without relying on an account?  There’s one site in particular that I love to visit and I always want to comment but find after writing up this huge response that I can’t reply at all!  It’s exceedingly irksome.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Speaking on commenting, I was going through Askimet this morning to clean out all of the comments tagged as being spammed and stumbled across this:

Whaaaa?

Well, random spambot from the past, thank you for linking my site elsewhere.  That post, “These Are the People in Your Roleplaying Guild,” happens to be one of my favorite — even if I can’t take credit for the content.  Unfortunately, I will not be returning the favor this morning or any time in the future.

However, I will share the link with Tallaa, who would probably be very interested in the contents of said site!

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Face-Tanking for the Win!

Site 5 comments.

So, it’s been a hellacious week. Not only have I been managing the logistics for moving across the United States, but access to the internet has been spotty at best¹ and my mother spent a couple of days in the hospital due to some sort of heart complication. All in all, this left me with little time in-game, raiding, farming, updating this website, or managing whatever little project that I was working on at the time.

One of those projects was for the gentleman over at The Big Bear Butt. Earlier last week Triple-B wrote in “T-shirt art contest!” that he was holding another contest. Fans of the site were invited to submit designs for a t-shirt that featured the theme “I tank with my FACE!!!” The deadline for the contest was Friday evening, which — sadly — I missed due to the various aforementioned reasons. Yippee-skippy.

Though I have little to no experience with playing a druid² and the Feral aspect of the class continues to confuse the living daylights out of me³, I was intrigued by the contest theme. While at work, patiently waiting for data upload to an antiquated database that should have been replaced years ago, I sketched out a very simple idea for the contest. The image could barely be considered World of Warcraft-related, but it amused me and I decided that come hell or high water I’d make the idea and toss it over to Triple-B for his review.

Despite the fact that the deadline for the contest was last night and that Triple-B most likely wouldn’t accept in on those grounds alone⁴, I sat down this evening to complete the idea and then sent him a copy. Hopefully he’ll get a chuckle or two out of it before tossing it into the Recycling Bin where it rightfully belongs. And because I’m a masochist, I’ve decided to include a resized copy of the image here for all of you wonderful people to enjoy. Or mock. Or take for your own t-shirt designs.

Because a bear with a bandage over his eye⁵ is worth sharing.

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Medicinally-Induced Rambling

Site 3 comments.

I apologize for the sporadic nature of my posting this week; Sunday morning I somehow managed to injure my right shoulder, which resulted in two visits to the local hospital, one visit to my doctor, and more than just a few headaches for my dear mother on Monday. Since then, I’ve been downing some awful pill cocktail containing a muscle relaxant, some heavy duty pain relievers, a steady steroid regimen, and a lot of water — which has resulted in me living like a zombie for the last couple of days. I’ve yet to leave my house since we got back from the hospital very early Tuesday morning¹, my last attempt to take a bath left me facedown in the water, and I’ve been going crazy with boredom when I’m coherent enough to recognize that I’m bored.

All in all, it’s made for an interesting week!

So while I’m on that half hour interlude between when I’m still enjoying the pain-numbing effects of my pills without the drooling and babbling mess of myself that has been amusing my guild, fellow raiders, and friends every day since Sunday, I thought that I would make a quick post explaining my absence. I’ll leave you with this screenshot I took of a Karazhan run I joined to help a friend earlier this afternoon; I can only blame the medication for impairing my judgment.²

Here’s hoping that I have something a bit more thought provoking up before the weekend!

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