Jennings in Jeopardy?

I'm sure all of you know about the rumours that his streak is over, but alas, we'll just have to watch and see. If it is, I still have to admit I'm impressed :/ Anyway, last night I went to watch Huy and a group of other people perform some jazz music and again, I'm also impressed, especially since I'm not a fan of jazz! Goes to show you what people really know about themselves huh? It was kind of like that talk with our prof the other day about grad school - while we have an idea of what we want, we don't really know exactly yet what that is... So yeah, who knows, maybe I'll be listening to jazz instead of jpop the next time you see me :D And oddly enough, with like 5 months left, it's time to start planning a grad trip?

And so it ends...

Now that the open beta testing of World of Warcraft has ended, I can resurface again. My last entry complained about various aspects of the game and I'm glad to report that most of the bugs I've encountered have been fixed. In fact, the game is quite fun now! While there are annoying quests and such, there are also some cool ones where a large party is required. There are even raid quests also, so more than 5 ppl can go together. Ah well, all that remains is to see if I subscribe to it. For now, I've posted some screenshots. (NOTE: While first 3 pics are small, the rest are bigger/actual window size)

A picture of my character (dead). The other two people/portraits are other members of my party.
Another view of the same death. The environment/world is very nicely made.
Server restarting due to lag? bug fixes? The world is ghostly, which is neat... also note resurrection option.
Remember my complaints about lag? This time I didn't even get the revive option since it's so laggy.
The following are from last night, when tons of ppl starting raiding since open beta was ending...
Raid begins. Green names mean Alliance/Allies, so they're flagged as PvP (also denoted by little shield by my portrait). This means that we're fair game for any Hordes. In the lower left you can see combat and chat messages. I'm currently chatting with Sunstroke, my classmate.
Another pic (lov the scenery)
Waiting for Hordes to arrive at Alliance town Astranaar. These ppl have blue names since we haven't attacked any players recently, so PvP isn't on.
Alliance fighting Hordes (red names) and the computer guards outside of their encampment. We were #@$%ed.
Corpses of ppl outside of Astranaar
More corpses... lots died in that raid...
Waiting for next raid...
Hordes around my corpse, so I didn't resurrect yet...
End of open beta - it was fun! I got to ride in that ship also...

WOW!

So, I've played World of Warcraft (WoW) open beta for two days now and I have to say, I'm quite disappointed. I've played UO (Ultima Online) before and I think there are various aspects of UO that WoW should learn from. I'm not gonna bother listing them here as ppl who never played these games won't have any idea what I'm talking about, but I can tell you one on one later if you're really curious. The thing that bugged me the most about WoW is how BIG the world is. It literally takes 5 minutes to travel across a major city, and I never realized that you start in different areas depending on what your race is. This would've been nice to know beforehand since I had to take a freaking tram to meet up with my buddy in another region. If we had known, we would've all chose the same race to begin with. Also, I think they put too much emphasis on quests that to me, all seem to be the same thing, ie kill X number of Y, bring this to Z, etc. It was just pointless walking back and forth. I can see them doing that to try to get people to explore, but it seems like there's NOTHING ELSE to do in the game other than accomplishing these tedious quests. At least in UO, you can learn skills that are quite useful (ie you can be "powerful" without even needing to go out and fight - you can just make powerful items yourself). WoW also has professions similar to the UO skills (ie blacksmithing, tailoring, farmer, etc) but it's clearly limited when compared to UO. Hrmm, I guess I did end up ranting about some game specifics. Another thing that was royally annoying was the game lag. It was soooo laggy yesterday at a certain point that we got lag killed several times. They had to resort to resetting the server several times and eventually the lag disappeared. Which led to a bug - we can no longer complete some quests, as even if we had obtained the required items, it wouldn't register! Considering this is as final as the game will look once it hits the shelves by Nov 23rd, I shudder to think what it will be like when it's released. I've contacted their "game masters" (aka tech support/bug reporting) but they haven't gotten back to me yet.

I don't even know what Blizzard is trying to do with WoW now, as it seems like a half-assed put together MMPORG that tried to do too much but are taking away from the simplicity that games require. For example, they definitely spent a lot of time designing the world and cities as they are huge and magnificant (just go look at some screenshot) - but that makes going from point A to B that much more tedious and annoying. They tried to implement everything from the Warcraft universe/games, but that just results in an overwhelming number of spells, which I KNOW eventually, 90% of the ppl will just use that one spell. Everybody will be learning and doing the same thing. Anyway, I'm still gonna play until they stop this open beta and decide then if it's worth it, but yeah.... I'm not impressed. Time to go kill some monsters.

World of Warcraft

Well, I just signed up for open beta testing of World of Warcraft... but I've still got 2.2gb left to download. Interesting how they're using BT technology to distribute the client.... Anyway, got around 30 hrs remaining in the download... Zug zug, time to sleep.

Censored

A few posts ago I mentioned that I might be able to get a video of myself... well, I recorded the video, but nooooo, I wasn't in it. Basically what happened is that CKCO (local CTV station) came to interview my prof and they filmed in our lab. During their filming, I didn't look back, but I thought the back of my head would be in it. I was wrong as I apparently was too short to make it into the shot when John was talking. Ah well... here's the bit they aired on TV this evening.




It took freaking forever to get it to encode in Windows Media Encoder because it kept on crashing!!@##$!@# (I still love M$ though) Eventually I found a little work around, but still, so tedious. Even my 3rd party editors, rippers and encoders work better with each other... Ah well, hopefully Microsoft will fix it.

BTW, this weekend I watched Infernal Affairs 2 and 3 and I also saw One Nite in Mongkok. If you like Infernal Affairs, you should also enjoy One Nite in Mongkok. While it's not the same storyline as IA, ONIM was surprisingly intense for a triad/cop movie. If you checked out the IA link, you'll notice there's a remake being done, called The Departed. I seriously hope they don't ruin that one like they did The Grudge. On the topic of remake, I heard that Tarantino is trying to import a full chinese movie and just sub it due to Kill Bill. On a less violent side, I managed to find The Lovers, which is kind of like a chinese version of Romeo and Juliet, minus the family feud... so no, maybe it's not like Romeo and Juliet... anyway, I enjoyed that movie a lot (and no, I'm not ashamed I like that movie) so I recommend the readers to check it out. Now I have to find Swordsman I and II... They rock. Period. Whether it means anything, they are my favourite martial arts movie. Anyway, time to delete my intermediate files...

Part 2

Well, since everyone is talking about the result of the election, I figured I'll share a view that some ppl I know have: US Election: Good or Bad?. On another hand, perhaps we should all just move to China (I got this off of suberfantacularizzle ) with their 10 things that they do better than we do...

Join the club...

I'm currently watching the election, are you? Anyway, thanks to those ppl who wondered about my previous post. I'm not gonna say what I did here, but basically I was just pissed at myself :D

Earlier yesterday at CC, I picked up a Creative's Video Blaster Webcam Go Plus (gotta remember the plus!) for $20+tax. Why did I get a webcam? I wanted a mic and a webcam for talking to family/friends. At first I thought it was a pretty good deal since the store advertised it as $75 (this is CC we're talking about, so they're usually pretty cheap) and later that day I checked other stores and it went for $50USD. So yeah, all I have to say is be careful cause you get what you paid for. Although it is portable, which is neat, I cannot get the built-in mic to work as a standalone mic (so I can use skype properly). That and the colours are brutal - after much tweaking, this is what I get:

Looney Tunes Box Set (Not mine)
Watching the election
Crap in my keyboard after years of frustrating nights studying

Still, I think the fact that I can at least take it around to take pictures is neat and hey, it's only $20.

BTW, my friend had trouble installing it (ie getting BSOD) while installing their software, and I had trouble loading the control panel for the webcam as it kept on crashing. I think my problem is that it automatically tried to access my AiW Card as it is also a capture device, so of course it's complaining. You have to load the PhotoEditor as provided by them, choose the webcam (they gave me an option to choose my TV or my Webcam) and then quit and open up the control panel. I've no clue why you can shoose in the photoeditor and not in the control panel... oh well, it works now. Perhaps soon I'll accept requests for videos if u know what I mean :P Hrmmm, actually, as for video of myself, if I catch it, perhaps I'll post it... we'll see!

I'm sorry if this isn't the right time, but...

I'm a fucking retard. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK... Although I SHOULD get off lucky, but what about next time? Fucking clumsy retard!@#%#@^$#@!#@!@!@##@$$^...