Musings From New York

Chuckletime

A couple of interesting links ...

1. You know, I never quite thought of KITT in any other way until I read this strip.

2. So true, so true. It's just more fuel to the fire (har!) to get me to buy a new Alienware PC (or should I go Dell?)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!

WHY? WHY? I NEED MY PC!!!!

A Poyum!

Oh, woe is me!
My call to arms has been dispatched from the Amazon!
How I burn to join the Crusade!
To slake the draenei-ing blood lust!
Alas, my PC lies in smoldering ruin!
I curse the weeks I must wait for redemption!

Just in case you missed it ...

In case you missed the multiple write-ups, the almost constant advertising on Comedy Central, South Park's season opener will feature World of Warcraft. This preview seems to show that there's a fair bit of gameplay involved too.

Sweeeet.

Weekend Update

So a few things happened over the weekend to warrant a post ...

The planets, stars, sun and moon finally aligned themselves in an auspicious position for my mother to purchase her air tickets to come over to the US. She'll be arriving mid-September and staying for about 6 weeks. I hope her travel isn't disrupted too much by any upcoming new security measures (especially since India was named as a target).

Then, last night, I watched Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna. Someone asked me as we were in line why I hadn't watched a Hindi movie for year (not strictly true, I watched a couple on DVD). I daresay the question was answered over the next three hours. This movie has more twists than a corkscrew ... I think at one point, it was attempting to become the Bollywood's first Mobius strip! What posessed Karan Johar to write this movie, let alone make it, is beyond me. Of course, it wasn't all bad - there  were some fairly funny moments ... mostly Amitabh Bacchan's scenes, though. There are a few one line zingers thrown in for good measure. But still ... time-pass stuff, all told. Oh, and there was an interesting song sequence that (IMO) blatantly whacked the whole colored canvas concept of Hero, but without understanding the reason for the technique.

Lastly, I retired Bheema, my paladin in WoW, this weekend. It just wasn't fun playing anymore ... my guild had become a hardcore raiding guild, with some intense pressure to perform according to a strict gameplan. I figure I get enough of that at work, I should be able to play to relax. Which is not to say I'm giving up WoW (I think I need to speak to a shrink about that) ... I am playing other characters on other servers, to give myself a clean break from my old "life". But it was still a bit of a sad moment, giving up something that I had invested time and effort over the last 18 months, ya know?

A short weekend

Well, another weekend, another 5 bucks spent on iTunes Music Store :-) ... As a method of relaxing this Saturday, and Gods know I needed it, I decided to rate my music collection. When my hard disk crashed a few months ago (re: bad motherboard/ RAM stick) I lost everything on it, but was able to retrieve my music collection from my iPod.

Unfortunately, the method I chose* of retrieving the tracks meant that while the tags stayed intact, my ratings were lost ... and so were a lot of automatic playlists. I've slowly worked on rebuilding the ratings but so far, I've done about 1500 of 2200 tracks. I decided to tackle Classic Rock yesterday, and in the process rediscovered my love of The Beatles. I've been listening to too much electronica these days. Gotta return to my roots and all that ...

Of course, my roots are Hard Rock (my first love was GnR, in the heady days of Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion), but you know what I mean!

1. Because by Anthony Way & Vanessa-Mae ... a song from the amazing cover album, "In My Life", put together by George Martin. If you are a Beatles fan, you must own this album. That is all.
2. In My Life by Sean Connery ... by far one of the best covers of a Beatles song I've ever heard. Sean Connery gives a weary, contemplative reading of this song, which is really quite touching. It makes you wonder why the Beatles, in all their youth, would pen a song as contemplative as this.
3. Layla (Unplugged) by Eric Clapton ... going down memory lane, I got mugged by the recollection of this song. I mean, this is a shining example of how heavy airplay can kill a good song. It's kinda like ... well, Mike knows the discussions of pop vs. art that he's conducted on his blog, but ... this is Clapton dammit! Appreciate the music! I had to put up with gaggles of girls swooning at the song's romance instead, and constant lovey-dovey crap on MTV. Made me sick. Of course, you'd never see the electric version of Layla get that kind of attention!
4. Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap ... slumming around the electronica section of iTMS these past few weeks brought this song to my attention ... it's been the bestseller for ... a month, I think. Heavily synthed female vocals, nothing else. A treat to listen to.
5. Crossroads by Rush ... Cream ... covered by Rush ... power-trio heaven, if you ask me.

I was going to watch Aeon Flux, but it got a pretty mixed bag of reviews that I wasn't sure I wanted to spend the time in a crowded theater. Of course, next week is Narnia and the week after is King Kong. I highly recommend everyone get a copy of the original and bone up on the 1933 version over the next couple of weeks!

I'm thinking of buying the Chronicles of Narnia compendium ... I remember absolutely loving Prince Caspian and A Horse & His Boy ... of course, that was over 15 years ago! Damn, I'm old.

Oh, the other major highlight of this weekend was an amazing 6 hour WoW marathon, a complete clearing of the Molten Core, including Ragnaros. I think this was the first time we tried it. I was glad I managed to stay awake for Rags (it was around 2:30am when we finally killed him!) One of the downsides to flying to Atlanta every Sunday afternoon is that I can't participate in Sunday's raids (or Tuesdays or Thursdays, for that matter). And thus far, Archon's MC runs have stopped 2 bosses short of Rags on Saturday (the defeat of the penultimate boss starts 2 hour timer to kill Ragnaros). While Archon has killed Rags about 4 or 5 times thus far, it was my first time there. I have a screenshot somewhere, but no time to fix & upload it :p The exquisite execution of the encounter that I saw last night was just ... breathtaking! For more details on the tactics & forethought necessary, click here.

Anyway, my flight to Atlanta is in 3 hours and I have to start packing :p

* Plug your iPod in, but don't accept the message to sync with iTunes. Then, in iTunes, click on Edit-> Preferences-> iPod, and check "Enable Disk Use". the iPod is now an external hard disk with all the tracks displayed as files (I think the folders are hidden though, so you'll have to turn that on). The teack names are gobbledegook, but once you copy all the songs to your PC, add them to iTunes. That'll fix the naming problem, and rearrange them into the proper folder structure. Like I said before, you lose your track rating. You also lose your playlists, and the iTunes Playlist of Recently Added will have ALL tracks in it.

Binky!

My paladin finally got 4 others to tag along to Scholomance and kill a bunch of ghosts ... and finally got his uber-mount.

The quest itself if pretty cool. To "kill" the ghosts, you have to pass judgement (using the spell, Judgement) on them. But you have to figure out which judgement works during each wave. So, for example, Judgement of Light works only against Shadowy Spirits, or Judgement of Wisdom against Banal Spirits. One of my party observed that it was like a SAT English test ... figure out the antonym of the word in the name of the spirit and then figure out what spell best matches it.

PS: For those of you wondering why "Binky" - in Pratchett's Discworld, Death came astride Binky.

ArchonPvP

So I was introduced to World of Warcraft's Player-vs-Player (PvP) games this weekend. I can't belive I've been missing out on this for so long!

It was a lot of fun. Primarily played Warong Gulch, which is a 20-player (10 Alliance, 10 Horde) Capture-the-flag competition. Now, I have played Capture-the-flag on Rainbow 6, and Halo 2 on the XBox (Bet you didn't know that Nikhil!) But the difference here is that I know all the guys I'm playing with. And even if I haven't partied with some of the players, I know that I can expect a certain level of ... for lack of a better word, professionalism - because they're in the Archon Guild (hey, we don't call ourselves the Premier Raiding Guild of the Scarlet Crusade Realm for nothing!)

Anyway, I played about 6 games over the weekend. The shortest game we played was 10 minutes - the Horde players had NO clue what hit them! The longest 30 minutes or so - we got into a defensive stalemate where each team had their opponent's flag, and went into defensive mode (to win, a team has to have their flag, and the opponent flag). But thanks to some AMAZING teamwork we managed to break that stalemate. And I think I got about 170 kills ... I think my rank is going to be Corporal when the tallies are made!

ArchonPvP FTW!

A new writing project

Not that I have a LOT of time on my hands ... well, OK I do - but that's not the point of this post!

Playing WoW, I find a lot of similarities between "real life" and "virtual life" in the field of people & resource management. Some of you know that one of my favorite subjects in my MBA was Managing People in Organizations, and I see a lot of similarities between "corporate" challenges and Guild challenges.

Issues like:

• Mission & Vision
• Culture
• Guild roster makeup (how many Hunters should the guild have? What about druids? ... How useful are Paladins?*)
• How do you handle guild drama? Political agendas being forwarded?
• What checks & controls does one put in place?

For example, the way I see it, the Guild is a Corporation, made up of a Players (the workforce) of different classes (Functional Divisions, Finance, Operations, etc.), competing for money, equipment - "phat lewt" - (assets). Sometimes Guild merge, or disband. Sometimes Players leave, or form alts (cross-training).

Anyway, no deadline on when I'll write this up. It'll definitely be a free-wheeling work-in-progress, and more likely that not, I'll be posting it in the WoW section of the blog.

* Not very

A Big Mystery Solved

In the last ... oh, 6 months of playing WoW, I've always thought "pwned" was a typo. Or an acroym of some sort ("PWN-ed"). My fear of being laughed at by dorks always prevented me from seeking clarification. But at long last, here's a good explanation.