I think part of this tale could be considered ironic. Although in the strictest sense, the word “irony” is often misused to characterize what could purely be coincidental and unfortunate. Even more confusing is the association of irony, “dramatic irony” in particular, as a common device of literary tragedy.

A high school English teacher I once had, made it a point to have a 40-minute class dedicated to the differentiation of the common usage of irony as we know, versus the literary device & meaning of the word. Perhaps it was only fitting, that this particularly bright & dedicated teacher was fired at the end of the semester, due to many student issued complaints about her moodiness; ironic indeed.

Either way, I’m not sure if these particular events in my life qualifies as irony, or maybe coincidence, and for those of us who has more faith in the unseen, perhaps we could call it fate.

As I’ve mentioned before, a surgery scheduled around Christmas was what started me off on World of Warcraft two years ago. That surgery, was a combination of chance, timing, and my own choice. I could’ve had the surgery earlier, or later, but the only time slot that seemed to make sense, was to throw it into the middle of the Christmas season.

However, it also is not the first time I’ve had surgery during the festive seasons. My first surgery (and only other surgery in my life) was also performed around the same time. It was…

This has always been one of my favorite annual tradition, when Wired recounts exactly what great promises were made to us, the consumers, and just didn’t quite deliver. Have fun, read it here:

Vaporware ‘06: Return of the King

Already, a couple of serious security flaws has been discovered in Vista, a month before its official consumer release (enterprise users can get their hands on Vista right now). Read more about it at Wired:

Vista Security Flaws Uncovered

That, in combination with how hackers already found a way to fool Vista into a permanent 30-day trial. Does not bode well for Microsoft’s PR. Of course, all operating system has its share of security flaws, MacOS X has plenty as well. Just that Microsoft is always under more scrutiny than anyone else. It’s the price you pay for being a dominant, yet also hated company at the same time.

With the expansion around the corner, Blizzard saw this as an opportunity to implement a lot of changes which are long overdue. The scripting language engine behind the user interface has been updated to the newest version of LUA, and a lot of UI functionality has been modified. Some of the changes are more or less just for maintenance, some of the changes impacts gameplay greatly.

For example, a very popular addon, Decursive, no longer works. Which doesn’t bother me a bit, not because I don’t often play a class that needs to cleanse/decurse; but there was a long standing tradition for hardcore raiders to not rely too heavily on addons that make choices for you. Decursive was one of those addon that clearly would deteriorate a player’s ability to play the “right way” if used too often. I never used it even when I played my Priest, running through Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. In fact, I much appreciate the fact that Blizzard finally made a strong stance on how people should have to learn certain skills to advance in the game, rather than relying on addons that will perform the duty for them.

What really grinds my gear, in a Peter Griffin-like fashion, is that the patch has been out for almost a month now, and there still isn’t a single reliable and flexible actionbar addon.

The previous “king of actionbar” addon has to be Discord ActionBars. Which is all but defunct given the release of WoW 2.0. The…

I first started playing World of Warcraft two years ago, when I had a surgery scheduled right before Christmas. Given my work schedule at the time, the only sensible way to get a surgery done was to mix it into the Christmas/New Years season and lump it into my vacation to give myself adequate time for recovery.

Knowing that I wouldn’t have very much physical activity for a while, I decided to give World of Warcraft a try. WoW had already been released for several months, and garnered many good reviews. I haven’t been a steady gamer for quite a while, although I dabbled in various MMORPG for a bit (anything from the pre-alpha, beta of Ultimate Online, to a few months in EverQuest amongst other various MMO’s that came and went), I’ve never found any of them to be a satisfying experience. I liked Blizzard’s games from before, and WoW was getting enough good press to garner my interest.

To my surprise, WoW was not only a great MMORPG, but it was a great “game” by any standard. Up to that point, MMO’s has always played second fiddle to your regular PC games. Yes, they have a huge community that may suck you in, but generally the grahpics and gameplay was sub-standard compared to what you would get from a single player experience. WoW was really the first MMO to bring it altogether, great interesting play on a single-player level alongside of the massive world and community. Before you…

Some people know, but most probably don’t… My current place of employment is Presto Services Inc., which in conjuncture with HP, makes a device that allows people who don’t have a computer to have access to email that “prints”. It differs from previous offering of similar type in the industry, in that it doesn’t attempt to make another device that’s just similar to a miniature computer. I don’t want to go into too much here, but it’s been getting enough reviews in the press, so you can go read about it in the expanded post.

USA Today’s article on Presto

Walt Mossberg’s review on Wall Street Journal
(sorry, subscription required for this one)

Presto on CBS’s Early Show

Presto on CBS’s local San Diego station

San Jose Mercury News

A very detailed out of the box experience via Gear Diary

I swear I’ve been dreaming about getting these shoes since I was like.. 8 years old or something. No power lace yet, but at least we’re… hrm… half-way there?

Via my favorite gadget blog.. Engadget:

Smart sole, adjustment shoe.. etc…

On my morning commute, I tend to drive through a lot of areas with relatively wealthy residents, right into the heart of the Silicon Valley. Once in a while, it amazes me that how trivial it was to see a Porsche, Corvette, NSX, Lamborgini, Ferarri on the freeway. As a child growing up in the Midwest (for what little time period it was), those were cars of dreams, magazines, for the most part fictitious entities that few lucky people in the world would ever own.

Yet here, they are the common vehicles of the wealthy young or old alike. What’s most ironic though, is finding a middle-aged man with silver mane, proudly and triumphantly driving down the freeway in his exotic sports car traveling at 55mph. Perhaps they are just past their athletic prime and no longer possess the reaction time required for pushing their vehicles to the limit. Or maybe they’re just very aware of how much it would cost if a dent was ever placed on their precious gem.

Either way, there’s nothing funnier than following a Porsche at 55mph in the slow lane (I was heading for the exit, mind you), then watching the driver slam on the brake lights as if going any faster would tear their $100k vehicle apart (he, on the other hand, was not exiting).

Alright.. this is just ridiculous….

I just spent half a day of work fixing Windows on my work computer, which Windows Update broke. Apparently, somewhere along the line, the automatic update got some corrupted install files. Every time I started up my computer, it attempts to run itself, then crashes svchost.exe with some memory error.

If you looked into your task manager, you’ll probably see several entries by svchost.exe. This is a process that Windows uses to execute DLL’s, thus an integral process of the system that just can’t be allowed to fail by any extent. After my svchost.exe took a dump (and not all of them, just one of the many processes), my XP-styled UI disappeared, reverting back to “classic style”. I couldn’t run certain applications, Internet Explorer hung & crashed, and I could not access any networked drives.

The solution was, to turn off automatic Windows Update completely. Reboot the computer so it no longer tries to run the Windows Update process. Then manually go to the Windows Update site to get my updates. After wasting a few hours figuring out what’s going on, and fixing it… now my computer is up and running again. Still, isn’t this the type of thing that should *never* happen with an automatic update process? Now I’m leaving my automatic update off permanently to prevent any future occurrences of this issue.

Now that Windows Vista is shipping to enterprises along with a planned consumer release in January of 2007, you would think that all the major magazines are conjuring up their mega-features and 80 page reports on a much-delayed and somewhat trimmed-down Windows release. So on the lookout for the mega-issues of PCWorld, PCMag, and whatever else tickles your tech-geek fancy coming just around the corner. Meanwhile, the SuperSite for Windows has a very through and detailed review of Windows Vista which will quench your thirst for the meanwhile (and likely much more complete than what you’ll get out of those 80/50/30/15-page features).

As much as I adore Paul Thurrot (and that’s no sarcasm, I really do admire how much time & effort he put into giving us accurate & detailed information), I can’t help but note the enthusiasm and appreciation he has towards one of the “most important Windows release in years.” I mean, if you only release one major OS revision ever fives years, are there anything less important? However the review eschews every possible comparison to other existing operating system and turns a blind eye towards the alternatives. There’s much to be said about judging an OS release on its own merit, but the whole mega-multi-part review just reminds me of how much Windows Vista is just playing catch-up.

The most apparent example of this, is the 3d-accelerated UI of Vista. The Aero/Glass (I’m still not sure exactly how it’s branded, Aero Glass, Glass Aero? Aero,…