. : : Marc Sez : : .

Now that college and exams are over I’ve had even more time to play World of Warcraft. I finally hit level 70, the maximum level. This isn’t very hard and almost everyone already a level 70 character and has started playing another class. (Unlike Ragnarok lots of people get to see the end game content and you are not forced to grind for hundreds of hours. Actually grinding is the gameplay in Ragnarok. Why am I even comparing it to WoW now?)

One of the advantages of hitting level 70 is that you can buy a flying mount and flying all around Outland! This isn’t cheap but you should have enough money by the time you are at 70, unless you spent it all on professions like Adithya did. So I made a Flying Machine mount for myself and it’s so much fun flying around the place and being able to see the landscape all at once. Also you get to lord it over the low levels and fly loops over them. Fun. Screenshot of my mount:

At 70 you also get much better armour so I could finally throw away my mismatched funny items. I got the Stalker set armour which looks better than the higher level PVP armour but isn’t that great.

What’s next? Well, a lot of high level instances and a whole new area are accessible. Also I have to get better gear and upgrade my flying mount to go even faster. That costs quite a lot of money. There’s a lot of things to do and I’ll never get bored of it but I also like to play other games and should have time to play those also now that I’m maximum level. I wish more people I know were playing the game. We could form guilds and go raiding and all that. It costs $15 a month though so all the people who didn’t bother establishing an alternate source of income yet have pretty much no way to playing.

A few days ago my PC began behaving very sluggishly. Firefox start up time went to 2 solid minutes and the rest of the programs very loading 3 times slower as well. I thought it might have something to do with SP3 for Windows XP that I had chosen to download from the Windows Update service so I waited for a few days.

Today I couldn’t take it anymore and checked the Task Manager and found ScanningProcess.exe running there. I had never seen it before so I looked it up and found the answer in some forum. (Everything can be looked up on the internet within seconds so remember this the next time you want to ask someone a question.)

The process in question belonged to ZoneAlarm, the firewall program I use. I’ve used ZA for a while and never experienced these slowdowns unless it was actively scanning so I checked the options and there was the problem. The antivirus part of the program which I usually leave disabled (since I run other antivirus software) was enabled. Turning it off restored my system to its marginally speedy self. Hurray.

I was looking at the movies section in the paper and was disappointed to find nothing interesting. It was the same old boring romantic flicks and dead boring dramas. What happened to all the action movies and all the horror movies?

And then I heard about Frontier(s), a new horror movie directed by Xavier Gens and went to the website of the movie to watch the Trailer. The trailer is absolutely scary and since it reveals nothing of the plot it is even better. The movie is going to be released on the 9th of May in select theatres. It’ll be out on DVD on the 13th of May if you’re the type of person who prefers watching it at home in the middle of the night for greater effect.

The movie is unrated and usually movies that are unrated do not make it to theatres. But Frontier(s) is changing all that by making it to select theatres. So you’d better not miss it in the theatres since this is a horror film that pushes the boundaries of everything that has been done before in the horror genre. The reviews have promised that this is going to be one movie that will scar you and leave its memory etched in your mind so it’s a must watch.

Nobody will keep election promises.
Nobody will listen to your concerns.
Nobody will help the poor & unemployed.
Nobody cares!

If nobody is elected, things will be better for everyone.

Nobody tells the truth.

I’ve gone to most of the showrooms of the major brands here but I haven’t found any shoes that I liked since all they had was generic overpriced stuff. So I went online to find shoes I liked and was directed to the Infinity Shoes website.

I could tell from the site design itself that I would find some interesting stuff here. The shoes are classified according to the name of the designer or the brand and going into that sections shows you images of the shoes along with the price. The New Arrivals section lists the newest entrants in the collection like Tsubo shoes but nothing really caught my eye here. I went to the What’s Hot section and was looking at the designs there. I found some Seychelles shoes and Minnetonka boots which looked good. Nara was sophisticated but I wanted something a bit different and so I kept on looking and was not disappointed. I absolutely loved the Sabra with it’s straps and unique design. It would be a great gift for my sister’s birthday and you can instruct the site to deliver it gift wrapped as a present.

Shipping is also free for order over $59.98 so that’s a nice plus. If you prefer you can also visit the outlets in New York to pick up a pair of shoes.

Comments Section
A few people told me that they couldn’t find the comments section since there was no obvious link to it. You could get to the comments by clicking on the post title or by clicking on the number of comments displayed on the left side of each post. Now I have added the word ‘Comments’ below the number of comments on the left side. Hope this clears things up.

No More Capitalisation
The capitalised headers and blog title were annoying me so I modified the CSS to make them display as default upper and lower case.

Comments Feed Error
PS Praveen, the founder of Orkut, notified me that the comments feed was screwed up somehow and wasn’t showing any entries. George helped me determine that the problem was with the FeedBurner Feedsmith plugin so I simply deactivated it.

Shoutbox
The shoutbox was getting choked with spam so I went and found an updated version of it that had a weird numerical CAPTCHA. It should show up only for new users/spammers so it won’t be annoying. Let us see if this version combats spam better.

Later
I’ll work on the blog header sometime later and add a few more things to the sidebar. Also have to add gravatars to the comments section along with some cosmetic changes. Anything else that needs tweaked?

For all you people who’ve just graduated, here’s some advice - learn to cook if you plan to be living alone for any amount of time. Cooking isn’t all that difficult; you just need to know what to do. Get your ass over to My Wooden Spoon, a recipe blog with a whole bunch of recipes of all kinds of food from the usual to the wild.

What is Indian culture? Who defines it?

What gives you the moral authority to say what other people should do? Were you granted some sort of special knowledge by a supernatural entity? Are you somehow better than other people?

You are enforcing your idea of India upon other people. People will do what the hell they want. They have every right to. Who are you to tell them what to do?

If it is your own personal opinion of things that you are talking about, then you should mention that it is what you would prefer and not what has to be done as a general rule.

Your so called culture conflicts with that of most developed countries. And you still think you are right?

As a parting shot, have you heard of the temples at Khajuraho? You probably haven’t, because the so-called guardians of our culture would prefer that you not know about it.

The IT industry is very competitive and it pays to have the workforce motivated and trained in the face of changing technological trends. But most of the time employees will not have the time to attend full time classes so QuickCert has come up with a solution to this. When you enroll for a course such as CEH Certification with them they provide you with training materials for self study which you can then use for learning at your own pace whenever you have the time. This has been shown to be a highly effective tool.

Go look at the Quickcert.com site for more details about the courses they offer.

Some people I know directed me to this incredible new technique called port backwarding. By changing a few settings to backward your port you can improve your torrent download speeds. They said they noticed a speed increase and that they have seen this on many tutorials, so it must work right?

Sometimes when you connect a table fan to some other electrical socket in your house it works faster, doesn’t it? The concept of port backwarding is the same. No need to actually look up the logic behind it or anything. We can just blindly follow this technique and improve your torrent speed by 700% or more! Go tell everyone about port backwarding so that they can benefit too. You can learn more about it here.