v-s.net v0.6

Saturday, 10:12 am in Life

Another one of those wonderfully sporadic and completely boring multi-topic blog updates? Don’t mind if I do!

Mail Migration

I’m super-happy with the migration of void-star.net’s email to Google Hosted Apps. The POP3 access is great for my laptop, the IMAP is perfect for my iPhone, the spam filters are beautiful for the catch-all address and the mailing lists work better than that bloody perl system that comes with CPanel ever did. In short, it’s sweet. I’m not sold on the benefits of the other aspects of Apps (the Docs, Sites et cetera), but the mail is worth it. Even if it does mean Google is archiving all your stuff. Not like it wasn’t doing that anyway.

Anyway, if anyone wants a (free) @void-star.net or @furced.net email address, give me a username and an existing email address (to mail your password to), and I’ll set you up.

Material Goods

Season’s changing, which makes me want to buy clothes. But… from where. I don’t shop in stores much any more, but my usual online haunts are failing me. So, readers, where do you shop online?

I also bumped my hand against the back of my chair the other day and accidentally threw my Death Note mug across the room. I have a really bad track record with anime-themed mugs. Upshot: I need a new one. Anyone have any recommendations for something cool?

Plus I need to re-dye my hair and whinge at ~Mat [h] until he buys me some new RAM. Nothing new there.

SharePoint

After my SharePoint training a couple of weeks ago, I went through a fit of insanity and installed WSS 3.0 on my computer at home. For those of you who’ve never heard of it (which is probably most of you), WSS and it’s “big (un-free) brother” MOSS make up Microsoft’s CMS system. I guess it’s sort of like WordPress on steroids, if WordPress was hideously ugly, aimed at the corporate market and tightly-coupled into Microsoft Office.

I installed it partly as a training exercise, and partly because I thought it’s EDMS features would be cool for working on Urban Nordica in that hazy distant future where I get the time and energy to get back to writing. Alas, this was not the be the case. The system is up and working fine locally, but there’s some r-tarded going on with its Alternate Access Mappings (Micro-speak for vhosts) and it keeps trying to resolve the external URL to the internal one. Which works great on my local LAN, and not so awesomely from everywhere else in the world. No idea what’s going on there.

Oh, and my Office 12’s WSS integration support appears to be broken for no reason at all. I ♥ Vista so much, srsly.

World of Warcraft

Shamefully, I started playing WoW again. Mostly at first because I noticed they’d finally released a Hawkstrider PvP mount. Seriously, I’d been saving my tokens up for one of those ever since BC came out and just when I spend them all… So a dozen or so games of WSG later (fuck but I hate WSG), I now have my Black Battlecock. It’s awesome. Then I figured that I nearly had enough Honor for a new set of shoulders, and—

Goddamnit! Now I remember why I quit this stupid game!

Seriously, though, I recently heard WoW described (by one of the guys responsible for Warhammer Online, I believe) as a piece of “flawed genius”. Which is really pretty well true. There are things I adore in WoW and things I loathe. Unfortunately, all the loves things are mechanically trivial (the art direction, lore and way the devs are constantly upgrading the UI based on player wants), while all the things I loathe have to do with the actual gameplay. And yeah, I’m starting to look forward to Wrath of the Lich King, but it doesn’t look like it will be addressing any of the game’s systemic flaws. The new quests and new zones will keep me entranced for a while, but as soon as I hit 80 I’m going to quit again. Because I don’t grind, and in WoW there’s really no point in endgame if you don’t. And that’s always been my problem with WoW, because I want to love it, but I never feel like I can actually achieve anything worthwhile. I calculate the amount of time it would take to get decent gear or a cool mount or whatever and it just ends up at, “Fuck that shit, I could be writing/drawing/playing other games/gardening/doing housework/sleeping/going to work/cutting my toenails.” And the frustration of never achieving a state of satisfaction kills any enjoyment I might have otherwise found in the stuff I have done. Plus I kinda hate group content. Yeah, I know.

Still, we’ll always have Diablo III…

Work

HP Service Manager 7 is a hulking pile of fail. Srsly.

Obligitory Crap Art

Finally, some art. This is all Zenntheartof: Smallville, because that’s what I’ve been doodling most of lately. I need to learn not to draw right in the inside margin of my notebook, too.

• Tags » art, gmail, life, sharepoint, smallville, void-star.net, world of warcraft, zenntheartof
• Comments By » ~Jem [h], Ivy, Vickie