News from Great Castle Wilson

I had a chat with Todd this morning about the high-end game in WoW. Basically, I believe WoW is really two completely different games:

1. Until you hit level 60, the game is a group-oriented, but soloable RPG, where to a significant extent, your ability to progress is based on your relative level (versus the things you are fighting), followed by your skill at running the GUI, and then your gear.
2. At level 60, the game becomes essentially a squad-based (i.e. group or raid) action game, where the most important skill is your familiarity with a particular mission (i.e. “knowing the map”). Your skill with the GUI is still important (probably moreso), but for the more interesting content at least, your gear is critical. To see this, just ask all the players currently grinding for nature resist gear (which they didn’t think they’d ever need).

In any case, I’m not a big fan of the level 60 game in WoW. To me it feels like the rules changed just to keep the powergamers occupied. I realize that most MMO’s have this problem, and it’s not clear what they could do about it, other than release expansions. Here’s hoping that Burning Crusade gives me back the game I like to play for at least another 10 levels.

To preempt at least some of the flames: Yes, I know I can start a new character. Since I’ve played essentially every race/character class combination into the late teens — some into the late 40’s — and had characters on regular, rp and pvp servers, that’s starting to get old. I suspect I will start new characters in both of the races that come with BC, just to see the newbie area content, but given that it all funnels into the same stuff at around level 15, we’ll have to see how far I take them.

Anyway, here’s how the conversation with Todd went…

Todd — 9:13

Will you be joining us again tonight for another run on the Baron?

McQ — 9:14

Sadly, I will not. I am headed to the arts center to see the (second to) last performance by the current concert master.

Todd — 9:15

too bad… you realize that means the rogue leggings will drop

McQ — 9:17

absolutely. I am still not completely sold on the idea of doing “45 minute baron runs”. I would like to see all the content in the zone, but after about my third time through, I start to get bored. I really think that the WoW high end content is just for the uber-optimizing, power gamer crowd, and as I’ve said before, that’s really not my thing.

Todd — 9:19

the 45 minute baron run is for 1 quest. I understand that you are not keen on the repeated runs through an instance. I want the quest as I want the items that come from completing it. I try to think of it as a test of skill… can we complete it in the manner specified.

McQ — 9:21

yes, I get that. I believe what I was trying to say was a) I’m not particularly fussed about the gear I have, since what I’m already using works for everything I’ve done with it (and I’ll likely never get into a 40 man raid), and b) If I wanted a task of skill, I’d play Q3 Arena or Tetris. Having said that, I enjoy the social aspects of getting together on Thursdays.

Todd — 9:22

Well at least you are consistent

For some reason, the e-book community looks at Cory Doctorow’s use of free electronic versions of his books as loss leaders for his p-book versions as a success story.

As far as I can see, the fact that this actually works is proof that e-books are a failure. After all, if we were all regularly reading them, then giving away the electronic version would just be mean that Cory wasn’t getting paid. Since no one can make money of e-books anyway, of course you can give them away.

I solved my color noise problem.

The company called AKVIS makes a product called Noise Buster, which is a plug-in for Photoshop that removes color noise. The filtering it does is quite flexible, but it has a fully automatic mode as well. Here are a couple of images that provide an example of the results you can get by letting it choose the settings:

Take a look at Vicky’s blue shirt and the wall behind her in particular. As you can see, the before shot is filled with random colored dots, while the after shot is completely acceptable (or at least is good enough for me).

I created a gallery of test photos with the new camera. Take a look at them here and tell me what you think. In the interest of making them vaguely more downloadable, I reduced them from 3072×2304 to 1280×1024, but that should still give you the right idea.

I’m not particularly happy with them, to tell you the truth. You would think having more megapixels would mean that the size of the dots of color noise would be smaller but that doesn’t actually seem to be the case. In all honesty, I think Deb’s 4 megapixel camera takes better shots.

Now I have to decide, whether I can live with that picture quality, or whether I should take it back to the store.

One other oddity: Take a look at the sheet music in this shot. Do you see the circular areas where it looks “smudged” on the right hand sheet? (There’s another one visible on the side of the grey filing cabinet.) Those areas are not in the original images! However, anything that displays or manipulates them on the Mac causes them to appear. If I use my PC to look at them instead, they’re gone. I can’t imagine what would cause that behavior, but it’s totally bogus.

An Olympus Stylus 720 SW. I haven’t played with it much yet, but it seems pretty good so far.

It’s main selling feature for me: It’s supposed to be shockproof. I’m not planning on testing this actively, but I do intend to just toss it in my geekbag and leave it there.

The only negative I’ve found so far is that there seems to be a bit more noise in low light conditions than I’d like. I’ll play with it a bit more and then post some pictures.

Anyone have any recommendations on a good, cheap, digital camera? Something with a 4 mega-pixel ccd, good battery life, outdoor readable display, fast cycle time, and quiet zoom/focus motors? I’d also like it to be small, light and sturdy enough to throw in my geek bag without getting damaged.

’cause as a camera, my phone just doesn’t cut it:

I got back from the Toronto trip Thursday evening. The drive back was exhausting because of some seriously unsettled weather. Over the course of the trip, I drove through at least 5 micro-cells, a couple of which included zero visibility events — always fun when passing transport trucks on the 401.

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Today was my first opportunity to relax enough to figure out what was wrong with photo uploading. As usual, the problem was that my ../uploads/2006 folder wasn’t in the webserver’s group. (To use the Eclipse vernacular: “FIXED”)

Of course to test it, I grabbed a recent orchestra photo and tried to upload it (see below). This is the first time I tried to push a full size image from Deb’s camera up and it exposed a limitation in the current WP code: If your picture is >3Mpixels, it won’t create a thumbnail. I shrunk the picture down a bit, and now all is right with the world:

The orchestra tuning up