Author: mcq

Below find the posting I made to the Oie Jedoonee mailing list…

Effective immediately, I am canceling my WoW account.

I have had fun playing WoW, and I still enjoy hanging out with you guys on Sunday nights, but lately I feel like we have lost focus. I honestly believe that the game mechanics are most of the problem here: I hate the group size limit. I think it’s too easy to solo (or pickup group) your way through the game. I find too many of the quests at our level are common between alliance and horde (and so I’ve done them with Bais)…

I also think that the thing which I thought would help us — playing Alliance during the week and Horde on the weekend — has actually hurt instead: I just don’t have any emotional attachment to my horde character. Every Sunday night I think “Too bad I can’t play Bais instead.”

Basically though it’s just that I’ve seen enough of WoW to realize that I know the mechanics. Did I do a large scale raid? No, but I know that it will just be more of the same, except for having more rigid constraints on your roles and less margin for error. Honestly, I’m not in it for that. I have seen almost every zone (gotta love rogues), and I’ve played both sides far enough to know most of the quests. That’s enough for me.

I also have a number of other constraints on my time:
– It’s orchestra season again. I completely failed to practice over the summer, and am struggling with the music. I *need* to make cello a priority again.
– I’m starting a new project at home: I’m going to work with my dad to do a genealogy of our family.
– Dennis is back in school, and I suspect that I am going to have to spend even more time working with him on his homework this year.

And lastly, I took a look at our finances after putting in new carpets and new living room furniture and going on vacation, and it became clear that we need to spend less. Given the other arguments above, this seemed like an obvious way to save some money.

As usual, I’m sure I will get involved with “the next big thing” when it comes along, but for now, I’m done.

Thanks for all the awesome times,
McQ.

FAQ #1: Can I have your stuff?
A: No. Canceling the account means I won’t be playing for a while. Giving up my stuff means that I would *never* play again.

Does anyone else think that this is silly:

And that doesn’t include the laptop, the digital still camera, the dv camera, the…

Like most Mac users, I’m a zealot. I love my Macs, so when I find something that they can’t do well, I’m frustrated. GPS software seems to be one of those areas.

All I wanted was a nice, simple piece of Canadian, street navigation software that supported GPS and would do voice directions. Well, I’ve been searching for several weeks now, and the only software I’ve found that might do it is Route 66.

I haven’t tried it because I haven’t been able to get a copy in Ottawa. [Of course, you basically can’t get any mac software in Ottawa, but that’s the subject of another rant.] Given the rather negative comments I have read about Route 66 (terrible ui, buggy, the cheapest possible port of the windows version, etc.) I’m not willing to buy it before trying it, and there didn’t seem to be a demo version available.

I did buy MacGPS Pro which claims to be “the ultimate Macintosh mapping software for GPS communication”. This may actually be true, given the state of the industry, but it certainly wasn’t what I was looking for: manual waypoints, maps cost extra, no route planning. Basically, it was a total bust. This might be useful if you were doing marine navigation, or some such, but it’s not for road travellers.

I haven’t found anything else for the Mac that looked promising. Part of that is because I am looking for Canadian mapping info. There seemed to be a couple of other choices if you were going to be U.S. only.

So, I tried looking for palm software instead.

I wanted to get TomTom, but it doesn’t look like they sell the “software only” version any more, or if they do, it wasn’t clear from their web site. I asked a question on their tech support pages, but haven’t gotten a response.

After much googling, I found Mapopolis, which is close to being exactly what I wanted. I find the map display to be somewhat ugly, but it has all the features I want. There are two issues with it, however:

1. As soon as I connect the GPS to it, the HD light on my LifeDrive starts flickering constantly. This continues as long as the GPS is connected. Given that the intended use would be for 8..10 hours of continuous driving, I don’t imagine my drive would last very long. The guys at Mapopolis are aware of the problem, and are looking at fixes (before you write to me: yes, I am running the latest version).
2. One of the tech guys at Mapopolis claims that there are very few BT GPS solutions that work well with the Palm.
   

   Most do NOT work reliably with the new Palm architecture. Only the MC BTGPS we sell from our website and the Globalsat 338 have new microcode that handles the Palm LOOKAWAY.

   Needless to say, I don’t have either of those, but an MG668 instead.

So where does that leave us? I found a copy of Microsoft Streets & Trips for Windows, and I’m running it on VirtualPC. It still doesn’t do voice navigation, but it has maps of everywhere I wanted to go in Canada, reasonably good route planning, and a professional looking GUI. Connecting it to the GPS was trivial, and I have proven that it all works together well. Given that we’re leaving this week, that’s likely to be the best I can do, but man is it frustrating.

Oh, well.

Update (14:46): TomTom got back to me. Apparently, you can order just the software by calling them directly. Unfortunately, it’s $150 (probably US), so I guess I’ll have to see if anybody in Ottawa stocks TomTom gear; that’s too much money to just buy it based on reputation alone.