Back in the days of the Atari 800, there used to be one golden rule: NEVER open the disk drive when the light's on. Today, you don't unmount a drive when the computer tells you it's in use. Yesterday I ejected my iPod for my lunchtime walk when for some reason iTunes said that the iPod couldn't be disconnected because it's in use. "In use? By what?". There were no open windows, no apps were using it (except iTunes which wasn't playing anything from it). Thinking that my XP machine was lying to me just to get attention, I disconnected the iPod anyway.

And I lost everything.

Yup, I went to find whatever it was I felt like listening to and my iPod told me nothing was there, but the "About this iPod" screen told me there were 7k files and 200+ pictures still on it. I brought the iPod back, and sure enough iTunes laughed at me. I had a dead iPod.

Or did I?

I make playlists based on music from the iPod and on my Windows machine at work. It's a mash-up because I don't like keeping 2 copies of things. Well, I tried a playlist I thought was based on files from my hard drive, but it was actually based on files from my iPod. Yup, the files were still there, it was just the directory iTunes used that was dead. Not one corrupted file in the iPod_Control folder. The problem was that they were all renamed KDFF.mp3 or somesuch. I backed up a few, even though everything is on CD at home and ripped to my Mac's hard drive and restored the iPod when I got home.

It's a totally useless story, but I hope I keep someone from pulling the plug on their iPod prematurely.

In this day and age of call waiting and voice mail, do we hear busy signals anymore?

After only two years, Ternt Reznor's coming out with a new NIN album. I haven't heard the new single yet, but instead I'm downloading it from the NIN page in GarageBand format. Serious kudos to Trent for showing us a behind-the-scenes look at how his albums are made.

Click here for the GarageBand file

Yes, I know this is long overdue. I dinged 70 on Feb. 11. 1-70 in around 6 weeks. I'm sure that's not a speed record, but I have impressed myself.



Being level 70 has been fun. Not only can I start doing the Caverns of Time quests seriously, but I get my FLYING MOUNT!



Flying around has been a lot of run. It's a shame you can't use a flying mount on Azeroth. I've been discovering a lot of places you can only get to with a mount, and scouting for horde has never been easier :D.

Before I hit 70, though, I was rummaging around Netherstorm and came across this puppy:



It looks impressive, but it turns out it's also the staff used by the Undead Warlock in the Burning Crusade video:



Saving Thrall was a good run, but The Black Morass was a study in focusing on playing your character. Rift Lords spawn from time portals, trying to prevent Medivh from opening the Dark Portal. 18 waves, with breaks after every 6 for a mini-boss fight.

First things first: Zangarmash is pretty, but a pain in the ass to navigate in. I was excited to be there and out of HELLfire Peninsula, but it's like "out of the frying pan, into the fire". My first impressions of Zangarmash was that I was that I wanted to hang out there more, but that lasted about an hour or so. It reminded me of the Sporali Cavern in Everquest with the large mushrooms everywhere. Traversing large lakes and not having any real landmarks made navigation tough.



Telredor is a nice little town, but it has this annoying elevator which glides a few feet from the platform before levitating up or down. On the lower end you can just jump to it, but on the top end there's a 10 foot gap that you can fall off of if you're not paying attention. It didn't happen to me, but I saw people misjudge the distance and SPLAT.





The coolest part of the zone is this spire in the center of serpent lake which has some energy vortex spinning up into the sky. Very impressive.

I was able to score a decent PUG for The Underbog. We went all the way to the last boss without a healer, our DPS was that impressive. We burninated our entire way to the last boss when one person had to leave and we replaced him with a priest.





After finishing all the quests there, I made a run for Terokkar.


First entering Terokkar

The best way I can describe Terokkar is a "beautiful nightmare" if that makes any sense. The greenish tint gives a sense of gloom, while the landscape is mesmerizing.

I had an "oooooooooh!" moment when I first entered The Bone Wastes - there's a rather large, destroyed building which gives you the same sense of scale as I felt when seeing the Spires of North Karana for the first time in Everquest.





Last night I spent some time just running around finishing quest after quest. I started burning down spiders for Netherweave Spider Silk for 18-slot bags which I can now make (woot!).

63.5 now, I plan on getting to 64 tonight, and 66-67 by the end of the weekend.

This is damn impressive. Someone turned their basement into a Macintosh shrine.

Click Here

As everyone knows, I'm a Mac guy. However, there is a need for me to run Windows, at the very least on my gaming PC which is what I use to run WoW, EQ, EQ2, Dreamfall, Guild Wars, BF2142, etc. I need to keep the machine running smooth all the time, and I have to be confident that it's going to run well every time I turn it on.

Back in the days before Windows XP, I hated Windows. I friggin' hated it. It was a necessary evil because you couldn't play EQ on a Mac, and Unreal Tournament sucked on a Mac. When Windows XP came out, I loved it because MS finally moved away from that Windows 3.1-type architecture and moved towards an NT-like one that was much more stable. To this day, I've had less blue screens since XP's release in 2001 than I have fingers on one hand. I love XP for what it is. It's no Mac OS X, but it does its job and does it well.

So what about Vista? I couldn't give a crap about it. For one thing, there's no guarantee that all my games, devices, and drivers will work with it in perfect harmony. It seems to me that Vista's biggest competition is XP. Not to mention all the security bullshit which will someday disallow me to play my own podcast on my PC. Could you imagine?

So, no Vista for me, at least not for now.

Oh, and here's a picture of the box, just to keep the place pretty: