I love Wikipedia, and I think it’s a great resource. I also realize that running a large server farm costs a lot of money. But the latest drive, in which Wikipedia asks for millions of Euro, is getting on my nerves. The huge banners have been bad enough, but now we get this:

I mean – really! Do you have to make it that big and obnoxious? Besides, Wales is a thoroughly unlikable man, in my personal opinion; I am now even less inclined to donate money.

Bought the second World of Warcraft expansion, played it for a while, and feel confident enough to post a super quick review.

The good:

• Zone design is great, the zones look really nice.
• Quests are much less annoying – there are of course still FedEx- and kill-ten-grue-type-quests, but over all it is MUCH more imaginative, and has many nice extras (for example there’s a quest to free Murloc babies, which has got to be ones of the cutest things in a video game ever).
• Death Knights are actually a fun melee class, which I had not thought would ever happen; their starter “campaign” is also really well designed.
• Less reputation grind… it seems.

The bad:

• It’s more of the same. Really. If you have played WoW at all, you have played the expansion. Unless you are a WoW ultra-nerd, you should get tired of it really quickly.
• Inflation got knocked up another notch. My mage made 500g profit, just by questing, in three days of game-play.
• It absolutely sucks to be a new player at the moment, or to play a low level character. Unless you are level 70 or higher, and thus able to consume the WOTLK content, you will play this game alone for a long time.

Bottom line:

Wotlk gets 3/5. This is what the first expansion should have been like – Northrend totally puts Outland to shame. There’s enough to keep the old timers happy for a while, and some of the new additions are quite nice, but it is not compelling enough to warrant anything more than a “for fans” recommendation.

Passed my first LPIC exam today, the 101. More to come – but I am now, finally, on my way to being a certified Linux geek.

I just discovered something on YouTube that let my geeky little heart beat faster. Something from the good old days, when MTV would still should the occasional white person on their shows. You know, even way back before they ceased to be a cultural icon.

YouTube has a handful of Zig & Zag clips.

Yes, I will out myself, I used to watch Zig & Zag when they were still on TV, and I liked them. Go ahead, call me a nerd. Call me weird. Hell, call me old man. If you were born after 1980, you won’t remember these guys.

America is not totally retarded, and there is still hope for that nation despite everything that has happened in recent history. Now it is up to Mr. Obama to prove that the hopes the world is putting in him are justified.

• Obama Wins Election
• Obama’s Victory Speech

One thing is for sure: He can not possibly do worse than Mr. Bush did.

Oh and go watch his victory speech. It starts a little slowly, but it gets really good.

Halloween is my favorite ‘holiday’. It is not celebrated here in Germany (but of course shops use it to sell candy, and nowadays Halloween party are quite common) and is probably the one thing I wish I had had in my youth. Trick-or-treat, spooky decorations, fog, scary stories, things that go bump in the night, the legend of sleepy hallow, jack-o-lanterns, ghosts, ghouls, vampires and zombies.

In the past years I always had a private Halloween movie marathon. This year, I somehow completely lost track of it and so I didn’t borrow or buy any scary movies. I still have a bunch that I have viewed before, we’ll see. I’ll probably spend the entire night working on the NaNoWriMo thing anyway.

I signed up for NaNoWriMo 2008. NaNoWriMo is the National Novel Writing Month, and the goal is to write a whole novel in 30 days. Quantity matters, quality doesn’t. Head over to Are You A God?, my world-building blog that I also use for my other creative endeavors, to follow my progress (and, perhaps, watch my fail live and in color).

The German Government has approved a 70 billion Euro deal to save Hypo Real Estate bank. The financial crisis has therefore finally reached Europe, and it has done so in full force. I do not know how bad the situation of banks is here in Germany, but I can imagine that the loss of trust in the system is going to cause a great deal of agony in the near future.

I am not really worried, yet. But I do wonder how many hits the financial system can take before it starts to sink. It is important to remember that actual numbers on a balance sheet matter rather little if panic sets in and the dreaded “run on the banks” begins.

I do have the gut feeling that the situation is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.