Richard, I see your 34 matches and counter with 46 players named “Jeppe” in Europe and 9 in the American World of Warcraft. ;-)

(Of course “Jeppe” is a fairly common name in Scandinavia, especially in Denmark.)

I recent weeks I’ve done something I’d never actually seriously considered before: I am now raiding in World of Warcraft. Raids, in case you are not familiar with the lingo, are larger groups of adventurers than the basic 5-man party. Currently, WoW uses 10-man and 25-man raids, though in the past there have been 20-man and 40-man raids as well.

Raids take on challenges that’d be much too hard for smaller groups. Naxxramas – a floating, undead citadel – was the primary raid in the current content; last week, Ulduar was added. Ulduar is a fortress inhabited by titans.

After joining raids fro some weeks now, I’ve gotta say: I am kind of glad I did. They are much more interesting and challenging than small-scale encounters. They require 25 people to work well together; there’s a leadership structure (though we’re kind of casual about it) and people have more specialized roles. Everybody needs to do their job well; a weak link means a wipe – death of the entire raid. For example, on one boss in Naxxramas, I have to use my hunter’s ability to set freezing traps to help neutralize a large group of zombies, and I have to use my tranquilizing shot to calm down the boss when he becomes enraged. Positioning is much important as well. In short, it’s much more about tactics than most other fights.

It’s really fun to do this. Naxxramas is a bit too easy, but Ulduar is very tough for us. This is in part because it’s just a hard area, but it’s also because we’re still learning how to defeat the bosses there. There is immense satisfaction in taking on a big, bad monster, failing for many attempts, and then finally working out the right approach for a successful victory.

Very gratifying.

Razorscale - Ulduar 10-man

I’m now up to LPIC201 exam. I’ve still got to do the 202 exam sometime in the near future, but I’m already LPIC1 certified. Yay me – especially since this is something I’ve always wanted to do.

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.

Oh my god, it is full of stars…

I got my first computer pretty much 20 years ago. I’ve been a gamer and I’ve followed the cool stuff the demo scene put out. I thought I was a hardened user, one which simply doesn’t get “wow’ed” anymore.

Enter Apple and iTunes to prove me wrong.

Their new visualizer is simply stunning. Words would be wasted, take a look:

Needless to say… I am currently going through my classical music collection. The Blue Danube is playing as I write this, and it is stunning.

I can’t help it, this absolutely fantastic. Maybe we will manage to build up a real space industry after all.

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

(via Ben.)

Woke up early today and did something I had wanted to do in a while. I shut down a lot of the minor websites I have and that I never use. Now I am still left with way too many websites that I never update, but that I think I should update… I’ll probably consolidate them somehow. Anyway in the unlikely case anybody is actually missing a site, just let me know.

…not my idea, but I am participating! You’ll find my work on my world building blog.

For those TORG-Players out there:

(SVG Format)

I make no claim as to the accuracy of this map.