I know it's been a (long) while. I've not really been playing much. Tonight, though, I got a beta invite for Wrath of the Lich King. Hopefully this will re-peak my interest. I'll make sure to take some screenshots along the way. I'm also hoping to get back into developing the site once Wrath time comes around.

Unbarc showed up on my doorstep yesterday (after waiting 2.5 months or so). First: the (semi) bad. Someone on Twitter asked me if it was my camera / lighting / flash that made the colors seemed washed out, or if they're just like that. It's a combination of both, actually; I have a simple point-shoot camera, and it was pretty close to the figure while I was taking photos. The flash did wash out some of the colors (my hand isn't quite good enough to turn the flash off), but some of the colors are just like that.

The Good: it's Unbarc for reals! I really love the look of all the gear he's wearing, and it's great to have something to remember this game with (since I've been playing it for the past 3 years). Click the picture to see more in the gallery.

In-game, there hasn't been much since my last post. With the 4th of July holiday, I haven't played much lately. I did join an arena team named Fire and Slice. Only played a few matches (and lost them all [need some arena gear]). Out-of-game, I've been spending a lot of time playing with the new puppy, and she's still taking a lot of my time.

I've gone and done it again... Unbarc is packing his bags and moving to the Earthen Ring realm. It's been an odd and busy month in real life, and things have made it so I can't play as much. I got another puppy, so she's getting most of my attention. Also, for the past 2 weeks, my wife's been sick so I've been taking care of her.

Here's my character transfers to date:
07/21/2006 - Stormrage -> Kael'thas
11/29/2006 - Kael'thas -> Runetotem
03/06/2007 - Runetotem -> Kael'thas
05/23/2008 - Kael'thas -> Earthen Ring

So, why Earthen Ring? Well a couple of weeks ago I started an alt over there, and got accepted into the guild <alea iacta est>. AIE is a big guild... at the time of writing this, they almost have 2300 members. Currently, every time I get the chance to log on to Kael'thas, 90% of the guild is in a 25man instance, and most of my friends are either in that guild, or other big raiding guilds. AIE always has people on, and are some of the friendliest people I've met in the game. It's sad that I'm leaving my friends back on Kael'thas, but their play styles / plans are different than mine right now, and no sense paying monthly to be unhappy.

Earthen Ring is an RP server. Since I've never done any Roleplaying before, I figured I'd start off by giving Unbarc a last name. After clearing the cobwebs out of the creative gears, I came up with the name Unbarc Nightfire.

I'm really looking forward to becoming part of the AIE family, and can't wait to level to 80 with everybody else once the expansion comes out. Farewell my DD friends, I'll be in touch; come to Earthen Ring, I'll be in our channel.

Well, had myself another birthday yesterday (the 24th), and dinged 26. The day before, I was able to see Gruul and Magtheridon for the first time, and ended up getting [Legwraps of the Aldor], which also gave me one of my favorite set bonuses.

So what'd I get for my birthday? Nothing yet... on Sunday I'm getting Mario Kart for the Wii, and GTA IV for the 360 on Tuesday. Also, in my email inbox this morning was this message:

FigurePrints Wrote:

Congratulations!

You have been selected to create your very own FigurePrint!

Your account has been enabled to allow you to place an order any time before midnight May 9, 2008 PST. To be clear, being selected only grants you the opportunity to purchase a FigurePrint and this email is not meant as a free or discounted product.

To complete your order, simply sign into the FigurePrints website and select "Place An Order" from the main menu on www.figureprints.com to start the process of creating your very own custom FigurePrint.

Please note that this purchase privilege has been granted to you for your personal use only. Any attempted resale of this privilege is a violation of the terms and conditions you agreed to when you registered your account, and can result in a termination of any attempted online resale transaction as well as a deregistration of your account and any rights or privileges associated with your account.

Again, congratulations! We look forward to bringing your character into reality.

Sincerely,

The FigurePrints Team

So it looks like Unbarc will soon be on my desk under a glass dome! I'll post pictures as soon as I get it.

Dang, as it almost been 3 months since my last update? Since I don't have a developer's version of the site on my work laptop, I guess I let this site slip past me a bit. Hopefully I'll get back into doing updates (news and site-wise). Well, let's get to it.

Loot

Here's my most recent loots:
[Reins of the Onyx Netherwing Drake]
[Collar of the Aldor]
[Spellstrike Pants]
[Gladiator's Touch of Defeat]

Finally, I got my Netherwing Drake mount. I admit, I didn't do my daily quests... well, daily, but I got it now, so I can stop fighting everybody to kill a stupid Nethermine Ravager.

I've only been to Karazhan twice. The first time, it was for the first 2 bosses (with no loots), and this second time, it was for the last 2 bosses. Luckily, I won the roll for the T4 token, and got my helm. It was a pretty nice upgrade from what I used to have.

I also buckled down and finally got the mats together for my [Spellstrike Pants]. The hardest part was finding a Tailor who knew the pattern, and either A) Had a [Primal Nether] they could use or B) Have enough [Badge of Justice] to buy one.

Lastly on the loot frontier, I actually did some PvP on my own. If you knew me, you'd be surprised. The most honor I've gotten is just over 10k (that's total, from the day I started playing 3 years ago, without spending any previously). So, I upgraded my wand for the Gladiator's.


I have some more junk to post about, and site updates to do (probably Gallery pictures of my new mount), but I'm at work, and should probably get back to that.

Just a quick update to post about my absence. We gots a new puppy a few months ago, and since he's just over 4 months old, he still needs lots of attention (which I don't mind giving). I don't get as much time on the computer as I'd like, but hopefully it'll change soon.

Also, the laptop that I made all the site modifications on (using a test server) is being watched by Big Brother, so I can only try to work on it here at home. I do have a big site overhaul coming soon, I just need to make sure there's no bugs left.

Anyways, that's where I've been, and here's some cuteness of our puppy Monty:

From Monty

It's been awhile (again) since my last update, and I've been pretty busy. For the life side, my wife and I were able to find the perfect house. It's a 4 bedroom / 2 bathroom house on a 1 acre lot. On the south side of the property, there's a little grove that separates us from the neighbors; on the north side, there is a community center as our neighbor, so there's a parking lot between us and them. It's got a lot of trees in the yard, and it takes forever to mow, but I don't care, because it's mine. We're still unpacking (it's been just over 3 weeks since we moved in), but at least we don't have a deadline on that.

We moved out of our apartment a month before our lease ended. We were totally prepared and willing to pay for the last month, but on the day we were moving out, they call us and say:

Landlord Wrote:

Are you moving out today? We have somebody who wants your apartment. The sooner you can get out and get the place cleaned, the sooner we can move them in and pro-rate back what you pay.

The moving of boxes and junk took ~4.5 hours on Monday, and we were out of the apartment by Wednesday. My wife went into the office to pay the rent, and they said there was no need, since they asked us to be out earlier then our lease was for. That means we got a completely rent/mortgage-free month.

Lately, I've been getting a lot of new toys... after months (count: 9) of working for my dad, I finally got my LCD HDTV. Then came the HD DVD player for my Xbox 360 (TNMT at 1080i looks amazing, btw), and last night I got a new router. That last one wasn't planned, my old one was on the outs.


On the site, there's been some good changes. Although they won't be completely obvious to visitors (like most updates I do), there's one I like. If you head over to the Gallery, and click on down to a picture, you'll notice something different. An image loads in its own page now (example), and is all database-driven. Before, it was just reading from a config file to populate all the albums.

Pretty soon, there will be some forums available on the site as well. I decided to add them for a few different reasons. One being the fact that my old domain is no more, and I need a forum for some things, and the other reason is so visitors of the site can contact me if they want. I was thinking about trying to code some sort of comment system for the news posts, but I didn't want to deal with all the anti-spam measures. I'm not sure how long until it's working, but there'll be a link in the Navigation menu, and I'll post something.


On the game side, I haven't played much the past few weeks (basically since I moved). The other day I helped a friend of mine, Barddius, hit his first 70. Now I'm trying to get Device back into playing the game, getting to 70, so we can start a 3v3 Arena team. My Hunter , Barcana, is just shy of getting to level 65, so maybe once I get her up all the way, I can get her into the Arena team.

Ok, Azerothianites. My old domain was on the verge of expiration, and I decided to switch registrars. In doing so, I decided to register a new domain, www.unbarc.com. A little more fitting, don't you think? Once I get my old domain straightened out, I'll try and forward all that traffic to the new domain.

On the professions front, I made it up to 374, and have had the past 4 items I've made not get me over that last little skill. Hopefully tonight or tomorrow I'll have tailoring maxed, and the ability to make 20 slot bags, and finish my Spellfire set.

Speaking of which, since I last posted (yeah, I need to get back into posting more often), I made myself a [Spellfire Belt] and [Spellfire Gloves], and fitted each one with a [Potent Noble Topaz] and a [Glowing Nightseye]. Vera nice. All that's left is to make a robe, then try and start saving up the mats/money for the Spellstrike set.

Patch 2.1.0 came out recently, with a ton of changes. One of the best changes: gold spam reduction. Before the patch, I was getting between 10-15 gold-spam whispers per login, now I've gotten a total of 3 since patch day.

After almost 2.5 years of playing WoW, I finally had my first world-drop epic drop when I was farming in Netherstorm. After a few days of sitting on it, I put it up in the AH for 500 starting, 700 buyout, and it ended up selling for 671. Needless to say, that money was spent the next day on mats to try and max out the tailoring.

Tomorrow night, my wife and I are going to be taking a real look at a house. In the past, we've just been looking online, but now we're actually starting to go out and see what the houses look like in person. We found one we really like, so hopefully it'll turn out that way for real.

It's been 2 months, so I figured I should post some sort of update. I haven't really been playing Unbarc a whole lot lately. For a little while I was working on leveling my alt hunter, Barcana. The past week or so, though, I decided to drop my previous profession of Jewelcrafting (keeping Mining for some cash), and I took up Tailoring. Surprisingly, it didn't take too long to get up to 335 tailoring... Jewelcrafting took FOREVER. Right now I'm in a slump because of a lack of [Netherweave Cloth]. It's going to take me a while, but here's the reason(s) I switched:
[Spellfire Belt]
[Spellfire Gloves]
[Spellfire Robe]

As for the site, I've done some new things. There's a new Tutorials section. There isn't much there yet, but it's something I can add to over time. Right now I've written a couple of short tutorials about WoWMapView and how to convert WoWModelView models to Lightwave (you can see some examples here).

Pretty soon, the 2.1.0 will be going live. This is the biggest changelog yet... my version is 1322 lines of text long (my version being HTML-formatted), and the previous longest one was 1.11.0 with only 823 lines.

On the loots side, I haven't gotten much. I think the only thing of late would be these from a quest:
[Shattrath Wraps]

On the other side of the computer screen, my wife and I are starting the process of finding a house, which I'll probably start playing even less because of this. We're so tired of living in an apartment, and we're really looking forward to having someplace we can crank up the surround-sound without the people on the other side of the wall complaining, or doing the same thing.

After a few weeks of working, I just got myself an iPod. Not just any iPod, but a 5^th generation 80gb video iPod. Yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon organizing my music and subscribing/downloading/listening to podcasts. There's a few good WoW podcasts, and I added them to my Links.

Yeah, it's been a little while since my last update. Mainly, there hasn't been much to update with. While I was on vacation, double [Netherwind Robes] finally dropped, and one the following week. The guild also killed Anub'Rekhan (Nax) and Princess Huhuran (AQ40) while I was gone. Tonight, they have a full night of learning the Twin Emperors fight.

Last night, I was actually able to go on a ZG run, followed by a world dragon kill. Here's the notable loots:
[Cloak of Consumption]
[Jade Inlaid Vestments]

I go on vacation tonight, and I just can't get any real stuff done here at work, so I made some updates on the site again. The first one you'll notice is the news. Going along with the rest of my site, I took some graphics from the game (in this case, the Gossip Frame), and made it hold all the news.

Second, is the Guild Roster that I've been working on. I've actually been tinkering with it for a little bit now, but I think it's pretty much done and ready to be live on the site. I also made one almost identical on my guild's website.

P.S. Up to 11 kills on Nef (22 breastplates), and still no NW.

Last night was a good night for us. We cleared BWL for the first time on our new server, I got over a 10K crit from my Ignite tick, and I got loots.

First off, it was really something to do Blackwing with no lag. We weren't used to it. We've always used the lag, accepted its presence, and rolled with it. Had a wipe on Razorgore, since the mobs weren't standing around like normal, rogues pulled aggro on Vael, and hunters weren't getting the Tranq shot off fast enough with Ebonroc. Even with some wiping, we still did a full clear in 4.5 hours. It was actually our best run through the rest of the instance, kill-wise. People were actually assisting for a change!

For the 3^rd time in a row, I actually lived through the Nef encounter. I'm beginning to think that my problem was the [Limited Invulnerability Potion]s, since I always died when I used them.

New Loots!
[Mind Quickening Gem]
[Head of Nefarian] (turned into)
[Master Dragonslayer's Orb]

Now I go on vacation for a week and a half. Unfortunately I won't 'make it to the BWL clear again tonight (our server transfer wiped our saved raids clean). Hopefully, when Nef dies tonight, the #21 or #22 breastplate off him is Netherwind, because Nef is a bastard.