Something else new on the site: Gallery Ratings. You can now rate each image in the Gallery on a scale of 1 to 5 (lowest to highest, respectively). Check out this example and rate it to see it in action.

Yes, I know that IE has some layout issues, and Opera thinks you can keep voting, even though it votes the first time. Opera users: do a full-refresh on the page to see the result after you vote. Safari and Firefox users, though, seem to be sitting pretty well.

Saturday night, I finally dinged 70 on Barcana, my Blood Elf Hunter. So first thing I did was head down to Shadowmoon Valley to get my flying mount. After flying around for so long on Unbarc's epic flier, the regular one feels so sluggish, so I modified my Mount Macro that I made a while ago. Originally, it would automatically pick between my flying/land mount depending on if the area was flyable or not, but I added a modifier to it. If I now hold ctrl while clicking the macro, it just defaults to my land mount.

Been bored lately, so the profile page got a bit of an update. Now I have the ability to show many different characters, instead of only the one I specify. On the side of the Character sheet, there are 2 tabs; one being for my mage (Unbarc) and the other being for my hunter (Barcana). If I start any other serious alts, they'll be on here too.

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.

Over the past few days, I've hit some big milestones on Unbarc. First, I finally made my [Spellfire Robe] (which I dropped some gold on, since I was really tired of waiting for my 4 day timer...)! The set is complete, and at some point I'll probably start in on the Spellstrike set.

Second, after about a year and a half of throwing Runecloth in Thunder Bluff, they finally deemed me Exalted. I cast Slow Fall, mounted up on my horse and ran off the edge in excitement, floating almost half-way to Bloodhoof Village. There, I got myself a nice and shiny [Great White Kodo]. Now some of you might be asking "Why didn't you just get it the easy way from PvP?" and I'll reply with "Because I think PvP sucks and I really don't like it."

Besides, what fun is it to do stuff the easy way? I always somehow find myself doing things the hard way...

Recently, Apple released their Safari browser for Windows. I installed it, just to see how it worked with this site. Turns out, it didn't play well with my gzipped JavaScript files (which helps the site load MUCH faster). So, in lite of that, I made some Safari-specific files, and now the site seems to function completely fine (tooltips, effects, etc).

Also, for the time being, those of you still using IE6 will have to live with the ugly PNG transparency bug. I got tired of the somewhat crappy-looking .gif images of the UI portions of the site, so now they're in PNG (smoother edges, shadowing, just all-around better looking). At some point, I might try to incorporate a fix for IE6. Other then that, it looks like my site is now compatible with IE(7), Firefox, Opera, and now Safari.

For a small WoW note, patch 2.1.2 was released the other day.

I've still been playing my hunter, Barcana, a lot. I just dinged 52 on her last night. Playing a hunter is pretty fun... being Beast Mastery specced, it's pretty easy to take on multiple mobs, take on higher level mobs, and do group quests by myself. I tamed Rawr at about level 15. Device and I ran over to the Draenei starting area so I could tame him, since this is the only place to get a Ravager pet before going to Outland.