Silvanus' Blog

So. I decided to integrate my WordPress into Facebook. Sort of as a personal encouragement to get off my ass and occasionally post to my blog.
I tend to be a whole lot better about updating on Facebook than I am on my blog. So I figured I’d just use my blog to post directly to Facebook.
Not only that, but I can continue ranting for as long as I wish to on my blog, without having to worry about stupid Facebook character limits.

So.  I used to play WoW.  I got involved enough to eventually get my main to 80 and even managed to do some high-end raids.  During one of these high-end raids that took well over 12 hours to complete, my loathing for the game began.

I have never played a game that I find as intensely irritating and aggravating as I find WoW.

My primary complaints are:

1. Godawful graphics.  WoW is by far one of the most butt-ugly games in existence when compared to the disgusting level of system resources it requires to run it.  Cartoony looking avatars should NOT make my graphics card work hard, especially when games that require much higher fps (such as Left for Dead 2) do NOT tax my graphics nearly as much as WoW and it’s awful rendering.
2. Assholes.  They’re everywhere, no matter what you do.  If you want to do anything other than Solo content (which you cannot ‘defeat’ the game solo) you HAVE to deal with assholes.  Granted, I could probably play for a couple years doing nothing but quests, but then I’d never get to see the ‘end’ of the game, hence, to truly play the game, you are FORCED to deal with people at one point or another that you would likely kick the teeth in of were you to meet them in real life.
3. ADDICTS.  When I was in high school, no one wanted to sit and listen to me talk about how cool my Dungeons and Dragons character was.  Now that all of you tools have finally succumbed to some kind of geekdom, I’m really not interested in hearing about it.  I really don’t give a flying crap about how many achievements you have, or that you have oodles of phantom digital gold.  Guess what, my Shadowrun character has a couple million nuyen, and I’ve earned over 200 karma, I’m a grade 6 initiate… see how lame that gets?  I’m really not interested in your cool gear, or how awesome you are at stun-locking someone, anymore than I am interested in political or religious discussions.

In short, screw WoW, screw Blizzard, and if you want to talk about WoW to me, piss-off.

Infrequently Asked Questions of FAQs

This article on A List Apart made some excellent points.  I often encounter issues where I would like to have my answers given easily by a FAQ, only to start reading a bunch of marketing goo.  If I’m digging around on your site for information, that you are not providing, no amount of ‘buy it cuz it’s awesome’ will convince me that is correct.  I want to know details about what I’m considering purchasing.  While reading this article, I recalled encountering the same issues the author refers to, being exasperated, and thinking much along the same lines.  Most FAQ’s out there are totally useless.  When I’m discussing site design, and page choices with a customer, I make sure that they have a truly viable reason to have each element they want to include.  Yes, there are common staples to most sites, but that doesn’t mean that every site needs to have them.  About Us pages are also one of the most worthless pages on most people’s sites, the same information included in them could simply be part of the Contact section of their site instead.  For me an About Us page should reflect the owners of the site/business, add a human element to the digital interface.  FAQ’s are essentially supposed to provide the same function, as if you are asking a business receptionist a question they can easily answer.  Most marketing related questions should be reflected in the product information, not in a FAQ.

So far this semester has been much of a refresher for me, a chance to put some of my skills to use.  However after receiving my excellent feedback regarding my xhtml+css pre-assessment, I was shown a couple of ways to do things differently.

I originally learned to build webpages back when tables were all that was available for controlling your layout.  After css came out, I sort of fell out of the loop for a while.  I struggled for some time to get css to behave the way I wanted.  I finally am getting a good handle on how to implement css pretty well.

The feedback from my pre-assess was very helpful, there were a few ‘ugly’ mistakes I had made.  After reviewing the pre-assess I turned around and implemented the suggested alternatives, and of course they worked quite well.  It took a little tweaking of my overall stylesheet to get everything to work out cleanly, but I was able to reproduce the same, if not better, look.  I had used comic sans as a font, because I was struggling to find a font that would duplicate the design appearance.  However, a quick replace with Verdana, leaving it with the font style of italic, produced the results I wanted.

I am really appreciating having involved online instructors.  Taking classes online is always a challenge in it’s own right, it’s great to have good instructor support.