Elkagorasa the Casual

Last night, I finally completed 2 achievements that I had been working on for months (edit: since last October). World Explorer - This one meant exploring every nook and cranny of all 4 continents in the game. Shop Smart, Shop Pet ... Smart - this one involved finding, buying and getting 50 'vanity' pets. This comes quickly on the heels of finishing off the Midsummer fire festival achievements, a quick, successful 10-man run through Obsidian Sanctum , and completing the " For the Horde! ". In the last two weeks, I've gotten two vanity pets ( Stinker and Spirit of Summer ), one mount and 2 nifty titles (" Flame Keeper Elkagorasa" and "Elkagorasa the Explorer ").

Recently the Carbonite add-on for World of Warcraft has gone from a subscription based app, to a shareware/freeware based model. This means that I am now willing to install it! With that said, I can see that I ALMOST completed with the " Exploration " achievement on Warcraft. I was using Cartographer as a map replacement. It has a great feature to show the unexplored areas in a different color (than the default "fog". This means I could view my map and look for the bright-blue map areas to find where I hadn't explored. When I switched to Carbonite, replacing Cartographer and Questhelper , I thought I lost this unexplored areas quirk. Last night, while trying to finish off the Midsummer achievements, I ran around the Draneii starting areas. While there I happend to right-click on the Carbonite map and got a popup menu. On this menu, select Show, and uncheck "Hide the unexplored areas." Now my unexplored areas show in the map and I can immediately pick...

Last night while helping some guildies level their alts in Outlands - Hellfire Peninsula, I found that I had some unfinished instances and related quests. Namely, Hellfire Ramparts . I read somewhere that it is rather easy for a level 80 Warlock to solo Ramparts, but last time I tried I failed miserably. Now, with a new Destruction build, and a few equipment upgrades the Ramparts were manageable. With voidy tanking, I could easily handle the groups of three warriors. The bosses all dropped rather quickly, in fact the second boss ( Nazan and Vazruden ) never moved to phase 2. In fact, I only died once, and that was right at the entrance when I aggro'd 2 parties of three mobs and a patrol. After completing Ramparts, another guildie wanted to run Shattered Halls . This level 70 instance was a bit harder. I died three times in this instance, twice due to bad pulls on my part. "Hey! voidy did well in Ramparts, he can manage 5 mobs... oh my, I just aggro'd all of them." It ...

Moutain Dew is starting a new promotion for their "Gamer Fuel" soda with a World of Warcraft theme. Here's my banner.

I've posted this script before on my own server, but since it's being rebuilt, I thought I'd repost it here. The script will take the name of an item from Warcraft (for example) Mekgineer's Chopper, then return all the items and roughly how you get each. Maybe revise the code to return a webpage with links to the source, but that's for a third revision. Note: This script requires Powershell installed on your PC. Copy and paste the code below and save into a file with a PS1 extention. Sample Results Please Enter the WowHead name or ItemID (found in the URL)?: Mekgineer's Chopper Mekgineer's Chopper x 1 Titansteel Bar x 12 Titanium Bar x 36 - created Eternal Fire x 12 - created Eternal Earth x 12 - created Eternal Shadow x 12 - created Handful of Cobalt Bolts x 40 Cobalt Bar x 80 Cobalt Ore x 80 - drop Arctic Fur x 2 - drop ...

While my other server is down, I thought I'd take my own advice and use BlogSpot to start hosting my personal site. When the hardware is up and running again at the other location, I plan to keep both sites up and running, posting more personal content here, and technical articles at the other location. Update, now that the site is back up, if you want to read those posts... WoW, The Armory is cool! (July 2007)- Blizzard had just created the armory site.  My New Gaming Headset - Motorola S9 - I rave about my new bluetooth headset.  Better Warcraft Gear Script Version 2 - A script that uses the recently implemented Armory page to create crafted gear materials list.  Read WoWArmory XML via PowerShell - First attempt at reading the armory via Powershell.  Grab my WoW Character into Powershell (aka case study in pulling data from xml) - deep dive into reading Character data.  WoW Wallpaper Grabber Version 2 (July 2010) - updated version of a Windows ...