Benign Thoughts

It seems as though Blizzard is getting ready to send out invites to the WotLK beta. As of yet, I haven’t gotten one, but I don’t think that anybody else has gotten one either. As a mac user and beta tester of many different open source and closed source applications (some of which are under NDA so I cannot talk about), I am hoping I get an invite. Especially since I love WoW so much.

Speaking of World of Warcraft, I started playing again. Yeah, I couldn’t help it. I am, however, still active in real life and have given out 25-man raiding. Only 10-mans for me. It seems like a good compromise to keep it from taking over my life again. I am in a non-raiding guild on Arthas called “Fabulous”. The players in the guild are generally good players and often get picked up for other guild’s raids, so I guess we’re kind of like mercenaries.

So every time I get a new email, I jump. I have the gmail notifier and it beeps whenever a new email comes in, and I keep hoping I get a beta invite. Don’t worry, those who actually read this blog, I will remain (sort of) active like I am now. If I get a beta invite, I will share all the information on it that I am allowed to. If not, well, I’ll be reading other sites for said information. Anyway, that’s all for now. Toodles.

Edit: I haven’t gotten into the beta yet. Hopefully I will still get an invite, but if not, oh well. If anybody has an extra one that they’re not planning on using (or selling on ebay - that’d be the wrong thing to do!), I’d happily take it :). My email address is on my contact page, but if you are too lazy, it’s Louis [at] benignthoughts [dot] com. Fat chance though.

Well, this is gonna be a shortish entry to talk about a neat service I found. I have no idea how long it’s been out, but it’s pretty neat. It’s called Muchobene, and it’s a neat little question answering service. Basically, you enter a question, and in like a minute you get thrown into a conversation with someone running the Muchobene plugin, wanting to answer your question. You don’t always get good answers, but yeah. I’m running the muchobene plugin and occasionally a popup’ll show up asking me a question. I can just choose to answer the question, talk to the person a bit to clarify the problem, and throw him an answer. Usually, the person just thanks you and goes on his merry way. So yeah, check it out, and see if someone can answer your question. It’s pretty neat.

I’m not going to write a blog post on a single service, of course No. There is something much more important than a silly question-answering service. George Carlin died sunday. I was talking to my friend Antonio late sunday night, and towards the end of our conversation, as he was going to go to bed, he was like, “oh shit, george carlin died.” So, all night tonight (it’s still monday for me even though it’s actually tuesday), I’ve been watching George Carlin videos on Google Video. There are quite a few videos, so check them out. I actually haven’t seen his standup in a couple of years, and even then, I was too young to really understand it. So yeah.

Speaking of sunday, I had my graduation party that same day. It was pretty good, I had a few friends over and my family. Crap, you know what I just realized? I say “Speaking of” as a segway a lot. Speaking of language, speaking of badly designed sites, speaking of this, speaking of that. I do it a lot. I guess it’s a good way to link two separate topics that have nothing to do with one another. Yeah, so George Carlin died. By the way, I had my graduation party. Mhmm, yeah. Anyway, I had my graduation party on sunday. I graduate from highschool this thursday, so my party was a “Party in Anticipation of Graduation.” It’s my dad’s words, I didn’t come up with them myself. Sorry.

So that’s it. This closing paragraph also has no real value whatsoever. I don’t even know why you’re reading it. I guess you’re just expecting me to say something of value here, like give you the meaning of life. Or perhaps you’re not reading this at all and you’ve caught on to this years ago and never told me about it. In which case, you’re a douchebag and you should’ve told me that my last paragraph of almost every one of my blog posts makes no sense and has no value whatsoever. Gee, thanks a lot.

So, something truly epic happened this week… If you read reddit, you know what I’m talking about. Yes, the epic thread. It truly is epic. Read it and see if you can make it to the end. When I first came across it, I was on the floor laughing.

Speaking of reddit. I took Digg off my speed dial. Yep, it’s about damn time. All of you should know by now that I am an avid Opera user, and therefore have the nifty speed dial feature. Right now my speed dial sites are: Facebook, What.cd, Last.fm, Benign Thoughts, Netvibes, Reddit, Netflix, Google Reader, and Benign Thoughts Mail (branded gmail. Google manages my Benign Thoughts email. It’s nice). Usually I typed Benign Thoughts in my address bar, but since I now exclusively visit Reddit (it gets all news like four days before digg anyway), I replaced Digg with BT. Maybe it’ll force me to post more often, I dunno.

So my site was not XHTML 1.1 for a little bit. Yeah, it was invalid. Some pages around are still invalid, simply because they’re old. I just kind of realized this, but I’ve had this site since November 2002. It’s moved domains and blog software for quite a while (earlier posts had no titles, and that drives my title image plugin insane). I was actually *just* looking on my Quotes page (which is still around, believe it or not) and reading old AIM and IRC and Yahoo! convos I once had. It’s amazing that i still keep in contact with Bobby and some other people after all these years. Pretty insane.

But yeah, about XHTML 1.1. Turns out my WoW script that turns links that link to WoWhead stuff different colors isn’t compatible by default. I had to modify the plugin a bit to fix it. Oh well, no big deal. Still, though, something broke the mime type, not sure what. Opera’s detecting it fine, but the W3 validator isn’t. Go figure. Also, quick site change. I never actually agnowledged the ads. They’re a futile attempt to make some money back from the site. I also changed the search bar to a google sitesearch. It’s nice because it shows me what people are interested in from BT and makes me money too. Plus it’s nicer than Wordpress’s search. Site integration sucks though, maybe I’ll fix it, but it doesn’t really bother me so yeah.

Speaking of Opera, Opera 9.5 has been out for a week. Go get it. It blows Firefox 3 out of the water and isn’t even a major release. Opera 10, here we come (:

So uh, I’m done. It’s 04:30, and therefore time for me to sleep. Goodnight all. Well, good morning.

So I’m in school right now and really bored. It is the last day of school, so I have a bit to say. However, I have senioritis and only 15 minutes to write this entry, so I’ll make it quick.

I quit World of Warcraft. Yep, I did it last month, actually, shortly after I got some T6. See, I have a girlfriend now and I’m about to go to college, and they stopped taking me raiding so I really don’t have the time anymore to sit there for hours and wait for a raid spot. That’s all I’d do for hours every night, wait from 6 until around 7:30 for a raid invite, then get disappointed when I don’t get one. It happened for two straight weeks, so I just quit.

Yeah I have a girlfriend. It’s Caitlin and I’m going to prom with her. If you’ve read my really old stuff from 2004 you’d know her. She’s awesome, and this feels right. However, I’m going upstate to Binghamton to college and won’t be seeing her for a bit. Still, I have Skype and my webcam and the phone and long weekends and breaks, so I’ll see her pretty often. Just not often enough >_< .

K, done for now. Toodles.

Happy mother’s day! My family went to the NY Botanical Garden today, but I personally find it boring, so I stayed home. Hoorah. So anyway, I’m sitting here playing World of Warcraft waiting for my raid to start, if we even raid tonight because it’s mother’s day.

I got my first piece of Tier 6 in WoW the other day It was Gloves of the Tempest. They’re replacing my Spellfire Gloves, finally breaking my spellfire set. Now, because I’m breaking the spellfire set, it’s a downgrade, but properly enchanted and gemmed, it’s just as good. I had to break the set eventually, so yeah. I’m pleased.

I may post another update later after the raid or when the raid is cancelled. For now, though, goodbye :).

Hey guys, I’m here again! Jesus, I’m just kind of forcing myself to blog, even though I have nothing really to talk about that I can. Big news is coming soon, but I can’t tell you about it for another few weeks at least.

I’m addicted to twitter now, but I have no followers. I just kind of post updates to absolutely nobody. I suppose I’m not that interesting, but still. It’d be nice to have some people to respond to me. Check it out, it’s pretty neat.

I want a new calculator. Yeah, right now I’m using a TI-89 Titanium, and it’s great and all, but randomly it decides it doesn’t want to shut off and drains my batteries. It’s kind of a big problem because I take it out for a chem test, and lo and behold, it’s dead. Anyway, I’m hoping to get a HP 50G. It’s amazing from what I’ve read, though it takes a long time to figure out. Steep learning curve, you see. I’ll get it eventually though, and it’ll be fantastic.

Goodnight all. I’ll be back tomorrow maybe. I don’t know yet. I have a lot to say but I can’t share all of it. We’ll see.

So this should be interesting, my blogging for the first time in a very long time. Well, a lot has changed in the last like, year of non-serious blogging, so here’s my attempt at catching everything up.

One interesting point to note is that I now use a mac. I still use linux on my desktop, but it is only a file server for downloading torrents and running overnight. I have a miniature gigabit network between my mac and my desktop so I can transfer the files very quickly, and my little setup works rather nicely. The mac, of course, is a Macbook Pro 15 inch with the 2.6 ghz processor, 4 gigs of ram, pre-2008 refresh. I got it last year shortly after leopard was released. It’s nice, but I have no multitouch trackpad :(. Oh well, it’ll do. The pros of having a macbook pro? Well, right now I’m sitting on my bed, macbook on my lap (bad idea, I know, but it won’t overheat) typing this up in TextMate, my new favorite editor for editing anything. It’s fantastic, go get it.

So, why haven’t I been here, you may ask. Well, the answer is simple. You see, I’ve been playing a timesucking game called World of Warcraft. Right now, it rules my life. Well, something else rules my life but I can’t talk about that yet at the moment, but WoW rules my life when the other thing doesn’t. Basically, I’ve been playing WoW, going to work, or having a life all this time, without blogging about it. I know, I should just put a halfhour and blog every night before going to bed, but it never happens and probably won’t happen until I get back into the swing of things.

I currently play my mage, Tasai, on the Arthas US realm, in WoW of course. Tasai is a level 70 blood elf mage in <spire>, a BT/MH raiding guild. Tonight we got a decent amount of attempts in on Illidan. We made it to phase 3 of the fight, and hope to get him down tomorrow.

I figured out what school I’m going to next year. I’ll be going to Binghamton for Math. Yeah, math. People say I’m insane, but I plan on becoming a math teacher, and well, gonna need to go to school for math for that. Some friends of mine are going (or maybe going) too, so I won’t be alone, and the dorms freakin’ rock there.

Well, that’s all. Some last minute things: Yes, I have ads on the site now. I’m hoping to make some side money from this site. My dad didn’t allow me to sign up for adsense, but now I’m 18 so I’m able to just do it myself. They’re not too intrusive, but if they start to be bothersome, I can limit them more or set some settings to make them appear less. Goodnight.