The Ramblings of Ken

So, it turns out that Las Vegas is a lot of fun when you don't go with your parents. We came to Vegas a few years ago and basically just walked up and down the strip and we all thought it was lame.

Well, now my roommates and two other guys came down to Vegas and we are having a blast! Tonight we are going to see Phantom of the Opera and I am SO excited! I will post later about the show and also with pictures.

This post was done on a Mac mini in the Apple Store in Caesar's Palace.

So, my mage is now fairly well geared. I've cleared Naxxramas and Obsidian Sanctum several times. I still have yet to do Malygos, but I'll get there. I have 3 of the 5 T7 pieces Valorous Frostfire Shoulderpads, Heroes Frostfire Robe, and the Heroes Frostfire Gloves. I know... some of you are saying, "But you don't have all 5 pieces of Valorous gear! WTF are you doing playing another character?" Well, I'm not done, I will still raid with him every now and then.

Anyway, I kind of started to get bored of the mage and I am now leveling my Shaman. I want to try out healing these raids and see how difficult it is. My Shaman is now level 74 and steadily climbing. So far I am really enjoying his new healing talents. I am looking forward to being able to run heroics and raids to really test the new talents and abilities.

So I am considering blogging about my gaming on World of Warcraft. I see a lot of other sites out there where people tell about their experiences in the game. Since I don't seem to be updating the site very often, maybe this would give me a good excuse to update it. I'm on WoW a lot and I could talk about it a lot.

Yesterday was a fun evening of WoW. I got in a raid group that went and killed the Alliance leaders in Stormwind, Ironforge, Darnassus, and Exodar. It was way fun! I've been in groups before a couple of times, but they always failed at Stormwind. Way too many Alliance players were warned and were waiting for us. This time, however, we started in Stormwind, got King Varian Wrynn with no problems, quickly moved into the Deeprun Tram and took care of business in Ironforge, then ported to Orgrimmar and flew to Ashenvale to go up and finish the job in Darnassus and Exodar. It went very smoothly.

So, I got my Reigns of the Black War Bear. It's fun to have something that my other friends and guildmates don't have yet.

Today I finished up the Merrymaker achievement. I finally got a group to go to Blades Edge Mountains and finish the Ogri'la pre-req chain so that I could do Fa-la-la-la-Ogri'la. So, I now have the Merrymaker title. It's not the coolest title, but it is a title nontheless. Plus, it is one step closer to the Violet Proto-Drake.

I have noticed for awhile now that my download speeds have substantially increased. I decided to do a few speed tests and I was surprised by the results!



I am getting over 16 mbit downstream and 1 mbit upstream! I thought I was only paying for 8 mbit down and 256 kbit up. After testing out speeds on other Comcast customers it appears that they have increased speeds across the board. Nice! I'll take it. :)

EDIT: It only seems to get better :)

I neglected to write about something that happened this summer. Someone hacked my server through a vulnerability in Wordpress. I was hosting a site for a friend and I let it be. I never monitored the site or did security updates on it at all. I don't know why I didn't think to be responsible about what I hosted. The version of Wordpress that was running was almost two years old and it did indeed get hacked through a vulnerability in the upload function. My server was completely trashed. Somehow the hacker got enough access to delete most of the files on the drive. Luckily, I was able to recover everything that was important to me.

That brings us to my strategy at present. I put a new hard disk drive in my server and installed a minimal Gentoo installation. Then I installed VMware Server on it and built a Windows Server virtual machine. It's been running great for about six months now. If anyone ever manages to do something bad to my server again I just have to roll back to my latest snapshot of the server and I am good to go. There's no dealing with installing the operating system and reconfiguring PHP/Apache and all the other server goodies.

I highly recommend server virtualization to even the casual home server administrator. If you aren't doing it, you should! Go get [url=http://www.vmware.com/products/server/]VMware's free server[/url] now!

For probably about the past year I have been stuck listening to my favorites playlist that I made about a year or two ago. I've added a song to it here and there, but for the most part I've been listening to stuff from the 2004-2005 era. I decided last night, however, that I needed to give stuff from today a chance.

Today I have discovered [url=http://www.secondhandserenade.net]Secondhand Serenade[/url]. They freaking rock! "Fall For You" is so good! Give them a listen!

(Image copyright Secondhand Serenade - from the album "A Twist in My Story")